And now comes what is practically the important deduction from these facts. What has happened in the near past, will, other things being equal, happen in the near future. If the same forces that have been at work since the year 1850 continue to be at work, and if, although regulated, they are not checked, the labourers of this country will in another thirty years have nearly doubled the income which they enjoy at present. Their income will have risen from something under _seven hundred millions_ to something over _thirteen hundred millions_. The labourers, in fact, will, so far as money goes, be in precisely the same position as they would be to-day if, by some unheard-of miracle, the entire present income of the country were suddenly made over to them in the form of wages, and the whole of the richer classes were left starving and penniless. This is no fanciful calculation. It is simply a plain statement of what must happen, and will happen, if only the forces of production continue to operate for another thirty years as they have been operating steadily for the past hundred. Is not this enough to stimulate the labourer’s hopes, and convince him that for him the true industrial policy is one that will adjust his own relations with the existing system better, and regulate better the flow of the wealth which it promises to bring him, rather than a policy whose aim is to subvert that system altogether, and in especial to paralyse the force from which it derives its efficacy? [Sidenote ◆1 But the one point to remember is that all their prosperity depends on the continued action of Ability, and the best conditions being secured for its operation,] ◆¹ And this brings me back to that main, that fundamental truth which it is the special object of this volume to elucidate. The force which has been at the bottom of all the labourers’ progress during the past, and on the continued action of which depends all these hopes for their future—that force is not Labour but Ability; it is a force possessed and exercised not by the many but by the few. The income which Labour receives already is largely in excess of what Labour itself produces. Were Ability crippled, or discouraged from exerting itself, the entire income of the nation would dwindle down to an amount which would not yield Labour so much as it takes now; whilst any advance, no matter how small, on what Labour takes now must come from an increasing product, which Ability only can produce. [Sidenote ◆1 Labour must remember that Ability is a living force which cannot be appropriated as Capital might be; but that it must be encouraged and propitiated.]