Of course, in these representations there is a certain amount of truth: but it is difficult to conceive of anything more stupidly and more wantonly misleading, than the actual meaning which they are employed by the agitators to convey. For that meaning is nothing else than this—◆¹ that under improved conditions, when wealth is better distributed, the so-called slavery will disappear, the workers will be their own masters again, and will each own, as formerly, the implements and the materials of his work. But, as no one knows better than the extreme socialists, and as any intelligent man can see easily for himself, such a course of events is not only not possible, but is the exact reverse of that on which the progress of the workers must depend. ◆² The wildest agitator admits, and the most ignorant agitator knows, that the wealth of the modern world, on the growth of which they insist, and which, for the very reason that its growth has been so enormous, is declared by them to offer so rich a prize to the workers, mainly owes its existence to improved conditions of production. Such persons know also that of these conditions the chief have been the development of machinery, the increased subdivision of employments, and the perfected co-operation of the workers. But the development of machinery necessarily means this—the transformation of (say) each thousand old-fashioned implements into a single vast modern one of a hundred times their aggregate power: and it means that at this single implement a thousand men shall work. The increased subdivision of labour means that no man shall make an entire thing, but merely some small part of it; and perfected co-operation is another name for perfected discipline. It will be thus seen that the conditions which the agitator calls those of slavery are essential to the production of the wealth which is to constitute the workers’ heritage. ◆³ It will be seen that the workers’ hope of bettering their own position is so far from depending on a recovery of any former freedom, that it involves yet further elaboration of industrial discipline; and puts the old ownership of his own tools by the individual farther and further away into the region of dreams and impossibilities: and that no redistribution of wealth would even tend to bring it back again. The weaver of the last century was the owner of his own loom: and a great cotton-mill may now be owned by one capitalist. But a co-operative cotton-mill that was owned by all the workers, in the old sense of the word would not be owned by anybody. Could any one of these thousand or more men say that any part of the mill was his own personal property? Could he treat a single bolt, or a brick, or a wheel, or a door-nail, as he might have treated a loom left to him in his cottage by his father? Obviously not. No part of the mill would be his own private property, any more than a train starting from Euston Station is the property of any shareholder in