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.  And what is true labour, its products, and receipts in Great Britain, is broadly true of them in America and all other countries also, where modern capitalism has arrived at the same stage of development.

We are, let me say once more, not here contemplating individual cases.  Of the total wage-fund divided among the labourers in any given country, too much may be given to some men, and too little to others; but of every million pounds which a million of such men receive, some two hundred and fifty thousand are distributed well or ill, which have not been produced by the efforts of these men themselves, but are due to the efforts of a class which is definitely outside their own.[21] If, then, it is contended that the just reward of labour is that total of wealth which labour itself produces, the idea that labour, in respect of its pecuniary remuneration, is, under present conditions, the victim of any general wrong, is so far from having any justification in fact that it only touches fact at all by representing a direct inversion of it.  Labour, as a whole, does not, under existing conditions, get less than it produces.[22] It gets a very great deal more.  If, therefore, the claims of labour are based on, and limited to, the amount of wealth which is produced by labour itself—­that is to say, the total which it would now produce were the faculties of the directing and organising minority paralysed—­what labour, thus appropriating the entire product, would receive, would be far less, not more, than what it actually receives to-day.  Instead of defrauding it of any part of its due, the existing system is treating it with an extreme and even wanton generosity.

Is it, then, here contended, many readers will ask, that if matters are determined by ideal justice, or anything like practical wisdom, the remuneration of labour in general ought henceforth to be lessened, or at all events precluded from any possibility of increase?  Is it contended that the employing and directing class should attempt or even desire to take back from those directed by it every increment of wealth possessed by them which is not produced by themselves?  If any one thinks that such is the conclusion which is here suggested, let him suspend his opinion until, as we shall do in another chapter, we return to the subject and deal with it in a more comprehensive way.  Our conclusion, as for the moment we must now be content to leave it, is not that the labourers have not a claim, practically valid, to the only portion of their income which has any tendency to grow, but merely that they should understand the source from which this portion is drawn—­a source which consists of the efforts of other men, not of their own.