ed by the number a hundred, and if fifty
represents the amount which at present is the share of labour, the rest
being taken by men of directive ability--a picked body of organisers,
chemists, and inventors--labour, it is contended, produces more than the
fifty, which is all that it at present gets. Yes; but how much more? It
is not contended that it produces the entire hundred. Does it produce,
then, sixty, or sixty-five, or seventy, or eighty-three, or what? Unless
such a wrong as this can have some extent assigned to it--unless it can
be measured approximately by reference to some intelligible standard--it
is not only difficult to deal with it; it is impossible to be sure that
it exists. Of course we are here not contemplating individual cases.
That some employes may, under existing conditions, get less than their
work is worth, is possible and likely enough. It is equally likely or
possible that others may get more. We must confine ourselves to what
happens generally. We must take labour as a whole, on the one hand, and
directive ability on the other, and ask how we may estimate, with rough
but substantial accuracy, the proportion of the joint product
respectively produced by each.

At first sight it may seem that this problem is incapable of any
definite solution; and some socialistic writers have done their best to
obscure it. The efficiency of labour, they say, is in the modern world
largely due, no doubt, to the action of directive ability; but ability
could produce nothing unless it had labour to direct; whence it is
inferred that the claim of labour on the product may in justice be
almost anything short of the absolute total. To this abstract argument
we will presently come back; but we will first examine another urged by
a celebrated thinker, which, though less extreme in its implications,
would, were it only sound, be even more fatal to our chances of arriving
at the conclusion sought for. The thinker to whom I refer is Mill, who
assigns to this argument a very prominent place in the opening chapter
of his _Principles of Political Economy_.

Certain economists have, so he says, debated "whether nature gives more
assistance to labour in one kind of industry than in another"; and he
endeavours to show that the question is in its very essence
unanswerable. "When two conditions," he proceeds, "are equally necessary
for producing the effect at all, it is unmeaning to say that so much is
produced by one, and so m