At the beginning, the British plutocrat
was probably quite as honest in suggesting that every tramp carried a
magic cat like Dick Whittington, as the Bonapartist patriot was in
saying that every French soldier carried a marshal's _baton_ in his
knapsack. But it is exactly here that the difference and the danger
appears. There is no comparison between a well-managed thing like
Napoleon's army and an unmanageable thing like modern competition.
Logically, doubtless, it was impossible that every soldier should
carry a marshal's _baton_; they could not all be marshals any more
than they could all be mayors. But if the French soldier did not
always have a _baton_ in his knapsack, he always had a knapsack. But
when that Self-Helper who bore the adorable name of Smiles told the
English tramp that he carried a coronet in his bundle, the English
tramp had an unanswerable answer. He pointed out that he had no
bundle. The powers that ruled him had not fitted him with a knapsack,
any more than they had fitted him with a future--or even a present.
The destitute Englishman, so far from hoping to become anything, had
never been allowed even to be anything. The French soldier's ambition
may have been in practice not only a short, but even a deliberately
shortened ladder, in which the top rungs were knocked out. But for
the English it was the bottom rungs that were knocked out, so that
they could not even begin to climb. And sooner or later, in exact
proportion to his intelligence, the English plutocrat began to
understand not only that the poor were impotent, but that their
impotence had been his only power. The truth was not merely that his
riches had left them poor; it was that nothing but their poverty could
have been strong enough to make him rich. It is this paradox, as we
shall see, that creates the curious difference between him and every
other kind of robber.

I think it is no more than justice to him to say that the knowledge,
where it has come to him, has come to him slowly; and I think it came
(as most things of common sense come) rather vaguely and as in a
vision--that is, by the mere look of things. The old Cobdenite
employer was quite within his rights in arguing that earth is not
heaven, that the best obtainable arrangement might contain many
necessary evils; and that Liverpool and Belfast might be growing more
prosperous as a whole in spite of pathetic things that might be seen
there. But I simply do not believe he has