120 



ARISTOCRA C Y AND E VOL UTION 



Book II 

 Chapter i 



Enough men, 

 as it is, have 

 equal op- 

 portunities, to 

 show how un- 



of using them, 



No doubt a 

 man may be 

 ordinary in 

 one respect, 

 and great in 

 another ; 



events, whose opportunities are as equal as human 

 ingenuity could make them. This is so in the 

 French army, in the English House of Commons, 

 and in the world of business and industry ; and yet 

 of men thus equally placed we see some doing great 

 . things, and doubling their opportunities by using 

 them ; others doing little or nothing, and throwing 

 their opportunities away. We have accordingly in 

 every domain of activity a sufficient number of 

 persons with the same external advantages, to show 

 by the extraordinary difference between the results 

 accomplished by them how great the natural in- 

 equality between men's capacities is, and how far 

 the efficiency of a few exceeds that of the majority. 

 It is therefore nothing to the purpose to attribute, as 

 many reformers do, men's inequality in efficiency to 

 the fact that equality of opportunity is not at 

 present as general as it theoretically might be. To 

 extend this equality further might produce good 

 results or bad ; but in neither case would it tend to 

 make men's capacities equal. The utmost it would 

 do in this particular respect would be merely to 

 widen the area of their realised inequality to 

 increase the number of the mountains, not to 

 produce a plain. 



It will doubtless be objected by those who would 

 minimise natural inequalities that a man may be con- 

 temptible in one capacity that of a poet, for instance 

 and yet be greater as a man than men who in one 

 capacity are superior to him. It may, for example, 

 be said that Frederick of Prussia, in spite of his 







