air of hands can use them. These rude implements
are capital in its embryonic form; and so far as they go, they verify
the Marxian theory that capital is nothing but past labour crystallised.

But we need not, in order to see labour, past and present, operating and
producing in a practically unalloyed condition, go to savage or even
semi-civilised countries. The same thing may be seen among groups of
peasant proprietors, which still survive here and there in the remoter
parts of Europe. These men and their families, by their own unaided
labour, produce nearly everything which they eat and wear and use. Mill,
in his treatise on _Political Economy_, gives us an account of this
condition of things, as prevailing among the peasants in certain
districts of Germany. "They labour early and late," he says, quoting
from a German eulogist. "They plod on from day to day and from year to
year, the most untirable of human animals." The German writer admires
them as men who are their own masters. Mill holds them up as a shining
and instructive example of the magic effect of ownership in intensifying
human labour. In any case such men are examples of two things--of
labour operating as the sole productive agency, and also of such labour
self-intensified to its utmost pitch. And what does the labour of these
men produce? According to the authority from which Mill quotes, it
produces just enough to keep them above the level of actual want. Here,
then, we have an unexceptionable example of the wealth-producing power
of labour pure and simple; and if we imagine an entire nation of men
who, as their own masters, worked under liked conditions, we should have
an example of the same thing on a larger and more instructive scale. We
should have a whole nation which produced only just enough to keep it
above the level of actual bodily want.

And now let us turn from production in an imaginary nation such as this,
and compare it with production at large among the civilised nations of
to-day. Nobody could insist on the contrast between the efficiency of
the two processes more strongly than do the socialists themselves. The
aggregate wealth of the civilised nations to-day is, they say, so
enormous--it consists of such a multitude of daily renewed goods and
services--that luxuries undreamed of by the labourer of earlier times
might easily be made as abundant for every household as water. In other
words, if we take a million men, admittedly consisting