directing labour has not separated itself from the actual business of labouring.  Each man knows the object of what he does, and can co-ordinate that object with the object of what is done by his fellows.  But when the ultimate result is something so vast and complicated that a thousand men instead of three have to co-operate in the production of it, when a million pieces of metal, some large and some minute, have to be cast, filed, turned, rolled, or bent, so that finally they may all coalesce into a single mechanical organism, no one labourer sees further than the task which he performs himself.  He cannot adjust his work to that of another man, who is probably working a quarter of a mile away from him, and he has in most cases no idea whatever of how the two pieces of work are related to each other.  Each labourer has simply to perform his work in accordance with directions which emanate from some mind other than his own, and the whole practical value of what the labourers do depends on the quality of the directions which are thus given to each.

In other words, in proportion as the industrial process is enhanced in productivity by the concentration on it of the higher faculties of mankind, there is an increasing fission of this process as a whole into two kinds of activity represented by two different groups.  We have no longer merely—­although we have this still—­an increasing division of labour; but we have the labourers of all kinds and grades separating themselves into one group on the one hand, and the men who direct their labour, as a separate group, on the other hand.

The function of the directive faculties, as applied thus to the operations of modern labour, can perhaps be most easily illustrated by the case of a printed book.  Let us take two editions of ten thousand copies each, similarly printed, and priced at six shillings a copy; the one being an edition of a book so dull that but twenty copies can be sold of it, the other of a book so interesting that the public buys the whole ten thousand.  Now, apart from its negligible value as so many tons of waste paper, each pile of books represents economic wealth only in proportion to the quantity of it for which the vendors can find purchasers.  Hence we have in the present case two piles of printed paper which, regarded as paper patterned with printer’s ink, are similar, but one of which is wealth to the extent of three thousand pounds, while the other is wealth to the extent of no more than six pounds.  And to what is the difference between these two values due?  It obviously cannot be due to the manual labour of the compositors, for this, both in kind and quantity, is in each case the same.  It is due to the special directions under which the labour of the compositors is performed.  But these directions do not emanate from the men by whose hands the types are arranged in a given order.