has been, during the period in question, of the most notorious and astonishing kind. That class had been progressively absorbing into itself, and concentrating on the conduct of industry, ambitions, intelligences, and strong practical wills, which formerly found their outlets in very different channels--ecclesiastical, political, and more especially military. Man for man, then, industry became more productive, because to an increasing degree the ablest men of the nation concentrated their exceptional powers on directing the business of production; and any one who wished to push things to an extreme conclusion might contend that the entire amount--some four or five hundred per cent.--by which the product per head in the year 1880 exceeded the product per head some two hundred years before, was due to directive ability, and directive ability only; and that the labourers, in their capacity of labourers, had no claim whatsoever to it. We will, however, put the case in a much more moderate form. We will, for argument's sake, concede to self-directed labour all that increase in the values produced per head, which took place between the time of Charles II. and the general establishment in Great Britain of the modern industrial system, with its huge mills and factories, and its concomitant differentiation of the directing class from the directed--an event which had been securely accomplished at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In making this concession, we shall, indeed, be defying fact, and ignoring the improvements, alike in manufacture and agriculture, which had taken place during the hundred years preceding, especially during the last fifty of them, and which were solely due to a minority of exceptionally able men.[20] We shall thus be conceding to the labourer far more than his due. Certainly no one can contend that we concede too little. Let us take, then, the beginning of the nineteenth century as our standing-point; and, assuming that labour was the sole producer then, compare its productivity per head with the productivity of industrial effort--of labour and ability combined--some eight or nine decades later. The labourers of Great Britain as a body, to the exclusion of all other classes, actually divided among themselves, about the year 1880, more wealth per head--something like forty-five per cent.--than would have been theirs if they had lived in the days of their own grandfathers, and been able to appropriate as wages the income of the entire country.