Now with regard to this bargain or contract which the community has not only made, but is always remaking and revising with its great men, we must observe that it is a bargain which, from the necessities of the case, is made by the community solely with individual great men who are living. It is not a bargain offered to the great men of the past, no matter how much of his greatness the living great man may owe to them. It is impossible to bargain with the dead, and therefore to the present question the claims of the dead are as irrelevant as the claims of protoplasm. The present question is how shall such and such living people be induced to develop certain superiorities which are latent in them, or to use to the best advantage superiorities which have been developed already. And {276} the answer depends on these men themselves. It depends on the characters which they personally possess, and not on the parents or ancestors from whom their characters have been derived. We can no more go behind the personality of the great man in bargaining with him, than we can go behind the personality of the dipsomaniac in attempting to cure him. We may excuse the failing of the latter as something which he has inherited from his ancestors; we can cure it only as something for which he is himself responsible. If civilisation, therefore, depends on the great man, no community can become or remain civilised which does not so arrange itself as to accord to its living great men such rewards as they themselves feel to be a sufficient inducement firstly to develop their faculties, and secondly to employ them to the utmost. Here, then, we have a new and final verification of that truth which has already been established against the arguments of Mr. Spencer—namely, that the great man is a _vera causa_ of progress, and that no explanation of progress has any practical value which does not base itself on an examination of the great man’s character. And that such is the case will become yet more apparent when we take into consideration the following additional facts, which are quite distinct from any we have yet touched upon, and which practically have an equal, or perhaps even a superior, importance.