CHAPTER IV

THE GREAT MAN AS DISTINGUISHED FROM THE PHYSIOLOGICALLY FITTEST

SURVIVOR

The two objections to which reference has just been made are

connected with two doctrines, neither of which has thus far been

submitted to any detailed examination, and one of which has

indeed been hardly so much as alluded to, but which are both

intimately associated, in the estimation of the world at large,

with contemporary science, and more especially with contemporary

sociology. One of these doctrines is that of the survival of the

fittest. The other is that which, more or less distinctly, is

suggested at the present time by the much-abused word “evolution.”

When the reader thinks of the doctrine of the survival of the

fittest, when he reflects on the fact that Mr. Spencer is an avowed

disciple of Darwin, and that Mr. Spencer’s own disciples are

constantly making allusion to “_the rivalry of existence_” and the

“_successfuls and the unsuccessfuls_,” he may be tempted to ask

himself if it can be really true that Mr. Spencer has eliminated

the great man from his system after all. On the other hand, when

the reader thinks of _evolution_, {90} which, whatever it may

mean, at all events means a progress essentially different from the

achievements of particular individuals, he may wonder in what way the

doctrine of evolution can be reconciled with any doctrine which has

the achievements of individuals for its basis.

We will take these two points in order. With regard to the survival

of the fittest in the competitive struggle for existence, the great

fact which it is necessary to make clear is as follows; and it is

one which our contemporary sociologists have altogether failed to

perceive. In the evolution of societies, just as in the evolution

of species—in the evolution of man as a social being, as in the

evolution of man as an animal—the struggle for existence has played

an important part; but in social evolution the part played by it is

very far from being that which is popularly supposed, nor does the

survival of the fittest in any way correspond with the position and

influence claimed for the great man. Certain of the phenomena of

progress are no doubt produced by it, but they are as different from

those which the great or exceptional man produces, as is the movement

of the earth round the sun from its movement round its own axis.

In order to understand this, let us first consider carefully how

progress, as the result of the struggle for existence, is explained

by our contemporary sociologists. The matter is put succinctly

and very clearly in the following passage from Mr. Kidd’s _Social

Evolution_.

“_Progress everywhere_,” he says, “_from the {91} beginning of life,

has been effected in the same way, and is possible in no other way.

It is the result of selection and rejection. In the human species, as

in every other species which has ever existed, no two individuals of

a generation are alike in all respects; there is infinite variation

within certain narrow limits. Some are slightly above the average

in a particular direction, as others are slightly below it; and

it is only when the conditions prevail that are favourable to the

preponderating reproduction of the former, that advance in any

direction becomes possible. To formulate this as the immutable law of

progress since the beginning of life has been one of the principal

results of the biological science of the nineteenth century.

. . . To put it in words used by Professor Flower in speaking of

human society, ‘Progress has been due to the opportunity of those

individuals who are a little superior in some respects to their

fellows of asserting their superiority, and of continuing to live,

and of promulgating as an inheritance that superiority’_.”

The entire Spencerian position as regards the social struggle for

existence is here given us in a nutshell. The competitive struggle

is a process which produces progress by means of the manner in

which it affects men in general. In any community the means of

subsistence are being constantly appropriated by the members who

are a little stronger than the rest, whilst those who are weaker

have an insufficient portion left them. The latter therefore die

early themselves; or breed no children; {92} or breed children

who die early; whilst the former live long, and breed children who

live likewise; and of these children there is always a certain

percentage in whom are reproduced the superior qualities of their

parents. Thus the weaker members of the community are always dying

out, whilst stronger members not only become more numerous, but more

efficient as individuals also. In other words, the Darwinian struggle

for existence produces progress by raising the general average of

efficiency. It has nothing to do with a few men towering over the

rest. It works by producing a simultaneous rise of all. The superior

“_assert their authority_” not by commanding their inferiors, but

merely by “_continuing to live_” and having children as superior as

themselves. In this way, to quote an illustration from Mr. Spencer,

the progressive races of Europe have reached a stage of development

which makes possible amongst them the appearance of men like Laplace

or Newton, an event which could not occur amongst the Hottentots

or the Andaman islanders. It will thus at once be clear that the

theory of the survival of the fittest explains progress by reference

to an order of facts totally distinct from those involved in the

influence claimed for the great man. Whilst the theory of survival

is illustrated by the superiority of Europeans to Hottentots, the

great-man theory is illustrated by, and depends on, the superiority

of men like Newton to the great mass of Europeans.

What relation, then, do these two explanations {93} bear to each

other? In a direct way they are not related at all. They neither

conflict with each other nor overlap each other. They are both of

them true; but true as explaining different sets of phenomena. One of

the great errors of which our modern sociologists are guilty consists

in their failure to perceive that social progress is not a single

movement but the joint result of two, which differ from each other—to

repeat what was said just now—quite as much as do the two movements

of the earth. The difference between them will become instantly clear

to us if we will turn our attention merely to the single obvious fact

that the two take place at different rates of speed, the one set of

changes being slow, like the succession of years; the other set of

changes being rapid, like the succession of days. The general rise

in capacity which distinguishes the modern civilised nations from

primitive man, or from the lowest savages of to-day, and which has

been due to what Mr. Kidd calls “_the preponderating reproduction

of individuals slightly above the average_,” has been the work of

an incalculable number of centuries. It has been so slow that, in

many respects at all events, it has been indistinguishable during

the course of several thousand years. The great thinkers amongst

the ancient Egyptians were not congenitally inferior to the great

thinkers of to-day. The brain of Aristotle was equal to the brain

of Newton; whilst the masons whose hands constructed the Coliseum

and the Parthenon knew as much of their craft as those who {94}

constructed the Imperial Institute. But with this slowness in the

rise of the general level of capacity let us compare the progressive

results achieved within some short period. We cannot do better than

take the past hundred years, and consider the progress made in the

material arts of life. How the whole spectacle changes! Within that

short period, at all events, no one will venture to maintain that

the average congenital capacities of our own countrymen have been

enlarged. We are not wittier than Horace Walpole, more polite than

Lord Chesterfield, more shrewd and sensible than Dr. Johnson; whilst

it is easy to see by reference to those trades, such as the building

trade, which science and invention have done comparatively little

to alter, that the natural efficiency of the average workman is no

greater now than in the days of our great-great-grandfathers. And yet

during that short period what an astounding progress has taken place!

To sum it up in a bald economic formula, whilst the capacities of the

average Englishman have remained altogether stationary, the economic

productivity per head of the population of this country has during

the past century trebled, and more than trebled itself.

This remarkable comparison between the rapidity of actual progress

and the extreme slowness of the biological development resulting from

the survival of the fittest in the Darwinian struggle for existence,

will be enough to show anybody that progress is not one movement but

two; and whilst the survival of {95} the fittest explains the slow

and almost imperceptible movement, the rapid and perceptible movement

is explained by the leadership of the greatest. It is with the rapid

movement alone that the practical sociologist is concerned; and hence

for him the great man, not the fittest, is the important factor.

Let us now consider what is meant by the process called social

evolution, regarded as something distinct from those intentional

advances made and maintained by the genius of great men. To

understand this, we must consider what is meant by evolution

generally. Mr. Spencer defines it in terms of “_the homogenous_”

and “_the heterogenous_”; and from his own point of view we may

accept his definition as correct. But facts have many aspects;

and according to the purpose with which we deal with them they

will require different definitions, which, though none of them

are incompatible with the others, will have between themselves no

apparent resemblance. Thus the biologist’s definition of a man will

be quite distinct from the theologian’s; and the dangerous illness

of a great party leader will be one phenomenon for his followers,

and quite another for his doctor. In the same way Mr. Spencer’s

definition of evolution, however admirable it may be from a certain

point of view, is not exhaustive. It entirely leaves out of sight

those characteristics of the process which it is necessary before all

things that the practical sociologist should understand.

To reach a definition that will include these {96} let us begin by

fixing our attention on that order of facts which formed the special

study of Darwin, and in connection with which the theory of evolution

became first known to the world; and let us ask what was the greatest

and the most notorious effect produced by Darwinism on human thought

generally. Its greatest and most notorious effect was to disprove,

or rather render superfluous, the old theory which explained the

varieties of organic life by referring them to the design of some

quasi-human intelligence. According to the old theory, every species

of living thing, from the lowest to the highest, was produced by

the power and purpose of one supreme Mind, who adapted the frame

and faculties of each to a prearranged set of circumstances and the

fulfilment of certain needs. According to the theory of evolution,

associated with the name of Darwin, these results were accomplished

by purpose and intelligent power likewise, only not by the power and

purpose of one supreme external Mind, but by the power and purpose

of the living things themselves. Each living thing chose its mates,

reproduced its kind, hunted for food, fought with rivals, and either

conquered or was conquered by them, in obedience to the promptings

of its own instinctive purposes. These were the motive power of the

whole evolutionary process. The variety and development of organic

life, as we know it, did not result indeed from one great intention,

but it did result from an infinity of little intentions. {97}

Now so far the theory of design and the theory of evolution very

closely resemble each other; but here we come to the point of

essential difference between them. According to the theory of design,

the varieties and gradations of organic life were not only the result

of intention in the supreme Mind, but were also themselves the exact

result intended. According to the evolutionary theory, although they

were the result of an infinity of intentions, not one of the living

things, from whose intention they resulted, intended them. They were

the by-product of actions undertaken for entirely different ends—that

is to say, for the benefit of the individual creatures who undertook

them. This is the essential and this is the peculiar character with

which the theory of evolution invested them. It presented to the

mind the extraordinary phenomenon of a single series of actions

producing a double series of results—the intended and the unintended,

the latter of which, though entirely different from the former,

was equally orderly, equally reasonable and coherent. Evolution,

in fact, as revealed to us in the physiological world, is, for the

philosopher, neither more nor less than this—the _reasonable sequence

of the unintended_.

