With the demands which originate in men’s equal needs we are not concerned here.  It is impossible to modify them appreciably either by education or otherwise; but the desires or wishes which Ruskin so happily calls “romantic” vary in intensity and character to an almost indefinite degree, not only in different individuals, but also in the same individuals when submitted to different circumstances.  Those of them, indeed, which are most generally felt are often, to speak strictly, not so much desires as fancies; and while the image of their fulfilment may please or amuse the imagination, their non-fulfilment produces no sense of want.  So long as they are merely fancies, they raise no practical question.  They raise a practical question only when their insistence is such that their non-fulfilment produces an active sense of privation; and whether in the case of any given individual they reach or do not reach this pitch of intensity depends upon two things.  One of these is the individual’s congenital temperament, his talents, his strength of will, and the vividness or vagueness of his imagination.  Education, understood in its more general sense, is the other.  Now, men varying as they do in respect of their congenital characters, the strength of their romantic wishes bears naturally some proportion to their own capacities for attempting to satisfy these wishes for themselves.  Few men, for example, have naturally a strong wish for conditions which will enable them to exercise exceptional power, unless they are conscious of possessing exceptional powers to exercise.  Hence, though this consciousness is in many cases deceptive, the struggle of men for power is confined within narrow limits, and the disappointments which embitter those who fail to attain it are naturally confined within narrow limits also.  So long as matters stand thus, the majority of men are unaffected.  But wishes which are naturally confined to exceptional men, who are more or less capable of realising them, are susceptible by education of indefinite extension to others who are not so qualified; and in the case of these last, the results which they produce are different.  They multiply the number of those who demand preferential opportunities, in order that they may enter on a struggle in which they must ultimately fail.

They multiply the number of those, to a still greater extent, who demand that positions or possessions shall be somehow provided for them by society, without reference to any struggle on their own part at all.  The artificial diffusion of “wish” among these two distinguishable classes is thus accomplished by education in somewhat different ways; but the modus operandi is in one respect the same in both.  It consists of an artificial enlarging, in the case of all individuals alike, of the ideas entertained by them of their natural social rights; and an active craving is thus generalised for possessions and modes of life, which nine men out of ten would otherwise