This truth, when once generally recognised, will lead to many practical consequences, of which the most immediately important will be dealt with in the following chapter. {324} CHAPTER III EQUALITY OF EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITY The two great facts, then, that have been elucidated by our inquiry thus far, are these: in the first place, all progress and civilisation, and more especially all production of wealth, results from a complicated process in which, man for man, a minority plays a part incalculably greater than the majority; and consequently, in the second place, the minority, man for man, possesses wealth that is correspondingly greater than the wealth of the majority, likewise. In addition to these facts a third has been elucidated also, to which it in desirable that we should give renewed attention. Since great men not only produce wealth directly, but produce it indirectly by producing wealth which produces it, and which they are enabled to hand on to their children, the wealthy class is at any particular moment always more numerous than those members of it who are engaged actually in production. In Great Britain, for example, it has been estimated that two-thirds of the aggregate income that pays income tax is rent or interest on capital, and that one-third represents {325} the direct products of work. We may therefore here adopt the rough hypothesis that out of each generation of our wealthy class a third part is enriching itself by the process of direct production, and two-thirds are living on the products produced for them indirectly by the capital or the means of production which were created by their fathers and their grandfathers. Now such being the case, what we have to notice is as follows. Though the members of the wealthy class are not always changing, as they would be were no saving of capital, no interest, and no bequest allowed, they are still changing gradually from generation to generation, so that whilst the class, as a class, always possesses a nucleus of families with whom wealth and the traditions of wealth are hereditary, a number of individuals born in it are constantly disappearing over its borders, and a number of other individuals are constantly passing into it.† † The most permanent form of hereditary wealth is land; but only a small minority of our existing landed families existed as landed families at the time of the last Heralds’ visitation. Thus, though the estates of this country are as old as the country itself, the actual possession of a large proportion of them by their owners, at any given time, represents their purchase by wealth recently created, and is, in fact, recent wealth converted into another form.