326 ARISTOCRACY AND EVOLUTION 



Book iv Thus in spite of the permanence which interest 



gives to wealth, the families that live merely on 

 interest are constantly tending to disappear, and 

 their places are being taken by the men whose ex- 

 ceptional faculties, whose business ability, whose 

 and new men enterprise and strenuous will, actually contribute 



are constantly i -, . r r , 



forcing their most to the productive forces of the country. It 

 was observed by J. S. Mill with regard to political 

 government that this " is always in, or is passing 

 into, the hands " of the men who are at the time 

 the true repositories of power. In the same way 

 the wealth of any progressive country is always in, 

 or is passing into, the hands of the men who by 

 their own abilities are engaged actively in pro- 

 ducing it. 



sheep-farmers who began to make fortunes four hundred years ago. 

 As a matter of fact by far the larger part of the great commercial 

 businesses and commercial fortunes now existing in this country have 

 been founded during the past hundred, and many within the past 

 fifty years, by men who were the sons of ordinary wage-paid labourers, 

 and who were no more heirs to the men who formed the middle class 

 under the Tudors than they were to the merchants who are cele- 

 brated in the Arabian Nights. That such is the case is shown with 

 sufficient clearness by the following figures, which refer to commercial 

 incomes during the thirty years which followed the first Great 

 Exhibition. During these years, whilst the population increased by 

 about 30 per cent, fortunes of over ten thousand a year were 

 multiplied by 100 per cent, fortunes of from five to ten thousand by 

 96 per cent, and fortunes of from five to six hundred by 308 per 

 cent. It is obvious, then, that when a class is augmented in one 

 generation by a number of new members from three to ten times as 

 great as its natural increase would account for, most of its new 

 members must have come to it from some class outside, and have 

 gained their place in it solely by their own exertions. 



