Property and Common Sense 115 
It is one of the commonplaces of biology that the nature of 
the organism (which is mainly determined by ancestral 
antecedents) is greatly more important in determining its 
future than the conditions of its environment, provided, 
of course, that these are not too cruelly abnormal, so that 
good seed will do better on rather poor soil, than bad seed 
on rather good soil ; 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 development 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 isso ? Can there be a moment’s hesitation 
in admitting 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 skill 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 not go 
on steadily gaining ground, adding field to field and farm 
to farm, and becoming year by year more capable and 
