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 regime of socialism, were reduced to specific fractions of the aggregate product of the community, any decline in the efficiency of the labour of any single group would result in a diminution of the income of every member of all the others.

Wherever ten men were employed to do what might have been done by nine, the contribution to the general stock would be less by ten per cent.

than it might have been.

If ten men were employed in making chairs, which might have been made by nine had their labour been better directed, the community would lose the cushions which in that case would have been made by the tenth.