The practical validity of both these kinds of reasoning is shown by the following imaginary, but not impossible case. A hundred Russian workmen, all of them loyal to the Czar, are employed by a citizen of Moscow to enlarge a subterranean cellar, and another hundred are employed to fill it with heavy wine-cases. A week after the work is completed the Czar is driving outside, and, as he passes the citizen’s house, is killed by an explosion from below. The so-called cellar was a mine, the wine-cases were filled with dynamite. Now if all {217} those who were concerned in the production of this catastrophe were tried, it is perfectly evident that the part played by the workmen would be sharply separated from that played by the man employing them; and that, though they no doubt would have contributed something to the result, they would have contributed nothing to its essential and criminal elements. It is equally evident that if the designed and attained result had been not criminal, but beneficent, the elements in it that made it glorious would be the product of the man who planned and intended it, and not of the workmen who blindly obeyed his orders, neither knowing nor caring what the result would be. Let us take another case of a somewhat different character. When a spontaneous cheer bursts from a thousand people, the volume of sound is obviously the unadulterated product of the many. On the other hand, when a thousand people with ordinarily good voices are so trained and organised as to sing a chorus out of _Israel in Egypt_, the peculiar qualities which render the sounds produced by them valuable, obviously imply the existence of the musical genius of Handel, or in other words, faculties which belong to hardly one man in a million, and are thus the product not of the many, but of one. And now let us turn to the actual facts of life, and the kinds of activity on which progress and civilisation depend, and let us apply our two analytical methods to these. It is needless to repeat, after what has been said in a previous chapter, that it is {218} impossible, in a case like this, to examine social activity as a whole. Such activity is of various kinds, and each must be dealt with separately. Let us begin, then, with two—the activity of economic production, and the activity which results in the growth of speculative knowledge. The first affords us the clearest illustration of how to discriminate the product of the many by considering what it would shrink to were the influence of the few absent. The second affords us the clearest illustration of how to discriminate the product of the many by considering the nature of the faculties which the production of the result implies.