It is equally likely or possible that others may get more.

We must confine ourselves to what happens generally.

We must take labour as a whole, on the one hand, and directive ability on the other, and ask how we may estimate, with rough but substantial accuracy, the proportion of the joint product respectively produced by each.
At first sight it may seem that this problem is incapable of any definite solution; and some socialistic writers have done their best to obscure it.

The efficiency of labour, they say, is in the modern world largely due, no doubt, to the action of directive ability; but ability could produce nothing unless it had labour to direct; whence it is inferred that the claim of labour on the product may in justice be almost anything short of the absolute total.

To this abstract argument we will presently come back; but we will first examine another urged by a celebrated thinker, which, though less extreme in its implications, would, were it only sound, be even more fatal to our chances of arriving at the conclusion sought for.