The human activities and faculties, then, which are involved in the production of modern wealth, are not, as Marx says—­and as the orthodox economists said, whom he rightly calls his masters, and as their followers still say—­of one kind—­namely, those embodied in the individual task-work of the individual, to which Marx, Ricardo, and Mill alike give the name of “labour”; they are of two kinds.  And this, indeed, the earlier economists recognised, as we may see by Mill’s casual admission that the progress of industrial effort depends before all things on thought and the advance of knowledge.  But they recognised the fact in a general way only.  How thought and knowledge affected the industrial process they made no attempt to explain, otherwise than by comprehending them on occasion under the common name of labour, which they assigned throughout most of their arguments to manual task-work only.

Now, it is doubtless true that, as a mere matter of verbal propriety, this general sense may be given to the word “labour,” if we please; but if in discussing the efforts which produce wealth we admit that these efforts are not of one kind but two, and if the word “labour” is, in nine cases out of ten, employed with the definite intention of designating only one of them, it is impossible to reason about the industrial process intelligibly, so long as we apply also the same name to the other.  We might as well use the word “man”—­as with reference to some problems we are perfectly right in doing—­to designate both men and women, and then attempt to discuss the relations between the two sexes.

For the directive faculties, so essentially distinct from those to which universal custom has allocated the name of labour, it is difficult to find a name equally convenient and satisfying.  In default of a better, I have, on former occasions, applied to it the name of Ability; and this will serve our purpose here—­especially as it is a name which has been, of recent years, applied by many of the more thoughtful socialists themselves to certain activities of a mental and moral kind, which their conception of labour cannot be made to include, but which they are beginning to recognise as playing some part in production.  We must remember, however, that we are using it in a strictly technical sense, which will in some respects be narrower than the ordinary, and in some more comprehensive.  It will exclude all kinds of cleverness unapplied to economic production; and will include many powers, in so far as such production is affected by them, to the expression of whose scope and character it may sometimes appear inadequate.[1]

And now when we have come thus far, a quite new question arises.  We have seen how ability is, by its direction of labour, the chief agency in that process which produces wealth to-day, and how it makes the amount produced, relatively to the number of the producers, so incomparably greater than it ever was under any previous system.  We have now to consider the means by which this faculty of direction is exercised.