both the finished goods and its implements. But in proportion as
machines or other contrivances, such as vessels, grow in size or
complexity, and embody, as they do in their more modern developments,
ingenuity of the highest and knowledge of the most abstruse kinds, the
situation changes; and we are able to identify certain faculties as
essential to the ultimate result, which affect the work of the
labourers, but which do not emanate from themselves. Any three men of
average strength and intelligence might make a potter's wheel together,
or build a small boat together, as they frequently do now, their
several tasks being interchangeable, or assigned to each of them by easy
mutual agreement. The business of directing labour has not separated
itself from the actual business of labouring. Each man knows the object
of what he does, and can co-ordinate that object with the object of what
is done by his fellows. But when the ultimate result is something so
vast and complicated that a thousand men instead of three have to
co-operate in the production of it, when a million pieces of metal, some
large and some minute, have to be cast, filed, turned, rolled, or bent,
so that finally they may all coalesce into a single mechanical organism,
no one labourer sees further than the task which he performs himself. He
cannot adjust his work to that of another man, who is probably working a
quarter of a mile away from him, and he has in most cases no idea
whatever of how the two pieces of work are related to each other. Each
labourer has simply to perform his work in accordance with directions
which emanate from some mind other than his own, and the whole practical
value of what the labourers do depends on the quality of the directions
which are thus given to each.

In other words, in proportion as the industrial process is enhanced in
productivity by the concentration on it of the higher faculties of
mankind, there is an increasing fission of this process as a whole into