Modern capital, then, I repeat, is primarily wage-capital, such capital as modern machinery being the direct result of its application; and wage-capital is productive, not in virtue of any quality inherent in itself, but merely because as a fact, under the modern system, it constitutes the reins by which the exceptional ability of a few guides the labour, skilled or unskilled, of the many. It is the means by which the commonest labourer, who hardly knows the rule of three, is made to work as though he were master of the abstruest branches of mathematics; by which the artisan who only has a smattering--if he has as much as that--of mechanics, metallurgy, chemistry, is made to work as though all the sciences had been assimilated by his single brain. Let any one consider, for example, one of the great steel bridges which now throw their single spans over waters such as the Firth of Forth. These structures are crystallised labour, doubtless, but they are, in their distinctive features, not crystallised labour as such. They are crystallised mechanics, crystallised chemistry, crystallised mathematics--in short, crystallised intellect, knowledge, imagination, and executive capacity, of kinds which hardly exist in a dozen minds out of a million; and labour conduces to the production of such astonishing structures only because it submits itself to the guidance of these intellectual leaders. And the same is the case with modern production generally. Though labour is essential to the production of wealth even in the smallest quantities, the distinguishing productivity of industry in the modern world depends not on the labour, but on the ability with which the labour is directed; and in the modern world the primary function of capital is that of providing ability with its necessary instrument of direction. No unprejudiced person, who is capable of coherent thought, can, when the matter is thus plainly stated, possibly deny this. That it cannot be denied will be shown in the two following chapters by recent admissions on the part of socialists themselves, the more thoughtful of whom have now virtually abandoned the earlier theoretical framework of socialism altogether, and are trying to substitute a new one, with which we will deal later, and which will indeed prove the main subject of our inquiry. FOOTNOTES: