All the economists, since Adam Smith,
have pointed out the ADVANTAGES and the INCONVENIENCES of the law
of division, but at the same time insisting much more strenuously
upon the first than the second, because such a course was more in
harmony with their optimistic views, and not one of them ever
asking how a LAW can have INCONVENIENCES. This is the way in
which J. B. Say summed up the question:--
"A man who during his whole life performs but one operation,
certainly acquires the power to execute it better and more
readily than another; but at the same time he becomes less
capable of any other occupation, whether physical or moral;
his other faculties become extinct, and there results a
degeneracy in the individual man. That one has made only the
eighteenth part of a pin is a sad account to give of one's self:
but let no one imagine that it is the workingman who spends his
life in handling a file or a hammer that alone degenerates in
this way from the dignity of his nature; it is the same with the
man whose position leads him to exercise the most subtle
faculties of his mind.
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