his assimilated scientific knowledge, his
inventive gifts, his constructive and practical imagination, his energy,
his initiative, and his natural powers of leadership, was better able to
direct others than the other nine were to direct themselves?

We cannot make this experiment in precisely the way described; but
history will provide us with equivalents which are sufficiently accurate
for our purpose. There are, for example, in the case of Great Britain,
data which have enabled statisticians with a considerable degree of
unanimity to estimate the values produced per head of the industrial
population at various periods from the reign of Charles II. till to-day,
and to reduce these values to comparable terms of money. Now, we need
not insist too much on the accuracy of the figures in question; but one
broad fact is unmistakably shown by them--that the product per head
towards the close of the nineteenth century was, to say the least of it,
from four to five times as great as it was towards the close of the
sixteenth. To what, then, was this increase in industrial productivity
due? It was not due to any change in the spontaneous workings of nature.
It can only have been due to some change in the character of human
effort--either in that of the effort of each separate manual labourer,
or else in that of the men by whom the labour of others is directed. The
average labourer, however, at the close of the nineteenth century did
not differ, as an isolated labouring unit, from the average labourer as
he was at the time of the fire of London. The increase in industrial
productivity must therefore be necessarily due to a change in the
ability of those by whom the labourers are organised and directed. And
here _a priori_ reasoning is confirmed by actual facts, for the change
which has taken place in the class which directs the labour of others
has been, during the period in question, of the most notorious and
astonishing kind. That class had been progressively absorbing into
itself, and concentrating on the conduct of industry, ambitions,
intelligences, and strong practical wills, which formerly found their
outlets in very different channels--ecclesiastical, political, and more
especially military. Man for man, then, industry became more productive,
because to an increasing degree the ablest men of the nation
concentrated their exceptional powers on directing the business of
production; and any one who wished to push things to an