to return to the direct coercion of slavery, can escape from competition and the wage-system, under some form or other, any more than it can stand in its own shadow. With regard, then, to economic production, which, of all social activities, is for the practical sociologist incomparably the most important, what we have thus far seen is as follows. We have seen, not that it is impossible—for this question has been expressly postponed—that men may be made far more equal than they are now in respect of the possession of wealth; but that whatever degree of equality they may some day attain to in its possession, they can never be otherwise than unequal in the parts played by them in its production; that their inequality in productive power is of such a kind as to render the industrial obedience of the larger number of them to the minority the primary and permanent condition on which economic progress is possible; that what feather-brained fanatics call “_economic freedom_” would be merely another name for economic helplessness; and that all the democratic formulas which for the past hundred years have represented the employed as the producers of wealth, and the capitalistic employers as the appropriators of it, are, {175} instead of being, as they claim to be, the expressions of a profound truth, related to truth only as being direct inversions of it. Whatever appearances may seem to show to the contrary, it is the few and not the many who, in the domain of economic production, are essentially and permanently the chief repositories of power. That this is so in the domain of intellect we have seen already. We will now turn our attention to the domain of political government, and consider the part played by the exceptional few there—the nature and origin of their power, and the means by which it is exercised. {176} CHAPTER IV THE MEANS BY WHICH THE GREAT MAN ACQUIRES POWER IN POLITICS