The general or the sentimental objections, then, which might not unnaturally arise in the minds of many when the claims of the great man to be the sole agent of progress are first broadly asserted, are found to disappear altogether when the meaning of these claims is more fully considered. But sentimental objections, as has been said already, are by no means the only objections which these claims have {262} to encounter. Objections will be raised against them which are economic rather than sentimental, and which, moreover,—this is a still more important fact—rest solely upon a practical, and have no theoretical basis.

In order to see what these objections are it will be well to consider them in their extremest and most uncompromising form. We will accordingly consider them as put forward by the socialists. That the objections of the socialists to the claims made for the great man are not grounded in any theory that consistently disallows them, is sufficiently shown by the fact that even the most extreme socialists, no less than the members of every other militant party, are always extolling the exceptional qualities of their own leaders. Agitators, thinkers, and writers like Karl Marx, Lassalle, and Engels have been extolled by their followers as though in their own way equal to Cæsar and Napoleon, to Aristotle, Galileo, and Bacon; and their works are continually called “marvels of reasoning,” and described as evincing “such powers of thought as are given to only a few men in the course of five hundred years.” The arguments, therefore, which are employed by socialistic thinkers to convince them that the great man is not essential to social progress, and plays no real part in it—those arguments to the examination of which the first chapters of this work were devoted, do not really convince even those who lay most stress on them, so far as they are applicable to social progress generally. For the {263} socialists in practice are forced to limit the application of them to two kinds of social action only; and these are social activity in the domains of political government and of wealth-production. They are, moreover, applied to the latter of these with so much more strictness than to the former, that the objections to the special claims of the great man as a wealth-producer are the only ones that here require our attention.

Now even here we shall find that the objections in question are originated not by theoretical, but by practical considerations only; for one of the most curious features in the history of socialistic thought, from the time when socialists claim that it first began to be scientific till to-day, has been the unwilling replacement, in their theory of production and progress, of that factor or element—and this factor is the great man—which Karl Marx, with his doctrine of labour as the sole creator of value, had eliminated. Under one disguise or another the great or exceptional man, as distinct from the average labourer whose productivity is measured by time, has been put back in the place from which the theory of Marx had ousted him; and the inventors, the men of enterprise, the organisers and capitalists of to-day—or, as Mr. Sidney Webb calls them, “the monopolists of business ability”—are given back to us in the guise of officials of the bureaucratic State, armed by the State with the industrial powers of slave-owners. It is true that socialistic theorists still do their utmost to hide from themselves and their followers the nature {264} of this change, by means of those curious arguments which find their chief exponent in Mr. Spencer, and which have rendered sociology thus far so useless as a practical science. But the change is but partly hidden, nevertheless, even from themselves.

Why, then, should they endeavour to hide it at all? Why should they shrink from a perfectly frank avowal—an avowal which they are constantly compelled to make by implication—that the great man’s power in wealth-production is what has been described, and that every increase in the wealth of civilised communities is due to him? They shrink from making this avowal for one reason only. This reason is that their main practical object is to represent the possessions of the great man, or of the few, as a treasure to which the few have no theoretical right, and which can be, and ought to be, divided amongst the many. They are therefore compelled, by the necessities of popular agitation, to obscure the part that the few have played in producing it, and to pretend, so far as possible, that it is produced by the undifferentiated many. If it were not for its promise to the many of some indefinite pecuniary gain, it may safely be said that socialism would have been never heard of; and if this pecuniary promise were made good, the demands of the socialists, as a practical party, would be satisfied.

And now having considered this, let the reader look back at the claims that have, in our present argument, been advanced for the great man thus far. It will be seen that not a single claim has been {265} advanced on his behalf to which, on practical grounds, any socialist could object. We have not assumed that out of all the wealth he produces he shall take a larger, or even so large a share, as the least efficient of his workmen. On the contrary, we have assumed that his contributions to the national wealth find their way into the pockets of those around him, and that for him nothing is left but the bare means of subsistence. It has indeed been shown that he must necessarily have the control of capital, and be free to use it in the way that he thinks best; but this is only because the control of capital affords the sole means by which, amongst free men, industrial discipline can be enforced and the productive genius of the few be communicated to the muscles of the many. For all that has been said thus far to the contrary, the great man himself may derive from his control of it no advantage whatsoever. We have assumed only that by his use of it he shall concentrate his exceptional faculties on the practical business of wealth-production with as much intensity and devotion as he would do if the whole of what he produced were to go into his own coffers. We have, in fact, been regarding the great man as being socially the servant of the ordinary men, though in technical matters he is their master.

So far, then, as our argument has up to this point proceeded, we have merely in our theory assigned to the great man functions which are implicitly assigned to him in the reasonings of the more recent socialists themselves, whilst in practice we have {266} assumed the realisation of the very conditions at which socialism aims. For let us consider very briefly what these conditions are. The more carefully the theoretical admissions and the practical promises of the more recent socialists are examined, the more clear does it become that the sole essential change which socialism would introduce into the existing economic régime would consist not in getting rid of the great man, but in securing his activity on totally new terms. The socialists aim, in fact, at securing the best industrial masters and treating them like the worst servants. This, as social reformers, is their fundamental peculiarity. For whilst they propose to secure an equal distribution of products, they implicitly admit that the producers may be divided into three classes—the men of exceptional ability who produce an exceptional amount of wealth; the mass of average men who produce a normal amount; and the idle, the refractory, and the worthless, who produce less than the normal amount; and they propose accordingly to apportion the products as follows. To the average man they would give twice as much as he produces; to the idle and the worthless man they would give a hundred times as much as he produces; and to the great man, on whose talents the fortunes of all the others depend, they would give from a hundredth to a thousandth part of what he produces.

Now, whatever the reader may think of this economic programme, there is nothing in the present work, thus far, to show that it is impossible; and if {267} the object of socialists is to level social conditions, to abolish all differences of rank, and to confiscate all exceptional incomes, this book up to the present point might be accepted as a handbook of socialism. For the reader will recollect that when it was said that the great man’s activity involved the existence of motives which would lead him to develop his faculties, and that without such motives these faculties would be practically non-existent, the question of what these motives were was for the time altogether waived, and we assumed the development and the subsequent exercise of his abilities as something that would take place no matter under what conditions. The question, however, which we then put on one side must now be taken up and submitted to a careful examination. It being granted that the activity of the great man is necessary, on what conditions can his activity be secured? Can it be secured on the conditions that are proposed by socialism, or on any others that even remotely resemble them?

BOOK IV

CHAPTER I THE 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 as greatness, 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.