tion. The division of labor is the first result of enlightenment. The complexities of our modern life require our army to prepare a single dinner, and the farmer who raised the grain, the miller who ground it, the baker who made it into bread are as much specialists as the electrician who illumi nated the banquet. In a sense every man who labors is a specialist. The remark made at the opening would have been true if made in any time during the past three thousand years. What then did our learned friend have in mind? Simply that specialism will be the predominating characteristic of the future. The day of the all around mental athlete is passing. A man can no longer be great in general terms. If he is not great in one specific thing we are suspicious. It was not a long time ago when it was possible for one man to be master of the entire sum of hu • man knowledge. Bacon probably knew all of the book learning of his day, so did Milton, and even in our present century Humboldt stands as an example of one who had mastered about all there was known of human knowledge. Within the lifetime of comparatively young men it has been possible for man to become master of all there was to be learned from books of electricity, physics, chemistry and mathematics. Fifty years ago a man was considered a special. ist if he devoted his entire time to the study of medicine. Now to become even recognized' in the profession a man must give his life to the study of a single part of the human anatomy.- Men with a university degree, and the best training that can be had in our medical schools go to Paris and are told that after six years of hard work they may get through with the optic nerve. General practitioners of medicine or of law are now rare save in country towns. In the fields of scholarship and literature there is also working a great change. A century ago one noble man versed in Hebrew, Greek, Latin and mathematics, with several tutors, constituted a college. To-day our great universities divide their work among hundreds of specialists and THE FREE LANCE. there is a constant tendency to narrow the work down by each instructor. In literature phenome na like Holmes, who achieved success in poetry and biography, in the essay and the novel, are in deed rare. The next century will be a century of exact ing work. The standards are constantly rising. It is harder every day for a young man to win for himself a name. Whittier, shortly before his death, confessed that had he been born fifty years later his name never would have appeared on the roll of America's great poets. The only hope for the young man of the corning century will be to specialize, to become by the hardest toil a recog nized authority in one little field of human knowl edge. Kinglake devoted twenty-five of the best years of his life to the history of a two years' Cri mean war but his work will never be done again ; Darwin spent his life in a ceaseless hunt and grind for facts to support a single theory, but the theory is his monument ; Motley burrowed for years in the dust of the archives of Europe, often in months speaking to none but his family and the librarians, yet he mastered his field and his name will go down in history beside that of Wil liam of Orange ; Bancroft spent a lifetime of la bor on one book. These facts cannot be too forcibly presented to the minds of all who are to do their work in the next century. When the sciences have become more thoroughly understood and the arts have been proportionally developed there will be a place for everyone in the great laboratory of the world, but unless one has mastered, in all its de tails, some one item of the world's work, he will be unknown and'unsuccessful. What will be the preparation of the specialist of the future? First a sound body, the result of steady habits, and secondly a sound mind. Into whatever field the young man may decide to go he will find competition, and the prize will go to him who will work the hardest and who has the keenest and best organized mind. This mental organization can only come through systematic
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