BOOK IV
CHAPTER ITHE DEPENDENCE OF EXCEPTIONAL ACTION ON THE ATTAINABILITY OF EXCEPTIONAL REWARD, OR THE NECESSARY CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN THE MOTIVES TO ACTION AND ITS RESULTS.In entering on the inquiry which now lies before us it is necessary to recall to the reader, and to insist with renewed emphasis on a fact which has been explained with the utmost fulness already. This is the fact that those exceptional efficiencies of the few on which the initiation, the progress, and the maintenance of civilisation depend, and which in a technical sense we have here described asgreatness, do not consist of qualities which are unique in kind, or which are not possessed in some measure by the masses of ordinary men; but that they are made up of ordinary faculties magnified or mixed together in unusual proportions. For although, as George Eliot observes in a striking passage, the faculties of all men are the same in kind, they manifest themselves in different men in such very different degrees that a faculty or feeling which in one man has the power and dimensions of a tiger, may never in another man outgrow those of{272}a weasel.Greatness, then, is simply the possession and exercise by such and such a person, in an exceptional degree, of some faculty or assortment of faculties, the rudiments of which are possessed by all. And the reason why it is necessary to insist on this fact here is that, as a consequence of it, the use which the great man makes of his exceptional powers—or, in other words, their whole efficient existence—depends on certain causes which are relatively, though not absolutely, similar to those on which depends the use which the ordinary man makes of his.Let us, then, consider the powers of the ordinary man first, and let us take as examples of them those powers or faculties which are most universally distributed amongst the human race—namely, the powers by which the rudest populations obtain enough food to live upon. Now such faculties, practically universal as they are, would be potential only, not actual, if it were not for two things. These are certain appetites or desires, having a physiological origin, on the one hand, and the external conditions on the other, which make the satisfaction of those appetites, or the fulfilment of those desires, a possibility. Thus if men could live without eating, and had no desire for food, those special faculties would be dormant which are now exercised in agriculture; and this means that for all practical purposes they would not exist at all. These faculties would also not exist at all, no matter what men’s desire for food might be, if the whole of the earth’s crust had{273}happened to be cast-iron, and if tillage were consequently impossible, and there were no seeds to sow. In other words, the very commonest and very simplest faculties which human beings possess have a practical and a universal existence in those beings, only because, in the first place, they minister to universal wants, and because, in the second place, the earth is so constituted as to supply the materials on which these faculties can operate. Or, to put the matter in more general terms, the very commonest and simplest faculties are not practically self-existent, except as mere barren potentialities; and as practical forces they exist only in the degree to which they are evoked by external things and circumstances—by some external object, such as food, which excites and will satisfy desire, and by external circumstances which make the object obtainable.Now if this be true of those faculties of the commonest kind, ministering to the needs which all men inevitably feel alike, and which they always must feel so long as they remain alive, it is yet more obviously true of those higher and rarer faculties ministering to needs which are so far from being inevitable, that whole races have existed and do exist without any conscious knowledge of them. The great inventor, the great director of industry, will not develop or use his exceptional latent faculties unless by the use of them he can achieve some object which he desires; and this must be something which the community has to give, or the possession of which it will secure to him if it be something which he himself{274}produces. Columbus, for instance, as the records of his life show us, would never have braved the Atlantic if the society of his time, though in the end it rewarded him ill, had not rendered an enormous reward both in money and rank possible—a reward which he specifically bargained for in the event of his enterprise being successful. And similarly in the case of great men in general, unless society is so constituted as to render some reward or other the natural or possible result of the exercise of certain exceptional faculties, and unless this reward shall be one which the great men shall think worth working for, their exceptional faculties will remain potential only. That is to say, their faculties will be practically non-existent, and the community will be as helpless as it would be if it had no great men at all.Now here we have what is virtually a genuine social contract. It is not, indeed, such a contract as Rousseau dreamed of. It was never made deliberately at any period of history by two independent parties coming together for the purpose. It was the result of a gradual and quite unconscious process. Ordinary men, having experienced the advantages of being directed by great men, submitted instinctively to such conditions as the great men demanded, and instinctively offered them, or