The rest of the labours of the farm are a struggle with the earth--with weeds and with weather. It is all primitive and built into the bone and marrow of the race; but it is not more moralizing, nor more romantic, in practice than working at looms or ledgers. The labourer does not go to the land as to a leisurely summer home. Hitherto, no way has been found in England for inducing young people to stay in the villages. We ought to try to succeed in this. If we do it will be in a new kind of village, and it will be effected by cheap and rapid transit, and by widely scattering the ownership or holding of land. Then Ruskin’s aims will be realized, but not by the only methods he could see in his day. In fact, railways and domestic machinery would be essential.
Division of Labour goes with the factory system. It was early hailed as one of the great economies obtained by production on a large scale. It was found that by constantly keeping a man or a child to one occupation, an extraordinary degree of sure accuracy and readiness was obtained. Without the necessity for thinking, and so without risk of thinking wrong, the nimble fingers repeated hour by hour their appointed trick, the practised eye ever followed the same mechanism and stopped it at the same point, the same tool in the same place was ready to the same hand. Physiologically we believe that all this means that there is established a rut for the tracks of the brain wheels, a habitual nervous connection between certain sensory centres and certain motor centres, without the need for every piece of news to be transmitted by the sensory centre to the central thinking apparatus in the cerebrum, and a corresponding order sent down from the central control to the motor centre.
When we learn to write, the fashion and shape of every _a_, _b_ and _c_ have to be thought over; the hands learn painfully to follow an order sent down from the central thinking power in the cerebrum, sent down on information derived through the sensory centres behind the eye, of the shape of the copy. But in ordinary life we could copy pages of manuscript and talk and think about something else the whole time. There is a direct line of nerve flow between the reading apparatus behind the eye and the writing apparatus behind the hand; and thought is not required. We have become so far automatic; we have created a convenient writing machine within us, which works for us and leaves us free to do other things.