Now, that demand is essentially democratic, and depends on the tastes and characters of those by whom the demands are made, nobody will be inclined to deny. But if we turn our attention from society, taken as a whole, to the exceptionally able minority on whom the business of supply depends, we shall find that these men, in their turn, form similarly a small democracy in themselves, and make, as suppliers, their own demands also--a demand for an economic reward, or an amount of personal wealth, not, indeed, necessarily equal to the amount of wealth produced by them, but bearing a proportion to it which is, in their own estimation, sufficient. This demand made by the exceptional producer rests on exactly the same basis as does that of the average customer. It rests on the tastes and characters of the men who make it; and it is just as impossible for the many to decide by legislation that the few shall put forth the whole of their exceptional powers for the sake of one reward, when what they want is another, as it is for the few to make the many buy snuff when they want tobacco, or buy green coats when they want black.[16] That such is the case will, to those who may be inclined to doubt it, become more evident if they consider with more attention than they are generally accustomed to exercise what the main attraction of great wealth is for the men who in the modern world are the producers of it on the greatest scale. Socialists and similar reformers--the people who principally busy themselves with discussing what this attraction is--are the people who are least capable of forming any true opinion about it. They not only have, as a rule, no experience of wealth themselves, but they are further generically distinguished by a deficiency of those powers that create it. They are like men with no muscles, who reason about the temperament of a prize-fighter; and their conception of what wealth means for those who produce and possess it is apt, in consequence, to be of the most puerile kind. It is founded, apparently, on their conception of what a greedy boy, without pocket-money, feels when he stares at the tarts lying in a pastry-cook's window. To them it seems that the desire for great wealth means simply the desire for purely sensual self-indulgence--especially for the eating and drinking of expensive food and wine. Consequently, whenever they wish to caricature a capitalist they invariably represent him as a man with a huge, protuberant stomach. The folly of this conception is sufficiently shown by the fact that many of the greatest of fortune-makers have, in their personal habits, been abstemious and even niggardly to a degree which has made them proverbial; and that, even in the case of those who value personal luxury, the maximum of self-indulgence which any single human organism can appreciate, is obtainable by a hundredth part of the fortunes for the production of which such men work. The real secret of