r, as directed by him, failed to
replace the wages, would not thereby be incapacitated from continuing
his misdirections further; for the wage-capital dissipated by his
incompetence could, under these conditions, always be replaced, and its
loss more or less concealed, by fresh supplies which had a really
different origin. It was only in consequence of conditions resembling
these that the London County Council was enabled to continue for so long
its service of Thames steamboats, in spite of the fact that the labour
thus employed failed to reproduce, by the functions which it performed
for the public, more than a fraction of capital which was necessarily
consumed in its maintenance. Had labour been thus misdirected by any
private capitalist, his misdirection of it would have soon been checked
by his loss of the means of continuing it; but the County Council, with
the purse of the community at its back, was able, by taxing the
industrial successes of others, to refinance and prolong its own
industrial failure.

Socialists wholly overlook the importance of these considerations. Many
of them, for example, in the case of the London County Council's
steamboats, defended that enterprise in spite of its financial failure,
on the ground that the steamboats were a convenience to certain
travellers at all events, who in all probability were persons of modest
means, while the loss would be made good out of the pockets of the
ratepayers who were presumably rich. But even if this argument were
plausible as applied to a state of society in which the incomes of some
men were greater than those of others, it would be absolutely
inapplicable to conditions such as those desired by socialists, under
which the incomes of all would be fractions, approximately equal, of a
common stock to the production of which all contributed. For it must
surely be apparent to even the meanest intelligence that whatever
diminished the aggregate amount to be divided would diminish the
fraction of it which falls to the share of each; and it ought to be
equally apparent, though to many people it is not, that the labour of
any labourer which is directed in such a way that the men consume more
articles of utility than they produce, or fail to produce as many as
they would do if directed better, has this precise effect of diminishing
the divisible total, by making it either less than it has been or less
than it would be otherwise.[10]

Thus, in cases such as tha