CHAPTER III
That Ability is a natural Monopoly, due to the congenital Peculiarities of a Minority. The Fallacies of other Views exposed.
◆1 But the Socialists have yet another fallacy with which they will attempt to neutralise the force of what has just been said.
◆2 They will say that Ability is the creation of special opportunity, and that everybody at birth is potentially an able man.
◆¹Butthe socialistic theorist will not even yet have been silenced. Even if he is constrained to admit the truth of all that has just been said, we shall find that he still possesses in his arsenal of error another set of arguments by which he will endeavour to do away with its force. These are generally presented to us in mere loose rhetorical forms; but however loosely they may be expressed, they contain a distinct meaning, which I will endeavour to state as completely and as clearly as is possible. ◆² Put shortly, it is as follows. Though Ability and Labour may both be productive faculties, and though it may be allowed that the one is more productive than the other, it is on the whole a mere matter of social accident—a matterdepending on station, fortune, and education—which faculty is exercised by this or that individual. Thus, though it may be allowed that a great painter and the man who stretches his canvas, or an inventor like Watt and the average mechanic who works for him, do, by the time that both are mature men, differ enormously in the comparative efficacy of their faculties, yet the difference is mainly due to circumstances posterior to their birth; that the circumstances which developed the higher faculties in one man might equally well have developed them in the other; and that the circumstances in question, even if only a few can profit by them, are really created by the joint action of the many.
◆1 This is sometimes expressed in saying that “the great man is made by his age,” i.e. by the opportunities others have secured for him.
◆2 But this, though true psychologically, is absolutely false in the practical sphere of economics.
The above contention contains several different propositions, which we will presently examine one by one. We will, however, take its general meaning first. One of the chief exponents of this, strange as the fact may seem, is that vehement anti-Socialist, Mr. Herbert Spencer. Mr. Spencer disposes of the claims of the man of ability as a force distinct from the generation at large to which he belongs, by saying that ◆¹ “Before the great man canremake his society, his society must make him.” Thus, to take an example from art, the genius of a man like Shakespeare is explained by reference to the condition of the civilised world, and of England more especially, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth. The temper of the human mind caused by centuries of Catholicism, the stir of the human mind shown in the Reformation or the Renaissance, and the sense of the new world then being conquered in America, are all dwelt on as general or social causes which produced in an individual poet a greatness which has been since unequalled. ◆² Now this reasoning, if used to combat a certain psychological error, no doubt expresses a very important truth; but if it is transferred to the sphere of economics its whole meaning vanishes. It was originally used in opposition to the now obsolete theory according to which a genius was a kind of spiritual aerolite, fallen from heaven, and related in no calculable way to its environment. It was used, for instance, to prove with regard to Shakespeare that had he lived in another age he would have thought and written differently, and that he might have been a worse poetunder circumstances less exciting to the imagination. But when we leave the psychological side of the case, and look at its practical side, a set of facts is forced on us which are of quite a different order. We are forced to reflect that though Shakespeare’s mind may have been what it was because the age acted on it, the age was acting on all Shakespeare’s contemporaries, and yet it produced one Shakespeare only. If Queen Elizabeth had been told that it was the age which produced Shakespeare, and in consequence had ordered that three or four more Shakespeares should be brought to her, her courtiers, do what they would, would have been unable to find them; and the reason is plain. The age acts on, or sets its stamp on, the character of every single mind that belongs to it; but the effect in each case depends on the mind acted on; and it is only one mind amongst ordinary minds innumerable, that this universal action can fashion into a great poet. And what is true of poetic genius is true of industrial Ability. The great director of Labour is as rare as a great poet is; and though Ability of lower degrees is far commoner thanAbility of the highest, yet the fact that it is the age which elicits and conditions its activities does nothing to make it commoner than it would be otherwise, nor affects the fact that its possessors are relatively a small minority. For the psychologist, the action of the age is an all-important consideration; for the economist, it is a consideration of no importance at all.
