Now this reasoning has a certain fanciful plausibility, but it is absolutely devoid of any practical meaning; and in order to show the reader how and why it is so, it will be necessary to direct his attention to a certain fact which lies at the bottom of all practical reasoning, but which few practical reasoners ever consciously realise. All such reasoning is in its nature hypothetical, and can be reduced to a statement that if such conditions are present, such consequences will result; and that if existing conditions be altered in any specified way, the results will exhibit a specified and corresponding difference. If, however, this reasoning is to have any practical value, one thing is essential to it—namely, that the supposed alterations shall be at least approximately possible. No practical conclusion, for instance, could possibly be drawn as to machinery by considering what would happen if the properties of the circle were to be changed, and different parts of the circumference should be at different distances from the {206} centre. It is equally evident that no practical conclusion as to the claims and prospects of labour could be drawn by considering what would happen if the labourers could live without food. Now since no food is producible without labour, a population which does not labour is just as impossible a conception as a population which does not require to eat; and no practical conclusions can be arrived at by supposing it to exist; but populations which have developed and submitted themselves to no great men, not only can exist, but have existed, and do exist to-day; and thus we are reasoning in a strictly practical way when we consider what would be produced by the average men if the great man ceased to direct them, but we are reasoning to no practical purpose at all by considering what would happen if the average men ceased to labour. The latter—or the majority of them—would have to labour in any case, whether there were any great man to direct their labour or no; and the supposition of their labouring is bound up with the supposition of their existence. The sole practical alternatives which can in the present case be conceived and reasoned from are average men labouring under the direction of the great man’s talents, or the same men labouring blindly as best they can by themselves.