Now, although every item of this contention, and especially the last, is disputable, let us suppose, for argument’s sake, that it is, on the whole, well founded.  Even so, we have not touched the real crux of the question.  We have dealt only with the case of the ordinary worker, who fulfils the ordinary functions which must always be those of nine men out of every ten, let society be constituted in what way we will.  It remains for us to consider the case of those who are fitted, or believe themselves to be fitted, for work of a wider kind, and who aspire to gain, by performing this, an indefinitely ampler remuneration.  This ambitious and exceptionally active class is the class for which the promise of equal opportunities possesses its main significance, and in its relation to which it mainly requires to be examined.  Indeed, the writer from whom we are quoting recognises this himself; for he gives his special attention to the economic position of those who, in greater or less degree, are endowed with what he calls “genius”; and in order to illustrate how socialism would deal with these, he cites two cases from the annals of electrical engineering, in which opportunities, not forthcoming otherwise, were given by the state to inventors of realising successful inventions.

Now, what our author and others who reason like him forget, is that the opportunities with which we are here concerned differ in one all-important particular from those which concern us in the case either of education or of ordinary employment.  If one boy uses his educational opportunities ill, he does nothing to prejudice the opportunities of others who use them well.  Should a sorter of letters, who, if he had been sharp and trustworthy, might have risen to the highest and best-paid post in his department, throw his opportunities away by inattention or otherwise, the loss resulting is confined to the man himself.  The opportunities open to his fellows remain what they were before.  But when we come to industrial activity of those higher and rarer kinds, on which the sustained and progressive welfare of the entire community depends, such as invention, or any form of far-reaching and original enterprise, the kind of opportunity which a man requires is not an opportunity of exerting his own faculties in isolation, like a sorter who is specially expert in deciphering illegible addresses.  It is an opportunity of directing the efforts of a large number of other men.  Apart from the case of craftsmanship and artistic production, all the higher industrial efforts are reducible to a control of others, and can be made only by men who have the means of controlling them.  Since this is one of the principal truths that have been elucidated in the present volume, it is sufficient to reassert it here, without further comment.  If, therefore, a man is to be given the opportunity of embodying and trying an invention in a really practical form, it will be necessary to put at his disposal, let us disguise the fact as we may, the services of a number of other men who will work in accordance with his orders.  This, as we have seen already, is what is done by the ordinary investor whenever he lends capital to an inventor.  He supplies him with the food by which the requisite subordinates must be fed; and the state, were the state the capitalist, would do virtually the same thing.  It could give him his opportunity in no other way.