nature and whose honour and conscience are bound up in achievement.[1] Its oldest guild, which reaches back into the sheer primitive and fills the picture of this primitive with its dark sagas and rites and notions, is the guild of the smiths, who — as the result of their proud aloofness from the peasantry and the fear that hangs about them, and leads to their being venerated and banned by turns — have often become true tribes with a race of their own, as in the case of the Abyssinian Falasha or "Black Jews."[2]
In these three economics of production, preparation, and distribution, as in everything else belonging to politics and life at large, there are the subjects and objects of leading — in this case, whole groups that dispose, decide, organize, discover; and other whole groups whose function is simply to execute. The grading may be hard and definite or it may be scarcely perceptible,[3] promotion may be impossible or unimpeded, the relative dignity of the task may be almost equal throughout a long scale of slow transitions or different beyond comparison. Tradition and law, talent and possessions, population numbers, cultural level, and economic situation may effectively override this basic antithesis of subjects and objects — but it exists, it is as much a premiss as life itself, and it is unalterable. Nevertheless, economically there is no worker-class; that is an invention of theorists who have fixed their eyes on the position of factory-workers in England — an industrial, peasantless land in a transitional phase — and then extended the resultant scheme so confidently over all the Cultures and all the ages that the politicians have taken it up and used it as a means of building themselves parties. In actuality there is an almost uncountable number of purely serving activities in workshop and counting-houses, office and cargo-deck, roads, mine-shafts, fields, and meadows. This counting-up, portering, running of errands, hammering, serving, and minding often enough lacks that element which elevates life above mere upkeep and invests work with the dignity and the delight attaching, for example, to the status-duties of the officer and the savant, or the personal triumphs of the engineer, the manager, and the merchant — but, even apart from that, all these things are quite
- ↑ With this belong the machine industry, with its purely Western type of the inventor and engineer, and practically, also, a great part of the modern agronomy, as, for instance, in America.
- ↑ Even to-day the mining and metal industries are felt to be somehow nobler than, for example, the chemical and electrical. They possess the most ancient patent of nobility in the technical world, and a relic of cult-mystery lies over them.
- ↑ That is, up to the limit of servage and slavery, although very often — as in the present-day East and as in Rome in the case of "vernæ" — slavery itself may be nothing but a form of compulsory-labour contract and, apart from that, hardly sensible. The free employee often lives in far stricter subjection and enjoys far less respect, and his formal right to "give notice" is in many cases practically valueless to him.
[British readers will recall in this connexion the "Chinese slavery" controversy in South Africa in 1904, and the questions of indentured labour that come to the surface not infrequently in Australian politics. And in an older generation defenders of slavery as practised in the sugar islands of the West Indies are still to be found — not to mention the survivors and tradition-bearers of the "Old South" in the United States. — Tr.]
