Certainly no one can contend that we concede too little.
Let us take, then, the beginning of the nineteenth century as our standing-point; and, assuming that labour was the sole producer then, compare its productivity per head with the productivity of industrial effort--of labour and ability combined--some eight or nine decades later.

The labourers of Great Britain as a body, to the exclusion of all other classes, actually divided among themselves, about the year 1880, more wealth per head--something like forty-five per cent .-- than would have been theirs if they had lived in the days of their own grandfathers, and been able to appropriate as wages the income of the entire country.
Let us, then, repeat the question which we asked just now.

Where has this addition to the income of labour come from?
That part of it is attributable to ability--the ability of the Watts, the Stephensons, the Arkwrights, the Bessemers, the Edisons, and so forth--nobody in his senses will deny.

Can it be said that any of it is attributable to labour?
The period now under consideration is so brief that this question is not hard to answer.

It can easily be shown that man, as a labourer skilled or unskilled, has acquired individually no new efficiencies since--to say the least of it--the days of the Greeks and Romans.