Such being the case, then, let us alter our supposition somewhat, and

suppose that the hunters, instead of catching the game with their

hands, kill it with wooden darts; and that the amount of game which

each hunter will secure in a day depends not on the skill with which

the darts are thrown, but on the skill with which the darts are made.

Under these circumstances, the hunter who secures most will not be

the man who is quickest in seizing the quarry with his hands, but the

man who makes the darts that will reach their mark most certainly;

and yet no one would say that he was less entitled to what he took,

because his exceptional skill, before it could become effectual, was

obliged to become embodied in some object external to himself.

In the same way, if two peasants are cultivating similar fields,

and one, by sheer hard work, raises a larger crop than the other,

his right to his larger crop would not be denied by anybody. Let us

suppose, then, that instead of working harder than his neighbour

he works more intelligently, that he saves and stores up as manure

materials which his {313} neighbour wastes; and that every year,

through the powers accumulated in his manure heap, he can raise a

larger crop than his neighbour, though he actually works less. Would

any one affirm that the man lost his right to his extra produce

because he produced it indirectly by the external agency of his

manure, and not directly by overstraining his muscles? Or again, if

one of the peasants raised a larger crop than his neighbour because,

whilst his neighbour spent all his money in drinking, he himself

saved it and bought a horse, would any one maintain that the extra

crop due to the work which the horse performed for its owner did not

belong to the owner, but was stolen by him from the other man?

No one would put forward an argument so absurd as this. And yet

the wooden darts of the savage and the manure heap and the horse

of the peasant are neither more nor less than portions of fixed

capital, just as a steam engine is, or a cotton mill with all its

plant. Fixed capital is merely productive ability which, instead of

acting directly in the production of goods for the consumer, stores

itself up in externalised means of production, so that it may, with

accumulated force, produce such goods indirectly; and the additional

wealth which a man produces by a new machine is just as much produced

by himself as is the additional crop which he raises from a patch

of land by the employment of a horse which he has bought, or manure

which he has himself concocted. Indeed, fixed capital may be compared

to a breed of artificial horses, or if we like the simile better,

to {314} a race of iron slaves. The amount of wealth which the

employment of a machine adds to the amount that would be produced

without it by a given number of labourers, is produced by the

machine itself just as truly as it would be if the machine, instead

of a structure of wheels and framework, took the form of a gang of

artificial negroes, who only betrayed the fact that they were not

human by the heat of their breath, an occasional unearthly whistle,

and the different language in which they required to have their

orders given them. The machine produces this increment, but certain

men produced the machine; and therefore the increment is in reality

produced by the men, just as truly as when a murdered man has been

killed by a bullet from a rifle, his death has been caused by the

murderer who aimed and discharged the weapon.

And what is true of fixed capital is true of wage capital also;

for fixed capital, such as machines, buildings, or railways, is

the result of wage capital, as employed to direct labour, and is

therefore wage-capital externalised in the objective results of

its employment. But fixed capital, or a man’s productive power

externalised, differs from his productive power when exercised by

himself through wage capital. It is a part of his power which he can

separate from his own personality, and which he can make over to

others, just as a slave-owner might make over a body of slaves; only

these are slaves whose enslavement does them no wrong, and who belong

{315} by right to the men whose enterprise and whose intellect

created them.

Capital, then, as such, is as true a producer of wealth as the men

were who in the first instance produced it; and when one of them

passes a portion of it on to his son, and with it the income that

results from it, this income is nothing that is stolen from other

men, but is simply a part of the product produced by the artificial

slaves, the use of whom other men for their own advantage borrow,

and who rightly belong to the lender because he has received them

from his fathers, who created them. And should any socialist quarrel

with this reasoning, it will be sufficient to point out to him that

it is neither more nor less than the reasoning which, till only a

few years ago, the leaders of socialism themselves were never weary

of employing. Capital, said Lassalle, is merely labour fossilised:

and so long as labour was held to be the only wealth-producer, the

socialists urged that capital belonged to the labourers, because it

represented the labour of their fathers, whose heirs they were. But

with the gradual disappearance of the doctrine that labour is the

sole producer, it is becoming more and more evident that capital is

not what Lassalle thought it was—that it is not fossilised labour,

but fossilised business ability. In other words, it does not,

except in its earliest stages, represent on the part of producers a

process of exceptional saving. What it does represent is a process

of exceptional production. Since then the labourers, as labourers,

{316} would have been the rightful heirs to all capital, if all

capital had been produced by the common labour of their parents,

those who have actually inherited it must be its rightful owners in

fact, because in fact it has been produced by the ability of the

exceptional men who left it to them.

But the whole of this argument, based on the claims of abstract

justice, would avail very little to defend the income of the mere

owner of capital if his position rested upon its abstract justice

only, and if his right to his income did not form a part of the very

conditions that render the production of wealth possible. The part

which the right to income from capital plays when the ownership of

the capital is divorced from any active employment of it, depends

on the fact that the right to income of this kind is what gives to

wealth the larger part of its value, and renders the desire of it

efficient as a social motive.

The ways in which it does this are many and various; and because

it is impossible to indicate them in any simple or single formula,

certain people may imagine that they have no importance. Such people

might as well argue that no complicated process is an important

process, or that no results are necessary when many causes combine to

produce them.

The most obvious of the reasons why the right to income from capital

forms in the eyes of the exceptional wealth-producer a principal

element in the desirability of the wealth produced by him has

{317} its root in the facts of family affection. In spite of the

selfishness which distinguishes so much of human action, a man’s

desire to secure for his family such wealth as he can is one of

the strongest motives of human activity known; and the fact that

it operates in the case of many who are otherwise selfish shows

how deeply it is engrained in the human character. It may, indeed,

be regarded as a kind of selfishness itself; and the vigorous and

practical men who have exceptional faculties for wealth-production

are precisely those in whom it is strongest and most persistent. Men

like these would never for a moment tolerate an arrangement which

permitted the head of the family to keep his wife and children in

luxury so long as he lived, but would condemn all of them, the moment

he happened to die, to be turned by the butler and footmen into the

street as beggars.

It has been said that this family feeling on the part of the great

wealth-producer may be regarded as a species of selfishness; and

there is nothing very recondite in the process by which it comes

to be so. Such a man, no matter how selfish, values his family

because it happens to be his own. His own importance is enhanced by

the success and brilliancy of its members; and the possession of a

fashionable wife, and a popular and well-bred son, reflects almost

as much credit on him as the possession of a gentleman for his

grandfather. For this reason, if for no others, he will do for them

everything that exceptional wealth will enable him to do. Wealth,

{318} however, depends for its effects on those who enjoy it, not

merely on its present enjoyment, but on the prospect of its continued

possession; and unless the man who is making a fortune by his ability

may bequeath to one of his children, at all events, a position

similar to his own, and something exceptional in the way of wealth to

all, the money which he spends on them during his own lifetime will

be wasted. The whole social importance which wealth might have given

them would be gone. The tastes and the peculiar cultivation which

wealth is capable of securing for those who are from their earliest

years surrounded with it, they would under such circumstances neglect

to acquire at all; or, if they did acquire them, they would be living

in a fool’s paradise, for when their father died, and their wealth

consequently vanished, they would be infinitely worse off than those

who had never possessed it. They would resemble nothing so much as

plants that had been grown in a conservatory, merely that, when on

the point of flowering, they might be bedded out in the frost.

If, then, for the selfish, or even the heartless parent, wealth

would in most cases lose the larger part of its attractions unless

it could be accumulated and bequeathed to others in the shape of

income-yielding property, for the normally affectionate parent its

attractions would be reduced yet further.

But the full part which heritable incomes play, in rendering wealth

desirable in the eyes of exceptional men, is not to be understood by

considering such a {319} man and his family singly. For the life

and the ambitions of a family are not self-contained. They imply and

depend upon relations with other families; and these other families

will be valued, and intercourse with them will be rendered possible,

not by the bare fact that they are the possessors of so much money,

but by the fact that they have the habits and interests which result,

and result only, in the social atmosphere created by a number of

assured incomes, wholly independent of any daily struggle to make

them. It is easy to see that no rich society would be endurable if

the only men in it were men who had just made their fortunes, and if,

on their deaths, their families disappeared from it in the gulfs of

destitution. Anything more exquisitely ludicrous than the socialistic

proposal that great wealth-producers should be allowed large incomes

to spend, but that they must not on any account be allowed to invest

any part of them, or use it in a way by which more income may

result from it—anything more ludicrous than this it is not possible

to conceive. It is—to recur to an illustration used already—like

proposing that a peasant who is more industrious than his neighbours

shall be allowed all the money which the sale of his extra produce

brings him, provided only that he spends it on brandy, or beer, or

absinthe; but that if he save it up and buys a useful horse with it,

his purchase shall be confiscated by the State, because a horse is

productive capital. This proposal, however, is not only ludicrous in

theory, but it would, if put into practice, result in a sort of {320}

society more vile and bestial than anything which the world has ever

known. For the sole advantage which in that case wealth would bring

to its producer would consist in the meat and drink and other means

of physical pleasure which he and his family could consume or enjoy

during his lifetime—before he retired to the grave, and his wife and

children to the workhouse.

The main value of wealth in the eyes of the great wealth-producer does

not consist in its ministering to brief spasms of self-indulgence,

but in the fact of its being the foundation of an equable and

sustained life, in which the physical pleasures are refined

rather than intensified, and the time employed by the majority

in producing the necessaries of existence is given not to sloth,

but to other kinds of exertion. A life of this kind is impossible

except in a society of which a large section not only possesses

wealth, but is accustomed to its possession, and is characterised

by accomplishments, tastes, principles, and kinds of knowledge,

which can be developed and acquired only when the continuance of its

possession is assured. In other words, those men on whose exceptional

business ability the productive processes of the entire community

depend, and who are the cause of growth in the incomes of the mass of

the community, just as truly as they are the producers of their own

fortunes, are motived to activity less by the desire of the wealth

which comes to them day by day through their own direct exertions,

and which would cease instantly {321} when these exertions were

suspended, than they are by the desire of wealth that shall come to

them indirectly, not as the product of their exceptional exertions in

the present, but as the product of the accumulated product of their

exceptional exertions in the past—the product of those stored-up

forces with which they have enriched the world, and which, whilst

rendering help to thousands of men besides, will continue to render a

tribute to their creators and their creators’ children.

