244 HUXLEY 



portant thing being to catch the " small percentage of 

 the population which is born with that most excellent 

 quality, a desire for excellence, or with special apti- 

 tude of some sort or another, and turn them to ac- 

 count for the good of society," whose highest aim 

 should be the making of men, not of millionaires ; 

 the development of character, not the equation of 

 " success " with the " accumulation of cash." u For 

 the increase of wealth — that is, of the means of com- 

 fort — is not, necessarily, good in itself; everything 

 depends on the way in which the wealth is distributed 

 and its effect on the moral character of the nation." l 



No man can say where they will crop up ; like their 

 opposites, the fools and the knaves, they appear some- 

 times in the palace and sometimes in the hovel ; but 

 the great thing to be aimed at — I was almost going to 

 say, the most important end of all social arrangements 

 — is to keep these glorious sports of Nature from 

 being either corrupted by luxury or starved by poverty, 

 and to put them into the position in which they can 

 do the work for which they are specially fitted. 2 



Throughout the papers on social subjects which fill 

 portions of the first, third, and ninth volumes of the 

 Collected Essays, criticism is followed by definite sug- 

 gestion. And so it was with all matters, both prac- 

 tical and speculative, with which he dealt ; the order 



1 Letters front John Chinaman, p. 27. 

 3 Coll. Essays, ix. p. 210. 



