Once for all, let it be distinctly understood "that the industrial progress of the modern world and the rapid growth of wealth has been the creation, not of the labour of many, but of the intellect, the ingenuity, and the perseverance of the few; and that, despite numberless cases of cruelty, of oppression, and extortion, it is, broadly speaking, at the present moment in the hands of the very men, or the heirs of the very men, who have created it and are creating it." Let us take the history of the railway system and the history of the alpaca manufacture as examples. There are those who declare against the State for having allowed private individuals to " seize upon " the railways of this country. They argue as if the navvies made the railways, and leave you to infer that the capitalists seized upon the results of the navvies' labour. "Navvies were originally the class of workmen who were employed in the making of navigable canals; and had not their labour been given some new direction, the same class of workmen would be making navigable canals still. What, then, turned the makers of canals into the makers of railways, and worked, in doing so, a miracle like that of changing land into gold? The navvies themselves were not the alchemists. They themselves were merely the individual molecules. The workers of the change, the creators of the new wealth, were a set of men whose numbers, when compared with the navvies were infinitesimal, and whose names, whose biographies, the parts they played, the reward they received, could be all set down with exactitude in a pamphlet of fifty pages. Granting, which is not the case, that mere labour, without any direction, would suffice to make canals, all the difference between