Thus, to express the matter in brief and familiar language, the

sustained development and exercise of exceptional ability in

wealth-production implies the possession by those who monopolise

this ability, not merely of that portion of those products which are

called the wages of superintendence, but also to that portion which

is called interest on capital. For just as the control of capital

affords the only means by which, under free institutions, the great

man can apply his faculties so as to increase the production of

wealth, so does the right to interest, or to the products of the

capital accumulated by him, constitute the chief reward by the desire

of which the exercise of his faculties is stimulated.

There is a further point, however, which now remains to be noticed.

When it is said that the great wealth-producer is motived mainly

by the desire to enjoy an amount of wealth proportionate to what

is produced by him, it is not asserted that in order to gratify

this desire it is necessary that he should be able to appropriate

the whole of what {322} is produced by him. On the contrary, of

that constantly growing product which is added by the great man’s

faculties to the product of ordinary labour, and out of which

the income of the great man comes, a portion is capable of being

appropriated by the ordinary labourers themselves. Indeed, the

masses of the community are partakers in material progress, and

have an interest in material progress solely because, as an actual

fact, a considerable percentage of this added product goes to them;

and though few of our so-called “labour leaders” recognise this

truth, all the hopes of enrichment which they hold out to their

followers imply nothing whatever beyond the securing a larger amount

of an increment which is produced not by themselves but others. An

important question, therefore, arises in this way as to how far the

product of the great men can be taxed and handed over as a bonus

to average labour without weakening the motives which prompt the

great men to produce it. This is a question to which, by _à priori_

reasoning, it is absolutely impossible to give any definite answer.

It is a question that can be solved only by cautious practical

experiment; and the answer will vary constantly with times, places,

and circumstances. All that can be asserted here, and it is all that

requires to be insisted on, is that the amount of wealth which the

exceptional wealth-producer can secure must be proportionate to what

is produced by him, however far short of the whole of it; and that

it must not be diminished to such an extent as {323} will render it

less exceptional as the object of an ambitious and strenuous man’s

desire.

In other words, that graduation of social circumstances, those

differences in ways of living, in habits, manners, accomplishments,

and social functions, which have their physical basis in varying

degrees of wealth, and give to civilised society what is its present,

as it has been its past character—these graduations of social

circumstances, which it is the cherished dream of the socialists to

do away with, are indestructible so long as civilisation lasts. If

they perish, civilisation will perish also; when civilisation is

restored they will reappear along with it; and however they may be

modified or adjusted, they can never be even approximately effaced.

It is the facts briefly indicated in the present chapter which the

socialists of to-day are principally distinguished by ignoring; and

it is these facts which render socialism for ever impossible.

This truth, when once generally recognised, will lead to many

practical consequences, of which the most immediately important will

be dealt with in the following chapter.

{324}

CHAPTER III

EQUALITY OF EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITY

The two great facts, then, that have been elucidated by our

inquiry thus far, are these: in the first place, all progress and

civilisation, and more especially all production of wealth, results

from a complicated process in which, man for man, a minority plays

a part incalculably greater than the majority; and consequently, in

the second place, the minority, man for man, possesses wealth that is

correspondingly greater than the wealth of the majority, likewise. In

addition to these facts a third has been elucidated also, to which

it in desirable that we should give renewed attention. Since great

men not only produce wealth directly, but produce it indirectly by

producing wealth which produces it, and which they are enabled to

hand on to their children, the wealthy class is at any particular

moment always more numerous than those members of it who are engaged

actually in production. In Great Britain, for example, it has been

estimated that two-thirds of the aggregate income that pays income

tax is rent or interest on capital, and that one-third represents

{325} the direct products of work. We may therefore here adopt

the rough hypothesis that out of each generation of our wealthy

class a third part is enriching itself by the process of direct

production, and two-thirds are living on the products produced for

them indirectly by the capital or the means of production which were

created by their fathers and their grandfathers. Now such being the

case, what we have to notice is as follows. Though the members of

the wealthy class are not always changing, as they would be were no

saving of capital, no interest, and no bequest allowed, they are

still changing gradually from generation to generation, so that

whilst the class, as a class, always possesses a nucleus of families

with whom wealth and the traditions of wealth are hereditary, a

number of individuals born in it are constantly disappearing over its

borders, and a number of other individuals are constantly passing

into it.†

† The most permanent form of hereditary wealth is land; but only a

small minority of our existing landed families existed as landed

families at the time of the last Heralds’ visitation. Thus, though

the estates of this country are as old as the country itself, the

actual possession of a large proportion of them by their owners,

at any given time, represents their purchase by wealth recently

created, and is, in fact, recent wealth converted into another form.

And if there is a change like this in the possession of landed

wealth, there is a still more rapid change in the possession of

commercial capital. One of the many childish assumptions of Karl

Marx was the assumption on which a good deal of his reasoning

rests—that the English middle classes of the present century owed

their capital and positions to social opportunities which had come

to them as the heirs and descendants of the merchants and wealthier

sheep-farmers who began to make fortunes four hundred years ago.

As a matter of fact by far the larger part of the great commercial

businesses and commercial fortunes now existing in this country have

been founded during the past hundred, and many within the past fifty

years, by men who were the sons of ordinary wage-paid labourers, and

who were no more heirs to the men who formed the middle class under

the Tudors than they were to the merchants who are celebrated in the

_Arabian Nights_. That such is the case is shown with sufficient

clearness by the following figures, which refer to commercial

incomes during the thirty years which followed the first Great

Exhibition. During these years, whilst the population increased

by about 30 per cent, fortunes of over ten thousand a year were

multiplied by 100 per cent, fortunes of from five to ten thousand

by 96 per cent, and fortunes of from five to six hundred by 308

per cent. It is obvious, then, that when a class is augmented in

one generation by a number of new members from three to ten times

as great as its natural increase would account for, most of its

new members must have come to it from some class outside, and have

gained their place in it solely by their own exertions.

{326}

Thus in spite of the permanence which interest gives to wealth,

the families that live merely on interest are constantly tending

to disappear, and their places are being taken by the men whose

exceptional faculties, whose business ability, whose enterprise and

strenuous will, actually contribute most to the productive forces of

the country. It was observed by J. S. Mill with regard to political

government that this “is always in, _or is passing into_, the hands”

of the men who are at the time the true repositories of power. In

the same way the wealth of any progressive country is always in, or

is passing into, the hands of the men who by their own abilities are

engaged actively in producing it. {327}

Such being the case, then, the material civilisation of a country—the

wealth of the few or the progressive comfort of the many—depends

on the extent to which its potentially great wealth-producers, as

they come into the world, generation after generation, are induced

by circumstances to develop their exceptional talents, and devote

them to the maintenance and improvement of the productive process.

For those, therefore, who regard the material welfare of a community

as the test and basis of its welfare in all other ways, the abiding

social problem is always this: how to adjust circumstances in such

a way that the smallest possible number of these potentially great

wealth-producers may be wasted, and the largest possible number may

be induced to exert themselves to the utmost.

One set of conditions essential to this result has been described

already—those, that is to say, by which the possession of wealth

is secured to the producers of it, and the persons to whom they

leave it. But to these must be added another set of an entirely

distinct character—that is to say, the conditions which, the motive

to exertion being given, shall render exertion of the kind required

possible for the largest number who happen to be theoretically

capable of it. Now modern democratic thinkers have supplied the world

with a formula by which, in their judgment, these conditions are

sufficiently indicated. This formula is “equality of opportunity,”

and we cannot begin our consideration of the question better than

by taking this as a {328} starting-point, and asking what truth

is contained in it. We may at once admit, then, that if it is

taken in an abstract sense, it sums up a truth which is, beyond

doubt, indisputable; for if each individual having exceptional

potentialities as a wealth-producer, which require nothing but

the favour of circumstances to ensure their being turned into

actualities, could be provided with circumstances so nicely adapted

to his idiosyncrasies that these potentialities might be developed to

the utmost extent possible, the productive powers of the community,

it is almost needless to observe, would be raised in that case to

their utmost possible efficiency. Such an ideal condition of things

as this, however, is impossible for the following, if for no other,

reason. Successful parents as a rule will employ part of their

wealth—at all events they will employ the positions which they have

won by their own ability—to provide opportunities of a special kind

for their sons; therefore, whatever the State might do for its youths

and young men in general, exceptional parents for their sons would

be able to do something more. Equality of opportunity, therefore,

represents an ideal condition which we never can reach, but to which

we can only approximate; and the only practical questions for us are

accordingly these: how far towards this ideal can political action

carry us, and what results are to be anticipated from our nearest

possible approach to it?

Now the answer to both these questions will very largely depend

on the existing conditions of the {329} community with reference

to which they are asked. For though men’s powers of equalising

opportunities are limited, their powers of making them unequal may

be said to be indefinitely great; and the more unequal they have

been made at the time when we ask our questions, the greater will

the progress be which there will be room for us to make towards

equalising them, and the greater will be the social advantages which

we may hope to secure by making it. In France, for example, before

the first Revolution, the laws affecting industry had almost ruined

the nation, not because by unduly favouring one class they led to

wealth being concentrated, but because by unduly hampering other

classes they prevented its being produced; and the sweeping away by

the Revolution of the old feudal inequalities, though it had none of

the millennial effects which the Revolutionists themselves hoped for,

has had others equally striking, though of a very different kind. It

has not made men equal in point of wealth, but it has increased to an

astonishing extent the wealth of all classes alike. And the way in

which it has done this has been by removing artificial impediments to

the development and free exercise of exceptional productive talent;

or in other words, by an equalisation of economic opportunities.

