If one looks into the conditions of industrial employment specialisation will be found to linger just in proportion as a trade has remained unaffected by inventions and innovation.  The building trade, for example, is a fairly conservative one.  A brick wall is made to-day much as it was made two hundred years ago, and the bricklayer is in consequence a highly skilled and inadaptable specialist.  No one who has not passed through a long and tedious training can lay bricks properly.  And it needs a specialist to plough a field with horses or to drive a cab through the streets of London.  Thatchers, old-fashioned cobblers, and hand workers are all specialised to a degree no new modern calling requires.  With machinery skill disappears and unspecialised intelligence comes in.  Any generally intelligent man can learn in a day or two to drive an electric tram, fix up an electric lighting installation, or guide a building machine or a steam plough.  He must be, of course, much more generally intelligent than the average bricklayer, but he needs far less specialised skill.  To repair machinery requires, of course, a special sort of knowledge, but not a special sort of training.

In no way is this disappearance of specialisation more marked than in military and naval affairs.  In the great days of Greece and Rome war was a special calling, requiring a special type of man.  In the Middle Ages war had an elaborate technique, in which the footman played the part of an unskilled labourer, and even within a period of a hundred years it took a long period of training and discipline before the common discursive man could be converted into the steady soldier.  Even to-day traditions work powerfully, through extravagance of uniform, and through survivals of that mechanical discipline that was so important in the days of hand-to-hand fighting, to keep the soldier something other than a man.  For all the lessons of the Boer war we are still inclined to believe that the soldier has to be something severely parallel, carrying a rifle he fires under orders, obedient to the pitch of absolute abnegation of his private intelligence.  We still think that our officers have, like some very elaborate and noble sort of performing animal, to be “trained.”  They learn to fight with certain specified “arms” and weapons, instead of developing intelligence enough to use anything that comes to hand.

But, indeed, when a really great European war does come and lets loose motor-cars, bicycles, wireless telegraphy, aeroplanes, new projectiles of every size and shape, and a multitude of ingenious persons upon the preposterously vast hosts of conscription, the military caste will be missing within three months of the beginning, and the inventive, versatile, intelligent man will have come to his own.

And what is true of a military caste is equally true of a special governing class such as our public schools maintain.