But it is by no means my intention to dismiss the Socialistic argument with this simple demonstration of the irrelevance of its general meaning. I am going to call the attention of the reader to the particular meanings that are attached to it, and show how absolutely false these are, by comparing them with historical facts.
◆1 Again, Socialists urge that no perfected invention is the work of a single man, but that many men have always co-operated to produce it.
◆2 This is true; but the class of men referred to is that very minority who are the monopolists of Ability. It is this class only, not the community in general.
◆¹ In the first place, then, the claims of the age, or of society as a whole, to be the author of industrial progress, in opposition to the claims of a minority, are supported by many writers on the ground that no invention or discovery is in reality the work of any single man. Such writers delight to multiply—and they can do so without difficulty—instances of how the most important machines or processes have been perfected only after a long lapse oftime, by the efforts of many men following or co-operating with one another. Thus the electric telegraph, and the use of gas for lighting, were not the discoveries of those who first introduced them to the public; and Stevenson described the locomotive as the “invention of no one man, but of a race of mechanical engineers.” Further, it is frequently urged that the same discoveries and inventions are arrived at in different places, by different minds, simultaneously; and this fact is put forward as a conclusive proof and illustration of how society, not the individual, is the true discoverer and inventor. ◆² But these arguments leave out of sight entirely the fact that, in the first place, the whole body of individuals spoken of—such as the race of engineers who produced the locomotive, or the astronomers in different countries who are discovering the same new star—form a body which is infinitesimally small itself; and secondly, that even the body of persons they represent,—namely, all of those who are engaged in the same pursuits, and have even so much as attempted any step in industrial progress,—though numerous in comparison with those who have actually succeeded intaking one, are merely a handful when compared with society as a whole, and instead of representing society, offer the strongest contrast to it. The nature of the assistance which Ability gives to Ability is an interesting question, but it is nothing to the point here. To prove that progress is the joint product of Ability and Ability, does not form a proof, but on the contrary a disproof of the proposition, that it is the joint product of Ability and Labour—or, in other words, that it is the product of the age, or the entire community.
◆1 Further, Socialists contend that Ability is the product of education, and that an equal education would equalise faculties.
◆2 But this wild theory is in absolute opposition to the most notorious facts;
◆¹ The socialistic theorist, however, even if he admits the above answer, will by no means admit that it is fatal to his own position. He will still take refuge in the proposition already alluded to, that the Ability of individuals is the child of opportunity, and that Ability is rarer than Labour, and able men are a minority, only because, under existing social circumstances, the opportunities which enable it to develop itself are comparatively few. And if he is pressed to say what these opportunities are, he will say that they may be described generally by the one word education. This argument can be answered in one way only, namely,an appeal to facts; and it is hard to conceive of anything which facts more conclusively disprove. Indeed, of much industrial Ability, it can not only be shown to be false, but it is also, on the very surface of it, absurd. It is plausible as applied to Ability of one kind only, namely, that of the inventor or the discoverer; but this, as we shall see presently, is so far from being Ability as a whole, that it is not even the most important part of it. Let us, however, suppose it to be the whole for a moment, and ask how far the actual facts of life warrant us in regarding it as the child of opportunity and education. Let us first refer to that general kind of experience which is recorded in the memory of everybody who has ever been at a school or college, and which, in the lives of tutors and masters, is repeated every day. Let a hundred individuals from childhood be brought up in the same school, let them all be devoted to the study of the same branch of knowledge, let them enjoy to the fullest what is called “equality of opportunity,” and it will be found that not only is there no equality in the amount of knowledge they acquire, but that there is hardly anyresemblance in the uses to which they will be able to put it. Two youths may have worked together in one laboratory. One will never do more than understand the discoveries of others. The other will discover, like Columbus, some new world of mysteries. ◆² Indeed, equality of opportunity, as all experience shows, instead of tending to make the power of all men equal, does but serve to exhibit the extent to which they differ.
