our philosophers
by the exigencies of common-sense. As such, then, let us accept it; and
what will our conclusion be? It will be this: that whatever it may be
which the ordinary man produces, and in whatever sense he produces it,
the great man, in the same sense, produces a great deal more. The
difference between them in efficiency will be no more lessened by the
fact that both are standing on the pedestal of a common past, than the
difference in stature will be lessened between a dwarf and a giant
because they are both standing on the top of a New York skyscraper, or
because they have both been nourished on the same species of food.

But the practical absurdity of the whole set of arguments urged in a
contrary sense by Herbert Spencer, Mr. Kidd, and the speculative
sociologists generally, is brought to its climax by those modern
exponents of socialism who attempt to invest them with a moral as well
as an industrial significance. Thus Mr. Webb, who himself frankly
recognises that the monopolists of business ability are industrially
more efficient than the great mass of their fellows, and that man for
man they produce incomparably more wealth, endeavours, by means of the
arguments which we have been just considering, to show that though they
produce it they have no moral right to keep it. The proposal, he says,
that, though men are vastly unequal in productivity, they should all of
them be awarded an equal share of the product--that if one man produces
only one shilling, while another man produces ninety-nine, the resulting
hundred should be halved and each of the men take fifty--this proposal
"has," he says, "an abstract justification, as the special energy and
ability with which some persons are born is an unearned increment due to
the effect of the struggle for existence upon their ancestors, and
consequently, having been produced by society, is as much due to society
as the unearned increment of rent."

Now, if this argument has any practical meaning at all, it can only mean
that the men who have been born with such special powers will, as soon
as they recognise what the origin of these powers is, realise that they
have, as individuals, no special claims on the results of them, and will
consequently become more willing than they are at the present time to
continue to produce the results, though they will not be allowed to
keep them. We will not insist, as we might do, on the curious want of
knowledge of human natur