The second condition, and the one that concerns us here, is that, besides doing work of some sort, each labourer shall do the work which the distributer of the goods prescribes to him.
Here we have before us the means by which, in the modern world, the ability of the few directs the labour of the many; and, in proportion to the quality and intensity of the directive powers that are exercised, adds to the value of the results which this labour would have produced otherwise.

Thus in wage-capital we have the capital of the modern world in what dynamically is its primary and parent form--a kind of capital which improved machinery is always tending to augment, but of whose use the machinery itself, its renewal, and its continued improvement, are the consequences.
That such is the case might be illustrated by any number of familiar examples.

A man invents a new machine having some useful purpose--let us say the production of some new kind of manure, which will double the fertility of every field in the country.

In order to put this machine on the market, and make it a fact instead of a mere conception, the first thing necessary is, as every human being knows, that the inventor shall possess, or acquire, the control of capital.

And what is the next step?
When the capital is provided, how will it first be used?
It will be used in the form of wages, or articles of daily consumption, which will be distributed among a certain number of mechanics and other labourers, on condition that they set about fashioning, in certain prescribed groups, so much metal into so many prescribed shapes--some of them shaping it into wheels, some into knives and rollers, some into sieves, rods, cranks, cams, and eccentrics, in accordance with patterns which have never been followed previously; and of all these individual operations the new machine, as a practical implement, is the result.