we take, for example, a man working in a factory, at a great machine,
making screws. We go to that man and say: "Every screw here is made by
manual labor alone. The machine does not count; the brains of the
inventors of the machine have nothing to do with the making of screws."
Our laborer might be illiterate and unable to read a single page of
political economy with understanding, but he would know that our
statement was foolish and untrue. Or, suppose we take the machine itself
and say to the laborer: "That great machine with all its levers and
wheels and springs working in such beautiful harmony was made entirely
by manual workers, such as molders, blacksmiths, and machinists; no
brain workers had anything to do with the making of it; the labor of the
inventors, and of the men who drew the plans and supervised the making,
had nothing to do with the production of the machine"--our laborer would
rightly conclude that we were either fools or seeking to mock him as
one.

Curiously enough, notwithstanding the frequent reiteration of this
criticism of Marx by Mr. Mallock, he himself, in an unguarded moment,
provides the answer by which Marx is vindicated! Thus, speaking of the
great classical economists, Adam Smith, Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill,
he points out that they included "all forms of living industrial effort,
from those of a Watt or an Edison down to those of a man who tars a
fence, grouped together under the common name of labor" (Lecture I, page
16). And again: "At present the orthodox economists and the socialistic
economists alike give us _all human effort_[160] tied up, as it were, in
a sack, and ticketed 'human labor'" (Lecture I, page 18). Now, if the
Socialist includes in his definition of labor "all human effort," it
stands to reason that he does not mean only "ordinary manual labor" when
he uses the term. Thus Mallock answers Mallock and vindicates Marx!

Of course, Marx, like all the great economists, includes in his concept
of labor every kind of productive effort, mental as well as physical, as
Mr. Mallock, to the utter destruction of his disingenuous criticism,
unconsciously--we must suppose--admitted. Take, for example, this
definition: "By labor power or capacity for labor is to be understood
the aggregate of those _mental and physical_ capabilities existing in a
human being, which he exercises when he produces a use-value of any
description."[161] As against this luminous and precise definition, i