◆¹ To this question it is altogether impossible to give any answer based upon _à priori_ reasoning. The very idea of such a thing is ridiculous; and to attempt it could, at the best, result in nothing better than some piece of academic ingenuity, having no practical meaning for man, woman, or child. But what reasoning will not do, industrial history will. Industrial history will provide us with an answer of the most striking kind—general, indeed, in its character; but not, for that reason, any the less decided, or less full of instruction. For industrial history, in a way which few people realise, will show us how, during the past hundred years, Labour has actually succeeded in accomplishing the feat we are considering; how, without checking the development and the power of Ability, it has been able to appropriate year by year a certain share of what Ability produces. When the reader comes to consider this,—which is the great industrial object lesson of modern times,—when he sees what the share is which Labour has appropriated so triumphantly, he will see how the conclusions we have here arrived at, with regard to the causes of production, afford a foundation for the hopes and claims of Labour, as broad and solid as that by which they support the rights of Ability. Let us turn, then, once more to the fact which I have already so often dwelt upon, that during the closing years of the last century the population of Great Britain was about _ten millions_, and the national income about a _hundred and forty million pounds_. It has been shown that to reach and maintain that rate of production required the exertion of an immense amount of Ability, and the use of an immense Capital which Ability had recently created. But let me repeat what I have said already: that we will, for the purpose of the present argument, attribute the production of the whole to average human Labour. It is obvious that Labour did not produce more, for no more was produced; and it is also obvious that if, since that time, it had never been assisted and never controlled by Ability, the same amount of Labour would produce no more now. We are therefore, let me repeat, plainly understating the case if we say that British Labour by itself—in other words, Labour shut out from, and unassisted by the industrial Ability of the past ninety years—can, at the utmost, produce annually a _hundred and forty million pounds_ for every _ten millions_ of the population. [Sidenote ◆1 In 1860 Labour took at least twenty-five per cent more than it produced itself, out of the products of Ability; and it now takes about forty-five per cent.]