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ARISTOCRACY AND EVOLUTION 



Book IV 

 Chapter i 



They cannot, 

 therefore, be 

 coerced from 

 without, like 

 ordinary 

 workers. 



They must be 

 induced to 

 work by a 

 reward 



him, under certain circumstances, to do so much 

 ploughing daily ; but no one could have told that 

 he was a poet if he had not of his own free will 

 revealed the fact to the public ; and even when the 

 public were aware of it, no one could have forced 

 him to compose The Cotter s Saturday Night. A 

 press-gang could have turned Columbus into a 

 common sailor, but not all the sovereigns of Europe 

 could have forced him to discover a new hemisphere. 

 On the contrary, it was he who had to force sover- 

 eigns into the reluctant belief that possibly there 

 was a new hemisphere to discover. The great man, 

 therefore, is lord of his exceptional faculties in a way 

 in which the common man is not lord of his common 

 faculties. The existence of the latter faculties can- 

 not be concealed ; the kind of work that can be 

 accomplished by them is known to everybody ; and 

 therefore the community by the exercise of mere 

 force can command the average man, and make him 

 work like an animal. But over the exceptional 

 faculties of the great man it has no command what- 

 ever, except what the great man gives it ; for it 

 neither knows that the faculties exist, nor what things 

 the faculties can do, until the great man elects to 

 reveal the secret. He cannot be made to reveal 

 it, he can only be induced to do so ; and he can be 

 induced to do so only by a community which offers 

 to exceptional faculties some assured and exceptional 

 reward, just as a reward is offered for evidence 

 against an unknown murderer. Moreover, just as 

 in the latter case it very often happens that the re- 



