It is, moreover, easy to point out actual cases in which all the wealth that is produced is produced by labour only.  The simplest of such cases are supplied us by the lowest savages, who manage, by their utmost exertions, to provide themselves with the barest necessaries.  Such cases show that labour, wherever it exists, produces at least a minimum of what men require; for if it were not so there would be no men to labour.  Such cases show also another thing.  The most primitive races possess rude implements of some kind, which any pair of hands can fashion, just as any pair of hands can use them.  These rude implements are capital in its embryonic form; and so far as they go, they verify the Marxian theory that capital is nothing but past labour crystallised.

But we need not, in order to see labour, past and present, operating and producing in a practically unalloyed condition, go to savage or even semi-civilised countries.  The same thing may be seen among groups of peasant proprietors, which still survive here and there in the remoter parts of Europe.  These men and their families, by their own unaided labour, produce nearly everything which they eat and wear and use.  Mill, in his treatise on Political Economy, gives us an account of this condition of things, as prevailing among the peasants in certain districts of Germany.  “They labour early and late,” he says, quoting from a German eulogist.  “They plod on from day to day and from year to year, the most untirable of human animals.”  The German writer admires them as men who are their own masters.  Mill holds them up as a shining and instructive example of the magic effect of ownership in intensifying human labour.  In any case such men are examples of two things—­of labour operating as the sole productive agency, and also of such labour self-intensified to its utmost pitch.  And what does the labour of these men produce?  According to the authority from which Mill quotes, it produces just enough to keep them above the level of actual want.  Here, then, we have an unexceptionable example of the wealth-producing power of labour pure and simple; and if we imagine an entire nation of men who, as their own masters, worked under liked conditions, we should have an example of the same thing on a larger and more instructive scale.  We should have a whole nation which produced only just enough to keep it above the level of actual bodily want.

And now let us turn from production in an imaginary nation such as this, and compare it with production at large among the civilised nations of to-day.  Nobody could insist on the contrast between the efficiency of the two processes more strongly than do the socialists themselves.  The aggregate wealth of the civilised nations to-day is, they say, so enormous—­it consists of such a multitude of daily renewed goods and services—­that luxuries undreamed of by the labourer of earlier times might easily be made as abundant for every household as water.  In other