DEMAND FOR COMMODITIES DEMOCRATIC 239 

 processes which have only of late years reached Book in 



c ( Chapter 2 



any sort or perfection. 



But all the industrial ingenuity that great men have 

 ever possessed would be absolutely futile unless the 

 commodities they were employed in producing, or the 

 services they were employed in rendering, satisfied and though 

 tastes and wants existing in various sections of the f^ these 

 community. The eliciting of these wants, or the * 

 development of these tastes, depends often on the them 

 previous supply of the products or services that 

 minister to them. Thus the introduction of rail- 

 ways, of the electric telegraph, of the telephone, of 

 the electric light, preceded any popular demand for 

 them ; and many a great writer, according to the well- 

 known saying, has to create the taste by which he is 

 to be appreciated. But he could not create the 

 taste, or, in other words, make it actual, unless it 

 existed already in human nature as a potentiality, 

 any more than the producers of electric light could 

 make the general public anxious to have it in their 

 houses if mankind at large entertained no wish 

 whatever to do anything but sleep between the 

 hours of sunset and sunrise. The wants and tastes, 

 then, to which all production ministers, whether the wants 

 common to all men, like the desire for food, or 

 developed by influences from without, like the desire U 



for telegraphic accommodation, are, when once they and when 



J once aroused 



are in existence, essentially democratic in their are essentially 



Ti i r democratic 



nature. 1 hey are not like the movements of a phenomena. 

 mason, who constructs under an architect's order a 

 cathedral with the design of which he has nothing at 



