There is a further point, however, which now remains to be noticed. When it is said that the great wealth-producer is motived mainly by the desire to enjoy an amount of wealth proportionate to what is produced by him, it is not asserted that in order to gratify this desire it is necessary that he should be able to appropriate the whole of what {322} is produced by him. On the contrary, of that constantly growing product which is added by the great man’s faculties to the product of ordinary labour, and out of which the income of the great man comes, a portion is capable of being appropriated by the ordinary labourers themselves. Indeed, the masses of the community are partakers in material progress, and have an interest in material progress solely because, as an actual fact, a considerable percentage of this added product goes to them; and though few of our so-called “labour leaders” recognise this truth, all the hopes of enrichment which they hold out to their followers imply nothing whatever beyond the securing a larger amount of an increment which is produced not by themselves but others. An important question, therefore, arises in this way as to how far the product of the great men can be taxed and handed over as a bonus to average labour without weakening the motives which prompt the great men to produce it. This is a question to which, by _à priori_ reasoning, it is absolutely impossible to give any definite answer. It is a question that can be solved only by cautious practical experiment; and the answer will vary constantly with times, places, and circumstances. All that can be asserted here, and it is all that requires to be insisted on, is that the amount of wealth which the exceptional wealth-producer can secure must be proportionate to what is produced by him, however far short of the whole of it; and that it must not be diminished to such an extent as {323} will render it less exceptional as the object of an ambitious and strenuous man’s desire. In other words, that graduation of social circumstances, those differences in ways of living, in habits, manners, accomplishments, and social functions, which have their physical basis in varying degrees of wealth, and give to civilised society what is its present, as it has been its past character—these graduations of social circumstances, which it is the cherished dream of the socialists to do away with, are indestructible so long as civilisation lasts. If they perish, civilisation will perish also; when civilisation is restored they will reappear along with it; and however they may be modified or adjusted, they can never be even approximately effaced. It is the facts briefly indicated in the present chapter which the socialists of to-day are principally distinguished by ignoring; and it is these facts which render socialism for ever impossible.