But this definition of evolution does not apply only to development

in that world of facts studied by Darwinian science. It is equally

applicable to the process of social evolution also. Indeed social

evolution is even more strikingly, though not more truly, than

physiological evolution, the reasonable {98} sequence of the

unintended. How this is can be easily made plain; and when once the

idea is grasped, which the definition embodies, it will be seen that

social evolution, although it is no doubt different from all or from

any of those changes deliberately produced by the agency of the great

man, instead of excluding these changes, or eliminating the great man

as the cause of them, is a process which depends altogether upon him

and them, and that, instead of obscuring the great man’s importance,

it only exhibits it in a stronger and clearer light.

Let us take then our definition of evolution as the reasonable

sequence of the unintended, and apply the idea embodied in it to

that aggregate of conditions, either in our own or any similar

period, amongst which the great man works. All these conditions,

such as the knowledge which he finds accumulated, the inventions

which he finds in use, the political and the economic conditions

of his country, are, taken as a whole, the result of no one man’s

genius. It is equally obvious that they do not, in their incalculably

complex entirety, represent any one man’s intention, or even the

joint intention of any number of men acting in concert. Printing,

for example, and railway travelling have produced a number of social

results never dreamed of by the men who perfected our locomotives

and our steam printing presses. Accordingly, when any great man of

to-day initiates some fresh social change, whether as an inventor,

a director of industry, a politician, or {99} a religious teacher,

a large part of his achievement consists in his manipulation and

refashioning of results of past human action, which can be set down

to the credit, or ascribed to the intentions of no individual, and

no body of individuals. The society of the past intended these no

more than the great men of the past. They are results, that is to

say, which come all under the heading of the unintended. But when

we consider the great man’s achievement thus, we shall not only

witness the grouping of many of the factors essential to it into one

heterogeneous but logically coherent class, as the unintended. When

such a grouping has taken place, we shall see that there remains

behind an equally coherent and equally striking residuum—namely,

the social results and conditions that have been obviously and

notoriously intended. These may not be found existing apart from the

former; but though in conjunction or combination with them, they

will be visible as a distinct and separate element, and their true

importance as a factor in social progress will begin to be apparent

to the mind the moment their specific peculiarity, as just described,

is apprehended.

Let us take a few examples which, owing to their magnitude and

familiarity, will be at once intelligible. Our first shall be taken

from the histories of art and of speculative philosophy. In each

of these domains of human activity and achievement we find those

phenomena of development to which it is now customary to apply the

name of evolution. Thus we hear of the evolution of philosophy

from the {100} crude guesses of Thales to the elaborate system of

Aristotle. We hear of the evolution of the Greek drama from the

exhibitions of Thespis with his cart to the tragedies of Æschylus

and of Sophocles; and similarly we hear of the evolution of the

English drama from such exhibitions as miracle plays or _Gammer

Gurton’s Needle_ to tragedies such as _Hamlet_ and comedies such

as _As You Like It_. And to all such examples of development the

word _evolution_ is applied with perfect accuracy; for there is in

each an obvious and orderly sequence of the unintended. Aristotle’s

philosophy was in part derived from that of his predecessors. He

employed existing materials so as to produce a result which was not

intended, indeed was not even imagined, by those who originally

got them together and fashioned them, and which would never have

been reached by Aristotle himself, if his predecessors had not thus

unintentionally assisted him. None the less, however, does the

Aristotelian philosophy, as its author gave it to the world, embody

the deliberate intention of his profound and unrivalled genius;

and it is only because it embodies this intended element that it

constitutes an advance on the philosophies that went before it.

Similarly, though Sophocles and Shakespeare, in constructing their

dramas, each profited by the achievements of the dramatists who had

gone before them, and though the art of each would doubtless have

been more crude and imperfect had he come into the world a generation

or two before he did, yet the part played {101} by evolution in

the production of _Hamlet_ and _Antigone_ is totally distinct from,

and is altogether dwarfed by, the part played by the genius and the

intentions of their great authors.

Let us now turn to invention and applied science; and the history of

social progress, as connected with and derived from them, will show

the same two elements—the unintended and the intended, similarly

related and similarly coexistent. A brilliant illustration of

this fact is provided for us, in one of his books, by Mr. Herbert

Spencer, though he himself, with a curious blindness and perversity,

uses it not to illustrate but to obscure the point on which we are

now dwelling. The illustration referred to is the history of the

press by which the _Times_ is printed, which implement, according

to Mr. Spencer, is the result altogether of evolution. “_In the

first place_,” he says, “_this automatic printing machine is

lineally descended from other automatic printing machines . . . each

pre-supposing others that went before. . . . And then, in tracing

the more remote antecedents, we find an ancestry of hand printing

presses._” He further points out that this press implies not only an

ancestry of former presses, but also the existence of the machinery

used in making it, and again how this machine-making machinery has

a distinct ancestry of its own, which includes the fact of the

abundance of iron in England. Geometry, physics, chemistry also, he

says, played their part in the process; and he winds up by referring

to purely social causes. {102} Why, he asks, was the Walter press

produced? In order that “_with great promptness_” it might “_meet an

enormous demand_.”

It is difficult to imagine a better illustration than this of the

part played by evolution in the domain of mechanical invention. It

is perfectly evident that the mass of discoveries and inventions

which preceded and paved the way for the final invention in question

were due to men who had no idea in their heads of such a machine

as a steam-driven printing press at all. When printing was first

invented, steam-power was undreamed of. When the steam-engine was

being perfected as a means of driving machinery, the inventors had

no specific intention of applying this force to the printing press.

The men whose genius and energy in the seventeenth and eighteenth

centuries laid the foundation of the English iron trade, and with it,

as Mr. Spencer says, the foundation of “_machine-making generally_,”

in all probability never even saw a newspaper, and could not have

conceived the possibility of collecting enough news daily to fill as

much as one page of the _Times_. The mathematicians and chemists to

whose work Mr. Spencer alludes most probably never gave a thought to

the practical application of their discoveries, and knew as little

of the process of printing as they did of Chinese grammar. But let

us give to these facts all the weight we can. Let us accept the

antecedents that made the Walter press possible as not only sequences

but also concurrences of the unintended; and yet the part played

{103} by the great man remains as essential, and remains as large as

ever. The fact that the Walter press could never have existed unless

Caxton’s press had existed, and that Caxton never foresaw the future

development of his apparatus, does nothing to disprove the fact

that in the development of printing generally, genius like Caxton’s

was an indispensable agent, and one which stamped its character on

the whole sequence of inventions which it inaugurated. Nor again

does the fact that an invention like the Walter press implies not

only a direct sequence of inventions and discoveries, but also a

concurrence of many separate sequences, such as the invention and

discoveries of chemists, of machine-makers, and producers of iron,

do anything to disprove the importance and the necessity of the part

played by the men to whose genius the press was directly due. For

although the co-existence of the separate sequences referred to—the

parallel march of progress in many separate arts and sciences—may

have been altogether unintended by any of those concerned in them,

what was emphatically not unintended was their final concurrence—the

fact of their being brought together for one definite purpose. This

was due to the deliberate intention of exceptional men with strong

synthetic powers, who appropriated and connected the achievements

of various other men. Chemistry, geometry, the production of iron,

and the development of machinery for machine-making would never have

worked together to produce an automatic {104} printing press had the

immediate inventors of such an implement not coerced them into their

service, and forced them to contribute to a deliberately planned

result.

The state of the case is this. Let us take any civilised society

at any period we will, and examine it in the act of advancing to

the next stage of its development. We shall find that its existing

conditions consist partly of results intended by particular great

men whose past actions have produced them, and partly of results

neither foreseen nor intended by anybody. Thus at the present day

amongst our social conditions we have the telegraph and the railway

system—both of them results intentionally produced by individuals;

and we have also a variety of new wants and habits, new methods of

conducting trade and government, which have been produced by these,

but which were neither intended nor even thought of by the inventors

of the locomotive, or by Wheatstone and Cooke when their wires at

last realised the long-forgotten dream of the Italian Jesuit Strada.†

Thus, though social conditions at any given time are a compound

of intended results and unintended, and even though we may admit

that at any given time these last are more widely diffused than the

former, these last {105} are themselves the children of intention

once removed. Great men may not have meant to produce them, but they

have arisen from conditions which great men did mean to produce;

and they could not have arisen in any other way. And here we are

brought to a fact more obvious and more important still. Before any

further advance in social civilisation can be made, other existing

conditions, whether intentionally produced or not, require to be

intentionally re-combined and acted on by men whose enterprise,

whose intellect, and whose constructive imagination mark them out

from their fellows as the pioneers of the future. We are thus once

more confronted with the fact already insisted on—that the social

conditions of a time are the same for all, but that it is only

exceptional men who can make exceptional use of them, and turn them

into a stepping-stone on which their generation may rise higher.

† Strada, an Italian Jesuit, in the seventeenth century invented,

or rather imagined, communication by electric telegraph; and his

idea actually comprised the use of two needles moved by two magnets,

these magnets being connected in such a way that, by the movement of

either of them, the needle actuated by the other could be made to

point to such and such letters on a dial.

Social evolution, therefore, in so far as it is other than

biological, may be defined as the unintended result of the intentions

of great men; and this definition at once brings us back to the truth

which was urged in the first chapter as the starting-point of our

argument, and which can now be put before the reader with an added

force and clearness.

It was said in the first chapter that sociologists have succeeded

in dealing with those wider social phenomena which are exhibited

by social aggregates as wholes, and which are interesting and

significant {106} to the speculative or religious philosopher. The

truth of this statement is illustrated by what has just been said

about evolution. If evolved phenomena are phenomena which exhibit a

reasonable sequence, and have yet been intended by no animal or human

mind, it is open to the thinker to argue that they must have been

intended by the mind of some higher power; and a new gate is opened

into the Eden of theological speculation, from which man was driven

when he first ate of the tree of scientific knowledge.

