These alternatives are being constantly exemplified in the actual life of communities. We may see men to-day, not only amongst savages, but amongst the peasantries of civilised countries, such as Russia, India, and parts of Ireland and the Scottish islands, {207} who are still almost independent of any intellect superior to their own, and who maintain themselves by the exertion of man’s commonest faculties only. We may see again populations who have been in the same condition, but who, under great men’s guidance, become agents in producing a civilisation which they could by themselves not only not produce, but could, by themselves, hardly even imagine; and again we may see how in more than one country the energies of the great man, having worked these wonders for a time, become paralysed by insecurity under a barbarous and predatory despotism, and how, as his action ceases, the masses relapse again into their former condition of relative inefficiency. Accordingly, though the productivity of the average men, as distinct from the great men, will be different in one race or region from what it is in another, just as their diet will be and the other necessaries of existence, yet within each community experience furnishes us with comparisons which show us, roughly at all events, how much the average men produce without the aid of the great men, and how much the great men, by directing the average men, add to this.† To calculate these amounts {208} with any approach to exactness will, no doubt, be more difficult in some cases than others, just as is the case with book-keeping in various businesses. But it is enough to have shown the reader that, despite Mill’s contention to the contrary, the calculation is one which is based on the simplest and most indisputable principles, and that not only in a theoretical, but in the most strictly practical sense, what great men produce, when they co-operate with average men by directing them, is the amount or degree in which the total result produced exceeds or excels that which was produced by average men when unaided, and would be again produced by them were the great man’s aid withdrawn. † It is, of course, true that in densely populated countries and in certain industries the average workmen, if left to themselves suddenly, with no man of business ability to guide them, would be unable to produce anything. But so long as the man of exceptional talent employs them to produce anything, they contribute something to the result, and must, for practical purposes, be held to produce so much of it as will provide them with the means of living. If it happens, as is sometimes the case, that the total value of the profit is less than the workmen’s wages, the employer must either alter the character of his product, so as to meet the public demand, or he will otherwise be crushed out of existence as an employer, and his workmen will pass under the control of some more able rival.