DIVISION OF LABOR, or DIVISION or EMPLOYMENT, a term often used by political economist's to express a means by which labor is economized, or, as another method of stating the same result, by which production is increased. The problem in division of labor is so to adjust matters in any given community that each member of it shall work, or be able if he pleases to work, with the greatest possible results. In practice it is, like most other arrangements, apt to be too broad or too narrow. The old term, "jack of all trades and master of none," expresses the truth, that people who try too many things are not likely to be adepts in any. On the other hand, few people can do any sort of work to great perfection, unless it is part, as it were, of a group of functions for which they are more or less prepared. A good dentist will be in some measure a surgeon; a conveyancer or a, special pleader will know something of the other depart ments of legal practice; a shipwright will be able, on occasion, to do other kinds of carpentry, and he will be the better of a general knowledge of the mechanical powers. That division of labor, in fact, which is really productive, is where a man who can do several things selects one as that which he can do best, or has most opportunity of doing. By constant practice at that one thing, and the -withdrawal of his attention from other matters, he achieves perfection and rapidity of execution. There is an important difference between this selection of a special pursuit, and the inability to do anything more than one thing, which is often confounded with it. In the former case, the worker, whether with head or hand, has great resources, for his adopted pursuit is the best out of several others, on which he can fall back. The man who can do only one thing is in a precarious condition, because that one thing may be superseded. Indeed, as the one thing which can be so done is generally a very simple thing, it is almost a law in political economy that it will come to be superseded by machinery. Such was the fate of the hand-loom weavers, whose function, especially in the plainer and lighter fabrics, was too easy to last. Of the division of unskilled and easy labor, there is an excellent
illustration in Adam Smith's description of pin-making: "One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the bead requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on is a peculiar business; to whiten the pin is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into a paper; and the important business of making a pin is in this manner divided into above eighteen distinct operations, which in some manufactories are all performed by distinct hands." This division was doubtless useful, so long as pins were made entirely by human hands. It prompted serious inquiries, however, how far such functions were of an improving or a deteriorating character, and essays were written to prove that in manufacturing countries human beings were deteriorating, as no one of them had the faculty of self-support in separation from his fellows, and none could even make one single article by himself, all being dependent for their bread on a complex co-operation, which might break down any day. The answer to such fears may be found in the pin-making of the present day, where one man tends a machine, feeding it with wire at one end, while the pins drop out at the other. This, too, is the fruit of division of labor, for many skillful heads and hands have been occupied in bringing to perfection the different parts of the machinery. It is of the highest importance to the working-classes of a country, to keep in view that though the division of labor does sometimes create functions which, while they are extremely simple and easy, arc of value as helping other functions to go on, yet this kind of easy and uniform work has no stability in it, and the possession of the facility for doing it acquired by practice is no permanent industrial endowment, since it is pretty sure some day to be superseded by machinery.