But whilst the business of the speculative philosopher is solely

with the phenomena that have been unintended, the business of the

practical sociologist is solely with the phenomena that have been

intended. A moment’s reflection will convince the reader that

this must be so. The meaning of the words “practical science”

is a science from which we can draw practical advice; but all

advice implies an intended end; and every attempt to solve social

problems scientifically must be concerned with results which we may

deliberately set ourselves to produce, and not with by-products

which, _ex hypothesi_, are beyond our calculation. We may study

these by-products of intention as they have shown themselves in the

past; but if we do this, it will be with the object of becoming

able to foresee them in the future. So soon as we can foresee them,

we shall be able to intend their production; and when this happens

they will cease to belong to the unintended. The great man will

then consciously aim at them, and {107} not leave them to the

incalculable chances of evolution. It may safely be said, no doubt,

that, let us study human conduct as we may, unintended, or evolved

phenomena will always continue to form a large part of what we mean

by social progress; but, as practical inquirers, we must put them on

one side, and confine our attention to those factors in the problem

which either embody some definite human intention themselves, or on

which we can found, by studying them, some definite intention of our

own. And of such factors the chief is the great man, whose importance

is enhanced rather than dwarfed by the fact that his intellect and

his energy are the causes not only of great results which he intends,

but also of those others—wider, if not more important—which, though

neither intended nor foreseen by himself or by anybody else, would,

if it were not for him, never take place at all.

{109}

BOOK II

{111}

CHAPTER I

THE NATURE AND DEGREES OF THE SUPERIORITIES OF GREAT MEN

That great men are true causes of progress is admitted by Mr. Spencer

himself to be the natural opinion of mankind. What has been done,

then, in the preceding book is not much more than this:—a sound

popular judgment, which is of the highest sociological importance,

has been rescued from the discredit cast on it by the sophisms of

modern theorists. These very theorists themselves, when they reason

as practical men, have been shown to the reader blowing all their

disproofs of it to the winds, and holding and appealing to it as

tenaciously and as passionately as anybody; and it is consequently

given back to us, with its old authority unimpaired. Sound popular

judgments, however, are not science. They lack what is the essence of

science—that is to say, analytical precision. We must now, therefore,

take this judgment with regard to the great man, and endeavour to

invest it with a meaning exact and full enough to enable us to apply

it to the detailed phenomena of society.

And here Mr. Herbert Spencer shall once more {112} help us; for this

remarkable writer, though he fails to recognise what he is doing,

not only appeals on many critical occasions to the great-man theory

as an explanation of the most important social phenomena, but he is

repeatedly calling attention throughout his sociological writings

to those facts of human nature of which the great-man theory is the

expression. It will be sufficient to quote a few passages only.

Let us turn, then, to the opening pages of Mr. Spencer’s _Study of

Sociology_ and consider what is contained in them. We shall find that

they are entirely devoted to describing the abject mental condition

of by far the largest portion of all classes of English society, from

the labourer, the farmer, and the Nonconformist minister with his

Bible, up to “men called educated” and the most illustrious of our

historians and philosophers. All of them, says Mr. Spencer, “_are

slaves to unwarranted opinions_”; “_proximate causes_” are all that

the majority of them are able to understand. Nor does he represent

this as some accidental result, due to prejudices or deficiencies

in education peculiar to our own country. He represents it as

an inevitable result of the character of the human race. In his

“_Postscript_” to the same volume he takes care to make his meaning

plain. “_Most people_,” he says, “_conclude quickly from small

evidence_,” and are incapable “_of comprehending in their totality

assembled propositions._” Indeed, those whose mental constitution is

such that they can take a {113} rational view of “_human affairs_”

are, he proceeds to say, merely “_a scattered few_.” He elsewhere

divides society into “_the capable and the incapable_,” the “_worthy

and the unworthy_”; and in the “_Postscript_” just alluded to he

mentions as an admitted fact that in every social aggregate “_the

inferior form the majority_.” But a yet more caustic passage remains

to be mentioned. In this same work, _The Study of Sociology_, he is

ridiculing—and very justly—the socialistic idea that the State can be

endowed with any talent or wisdom beyond what happens to be possessed

by the individual functionaries who compose the State. These

functionaries, he says, are merely “_a cluster of men_,” which, like

any other cluster taken at hap-hazard, will comprise “_a few clever

individuals, many ordinary, some decidedly stupid_”; and he devotes

pages to showing by means of multiplied examples, how incapable the

ordinary statesman, to say nothing of the decidedly stupid, has been

of promoting progress in even the simplest ways.

Mankind at large, then, according to Mr. Spencer, may, roughly

speaking, be divided into three classes—the “_clever_” who are

few, the “_ordinary_” who are the bulk of the population, and the

“_decidedly stupid_” who form a considerable residuum; and it will

appear from what he says of that representative “_cluster_,” the

State, that whilst all real progress is the work of the clever few,

the “_ordinary men_” do nothing to promote it, and “_the decidedly

stupid men_” impede it. {114}

Now it must be perfectly obvious to the reader that in this

description of mankind we have the fundamental facts before us which

the great-man theory formulates. For let us begin by supposing that

the entire human race contained no individuals superior to the

“_decidedly stupid_,” who, whenever they are placed in official

positions, do nothing, Mr. Spencer declares, but commit the most

pernicious blunders, either by their irrational conservatism, or

their still more irrational innovations. It is obvious that in this

case the world would never have progressed at all. Let us next

suppose that in addition to the “_decidedly stupid_” men, the human

race comprises also a large proportion of “_ordinary_” men, but not

a single man who deserves to be called more than “_ordinary_.” Could

social progress, as we know it, have taken place even then? Could

thought, for example, ever have made any advances, had everybody

been as incapable as Mr. Spencer’s “_ordinary_” man is of taking a

rational view of human affairs—had everybody been enslaved, like

him, “_to unwarranted opinions_,” and been, like him, entirely

lacking in the faculty which enables a man to comprehend “_assembled

propositions in their totality_”? Or to put the whole matter in terms

of a single instance, could Mr. Spencer’s own system of philosophy

have been written if he himself had not been immensely superior not

only to “_ordinary_” men, but even to those rival thinkers whom, in

every one of his volumes, he treats with such supreme disdain? {115}

The answer of course is No. Under such conditions progress would

have been quite impossible. Our simple argument will accordingly run

thus. It is evident that those triumphs of thought, enterprise, and

invention, to which social progress is due, could never have been

made had the whole of each generation been as stupid and void of

character as its lowest and weakest members. Therefore progress must

be due to men who are superior to the “_decidedly stupid_.” Here we

have the great-man theory in embryo. But it is equally evident that

we can go a step farther, and say that progress could never have

taken place had there been no individuals who in will, originality,

and intellect were superior to “_ordinary men_.” Social progress,

therefore, must be due to this third class—the class which alone is

capable of taking “_a rational_” view of things; but this class,

as Mr. Spencer tells us, consists of a “_scattered few_,” and here

we have, in Mr. Spencer’s own language, neither more nor less than

the great-man theory developed. We have it developed in the form of

a distinct general proposition that progress is due not to mankind

at large, but to a minority of exceptional individuals, and in this

form, which Mr. Spencer has assisted us in giving it, it is brought

into actual accordance with the facts of social life, and, unlike the

wild exaggerations of Carlyle, it will be found to accord the more

closely with them the more fully it is analysed.

The error of writers like Carlyle was that they took a part for

the whole. They recognised no {116} great men at all except great

men of the greatest kind—heroic figures which appeared once or

twice in a century; and as for the rest of mankind, they treated

them, in accordance with Mr. Spencer’s formula, as a mass of units,

approximately equal in capacity. The truth of the case is, on the

contrary, this:—that whatever is done by great men of the heroic

type, something similar, if not so striking, is done by a number of

lesser great men also; that whilst the action of the heroic great

men is intermittent, the action of the lesser great men is constant;

and that the latter, as a body, although not individually, do

incalculably more to promote progress than the former.

Let us accordingly make it perfectly clear that when we describe

great men as being a minority, or a “_scattered few_,” we do not mean

that out of every thousand men there are nine hundred and ninety-nine

“_ordinary_” men and one genius; or that there are (let us say) seven

hundred who can be described for all purposes as “_ordinary_,” and

two hundred and ninety-nine who can be for all purposes described as

“_stupid_”; and that there is one “_clever_” or “_great_” man who

towers over them like an oak tree over bramble bushes. Nor, again,

do we mean that “_greatness_” is some single definite quality,

which marks its possessor out like a white man amongst negroes.

Believers in extreme democracy, who very rightly discern in the

great-man theory the destruction of their favourite enthusiasms, will

instinctively seek to attribute some meaning such as this to its

exponents. But the great-man {117} theory, when properly analysed

and explained, will be found to comprise no such absurdities as the

foregoing. When we speak of “greatness” we mean a great variety of

efficiencies, which, though grouped together because they are all

exceptional in degree, are nevertheless indefinitely various in

kind; and, moreover, the degrees to which they are exceptional are

indefinitely various also, the degree being in many cases so low that

it is difficult to say whether it should be classed as exceptional at

all. In short, there are as many degrees of greatness as there are of

temperature; and it is as difficult to draw a line between ordinary

men and men whose greatness is of a very low degree, as it is to

draw a line between coldness, coolness, and low degrees of heat. But

though it may be questionable whether we should call a day cool when

the thermometer is at fifty-nine, and whether we should call it hot

when the thermometer is at sixty-one, everybody admits that it is hot

when the thermometer is at eighty-five, and cold when the thermometer

registers twenty degrees of frost. In the same way, though there will

be a certain number of people who may be classed as great by one

judge and classed as ordinary by another, there is a certain number

whose capacities, however unequal amongst themselves, set their

possessors apart as indubitably greater than the majority; and we

are speaking with sufficient, though we cannot speak with absolute

precision, when we say that progress depends on the action of this

minority. {118}

How great the inequality is between the natural powers of men

is perhaps most clearly evidenced by the case of art, and more

especially the art of poetry. In certain domains of effort it may

be urged that unequal results are caused by unequal circumstances,

quite as much as by unequal capacities. But about poetry, at

all events, this cannot be said. Some of the greatest poets the

world has ever known—it is enough to instance the cases of Burns

and Shakespeare—have been men of no wealth and of very imperfect

education. Obviously, therefore, in poetry one man has as good a

chance as another. It is no doubt often argued—and this argument

has already been examined—that great poets, of whom Shakespeare is

a favourite example, owe part of their greatness not to themselves,

but to their age. But this does nothing to explain the differences

between poets who belong to the same age, and who, all of them, in

this respect, start with the same advantage. Let us confine our

comparisons then to men who were each other’s contemporaries, and

ask what made Burns a better poet than Pye, Shakespeare a greater

poet than the feeblest of his forgotten rivals, Pope than Ambrose

Philips, Byron than “_the hoarse Fitzgerald_”? There is only one

answer possible. These men in respect of poetry had been made giants

by nature; those were condemned by nature to live and to die dwarfs.

