onomy, Cleon of the million acres, the palace
and the dozen fortunes must be regarded as the richer of the two.

_The second principle is that wealth is produced by labor applied to
natural resources._

The only objections to this, the only attempts ever made to deny its
truth, have been based upon a misunderstanding of the meaning of the
word "labor." If a man came to you in the mill one day, and said: "See
that great machine with all its levers and springs and wheels working
in such beautiful harmony. It was made entirely by manual workers,
such as moulders, blacksmiths and machinists; no brain workers had
anything to do with it," you would suspect that man of being a fool,
Jonathan. You know, even though you are no economist, that the labor
of the inventor and of the men who drew the plans of the various parts
was just as necessary as the labor of the manual workers. I have
already shown you, when discussing the case of Mr. Mallock, that
Socialists have never claimed that wealth was produced by manual labor
alone, and that brain labor is always unproductive. All the great
political economists have included both mental and manual labor in
their use of the term, that being, indeed, the only sensible use of
the word known to our language.

It is very easy work, my friend, for a clever juggler of words to
erect a straw man, label the dummy "Socialism" and then pull it to
pieces. But it is not very useful work, nor is it an honest
intellectual occupation. I say to you, friend Jonathan, that when
writers like Mr. Mallock contend that "ability," as distinguished from
labor, must be considered as a principal factor in production, they
must be regarded as being either mentally weak or deliberate
perverters of the truth. You know, and every man of fair sense knows,
that ability in the abstract never could produce anything at all.

Take Mr. Edison, for example. He is a man of wonderful ability--one of
the greatest men of this or any other age. Suppose Mr. Edison were to
say: "I know I have a great deal of _ability_; I think that I will
just sit down with folded hands and depend upon the mere possession of
my ability to make a living for me"--what do you think would happen?
If Mr. Edison were to go to some lonely spot, without tools or food,
making up his mind that he need not work; that he could safely depend
upon his ability to produce food for him while he sat idle or slept,
he would starve. Ability is like a machine, Jon