And what does the labour of these 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.