◆1 As may be seen by a glance at the lives of some of the most distinguished inventors of the world.
◆¹ But particular facts are more forcible than general facts. Let us consider the men who, as a matter of history, have achieved by their Ability the greatest discoveries and inventions, and let us see if it can be said of these men, on the whole, that their Ability has been due to any exceptional education or opportunity. Speaking generally, the very reverse is the case. If education means education in the branch of work or knowledge in which the Ability of the able man is manifested, the greatest inventors of the present century have had no advantages of educational opportunity at all. Dr. Smiles observes that our greatest mechanical inventors did not even have the advantage of being brought up as engineers. “Watt,” hewrites, “was a mathematical instrument-maker; Arkwright was a barber; Cartwright, the inventor of the power-loom, was a clergyman; Bell, who afterwards invented the reaping-machine, was a Scotch minister; Armstrong, the inventor of the hydraulic engine, was a solicitor; and Wheatstone, inventor of the electric telegraph, was a maker of musical instruments.” That knowledge is necessary to mechanical invention is of course a self-evident truth; and the acquisition of knowledge, however acquired, is education: education, therefore, was necessary to the exercise of the Ability of all these men. But the point to observe is, that they had none of them any special educational opportunity; they were placed at no advantage as compared with any of their fellows; many of them, indeed, were at a very marked disadvantage; and though, when opportunity is present, Ability will no doubt profit by it, the above examples show, and the whole course of industrial history shows,[42]that Ability is so far from being thecreature of opportunity, that it is, on the contrary, in most cases the creator of it.
◆1 The theory is still further refuted by the fact that moral Ability is a matter of character and temperament, rather than of intellect.
◆2 A business started by Ability of intellect is maintained by Ability of character.
◆¹ The mental power, however, which is exercised by the inventor and discoverer, as I have said, is but one kind of industrial Ability out of many. Ability—or the faculty by which one man assists the Labour of an indefinite number of men—consists in what may be called exceptional gifts of character, quite as much as in exceptional gifts of intellect. A sagacity, an instinctive quickness in recognising the intellect of others, a strength of will that sometimes is almost brutal, and will force a way for a new idea, like a pugilist forcing himself through a crowd, these are faculties quite as necessary as intellect for giving effect to what intellect discovers or creates; and they do not always, or even generally, reside in the same individuals. The genius which is capable of grappling with ideas and principles, and in the domain of thought will display the sublimest daring,often goes with a temperament of such social timidity as to unfit its possessor for facing and dealing with the world. It is one thing to perfect some new machine or process, it is another to secure Capital which may put it into practical operation; and again, if we put the difficulty of securing Capital out of the question by supposing the inventor to be a large capitalist himself, there is another difficulty to be considered, more important far than this—the difficulty dealt with in the last chapter—namely, the conduct of the business when once started. Here we come to a number of complicated tasks, in which the faculty of invention or discovery offers no assistance whatsoever. We come to tasks which have to do, not with natural principles, but with men—the thousand tasks of daily and of hourly management. A machine or process is invented by intellect—there is one step. It is put into practical operation with the aid of Capital—there is another. When these two steps are taken, they do not require to be repeated, but the tasks of management are tasks which never cease; on the contrary, as has been said already, they tend ratherto become ever more numerous and complicated. ◆² Nor do they consist only of the mere management of labourers, the selection of foremen and inspectors, and the minutiæ of industrial discipline. They consist also of what may be called the policy of the whole business—the quick comprehension of the fluctuating wants of the consumer, the extent to which these may be led, the extent to which they must be followed, the constant power of adjusting the supply of a commodity to the demand. On the importance of these faculties there is a great deal to be said; but I will only observe here that it is embodied and exemplified in the fact that successful inventors and discoverers are nearly always to be found in partnership with men who are not inventors, but who are critics of inventions, who understand how to manage and use them, and who supplement the Ability that consists of gifts of intellect by that other kind of Ability that consists of gifts of character.