allowed them to retain possession of, such rewards as were necessary to stimulate them to further action. But these proceedings were a bargain, a social contract none the less, although they were not recognised as such; and they constitute a bargain still—a bargain which is{275}continually being renewed, and the terms of which reformers are continually trying to alter. Thus the socialists’ proposal to take from the founder of a new industry all the wealth that his exceptional faculties have created, and pay him, as they propose to do, with the paper money of honour, is merely an attempt to make a new bargain with the great man, which shall secure his services on cheaper terms for the little men. Similarly, all encouragement offered to art and science by the State is a bargain offered to a number of unknown persons, who are presumed to be the possessors potentially of artistic and scientific faculties; the State engaging to give them certain opportunities and rewards, if they on their part will make their potential faculties actual.Now with regard to this bargain or contract which the community has not only made, but is always remaking and revising with its great men, we must observe that it is a bargain which, from the necessities of the case, is made by the community solely with individual great men who are living. It is not a bargain offered to the great men of the past, no matter how much of his greatness the living great man may owe to them. It is impossible to bargain with the dead, and therefore to the present question the claims of the dead are as irrelevant as the claims of protoplasm. The present question is how shall such and such living people be induced to develop certain superiorities which are latent in them, or to use to the best advantage superiorities which have been developed already. And{276}the answer depends on these men themselves. It depends on the characters which they personally possess, and not on the parents or ancestors from whom their characters have been derived. We can no more go behind the personality of the great man in bargaining with him, than we can go behind the personality of the dipsomaniac in attempting to cure him. We may excuse the failing of the latter as something which he has inherited from his ancestors; we can cure it only as something for which he is himself responsible. If civilisation, therefore, depends on the great man, no community can become or remain civilised which does not so arrange itself as to accord to its living great men such rewards as they themselves feel to be a sufficient inducement firstly to develop their faculties, and secondly to employ them to the utmost.Here, then, we have a new and final verification of that truth which has already been established against the arguments of Mr. Spencer—namely, that the great man is avera causaof progress, and that no explanation of progress has any practical value which does not base itself on an examination of the great man’s character. And that such is the case will become yet more apparent when we take into consideration the following additional facts, which are quite distinct from any we have yet touched upon, and which practically have an equal, or perhaps even a superior, importance.If the exceptional faculties of the great man were so far like the faculties possessed by all men,{277}that by looking at him we could tell that he was a potential inventor, or organiser of industry, or philosopher, as easily as by looking at a common man we can tell that he can trundle a wheelbarrow, the entire force of the foregoing argument would be lost. The community would then know what each great man could do for it, and could force him to do it by flogging or starving him if he refused. The ordinary faculties—the faculties of manual labour—can be made to exert themselves precisely in this way. A large number of the great works of antiquity were due to labour successfully stimulated by the whip. But it is only a man’s commonest faculties that can be called into action thus; and they can be called into action thus only for this reason—that those who coerce him know that these faculties are possessed by him, and they also know the task which they wish to make him accomplish. But in the case of the great man both these conditions are wanting. It is impossible to tell that he possesses any exceptional faculties till he himself chooses to show them; and until circumstances supply him with some motive for exercising them, he will probably be hardly aware that he possesses such faculties himself. Moreover, even if he gives the world some reason to suspect their existence, the world will still not know what he can do with them, and will consequently not be able to impose on him any task until he himself chooses to show of what he is capable. Any farmer by looking at Burns could have told that he had the makings of a ploughman in him, and have forced{278}him, under certain circumstances, to do so much ploughing daily; but no one could have told that he was a poet if he had not of his own free will revealed the fact to the public; and even when the public were aware of it, no one could have forced him to composeThe Cotter’s Saturday Night. A press-gang could have turned Columbus into a common sailor, but not all the sovereigns of Europe could have forced him to discover a new hemisphere. On the contrary, it was he who had to force sovereigns into the reluctant belief that possibly there was a new hemisphere to discover. The great man, therefore, is lord of his exceptional faculties in a way in which the common man