the labour that has to do with elaborating the material means of
life. The precise line of demarcation is not the same as it was
in the early barbarian scheme, but the broad distinction has not
fallen into disuse.

The tacit, common-sense distinction to-day is, in effect, that
any effort is to be accounted industrial only so far as its
ultimate purpose is the utilisation of non-human things. The
coercive utilisation of man by man is not felt to be an
industrial function; but all effort directed to enhance human
life by taking advantage of the non-human environment is classed
together as industrial activity. By the economists who have best
retained and adapted the classical tradition, man's "power over
nature" is currently postulated as the characteristic fact of
industrial productivity. This industrial power over nature is
taken to include man's power over the life of the beasts and over
all the elemental forces. A line is in this way drawn between
mankind and brute creation.

In other times and among men imbued with a different body of
preconceptions this line is not drawn precisely as we draw it
to-day. In the savage or the barbarian scheme of life it is drawn
in a different place and in another way. In all communities under
the barbarian culture there is an alert and pervading sense of
antithesis between two comprehensive groups of phenomena, in one
of which barbarian man includes himself, and in the other, his
victual. There is a felt antithesis between economic and
non-economic phenomena, but it is not conceived in the modern
fashion; it lies not between man and brute creation, but between
animate and inert things.