And the same inequality that exhibits itself in the domain of poetry

will be found in every other domain of human effort. What can be

more {119} unequal than the gifts of different singers? In every

school and university we see multitudes of young men and boys whose

opportunities of learning are not only similar but identical, but

of whom, in respect to assimilating what they are taught, not one

in ten rises appreciably above a certain level, and not one in a

hundred rises above it signally. We have Virgil at one end of the

scale, and Bavius and Mævius at the other; at one end Patti, and the

other the vocalist of the street; at one end a Scaliger and a Newton,

and at the other the idler and the dunce, who can hardly conjugate

τυπτω or stumble across the Asses’ Bridge. And in practical life

the same phenomenon repeats itself. Let us take any department of

social activity or production, on the results of which the welfare

of society at any given time depends. Let us take, for instance,

the work of government, or invention, or commercial enterprise. In

each of these we shall find a large number of men, each doing what

is in him to subserve some particular end; and we shall find a few

producing results which are great both for themselves and others,

and the many producing results which are uniform in their individual

pettiness.

It is perfectly true that in these great departments of practical

life there may not be so obvious or so widely extended an equality

of opportunity as that which prevails amongst poets, or amongst

scholars in the same seminary, but in each department there will be

a large number, at all {120} events, whose opportunities are as

equal as human ingenuity could make them. This is so in the French

army, in the English House of Commons, and in the world of business

and industry; and yet of men thus equally placed we see some doing

great things, and doubling their opportunities by using them;

others doing little or nothing, and throwing their opportunities

away. We have accordingly in every domain of activity a sufficient

number of persons with the same external advantages, to show by the

extraordinary difference between the results accomplished by them how

great the natural inequality between men’s capacities is, and how far

the efficiency of a few exceeds that of the majority. It is therefore

nothing to the purpose to attribute, as many reformers do, men’s

inequality in efficiency to the fact that equality of opportunity is

not at present as general as it theoretically might be. To extend

this equality further might produce good results or bad; but in

neither case would it tend to make men’s capacities equal. The utmost

it would do in this particular respect would be merely to widen the

area of their realised inequality—to increase the number of the

mountains, not to produce a plain.

It will doubtless be objected by those who would minimise natural

inequalities that a man may be contemptible in one capacity—that

of a poet, for instance—and yet be greater as a man than men who

in one capacity are superior to him. It may, for example, be said

that Frederick of Prussia, in spite of his {121} bad poetry, was

a greater man than Voltaire. This is perfectly true; but it is

necessary to explain clearly that it in no way contradicts what is

being here asserted. It is, on the contrary, part of it. It cannot

be too emphatically said that greatness, in the only sense in which

we are here considering it—that is to say, as an agent of social

progress—is a quality which we attribute to a man not with reference

to his whole nature, but with reference solely to the objective

results produced by him, so that in one domain of activity a man may

be great, in another ordinary, in another decidedly stupid. What,

then, we here mean by a great man is merely a man who is superior to

the majority in his power of producing some given class of result,

whereas the average man and the stupid are not superior to the

majority in their powers of producing any.

The reader must thus entirely disabuse himself of the idea that

greatness, as an agent of social progress, has any necessary

resemblance to greatness as conceived of by the moralist. A man may

be a great saint or a noble “moral character” who passes his life

in obscurity, stretched on a bed of sickness, and incapable even of

rendering the humblest help to others. He is great in virtue not of

what he does, but of what he is. But greatness, as an agent of social

progress, has nothing whatever to do with what a man is, except in so

far as what he is enables him to do what he does. If two doctors were

confronted by some terrible epidemic, and the one met it by tending

the poor {122} for nothing, and died in his unavailing efforts to

save his patients, whilst the other fled from the infected district,

and solacing himself at a distance with a mistress and an excellent

cook, invented a medicine by which the disease could be warded off,

and proceeded to make a large fortune by selling it, though the

former as a man might be incalculably better than the latter, the

latter as an agent of progress would be incalculably greater than the

former. Again, if two doctors tried to invent such a medicine, and

whilst the first succeeded the second failed, the second, though he

might have exerted himself far more than the first, and have failed

only owing to some minute flaw in his faculties, would be not only

less great as an agent of progress than the first, but he would not

be practically an agent of progress at all, any more than a man is an

agent in saving another from drowning if he merely stretches a hand

which the drowning man cannot reach, and actually himself tumbles

into the water in doing so.

This truth, which sounds brutal when plainly stated, but is really

little more than a sociological truism, is constantly overlooked, and

even indignantly denied, by thinkers whose emotions are more powerful

than their minds. The way in which such persons reason is very easily

understood. They see that a number of men by whom great social

results are produced—men who make successful inventions and who found

great businesses—are narrow-minded, uncultivated, and contemptible

in {123} general conversation, and that a number of other men who

produce no such results are scholars, critics, thinkers, keen judges

of men and things; and contrasting the brilliancy of those who have

produced no great social results with the narrow ideas and dulness of

those who have produced many, they proceed to argue that great social

results cannot possibly require great men to produce them; or, in

other words, that they might be produced by almost anybody.

But the whole of this class of objections will altogether disappear

when we more closely examine what the qualities are on which the

production of given social results depends. Let us take a few of

these results as examples. Let us take the formulation and the

popularising of some particular political demand, by which the whole

course of a country’s history is affected, and the increasing and

cheapening the supply of some articles of popular consumption—sugar,

let us say, or workmen’s boots and clothing. The persons who urge the

objections we are now discussing assume that all greatness, other

than physical strength and dexterity, must be necessarily ethical or

intellectual, and be calculated to excite our ethical or intellectual

admiration. But let them consider the qualities requisite to produce

such results as have just been mentioned, and they will see that no

assumption could be more wide of the truth.

A man who should, without underpaying his employees, succeed in

manufacturing for the poorer {124} classes boots, jackets, or shirts

better in quality and very much less in price than those which they

are accustomed to buy now, would probably have to devote a large part

of his life to the consideration of a particular kind of seemingly

sordid detail. To a man of wide culture and brilliant imagination,

the concentration of his faculties on details such as these would

be impossible; and if he wished to produce any of the results in

question, he would soon discover that he could not. The men who do

produce them are rendered capable of doing so, not by the width of

their minds, but by the exceptional narrowness. The intellectual

stream flows strongly because it is confined in a narrow channel,

and thus what to the superficial observer seems a sign of their

inferiority, is really, so far as the results are concerned, one of

the chief causes of their greatness.

The mean man with the little thing to do

Sees it and does it;

The great man with the great end to pursue

Dies ere he knows it.

Robert Browning very tersely puts the case thus. We have only to

alter his language in one respect. Seeing that the results we have

now in view are realised results or nothing, the “_mean man_,” as an

agent of material progress, will be the “great man,” and the “great

man” will be the little.

So, too, with regard to the man who affects {125} the history of his

country by formulating and popularising some particular political

demand—the secret of such a man’s success, in four cases out of five,

will be found to lie in the greatness, not of his intellect, but of

his will—in an exceptionally sanguine temperament, in exceptional

courage and energy, and very likely in an exaggerated belief in his

own nostrums, which, instead of being a sign of great intellectual

acuteness, is incompatible with it.

No doubt social progress, as a whole, has required and does require

for its production intellectual powers of the highest and rarest

kind. The point here insisted on is that it is not produced by

intellectual powers alone, and that intellectual powers alone would

be quite unable to produce it. Thus the sorrows and disappointments

of the unfortunate inventor are proverbial; and the reason is that

great inventive powers are frequently accompanied by a very feeble

will and a fantastic ignorance of the world; the inventor, though

strong as a mind, being pitiably weak as a man. He can do everything

with his inventions except make them useful to anybody. He might be

practically far greater were he to lose some of his intellectual

powers, could he thereby develop some of the humbler qualities in

which he is wanting. As it is, he resembles a chronometer which is

without a main-spring, and which is useless when compared with a

ten-and-sixpenny watch. Hence the inventor has so frequently to ally

himself with the man of {126} enterprise, and only becomes great,

as a social force, by doing so. Such unions are often sufficiently

strange in appearance. We see some man whose intellect is the

finest machine imaginable, but he is only redeemed from absolute

and grotesque uselessness by his partner, who is little better

than an inspired bagman. But such a bagman’s gifts, however the

inefficient theorist may despise them, are, though less striking than

the inventor’s, often quite as rare. No doubt many great inventors

have the practical gifts as well as the intellectual, and their

greatness, in such cases, is comprehended completely in themselves.

It remains, however, an equally composite thing, no matter whether it

takes two men or only one to complete it; and exceptional intellect

is only one of its elements. The other qualities with which it

requires to be allied, and which alone give it its practical value,

such as determination, shrewdness, and a certain thickness of skin,

though often remarkable individually for the exceptional degree to

which they are developed, just as often unite to produce practical

greatness, not because of the exceptional degree to which they are

developed, but of the exceptional proportions in which they are

combined. Some of the most essential of them, indeed, need not

be exceptional at all, except from the fact of their association

with others that are so. Much greatness, for instance, of the most

powerful kind, consists mainly of very ordinary sense in conjunction

with extraordinary energy; and energy is often, as has already been

pointed out, in proportion {127} to the narrowness rather than to

the width of the imagination.

