nd the general process of industry,
or to judge how it can and how it can not be altered, from the purely
spectacular impressions which its intricate parts produce on them.

But the ingrained inability of such men to understand that which they
would revolutionise does not reveal itself in their errors of theory
only. It reveals itself still more strikingly in their own relations to
life. If we allow for exceptional cases, such as that of Robert Owen,
who was in his earlier days a competent man of business, we shall find
that the theorists who desire to socialise wealth are generically
deficient in the higher energies that produce it. Though they doubtless
could, like most men who are not cripples or idiots, make a living by
some form of manual labour, they have none of them done anything to
enlarge the powers of industry, or even to sustain them at their present
pitch of efficiency. They have never made two blades of grass grow where
one blade grew before. They have never applied chemistry to the
commercial manufacture of chemicals. They have never organised the
systems or improved the ships and engines by which food finds its way
from the prairies to the cities which would else be starving. If in some
city or district an old industry declines they demand with tears that
the thousands thus thrown out of employment shall be set by the state to
do or produce something, even though this be a something which is not
wanted by anybody. They never set themselves to devise, as was done in
the English Midlands, some new commodity, such as the modern bicycle,
which was not only a means of providing the labourers with a
maintenance, but was also a notable addition to the wealth of the world
at large. They fail to do these things for the simple reason that they
cannot do them; and they cannot do them because they are deficient alike
in the interest requisite for understanding how they are done, and in
the concentrated practical energy which is no less requisite for the
doing of them.

At the end of an address in which I had been dealing with this subject
at New York, a young man, one of my hearers, told me that I had been
putting into words what had long been borne in on himself by his own
studies and observations--the fact, namely, that the social leaders of
men are divided into two classes, _those who dream about reforming the
industrial business of the world, and those, an opposite type, who alone
advance and accomplish it_. He