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 two kinds of activity represented by two different groups.

We have no longer _merely_--although we have this _still_--an increasing division of labour; but we have the labourers of all kinds and grades separating themselves into one group on the one hand, and the men who direct their labour, as a separate group, on the other hand.
The function of the directive faculties, as applied thus to the operations of modern labour, can perhaps be most easily illustrated by the case of a printed book.

Let us take two editions of ten thousand copies each, similarly printed, and priced at six shillings a copy; the one being an edition of a book so dull that but twenty copies can be sold of it, the other of a book so interesting that the public buys the whole ten thousand.