This saving of labor by harnessing machines to natural forces, like wind and water and the heat latent in coal, produces leisure, which also has to be divided-up. If one person’s labor for ten hours can support ten persons for a day, the ten can arrange in several different ways. They can put the ten hours’ work on one person and let the other nine have all the leisure as well as free rations. Or they can each do one hour’s work a day and each have nine hours leisure. Or they can have anything between these extremes. They can also arrange that three of them shall work ten hours a day each, producing enough for thirty people, so that the other seven will not only have nothing to do, but will be able to eat enough for fourteen and to keep thirteen servants to wait on them and keep the three up to their work into the bargain. Another possible arrangement would be that they should all work much longer every day than was necessary to keep them, on condition that they were not required to work until they were fully grown and well educated, and were allowed to stop working and amuse themselves for the rest of their lives when they were fifty. Scores of different arrangements are possible between out-and-out slavery and an equitable division of labor, leisure, and wealth. Slavery, Serfdom, Feudalism, Capitalism, Socialism, Communism are all at bottom different arrangements of this division. Revolutionary history is the history of the effects of a continual struggle by persons and classes to alter the arrangement in their own favor. But for the moment we had better stick to the question of dividing-up the income the labor produces; for the utmost difference you can make between one person and another in respect of their labor or leisure is as nothing compared to the enormous difference you can make in their incomes by modern methods and machines. You cannot put more than 24 hours into a rich man’s day; but you can put 24 million pounds into his pocket without asking him to lift his little finger for it. 5 COMMUNISM If I have made this clear to you, will you try to make up your mind how you would like to see the income of your country divided-up day by day? Do not run to the Socialists or the Capitalists, or to your favorite newspaper, to make up your mind for you: they will only unsettle and bewilder you when they are not intentionally misleading you. Think it out for yourself. Conceive yourself as a national trustee with the entire income of the country placed in your hands to be distributed so as to produce the greatest social wellbeing for everybody in the country.