whole expenditure will consist in paying wages to certain labourers, on condition that they work up this metal in a manner which he prescribes to them.  For the raw metal he pays, we will say, a hundred pounds, or the odd shillings of the guineas.  He pays to twenty labourers a hundred pounds apiece as wages; and the result is twenty engines.  If the engines are successful, and if the public will give him a hundred and fifty guineas for each of them, the man has got his entire capital back again, with a thousand guineas added to it, and can continue his direction of labour by means of wages, on the same lines, and on a much more extended scale.  But if the engines, when tried, develop some inherent defect, and he consequently can sell none of them, he may still, perhaps, get back the price of the raw metal—­a petty sum, insufficient for his own needs—­but his whole wage-capital will be gone, and with it his power of directing any further labour in the future.  In other words, under the system of private capitalism, if labour has been directed by any man in an unsuccessful way, the resulting products being such that nobody cares to buy them, or in exact proportion as this result is approached, the man’s implement of direction passes out of his hands altogether; and the simple fact of his having directed labour ill deprives him of the means of directing or of misdirecting it again.

But under a system of state socialism the situation would be wholly changed.  Private capitalism is, in this respect, self-acting, and acts with absolute accuracy, because wage-capital being divided into a multitude of independent reservoirs, its waste at any one point brings about its own remedy.  Each reservoir is like a mill-pond which automatically begins to dry up whenever its contents are employed in actuating a useless mill; and the man who has wasted his water is able to waste no more.  But the moment the divisions between the reservoirs are broken down, and the separate capitals contained in them become, as would be the case under socialism, fused together like the waters of a single lake, the director of labour who so misused any portion of this fluid stock that the products of labour, as directed by him, failed to replace the wages, would not thereby be incapacitated from continuing his misdirections further; for the wage-capital dissipated by his incompetence could, under these conditions, always be replaced, and its loss more or less concealed, by fresh supplies which had a really different origin.  It was only in consequence of conditions resembling these that the London County Council was enabled to continue for so long its service of Thames steamboats, in spite of the fact that the labour thus employed failed to reproduce, by the functions which it performed for the public, more than a fraction of capital which was necessarily consumed in its maintenance.  Had labour been thus misdirected by any private capitalist, his misdirection of it would have soon been checked by his loss of the means of continuing it; but the County Council, with the purse of the community at its back, was able, by taxing the industrial successes of others, to refinance and prolong its own industrial failure.