But these are Utopian questionings.  The sane, practical man shakes his head, smiles pityingly at my dreamy impracticability, and passes them by.

AN AGE OF SPECIALISATION

There is something of the phonograph in all of us, but in the sort of eminent person who makes public speeches about education and reading, and who gives away prizes and opens educational institutions, there seems to be little else but gramophone.

These people always say the same things, and say them in the same note.  And why should they do that if they are really individuals?

There is, I cannot but suspect, in the mysterious activities that underlie life, some trade in records for these distinguished gramophones, and it is a trade conducted upon cheap and wholesale lines.  There must be in these demiurgic profundities a rapid manufacture of innumerable thousands of that particular speech about “scrappy reading,” and that contrast of “modern” with “serious” literature, that babbles about in the provinces so incessantly.  Gramophones thinly disguised as bishops, gramophones still more thinly disguised as eminent statesmen, gramophones K.C.B. and gramophones F.R.S. have brazened it at us time after time, and will continue to brazen it to our grandchildren when we are dead and all our poor protests forgotten.  And almost equally popular in their shameless mouths is the speech that declares this present age to be an age of specialisation.  We all know the profound droop of the eminent person’s eyelids as he produces that discovery, the edifying deductions or the solemn warnings he unfolds from this proposition, and all the dignified, inconclusive rigmarole of that cylinder.  And it is nonsense from beginning to end.

This is most distinctly not an age of specialisation.  There has hardly been an age in the whole course of history less so than the present.  A few moments of reflection will suffice to demonstrate that.  This is beyond any precedent an age of change, change in the appliances of life, in the average length of life, in the general temper of life; and the two things are incompatible.  It is only under fixed conditions that you can have men specialising.

They specialise extremely, for example, under such conditions as one had in Hindustan up to the coming of the present generation.  There the metal worker or the cloth worker, the wheelwright or the druggist of yesterday did his work under almost exactly the same conditions as his predecessor did it five hundred years before.  He had the same resources, the same tools, the same materials; he made the same objects for the same ends.  Within the narrow limits thus set him he carried work to a fine perfection; his hand, his mental character were subdued to his medium.  His dress and bearing even were distinctive; he was, in fact, a highly specialised man.  He transmitted his difference to his sons.  Caste was the logical expression in the social organisation of this state of high specialisation, and, indeed, what else is caste or any definite class distinctions but that?  But the most obvious fact of the present time is the disappearance of caste and the fluctuating uncertainty of all class distinctions.