The writer develops the idea in the passage by

 

Passage –II

Before there can be any wealth to divide up, there must be labour at work. There can be no loaves without farmers and bakers. There are a few little islands thousands of miles away where men and women can lie basking in the sun and live on the cocoa-nuts the monkeys throw down to them. But for us there is no such possibility. Without incessant daily labour we should starve, if anyone is idle, someone else must be working for both or there would be nothing for either of them to eat. That was why St Paul said ‘If a man will not work neither shall he eat. The burden of labour is imposed on us by nature, and has to be divided up and so is the wealth produced by it.

But the two divisions need not correspond to one another. One person has to produce much more than enough to feed him/her. Otherwise the young children could not be fed; and the old people who are past work would starve. Many a woman with nothing to help her but her two hands has brought up a family on her own earnings, and kept her aged parents into the bargain, besides making rent for a landlord as well. And with the help of water power, steam power, electric power, and modern machinery, labour can be so organised that one woman can turn out more than a thousand women could turn out 150 years ago.
This saving of labour by harnessing machines to natural forces, like wind and water and the heat latent in coal, produces leisure, which also has to be divided up. If one person's labour for ten hours can support ten persons for a day, the ten can arrange in several different ways. They can put the ten hours work on one person and let the other nine have all the leisure as well as free rations. Or they can each do one hour's work a day and each of them will have nine hours leisure. Or they can have anything between these extremes. They can also arrange that three of them shall work ten hours a day each producing enough for thirty people, so that the other seven will not only have nothing to do, but will be able to eat enough for fourteen and to keep thirteen servants to wait on them and keep the three up to their work into the bargain.

Another possible arrangement would be that they should all work much longer every day than was necessary to keep them, on condition that they were not required to work until they were fully grown and well educated, and were allowed to stop working and amuse themselves for the rest of their lives, lives when they were fifty. Scores of different arrangements are possible between out-and-out slavery and an equitable division of labour, leisure, and wealth. Slavery, Serfdom, Feudalism. Capitalism, Socialism, and Communism are all at bottom different arrangements of this division. Revolutionary history is the history of the effects of a continual struggle by persons and classes to alter the arrangement in their own favour. But for the moment we had better stick to the question of dividing-up the Income the labour produces; for the utmost difference you can make between one person and another in respect of their labour or leisure is as nothing compared to the enormous difference you can make in their incomes by modern methods and machines. You cannot put more than 24 hours into a rich man’s day; but you can put 24 million pounds into his pocket without asking him to lift his little finger for it.