And all work in modern London is almost of necessity routine work: the tendency to specialise in small articles, in small parts of a whole, insures that. It becomes daily more difficult to find a watch operative who can make a timepiece, from escapement to case. One man as a rule renders true little cogwheels that have been made by machine, another polishes tiny pinion screws, another puts all these pieces together, another adjusts them. In just the same way one woman machines together trousers that have been roughly cut out by machine, another buttonholes them, another finishes them. And in just the same way in offices, a partner mentions the drift of a letter to a clerk, he dictates it to a shorthand-typewriter, she writes and addresses it, a boy posts it. And the clerk, the typewriter and the boy go on doing the same thing from the beginning of the working day to the end without interest and without thought.
In the minds of these workers, work itself becomes an endless monotony; there is no call at all made upon the special craftsman's intellect that is in all the human race. It is a ceaseless strain upon the nerves and upon the muscles. It crushes out the individuality, and thus leisure time ceases to be a season of rest, of simple lying still and doing nothing. One needs, on the contrary, to assert one's individuality, and to still the cry of one's nerves. This leads to these hobbies which, psychologically considered, are a form of new work making some appeal to our special temperaments. In men this means, as a rule, some sport in which they have a chance of asserting an individual superiority, and women
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