Greatness, in short, as an agent of social progress, is in most

cases not a single quality, but a peculiar combination of many; its

composition varies according to the character of the results in the

production of which the great men are severally more efficient than

the majority; and it often depends less on the extent to which any

special faculty is developed, in comparison with the same faculty as

possessed by ordinary men, than it does on the degree to which each

faculty is developed as compared with the others possessed by the

great man himself.

When we speak of greatness, then, in the sense here attributed to

the word—when we speak of great men as agents of social progress—we

do not mean that the world is divided into ordinary men and heroes.

The members of that minority whom we group together as great men,

though some of them are, no doubt, of noble and heroic proportions,

are for the most part great in relation to special results only; even

in relation to these special results they are great in very various

degrees, and many of them in other relations may be ordinary, or even

less than ordinary. It must therefore be clearly understood that

greatness, as an agent of social progress, is not an absolute thing,

and that to say of any one man that he possesses more greatness

than another is a statement which, taken by itself, has no definite

meaning. When we {128} say that a man is great we mean that he is

exceptionally efficient in producing some particular result, which is

either implied or specified—that he is great in commanding armies, or

in managing hotels, or in conducting public affairs, or in cheapening

and improving the manufacture of this or that commodity; and when we

say that such and such a man possesses the quality of greatness to

such and such a degree we mean that he produces results of a given

kind, which are in such and such a degree better or more copious than

results of the same kind which are produced by other people.

The inequality of men, then, in natural capacity being an obvious

fact, and the nature and the degrees of their inequalities having

been now generally explained, we may re-state, with a meaning more

precise than was formerly possible, the fundamental proposition

implied in the great-man theory, when that theory is raised from a

rhetorical to a scientific formula. Progress of an appreciable kind,

in any department of social activity and achievement, takes place

only when, and in proportion as, some of the men who are working to

produce such and such a result are more efficient in relation to that

class of result than the majority; or conversely, if a community

contained no man with capacities superior to those possessed by the

greater number, progress in that community would be so slow as to be

practically non-existent.

We must now go on to inquire what is the {129} precise way in which

the men who are superior to the majority bring progress about; and we

shall find that, however various they may be in other respects, they

all promote progress in a way that is fundamentally similar.

{130}

CHAPTER II

PROGRESS THE RESULT OF A STRUGGLE NOT FOR SURVIVAL, BUT FOR DOMINATION

It has already been explained that the _great man_, as here

understood, does not in any way correspond with the _fittest man_

in the Darwinian struggle for existence. The fittest man in the

Darwinian sense merely promotes progress by the physiological

process of reproducing his slight superiorities in his children,

and thus raising in the slow course of ages the general level of

capacity throughout subsequent generations of his race. The great

man, on the contrary, promotes progress, not because he raises the

capacity of the generations that come after him, but because he rises

individually above the general level of his own. This, however, is

only one of the differences by which the great man is distinguished

from the fittest. There are two others, of which the first that we

must consider is as follows.

The fittest man, or the survivor in the Darwinian struggle for

existence, is, so far as his own contemporaries are concerned,

greater than his inferiors only in respect of what he accomplishes

for {131} himself, or for those immediately dependent on him. He

is the man who lives and thrives whilst others die or languish,

because whilst they can secure for themselves but little of what is

requisite for life and health, he, by his superior gifts, is able to

secure much. “_Families_,” says Mr. Spencer, “_whom the increasing

difficulty of obtaining a living does not stimulate to improvement in

production are on the high road to extinction, and must ultimately

be supplanted by those whom the difficulty does so stimulate_.” That

is to say, Mr. Spencer, and all our modern sociologists with him,

conceive of the fittest as a man, or a man and his family, who fight

for their food in isolation, like a lion and lioness with their cubs,

and who affect their contemporaries only by being better fed than

they, or as a race-horse affects its competitors only by being first

at the winning post.

But the great man, as an agent of progress, shows his greatness in

a way precisely opposite to that in which the fittest man shows his

fitness. This it is that our contemporary sociologists all fail to

perceive, and endless error is the consequence. The great man, unlike

the strongest lion, promotes progress by increasing the food-supply

not of himself, but of others; or if he increase his own, as he

no doubt generally does, he does so only by showing others how to

increase theirs. He is like a lion who should be better fed than the

rest of the lions in his region, not because he took a carcase from

them for which they all were fighting, {132} but because he showed

them how to find others which they never would have found unaided,

and took for himself in payment a small portion of each. The great

man, in fact, as an agent of social progress, is great not in virtue

of any completed results which he produces directly, by the action

of his own hands or brains, or which he exhibits in his own person,

but in virtue of the completed results which, by some simultaneous

influence which he exercises over the brains or hands of others, he

enables others to exhibit in themselves, or produce or do in the form

of products or social services.

In order to realise this great truth, let us begin with considering

that form of greatness which promotes social progress by supplying it

with its first materials, and from which all other kinds of greatness

draw some portion of their nourishment. It so happens that one of the

most remarkable thinkers of this century, who, though he preceded Mr.

Spencer, belongs to the same school, is able to assist us here by a

very apt and remarkable passage.

John Stuart Mill, in that section of his _System of Logic_ to which

he gives the title of “_The Logic of the Moral Sciences_,” writes

thus. “_In the difficult process of observation and comparison which

is required (for the purpose of obtaining a better understanding of

the laws of empirical sociology, and especially of social progress)

it would evidently be a great assistance if it should happen to

be the fact that one element in the complex existence of social

man is pre-eminent over all the others, as the prime agent {133}

of the social movement. For we could then take the progress of

that one element as the central chain, to each successive link of

which, the corresponding links of all the other progressions being

appended, the succession of facts would by this alone be presented

in a kind of spontaneous order, far more approaching to the real

order of their filiation than could be obtained by any other merely

empirical process. Now the evidence of history and that of human

nature combine, by a striking instance of consilience, to show that

there really is one social element which is predominant and almost

paramount amongst the agents of social progression. This is the state

of the speculative faculties, including the nature of the beliefs

which by any means they have arrived at, concerning themselves and

the world by which they are surrounded. Thus_,” Mill continues,

“_to take the most obvious case, the impelling force to most of the

improvements effected in the arts of life is the desire for increased

material comfort; but as we can only act on external objects in

proportion to our knowledge of them, the state of knowledge at any

given time is the limit of the industrial improvement possible at

that time, and therefore the progress of industry must follow and

depend upon the progress of that knowledge_.”

Any one who was inclined to be hypercritical might object, and object

with justice, that the practical application of knowledge often

lags behind the speculative attainment, and that material progress

therefore, at certain times, depends on {134} some new state of

the practical rather than of the speculative faculties; but apart

from this not very important inaccuracy of expression, Mill’s way of

putting the case is admirable for its lucidity and for its truth;

and we may, for our present purpose, be content to take it as it

stands. All civilisation depends on the accumulation of speculative

knowledge, and all progress in civilisation depends on an increase in

speculative knowledge.

Speculative knowledge, however, does not increase of itself. It is

not acquired without considerable effort; and people acquire it

only because they strongly desire to do so. Such being the case,

let us turn to another passage, taken likewise from the writings

of Mill, and occurring in the very same chapter as that which has

just been quoted. “_It would be a great error_,” says Mill, “_and

one very little likely to be committed, to assert that speculation,

intellectual activity, the pursuit of truth, is amongst the more

powerful propensities of human nature, or holds a predominating place

in the lives of any save decidedly exceptional individuals. But

notwithstanding the relative weakness of this principle among other

sociological agents, its influence is the main determining cause

of social progress, all the other dispositions of our nature which

contribute to that progress being dependent on it for accomplishing

their share of the work_.”

Now what does this passage mean? About its meaning, and the truth

of its meaning, there can be no possible doubt; but it will be

well to observe {135} the extraordinary confusion in which Mill

involves what he means by his perverse manner of expressing it. In

the first sentence of this last passage he tells us as clearly as

possible that with regard to the pursuit of truth, and the power of

discovering and understanding it, mankind are divided broadly into

two classes—the great majority with whom the “_pursuit of truth_”

and “_intellectual activity_” are “_slight propensities_,” and “_the

decidedly exceptional individuals_” with whom these propensities

are overmastering. But he has no sooner drawn this clear and

all-important distinction between the two classes than he proceeds

to undo his own work and mixes them together again in one unmeaning

blur. He converts his statement that only “_the decidedly exceptional

individuals_” desire truth with any great intensity, and have the

faculties requisite for discovering it, into the statement that if

we take “_the decidedly exceptional individuals_” and the majority

together, and regard them as one body, which he calls “_mankind_,”

we shall find that the average desire for truth is lukewarm, and

the faculties for discovering it insufficient. He might just as

well group Shakespeare with a hundred ordinary men; tell us that

Shakespeare could write the greatest poetry the world has ever known,

and that the hundred other men could write no poetry at all, and then

convert these statements into the following—that the one hundred and

one men, Shakespeare included, could only write poetry of a very

moderate quality. {136}

This confusion of statement, however, on the part of Mill, is merely

mentioned here in passing, as one more example of the nature of that

inveterate error—namely the ignoring of the differences between one

class of men and another—which has made modern sociology so useless

for practical purposes. The sole point which really now concerns us

is this. In spite of the verbal, and indeed the mental confusion into

which Mill lapses, the truth which he was struggling to express, and

which no one, he says, would be likely to contradict, is not that,

as he nonsensically puts it, the speculative faculties are weak in

mankind generally, but that amongst the larger part of mankind they

have hardly any efficiency at all, whilst “_in decidedly exceptional

individuals_” they are intense, active, and conquering; and that

consequently it is these “_decidedly exceptional individuals_” who

practically constitute “_the one social element which is predominant,

and almost paramount, amongst the agents of social progression_.”

