their specialisms the difficult task of earning their living in an open competitive market. The result is that we tend to get at the summit of our professions only those rare geniuses who combine real specialist capacity with the arts of the bagman. An enormous proportion of our experts have to earn their living by teaching—an exhausting and exacting art for which they are not at all necessarily qualified, and one which demands a great amount of time for the earning of a very exiguous pittance.
The teaching of our best schools, a task so important that it should be entrusted to none but those highly qualified by nature and instruction in the art, is almost entirely in the hands of athletes and grammarians of dead languages. We choose as our governors amateurs of whom we demand fluency, invincible prejudice, and a resolute blindness to dissentient opinion. In commerce we allow ourselves to be overrun by a multitude of small and mostly inefficient traders struggling to make a living by the supply of goods from the narrow and ageing stocks which are all they can afford to keep. We allow the supply of our foodstuffs to be largely in the hands of those who cannot afford to be clean, and submit out of mere indifference to being fed on meat, bread, vegetables which have been for an indefinite period at the mercy of dirty middlemen, the dust and mud and flies of the street, and the light-hearted thumbing errand-boy. We allow a large proportion of our skilled workers to waste skill and energy on the manufacture of things which are neither useful nor beautiful, on elaborate specialist valeting, cooking, gardening for those who are their inferiors in social activity and value.
The moral homogeneity so plainly visible in the {137} society of the bee is replaced in man by a segregation into classes which tends always to obscure the unity of the nation and often is directly antagonistic to it. The readiness with which such segregation occurs seems to be due to the invincible strength of the gregarious impulse in the individual man and to the