Marx here advances to the second stage of his argument.  Capital, as he conceives of it, is the tools or instruments of production; and modern capital for him means those vast aggregates of machinery by the use of which in most industries the earlier implements have been displaced.  Now, here, says Marx, the capitalist is sure to interpose with the objection that the increased output of wealth is due, not to labour, but to the machinery, and that the labourer, as such, has consequently no claim on it.  But to this objection Marx is ready with the following answer—­that the machinery itself is nothing but past labour in disguise.  It is past labour crystallised, or embodied in an external form, and used by present labour to assist itself in its own operations.  Every wheel, crank, and connecting-rod, every rivet in every boiler, owes its shape and its place to labour, and labour only.  Labour, therefore—­the labour of the average multitude—­remains the sole agent in the production of wealth, after all.

Capital, however, as thus understood, has, he says, this peculiarity—­that, being labour in an externalised and also in a permanent form, it is capable of being detached from the labourers and appropriated by other people; and the essence of modern capitalism is neither more nor less than this—­the appropriation of the instruments of production by a minority who are not producers.  So long as the implements of production were small and simple, and such that each could be used by one man or family, the divorce between the labourer and his implements was not easy to accomplish; but in proportion as these simple implements were developed into the aggregated mechanisms of the factory, each of which aggregates was used in common by hundreds and even by thousands of labourers, the link between the implement and the user was broken by an automatic process; for a single organised mechanism used by a thousand men could not, in the nature of things, be owned by each one of the thousand individually, and collective ownership by all of them was an idea as yet unborn.  Under these circumstances, with the growth of modern machinery, the ownership of the implements of production passed, by what Marx looked upon as a kind of historical fatality, into the hands of a class whose activities were purely acquisitive, and had no true connection with the process of production at all; and this class, he said, constitutes the capitalists of the modern world.

The results of this process have, according to him, been as follows:  Society has become divided into two contrasted groups—­an enormous group, and a small one.  The enormous group—­the great body of every nation—­the people—­the labouring mass—­the one true producing power—­has been left without any implements by means of which its labour can exert itself, and these implements have been monopolised by the small group alone.  The people at large, in fact, have become like the employes of a single mill-owner, who have no choice