gained their livelihood.

It is, moreover, easy to point out actual cases in which all the wealth
that is produced is produced by labour only. The simplest of such cases
are supplied us by the lowest savages, who manage, by their utmost
exertions, to provide themselves with the barest necessaries. Such
cases show that labour, wherever it exists, produces at least a minimum
of what men require; for if it were not so there would be no men to
labour. Such cases show also another thing. The most primitive races
possess rude implements of some kind, which any pair of hands can
fashion, just as any pair of hands can use them. These rude implements
are capital in its embryonic form; and so far as they go, they verify
the Marxian theory that capital is nothing but past labour crystallised.

But we need not, in order to see labour, past and present, operating and
producing in a practically unalloyed condition, go to savage or even
semi-civilised countries. The same thing may be seen among groups of
peasant proprietors, which still survive here and there in the remoter
parts of Europe. These men and their families, by their own unaided
labour, produce nearly everything which they eat and wear and use. Mill,
in his treatise on _Political Economy_, gives us an account of this
condition of things, as prevailing among the peasants in certain
districts of Germany. "They labour early and late," he says, quoting
from a German eulogist. "They plod on from day to day and from year to
year, the most untirable of human animals." The German writer admires
them as men who are their own masters. Mill holds them up as a shining
and instructive example of the magic effect of ownership in intensifying
human labour. In any case such men are examples of two things--of
labour operating as the sole productive agency, and also of such labour
self-intensified to its utmost pitch. And what does the labour of these