We thus see that even in that sphere of political action in which, if anywhere, the many should be independent of the few, the many without the few would have no power at all.

The apologists of democracy, however, have another argument left them. They may contend that the exceptional men, who are necessary to the development of the collective powers of ordinary men, though each of them is constantly, with regard to particular questions, following his own devices rather than the instructions of the electorate, do on the whole, and in the long-run, substantially carry out the intentions and devices of those who are theoretically their masters; and that though they may do what their masters could never have thought of for {189} themselves, yet they can never continue to do anything of which their masters do not actually approve. Now even were this representation of the case true, it would leave untouched that broad and fundamental truth on which it is the primary purpose of the present work to insist. It would leave untouched the truth that the great mass of human beings are helpless without the assistance of a minority more efficient than themselves. If ninety-nine average men, through the aid of a hundredth man who is exceptional, can develop and give effect to a collective will, which is altogether their own, and originates entirely with themselves, but if they can neither develop it nor give effect to it unless the hundredth man lent them his services, the power of this one man is as essential to the power of the ninety-nine, as it would be if the orders which he executes had been largely originated by himself; just as a lens is essential to the photographer’s camera though its function is solely to focalise, not to colour, the rays transmitted by it. Accordingly, even on the above hypothesis, the modern democratic formula, which makes each man count for one, and nobody count for more than one, would, if judged scientifically, be absolutely and fundamentally false; for the power ascribed by it to the accumulated faculties of equals would be really the power of equals united with the power of a superior; and the difference between the equals and the superior would be at once apparent from this—that if one of the equals were subtracted, the power of the whole {190} hundred would be diminished by one ninety-ninth only; but if the one superior were subtracted, it would collapse altogether. Thus the presence of the superior, and the terms on which his services can be secured, would even in this case be subjects on which the sociologist would be bound to bestow the same attention as he bestows at present on the activities of the ordinary men; and unless he should do this, his conclusions would be wholly valueless.

As a matter of fact, however, the hypothesis that the superior few are ever the mere passive agents which the democratic theory assumes them to be is false; and it is as a rule false in exact proportion to the difficulty and importance of the cases to which it is applied. The qualities which enable men to organise the opinions of others are usually qualities which endow them with strong opinions of their own; and in addition to their own opinions, these men, with their exceptional vigour, have usually their own purposes also; and the popular will, as put into execution by them, is always modified, and very often metamorphosed, by what they themselves add to or subtract from it. Still it must be admitted that, in spite of their dependence on the few, the many can, and do to a great extent, impress their own genuine will—the will and wishes of the average man as distinct from the will and wishes of the man who is in any way exceptional—on the exceptional men to whom their power is surrendered. The acts of the governing few may never entirely represent {191} the will and wishes of the average man, when these acts are considered as a whole; but they may be forced to embody, and they generally do embody, a certain element of what average men wish and will; and their character as a whole is profoundly modified in consequence. The question then is simply a question of degree. What is the extent—or rather what is the utmost possible extent—of this genuine power of the many to make the faculties of the exceptional few their servants? Is it great or small?

The reader will perceive that when this question is asked our inquiry is gradually taking a new turn, and that having started with asserting the claims of the great man as the author and sustainer of both intellectual and economic progress, we are led, when we come to consider him as an agent in the domain of politics, to inquire into what is done by the average man, as well as into what is done by him. And the reason for this is that in the domain of politics the many, so far as direct and intentional influence is concerned, are actually capable of playing a far larger part than they are in the domain of speculation or of advanced economic production. A statesman like Mr. Gladstone might, without absurdity, maintain that he had a mandate from the many to grant home-rule to Ireland; but nobody could pretend that any body of mechanics had given Watt a mandate to invent the steam-engine, or that any one gave Newton a mandate to discover the law of gravitation. And yet the reflection will {192} probably force itself upon every reader that if the many play a part in politics which is commensurate with that of the few, they play a part in intellectual and economic progress also. It would be useless for the few to unfold their thoughts and their discoveries to the many, if the many were not, in various degrees, capable of assimilating and responding to them. Still less could the great man of industry realise his progressive inventions, or carry out his extending schemes of business, if it were not that an indefinite number of ordinary men—those “serviceable animals,” as Mr. John Morley calls them—were endowed with capacities that enabled them to carry out his bidding. What would Mahomet have done if he had not had followers? What would Columbus have done if he had not had seamen? The reader, accordingly, will inevitably be led to urge that in attributing to the great men of the world the results which we have attributed to them, our statements are unmeaning, unless they are accepted as incomplete, and are understood to imply more than they have actually expressed. If no progress of any kind could have taken place without the many, surely, it will be argued, the many must have had some share in producing it; and unless we can assert and discriminate precisely what this share is—what are the phenomena of progress which are due to the activity of ordinary men—it is meaningless to assert that most of them are due to the activity of exceptional men.

And the larger part of this argument is perfectly {193} true. In dealing with the activities of the few, we have taken those of the many for granted. This general assumption, however, though inevitable at the beginning of our inquiry, has been provisional only. To any scientific conception of what is done exclusively by the few, an equally scientific conception of what is done by the many is essential. We must measure the former by the latter, as we measure mountains by their respective heights above the sea-level. That such a discrimination between the work of these two bodies is possible may be doubted by some; and accordingly before we actually proceed to undertake it, we will dispose of the arguments that will be, and actually have been, advanced in proof of its impracticability, and set forth the principles on which it must be, and obviously can be, made.