is not lord of his common faculties. The existence of the latter faculties cannot be concealed; the kind of work that can be accomplished by them is known to everybody; and therefore the community by the exercise of mere force can command the average man, and make him work like an animal. But over the exceptional faculties of the great man it has no command whatever, except what the great man gives it; for it neither knows that the faculties exist, nor what things the faculties can do, until the great man elects to reveal the secret. He cannot be made to reveal it, he can only be induced to do so; and he can be induced to do so only by a community which offers to exceptional faculties some assured and exceptional reward, just as a reward is offered for evidence against an unknown murderer. Moreover, just as in the latter case it very often happens that the{279}reward originally offered has to be raised several times before a sum is reached which will induce the witness to come forward, so must any community, as the condition of becoming civilised, raise the rewards of greatness to such a figure that the possessors of latent superiorities will be induced to develop and use them. And hence the great man not only causes progress by what he does, but he influences also the entire structure of society, by his character, which regulates the terms on which he will consent to do it.This is the point at which the science of sociology primarily comes in contact with the practical problems of to-day. That all progress is due to the efforts of the superior minority is a truth which, taken by itself, and apart from other truths allied to it, we can merely recognise and assent to. We can do nothing to alter it; nor will the fact of our recognising it, if taken by itself, tend to alter or guide our conduct. We are not even able to settle the number of males and females which shall be produced in each family. Still less can we settle or increase the number of individuals who shall bring into the world with them talents more than ordinary. But though no community can do anything to settle or alter the percentage of potential greatness that will be born into it from generation to generation, it can settle or alter the social conditions and rewards by means of which this potential greatness shall be developed and enabled to use itself; and a very large part, though not the whole, of political wisdom{280}will thus consist in arranging these conditions and rewards, so that from each potentially great man, whatever degree or kind of potentiality may be his, the community may elicit the highest and most far-reaching efforts of which he is capable. It will, of course, be to the interest of the community to secure this result by offering the great man the smallest and least costly reward, the desire of which will induce him to develop and exert himself to the utmost; but the ultimate fixer of the great man’s price—let it once again be said—is not the community, but the great man himself.It is this sociological and psychological truth that even the clearest-headed amongst the socialists are continually forgetting. They perceive it at one moment, at the next moment they entirely forget it, and solemnly proceed to build up their visionary polity on foundations which their own arguments had previously condemned. A curious example of this “inability,” as Mr. Spencer calls it, “to comprehend assembled propositions in their totality” is to be found in a remarkable passage by Mr. Sidney Webb. Having observed that “socialists would nationalise both rent and interest by the State becoming the sole landowner and capitalist,” he goes on to acknowledge that great fundamental fact which it is the main object of the present work to elucidate. “Such an arrangement, however,” he says, “would leave untouched the third monopoly—the largest of them all—the monopoly of business ability.” In these last words he appears to be like a Daniel{281}come to judgment. He recognises in the fact that the few have a natural monopoly of faculties, the exercise of which is required for the progressive well-being of all, a genuine and a formidable difficulty in the way of the realisation of socialism; but now comes the passage for the sake of which these others have been quoted. Great as this difficulty is, he tells us, “the more recent socialists” have devised a way for getting over it. And what does the reader think this way is? It has at all events the merit of being very simple. “The more recent socialists,” says Mr. Webb, “attack this third monopoly also by allotting to every worker an equal wage, whatever may be the nature of his work.”It has been thought worth while to quote Mr. Sidney Webb because he is an exceptionally favourable specimen of the modern socialistic theoriser. It is therefore interesting to notice the hiatus that here yawns in his argument. The entire question which is really at issue is begged by him. His allies, he tells us, though they cannot destroy the monopoly which the few possess of exceptional business powers, will destroy the effects of this monopoly by taking away from the few nearly all the wealth that their exceptional powers produce. It never seems to occur to him to ask whether, under these circumstances, the few would develop or exercise their exceptional powers at all. And yet the whole problem for him, as a socialist, lies here, and lies nowhere else. For from the very fact that these powers are admittedly a monopoly of the few, it is{282}evident that their existence cannot be assumed in anybody unless he exerts himself