Building as a whole is not checked by the fact that the best bricklayers may do no more than the worst.

All kinds of commodities are multiplied, improved, and cheapened, while thousands of the operatives whose labour is involved in their production are allowed to attend to but one machine, when they might easily attend to three.

In a word, while the unions have been doing their effective best to keep labour, as a productive agent, stationary, or even to diminish its efficiency, the product of industry as a whole exhibits an unchecked increase.

And what is the explanation of this?
Little as the trade-unions realise the fact themselves, their own policy is an object-lesson which supplies us with the simple answer.

The answer is that the increase of modern wealth--certainly its increase during the past eighty years--has not been due to any change in the efficiency of labour at all; that labour is merely a unit which directive ability multiplies; that if in the year 1800 labour produced everything, and its total products then be expressed by the number five, the products of the industrial population would be five per head still, if ability, as a multiplying number, successively expressible by two and three and four, had not increased the quotient to ten, fifteen, and twenty; ability thus being the producer, not indeed of the five with which we start, but of all the increasing differences between this and the larger numbers.
To return then to definite facts, since in the year 1800 an equal division of all the wealth of Great Britain would have yielded to each family an income of eighty pounds, and since eighty years later an equal division of the total which was actually appropriated as wages by wage-paid labour alone, would have yielded to each labourer's family some twenty-five pounds in addition, the labouring class as a whole in Great Britain to-day, instead of receiving less than its labour produces, receives on the lowest computation from thirty to thirty-three per cent.more.Or, to put the matter otherwise, more than a fourth of its present income is drawn from a fund which would cease to have any existence if it were not for the continued activity of a specially gifted class, by whose brains the data of science are being constantly remastered and re-assimilated, and by whose energy they are applied to the minds and muscles of the many from the earliest hour of each working day to the latest.