But the kind of equality that has thus been reached may be described

as being of a negative rather than a positive kind. It depends on

the absence of artificial impediments to production, rather than

on the supply of any artificial helps to {330} it; which means

that it depends on the absence of everything that might obstruct

the strong, rather than on measures or institutions that should

artificially lend strength to the weak. Now, so far as industrial

ability of the highest kind is concerned, it is probable that this

negative condition of things, which is merely the complete embodiment

of a policy of _laisser-faire_, represents the utmost that, in

any civilised country, can be done by the process of equalisation

with any beneficial result. For in wealth-production the men whose

capacities are really of the first order will, when not positively

impeded, make their own opportunities for themselves; and the genius

who is born with every opportunity waiting for him has but a few

years’ start of the genius who is born with none. That such is

the case is abundantly illustrated by history. If we consider the

most famous of the men whose originality of mind and extraordinary

spirit of enterprise have been chief amongst the forces which have

enriched the civilised world, we shall find that those whose names

most readily occur to us have had no opportunities save such as their

own genius made for them. Arkwright, Cartwright, Watt, Stephenson,

the intrepid and enduring adventurers who, in the teeth of prolonged

opposition, laid the foundations of the modern manufacture of iron;

Columbus, who gave to Europe a new hemisphere—all these have been men

born amongst social circumstances which conspired to deny them rather

than to provide them with opportunities. And if we turn from {331}

Europe to new countries like America, and consider the leaders of

economic production there, we shall find that the histories of these

men have been similar. Nor, indeed, in this fact is there anything to

be wondered at. In the sphere of industry, just as in the sphere of

art, the greatest men will never be suppressed. They are always sure

to assert themselves, and the struggle with adverse circumstances

will, instead of crushing, strengthen them.

It may therefore be safely said that no equalisation of opportunity

which goes beyond the abolition of arbitrary and unequal impediments

would tend to increase the number of those exceptional men whose

productive faculties are really of the first order. And this

inference is supported by a large number of analogies drawn from

domains of activity other than economic. Any workman’s boy, for

example, who has any taste for books has now in England, before he

is fifteen, more educational opportunities than Shakespeare had in

all his lifetime. But the number of Shakespeares has not appreciably

increased. Again, popular education has given to the whole French

army advantages confined to a few at the time of Napoleon’s boyhood.

Every private carries the marshal’s _bâton_ in his knapsack. And yet

democratic France, with all its equalisation of opportunity, has not

produced a series of new Napoleons. On the contrary, the mountain,

after years and generations of labour, does nothing at last but give

birth to a Boulanger.

Though faculties of the first order, however, are {332} independent

of artificial assistance, many of an inferior, but still of an

exceptional kind, are not; and it cannot be doubted that the supply

of these last will depend very largely on the degree to which

facilities for self-development are given by the State to those

who desire to take advantage of them. Thus, though the spread

of education in this country has not increased the number of

Shakespeares, it has enormously increased the number of those who can

write good English. And no doubt in the domain of wealth-production

it has had an analogous effect. This effect, however, though real,

has been enormously exaggerated; and it has been exaggerated for

a particular reason. Social reformers have confused two things

together. They have confused talents which are exceptional in their

very nature, with accomplishments which are exceptional only because

they are not universally taught. Thus reading and writing, for

instance, were rare accomplishments once. Of all accomplishments they

are the most universal now; and there is not the least doubt that

there are very many others which, with equal opportunities, might

be acquired by almost anybody, but which yet, as a matter of fact,

are still confined to a minority. In this fact that education may

increase the accomplishments of a community, social reformers have

fancied that they discovered an indication of the extent to which

education could elicit exceptional talent. But to call into practical

activity by means of external help exceptional faculties, of which

the supply is necessarily limited, is a very {333} different process

from evoking by similar means faculties which are potential in

everybody, and the supply of which can be increased indefinitely; and

it is a process, moreover, which produces very different results. Let

us consider how this is.

For productive faculties of the highest order, which not only

minister to progress, but initiate it, and which make, as if by

a conjuring trick, the hands of the average labourer produce new

commodities of which he never would have dreamed himself—for

faculties such as these, the demand is always unlimited. There

are productive faculties also, exceptional although they are

inferior, the demand for which is usually greater than the supply.

But with regard to those faculties or accomplishments which are

only exceptional accidentally, and which might be, like reading,

conceivably made universal, the case is precisely opposite, and it

is so for two reasons. In the first place, these accomplishments,

which anybody might conceivably acquire—knowledge of French, for

instance, or of book-keeping—though they may minister to the business

of wealth-production, yet have no tendency in themselves to make

the business grow. The number of persons, then, possessing these

accomplishments who at any given time can put them to a productive

use is limited by the condition in which production at that time

is. Thus the number of clerks which a mercantile firm can employ

is limited by the business which the firm happens to be doing; and

though this business might be enlarged by the enterprise of one new

{334} partner, it would not be enlarged, when there were no letters

to copy, by the accession of ten young men who could copy letters

beautifully. In the second place, even at times when the national

business is growing, and the demand for these accomplishments is for

the moment greater than the supply, any attempt by the State to make

their development general would produce a supply indefinitely greater

than the demand. Thus to multiply the number of labourers’ sons

possessing accomplishments that would fit them for the work of clerks

would not be to increase the number of young men who would wear black

coats, and sit on stools in offices, instead of working in factories,

or laying bricks, or ploughing. Instead of raising the position of

the plough-boy to the same level as the clerk’s, it would lower the

clerk’s salary to the level of the plough-boy’s wages; and clerk and

plough-boy would be alike sufferers by the process.

The beneficial effects, then, to be looked for from an equalisation

of opportunity have been exaggerated by democratic thinkers because

they have failed to perceive those facts. They have confounded the

development of accomplishments which might conceivably be acquired

by all with the development of faculties which, even potentially,

are possessed by a few only. They see that education can increase

the number of possible clerks, and they have therefore imagined that

it can, with similar ease and certainty, increase the number of

efficient men of genius. It must, however, be distinctly stated that

{335} the error in their conclusion is one of exaggeration only.

There is much exceptional talent which, though not of the highest

order, will, when opportunity is given it, increase the wealth of the

community, but which will, without the educational help of the State,

be lost; and it may frankly be admitted that, within certain limits,

the equalising of educational opportunity plays a very important part

in supplying the community with exceptionally efficient citizens.

But the main difficulties involved in the artificial equalisation of

opportunity are not concerned with the problem of how to produce good

results by it. They are connected with the problem of how to avoid

producing bad results. Let us consider what the possible bad results

of it are.

In a general way they are indicated, or indirectly implied, in

the saying so dear to the sterner and more thoughtless of the

Conservatives—that popular education does nothing but promote

discontent. Sweeping statements of this kind, however, though they

may have an element of truth in them, are valueless till they have

been carefully qualified; for what we have to ask about them is

not whether they are true, but how far they are true, and in what

precise senses. Thus, though it is true that the danger of diffusing

education lies in the discontent that may thereby be promoted, some

kinds of discontent are not dangerous—they are beneficial; therefore

the danger of diffusing education lies in its tendency to promote not

discontent generally, but {336} discontent of certain special kinds;

and it is necessary to discriminate carefully what these kinds are.

Now the kind of discontent which Conservatives generally have in

view, when they denounce education because they think it tends to

promote it, is by no means that from which danger really arises. What

they generally have in view is a discontent with his circumstances

which they think education will produce in the average working man.

In reality, however, the primary danger of education is not to be

looked for in its effects upon average men at all. It is to be looked

for in its effects upon men who are distinctly exceptional.

In order to understand how this is, let the reader reflect once more

on one of the main truths that have been insisted on in the present

volume—namely, that though all progress is the work of great or

exceptional men, all great or exceptional men do not promote progress

equally, and some of them indeed do not promote it at all. Progress

results from the victory of the fittest of these over the less fit

in the struggle to gain dominion over the thoughts and actions of

others. Let the reader reflect also on the analysis that was given

of the various qualities which go to make up greatness—that is to

say, the qualities by which dominion over others is obtained. It

was pointed out that greatness is a highly composite thing; that it

need not necessarily imply any moral, nor indeed any intellectual

superiority; and as an illustration of this it was mentioned that

many most {337} important political movements have been produced by

men whose greatness consisted merely in ordinary sense joined to, and

made efficient by, an extraordinary strength of will. It is necessary

now to follow this line of observation farther, and to point out that

if extraordinary strength of will can produce beneficial effects

when allied with ordinary sense, it is equally capable of producing

effects that are mischievous when allied with stupidity, or with

that kind of imperfect intellect which is as quick in defending and

popularising, as it is in being duped by fallacies. And with these

latter qualities it is allied as often as with the former. It is

a great mistake to suppose that even the most false and foolish

opinions which have influenced multitudes to their own detriment have

been originated and promulgated by men who were altogether weak and

inferior. On the contrary, most of the follies which have disturbed

or retarded civilisation have been due to the influence of men who,

though morally or intellectually contemptible, have possessed a

vigour of character far beyond what is ordinary.

Now, if education has the effect attributed to it of liberating

the will and developing the intellectual powers of men in whom the

intellect is really acute and sound, there is an obvious danger of

its having the same effect on men whose intellect is unbalanced

and imperfect. To some of such intellects, no doubt, it may give

clearness and equilibrium; but there are others for which it does

nothing, except to increase their powers of reasoning wrongly; and

when an {338} intellect of this kind is allied with a naturally

strong will, the effect of education is to let loose a wild horse,

merely in order that it may run away with a lunatic.

