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