Now such being the case, let us resume our present inquiry, and ask

how do these individuals who alone strongly desire truth, and have

the faculties for discovering it, perform the practical part which

Mill so rightly assigns to them? By what kind of conduct do they

become “_agents of social progression_” so as to raise communities

from the level of helpless savagery and gradually endow them with

all the resources of civilisation? One thing is perfectly clear.

They do not so by the mere act {137} of acquiring knowledge, by

laying up this treasure in a napkin, or by showing it secretly to

one another. They do so only by diffusing it, in such measure as is

practicable, amongst a circle of men much wider than themselves. They

do so, that is to say, by influencing the minds of others, by guiding

their attention to this and to that fact, by providing, as it were, a

go-cart for their weaker intellectual faculties, and compelling them

to confront and assent to such and such propositions. All that mass

of developing knowledge and expanding ideas which forms not only the

basis but a part of all progressive civilisation, and is commonly

called by the general name of enlightenment, is produced solely by

the influence on average minds of the minds that are “_decidedly

exceptional_.” It is not produced by the fact that the “_decidedly

exceptional_” minds are stocked with such ideas and with such

knowledge themselves, but by the fact that they communicate such a

measure of these to average minds as average minds are severally able

to receive.

To realise the truth of this we need do no more than consider for a

moment the ordinary process of education. The schoolmaster and the

college tutor, by the State or some other authority, are compelled

to give their pupils instruction in certain subjects. But there is

another kind of compulsion involved in the matter also; and this has

to do not with the selection of the subjects that are to be taught,

but with what is to be taught about them. The general progress of

a community depends {138} primarily upon this; and what is to

be taught about them is determined not by the State, or by any

other legally constituted body, but by the masters of speculative

knowledge, by contemporary men of science, scholars, historians,

and philosophers. Knowledge advances because these men are not only

adding to it, but because they are perpetually assimilating the new

discoveries with the old; and these men, by means of their comments

on previous writers, or by new works of their own, often reproduced

in the form of text-books, put the word into the teachers’ mouths;

and the teachers, like the prophet Balaam, are compelled to speak it.

In other words, great speculative thinkers are great as agents of

mental civilisation and enlightenment only because, and only in so

far as, they settle for others what these others shall believe and

think.

And now let us pass from mental progress to material—that is to say,

from speculative knowledge to applied knowledge; and the truth that

is being here insisted on will become clearer still. The master

of knowledge, as applied to production, is the inventor. Now the

most perfect and important machines ever devised by man—let us say

the steam-engine and the printing press—had they been planned by

their original inventors in all their present completeness, but

kept by the inventors to themselves in the form of working models,

made by their own hands and shut up in their own rooms, would have

left the arts of life totally unaffected; our fastest means of

travelling would still be the stage-coach; {139} our few books

would be produced by the methods of the mediæval scriptorium. These

machines are instruments of social progress only because, and in so

far as, they are multiplied and brought into use; and they could

not be multiplied—as efficient implements, they could not be even

made—without the co-operation of an enormous number of workers. It

is probable indeed that in constructing the very model itself an

inventor will have to employ some labour besides his own. Thus this

first and preliminary step towards rendering his apparatus a factor

in social progress he can take only by influencing one or two other

men, at all events—artisans whose technical action he directs in such

a way that it produces something specifically different from anything

which it had produced before; and as the apparatus is reproduced on a

larger scale, put on the market, multiplied so as to meet a growing

demand, and thus actually produces an effect on the arts of life,

this practical result takes place only because, and in so far as,

the number of artisans whose action is influenced by the inventor

increases. The inventor, in other words, is an agent of “_social

progression_” only because the particularised knowledge of which his

invention consists is embodied either in models, or drawings, or

written or spoken orders, and thus affects the technical action of

whole classes of other men, just as Mr. Spencer affects, by means of

his manuscript, the technical actions of the compositors who put his

treatises into type. {140}

Material progress, however, depends not only on the inventor and his

machine. It depends also on the uses to which his machine is to be

put. Here we shall find a new kind of greatness to be necessary—that

which is called business ability; and we shall find that this

operates precisely like the greatness of the inventor, through the

influence which its possessor exercises over other men.

All progress or development in commerce and in the arts of production

is in proportion to the correspondence in every place and season of

the goods brought into the market with the contemporary wants of

the buyers. If it were not for this correspondence of the economic

supply with the demand, progress in production would not be social

progress at all; for just as a community does not become materially

civilised by the mere act of wanting what it cannot get, so it does

not become materially civilised by being presented with what it does

not want—clothes, for example, which it could not possibly wear,

and books in an unknown language, which it could not possibly read,

or diminutive houses and furniture fit only for dolls. Now in any

progressive community the wants of the buyers are in constant process

not only of development but fluctuation, and are rarely quite the

same in any two localities simultaneously. In order, therefore, that

what is supplied may be in correspondence with what is wanted, it

is necessary that in each industry the nature of the commodities

produced be continually modified by men with a {141} special sort

of knowledge of the world; and also, since want, in the sense of

efficient demand, depends on the price at which these commodities

can be supplied, it is necessary, just as it is in the case of the

manufacture of machinery, that the army of men whose labour is

involved in producing them shall be subject to men who, by their

powers of industrial generalship, will be able to reduce the cost

of reproduction to a minimum. Every business, in fact, and every

industrial enterprise, succeeds or fails, not according to the amount

of average labour involved in it, but according to the talents and

energy by which this labour is directed. Thus in the economic domain,

even more than in the intellectual, the great man is seen to be an

agent of “_social progression_,” in virtue not of the results which

he himself produces by the direct action of his own hands or brain,

but of the results which, being what he is, he causes to be produced

by others.

And now having dealt with the great man as an agent of speculative

progress which, as Mill says, is at the bottom of progress of all

other kinds, and having dealt with him also as an agent of that

manufacturing, commercial, economic or material progress which Mill

cites as the chief example of what practical progress is, and having

shown how the essence of his greatness is his power of influencing

others, let us illustrate this truth finally by a brief reference to

three other kinds of human and social activity which exhibit it {142}

in a light so obvious that it requires no explanation. These three

kinds of activity are the military, the political, and the religious.

The great soldier, as has been said already, is essentially the

great commander—the man who makes others act and group themselves

in a specific way. The statesman not only aims at benefiting his

countrymen generally, but he achieves his aim by the same means as

the soldier, namely, by influencing the actions of others in certain

specific respects; whilst the man who is socially great in the domain

of morals and religion is the man whose teaching and example affect

the actions, and even the inmost feelings, of multitudes, or gives

precision to their faith.

But here, having reduced to a truism this important truth that the

great man, as an agent of social progress, is great only because he

is able to exercise a specific influence over others, it is necessary

to turn our attention to a different order of facts altogether.

Greatness, as we have seen already, is of very many kinds. It is a

varying compound of various and variously developed qualities; and

its degree is measured by its efficiency in producing this or that

result by which society is benefited. But greatness, in the sense of

exceptional power of so influencing others that some given result

shall be produced by them, has other varieties besides those that

have been already mentioned. Each domain of progress has not only

its own leaders, but it has leaders who desire to lead men in very

different directions. There are scientists {143} with conflicting

theories, inventors with rival inventions, statesmen with rival

policies. It follows accordingly that though all these men may be

possessed of talents indefinitely above the average, they would

not all of them, were their influence over other men equal, affect

society in an equally advantageous way. Some men, indeed, whose

talents are “_decidedly exceptional_” would, on account of some flaw

or defect in their character, not promote, but, on the contrary,

retard true progress, in exact proportion as they made their views

prevail. Thus, though all progress is due to great men, all great men

would not promote progress; or they would, at all events, not promote

it equally. Progress, therefore, as resulting from the actions of

great men, depends on the degree to which certain of them make their

own views prevail, and secure the rejection of others which are

directly or indirectly opposed to them. It depends, that is to say,

on a keen competitive struggle which is continually taking place

within the limits of the exceptional minority.

And here we come to that further point of difference, which still

remains to be noticed, between the part played in social progress by

the great man, and the part in it played by the fittest according

to the Darwinian theory. Two points of difference between them have

been noted and explained already, one being that the fittest man

promotes progress only because he raises, by a physiological process,

the average capacities of his successors, whereas the great man

promotes {144} progress because he is himself more capable than

his contemporaries; the other being that the fittest fulfils his

social function by fighting for his own hand, without any reference

to others, whereas the great man fulfils his solely by influencing

others. We are now coming to a third point, which is, for practical

purposes, even more important than the preceding.

The great-man theory, just like the theory of Darwin, involves a

competitive struggle. This struggle is a struggle between great

men; and its existence is a fact of too obvious a character to

have escaped the notice of even the most inaccurate of our social

evolutionists. But they one and all of them have completely

misunderstood its nature. They have hastened to identify it with

the Darwinian struggle for existence, from which it differs in the

most vital manner conceivable; and, obscuring it thus by a loose and

misleading analogy, they have managed to blind themselves to its

entire practical significance. The Darwinian struggle for existence

no doubt has its counterpart in the contemporary competition of

labourers to find remunerative employment, and in the fact that those

who are least successful in finding it would, if left to themselves,

be continually dying off. In a progressive country there is, or

there always tends to be, a larger number of would-be labourers than

there is of tasks which at the moment can be profitably assigned

to them. A struggle therefore is involved in obtaining work of any

kind; and for the higher kinds of work the struggle is very keen.

But this is not the {145} struggle to which modern progress is due.

Progress, in the sense of the rapid and appreciable movement which

alone concerns us here, is—to confine ourselves for a moment to the

domain of industry—not the result of a struggle to execute work in

the best way, but is the result of a struggle to give the best orders

for its execution. It presupposes the existence of a certain amount

of skill; but it does not, except in its very earliest stages, depend

on the struggle of so many thousand men, each to become individually

a more skilful worker than his fellows. It is, on the contrary, when

its earliest stages have been passed, so independent of any further

increase of skill in the individual worker, that it continues its

course whilst skill remains stationary.