BOOK III

CHAPTER I HOW TO DISCRIMINATE BETWEEN THE PARTS CONTRIBUTED TO A JOINT PRODUCT BY THE FEW AND BY THE MANY.

In the first chapter of his Principles of Political Economy Mill alludes to the question raised by certain thinkers, of “whether nature gives more assistance to labour in one kind of industry than another”; and he endeavours to show that the question is useless and unanswerable. In every industry, he says, there would be no product at all unless nature gave something and labour did something. Each is “absolutely indispensable” and the part played by each is consequently “indefinite and incommensurable.” “When two conditions,” he proceeds, “are equally necessary for producing the effect at all, it is unmeaning to say that so much of it is produced by one, and so much by the other; it is like attempting to decide which half of a pair of scissors has most to do in the act of cutting, or which of the factors five and six contributes most to the production of thirty.” If this argument is applicable to nature and labour as agents in the {198} production of commodities, it is equally applicable to the few and the many as agents in the production of social progress generally; and the crisp phrases and illustrations which Mill employs in formulating it, put in the clearest and most forcible manner possible the whole class of objections referred to at the close of the last Book.

Mill brings the argument forward with special reference to agriculture. Let us take, he says in effect, the products of any farm; and it is obviously absurd to inquire which produces most of it—the fields or the farm labourers. Now if all labour were equal, and if there were only one farm in the world, or if every acre of land, when the same labour was applied to it, yielded the same amount of produce, this would, no doubt, be true. The actual state of the case is, however, widely different. Acres vary very greatly in fertility; and if the produce of one—the least fertile—when cultivated by a given amount of labour, be symbolised by ten loaves, the produce of others, when cultivated by the same labour, will be symbolised by loaves to the number of twelve, fifteen, or twenty. Here, then, we have a constant quantity of labour, which produces ten loaves from each of the four acres in question; but when applied to the first, it produces ten loaves only; when applied to the three others, it produces two, or five, or ten loaves in addition. About the first ten loaves, in each case, it is not possible to argue. So far as they are concerned, the result is in each case the same; with regard to them we cannot {199} make any comparison; and we must admit that the parts played by land and labour in producing them are “indefinite and incommensurable,” precisely as Mill says they are. But the two, the five, or the ten extra loaves which result when labour is applied to the second, the third, and the fourth acre respectively, but do not result at all so long as it is applied only to the first, constitute phenomena of a different order altogether. The labour being in each of the four cases the same, and these additional loaves resulting in three cases only, these additional loaves are obviously not due to labour, but to certain additional qualities present in the last three acres and not present in the first. In other words, though in producing the loaves, or, as Mill puts it, “the effect,” the parts played respectively by land and labour are incommensurable so long as the land, the labour, and the effect remain the same, the parts become immediately mensurable as soon as the effect begins to vary, and one of the causes, and one of the causes only, varies also.

This truth can be yet further elucidated by means of Mill’s two other illustrations. If the two blades of a pair of scissors were made of two different materials, and the one blade were of such a nature that it was always of the same quality, and human ingenuity was not capable of improving it, whilst the qualities of the other blade varied with the skill devoted to its manufacture, and if one pair of scissors should cut twenty yards of cloth in a minute, whilst another cut only ten, the additional {200} efficiency of the more efficient pair would, it is perfectly obvious, be due to that blade in respect of which this pair differed from the pair which was less efficient, not to the blade in respect of which both pairs were similar. Again, let us take Mill’s case of the two numerals five and six. If five is always to be the number multiplied, and six is always to be the multiplier, it is true we cannot say which does most in producing the result—thirty. But if the number to be multiplied remains always five, whilst the multiplying number varies—if it is in one case six and in another case ten,—and if the result of the multiplication in the second case is not thirty but fifty, it is obvious that the additional twenty which results from our multiplying by ten is due not to any change in the number multiplied, but to the additional four introduced into the number multiplying. To these illustrations we may add two others—the movement of a modern bicycle and the movement of a man running. A modern bicycle cannot be propelled without a chain; and if there were only one kind of bicycle in the world, Mill might fairly have said that it was meaningless and useless to ask whether the wheels or the chain contributed most to its velocity. But if there are two bicycles, with precisely similar wheels, but with dissimilar chains, and if the same man riding on one can accomplish ten miles an hour only, but on the other fifteen, the common sense of every bicycle rider in the world will tell him that the additional five miles are contributed entirely by the chain, and {201} the patentees of the chain, we may be certain, will add their valuable testimony to the fact. So with regard to running, Mill might fairly have said that if we consider it in an abstract and general sense, it is absurd to ask which contributes most to “the effect”—the ground or the man that runs on it, because the first is as indispensable to the man’s movement as is the second. But if two men are racing each other over the same course, and one runs a mile whilst the other runs only half, it is perfectly obvious that the extra speed of the winner is contributed not by the ground, which for both men is just the same, but by certain qualities in the winner which the loser does not possess, or which the winner possesses in larger measure than he.