◆¹ Let us then take a community of eight labourers, each producing commodities worth _fifty pounds_ a year, and each consuming—as he easily might—the whole of them. These men represent the productive power of Labour; ◆² and now let us suppose the advent of Ability in the person of the ninth man, by whose assistance this productive power is multiplied, and consider more particularly what the ninth man does. There is one thing which it is quite plain he does not do. He does not multiply the power of Labour for the sake of merely increasing the output of those actual products which he finds the labourers originally producing and consuming, and of appropriating the added quantity; for the things he would thus acquire would be of no possible good to him. He would have more boots and trousers than he could wear, more bread and cheese than he could eat, and spades and implements which he did not want to use. He would not want them himself, and the labourers are already supplied with them. They would be no good to anybody. He does not therefore employ his Ability thus, so as to increase the output of the products that have been produced hitherto; but he enables first, we will say, four men, then three, then two, and lastly one, to produce the same products that were originally produced by eight; and he thus liberates a continually increasing number, whom he sets to produce products of new and quite different kinds. Let us see how he does this. The eight labourers, when he finds them, make each _fifty pounds_ a year, or _four hundred pounds_ in the aggregate; and this represents the normal necessaries of their existence. He, by the assistance which his Ability renders Labour, enables at last, after many stages of progress, these same necessaries to be produced by one single man, who, instead of producing, as formerly, goods worth _fifty pounds_, finds himself, with the assistance of Ability, producing goods worth _four hundred pounds_. There is thus an increase of _three hundred and fifty pounds_, and this increment the man of Ability takes. Meanwhile, seven men are left idle, and with them the man of Ability makes the following bargain. Out of the _three hundred and fifty pounds_ worth of necessaries which he possesses, he offers each of them _fifty pounds_ worth—the amount which originally they each made for themselves, on condition that they will make other things for him, or put their time at his disposal. They accordingly make luxuries for him, or become his personal servants. For the _three hundred and fifty pounds_ he pays them in the shape of necessaries, they return him another _three hundred and fifty pounds_ in the shape of commodities or of service; and this new wealth constitutes the able man’s income. [Sidenote ◆1 In this case, there being no competition of employers, there would be no natural distribution of the increasing products amongst the labourers.]