GREAT MEN AND THE INCREMENT 207 



who are still almost independent of any intellect 

 superior to their own, and who maintain themselves Cha P ter 

 by the exertion of man's commonest faculties only. 

 We may see again populations who have been in the 

 same condition, but who, under great men's guidance, 

 become agents in producing a civilisation which they 

 could by themselves not only not produce, but could, 

 by themselves, hardly even imagine ; and again we 

 may see how in more than one country the energies 

 of the great man, having worked these wonders for 

 a time, become paralysed by insecurity under a 

 barbarous and predatory despotism, and how, as 

 his action ceases, the masses relapse again into 

 their former condition of relative inefficiency. 



Accordingly, though the productivity of the 

 average men, as distinct from the great men, will 

 be different in one race or region from what it is 

 in another, just as their diet will be and the other 

 necessaries of existence, yet within each community 

 experience furnishes us with comparisons which show 

 us, roughly at all events, how much the average 

 men produce without the aid of the great men, and 

 how much the great men, by directing the average 

 men, add to this. 1 To calculate these amounts 



1 It is, of course, true that in densely populated countries and in 

 certain industries the average workmen, if left to themselves 

 suddenly, with no man of business ability to guide them, would be 

 unable to produce anything. But so long as the man of exceptional 

 talent employs them to produce anything, they contribute something 

 to the result, and must, for practical purposes, be held to produce so 

 much of it as will provide them with the means of living. If it 

 happens, as is sometimes the case, that the total value of the profit 



