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.  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.  An ancient gem-engraver would to-day be eminent among modern craftsmen.  The implements of the Roman surgeons, the proportional compasses used by the Roman architects, the force-pumps and taps used in the Roman houses—­all things that could be produced by a man directing his own muscles—­were produced in the Rome of Nero as perfectly as they could be produced to-day.  To this fact our museums bear ample and minute witness; while the Colosseum and the Parthenon are quite enough to show that the masons of the ancient world were at least the equals of our own.  If no advance, then, in the quality of manual labour as such has taken place in the course of two thousand years, it is idle to contend that its powers have increased in the course of eighty.  But a still more remarkable