◆¹ Let us consider how it does so. Socialists tell us that Capitalism in the modern world means merely the appropriation by the few of all the materials of production, so that the many must either work as the few bid them, or must starve. But this is a very small part of what modern Capitalism means, and it is not the essential part, nor does it even suggest the essential part. The majority of men must always work or starve. Nature, not modern Capitalism, is responsible for that necessity. The essential difference which modern Capitalism has introduced into the situation is this—and it is an enormous difference—that whereas in former ages the livelihood of a man was contingent on his working in the best way that the average man knew, modern Capitalism has made his livelihood contingent on his working in the best way that exceptional men know. Now this best way, as we shall see more clearly presently, does not involve the forcing of each man to work harder, or the exacting from him any more difficult effort. It involves merely the supplying him with a constant external guide for even his minutest actions—a guide for every movement of arm and hand, or a pattern of each of the objects which are the direct result of these movements; and consequently the one thing which before all others it requires is constant obedience or conformity to such guides and patterns. The entire industrial progress of the modern world has depended, and depends altogether on this constant obedience being secured; and the possession of Wage Capital by the employing class is the sole means which is possible in the modern world of securing it. In the ancient world the case would no doubt have been different. The lash of the taskmaster, the fear of prison, of death, of torture, were then available for the stimulation and organisation of Labour. But they are available no longer. The masses of civilised humanity have taken this great step—they have risen from the level on which they could be driven to industrial obedience, to the level on which they must be induced to it. Obedience of some sort is a social necessity now as ever, and always must be: but social necessity spoke merely to the fear of the slave; it speaks to the will and the reason of the free labourer. The free labourer may be, and must be, in one or other of two positions. He may work for himself, consuming or selling his own produce; or he may work for an employer, who pays him wages, and exacts in return for them not work only, but work performed in a certain prescribed way. The first position is that of the peasant proprietor or the hand-loom weaver. The second is that of the employee in a mill or factory. In both cases, the voice of social necessity, or of society, speaks to the man’s reason, informing him of the homely fact that he cannot live unless he labours: but in the first case, the voice of society cries to him out of the ground, “You will get no food unless you labour in some