Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/760

740 we have just said of the relativity of the term aptitude. No matter how much stronger she may be morally, she is industrially weaker than man, and even in her own special aptitude, which nevertheless is a special aptitude, she is weaker. An exception may be made in regard to her care of children, so far as it is an industrial task to be included in the study of political economy; but at any rate the cooking and the children keep her at home, and, as a rule, she must either chore about the house or do nothing most of her time, leaving unsatisfied the instinct of mutual help in social sustenance, and leaving humanity that much short of its amplest possible life.

What we are striving for is that both the competent and the incompetent shall be employed and to the best advantage. The competent must therefore do the work at which he most excels the incompetent, and the incompetent must toil and sweat over a task which the competent could do better and more easily. It is the competent, the rich, the fortunate, the versatile, who leaves to others work that he could do better than they. Mediocrity sticks to one task through life. This is the rule. We promised to point out the exceptions. They are the men of one aptitude or one acquired skill highly developed, but barred by bad habits, lack of enterprise, lack of judgment, or some other similar lack, from rising to a higher and more profitable task. If that one aptitude is itself a high one, we can hardly call the man mediocre. If it is a somewhat lower one, we may say that he is a prodigy in his way. Going on down, we reach a point where we have no hesitation in saying that no attainable development of the one faculty could lift the man above the average of his fellows.

But, as a very general rule, the man who from choice leaves to another work in which the first excels the second is the one of the two who is to be most congratulated. The other is still to be congratulated, for it gives him a job. Both parties are benefited. We never think of commiserating a man, no matter how capable he may be at his work, who has a chance to earn more at no matter how different a task, leaving his former one to no matter how sad a bungler. Why should we deplore the fact that nations are able to do the same thing? The statesmen at Washington who consider it a disgrace that America should import things for whose domestic production it has plenty of skill and ample natural resources, would let the scrubbing and care of the building in which they say these things be ever so badly botched before they would take hold and do the work themselves. No doubt the least able-bodied of them could, with an hour's practice every day, soon do it better and more easily than it is done, at least that part of it that is done by women.

He not only never thinks of trying it; he never feels it the slightest disgrace to let a woman do for him work that he would be ashamed to admit his inability, with a tenth of the training, to do better than she. In many cases, perhaps a majority, he could do it without any