It must be remembered that the strength of a man’s will, though

depending as a potentiality on the character with which he happens

to be born, depends as an actual force on his desire for certain

objects or results, coupled with the belief that he can attain

these by action. Now, when a man’s powers of action are capable of

realising his desires—as when a man who desires to be wealthy has the

talents that produce wealth, or when the man who desires to be Prime

Minister has the talents of a great statesman—his career satisfies

himself, and is presumably serviceable to his country. In many cases,

however, desire is exceptionally great, and generates also a strong

impulse to act, but the capacity for that kind of action by which

the desired object might be obtained is small. Thus many men desire

exceptional wealth, but find themselves incapable of the peculiar

kind of action that produces it. Their will, accordingly, if it makes

them act at all, is like a steam-engine which merely puts useless

machinery into motion; or if it fails to make them act, as it very

often does, it shakes them to pieces with a kind of intellectual

retching. These unhappy persons owe the condition in which they find

themselves mainly to an over-estimate of their own powers; and this

over-estimate is generally the direct result of education, which, by

making them {339} falsely imagine themselves capable of attaining

wealth, actualises a fruitless desire for it, which might otherwise

have remained latent. When education has this effect on a man it is

an unmitigated evil for himself, and very frequently for others.

Again, education, besides actualising exceptional desires which are

wholly unaccompanied by any exceptional faculties that correspond

to them, actualises desires accompanied by faculties which are

really exceptional, and which produce results undoubtedly more than

ordinary, but are nevertheless incapable of complete development.

Many men, for instance, have gifts for music and poetry which, though

genuine so far as they go, have yet some fatal defect in them, and

will never produce, however devotedly they are exercised, any results

possessing artistic value. Now the fact that progress is caused by

a struggle between exceptional men, of course implies that some of

them shall be less efficient than the others. It is by struggling

with the less efficient that the superiority of the most efficient is

realised; and in order that it may be found who the most efficient

are, the inferior as well as the superior must put their capacities

to the test. It is therefore unavoidably one object of education to

stimulate the activity of some exceptional men whose own efforts are

foredoomed to ultimate failure. Failures, however, differ in degree

and kind. Some men fail because they can accomplish nothing of what

they attempt, like the dreamers who have wasted their {340} lives

in trying to make perpetual motions. Some fail because, though they

accomplish something, others accomplish more; and the production of

what is the best makes the second best valueless. Thus nine inventors

might produce nine motor-cars, each of which worked well enough to

command a considerable sale; but if a tenth inventor was to produce

another which was faster, simpler, more durable, and cheaper than

any of these, all the rest would drop out of use altogether, and be

practically as valueless as the mad aggregation of wheels by which

the seeker for the perpetual motion endeavoured to accomplish the

impossible. Between the men who fail, however, because they succeed

less than others, and the men who fail because they do not succeed

at all, there is a great practical difference. The men who fail only

because others succeed better than they do, contribute to the very

success of the men by whom they are defeated; for they raise the

standard of achievement which these men have to overpass. But the

men who fail because they accomplish nothing waste their own lives

without benefiting anybody. In the domain of economic production

the truth of this is obvious. It is not less so in the domain of

speculative thought. Scientific theories are constantly put forward

which, though not true, are sufficiently near the truth to have some

definite relation to it; and those who actually reach it find in

errors of this kind an indispensable assistance. Nothing gives to

truth so keen and clear an outline as the refuted errors of really

powerful thinkers. But {341} there are errors, on the other hand,

which, though it may be necessary to refute them because they have

imposed themselves on a number of ignorant people, do nothing to

advance the discovery of truth whatever, and the activity of those

who originate them is altogether mischievous. Thus whilst the

reasonings of heretical thinkers like Arius, by the controversy

they provoked, were very largely instrumental in advancing orthodox

theology to really logical completeness, the philosophy of religion

owes absolutely nothing to Joanna Southcott or the American prophet

Harris. Accordingly, whilst it is impossible to say with precision

where the line is to be drawn between the exceptional talents

which, if developed, would be of use in the progressive struggle

and those which are so defective that their influences would be

merely mischievous, it is obvious that talent of this latter kind is

sufficiently plentiful to render its development dangerous.

History teems with examples of this fact, and so do the unwritten

annals of the social life around us. Henri Murger in his studies

of Bohemian Paris bears eloquent witness to the tragic absurdity

of the results caused by the development of imperfect artistic

talent, and the miserable endings of men who, if they had not tried

to be artists, might have lived and thriven as honest and healthy

_ouvriers_; whilst, according as we hold vaccination to be a blessing

to the world or a curse, we must necessarily hold that it would have

been far better for everybody if the talents of the men who invented

it, or else {342} those of the men who now oppose it, had been

killed by the frosts of ignorance, and never allowed to blossom.

But the commonest examples of talent that is wholly mischievous

are afforded by certain classes of politicians and social

agitators. There is a large number of men whose potential activity

is considerable, and whose intellect has a natural nimbleness

which will enable them, when stimulated by education, to seize

on plausible fallacies and impose them both on themselves and

others. Politicians of this class are familiar figures enough.

The social agitator, whose mental equipment is similar, is more

familiar still. Many attempts have been made to give a scientific

explanation of those constant attacks on the existing organisation

of society which are common to all civilised countries, and go by

the name of socialism. Socialism is said by some to be the protest

of increasing poverty against increasing wealth; by some to be the

natural voice of highly organised labour, which has come at last to

be capable of self-government; and by some to be an embodiment of

the esoteric philosophy of Hegel. In reality it is the embodiment

of the results of indiscriminate education on talents which are

exceptional, but at the same time inefficient. The avowed object

of socialism is a redistribution of wealth; but the most striking

characteristic of all the socialistic leaders has been an incapacity

to produce the thing which they are so anxious to distribute.

The wish to {343} redistribute it in some of them arises from

sentiments of benevolence; in some from fallacious reasoning; and

in some from personal envy; but in none has it been accompanied

by those particular faculties on which the actual production of

wealth in large quantities depends. Socialism, therefore, so far as

it is a serious theory, is essentially an attempt on the part of

men who are themselves economically impotent to prove that they,

and others like them, have some reasonable right to possess and

divide amongst themselves what they are constitutionally powerless

to make for themselves. The result has been the elaboration of

a theory of production which sometimes declares that wealth is

produced by “aggregates of conditions,” or “social inheritances,” or

“environments,” as Mr. Spencer, Mr. Bellamy, and Mr. Sidney Webb tell

us; and sometimes that it is produced by “average labour measured by

time,” as Karl Marx tells us,—the one doctrine being that wealth is

produced by nobody, and that one man has thus as good a right to it

as another; the other being that it is produced in equal quantities

by everybody, and that everybody on that ground has a right to

an equal quantity of it. Both doctrines agree in this, that they

altogether miss and divert the attention of the mind from the forces

and conditions on which wealth-production depends in reality.

Now if the elaboration of these fallacies had been confined to men

who were capable of presenting them in a really arguable form, and if

they had been promulgated only amongst classes who were capable {344}

of passing a scientific judgment on them, they might have played—and

within limits they have played—a valuable part in eliciting the

truth opposed to them. But they have become wholly mischievous when,

through the agency of indiscriminate education, they have influenced

men who, whilst wanting in intellectual judgment, are nevertheless

endowed with a potential activity of character, and who, when this is

developed, at once become powerful agents in disseminating fallacies

amongst others even less capable of criticising them than themselves.

Thus many of the leaders of the “new unionism” in England are to be

credited with energy of a really remarkable kind; but unfortunately

the energy is united to such defective intellectual powers, that the

more vigorously these are employed, the more mischievous and absurd

is the result. The general resolutions that have been passed at Trade

Union conferences declaring that no progress is possible till all the

means of production shall have been nationalised, or the doctrine of

the “new unionists” that wages control prices, are all results of

the exercise of faculties which, though in some respects doubtless

superior to those of the average man, had far better have never been

developed at all.

It is men like these—the men with ill-balanced or abortive

talents—the men with strong wills and defective intellects, the men

whose ambition is developed by the smallest educational stimulus,

but who have no talents proportionate to it which any {345}

education could develop—it is men like these who invest with its

principal dangers the equalisation of educational opportunity; and

if education, as so many Conservatives say, really does nothing but

promote popular discontent, it promotes discontent amongst the great

masses of the population less from the manner in which it affects

the average man directly, than from the manner in which it affects

men who are inefficiently exceptional, and who, not having the gifts

that would enable them to rise in any society, endeavour to persuade

the masses that society, as at present constituted, is an organised

conspiracy of the few to keep everybody else down.

The equalisation of educational opportunity has, therefore, two

dangers—the danger of developing wants in the average man which could

never be generally satisfied under any social arrangements; and the

danger of developing the talents of a certain class of exceptional

men which are naturally incomplete, and which the more fully they

were developed, would only become more mischievous both to their

possessors and to society.

And these dangers correspond with the two objects for the sake of

which the equalisation of educational opportunity is advocated. One

of these objects is the raising the condition of the average man; the

other is the securing, alike for himself and for society, the full

benefit of the potential gifts of the exceptional man. The average

man, however, is not made better or happier by being filled in early

life with importunate wants and propensities which he {346} will,

when he comes to maturity, be unable to gratify; nor is any one

made better or happier by the development of gifts which, however

exceptional, can, by reason of their incompleteness, do nothing but

give currency to error, or initiate abortive action.

It is the latter of these dangers that is practically the source

of the former. The average man would, as has been said already,

probably suffer little from over-development under existing systems

of education if it were not for the effects of these systems on

inefficiently exceptional men whose superiorities ought never to be

developed at all. It is doubtless impossible to avoid this danger

completely. If educational opportunities are to be of a kind that

will enable the efficiently exceptional to work their way to the top,

and advance or maintain civilisation by their influence or domination

over others, it is inevitable that a certain proportion of the

inefficiently exceptional will be induced to develop their unhappy

capabilities also; but the number of these may, at all events,

be reduced to a minimum. The fundamental fault of contemporary

educational theories is, that in proportion to the completeness with

which they were carried out, they would tend to raise the number

of these men to a maximum. And the reason why they would have this

tendency is that they are founded on two absolutely false principles.