to give some sign of their presence. External authority, therefore, can compel nobody to employ them who does not put himself at the mercy of the authorities by letting them know he has them; and thus “the more recent socialists,” in attacking “the third and greatest monopoly,” are really themselves at the mercy of the very monopolists whom they propose to attack. It is true that if a socialistic revolution could be brought about suddenly, existing great men known to have certain talents, which had been already developed and exercised under conditions which the revolution destroyed, might be seized on by the State, in its capacity of universal employer, and forced to continue something of their former voluntary activity by threats of torture or some similar method of coercion. But even granting this to be possible, it would only solve the problem for a moment; for as these men died—and some of them would be dying daily—new talent would be wanted to take the place of the old; and though the State might coerce such talent as was already developed, it could not by coercion secure the services of the new, because threats of coercion would never tempt new talent to discover itself, but would, on the contrary, drive it yet deeper beneath the surface.Exceptional potentialities can be called out and realised only by a kind of action which is the very antithesis of coercion, and which is analogous to that of sunshine on buds, or flowers or{283}fruits—namely, the penetrating, the warming, the stimulating action of the hope of certain personal advantages on the mind of the exceptional man, which advantages he will not only covet as advantageous, but will recognise as the natural result of the exercise of his exceptional faculties, and as a result attainable by the exercise of these faculties only. What these personal advantages are, the desire of which, coupled with their attainability, is necessary to stimulate men who have more than ordinary potentialities, to do greater things by developing them than are done by ordinary men, must be determined by reference to the actual facts of life, the records of which are ample, and the details of which, though numerous, can by careful analysis be easily reduced to order.
In entering on the inquiry which now lies before us it is necessary to recall to the reader, and to insist with renewed emphasis on a fact which has been explained with the utmost fulness already. This is the fact that those exceptional efficiencies of the few on which the initiation, the progress, and the maintenance of civilisation depend, and which in a technical sense we have here described asgreatness, do not consist of qualities which are unique in kind, or which are not possessed in some measure by the masses of ordinary men; but that they are made up of ordinary faculties magnified or mixed together in unusual proportions. For although, as George Eliot observes in a striking passage, the faculties of all men are the same in kind, they manifest themselves in different men in such very different degrees that a faculty or feeling which in one man has the power and dimensions of a tiger, may never in another man outgrow those of{272}a weasel.Greatness, then, is simply the possession and exercise by such and such a person, in an exceptional degree, of some faculty or assortment of faculties, the rudiments of which are possessed by all. And the reason why it is necessary to insist on this fact here is that, as a consequence of it, the use which the great man makes of his exceptional powers—or, in other words, their whole efficient existence—depends on certain causes which are relatively, though not absolutely, similar to those on which depends the use which the ordinary man makes of his.
Let us, then, consider the powers of the ordinary man first, and let us take as examples of them those powers or faculties which are most universally distributed amongst the human race—namely, the powers by which the rudest populations obtain enough food to live upon. Now such faculties, practically universal as they are, would be potential only, not actual, if it were not for two things. These are certain appetites or desires, having a physiological origin, on the one hand, and the external conditions on the other, which make the satisfaction of those appetites, or the fulfilment of those desires, a possibility. Thus if men could live without eating, and had no desire for food, those special faculties would be dormant which are now exercised in agriculture; and this means that for all practical purposes they would not exist at all. These faculties would also not exist at all, no matter what men’s desire for food might be, if the whole of the earth’s crust had{273}happened to be cast-iron, and if tillage were consequently impossible, and there were no seeds to sow. In other words, the very commonest and very simplest faculties which human beings possess have a practical and a universal existence in those beings, only because, in the first place, they minister to universal wants, and because, in the second place, the earth is so constituted as to supply the materials on which these faculties can operate. Or, to put the matter in more general terms, the very commonest and simplest faculties are not practically self-existent, except as mere barren potentialities; and as practical forces they exist only in the degree to which they are evoked by external things and circumstances—by some external object, such as food, which excites and will satisfy desire, and by external circumstances which make the object obtainable.
