will make daily, not ten pins, but some thousands.  Here we have labour divided by its different applications, but not requiring different degrees of capacity.  We have the average labour of the average man still.  And here we have a fact which, unlike the fact of skill—­a thing in its nature confined to the few only—­affords a real explanation, up to a certain point, of how ordinary labour as a whole, without ceasing to be ordinary labour, may rise from a lower to a higher grade of efficiency.

But such simple divisions of labour as those which are here in question fail, for a reason which will be specified in another moment, to carry us far in the history of industrial progress.  They do but bring us to the starting-point of production as it exists to-day.  The efficiency of productive effort has made all its most astounding advances since the precise time at which the Wealth of Nations was written; and these advances we shall find that it is quite impossible to explain merely by a further division of average and equal labour.  Such a further division has no doubt been an element of the process; but it is an explanation which itself requires explaining.  Even in Adam Smith’s time two other factors were at work, which have ever since been growing in magnitude and importance; and the secret of modern production lies, we shall find, in these.  I call them two, but fundamentally there is only one, for that which is most obvious, and of which I shall speak first, is explainable only as the direct result of the second.  This, the most obvious factor, is the modern development of machinery.  The other is the growing application of exceptional mental powers, not to the manual labour of the men by whom these powers are possessed, but to the process of directing and co-ordinating the divided labours of others.

Now, as to machinery, Marx and his followers, as we have seen, maintain that it represents nothing but the average labour of the past; and so long as it exists only in its smaller and simpler forms, the devising and constructing of which are not referable to any faculties which we are able to distinguish from those of the average labourer, we have further seen that the theory of Marx holds good.  Labour produces alike both the finished goods and its implements.  But in proportion as machines or other contrivances, such as vessels, grow in size or complexity, and embody, as they do in their more modern developments, ingenuity of the highest and knowledge of the most abstruse kinds, the situation changes; and we are able to identify certain faculties as essential to the ultimate result, which affect the work of the labourers, but which do not emanate from themselves.  Any three men of average strength and intelligence might make a potter’s wheel together, or build a small boat together, as they frequently do now, their several tasks being interchangeable, or assigned to each of them by easy mutual agreement.  The business of