of them, for example, in the case of the London County Council's
steamboats, defended that enterprise in spite of its financial failure,
on the ground that the steamboats were a convenience to certain
travellers at all events, who in all probability were persons of modest
means, while the loss would be made good out of the pockets of the
ratepayers who were presumably rich. But even if this argument were
plausible as applied to a state of society in which the incomes of some
men were greater than those of others, it would be absolutely
inapplicable to conditions such as those desired by socialists, under
which the incomes of all would be fractions, approximately equal, of a
common stock to the production of which all contributed. For it must
surely be apparent to even the meanest intelligence that whatever
diminished the aggregate amount to be divided would diminish the
fraction of it which falls to the share of each; and it ought to be
equally apparent, though to many people it is not, that the labour of
any labourer which is directed in such a way that the men consume more
articles of utility than they produce, or fail to produce as many as
they would do if directed better, has this precise effect of diminishing
the divisible total, by making it either less than it has been or less
than it would be otherwise.[10]

Thus, in cases such as that of the London County Council's steamboats,
the efficiency of labour is so lessened by incompetent direction that
the labourers employed can only perform for society one-half of the
services which society must perform for them. For every hour which they
spend in conveying ten men on the river, twenty men must work to provide
them with food and clothing. So long as fortunes are unequal, and depend
on individual effort and enterprise, such losses may be localised and
obscured in a hundred different ways; but the moment all fortunes, as
they would be under the régime of socialism, were reduced to specific