men produce? According to the authority from which Mill quotes, it
produces just enough to keep them above the level of actual want. Here,
then, we have an unexceptionable example of the wealth-producing power
of labour pure and simple; and if we imagine an entire nation of men
who, as their own masters, worked under liked conditions, we should have
an example of the same thing on a larger and more instructive scale. We
should have a whole nation which produced only just enough to keep it
above the level of actual bodily want.

And now let us turn from production in an imaginary nation such as this,
and compare it with production at large among the civilised nations of
to-day. Nobody could insist on the contrast between the efficiency of
the two processes more strongly than do the socialists themselves. The
aggregate wealth of the civilised nations to-day is, they say, so
enormous--it consists of such a multitude of daily renewed goods and
services--that luxuries undreamed of by the labourer of earlier times
might easily be made as abundant for every household as water. In other
words, if we take a million men, admittedly consisting of labourers pure
and simple in the first place, and the same number of men exerting
themselves under modern conditions in the second place, the industrial
efforts of the second million are, hour for hour, infinitely more
productive than the industrial efforts of the first. If, for example, we
take the case of England, and compare the product produced per head of
the industrial population towards the close of the seventeenth century,
with the product produced less than two centuries afterwards, at the
time when Marx was writing his work on _Capital_, the later product
will, according to the estimate of statisticians, stand to the earlier
in the proportion of thirty-three to seven.

Now, if we adopt the scientific theory of Marx that labour pure and