extreme
conclusion might contend that the entire amount--some four or five
hundred per cent.--by which the product per head in the year 1880
exceeded the product per head some two hundred years before, was due to
directive ability, and directive ability only; and that the labourers,
in their capacity of labourers, had no claim whatsoever to it. We will,
however, put the case in a much more moderate form. We will, for
argument's sake, concede to self-directed labour all that increase in
the values produced per head, which took place between the time of
Charles II. and the general establishment in Great Britain of the modern
industrial system, with its huge mills and factories, and its
concomitant differentiation of the directing class from the directed--an
event which had been securely accomplished at the beginning of the
nineteenth century. In making this concession, we shall, indeed, be
defying fact, and ignoring the improvements, alike in manufacture and
agriculture, which had taken place during the hundred years preceding,
especially during the last fifty of them, and which were solely due to
a minority of exceptionally able men.[20] We shall thus be conceding to
the labourer far more than his due. Certainly no one can contend that we
concede too little.

Let us take, then, the beginning of the nineteenth century as our
standing-point; and, assuming that labour was the sole producer then,
compare its productivity per head with the productivity of industrial
effort--of labour and ability combined--some eight or nine decades
later. The labourers of Great Britain as a body, to the exclusion of all
other classes, actually divided among themselves, about the year 1880,
more wealth per head--something like forty-five per cent.--than would
have been theirs if they had lived in the days of their own
grandfathers, and been able to appropriate as wages the income of the
entire country.

Let us, then, repeat the question which we asked just now. Where has
this addition to the income of labour come from? That part of it is
attributable to ability--the ability of the Watts, the Stephensons, the
Arkwrights, the Bessemers, the Edisons, and so forth--nobody in his
senses will deny. Can it be said that any of it is attributable to
labour? The period now under consideration is so brief that this
question is not hard to answer. It can easily be shown that man, as a
labourer skilled or unskilled, has acquired individually no new
eff