The first of these principles is, that whatever potential talents

any man may possess, it is desirable to assist and encourage him to

develop them to the utmost. The second is that the type of {347}

education and culture to which education generally should, so far

as is possible, be assimilated, is the kind of education and culture

that is actually prevalent amongst the rich.

It is impossible to meet these principles with too emphatic a

negative.

The first of them is false because, as has just been shown, there

is a large amount of really exceptional talent which, if developed,

would work nothing but mischief, and which ought, consequently, for

the sake of everybody, not to be developed, but suppressed. The

second is false because all tastes and talents are good or bad,

useful for a man or useless, according to the conditions under

which his life will be passed; and the conditions of the rich are

altogether exceptional. Societies have existed in which they have

been enjoyed by nobody. It would be impossible to construct a society

in which they should be enjoyed by more than a few. The attempt,

therefore, to give to everybody a rich man’s education is like

including skating in the curriculum, and fur coats in the wardrobe,

of a thousand boys, when nine hundred of them are to spend their

lives in the tropics.

Both these false principles rest on that radically false theory

of society which it is the principal object of the present volume

to expose—the theory that civilisation is the product of men

approximately equal in capacities, and that in proportion as these

equal capacities have equal opportunities of development, there

will naturally be an approximation to an {348} equality of social

conditions. The facts of the case are precisely the reverse of

these. Civilisation originated in, and is still maintained by, men

whose capacities are unequal to those of the majority; and just as

there is no tendency towards equality in capacity, so, for reasons

which have been explained in the last chapter, there is no tendency

towards equality in social conditions. Inequalities of condition may

at some times be greater than at others, but the fact that at times

they show a tendency to become less is no more a sign that they

have any tendency to disappear than the fact that an economy has

been effected in the consumption of coal on board a steamship is a

sign that steam has a tendency to be generated without fire. It is

therefore a scientific certainty that of each generation of children

in every civilised country the majority will, throughout their

subsequent lives, occupy positions very different from those of the

few. Most of the members of each class will remain in the position in

which they were born; but there will be a gradual descent from the

upper classes of their weaker members into the lower, and amongst

the stronger members of the lower classes there will be a constant

potential desire to push their way into the upper. Some of these last

are strong in potential desire only. With others the strength of

desire is accompanied by corresponding talent, by means of which, if

developed, the position which they desire will be obtained. It will

be obtained by the talent of these men, because the talent of such

men is creative; and when it is {349} developed it renders those who

possess it actual additions to the civilising forces of the community.

With regard, then, to exceptional men, the object of education should

be to stimulate the ambitions of those of them whose talents are

efficient, whilst discouraging the ambitions of those whose talents

are inherently defective. The stronger the ambitions of the former

are, the better for themselves and for the community. Men like these

are the true gold-mines of their country. The stronger the ambitions

and the larger the opportunities of the latter, the more will the

health and strength of the social organism be interfered with.

With regard to the average man, the object of education should be

to develop in him such tastes or accomplishments as will assist him

in the work by which he is to live, and enable him to make the most

of such means of enjoyment as are within his reach, whilst leaving

him untormented with a desire for enjoyments that are beyond it;

and the crucial fact on which it is necessary to insist is that the

circumstances of different classes are permanently and necessarily

different, and that for the average man of each class the education

that will make the most of his life is necessarily different also.

In other words, the only true equality of educational opportunity is

an equal opportunity for each, not of acquiring the same knowledge

or developing the same faculties, but of acquiring the knowledge and

of developing the faculties which, given his circumstances and given

his natural capacities, will {350} do most to make him a useful, a

contented, and a happy man.

Unfortunately these conclusions, simple and obvious as they seem,

run directly counter to that entire theory of society which, with

more or less consciousness, and with more or less precision, is held

by the school of writers, reformers, and politicians, who suppose

themselves, in some exclusive sense, to have social progress at

heart; and also to that mass of diffused sentiment which, though not

expressing itself formally in any theoretical propositions, has that

theory as its foundation, and bears to it, as a political force,

the same relation that vapour bears to water. These conclusions,

therefore, which imply inequality in capacity as the cause of social

progress, and inequality in social circumstances as the necessary and

permanent conditions of it, are, like most of the other conclusions

put forward in this work, certain to be met with objections of the

most vehement kind, which it will now be necessary for us fairly and

carefully to consider. We shall find that, as we do so, the entire

arguments of the present work are summed up and brought together

before us; and however incompatible they may be with the false

conception of progress, of class relationships, and of the structure

of society generally, which are at present mischievously popular,

they form the foundation of hopes, for all classes, far more solid

than those, the fallacy of which they aim at demonstrating.

{351}

CHAPTER IV

INEQUALITY, HAPPINESS, AND PROGRESS

Man does not live by wealth alone, and progress is not concerned

solely with the production and the distribution of it. But the

processes involved in the production and distribution of wealth,

though far from being coextensive with all social progress, are

typical of it. They form, moreover, the subject with regard to which

contending politicians and reformers practically join issue; and it

is mainly because inequality in the possession of wealth is affirmed

to be a permanent and necessary feature of civilisation, that the

conclusions here put forward will be attacked.

The objections that will be brought against them will take two

forms; one being the form which will be given them by the radical or

socialistic politician; the other the form which will be given to

them by the radical or socialistic theorist.

The radical or socialistic politician, whether he is journalist

or popular orator, will express them by asserting, in a tone of

contemptuous irony, that {352} these conclusions, whilst highly

satisfactory to the fortunately-placed minority, bring but cold

comfort to the majority; that they represent an attempt “to put the

clock of progress back,” and that the masses of mankind are not very

likely to accept them. He will probably go on to say that they are

merely a prose rendering of the well-known lines which the sarcastic

radical loves—

God bless the squire and his relations,

Teach us to know our proper stations;

which last request to the radical seems to be the very height

of absurdity; and he will end his attack by appealing to our

electioneering instincts, asking us, if we take away the hopes to

which at present the masses cling, what new hopes or promises we

propose to put in the place of them?

The radical or socialistic theorist, as distinct from the militant

politician, will express these same objections in a more logical

form, thus: He will remind us that in our analysis of social action

we represent the attainment of an exceptional position, and more

especially of an exceptional amount of wealth, as the sole motive

that can be counted on to induce exceptional men to develop and use

their powers. Now this, he will urge, is tantamount to declaring that

exceptional wealth is naturally regarded by men as the main condition

of happiness; and since it is obvious that exceptional wealth can be

possessed by the few only, we are, he will say, convicted of teaching

that social progress involves a denial of {353} happiness to the

vast majority of those amongst whom social progress takes place;

which, the critic will go on to say, is absurd.

Now even if the conclusions we are discussing did involve in reality

all those consequences which would be so depressing to the majority

of mankind, yet to prove the conclusions depressing would not be

to prove them false; and few enthusiasts will deny that the object

of sociological inquiry is not to reach conclusions which are

inspiriting, but to reach conclusions which are true. As a matter of

fact, however, the conclusions now in question have by no means that

depressing tendency which the radical and the socialist will impute

to them.

For, in the first place, none of the arguments contained in the

present work have been invoked to prove, or have any tendency to

prove, that the many, as distinct from the few, in any progressive

country, may not reasonably look forward to a continuous improvement

in their condition—to a greater command of the comforts and luxuries

of life, together with a lightening or a lessening of the labour

necessary to procure them. On the contrary, the majority may look

forward to an improvement in their circumstances which it is as

impossible for us to imagine distinctly at the present time as it

would have been for our grandfathers to imagine the telephone or the

phonograph. All that has been urged in this work is as follows: That

whatever may be the new advantages which the majority of mankind

attain, they will attain them {354} not by any development in their

own productive powers, but solely by the talents and activity of an

exceptionally gifted minority, who will enable the ordinary man to

earn more whilst labouring for fewer hours, because they will, by

directing his labour to more and more advantage, secure from equal

labour an ever-increasing product. The conclusion, therefore, is not

that the majority in any progressive community may not look forward

to indefinitely better conditions, but merely that their condition

will not depend on themselves, and that, though the conditions of all

may be bettered, they will never be even approximately equal.

What, then, of the argument that, however conditions may be bettered,

yet if exceptional conditions are still objects of exceptional

desire, the want of these objects of desire will cause a sense of

privation amongst the majority?

To this really important question there are two answers.

The first is, that the conclusion now before us—the conclusion that

certain of the most coveted prizes of life will always be for the

few only—is, whatever may be its consequences, true; and that its

truth is nowhere more clearly evidenced than in the ideal State,

as presented to us by the extremest socialists. For we shall find

that whatever in the way of equalised incomes these statesmen of

cloud-land promise to their imaginary citizens, they do not even

suggest that the most coveted social prizes shall be distributed

more equally than they are at {355} the present moment. They, as

has been said already, though they consider themselves the apostles

of equality, recognise that the prosperity, and, above all, the

wealth of the community, will depend on their securing the very

ablest of their citizens as members of the bureaucracy by whom all

labour will be directed; and they recognise that these able men,

like the present race of employers, will not develop their ability

without some special inducement. They accordingly propose to reward

them, not by allowing them to retain any exceptional portion of the

wealth which they are instrumental in producing, but by investing

them with exceptional honour; and the desire for such honour,

say the socialists, as a motive to exceptional effort, “_will be

incalculably more efficacious_” than the desire for wealth. Now if

those who make this assertion attribute to it any serious meaning,

they must mean that men like honour much better than they like

wealth—that they covet it more keenly, that they will struggle more

desperately to win it, and are more exasperated at not possessing it.

