value to the particular articles on which his own hands are engaged. It
does not communicate itself to the labour of the ordinary men around
him. The agency which causes the increasing and sustains the increased
output of necessaries, comforts, and conveniences in the progressive
nations of to-day must necessarily be an agency of some kind or other
which raises the productivity of industrial exertion as a whole. Those,
therefore, who, in spite of the fact that the productivity of modern
communities has, relatively to their numbers, undergone an increase
which is general, still maintain that the sole productive agency is
labour, must seek for an explanation of this increase in some other fact
than skill.

And without transgressing the limits which the theory of Marx imposes on
us, such a further fact is very easy to find. Adam Smith opens his
_Wealth of Nations_ with a discussion of it. The chief cause, he says,
which in all progressive countries increases the productive power of the
individual labourer, is not the development among a few of
potentialities which are above the average, but a more effective
development of potentialities common to all, in consequence of labour
being divided, so that each man devotes his life to the doing of some
one thing. Thus if ten ordinary men were to engage in the business of
pin-making, each making every part of every pin for himself, each man
would probably complete but one pin in a day. But if each man makes one
part, and nothing else but that, thus repeating incessantly a single
series of motions, each will acquire the knack of working with such
rapidity that the ten together will make daily, not ten pins, but some
thousands. Here we have labour divided by its different applications,
but not requiring different degrees of capacity. We have the average
labour of the average man still. And here we have a fact which, unlike
the fact of skill--a thing in its nature confined to the few