The general or the sentimental objections, then, which might not unnaturally arise in the minds of many when the claims of the great man to be the sole agent of progress are first broadly asserted, are found to disappear altogether when the meaning of these claims is more fully considered. But sentimental objections, as has been said already, are by no means the only objections which these claims have {262} to encounter. Objections will be raised against them which are economic rather than sentimental, and which, moreover,—this is a still more important fact—rest solely upon a practical, and have no theoretical basis. In order to see what these objections are it will be well to consider them in their extremest and most uncompromising form. We will accordingly consider them as put forward by the socialists. That the objections of the socialists to the claims made for the great man are not grounded in any theory that consistently disallows them, is sufficiently shown by the fact that even the most extreme socialists, no less than the members of every other militant party, are always extolling the exceptional qualities of their own leaders. Agitators, thinkers, and writers like Karl Marx, Lassalle, and Engels have been extolled by their followers as though in their own way equal to Cæsar and Napoleon, to Aristotle, Galileo, and Bacon; and their works are continually called “marvels of reasoning,” and described as evincing “such powers of thought as are given to only a few men in the course of five hundred years.” The arguments, therefore, which are employed by socialistic thinkers to convince them that the great man is not essential to social progress, and plays no real part in it—those arguments to the examination of which the first chapters of this work were devoted, do not really convince even those who lay most stress on them, so far as they are applicable to social progress generally. For the {263} socialists in practice are forced to limit the application of them to two kinds of social action only; and these are social activity in the domains of political government and of wealth-production. They are, moreover, applied to the latter of these with so much more strictness than to the former, that the objections to the special claims of the great man as a wealth-producer are the only ones that here require our attention.