USELESS WANTS AND TALENTS 345 



education could develop it is men like these who Book iv 

 invest with its principal dangers the equalisation of 

 educational opportunity ; and if education, as so many 

 Conservatives say, really does nothing but promote 

 popular discontent, it promotes discontent amongst 

 the great masses of the population less from the 

 manner in which it affects the average man directly, 

 than from the manner in which it affects men who 

 are inefficiently exceptional, and who, not having 

 the gifts that would enable them to rise in any 

 society, endeavour to persuade the masses that 

 society, as at present constituted, is an organised 

 conspiracy of the few to keep everybody else down. 



The equalisation of educational opportunity has, 

 therefore, two dangers the danger of developing 

 wants in the average man which could never be 

 generally satisfied under any social arrangements ; 

 and the danger of developing the talents of a certain 

 class of exceptional men which are naturally incom- 

 plete, and which the more fully they were developed, 

 would only become more mischievous both to their 

 possessors and to society. 



And these dangers correspond with the two objects namely, the 

 for the sake of which the equalisation of educational average man 6 

 opportunity is advocated. One of these objects is he cannot 011 

 the raising- the condition of the average man; the satisf > r ' and * e 



stimulating of 



other is the securing, alike for himself and for talents that are 



i r 11 i r r i i -r r i constitutionally 



society, the lull benefit of the potential gifts of the imperfect. 

 exceptional man. The average man, however, is 

 not made better or happier by being filled in early 

 life with importunate wants and propensities which he 



