◆¹ Now why is this? The reason why is as follows. Although, according to such an hypothesis, if a plough had not been made by this one able man, no ploughs would ever have been made by anybody, yet when such a simple implement has once been made and used, anybody who has seen it can make and use others like it; so that the Ability of the inventor of the plough increases the productivity of every labourer who uses it, not by co-operating with him, but by actually passing into him. Thus, so far as this particular operation is concerned, the simplest labourer becomes endowed with all the powers of the inventor; and the inventor thenceforward is, in no practical sense, the producer of the increased product of what he has enabled the labourer to produce, any more than a father is the producer of what is produced by his son. [Sidenote ◆1 But the inventions by which Ability in the modern world has increased production are the very opposite of these inventions of earlier days; for they require as much Ability to use them to the best advantage as they required to make them.] And if the productivity of Labour were increased by inventions alone, and if all inventions were as simple as the primæval plough—if, when once seen, anybody were able to make them, and, having once made them, to use them to the utmost advantage—then, though Ability might still be the sole cause of every fresh addition to the productive powers of exertion, these added powers would be all made over to Labour, and be absorbed and appropriated by it, just as Lear’s kingdom was made over to his daughters; and whatever increased wealth might be produced thenceforward through their agency would be the true product of Labour, which had in itself become more effective. ◆¹ But, as a matter of fact, this is not the case; and it is not so for two reasons. In the first place, such implements as the primæval plough differ from the implements on which modern industry depends, in the complexity alike of their structure, and of the principles involved in it; so that without the guidance of Ability of many kinds, Labour alone would be powerless to reproduce them; and, in the second place, as these implements multiply, not only is Ability more and more necessary for their manufacture, but is more and more necessary also for the use of them when manufactured. One of the principal results of the modern development of machinery, or of the use, by new processes, of newly discovered powers of Nature, is the increasing division and subdivision of Labour; so that the labourers, as I have said before, by the introduction of this mass of machinery, become themselves the most complicated machine of all, each labourer being a single minute wheel, and Ability being the framework which alone keeps them in their places. It may be said, therefore, that each modern invention or discovery by which the productivity of human exertion is increased has