To begin with production, then, let us take the case of the United Kingdom, and consider the amount per head that was annually produced by the population a hundred years ago. This amount was about £14. At the present time it is something like £35, and the purchasing power of money has so increased with the cheapening of commodities, that the excess of the latter sum over the former is far greater than it seems. Now, if we attribute the entire production of this country, at the close of the last century, to common or average labour (which is plainly an absurd concession), we shall gain some idea of what the utmost limits of the independent productivity of the ordinary man are; for the ordinary man’s talents as a producer, when directed by nobody but himself, have, as has been said already, not appreciably increased in the course of two thousand years, and have certainly not increased {219} within the past three generations. The only thing that has increased has been the concentration on the ordinary man’s productive talents of the productive talents of the exceptional man. The talents of the exceptional man, in fact, have been the only variant in the problem; and, accordingly, the minimum which these talents produce is the total difference between £14 and £35. This sum is no mere piece of fanciful ingenuity. Parts of it are being done daily before our eyes, and its practical character is being shown in the most conclusive manner, when the profits of a business decline on the death of some head or partner, or when some declining town is restored to its old prosperity by some man of industrial genius, who starts in it some new manufacture. And now let us pass from industrial activity to intellectual, and apply to this our second method of analysis. Of purely intellectual results, or, as Mill calls them, “_advances in speculative knowledge_,” the most striking examples are to be found in the mathematical sciences. To the advances made in these it is not only certain but obvious, that the many have contributed nothing, because even of that section of mankind which has some mathematical aptitude the majority are unable even to appreciate them completely when they are made; much less do they possess the powers to make them. No one would contend that the books of Euclid are the result of the faculties possessed by every average school-boy, or of the kind of man into which the average school-boy grows. We may indeed dismiss {220} purely intellectual progress as the domain in which the efficiency of the many stands absolutely at zero.