And now let us turn from what Labour produces to what the labouring classes[43] have received at different dates within the ninety or hundred years in question. ◆¹ At the time of which we have just been speaking, they received about half of what we assume Labour to have produced. A labouring population of _ten million_ people received annually about _seventy million pounds_.[44] Two generations later, the same number of people received in return for their labour about a _hundred and sixty million pounds_.[45] They were twenty-five per cent richer than they possibly could have been if, in 1795, they had seized on all the property in the kingdom and divided it amongst themselves. In other words, Labour in 1860, instead of receiving, as it did two generations previously, half of what we assume it to have produced, received twenty-five per cent more than it produced. If we turn from the year 1860 to the present time, we find that the gains of Labour have gone on increasing; and that each _ten millions_ of the labouring classes to-day receives in return for its labour _two hundred million pounds_, or over forty per cent more than it produces. And all these calculations are based, the reader must remember, on the ridiculously exaggerated assumption which was made for the sake of argument, that in the days of Watt and Arkwright, Capital, Genius, and Ability had no share in production; and that all the wealth of the country, till the beginning of the present century, was due to the spontaneous efforts of common Labour alone. [Sidenote ◆1 The gains of Labour are put in a yet more striking light by comparing the present income of Labour with the total income of the country fifty years ago.] ◆¹ And now let us look at the matter from a point of view slightly different, and compare the receipts of Labour not with what we assume it to have itself produced, but with the total product of the community at a certain very recent date. In 1843, when Queen Victoria had been six or seven years on the throne, the gross income of the nation was in round numbers _five hundred and fifteen million pounds_. Of this, _two hundred and thirty-five million pounds_ went to the labouring classes, and the remainder, _two hundred and eighty million pounds_, to the classes that paid income-tax. Only fifty years have elapsed since that time, and, according to the best authorities, the income of the labouring classes now is certainly not less than _six hundred and sixty million pounds_.[46] That is to say, it exceeds, by a _hundred and forty-five million pounds_, the entire income of the nation fifty years ago.