of the third class is possessed by but one man out of two thousand; of the second class by but one man out of four thousand; and of the first class by but one man out of a hundred thousand. This is, as I have said, a very rough method of calculation, but it is not a random one; and there is reason to believe that it affords us an approximation to truth. At all events, taking it as a whole, it does not err by making Ability too rare; and we shall be certainly within the mark if, taking Ability as a whole, and waiving the question of its various classes and their rarity, we say that of the men in this country actively engaged in production, the men of Ability constitute one-sixteenth. [Sidenote ◆1 We may now repeat the conclusions arrived at in the last Book, that Ability produces at _least_ eight-thirteenths of the present income of this country; and Labour, at the utmost, five-thirteenths.] And now we are in a position to repeat with more precision and confidence the conclusion which we reached at the end of the last chapter. ◆¹ It was there pointed out that of our present national income, consisting as it does of about _thirteen hundred million pounds_, Labour demonstrably produced not more than _five hundred million pounds_, whilst _eight hundred million pounds_ at least was demonstrably the product of Ability. In the present chapter, I have substantiated that proposition: I have exposed the confusions and fallacies which have been used to obscure its truth; I have shown that Ability and Labour are two distinct forces, in the sense that whilst the latter represents a faculty common to all men, the possession of the former is the natural monopoly of the few; that the labourer and the man of Ability play such different parts in production that a given amount of wealth is no more their joint product than a picture is the joint product of a great painter and a canvas-stretcher; and I have now pointed to some rough indication of the respective numbers of the men of Ability and of the labourers. Instead, therefore, of contenting ourselves with the general statement that Ability makes so much of the national income, and Labour so much, we may say that ninety-six per cent of the producing classes produce little more than a third of our present national income, and that a minority, consisting of one-sixteenth of these classes, produces little less than two-thirds of it. ——————————————————————————————————————————————————————— BOOK IV THE REASONABLE HOPES OF LABOUR — THEIR MAGNITUDE, AND THEIR BASIS ——————————————————————————————————————————————————————— CHAPTER I _How the Future and Hopes of the Labouring Classes are bound up with the Prosperity of the Classes who exercise Ability._