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 are rare 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 light upon 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 seventeenth century, 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,