This is shown by the fact that some of the greatest advances ever

made in material civilisation have been made during the active

lifetime, and with the aid of the hands and muscles, of a single

generation of workers, and has implied no improvement at all either

in their acquired faculties or their inherited. Let us take, for

instance, the introduction of the electric light, and the way in

which it is superseding gas. The mechanics first employed to make the

appliances for its production were none of them asked to perform any

task which required on their part any new knowledge or dexterity.

All they were asked to do, and all they did, was to submit their

existing faculties to some new external guidance: and the electric

light, in so far as it has superseded {146} gas, has superseded it

not because it is the product of more skilful labour, but because

it is the product of manual labour directed by a set of inventors

and employers, who, so far as regards certain social requirements,

direct it more successfully than another set. The struggle which it

represents is a struggle between employers only. It does not, except

by accident, represent any struggle between the employed.

And what is true of the struggle which produces industrial progress,

is true of that which produces progress of all other kinds.

Scientific knowledge increases in proportion as those exceptional

individuals whose studies have brought them most near to the truth

are able to fight down the opinions of the exceptional individuals

who differ from them, and to impress their own undisputed upon the

world. Such knowledge does not increase on account of any struggle

amongst the learners, which causes some of them to become more and

more apt in learning. It grows on account of a struggle between

philosophers, each of whom aims at settling what the learners shall

learn. And with regard to religion and politics the case is just the

same. The progressive struggle is primarily between rival prophets

and politicians. The spread of Christianity, for instance, was not

brought about by Christian races exterminating those that were not

Christians. It was brought about by Christian thinkers and teachers

discrediting the doctrines taught by thinkers and teachers who were

opposed to them. Free-trade, {147} again, in this country has not

triumphed over protectionism, because the mass of free-traders have

exterminated the mass of protectionists. It has triumphed simply

because, in the eyes of the majority, one school of theorists has

succeeded in discrediting another.

Now these facts, which, when once stated, are so obvious, not only

throw the Darwinian struggle for existence altogether into the

background as an agent in social progress, but they show that it

presents us with no true analogy to that kind of struggle from which

progress principally results. They show us, on the contrary, that

the struggle which produces social progress, though it resembles

the Darwinian struggle in one point, is in all other points

contrasted with it. The struggle of one employer against another to

direct labour in the most advantageous way, or the struggle of one

politician or religious teacher against another to secure for his own

views the largest number of adherents, is so far like the Darwinian

struggle for existence, that it is a struggle in which individual is

pitted against individual, and the gain of the successful is the loss

of the unsuccessful. But the limits within which this struggle is

confined are very narrow indeed; and the mass of the community takes

no part in it whatsoever.

In order to show this with the utmost clearness possible, let us turn

again to the domain of economic progress, which generally supplies

the sociologist with his simplest and most luminous illustrations.

{148} The success of the strongest and ablest employers—that is to

say, the heads of the most successful businesses—may involve, and

does involve their selection for survival as employers, and does

involve the extinction, as employers, though not necessarily as men

and parents, of their weaker and less able rivals; but it involves no

struggle for existence with the men employed by them—that is to say,

with the great masses of the community. Two men, we will say, start

rival hotels, and each begins with a staff of a hundred persons. One

of the two understands his business far better than the other. His

hotel is always full, whilst his rival’s is half empty. The latter

at last becomes bankrupt; the former buys his business, and together

with his premises takes over his staff. He employs two hundred

persons, instead of a hundred as at first; the hotel of the bankrupt,

which the bankrupt ran at a loss, now yields the same profit as

the other; and the aggregate takings of the two are thus increased

largely. Here we have a community of two hundred and two persons

offering a marked example of great material progress; and this

progress has been the result of a genuine struggle for existence. But

the struggle for existence has been between two persons only—that

is to say, between the two hotel-keepers. As _hotel-keepers_

existence is the very thing they have been struggling for, and the

survival of the one has meant the disappearance of the other; but

between them and the two hundred persons employed by them there has

been no struggle at all. The achievement {149} by the successful

hotel-keeper of a fortune double that with which he started has not

involved any diminution in the wages of his staff. It will, on the

contrary, if we are to take the case now in question as typical of

the survival of the fittest employers generally, have not only not

diminished their wages, but very largely increased them. For here

there is one further truth which naturally introduces itself to our

observation. Whatever allowance it may be necessary to make for the

lowest class or residuum of our modern populations, it is the most

clearly proved and prominent fact in modern industrial history—and

one which even socialists are now ceasing to deny—that along with the

vast increase in wealth which the ablest employers have, by their

struggle with rivals, secured for their own enjoyment, there has been

not a corresponding diminution, but a corresponding increase in the

means of subsistence that have gone to the population generally. The

average income per head in this country of that class—composed mainly

of wage-earners—which does not pay income tax has, in terms of money,

nearly trebled itself during the present century; its purchasing

power has increased in a yet larger ratio, and its increase will

be found to have been most rapid and striking at periods when the

struggle amongst the employing class has been keenest.

It will thus be seen that the struggle which produces economic

progress—and progress of every kind is produced in the same way—is

not a general {150} struggle which pervades the community as

a whole; neither is it a struggle between the majority and an

exceptionally able minority, in which both classes are struggling

for what only one can win, and in which the gain of the one involves

the loss of the other; but it is a struggle which is confined to the

members of the minority alone, and in which the majority play no part

as antagonists whatsoever. It is not a struggle amongst the community

generally to live, but a struggle amongst a small section of the

community to lead, to direct, to employ, the majority in the best

way; and this struggle is an agent of progress because it tends to

result, not in the survival of the fittest man, but in the domination

of the greatest man.

{151}

CHAPTER III

THE MEANS BY WHICH THE GREAT MAN APPLIES HIS GREATNESS TO

WEALTH-PRODUCTION

The whole secret of social progress, other than the most rudimentary,

is summed up in the formula with which the preceding chapter has

concluded. Progress is the result of the domination or the triumphant

influence of the greatest. That is to say, the civilisation of

the entire community depends alike for its advance and for its

maintenance on a struggle which is confined within the limits of an

exceptional class; and the ordinary members of the community are

connected with it only by the fact that when the fittest competitor

achieves the domination for which he is struggling, they, instead

of being defeated by him, share the advantage of his victory. When

the scientific doctor discredits the theories of the quack, when the

competent organiser of industry causes the ruin of the incompetent,

when a good ministry drives a bad from office, when a great general

supersedes one who is inferior, or when a true religious teacher

destroys the influence of a false, the whole community gains, except

the men who have personally lost {152} authority, and who share the

merited fate of their own errors or deficiencies.

The progress and the maintenance, then, of civilisation in any

community depends on its possessing a number of great men, of which

number the greatest shall, by competition with the others, succeed in

gaining a control over the beliefs and actions of the majority.

Here, however, we are introduced to two new sets of facts, which have

not thus far come under our consideration at all.

In the first place, great men do not come into the world ready-made.

Their greatness is potential only, or in other words it is

practically non-existent, until it has been developed; and the

process of developing it is in most cases extremely arduous. The

philosopher, the soldier, the inventor, the statesman, the great

merchant or manufacturer, achieve success only by prolonged and

intense effort, by study, by concentrated thought, by action, by rude

experience. Genius, indeed, has been defined as an infinite capacity

for taking trouble; and the definition, though very incomplete, is,

so far as it goes, true. No one, however, takes trouble without a

motive; and a motive being some object of desire, such as money,

rank, or pleasure, which a man hopes to attain by a certain line of

action, it follows that if a community is to possess great men as

actual agents of progress, and not merely as wasted potentialities,

its social constitution must be such as to offer and make attainable

positions, possessions, {153} pleasures, or other advantages which

its potentially great men will feel to be worth working for.

In the second place, since the great man, as we have seen, is an

agent of progress and civilisation only because he influences

others—because he guides their speculative beliefs, and in certain

respects commands their actions—the society or community to which

the great man belongs must be such as not only to supply him with

a motive for exercising this influence, but also to enable him to

secure for himself the means by which it may be exercised; and,

furthermore, the means in question must be of a kind which will

enable the rival great men to bring their respective capacities to a

decisive practical test, so that the influence of the most efficient

may establish itself, and that of the less efficient cease.

Now the whole question of motive we will deal with later on. We will

for the present put it altogether aside. We will assume a natural

impulse on the part of all great men to develop their powers to the

utmost, and employ them in influencing others, wholly independent

of any other reward than such a minimum of sustenance and comfort

as is physically essential to their efficiency; and we will confine

our attention altogether to the question of the means by which the

influence of the great men over the majority is obtained.

Human progress, however, being a complex thing, and taking place

in different domains of activity, the means by which the great man

influences others will vary with the nature of the results which his

{154} influence aims at eliciting. The social activities on which

progress depends, though they may be subdivided indefinitely, are

reducible to five kinds—intellectual, religious, military, economic,

and political; and with regard to the two first, the influence of the

great man exerts itself to determine what others shall believe and

think; with regard to the three last, it exerts itself to determine

what others shall do.