If, however, great wealth is possible for the few only, and if the

majority of mankind are for ever destined to be without it, such,

with regard to honour, is the case even more evidently. For honour

is more essentially confined to the few than wealth is. We can, at

all events, conceive a community composed wholly of millionaires,

supported in luxury by battalions of labouring automata; but it is

impossible to conceive a community wholly composed of men on whom

{356} honour is conferred as the choicest prize of life, and all of

whom—the exceptional and the ordinary—enjoy it to the same degree.

The essence of honour is distinction or differentiation; and it forms

a motive for the exceptional actions of the few only because it is

withheld from the many whose action is not exceptional. Either, then,

in the socialistic State the honour that is to form the reward of

exceptionally able men will fail to stimulate their abilities and

attract them into the ranks of the bureaucracy because it is not of

itself so keenly desired as wealth is; or if, as the socialists say,

it is desired even more keenly, and if it consequently does stimulate

exceptional men to struggle for it, the socialistic bureaucracy,

with its honours, will excite amongst the mass of the citizens

incalculably more envy than the rich excite amongst the poor; and

the millions of average men will be rendered by the want of honour

incalculably more miserable than they could be by want of wealth. If,

therefore, inequality in the possession of external goods, for which

many men struggle, and which only a minority can secure, necessarily

means unhappiness for the larger part of the community, this evil at

all events is not due to the existing structure of society, but is,

on the contrary, so rooted in the constitution of human nature, that

even the wildest and completest schemes of social reform are unable

to offer us so much as a mitigation of it.

The second answer to the objection, however, is of quite a different,

and of a far more reassuring {357} character. It is that the entire

supposition on which the objection rests is untrue. The external

prizes of life, of which exceptional wealth is the type, though

struggled for by many with every faculty they possess, though valued

by those who achieve them, and though recognised by men in general as

something of which everybody would choose to be the possessor if he

could be, do nevertheless amongst average human beings not cause any

unhappiness by their absence at all corresponding to the satisfaction

which they cause notoriously by their presence. Such an assertion

will to many people probably seem self-contradictory. But if it does

so, this will simply be owing to the fact that the whole science of

the subjective conditions of happiness has been utterly neglected

by sociological writers hitherto. The assertion here made, however

paradoxical it may sound, embodies one of the most important truths

which can claim the sociologist’s attention; and though it cannot

be called self-evident, every student of social science should be

familiar with it. It forms, indeed, the _pons asinorum_ of all social

psychology. A brief elucidation of it will be enough for our present

purpose.

There is a certain minimum of external goods, the desire for which

has a physiological basis, and causes, when unsatisfied, misery,

disease, or death. Chief amongst such goods are food and, in most

climates, clothes and shelter. So far as this minimum is concerned,

the desires of all are practically equal; and they are equal because

they arise out of that physical {358} constitution which we cannot

alter, and in respect of which we are all similar. But for external

goods that are beyond this minimum men’s desires vary indefinitely;

and they vary because they depend on the action of the imagination

and the intellect, which varies in different men, and in the same men

under different circumstances.

In civilised countries the minimum of goods desired is practically

not limited to the bare necessaries of existence, and it is difficult

to define it with anything like absolute precision. But without any

formal definition of it, it is at all events sufficiently distinct to

enable us to place in contrast with it those obviously unnecessary

goods which make up wealth and luxury. Now luxury is very commonly

supposed, in contradiction to what has just been asserted, to

represent materialism in its most exaggerated form, and thus to offer

a contrast to competence or modest comfort. And it does, no doubt,

rest on a material basis; but competence and modest comfort do so

likewise. An arm-chair which costs perhaps thirty shillings is as

material as one which, on account of its artistic workmanship, costs

four or five times that number of pounds. But so far as wealth and

luxury transcend comfort and competence, and possess those peculiar

qualities which are held to render them enviable, what they appeal

to, and what they are measured by, is not their effect upon the

senses, but their appeal to the imagination and the mind. We can

easily see this by considering very simple examples, which will show

us that the {359} same external things are luxuries or not luxuries

according to the way in which the mind regards them. Thus a man

will be called luxurious if his house is of palatial proportions,

if he lives under lofty ceilings and treads upon shining floors.

But the luxury which the owner finds in existing amongst these

surroundings consists not in any physical effect which they produce

upon his senses as he moves amongst them, but in a great variety of

complicated relations which exist between them and his own life, past

and future, and of which the senses take no account at all. Were this

not so the poorest and most destitute might daily enjoy a luxury

superior to that of the millionaire by strolling through the halls

and corridors of our great public institutions, of which many are far

finer than the most magnificent private houses. A man, again, will be

thought, and will think himself, luxurious if he travels from Paris

to Monte Carlo in a sleeping compartment with sheets and pillows;

and passengers who have ordinary places, if they are sensitive to

social contrasts, will glare through the windows enviously at the

occupant of this paradise, who has probably had to pay a hundred

francs to enter it. But let us only imagine that the sleeping

compartment is taken off its wheels and is permanently planted by

the side of some street or road. It will then form a bedroom which

the owner of the pettiest villa would hardly venture to assign to a

maid-of-all-work; whilst if three workmen had to sleep in it instead

of three first-class passengers, the agitator {360} would point to

it as an example of the horrors of overcrowding. When, therefore, the

sleeping compartment is admitted—as it is admitted—to be a luxury,

it is admitted to be so because it is regarded in relation to a

variety of circumstances to which the senses are quite blind, and

which are realised by acts of the mind and the imagination only. And

with all wealth and luxury the case is just the same. Like comfort

and competence, they have material things for their foundation; and

the material foundation that supports them is no doubt necessarily

larger. But what renders them more desirable is not the additional

material in itself, but the qualities with which it is invested by

the subtle craftsmanship of the mind.

Just, then, as wealth and luxury depend on the intellect and the

imagination for the larger part of the pleasure which they give to

those who possess them, so does the desire for them amongst men in

general depend on the action of the intellect and the imagination

also. Hence, though a desire for wealth is popularly supposed to

be universal, and in a certain sense is so, it is a desire the

non-satisfaction of which causes a sense of privation only when the

imagination and the intellect work in an exceptional way. Let us

take, for example, some community on the outskirts of civilisation

which continues to maintain itself in rude plenty and comfort, but

to which wealth and luxury are merely remote ideas. If a stranger

suddenly came within its borders carrying a bag which had in it a

hundred thousand pounds, and if {361} he placed this bag on the

summit of a neighbouring mountain and promised to give it to the

first man who should get hold of it, every member of this simple

community who was not lame or bed-ridden would start for the mountain

as fast as his legs could carry him, and the slopes would soon be the

scene of a mad and breathless scramble. But if no such stranger came

bringing the image of wealth close to them, or if instead of placing

his bag on the summit of a neighbouring mountain he showed it to them

through a telescope hung up in the moon, not a single heart amongst

them would beat quicker at the thought of it or suffer a single pang

from the knowledge that it was unattainable.

The reason of this is as follows: Amongst the great masses of mankind

the desire for wealth is a speculative desire only. They give, if

we may borrow an expression from Cardinal Newman, only a “_notional

assent_” to the fact that it is desirable. Wealth means for them no

special pleasure which they have experienced, or can represent to

themselves, and the repetition of which they crave for; nor does it

mean the satisfaction of any importunate wants. It does not mean

for them what a shilling would mean for a starving man. For him the

shilling would mean the food for which his stomach clamoured; and he

would feel the want of it as keenly as he would value its possession.

So, too, a poor youth separated from his family may crave for a

five-pound note, and be miserable at not possessing it, because this

will represent the {362} possibility of spending Christmas with

them. But no ordinary man, unless he has lived amongst the very

rich, and his entire view of life has been practically identified

with theirs, has any similar craving for a hundred thousand pounds,

or for a million; for he has no personal experience and no detailed

knowledge of the peculiar conditions of life which require such sums

to purchase them. Wealth is to him little more than a name for a

power which would secure for him, if he possessed it, an indefinite

number of indefinite things, if he wanted them; but he is under

ordinary circumstances no more troubled by its absence than he is by

the fact that he has not a fairy for his godmother, or that he does

not happen to be the owner of Aladdin’s lamp.

How, then, does it come to be the object of that keen hunger which is

the strongest motive to activity amongst the men who are the chief

producers of it? What are the exceptional circumstances which convert

it from a remote something, held in a passionless and speculative

way to be desirable, into a near something, craved for, and eagerly

struggled for with the painful industry of a lifetime?

The speculative desire for wealth, common to all human beings, is

converted into this practical craving by two causes, which act and

re-act upon each other. One of them is an exceptionally powerful

imagination; the other is the belief on the part of any given

individual that wealth is a thing which he actually may acquire if he

will only make certain {363} efforts, of which he believes himself

to be capable. In cases where the necessary efforts are recognised

as long and arduous, and the coveted reward as being consequently

far distant, the belief of the individual that it is really possible

for him to attain it will require the aid of an exceptionally

powerful imagination to rouse it into activity, and to keep it alive

when roused. In cases where the necessary efforts are obviously

extremely slight, and the individual believes that wealth is almost

in his hands already, the belief will stimulate his imagination,

however feeble it may be naturally, instead of requiring that his

imagination should sustain or stimulate _it_. Thus the attainment of

wealth being under ordinary circumstances difficult, and requiring

intense, anxious, and prolonged effort, a keen desire for it is not

ordinarily felt except by men whose strength of imagination amounts

almost to genius, and in whom a belief, whether true or false, is

developed, that they are capable of creating for themselves this

prize which they see so clearly. Warren Hastings, for instance, if

his imagination had not been exceptional, would never have had that

vision of the past glories of his family which made the desire of

restoring them the main motive of his career; and again, on the

other hand, if some sudden and exceptional circumstance, such as the

advent of an imaginary stranger with his bag and his hundred thousand

pounds, should present every member of a community with a chance of

acquiring wealth instantly, the feeblest imaginations would be {364}

stimulated to such a degree, that all would find themselves craving

for the possible prize equally.

