although they will be strictly limited, must, “X” says, be considerable.  He suggests that incomes should be allowed up to L8,000, and bequeathable property up to L200,000.  And here we come to a question which is still more pertinent than the preceding.  Why must the permissible amounts of income and of bequeathable property be of proportions such as those which he contemplates?  Why does he not take his bill and write down quickly L200 of income instead of L8,000, and limit bequeathable property to L2,000 instead of L200,000?  Because he evidently recognises that the men whose possible services to society are “immensely and incalculably greater” than those of the majority of their fellow citizens would not be tempted by a reward which, reduced to its smallest proportions, would not be very largely in excess of what was attainable by more ordinary exertions.  In his formal statement of his case, he says that the amount of the reward would be entirely determined by what ought to be sufficient for the purpose in the estimation of the voting majority; and he mentions the sums in question as those on which they would probably fix.  And it is, of course, quite imaginable that the majority, in making either these or any other estimates, might be right.  But what “X” fails altogether to see is that, if the majority of the citizens were right, such sums would not be sufficient because the majority of citizens happened to think that they ought to be.  They would be sufficient because they were felt to be sufficient by the minority who were invited to earn them, at whose feelings the majority would have made a shrewd or a lucky guess.  A thousand men with fishing-rods might meet in an inn parlour and vote that such and such flies were sufficient to attract trout.  But it lies with the trout to determine whether or no he will rise to them.  It is a question, not of what the fishermen think, but of what the trout thinks; and the fishermen’s thoughts are effective only when they coincide with the trout’s.

So long, then, as society desires to get the best work out of its citizens, and so long as some men are, in the words of “X,” “immensely and incalculably” more efficient than the great mass of their fellows, and so long as their efficiency requires, as “X” admits that it does, some exceptional reward to induce these men to develop it, these men themselves, in virtue of their inherent characters, must primarily determine what the reward shall be; and not all the majorities in the world, however unanimous, could make a reward sufficient if the particular minority in question did not feel it to be so.  The majority might, by making a sufficient reward unattainable, easily prevent the services from being rendered at all; but, unless they are to forgo the services, the majority can only obtain them on terms which will, in the last resort, depend on the men who are to render them.