Now if this be true of those faculties of the commonest kind, ministering to the needs which all men inevitably feel alike, and which they always must feel so long as they remain alive, it is yet more obviously true of those higher and rarer faculties ministering to needs which are so far from being inevitable, that whole races have existed and do exist without any conscious knowledge of them. The great inventor, the great director of industry, will not develop or use his exceptional latent faculties unless by the use of them he can achieve some object which he desires; and this must be something which the community has to give, or the possession of which it will secure to him if it be something which he himself{274}produces. Columbus, for instance, as the records of his life show us, would never have braved the Atlantic if the society of his time, though in the end it rewarded him ill, had not rendered an enormous reward both in money and rank possible—a reward which he specifically bargained for in the event of his enterprise being successful. And similarly in the case of great men in general, unless society is so constituted as to render some reward or other the natural or possible result of the exercise of certain exceptional faculties, and unless this reward shall be one which the great men shall think worth working for, their exceptional faculties will remain potential only. That is to say, their faculties will be practically non-existent, and the community will be as helpless as it would be if it had no great men at all.
Now here we have what is virtually a genuine social contract. It is not, indeed, such a contract as Rousseau dreamed of. It was never made deliberately at any period of history by two independent parties coming together for the purpose. It was the result of a gradual and quite unconscious process. Ordinary men, having experienced the advantages of being directed by great men, submitted instinctively to such conditions as the great men demanded, and instinctively offered them, or allowed them to retain possession of, such rewards as were necessary to stimulate them to further action. But these proceedings were a bargain, a social contract none the less, although they were not recognised as such; and they constitute a bargain still—a bargain which is{275}continually being renewed, and the terms of which reformers are continually trying to alter. Thus the socialists’ proposal to take from the founder of a new industry all the wealth that his exceptional faculties have created, and pay him, as they propose to do, with the paper money of honour, is merely an attempt to make a new bargain with the great man, which shall secure his services on cheaper terms for the little men. Similarly, all encouragement offered to art and science by the State is a bargain offered to a number of unknown persons, who are presumed to be the possessors potentially of artistic and scientific faculties; the State engaging to give them certain opportunities and rewards, if they on their part will make their potential faculties actual.
Now with regard to this bargain or contract which the community has not only made, but is always remaking and revising with its great men, we must observe that it is a bargain which, from the necessities of the case, is made by the community solely with individual great men who are living. It is not a bargain offered to the great men of the past, no matter how much of his greatness the living great man may owe to them. It is impossible to bargain with the dead, and therefore to the present question the claims of the dead are as irrelevant as the claims of protoplasm. The present question is how shall such and such living people be induced to develop certain superiorities which are latent in them, or to use to the best advantage superiorities which have been developed already. And{276}the answer depends on these men themselves. It depends on the characters which they personally possess, and not on the parents or ancestors from whom their characters have been derived. We can no more go behind the personality of the great man in bargaining with him, than we can go behind the personality of the dipsomaniac in attempting to cure him. We may excuse the failing of the latter as something which he has inherited from his ancestors; we can cure it only as something for which he is himself responsible. If civilisation, therefore, depends on the great man, no community can become or remain civilised which does not so arrange itself as to accord to its living great men such rewards as they themselves feel to be a sufficient inducement firstly to develop their faculties, and secondly to employ them to the utmost.
