◆¹ This is really Mill’s argument with respect to Land and Labour, put into different language and applied to Labour and Ability. It says in effect precisely what was said by Mill, that when two causes are both necessary to producing a given result, it is absurd to say that the one produces more or less of it than the other: only here the argument can be used with greater apparent force. For the Socialists may say that if the principle which has been explained in this book is admitted, and if Ability is held to produce all that part of the product which is over and above what Labour could produce by itself, Labour, by the same reasoning, could be proved to produce the whole of the product, since, without the assistance of Labour, Ability could produce nothing. Accordingly, they will go on to say, this conclusion being absurd, the reasoning which leads to it must be false, and we must fall back again on the principle set forth by Mill. Labour and Ability are both necessary to the result, and being equally necessary must be held to contribute equally to producing it. This argument, as I have said, has great apparent force; but again we have a plausibility which is altogether upon the surface. If Labour and Ability were here conceived of as faculties, without regard to the number of men possessing them, the argument would, whatever its logical value, coincide broadly with one great practical fact, to which by and by I shall call the reader’s attention; namely, that Labour and Ability do in this country divide between them the joint product in nearly equal portions. But those who make use of the socialistic formula use it with a meaning very different from the above. When they say that Ability and Labour contribute equally to producing a given amount of wealth, they mean not that the men who exercise one faculty produce collectively as much as the men who exercise the other; for that might mean that _five hundred men of Ability_ produced as much as _five hundred thousand labourers_; and that is the very position which the Socialists desire to combat. They mean something which is the exact reverse of this: not that one faculty produces as much as the other faculty, but that one man produces as much as, and no more than another man, no matter which faculty he exercises in the producing process. They mean not that the faculty of Labour which an ordinary ploughman represents, produces as much as the faculty represented by an Arkwright or by a Stevenson, but that the individual ploughman, by the single task which he himself performs, adds as much to his country’s wealth as the creators of the spinning-frame and the locomotive. [Sidenote ◆1 Their meaning needs only to be clearly stated to show its absurdity.]