FRACTIONAL HUMANITY

Mankind, in its heavy fashion, has chosen to mock the tailor with the fact—­the indubitable fact—­that he is but the ninth part of a man.  Yet, after all, at this time of day, it seems more of a compliment than a gibe.  To be a whole ninth of a man!  Few of us, when we ponder it, can boast so much.  Take, for instance, that other proverbial case of the fractional-part-of-a-pin-maker.  It takes nine persons to make a pin, we were taught in our catechism.  Actually that means that it takes nine persons to make one whole pin-maker, which leaves the question still to be solved as to how many whole pin-makers it takes to make a man.  What is the relation of one pin-maker to the whole social economy?  That discovered, a multiplication by nine will give us the exact fractional part of manhood which belongs to the ninth-of-a-pin-maker.  Obviously he is a much more microscopic creature than the immemorially despised tailor, and, alas! his case is nearest that of most of us.  And it is curious to notice how we rejoice in, rather than lament, this inevitable result of that great law of differentiation, which one may figure as a terrible machine hour after hour chopping up mankind into more and more infinitesimal fragments.  We feel a pride in being spoken of as ’specialists’—­and yet what is a specialist?  The nine-hundred-and-ninety-ninth part of a man.  Call me not an entomologist, call me a lepidopterist, if you will—­though, really, that is too broad a term for a man who is not so much taken up with moths generally as with the third ring of the antennae of the great oak-eggar.

If one is troubled with a gift for symbolism, it is hard to treat any man one meets as though he were really a whole man:  to treat a lawyer as though he were anything but a deed of assignment, or a surgeon as if he were anything more than an operation.  As the metropolitan trains load and unload in a morning, what does one see?  Gross upon gross of steel pens, a few quills, whole carriages full of bricklayers’ trowels, and how strange it seems to watch all the bank-books sorting themselves out from the motley, and arranging themselves in the first classes, just as we see them on the shelf in the bank!  It is a curious sight.  The little shop-girl there, what is she but a roll of pink ribbon?—­nay, she is but half-a-yard.  And the poor infinitesimal porters and guards, how pathetically small seems their share in the great monosyllable Man, animalcules in that great social system which, again, is but an animalcule in the blood of Time.  Still more infinitesimal seems the man who is a subdivision, not of a form of work even, but merely of a form of taste; the man who collects foreign stamps, say, or book-plates, or arrow-heads, the connoisseur of a tiny section of one of the lesser schools of Italian painting, the coral-insect who has devoted his life to a participle, first-edition men, and all those various bookworms