The real parties, then, to the industrial disputes of the modern world are not active labourers on one side, and idle, perhaps idiotic owners of so much dead material on the other side: but they are, on the one side, the vast majority of men, possessed of average powers of production, and able to produce by them a comparatively small amount; and, on the other, a minority whose powers of production are exceptional, who, if we take the product of the average labourer as a unit, are able to multiply this to an almost indefinite extent, and who thus create an increasing store of Capital to be used by themselves, or transmitted to their representatives, and an increasing income to be divided between these and the labourers. In other words, the dispute is between the many who desire to increase their incomes, and the few by whose exceptional powers it is alone possible to increase them. Such has been the situation hitherto; it is such at the present moment; and the whole tendency of industrial progress is not to change, but to accentuate it. As the productivity of Human Exertion increases, the part played by Ability becomes more and more important. More and more do the average men become dependent on the exceptional men. So long as the nation at large remembers this, no reforms need be dreaded. If the nation forgets this, it will be in danger every day of increasing, by its reforms, the very evils it wishes to obviate, and postponing or making impossible the advantages it wishes to secure. [Sidenote ◆1 In this view there is nothing derogatory to Labour.] [Sidenote ◆2 Ability does not _improve_ the products of Labour, but multiplies them.]