ESSENTIAL FUNCTION OF WAGE-CAPITAL 161 



labourers in every day through the gates, on the Book n 

 condition that every evening the unhappy men 

 render up to him the whole produce of their 

 labours, except that insignificant fraction of it 

 which is just necessary to fit them for the labours 

 of the day following. Now it is no doubt theoreti- 

 cally possible that a society might exist, composed 

 of a mass of undifferentiated and undirected 

 manual labourers on the one hand, and on the 

 other of a few passive monopolists who extracted 

 from them most of what they produced, as the 

 price of allowing them the opportunity of pro- 

 ducing anything ; but it is perfectly certain that 

 a society of this kind would exhibit none of the 

 increasing productive power which, as even Marx 

 and his school admit, is one of the most distinctive 

 features of industry under the capitalistic wage- 

 system. Under that system productive power has 

 increased, not because capital has enabled a few 

 men to remain idle, but because it has enabled a 

 few men to apply, with the most constant and intense The essence 

 effort, their intellectual faculties to industry in its 

 minutest details. It has increased not because the 

 monopoly of capital has enabled the few to say to j^ ected by the 

 the many, "We will allow you to work at nothing, 

 unless you give us most of what you produce," but 

 because it has enabled them to say to the many, 

 "We will allow you to work at nothing, unless you 

 will consent to work in the ways that we indicate to 

 you." 



The few, so far as our present argument is 



