Now were the question merely one of literary or philosophical propriety, this inclusive use of the word Labour might be defensible; but we have nothing to do here with the niceties of such trivial criticism. We are concerned not with what a word might be made to mean, but what it practically does mean; and if we appeal to the ordinary use of language,—not only its use by the mass of ordinary men, but its most frequent use by economic writers also,—we shall find that the word Labour has a meaning which is practically settled; and we shall find that this meaning is not an inclusive one, but exclusive. ◆¹ We shall find that Labour practically means muscular Labour, or at all events some form of exertion of which men—common men—are as universally capable, and that it not only never naturally includes any other idea, but distinctly and emphatically excludes it. For instance, when Mill in his _Principles of Political Economy_ devotes one of his chapters to the future of the “Labouring Classes,” he instinctively uses the phrase as meaning manual labourers. When, as not unfrequently happens, some opulent politician says to a popular audience, “I, too, am a labouring man,” he is either understood to be saying something which is only true metaphorically, or is jeered at as saying something which is not true at all. Probably no two men in the United Kingdom have worked harder or for longer hours than Mr. Gladstone and Lord Salisbury; yet no one could call Mr. Gladstone a labour member, or say that Lord Salisbury was an instance of a labouring man being a peer. The Watts, the Stevensons, the Whitworths, the Bessemers, the Armstrongs, the Brasseys, are, according to the formal definition of the economists, one and all of them labourers. But what man is there who, if, in speaking of a strike, he were to say that he supported or opposed the claims of Labour, would be understood as meaning the claims of employers and millionaires like these? It is evident that no one would understand him in such a sense; and if he used the word _Labour_ thus, he would be merely trifling with language. The word, for all practical purposes, has its meaning unequivocally fixed. It does not mean all Human Exertion; it emphatically means a part of it only. It means muscular and manual exertion, or exertion of which the ordinary man is capable, as distinct from industrial exertion of any other kind; and not only as distinct from it, but as actively opposed to and struggling with it. Since, then, we have to deal with distinct and opposing things, it is idle to attempt to discuss them under one and the same name. ◆² To do so would be like describing the Franco-Prussian War with only one name for both armies—the soldiers; or like attempting to explain the composition of water, with only one name for oxygen and hydrogen—the gas. Accordingly, for the industrial exertion—exertion moral and mental—which is distinct from Labour and opposed to it, we