In converting, then, a mere notional assent to the proposition

that wealth is desirable into an actual hunger for it, which is

painful if not satisfied, the essential cause is a belief that

the desired wealth is attainable; and the intensity of the hunger

is in proportion to the vitality of the belief. This important

psychological truth is very easily demonstrable by a kind of

experience sufficiently familiar to most people. If a man who has

perfect taste, and a few thousands a year, is buying furniture for

his house, and is anxious that every room shall be as beautiful as

it is in his power to make it, we all of us know with what eagerness

day after day he will stare into the windows of the dealers in old

furniture and _bric-à-brac_, and how quickly he will take note of any

object that his taste approves. Now if such a man, having admired

a cabinet or a piece of tapestry, finds that the price of it is a

hundred or a hundred and fifty pounds, he will feel perhaps that it

is a little beyond his means; but he will dream of it, long for it,

and will never know a moment’s peace till he has so arranged his

expenditure as to enable him to complete the purchase. But if the

price of the cabinet or the tapestry, instead of being a hundred or

a hundred and fifty pounds, had been a thousand or fifteen hundred,

he would have recognised that the objects were totally beyond his

reach, and though they still excited admiration in him, they would

{365} excite no desire. Here is the great difference between the

necessaries of life and the luxuries. Men crave for the former,

whether they are able to procure them or no. They crave for the

latter only in proportion as they feel them to be procurable. A

starving boy does not want a bun the less because he has not a penny

to buy it with. A man of taste, with only a hundred pounds to spend,

does not crave for a piece of tapestry at all, if he knows that the

lowest price for it would be not less than a thousand.

Now under normal conditions the belief that exceptional wealth is

procurable by them is confined to men with exceptionally vivid

imaginations and with certain exceptional talents and energies that

correspond to them. They crave for wealth, in fact, because they

believe themselves capable of creating it, and their craving keeps

pace with their belief in the range of their capabilities. The

more wealth they can create, the more they desire to create. Their

desire for wealth, in fact, unlike their desire for necessaries,

is proportionate not to their natural wants, but to the extent of

their natural powers. It follows what may be called _the law of

expanding desire_. Here, then, is the explanation of the fact which

is at first sight so paradoxical—that whilst the desire of wealth

is the strongest of all motives amongst a minority, the absence of

wealth is not felt as any privation by the majority; and so long as

the normal conditions that have just been indicated prevail, and

the men who {366} can really produce exceptional wealth are the

only men who believe it to be a thing attainable by them, and are

consequently the only men who feel any actual craving for it, all

goes well and healthily, and the desire of all classes may be at

least approximately satisfied. Unfortunately, however, the belief

that wealth is attainable, though it is naturally confined to men who

have exceptional powers of creating it, is capable of being implanted

under certain circumstances artificially in men who possess no

exceptional powers at all.

A familiar case like the following will show how this is effected. A

man, we will say, occupies an ornamental cottage, which is beautiful

in itself, is embowered in beautiful gardens, and also commands views

of a picturesque and magnificent park, into the glades of which one

of the gates of his garden opens, and which the owner allows him to

use precisely as if it were his own. All his friends tell him, and

tell him truly, that there is no such place of its size within fifty

miles of London. They envy him his dainty drawing-room, his verandah

festooned with roses, his prospect of the timbered park, and his

free access to its solitudes. His friends envy him, and he feels

himself that he is enviable. One morning, however, he receives a

lawyer’s letter, which gives him to understand that he is really the

legal owner, not of his cottage only, but of the park and property

adjoining, and that with adequate legal assistance he could certainly

substantiate his claim to them. In an instant his whole {367} temper

of mind with regard to his surroundings is changed. His pride in his

cottage is gone, and its place is taken by indignation at having

been kept out of possession of the park, and by a feverish craving

to acquire it. He goes to law. The case is long and difficult. He

lives for months distracted by fear and hope; and when the case is

finally given against him, he comes back to his cottage with his mind

unhinged by the shock, contemptuous of the dwelling which once was a

source of pride to him, and cursing the prospects which once were his

daily pleasure.

Now this craving for wealth, by which the man’s life is blighted, has

been produced, precisely as such a craving normally is, by the belief

on his part that certain wealth is attainable; but the belief here

does not rest on a consciousness that he is able by his own abilities

to create or earn it for himself; it rests on his intellectual

assent to a delusive proposition that he has a legal right to it,

or, in other words, that the law will make him the possessor of it

without any exceptional productive effort of his own. And here we

have a counterpart to the socialistic teaching of to-day. It excites,

or aims at exciting, an artificial craving for wealth in men who

would not naturally trouble their heads about it, by teaching them

that they have a right to it, which is wholly independent of any

exceptional productive power in themselves, or in any ancestors from

whom they might claim to inherit. The only difference between men

who are thus deluded, and {368} the claimant to the park and estate

whose case we have been just imagining, is that whilst the latter is

deceived into expecting that he individually can be made rich by a

law-suit, the latter are deceived into expecting that they all can be

made rich by legislation.

The desire for wealth, as something distinct from competence, is a

desire which normally affects men only in proportion as they believe

themselves to be possessed of power by which they may individually

earn it; and so long as men recognise the truth that, apart from rare

chances, the powers that earn wealth are the exceptional powers that

create it, the craving for wealth which makes the non-possession

of it a pain is confined to a minority composed of exceptionally

constituted individuals. The absence of wealth amongst the majority

causes unhappiness only when false theories with regard to its

attainability and men’s natural rights to it have produced in the

average man an artificial and diseased sensitiveness. There is no

surer means of exaggerating inequalities in happiness than the false

and pestilent teachings which encourage equality of expectations.

And not only do these teachings, so far as they have any effect at

all, create private unhappiness and multiply private disappointments,

but they give rise amongst masses of men to an impracticable temper,

which is the source of many of the difficulties confronting us in

the domain of politics, and most of those confronting us in the

domain of industry. {369} The crude and childish philosophy which

socialists and so-called labour-leaders endeavour to diffuse amongst

the great masses of the population rests, so far as the masses of the

population understand it, on the theory that society is composed of

“approximately equal units,” and that whatever is produced within a

community is produced by that community as a whole. Hence the members

argue, and the socialists distinctly tell them, that property and

capital are merely accidental possessions, which give to those who

possess them a purely adventitious power. These teachers add that

such possessions, in abstract justice, should be taken from their

present possessors and divided amongst the community at large; and

from this it follows that all claims to the profits of capital, as

put forward by its present possessors, are, in an abstract sense,

unjust. The consequence is that the employed, when stimulated into

conflict with the employers, enter on the conflict in a temper

which forbids them to be satisfied with any immediate result of it,

however favourable to themselves. Whatever advance in wages, or

reduction in hours, the employers may have conceded, the employed—so

far as they are influenced by the socialistic fallacies of the

day—consider themselves still wronged almost as much as ever, so

long as the employers continue to exist at all; and thus any cordial

understanding between the two classes is made impossible. When the

employed strike or agitate for higher wages, they may be compared to

a man who maintains that his tailor’s bill is {370} exorbitant, and

desires to have a certain portion of the total deducted. Now if the

tailor is reasonable and agrees to take off something, the matter

may be easily adjusted to the satisfaction of both parties; for

though the customer may think that the tailor has claimed too much,

he admits that to a certain sum the tailor has an undoubted right.

But if the customer were a madman, who believed when he ordered his

clothes that in abstract justice he ought to be charged nothing

for them, and that any claim on the tailor’s part was in reality

robbery and oppression, whatever deduction the tailor might consent

to make, the customer’s grievance against him would remain the same

as ever. It is possible for customers and tradesmen to come to some

satisfactory understanding, so long as the demand of the former is

that their bills shall not be too high. No satisfactory understanding

could be arrived at between them possibly—there would be nothing

but friction, constant dunning, and writs—were it known that the

customers entertained and meant to act on the theory that they ought

not, in abstract justice, to pay their bills at all. Now such is the

labour-leaders’ theory with regard to the employing classes. For a

time some part of their bills must unfortunately be paid—that is,

some part of their profits be allowed them. But to these profits

they have no real right, and the employed must never be contented

until they have absorbed the whole of them. So long as such a theory

prevails, no satisfactory progress in the condition of labour is

possible, {371} partly because the employed, whatever advantages

they may gain, will be no nearer to content than they were before,

partly because the employers are constantly forced into a position of

unwilling antagonism to men whom they would wish to befriend.

The object of this present work, so far as the question of wealth

and its distribution is concerned, has been to show how absolutely

false to fact are the theories to which this impracticable discontent

is due, and how intellectually ludicrous is the position of the

school of thinkers who imagine that such theories represent accurate

science. These thinkers, in their dealings with property and capital,

in spite of the esoteric admissions of a certain number of them to

the contrary, touch the truth in their more popular utterances, only

by the process of inverting it, or of putting the cart before the

horse. They represent the employing classes as possessing exceptional

strength merely because they are accidentally the possessors of

capital. The actual truth is that these classes are possessors of

capital because they themselves or their fathers have possessed

exceptional strength. The arrows of Ulysses were more formidable than

those of the suitors because Ulysses shot with a stronger bow than

they; but he shot with a stronger bow for the very simple reason that

he was strong enough to bend it and they were not. The employing

classes contribute to the processes of production not less than the

employed; in certain senses they contribute incalculably more, {372}

and in every sense they contribute as truly; and they contribute

not primarily because they possess capital, but because as a class

they possess exceptional faculties, of which the capital possessed by

them is at once the creation and the instrument. In other words, the

inequalities which socialists regard as accidental are the natural

result of the inequalities of human nature, and constitute also

the sole social conditions under which men’s unequal faculties can

co-operate towards a common end.

Socialists contend that the source of all power is in the multitude.

