Sec.6. The Apportionment of Labor among Social Grades.  The question of the apportionment of the labor of a country among different employments falls under two heads.  Some differences of occupation are associated particularly in Great Britain with differences of what we know as class.  The movement of labor between different social grades is clearly a very different thing from its movement between different occupations in the same grade.  The grades themselves are not easy to define:  not a little ingenuity has been expended on the attempt, and perhaps the best brief classification that has been put forward is one which divides labor into the following four grades:—­

(1) Automatic manual labor. (2) Responsible manual labor. (3) Automatic brain workers. (4) Responsible brain workers.

But the matter is one perhaps for the satirist of manners rather than the economist.  It suffices for our purpose that the distinctions, however vague, are very real.

It is obvious the mobility of labor between the occupations of a platelayer and a barrister is not very great.  It may seem perhaps to be even smaller than it is.  For here it is important to bear in mind a general consideration which is equally applicable to horizontal movements within any social grade.  There may be a considerable movement of labor between different employments without any individual worker having to change his occupation.  The personnel of any industry is constantly changing.  At one end, men die, retire, or are pensioned off; at the other end, young recruits are taken on.  By a diversion of the new recruits from one employment to another, a radical change can be made in the occupational census in a comparatively short space of time.  It is in this manner that such movement as takes place is largely effected at the present time.  Within the ranks of the professional classes, a man does not commonly leave the profession to which he has been trained.  But his choice of profession is determined by him or his parents not solely on pecuniary grounds but usually with an anxious scanning of the general prospects, which include pecuniary advantages together with many other things.  The same thing is true in no small measure of manual wage-earners.  This general consideration must be borne in mind throughout the remainder of this chapter.

But even the sons of platelayers do not commonly practise at the bar.  The obstacles in the way are various and subtle.  Many of them are ideas, inherited from a bygone epoch, about keeping other people “in their proper stations,” which the whole drift of circumstance, and the spirit of the age are rapidly wearing down.  In the new world such obstacles are rare.  But an obstacle of a more tangible and formidable kind arises from the fact that the liberal professions and many business careers require a long and expensive education and training, which the platelayer is quite unable to afford to give his son.