◆2 What then are the causes of this progress?
◆¹ What the presence, then, and the persistence of this class really shows us is not that the progress of the labouring classes as a whole has been less rapid and less remarkable than it has just been said to be, but that a certain fraction of the population, for some reason or other, has always remained hitherto outside this general progress; and the one practical lesson which its existence ought to force on us is not to doubt the main movement, still less to interfere with it, but to find some means of drawing these outsiders into it. ◆² This great and grave problem, however, requires to be treated by itself, and does not come within the scope of the present volume. Our business is not with the causes which have shut out one-tenth of the poorer classes from the growing national wealth, but with those which have so signally operated in making nine-tenths of them sharers in it.
◆1 They are of two kinds: spontaneous tendencies, and the deliberate and concerted actions of men.
We will accordingly return to these, and consider what they are. ◆¹ We shall find them to be of two kinds: firstly, those which consist of the natural actions of men, each pursuing his own individual interest; and secondly, their concerted actions, which represent some general principle, and are deliberately undertaken for the advantage not of an individual but of a class. We will begin with considering the former; as not only are they the most important, but they also altogether determine and condition the latter, and the latter, indeed, can do little more than assist them.
◆1 We will begin with the spontaneous tendencies—i.e. the natural actions of individuals, each pursuing his own interest.
◆2 There are two ways of getting rich: (1) by abstracting from an existing income, or (2) by adding to it. The rich class of the modern world have, as a whole, become rich in the second way.
◆¹ The natural causes that tend to distribute amongst Labour a large portion of the wealth produced by Ability will be best understood if we first consider for a moment the two ways—and the two only ways—in which a minority can become wealthy. ◆² What these are can be easily realised thus. Let us imagine a community of eight labouring men, who make each of them fifty pounds a year, and who represent Labour; and let us imagine a ninth man,—a man of Ability,—who represents the minority. The ninth man might, if he were strong enough, rob each of the eight men of twenty-five pounds, compelling them each to live on twenty-five pounds instead of on fifty pounds, and appropriate to himself an annual two hundred pounds. Or he might reach the same result in a totally different way. He might so direct and assist the Labour of the eight men, that without any extra effort to themselves they each, instead of fifty pounds produced seventy-five pounds, and if, under these circumstances, he took twenty-five pounds from each, he would gain the same sum as before, namely two hundred pounds, but, as I said, in a totally different way. It would represent what he had added to the original product of the labourers, instead of representing anything he had taken from it. Now whatever may have been true of rich classes in former times and under other social conditions, the riches now enjoyed by the rich class in this country have, with exceptions which are utterly unimportant, been acquired by the latter of these two methods, not by the former. They represent an addition to the product of Labour, not an abstraction from it. This is, of course, clear from what has been said already; but it is necessary here to specially bear it in mind.
◆1 Let us consider the nature of the process,
◆2 By first representing Labour and Ability in their simplest imaginable forms; Ability, or the employing class, being represented as one man.
◆¹ Let us then take a community of eight labourers, each producing commodities worth fifty pounds a year, and each consuming—as he easily might—the whole of them. These men represent the productive power of Labour; ◆² and now let us suppose the advent of Ability in the person of the ninth man, by whose assistance this productive power is multiplied, and consider more particularly what the ninth man does. There is one thing which it is quite plain he does not do. He does not multiply the power of Labour for the sake of merely increasing the output of those actual products which he finds the labourers originally producing and consuming, and of appropriating the added quantity; for the things he would thus acquire would be of no possible good to him. He would have more boots and trousers than he could wear, more bread and cheese than he could eat, and spades and implements which he did not want to use. He would not want them himself, and the labourers are already supplied with them. They would be no good to anybody. He does not therefore employ his Ability thus, so as to increase the output of the products that have been produced hitherto; but he enables first, we will say, four men, then three, then two, and lastly one, to produce the same products that were originally produced by eight; and he thus liberates a continually increasing number, whom he sets to produce products of new and quite different kinds.