It is well that this is so, because the variety and inequality of
individual aptitudes naturally produce that division of labor that
Darwinism has rightly declared to be a law of individual physiology and
of social economy.

All men ought to work in order to live, but each ought to devote himself
to the kind of labor which best suits his peculiar aptitudes. An
injurious waste of strength and abilities would thus be avoided, and
labor would cease to be repugnant, and would become agreeable and
necessary as a condition of physical and moral health.

And when all have given to society the labor best suited to their innate
and acquired aptitudes, each has a right to the same rewards, since
each has equally contributed to that solidarity of labor which sustains
the life of the social aggregate and, in solidarity with it, the life of
each individual.

The peasant who digs the earth performs a kind of labor in appearance
more modest, but just as necessary, useful and meritorious as that of
the workman who builds a locomotive, of the mechanical engineer who
improves it or of the savant who strives to extend the bounds of human
knowledge in his study or laboratory.

The one essential thing is that all the members of society work, just as
in the individual organism all the cells perform their different
functions, more or less modest in appearance--for example, the
nerve-cells, the bone-cells or the muscular cells--but all biological
functions, or sorts of labor, equally useful and necessary to the life
of the organism as a whole.