But all the industrial ingenuity that great men have ever possessed would be absolutely futile unless the commodities they were employed in producing, or the services they were employed in rendering, satisfied tastes and wants existing in various sections of the community. The eliciting of these wants, or the development of these tastes, depends often on the previous supply of the products or services that minister to them. Thus the introduction of railways, of the electric telegraph, of the telephone, of the electric light, preceded any popular demand for them; and many a great writer, according to the well-known saying, has to create the taste by which he is to be appreciated. But he could not create the taste, or, in other words, make it actual, unless it existed already in human nature as a potentiality, any more than the producers of electric light could make the general public anxious to have it in their houses if mankind at large entertained no wish whatever to do anything but sleep between the hours of sunset and sunrise. The wants and tastes, then, to which all production ministers, whether common to all men, like the desire for food, or developed by influences from without, like the desire for telegraphic accommodation, are, when once they are in existence, essentially democratic in their nature. They are not like the movements of a mason, who constructs under an architect’s order a cathedral with the design of which he has nothing at {240} all to do. They represent the uncontrolled promptings of the individual’s own nature, and they affect production, and dictate to the producers what they shall produce, because they represent a spontaneous similarity of taste amongst a multitude of individuals living under similar circumstances. Here we have the reconciliation of the seemingly contradictory facts, that the power of the many over production is at once paramount and small. Economic demand, though it owes most of its development to the few, is yet, when its development has taken place, fundamentally democratic in its nature. But, on the other hand, economic supply, which not only ministers to existing wants, but elicits new ones, tends ever more and more as civilisation advances to depend on the action of the few. For as wants increase there is required, in order to satisfy them, a growing elaboration in the methods and organisation of supply; and in proportion as supply becomes more and more elaborately organised, it becomes, from the necessities of the case, less and less democratic. In the Middle Ages, for instance, the only rich _supplying_ class consisted of merchants, because the exchange of commodities, and the bringing them in the required quantities to the proper markets, was a process more complicated than the orginal processes of producing them. Production has now become quite as complicated as commerce; and a manufacturing aristocracy has developed itself equal in wealth to the commercial. {241}