Man for man, then, industry became more productive, because to an increasing degree the ablest men of the nation concentrated their exceptional powers on directing the business of production; and any one who wished to push things to an extreme conclusion might contend that the entire amount--some four or five hundred per cent .-- by which the product per head in the year 1880 exceeded the product per head some two hundred years before, was due to directive ability, and directive ability only; and that the labourers, in their capacity of labourers, had no claim whatsoever to it.

We will, however, put the case in a much more moderate form.

We will, for argument's sake, concede to self-directed labour all that increase in the values produced per head, which took place between the time of Charles II.

and the general establishment in Great Britain of the modern industrial system, with its huge mills and factories, and its concomitant differentiation of the directing class from the directed--an event which had been securely accomplished at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

In making this concession, we shall, indeed, be defying fact, and ignoring the improvements, alike in manufacture and agriculture, which had taken place during the hundred years preceding, especially during the last fifty of them, and which were solely due to a minority of exceptionally able men.[20] We shall thus be conceding to the labourer far more than his due.