Here, then, we have a new and final verification of that truth which has already been established against the arguments of Mr. Spencer—namely, that the great man is avera causaof progress, and that no explanation of progress has any practical value which does not base itself on an examination of the great man’s character. And that such is the case will become yet more apparent when we take into consideration the following additional facts, which are quite distinct from any we have yet touched upon, and which practically have an equal, or perhaps even a superior, importance.
If the exceptional faculties of the great man were so far like the faculties possessed by all men,{277}that by looking at him we could tell that he was a potential inventor, or organiser of industry, or philosopher, as easily as by looking at a common man we can tell that he can trundle a wheelbarrow, the entire force of the foregoing argument would be lost. The community would then know what each great man could do for it, and could force him to do it by flogging or starving him if he refused. The ordinary faculties—the faculties of manual labour—can be made to exert themselves precisely in this way. A large number of the great works of antiquity were due to labour successfully stimulated by the whip. But it is only a man’s commonest faculties that can be called into action thus; and they can be called into action thus only for this reason—that those who coerce him know that these faculties are possessed by him, and they also know the task which they wish to make him accomplish. But in the case of the great man both these conditions are wanting. It is impossible to tell that he possesses any exceptional faculties till he himself chooses to show them; and until circumstances supply him with some motive for exercising them, he will probably be hardly aware that he possesses such faculties himself. Moreover, even if he gives the world some reason to suspect their existence, the world will still not know what he can do with them, and will consequently not be able to impose on him any task until he himself chooses to show of what he is capable. Any farmer by looking at Burns could have told that he had the makings of a ploughman in him, and have forced{278}him, under certain circumstances, to do so much ploughing daily; but no one could have told that he was a poet if he had not of his own free will revealed the fact to the public; and even when the public were aware of it, no one could have forced him to composeThe Cotter’s Saturday Night. A press-gang could have turned Columbus into a common sailor, but not all the sovereigns of Europe could have forced him to discover a new hemisphere. On the contrary, it was he who had to force sovereigns into the reluctant belief that possibly there was a new hemisphere to discover. The great man, therefore, is lord of his exceptional faculties in a way in which the common man is not lord of his common faculties. The existence of the latter faculties cannot be concealed; the kind of work that can be accomplished by them is known to everybody; and therefore the community by the exercise of mere force can command the average man, and make him work like an animal. But over the exceptional faculties of the great man it has no command whatever, except what the great man gives it; for it neither knows that the faculties exist, nor what things the faculties can do, until the great man elects to reveal the secret. He cannot be made to reveal it, he can only be induced to do so; and he can be induced to do so only by a community which offers to exceptional faculties some assured and exceptional reward, just as a reward is offered for evidence against an unknown murderer. Moreover, just as in the latter case it very often happens that the{279}reward originally offered has to be raised several times before a sum is reached which will induce the witness to come forward, so must any community, as the condition of becoming civilised, raise the rewards of greatness to such a figure that the possessors of latent superiorities will be induced to develop and use them. And hence the great man not only causes progress by what he does, but he influences also the entire structure of society, by his character, which regulates the terms on which he will consent to do it.
This is the point at which the science of sociology primarily comes in contact with the practical problems of to-day. That all progress is due to the efforts of the superior minority is a truth which, taken by itself, and apart from other truths allied to it, we can merely recognise and assent to. We can do nothing to alter it; nor will the fact of our recognising it, if taken by itself, tend to alter or guide our conduct. We are not even able to settle the number of males and females which shall be produced in each family. Still less can we settle or increase the number of individuals who shall bring into the world with them talents more than ordinary. But though no community can do anything to settle or alter the percentage of potential greatness that will be born into it from generation to generation, it can settle or alter the social conditions and rewards by means of which this potential greatness shall be developed and enabled to use itself; and a very large part, though not the whole, of political wisdom{280}will thus consist in arranging these conditions and rewards, so that from each potentially great man, whatever degree or kind of potentiality may be his, the community may elicit the highest and most far-reaching efforts of which he is capable. It will, of course, be to the interest of the community to secure this result by offering the great man the smallest and least costly reward, the desire of which will induce him to develop and exert himself to the utmost; but the ultimate fixer of the great man’s price—let it once again be said—is not the community, but the great man himself.
