he productivity of industrial exertion as a whole. Those,
therefore, who, in spite of the fact that the productivity of modern
communities has, relatively to their numbers, undergone an increase
which is general, still maintain that the sole productive agency is
labour, must seek for an explanation of this increase in some other fact
than skill.

And without transgressing the limits which the theory of Marx imposes on
us, such a further fact is very easy to find. Adam Smith opens his
_Wealth of Nations_ with a discussion of it. The chief cause, he says,
which in all progressive countries increases the productive power of the
individual labourer, is not the development among a few of
potentialities which are above the average, but a more effective
development of potentialities common to all, in consequence of labour
being divided, so that each man devotes his life to the doing of some
one thing. Thus if ten ordinary men were to engage in the business of
pin-making, each making every part of every pin for himself, each man
would probably complete but one pin in a day. But if each man makes one
part, and nothing else but that, thus repeating incessantly a single
series of motions, each will acquire the knack of working with such
rapidity that the ten together will make daily, not ten pins, but some
thousands. Here we have labour divided by its different applications,
but not requiring different degrees of capacity. We have the average
labour of the average man still. And here we have a fact which, unlike
the fact of skill--a thing in its nature confined to the few
only--affords a real explanation, up to a certain point, of how ordinary
labour as a whole, without ceasing to be ordinary labour, may rise from
a lower to a higher grade of efficiency.

But such simple divisions of labour as those which are here in question
fail, for a reason which will be specified in another moment, to carry
us far in the history of industrial progress. They do but bring us to
the starting-point of production as it exists to-day. The efficiency of
productive effort has made all its most astounding advances since the
precise time at which the _Wealth of Nations_ was written; and these
advances we shall find that it is quite impossible to explain merely by
a further division of average and equal labour. Such a further division
has no doubt been an element of the process; but it is an explanation
which itself requires explaining. Even in Adam Sm