wealth at present annually produced by it, ask ourselves what would happen if some duly qualified angel were to pick out and kill, or otherwise make away with, every man, who, in virtue of his assimilated scientific knowledge, his inventive gifts, his constructive and practical imagination, his energy, his initiative, and his natural powers of leadership, was better able to direct others than the other nine were to direct themselves?

We cannot make this experiment in precisely the way described; but history will provide us with equivalents which are sufficiently accurate for our purpose.  There are, for example, in the case of Great Britain, data which have enabled statisticians with a considerable degree of unanimity to estimate the values produced per head of the industrial population at various periods from the reign of Charles II. till to-day, and to reduce these values to comparable terms of money.  Now, we need not insist too much on the accuracy of the figures in question; but one broad fact is unmistakably shown by them—­that the product per head towards the close of the nineteenth century was, to say the least of it, from four to five times as great as it was towards the close of the sixteenth.  To what, then, was this increase in industrial productivity due?  It was not due to any change in the spontaneous workings of nature.  It can only have been due to some change in the character of human effort—­either in that of the effort of each separate manual labourer, or else in that of the men by whom the labour of others is directed.  The average labourer, however, at the close of the nineteenth century did not differ, as an isolated labouring unit, from the average labourer as he was at the time of the fire of London.  The increase in industrial productivity must therefore be necessarily due to a change in the ability of those by whom the labourers are organised and directed.  And here a priori reasoning is confirmed by actual facts, for the change which has taken place in the class which directs the labour of others has been, during the period in question, of the most notorious and astonishing kind.  That class had been progressively absorbing into itself, and concentrating on the conduct of industry, ambitions, intelligences, and strong practical wills, which formerly found their outlets in very different channels—­ecclesiastical, political, and more especially military.  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