It is this sociological and psychological truth that even the clearest-headed amongst the socialists are continually forgetting. They perceive it at one moment, at the next moment they entirely forget it, and solemnly proceed to build up their visionary polity on foundations which their own arguments had previously condemned. A curious example of this “inability,” as Mr. Spencer calls it, “to comprehend assembled propositions in their totality” is to be found in a remarkable passage by Mr. Sidney Webb. Having observed that “socialists would nationalise both rent and interest by the State becoming the sole landowner and capitalist,” he goes on to acknowledge that great fundamental fact which it is the main object of the present work to elucidate. “Such an arrangement, however,” he says, “would leave untouched the third monopoly—the largest of them all—the monopoly of business ability.” In these last words he appears to be like a Daniel{281}come to judgment. He recognises in the fact that the few have a natural monopoly of faculties, the exercise of which is required for the progressive well-being of all, a genuine and a formidable difficulty in the way of the realisation of socialism; but now comes the passage for the sake of which these others have been quoted. Great as this difficulty is, he tells us, “the more recent socialists” have devised a way for getting over it. And what does the reader think this way is? It has at all events the merit of being very simple. “The more recent socialists,” says Mr. Webb, “attack this third monopoly also by allotting to every worker an equal wage, whatever may be the nature of his work.”
It has been thought worth while to quote Mr. Sidney Webb because he is an exceptionally favourable specimen of the modern socialistic theoriser. It is therefore interesting to notice the hiatus that here yawns in his argument. The entire question which is really at issue is begged by him. His allies, he tells us, though they cannot destroy the monopoly which the few possess of exceptional business powers, will destroy the effects of this monopoly by taking away from the few nearly all the wealth that their exceptional powers produce. It never seems to occur to him to ask whether, under these circumstances, the few would develop or exercise their exceptional powers at all. And yet the whole problem for him, as a socialist, lies here, and lies nowhere else. For from the very fact that these powers are admittedly a monopoly of the few, it is{282}evident that their existence cannot be assumed in anybody unless he exerts himself to give some sign of their presence. External authority, therefore, can compel nobody to employ them who does not put himself at the mercy of the authorities by letting them know he has them; and thus “the more recent socialists,” in attacking “the third and greatest monopoly,” are really themselves at the mercy of the very monopolists whom they propose to attack. It is true that if a socialistic revolution could be brought about suddenly, existing great men known to have certain talents, which had been already developed and exercised under conditions which the revolution destroyed, might be seized on by the State, in its capacity of universal employer, and forced to continue something of their former voluntary activity by threats of torture or some similar method of coercion. But even granting this to be possible, it would only solve the problem for a moment; for as these men died—and some of them would be dying daily—new talent would be wanted to take the place of the old; and though the State might coerce such talent as was already developed, it could not by coercion secure the services of the new, because threats of coercion would never tempt new talent to discover itself, but would, on the contrary, drive it yet deeper beneath the surface.
Exceptional potentialities can be called out and realised only by a kind of action which is the very antithesis of coercion, and which is analogous to that of sunshine on buds, or flowers or{283}fruits—namely, the penetrating, the warming, the stimulating action of the hope of certain personal advantages on the mind of the exceptional man, which advantages he will not only covet as advantageous, but will recognise as the natural result of the exercise of his exceptional faculties, and as a result attainable by the exercise of these faculties only. What these personal advantages are, the desire of which, coupled with their attainability, is necessary to stimulate men who have more than ordinary potentialities, to do greater things by developing them than are done by ordinary men, must be determined by reference to the actual facts of life, the records of which are ample, and the details of which, though numerous, can by careful analysis be easily reduced to order.