Socialists wholly overlook the importance of these considerations.  Many 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 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.  And what holds good of labour in respect of its productive efficiency holds good of it also in respect of the character of the goods produced.  If ten men were employed in producing forty loaves when all that could be eaten was twenty, not only would the remaining twenty be wasted, but the community would lose the butter which might have been made instead of them.  The importance, therefore, to the community