Now out of these five domains of activity the three first—namely,

the intellectual, the religious, and the military—are such that

the means by which the great man makes his influence felt in them

hardly require discussion. In the first place, they are obvious—there

is no dispute about what they are; and, in the second place, the

fact of their being what they are has no bearing, except such as

is very remote, on any disputed question concerning the practical

organisation of society. In the intellectual world thinkers,

scholars, and men of science gain their influence by discussions,

for the most part embodied in books, which discussions are carried

on before a jury of expert critics, each man defending his own views

against the views of those who differ from him; and the jury of

experts ultimately gives its verdict, to which sooner or later the

community at large submits. The religious leader gains his influence

similarly. He gains it by arguments and persuasions, which are felt

by a band of followers to touch the spirit more deeply than those of

other prophets. He gives to his disciples, and his {155} disciples

give to the multitude. But these means are of so universal a kind,

and have so little connection with any specific social arrangements,

that none of the disputed points of social politics are involved in

them; and we consequently have at present no occasion to discuss

them. So, too, with regard to the military leader, though the

means which are employed by him do, beyond a doubt, imply social

arrangements of a very specific kind—namely, an iron system of

discipline, with death and the lash to sanction it; yet these

arrangements, however they may be denounced by sentimentalists, have

always been found essential to the efficiency of every army; and

though many worthy people would abolish military activity altogether,

and whilst socialists especially express themselves anxious to do

so, it is perfectly evident—nor would any socialist deny it—that

a socialist State, if it had to fight for its existence, would be

obliged to enforce the required military discipline by methods

essentially identical with those of Cæsar or Wellington. It may,

indeed, be disputed whether the great military leader is not a

superfluous figure on the social stage; but so long as his greatness

makes itself felt at all, it will continue to make itself felt by the

same means.

The only domains of social activity, therefore, in which the means

employed by the great man to control the actions of others so that

ordinary men may be guided by the faculties of the exceptional—the

only domains of activity in which these means, {156} thus employed,

really require minute and careful discussion, and have really a

direct bearing on the practical problems of the day—are the domain

of economic production and the domain of political government.

These, indeed, may be said to contain between them the whole of the

questions with regard to which parties are divided—with regard to

which those who believe that the conditions of civilisation may be

indefinitely improved but can never be fundamentally altered, are

divided from those who believe them to be capable of indefinite

metamorphosis.

This is specially true of the domain of economic production; for

it is mainly on account of its connection with the production

and distribution of wealth that political government excites so

much popular interest and forms the subject of so much vehement

controversy. And in every other domain of human activity equally, we

shall find that the interests, the endeavours, and the disputes of

men have an economic process as their basis, or economic progress

as their object. The processes of production and commerce are, in

fact, the central processes of every nation’s life. Government exists

to foster them, and changes its form as these processes develop;

whilst fleets and armies exist mainly for their protection, and more

and more depend on the progress that takes place in them. It is, in

short, in the domain of economics that all the social problems of

the day either begin or end; and consequently in examining the means

by which the great man influences others, the question which it is

{157} really our first concern to examine relates to the means by

which great men, whose greatness consists in the fact that they are

exceptional in their powers of causing the production of wealth,

and on whom consequently the wealth of the whole community depends,

obtain a control over other men’s productive actions.

This control can be secured in two ways only, or else in some way

that is a combination or modification of both. One of these ways is

slavery; the other is the capitalistic wage-system. Let us consider

how the two resemble each other, and also how they differ.

They resemble each other because both, in so far as they subserve

progress, subserve it for precisely the same reason. They are both

contrivances by which the superior few may secure, so far as industry

is concerned, the implicit obedience of the many. On the private

lives of the many their effects will be widely different; but so far

as concerns their direct connection with industry—their operation

on men during the actual processes of production—slavery and the

capitalistic wage-system differ only in this: that the one secures

the required industrial obedience by operating on men’s fears; the

other secures it by operating on their desires and wills. Thus the

slaves who built the pyramids had each some specified task—the making

of so many bricks, the cutting of such and such stones, or the

fixing of bricks and stones in such and such situations—which had to

be performed if the pyramids were to be built at all. So, too, if

the Hotel Metropole at Brighton was to {158} be built at all, the

bricklayers, masons, and other workmen who built it had to perform

tasks of a precisely similar kind. But obedience to orders on the

part of the Egyptian slave was secured by the knowledge on his part

that disobedience would be punished by some form of chastisement, and

very likely of torture, whilst obedience on the part of the Brighton

workman was secured by the knowledge on his part that, unless he

chose to yield it, one way, at all events, of earning a livelihood

would be closed to him.

It is this latter method of securing industrial obedience that is

made possible by the capitalistic wage-system; and it is primarily

for this reason that what is called capitalism is an agent of

progress, and has developed itself in progressive communities. As for

capital itself, this, as we all know, performs part of its functions

by assuming the form of machinery, buildings, bridges, railways, and

a variety of structures and appliances which are grouped together

under the general head of _fixed capital_ by economists. But these

structures and appliances are themselves the result of the previous

influence of great men on the industrial actions of the many; and as

it was by means of wage-capital that this influence was secured, the

primary and most essential functions which capital fulfils, and which

really form the essence of the capitalistic system, are to be found

by considering capital as employed in the payment of wages.

Now capital as thus employed consists of an {159} accumulation

of the necessaries and comforts of life, by the consumption and

use of which men are able to sustain themselves when engaged on

works requiring a long period for their completion, which will when

completed be useful and produce much, but which, until they are

completed, will be of no use at all, and will consequently supply

nothing to the workers when actually engaged on them. The simplest

example of work of this kind is agriculture. The first man who

saved sufficient food to support himself, whilst tilling the soil

and waiting for his crops to ripen, was the first capitalist. But

capital, when it takes the form of accumulated necessaries and

comforts, though it now reaches the workers in the form of wages

usually, need not do so of necessity. It need not do so when the

work is extremely simple and the methods employed are rude. Wherever

agriculture, for example, is in its earliest stages, every husbandman

may be his own capitalist, and start with an accumulation of food in

his own cottage which will keep him alive till his crops are ready

for sale or for consumption. In cases such as these we have capital

which, so far as its substance is concerned, is identical with

wage-capital, but is not wage-capital nevertheless. In order to turn

it into wage-capital it is necessary that these accumulations of food

shall pass out of the control of the workers—such as the husbandmen

just referred to—and be brought under the control of some other

person or persons, who will dole them out to the workers on certain

conditions only. The wage-system, in short, {160} does not represent

capital as such. It represents capital, in the form of the immediate

means of subsistence, as owned or controlled by a small number of

persons; and its efficiency as a productive agent resides in the

bargain which it enables any great man possessing it to make with

ordinary workers—a bargain, not that they shall work such and such a

number of hours (for that they would have to do were each man his own

employer), but that they shall do their work in accordance with the

great man’s directions.

Now this fact that the wage-system represents the control of capital

by the few—and this is its essential characteristic—is the fact on

which, more than on any other, the socialistic opponents of the

modern wage-system insist. They are never weary of insisting that

it has its foundation in a monopoly. But though they perceive the

fact, they entirely miss its significance. Karl Marx conceives

of the capitalists as a body of men who, so far as production is

concerned, are absolutely inert and passive. Owing to a variety of

causes, he says, during the past four hundred years all the means of

production have come under their control, and access can be had to

them only, as it were, through gates, of which these tyrants hold the

key. Outside are the manual labourers, who are the sole producers

of wealth, but who, without the means of production, naturally can

produce nothing—not even enough to live on; and the sole economic

function which the capitalist fulfils is to let the {161} labourers

in every day through the gates, on the condition that every evening

the unhappy men render up to him the whole produce of their labours,

except that insignificant fraction of it which is just necessary to

fit them for the labours of the day following. Now it is no doubt

theoretically possible that a society might exist, composed of a mass

of undifferentiated and undirected manual labourers on the one hand,

and on the other of a few passive monopolists who extracted from

them most of what they produced, as the price of allowing them the

opportunity of producing anything; but it is perfectly certain that a

society of this kind would exhibit none of the increasing productive

power which, as even Marx and his school admit, is one of the most

distinctive features of industry under the capitalistic wage-system.

Under that system productive power has increased, not because capital

has enabled a few men to remain idle, but because it has enabled a

few men to apply, with the most constant and intense effort, their

intellectual faculties to industry in its minutest details. It has

increased not because the monopoly of capital has enabled the few to

say to the many, “We will allow you to work at nothing, unless you

give us most of what you produce,” but because it has enabled them to

say to the many, “We will allow you to work at nothing, unless you

will consent to work in the ways that we indicate to you.”

The few, so far as our present argument is {162} concerned, may

appropriate much of the gross product or little; or they may leave

the whole of it to be divided amongst their employees. What they

actually have done, or do, or may do, in this respect, is another

question altogether, and will be discussed hereafter separately. The

essence of the wage-system, in so far as it has influenced the actual

processes of production, is in the power it gives to the few to

direct the producers, not in the power it gives them to appropriate

the products. It will indeed require very little reflection to

show us that if the great men in the industrial world would only

develop and use their faculties, without any motive of ambition or

self-interest to stimulate them,—as indeed at the present moment we

are assuming that they do,—they could use the wage-system for the

purpose of directing industry merely by monopolising the control

of capital without monopolising, and even without sharing in, its

possession.

This truth will become plainer still when we reflect that if only

certain conditions prevailed which in many civilised countries

survived till quite recently, the whole process of production as we

now have it might be carried on without any wage-capital at all.

These conditions are those of the _corvée_ system, under which

peasants and others who owned the lands upon which they lived,

and maintained themselves on those lands in a certain position of

independence, were compelled to place their labour, for so many days

a week, at the absolute {163} disposal of this or that superior.

Such a system, if applied to modern industry, would have, no doubt,

many incidental disadvantages; but if only a number of independent

peasant-proprietors could be forced to give half their time to the

proprietor of a neighbouring factory, and during that time to work

in it under his orders, the entire use and necessity of wage-capital

would in theory, at all events, be gone. The same thing is also true

of slavery, between which and the wage-system the _corvée_ system

stands midway. Like the peasant-proprietor, who is forced to give

part of his labour to his over-lord, the slave is supplied with the

necessaries of life independently of his obedience to the detailed

orders of his task-master. The peasant maintains himself by tilling

his own fields; the slave-owner feeds his slave just as he would

feed an animal. In neither case is the giving or the withholding

of a livelihood used as the motive or sanction by which industrial

obedience is ensured. Obedience is ensured by the direct application

of force, or the knowledge on the slave’s part or the peasant’s that

force will be applied if necessary.