At first sight it may seem that this problem is incapable of any definite solution; and some socialistic writers have done their best to obscure it.  The efficiency of labour, they say, is in the modern world largely due, no doubt, to the action of directive ability; but ability could produce nothing unless it had labour to direct; whence it is inferred that the claim of labour on the product may in justice be almost anything short of the absolute total.  To this abstract argument we will presently come back; but we will first examine another urged by a celebrated thinker, which, though less extreme in its implications, would, were it only sound, be even more fatal to our chances of arriving at the conclusion sought for.  The thinker to whom I refer is Mill, who assigns to this argument a very prominent place in the opening chapter of his Principles of Political Economy.

Certain economists have, so he says, debated “whether nature gives more assistance to labour in one kind of industry than in another”; and he endeavours to show that the question is in its very essence unanswerable.  “When two conditions,” he proceeds, “are equally necessary for producing the effect at all, it is unmeaning to say that so much is produced by one, and so much by the other.  It is like attempting to decide which of the factors five and six contributes most to the production of thirty.”  And if this argument is true of nature and labour, it is equally true of labour and the ability by which labour is directed.  Thus a great ocean liner which, in Mill’s language, would be “the effect,” could not be produced at all without the labour of several thousand labourers; and it is equally true that it could not be produced at all unless the masters of various sciences, designers, inventors, and organisers, directed the labour of the labourers in certain specific ways.  Both conditions, then, being “necessary for producing the effect at all,” the portions of it due to each would, according to Mill’s argument, be indeterminable.  Let us consider, therefore, if Mill’s argument is sound.  We shall find that it is vitiated by a fallacy which will, as soon as we have perceived it, show us the way to the truth of which we are now in search.  Let us begin with taking the argument as he himself applies it.

He brings it forward with special reference to agriculture, and aims it at the contention of a certain school of economists that nature in agriculture did more than in other industries.  To urge this, says Mill, is nonsense, for the simple reason that though nature in agriculture does something, it is impossible to determine whether the something is relatively much or little.  Let us, he says in effect, take the products of any farm, which we may for convenience’ sake symbolise as so many loaves; and it is obviously absurd to inquire which produces most of them—­the soil or the farm labourers.  The soil without the labourers would produce no loaves at all.  The labourers would produce no loaves if they had not the soil to work upon.