PROPERTY AND COMMON SENSE. 125; 



this alone should be enough to show that cunning, or 

 individual effort, is more important in determining, 

 organic results than luck is, and therefore that if 

 either is to be insisted on to the exclusion of the 

 other, it should be cunning, not luck. Which is more 

 correctly said to be the main means of the develop- 

 ment of capital — Luck ? or Cunning ? Of course there 

 must be something to be developed — and luck, that 

 is to say, the unknowable and unforeseeable, enters 

 everywhere ; but is it more convenient with our oldest 

 and best-established ideas to say that luck is the main 

 means of the development of capital, or that cunning 

 is so ? Can there be a moment's hesitation in admit- 

 ting that if capital is found to have been developed 

 largely, continuously, by many people, in many ways, 

 over a long period of time, it can only have been by 

 means of continued application, energy, effort, industry, 

 and good sense ? Granted there has been luck too ; 

 of course there has, but we let it go without saying, 

 whereas we cannot let the skiU or cunning go without 

 saying, inasmuch as we feel the cunning to have been 

 the essence of the whole matter. 



Granted, again, that there is no test more fallacious 

 on a small scale than that of immediate success. As 

 applied to any particular individual, it breaks down 

 completely. It is unfortunately no rare thing to see 

 the good man striving against fate, and the fool born 

 with a silver spoon in his mouth. Still on a large 

 scale no test can be conceivably more reliable ; a 

 blockhead may succeed for a time, but a succession of 

 many generations of blockheads does iibt go on steadily 