It is impossible to imagine a greater or more abject error. The

multitude, or the mass of average men—the men undistinguished by

any exceptional faculties—are the source of certain powers, or

rather they possess certain powers. That is true; but what may these

powers be? Their most striking characteristic is their limitation.

In the domain of industry the many, if left to themselves, could

produce only a very small amount, which would have, moreover, no

appreciable tendency to increase. In the domain of government they

could initiate the simplest movements only, and carry out only the

simplest measures. The powers which they actually possess under

existing circumstances are as much greater than these as the man

is greater than the child; but these added powers acquired by the

average men, or by the many, do not depend upon average men alone.

They are developed only with the development of another set of

powers altogether—the powers belonging to the exceptional men or

to {373} the few; and if these latter powers were impaired, the

former would be impaired also. In the domain of production and the

domain of government alike, not all, but nearly all, the powers of

a democracy presuppose the powers of a _de facto_ aristocracy, and

although they modify them, they depend upon them. Here are the two

factors or forces which we can never get rid of unless we get rid of

civilisation altogether—the force represented by the mass of ordinary

men, and the force represented by those who in various ways are more

than ordinary. Let us destroy society a hundred times over, and

attempt to reconstruct it in what way we will, these two forces will

inevitably reassert themselves, and reveal their existence in the

form which society takes, as surely as a man’s figure will give its

shape to whatever kind of cloak we hang on it. These two forces at

the present time attract our attention principally by their activity

in the domain of industry, where they show themselves under the forms

of employer and employed. In order that any satisfactory solution of

our industrial difficulties may be arrived at it is necessary that

employers and employed alike should each recognise the importance of

the part played by the other, the nature and extent of the other’s

strength, and the permanent need each has of the other’s strenuous

co-operation. It is hardly to be expected that between these two,

serious disputes and difficulties will ever completely cease. In the

interest of social progress it is not necessary that they should.

What is necessary is that {374} whatever disputes between these two

parties may arise, and however unreasonable or excessive on any given

occasion the claims of the few may seem to the many, or the claims

of the many to the few, neither party shall regard the other as its

opponent, excepting with reference to the particular points at issue;

that the few shall not deal with the many as though the many, in

asserting themselves, were rebels, nor the many attack the few, as

though the powers of the few were usurpations. What is necessary is

that each should recognise its own position and its own functions,

and the position and the functions of the other, as being, in a

general sense, all equally unalterable, and although admitting of

indefinitely improved adjustment, not admitting of any fundamental

change.

And what is true of the social forces that are involved in the

production of wealth, is true of those that are involved in political

government. In political government, just as in the production of

wealth, the power of the few has a root in the nature of things

as indestructible as has that of the many; and though the few can

produce progress only when the many can co-operate with them, it

is not from the many that their power is primarily derived. In the

domain of speculative knowledge this is self-evident. The ordinary

brains are pensioners of the few brains that are superior to them;

and yet the superior brains are powerless to produce social results,

except in so far as the ordinary brains respond to what their

superiors {375} teach them. So it is in economic production, so it

is in political government. The power of democracy is not only an

actual power; it is a power from which no society can ever wholly

escape; but never—not even when nominally it reaches its extreme

development—is it, or can it be, or does it ever tend to be, a

power which is self-existent. It always implies and rests upon the

corresponding power of the few, as one half of an arch implies and

rests upon the other. The whole object of the democratic formulas

popular to-day is to deny or to obscure this fundamental truth; and

no greater obstacle to general progress exists than the prevalence of

the spirit which the acceptance of these formulas engenders. If there

is anything sacred in the rights of the poorest wage-earners, there

is something equally sacred in those of the greatest millionaires;

and if the latter are capable of abusing their power, so also are the

former; but nothing will tend to prevent their abuse of it so much

as the recognition that such an abuse on either side is possible. If

there is any wisdom and power in the cumulative opinions of ordinary

men, there is another kind of wisdom and another kind of power in

the ideas, the insight, the imagination, and strength of will which

belong to exceptional men; and these last, though they may give

effect to what the many wish, do so only because they represent what

the many do not possess. What is required to bring our political

philosophy—and not only our political philosophy but our political

temper—into correspondence with facts is not to {376} deny the

power that has been claimed during this century for the many, but to

recognise that this power does not stand alone, and that those other

powers represented by the wealthy few are not only essential to the

wealth of the few themselves, but also to the prosperity, and most

emphatically to the progress, of all.

The progress of all, instead of being incompatible with the fact

that the positions of all have no tendency to become equal, assumes,

on the contrary, a more and more practicable aspect in proportion

to the accuracy with which this fact is recognised; and that such

is the case shall, in conclusion, be briefly shown by reference to

the theory of progress which at present deceives the socialists.

This theory, which was formulated by Karl Marx, bases itself on

the fact, which is indubitable, that the industrial systems of the

civilised races of the world have undergone great changes in the

past, and may therefore be expected to undergo changes as great in

the future. The three most marked stages in the sequence of change

referred to are slavery, feudalism, and capitalism; and the practical

conclusion drawn from them by the socialists is that as feudalism

arose out of slavery, and capitalism arose out of feudalism, so

will socialism arise out of capitalism. This argument is merely

another example of those self-confusions by which the socialists are

distinguished as reasoners. It is an argument which depends for its

whole apparent point on the defective manner in which these various

systems—socialism {377} included—have been analysed. For, though

slavery, feudalism, and capitalism differ from one another in many

most important points, they happen not to differ at all as regards

that one particular point in respect of which socialism will have

to differ from all three of them. That is to say, in whatever way

these three systems differ from one another, they all agree with one

another in being systems under which the few, the strongest, the most

intellectual, the most energetic, not only controlled the actions

of the average many, but received for their exceptional action a

correspondingly exceptional recompense. The few who occupied this

commanding position differed, at different times, in the nature

of the powers which gave them the command. Sometimes it was the

great fighters who were paramount, sometimes the great legislators,

sometimes the great industrialists. But into whatever mould human

society has been cast, with whatever circumstances it has been

surrounded, and whatever kind of talent or strength has been most

essential to it at given periods, the few who have possessed this

kind of talent and strength to the highest degree have, as a whole,

and with them their families, invariably occupied a position of

exceptional wealth and power. We may deplore this fact or no, but the

fact still remains, and consequently the argument of the socialists

from the facts of social evolution, when reduced to its true terms,

merely amounts to this—that because many social changes have taken

place already, but one particular change in spite of these has never

taken {378} place, yet this particular change which has refused to

take place in the past is perfectly certain to take place in the

future.

The historical evolution of society, however, and the social changes

that have taken place, do indeed convey to us a very important moral;

but this moral which the changes convey to us is curiously different

from that which the socialists draw from them. They draw from them

the moral that because social arrangements have been greatly changed,

therefore they can be fundamentally changed. The true moral is that,

although they may be changed greatly, they can never be changed

fundamentally; and from this there follows another as its yet more

important corollary—that although social arrangements can never be

changed fundamentally, they can, nevertheless, be progressively and

indefinitely improved, but that real reforms can be accomplished

only by those who abandon altogether every dream of fundamental

revolution. Many reforms which socialists eagerly recommend, and

many wishes which socialists entertain, may meet with the approval

and sympathy of the most determined conservatives; but the error

of the socialists is sufficiently indicated by the fact, already

remarked upon in the course of this work, that the changes which

they advocate, and whose advent they delight to prophesy, leave

the possible and approach the absolutely impossible, in precise

proportion as these visionaries set value upon them.

Nowhere is the impossibility of such changes more clearly indicated

than in the phrases now most {379} frequently used to indicate

their specific nature—such phrases as “_the emancipation_” and “_the

economic freedom_” of the labourer. These phrases, if they have any

meaning at all, can mean one thing only—the emancipation of the

average man, endowed with average capacities, from the control, from

the guidance, or, in other words, from the help, of any man or men

whose capacities are above the average—whose speculative abilities

are exceptionally keen, whose inventive abilities are exceptionally

great, whose judgments are exceptionally sound, and whose powers of

will, enterprise, and initiative are exceptionally strong. That is

to say, these phrases, if they have any meaning at all, mean the

deliberate loss and rejection, by the less efficient majority of

mankind, of any advantage that might come to it from the powers of

the more efficient minority. “_Economic freedom_,” in fact, would

mean economic poverty; and the “_emancipation_” of the average man

would merely be the emancipation which a blind man achieves when

he breaks away from his guide. The human race progresses because

and when the strongest human powers and the highest human faculties

lead it; such powers and faculties are embodied in and monopolised

by a minority of exceptional men; these men enable the majority to

progress, only on condition that the majority submit themselves to

their control; and if all the ruling classes of to-day could be

disposed of in a single massacre, and nobody left but those who at

present call themselves the workers, these {380} workers would be as

helpless as a flock of shepherdless sheep, until out of themselves

a new minority had been evolved, to whose order the majority would

have to submit themselves, precisely as they submit themselves to the

orders of the ruling classes now, and whose rule, like the rule of

all new masters, would be harder, and more arbitrary, and less humane

than the rule of the old.

THE END

_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh._

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

Original spelling and grammar have been generally retained, with

some exceptions noted below. Original small caps are now uppercase.

Italics look _like this_. The original sidenotes have been removed,

being redundant with the Table of Contents. I produced the cover

image and hereby assign it to the public domain. Original page images

are available from archive.org; search for “b21508343”.

Page xxvi. The page reference in ‹often remember it, • 285› was

changed to ‹284›.

Page xxx. The page reference in ‹wealth that raises them • 329› was

changed to ‹326›.

Page 70. The word ‹negligeable› was changed to ‹negligible›.

Page 159. The word ‹Where-ever› was changed to ‹Wherever›.

Page 240. The phrase ‹orginal processes› was changed to ‹original

processes›.

End of Project Gutenberg's Aristocracy & Evolution, by W. H. Mallock