◆1 Equality of education and opportunity, instead of equalising characters, displays their differences.
◆2 Ability, then, is a natural monopoly; because few people are born with it.
Now if, as we have seen, it is entirely contrary to experience to suppose that inventive Ability is produced by educational opportunity,much more is it contrary to experience—it is contrary even to common sense—to suppose that Ability of character can be produced in the same way. ◆¹ Education, as applied to the rousing and the training of the intellect, is like a polishing process applied to various stones, which may give to all of them a certain kind of smoothness, but brings to light their differences far more than their similarity. Education may make all of us write equally good grammar, but it will not make all of us write equally good poetry, any more than cutting and polishing will turn a pebble into an emerald. And if this is true of education applied to intellect, of education applied to character it is truer still. Character consists of such qualities as temperament, strength of will, imagination, perseverance, courage; ◆² and it is as absurd to expect that the same course of education will make a hundred boys equally brave or imaginative, as it is to expect that it will make them equally tall or heavy, or decorate all of them with hair of the same colour.
◆1 And now let us again compare its action with that of the mass of men surrounding it.
Ability, then, is rare as compared with Labour, not because the opportunities arerare which are favourable or necessary to its development, but because the minds and characters are rare which can turn opportunity to account. ◆¹ And now let us turn again to the more general form of the Socialistic fallacy—the general proposition that the Age, or Society, or the Human Race is the true inventor, and let us test this by a new order of facts.
◆1 Do able men in any sense represent the tendencies and intelligence of their average contemporaries? Let us turn for an answer to the history of the three chief industrial triumphs of this country: (1) the iron manufacture, (2) the cotton manufacture, (3) the steam-engine.
I have already alluded to the stress laid by Socialists on the fact that different individuals in different parts of the world often make the same discoveries at almost the same time; and I pointed out that whatever this might teach us, applied only to a small minority of persons, and had no reference whatever to the great mass of the race. But Socialists very frequently put their view in a form even more exaggerated than that which I thus criticised. ◆¹ They use language which implies that the whole mass of society moves forward together at the same intellectual pace; and that discoverers and inventors merely occupy the position of persons who chance to be walking a few paces in advance of the crowd, and who thus lightupon new processes or machines like so many nuggets lying and glittering on the ground, which those who follow would have presently discovered for themselves; or, again, they are represented as persons who are merely the first to utter some word or exclamation which is already on the lips of everybody. Let us, then, take the three great elements which go to make up the industrial prosperity of this country—the manufacture of iron, the manufacture of cotton, and the development of the steam-engine, and see how far the history of each of these lends any support to the theory just mentioned.
◆1 The modern development of the iron industry dependent on the use of coal in place of wood.
◆2 The discovery of how to use coal for this purpose due to a few individuals, whose labours were either secret, or bitterly opposed by all who knew of them. Chief amongst these were
We will begin with the manufacture of iron. Ever since man was acquainted with the use of this metal till a time removed from our own by a few generations only, ◆¹ its production from the ore was dependent entirely upon wood, which alone of all fuels—so far as knowledge then went—had the chemical qualities necessary for the process of smelting. The iron industry in this country was therefore, till very recently, confined to wooded districts, such as parts of Sussex and Shropshire; and so large, during the seventeenthcentury, was the consumption of trees and brushwood, that the smelting furnace came to be considered by many statesmen as the destroyer of wood, rather than as the producer of metal. ◆² This view, indeed, can hardly be called exaggerated; for by the beginning of the century following the wood available for the furnaces was becoming so fast exhausted that the industry had begun to dwindle; and but for one great discovery it would have soon been altogether extinguished. This was the method of smelting iron with coal. Now to what cause was this discovery due? The answer can be given with the utmost completeness and precision. It was due to the Ability of a few isolated individuals, whose relation to their contemporaries and to their age we will now briefly glance at.
