minish
its efficiency, the product of industry as a whole exhibits an unchecked
increase. And what is the explanation of this? Little as the
trade-unions realise the fact themselves, their own policy is an
object-lesson which supplies us with the simple answer. The answer is
that the increase of modern wealth--certainly its increase during the
past eighty years--has not been due to any change in the efficiency of
labour at all; that labour is merely a unit which directive ability
multiplies; that if in the year 1800 labour produced everything, and
its total products then be expressed by the number five, the products of
the industrial population would be five per head still, if ability, as a
multiplying number, successively expressible by two and three and four,
had not increased the quotient to ten, fifteen, and twenty; ability thus
being the producer, not indeed of the five with which we start, but of
all the increasing differences between this and the larger numbers.

To return then to definite facts, since in the year 1800 an equal
division of all the wealth of Great Britain would have yielded to each
family an income of eighty pounds, and since eighty years later an equal
division of the total which was actually appropriated as wages by
wage-paid labour alone, would have yielded to each labourer's family
some twenty-five pounds in addition, the labouring class as a whole in
Great Britain to-day, instead of receiving less than its labour
produces, receives on the lowest computation from thirty to thirty-three
per cent. more. Or, to put the matter otherwise, more than a fourth of
its present income is drawn from a fund which would cease to have any
existence if it were not for the continued activity of a specially
gifted class, by whose brains the data of science are being constantly
remastered and re-assimilated, and by whose energy they are applied to
the minds and muscles of the many from the earliest hour of each working
day to the latest. And what is true labour, its products, and receipts
in Great Britain, is broadly true of them in America and all other
countries also, where modern capitalism has arrived at the same stage of
development.

We are, let me say once more, not here contemplating individual cases.
Of the total wage-fund divided among the labourers in any given country,
too much may be given to some men, and too little to others; but of
every million pounds which a million of such men receive, some t