◆¹ What this function is must be explained very clearly and carefully. It is not to enable labourers to wait for the results of their labours. It is to enable the exceptional knowledge, ingenuity, enterprise, and productive genius of a few men so to animate, to organise, and direct the average physical exertions of the many, as to improve, to multiply, or to hasten the results of that exertion without increasing its quantity. All civilisations, ancient as well as modern, have involved, in a certain sense, the direction by the few of the many. The temples and palaces of early Egypt and Assyria, which excite the wonder of modern engineers and architects by the size of the blocks of stone used in their astounding structure, are monuments of a control, absolute and unlimited and masterly, exercised by a few human minds over millions of human bodies. But in that control, as exercised in the ancient world, one element was wanting which is the essence of modern industry. When the masters of ancient labour wished to multiply commodities, or to secure an increase of power for accomplishing some single work, the sole means known to them was to increase the number of labourers; and when one thousand slaves were insufficient, to reinforce them with (let us say) four thousand more. The masters of modern labour pursue a new and essentially opposite course. Instead of seeking in such a case to secure four thousand new labourers, they seek to endow one thousand with the industrial power of five. ◆² If Nebuchadnezzar had set himself to tunnel a mountain, he could have hastened the work only by flogging more slaves to it. The modern contractor, in co-operation with the modern inventor, instead of flogging labour, would assist it with tram-lines, trucks, and boring engines. In other words, whereas in former ages the aim of the employing class was simply to secure the service of an increasing quantity of labour, the aim of the employing class in the present age is to increase the productive power of the same quantity. The employing class in former ages merely forced the employed to exert their own industrial faculties, and appropriated what those faculties produced. The employing class of the present age not only commands the employed, but it co-operates with them by lending them faculties which they do not themselves possess. ◆³ It applies to the guidance of the muscles of the most ordinary worker the profoundest knowledge of science, all the strength of will, all the spirit of enterprise, and the exceptional aptitude for affairs, that distinguish the most gifted and the vigorous characters of the day. And it is the peculiar modern function of Capital, as spent in Wages, to enable this result to take place. [Sidenote ◆1 Wage Capital does this in a way which the socialistic definition of Capital altogether ignores.]