◆1 Dud Dudley,
◆2 The two Darbys,
◆3 Reynolds and the two Craneges, and others;
◆¹ The first of these was a certain Dud Dudley, who procured a patent in the year 1620 for smelting iron ore “with coal, in furnaces with bellows”; and his process was so far successful, that at length from a single furnace he produced for a time seven tons of iron weekly. For reasons, however, which will be mentioned presently Dudley’s inventiondied with himself; and for fifty years after his death the application of coal to smelting was as much a lost art as it would have been had he never lived. ◆² Between the years 1718 and 1735 it was again discovered by a father and son—the Darbys of Coalbrookdale. A further step, and one of almost equal importance, ◆³ was achieved by two of their foremen—brothers of the name of Cranege—assisted by Reynolds, who had married the younger Darby’s daughter, and this was the application of coal to the process which succeeds smelting, namely, the conversion of crude iron into bar-iron, or iron that is malleable. Other inventors might be mentioned by whom these men were assisted, but it will be quite enough to consider the case of these. As related to the age, as related to the society round him, the one thing most striking in the life of each of them is not that he represented that society, but that he was in opposition to it, and had to fight a way for his inventions through neglect, ridicule, and persecution. The nation at large was absolutely ignorant of the very nature of the objects which these men had in view; whilst the ironmasters of theday, as a body, though not equally ignorant, disbelieved that the objects were practicable until they were actually accomplished. It is true that these great inventors were not alone in their efforts; for where they succeeded, others attempted and failed: but these failures do but show in a stronger light how rare and how great were the faculties which success demanded.
◆1 The details of whose several lives are signal illustrations of what has just been said.
◆¹ Let us take each case separately. Dudley’s life as an ironmaster was one long succession of persecution at the hands of his brothers in the trade. They petitioned the king to put a stop to his manufacture; they incited mobs to destroy his bellows and his furnaces; they harassed him with law-suits, ruined him with legal expenses; they succeeded at last in having him imprisoned for debt; and by thus crippling the inventor, they at last killed his invention. It is true that meanwhile a few men—a very few—believed in his ideas, and attempted to work them out independently; and amongst these was Oliver Cromwell himself. He and certain partners protected themselves with a patent for the purpose, and actually bought up the works of the ruined Dudley; but all theirattempts ended in utter failure. Two more adventurers, named Copley and Proger, were successively granted patents during the reign of Charles II. for this same purpose, and likewise failed ignominiously. One man alone in the whole nation had proved himself capable of accomplishing this new conquest for industry; whilst the nation as a whole, and the masters of the iron trade in particular, remained as they were—stationary in their old invincible ignorance. The two Darbys, the two Craneges, and Reynolds, though not encountering, as Dudley did, the hostility of their contemporaries, yet achieved their work without the slightest encouragement or assistance from them. The younger Darby, solitary as Columbus on his quarter-deck, watched all night by his furnace as he was bringing his process to perfection. His workmen, like the sailors of Columbus, obeyed their orders blindly; and in hardly a brain but his own did there exist the smallest consciousness that one man was laying, in secret, the foundation of his country’s greatness. With regard to Reynolds and the Craneges, who imitated, though they did not perfect, the further use of coal for the productionof iron that is malleable, we have similar evidence that is yet more circumstantial. Reynolds distinctly declares in a letter written to a friend that the conception of this process was so entirely original with the Craneges that it had never for a moment occurred to himself as being possible, and that they had had to convince him that it was so, against his own judgment. But when once his conversion was completed, he united his Ability with theirs; and within a very short time the second great step in our iron industry had been taken triumphantly by these three unaided men.
Were it necessary, and would space permit of it, we might extend this history further. We might cite the inventions of Huntsman, of Onions, of Cort, and Neilson, and show how each of these was conceived, was perfected, and was brought into practical use, whilst the nation as a whole remained inert, passive, and ignorant, and the experts of the trade were hostile, and sometimes equally ignorant. Huntsman perfected his process in a secrecy as carefully guarded as that of a mediæval necromancer hiding himself from the vigilance of the Church; whilst James Neilson, theinventor of the hot-blast, had at first to encounter the united ridicule and hostility of all the shrewdest and most experienced iron-masters in the kingdom.
