far it gives us, or fails to give us, even an approximately complete account of them.

We shall find that, in spite of the plausibility with which the talent of Marx invested it, this basic doctrine of so-called scientific socialism is the greatest intellectual mare's-nest of the century which has just ended; and when once we have realised with precision on what, in the modern world, the actual efficiency of the productive process depends, we shall see that the analysis of Marx bears about the same relation to the economic facts of to-day that the child's analysis of matter into the four traditional elements, or the doctrine of Thales that everything is made of water, bears to the facts of chemistry as modern science has revealed them to us.

CHAPTER III

THE ROOT ERROR OF THE MARXIAN THEORY.
ITS OMISSION OF DIRECTIVE ABILITY.
ABILITY AND LABOUR DEFINED

In approaching the opinions of another, from whom we are about to differ, we gain much in clearness if at starting we can find some point of agreement with him. In the case of Marx we can find this without difficulty, for the first observation which our subject will naturally suggest to us is an admission that, within limits, his theory of production is true. Whatever may be the agencies which are required to produce wealth, human effort is one of them; and into whatever kinds this necessary agency may divide itself, one kind must always be labour, in the sense in which Marx understood it—in other words, that use of the hands and muscles by which the majority of mankind have always gained their livelihood.

It is, moreover, easy to point out actual cases in which all the wealth that is produced is produced by labour only. The simplest of such cases are supplied us by the lowest savages, who manage, by their utmost exertions, to provide themselves with the barest necessaries. Such cases show that labour, wherever it exists, produces at least a minimum of what men require; for if it were not so there would be no men to labour. Such cases show also another thing. The most primitive races possess rude implements of some kind, which any pair of hands can fashion, just as any pair of hands can use them. These rude implements are capital in its embryonic form; and so far as they go, they verify the Marxian theory that capital is nothing but past labour crystallised.

But we need not, in order to see labour, past and present, operating and producing in a practically unalloyed condition, go to savage or even semi-civilised countries. The same thing may be seen among groups of peasant proprietors, which still survive here and there in the remoter parts of Europe. These men and their families, by their own unaided labour, produce nearly everything which they eat and wear and use. Mill, in his treatise on Political Economy, gives us an account of this condition of things, as prevailing among the peasants in certain districts of Germany. "They labour early and late," he says, quoting from a German eulogist. "They plod on from day to day and from year to year, the most untirable of human animals." The German writer admires them as men who are their own masters. Mill holds them up as a shining and instructive example of the magic effect of ownership in intensifying human labour. In any case such men are examples of two things—of labour operating as the sole productive agency, and also of such labour self-intensified to its utmost pitch. And what does the labour of these men produce? According to the authority from which Mill quotes, it produces just enough to keep them above the level of actual want. Here, then, we have an unexceptionable example of the wealth-producing power of labour pure and simple; and if we imagine an entire nation of men who, as their own masters, worked under liked conditions, we should have an example of the same thing on a larger and more instructive scale. We should have a whole nation which produced only just enough to keep it above the level of actual bodily want.

And now let us turn from production in an imaginary nation such as this, and compare it with production at large among the civilised nations of to-day. Nobody could insist on the contrast between the efficiency of the two processes more strongly than do the socialists themselves. The aggregate wealth of the civilised nations to-day is, they say, so enormous—it consists of such a multitude of daily renewed goods and services—that luxuries undreamed of by the labourer of earlier times might easily be made as abundant for every household as water. In other words, if we take a million men, admittedly consisting of labourers pure and simple in the first place, and the same number of men exerting themselves under modern conditions in the second place, the industrial efforts of the second million are, hour for hour, infinitely more productive than the industrial efforts of the first. If, for example, we take the case of England, and compare the product produced per head of the industrial population towards the close of the seventeenth century, with the product produced less than two centuries afterwards, at the time when Marx was writing his work on Capital, the later product will, according to the estimate of statisticians, stand to the earlier in the proportion of thirty-three to seven.

Now, if we adopt the scientific theory of Marx that labour pure and simple is the sole producer of wealth, and that labour is productive in proportion to the hours devoted to it, how has it happened—this is our crucial question—that the amount of labour which produced seven at one period should produce thirty-three at another? How are we to explain the presence of the additional twenty-six?

The answer of Marx, and of those who reason like him, is that, owing to the development of knowledge, mechanical and chemical especially, and the consequent development of industrial methods and machinery, labour as a whole has itself become more productive. But to say this is merely begging the question. To what is this development of knowledge, of methods, and of machinery due? Is it due to such labour as that of the "untirable human animals," to which Mill refers as an example of labour in its intensest form? In a word, does ordinary labour, or the industrial effort of the majority, contain in itself any principle of advance at all?

We must, in order to do justice to any theory, consider not only the points on which its exponents lay the greatest stress, but also those which they recognise as implied in it, or which we may see to be implied in it ourselves. And if we consider the theory of Marx in this way, we shall see that labour, in the sense in which he understands the word, does contain principles of advance which are of two distinguishable kinds.

One of these is recognised by Marx himself. Just as, when he says that labour is the sole productive agency, he assumes the gifts of nature, which provide it with something to work upon, so, when he conceives of labour as the effort of hand and muscle, he assumes a human mind behind these by which hand and muscle are directed. Such being the case, he expressly admits also that mind is in some cases a more efficient director than in others, and is able to train the hands and muscles of the labourer, so that these acquire the quality which is commonly called skill. Ruskin, who asserted, like Marx, that labour is the sole producer, used in this respect a precisely similar argument. He defined skill as faculty which exceptional powers of mind impart to the hands of those by whom such powers are possessed, from the bricklayer who, in virtue of mere alertness and patience, can lay in an hour more bricks than his fellows,