◆¹ These facts speak plainly enough for themselves; and the conscience of most men will add its own witness to what they teach us—which is this. So far as industrial progress is concerned, the majority of mankind are passive. They labour as the conditions into which they are born compel them to labour; but they do nothing, from their cradle to their grave, so to alter these conditions that their own labour, or Labour generally, shall produce larger or improved results. The most progressive race in the world—or in other words the English race—has progressed as it has done only because it has produced the largest minority of men fitted to lead, and has been quickest in obeying their orders; but apart from these men it has had no appreciable tendency to move. Let the average Englishman ask himself if this is not absolutely true. Let him imagine himself arraigned before the Deity at the Day of Judgment, and the Deity saying this to him: “You found when you entered the world that a man’s labour on the average produced each year such and such an amount of wealth. Have you done anything to make the product of the same labour greater? Have you discovered or applied any new principle to any branch of industry? Have you guided industry into any new direction? Have the exertions of any other human being been made more efficacious owing to your powers of invention, of enterprise, or of management?” There is not one man in a hundred who, if thus questioned at the Judgment-seat, would be able, on examining every thought and deed of his life, to give the Judge any answer but, “No. So far as I am concerned, the powers of Labour, are as I found them.”
CHAPTER IV
The Conclusion arrived at in the preceding Book restated. The Annual Amount produced by Ability in the United Kingdom.
◆1 The more, then, that we examine the question, the more clearly do we see the magnitude of the work performed by Ability of the few.
◆¹ In spite, then, of the arguments which Socialists have borrowed from psychology, and with which, by transferring them to the sphere of economics, and so depriving them of all practical meaning, they have contrived to confuse the problem of industrial progress, the facts of the case, when examined from a practical point of view, stand out hard and clear and unambiguous. Industrial progress is the work not of society as a whole but of a small part of it, to the entire exclusion of the larger part; the reason of this being that the faculties to which this progress is due—the faculties which I have included under the name of Industrial Ability—are found to exist only in a small percentage of individuals, and are practically absent from the minds, characters, and temperaments of the majority of the human race. Ability is, in fact, a narrow natural monopoly.
◆1 But it must not be supposed that Ability is rarer than it is.
◆2 A rough indication of the number of able men in this country is found in the incomes earned that are above the average wages of Labour.
◆3 The highest Ability very rare. Of all grades of Ability below the highest, there is always a plentiful supply.
◆¹ Ability, however, is of different kinds and grades, some kinds being far commoner than others; and before summing up what has been said in this chapter, it will be well to give the reader some more or less definite idea of the numerical proportion which, judging by general evidence, the men of Ability bear to the mass of labourers. Such evidence, not indeed very exact, but still corresponding broadly to the underlying facts of the case, is to be found in the number of men paying income-tax on business incomes, as compared with the number of wage-earners whose incomes escape that tax; in the number of men, that is, who earn more than one hundred and fifty pounds a year, as compared with the number of men who do not earn so much. It may seem at first sight that this division is purely arbitrary; but we shall see, on consideration, that it is not so. ◆² We shall find that, allowing for very numerous exceptions, men in this country do as a rule receive less than one hundred and fifty pounds a year for Labour, and that when they receive for their exertions a larger income than this they receive it for the direction of Labour, or for the exercise of some sort of Ability. Now if we take the males who are over sixteen years of age, and who are actually engaged in some industrial occupation, we shall find that those who earn more than one hundred and fifty pounds a year form of the entire number something like six per cent. We may therefore say that out of every thousand men there are, on an average, sixty who are distinctly superior to their fellows, who each add more to the gross amount of the product by directing Labour, than any one man does by labouring, and who possesses Ability to a greater or less extent. ◆³ The commoner kinds of Ability, however, depend as a rule on the higher kinds, and are efficacious only as working under their direction; and if we continue our estimate on the basis we have just adopted, and accept the amount that a man makes in industry as being on the whole an evidence of the amount of his Ability, we consider that, all allowance being made for mere luck or speculation, a business income of fifty thousand pounds means, as a rule, Ability of the first class, of fifteen thousand pounds Ability of the second, and five thousand pounds Ability of the third, we shall find that men possessing these higher degrees of the faculty are, in comparison to the mass of employed males, very few indeed. We shall find that Ability of the third class is possessed by but one man out of two thousand; of the second class by but one man out of four thousand; and of the first class by but one man out of a hundred thousand. This is, as I have said, a very rough method of calculation, but it is not a random one; and there is reason to believe that it affords us an approximation to truth. At all events, taking it as a whole, it does not err by making Ability too rare; and we shall be certainly within the mark if, taking Ability as a whole, and waiving the question of its various classes and their rarity, we say that of the men in this country actively engaged in production, the men of Ability constitute one-sixteenth.
◆1 We may now repeat the conclusions arrived at in the last Book, that Ability produces at least eight-thirteenths of the present income of this country; and Labour, at the utmost, five-thirteenths.