◆1 The history of the cotton manufacture does so with equal force;
◆¹ The history of the cotton manufacture offers precisely similar evidence. Almost every one of those great improvements made in it, by which Ability has multiplied the power of Labour, had to be forced by the able men on the acceptance of adverse contemporaries. Hay was driven from the country; Hargreaves from his native town; Arkwright’s mill, near Chorley, was burnt down by a mob; Peel, who used Arkwright’s machinery, was at one time in danger of his life. Nor was it only the hostility of the ignorant that the inventors had to encounter. They had to conquer Capital before they could conquer Labour; for the Capitalists at the beginning were hardly more friendly to them than the labourers. The first Capitalists who assisted Arkwright, and had Ability enough to discover some promise in his invention, had not enough Ability to see their way through certain difficulties, and withdrew their help from him at the most critical moment. The enterprising men who at last became hispartners, and with the aid of whose Capital his invention became successful, represented their age just as little as Arkwright did. He and they, indeed, had the same opportunities as the society round them; but they stand contrasted to the society by the different use they made of them.
◆1 Also the history of the steam-engine, as a very curious anecdote will show.
◆¹ And now, lastly, let us come to the history of the steam-engine. We need not go over ground we have already trodden, and prove once more that in this case, as in the others, the age, in the sense of the majority of the community, had as little to do with the work of the great inventors as Hannibal had to do with the beheading of Charles I. It will be enough to insist on the fact that the scientific minority amongst whom the inventors lived, and who were busied with the same pursuits, were, as a body, concerned in it just as little. The whole forward movement, the step after step of discovery by which the power of steam has become what it now is, was due to individuals—to a minority of a minority; and this smaller minority was so far from representing the larger, or from merely marching a few steps ahead of it, that the large minority alwayshung back incredulous, till, in spite of itself, it was converted by the accomplished miracle. One example is enough to illustrate this. Watt, when he was perfecting his steam-engine, was in partnership with Dr. Roebuck, who advanced the money required to patent the invention, and whose energy and encouragement helped him over many practical difficulties. When the engine was almost brought to completion, Roebuck found himself so much embarrassed for money, on account of expense incurred by him in an entirely different enterprise, that he was forced to sell a large part of his property; and amongst other things with which he parted was his interest in Watt’s patent. This he transferred to the celebrated engineer Boulton; and the patent for that invention which has since revolutionised the world was valued by Roebuck’s creditors at only one farthing.
◆1 The average man, if cross-examined at the Day of Judgment, would be forced to give his testimony to the same effect.
◆¹ These facts speak plainly enough for themselves; and the conscience of most men will add its own witness to what they teach us—which is this. So far as industrial progress is concerned, the majority of mankind are passive. They labour as the conditions into which they areborn compel them to labour; but they do nothing, from their cradle to their grave, so to alter these conditions that their own labour, or Labour generally, shall produce larger or improved results. The most progressive race in the world—or in other words the English race—has progressed as it has done only because it has produced the largest minority of men fitted to lead, and has been quickest in obeying their orders; but apart from these men it has had no appreciable tendency to move. Let the average Englishman ask himself if this is not absolutely true. Let him imagine himself arraigned before the Deity at the Day of Judgment, and the Deity saying this to him: “You found when you entered the world that a man’s labour on the average produced each year such and such an amount of wealth. Have you done anything to make the product of the same labour greater? Have you discovered or applied any new principle to any branch of industry? Have you guided industry into any new direction? Have the exertions of any other human being been made more efficacious owing to your powers of invention, of enterprise, or of management?” Thereis not one man in a hundred who, if thus questioned at the Judgment-seat, would be able, on examining every thought and deed of his life, to give the Judge any answer but, “No. So far as I am concerned, the powers of Labour, are as I found them.”