Page:The Effects of Civilisation on the People in European States.djvu/42

20 part of the manufacturing trades just occupy the mind so as to exclude all other ideas on which it might operate.

In the progress of the division of labour, the employment "of the far greater part of those live by labour—that is, the great body of the people—comes to be confined to a very few simple operations; frequently to one or two. But the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention, in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for human nature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and, consequently, of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of life.

"It is otherwise in the barbarous societies, as they are called, of hunters, shepherds, or even of husbandmen in that rude state of husbandry which