the owner of the engine; and it would fail to do so only if one thing happened—if the owner refused to receive it, and, for some reason or other, made the village a free gift of what the village would be perfectly willing to buy. In this truth there is nothing that makes for or against Socialism. The real contention of the Socialist is simply this—not that labour makes what is actually made by machinery; but that labourers ought to own the machinery, and for that reason appropriate what is made by it. A machine or engine, in fact, which is used to assist labour is, in its quality of a producing agent, just as separate from the labour with which it co-operates, as a donkey, in its quality of a carrying agent, is distinct from its master, if the master is walking along carrying one sack of corn, and guiding the donkey who walks carrying seven. [Sidenote ◆1 A machine, then, as a productive agent, is as distinct from human labour as are the efforts of an animal.] ◆¹ And this brings us back into the line of our main argument; the comparison just made being a very apt and helpful illustration of it. Every machine may be looked on as a kind of domestic animal, and each new machine as an animal of some new species; which animals co-operate with men in the production of certain products: and the point I am urging on the reader may accordingly be put thus. When a man, or a number of men, without one of these animals to assist them, produce a certain amount of some particular product, and with the assistance of one of these animals produce a much larger amount, the added quantity is produced not by the men, but by the animal—or, to drop back again into the language of fact, by the machine. [Sidenote ◆1 The history of the cotton industry is a remarkable illustration of this.] ◆¹ I have taken an imaginary case of drawing and pumping water, because the operation is of an exceedingly simple kind. We will now turn from the imaginary world to the real, and clench what has been said by an illustration from the history of our own country—and from that period which at present we specially have in view—namely the close of the last century.