ith's time two other
factors were at work, which have ever since been growing in magnitude
and importance; and the secret of modern production lies, we shall find,
in these. I call them two, but fundamentally there is only one, for
that which is most obvious, and of which I shall speak first, is
explainable only as the direct result of the second. This, the most
obvious factor, is the modern development of machinery. The other is the
growing application of exceptional mental powers, not to the _manual
labour of the men by whom these powers are possessed_, but to the
_process of directing and co-ordinating the divided labours of others_.

Now, as to machinery, Marx and his followers, as we have seen, maintain
that it represents nothing but the average labour of the past; and so
long as it exists only in its smaller and simpler forms, the devising
and constructing of which are not referable to any faculties which we
are able to distinguish from those of the average labourer, we have
further seen that the theory of Marx holds good. Labour produces alike
both the finished goods and its implements. But in proportion as
machines or other contrivances, such as vessels, grow in size or
complexity, and embody, as they do in their more modern developments,
ingenuity of the highest and knowledge of the most abstruse kinds, the
situation changes; and we are able to identify certain faculties as
essential to the ultimate result, which affect the work of the
labourers, but which do not emanate from themselves. Any three men of
average strength and intelligence might make a potter's wheel together,
or build a small boat together, as they frequently do now, their
several tasks being interchangeable, or assigned to each of them by easy
mutual agreement. The business of directing labour has not separated
itself from the actual business of labouring. Each man knows the object
of what he does, and can co-ordinate that object with the object of what
is done by his fellows. But when the ultimate result is something so
vast and complicated that a thousand men instead of three have to
co-operate in the production of it, when a million pieces of metal, some
large and some minute, have to be cast, filed, turned, rolled, or bent,
so that finally they may all coalesce into a single mechanical organism,
no one labourer sees further than the task which he performs himself. He
cannot adjust his work to that of another man, who is probably working a
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