Now the answer to both these questions will very largely depend on the existing conditions of the {329} community with reference to which they are asked. For though men’s powers of equalising opportunities are limited, their powers of making them unequal may be said to be indefinitely great; and the more unequal they have been made at the time when we ask our questions, the greater will the progress be which there will be room for us to make towards equalising them, and the greater will be the social advantages which we may hope to secure by making it. In France, for example, before the first Revolution, the laws affecting industry had almost ruined the nation, not because by unduly favouring one class they led to wealth being concentrated, but because by unduly hampering other classes they prevented its being produced; and the sweeping away by the Revolution of the old feudal inequalities, though it had none of the millennial effects which the Revolutionists themselves hoped for, has had others equally striking, though of a very different kind. It has not made men equal in point of wealth, but it has increased to an astonishing extent the wealth of all classes alike. And the way in which it has done this has been by removing artificial impediments to the development and free exercise of exceptional productive talent; or in other words, by an equalisation of economic opportunities. But the kind of equality that has thus been reached may be described as being of a negative rather than a positive kind. It depends on the absence of artificial impediments to production, rather than on the supply of any artificial helps to {330} it; which means that it depends on the absence of everything that might obstruct the strong, rather than on measures or institutions that should artificially lend strength to the weak. Now, so far as industrial ability of the highest kind is concerned, it is probable that this negative condition of things, which is merely the complete embodiment of a policy of _laisser-faire_, represents the utmost that, in any civilised country, can be done by the process of equalisation with any beneficial result. For in wealth-production the men whose capacities are really of the first order will, when not positively impeded, make their own opportunities for themselves; and the genius who is born with every opportunity waiting for him has but a few years’ start of the genius who is born with none. That such is the case is abundantly illustrated by history. If we consider the most famous of the men whose originality of mind and extraordinary spirit of enterprise have been chief amongst the forces which have enriched the civilised world, we shall find that those whose names most readily occur to us have had no opportunities save such as their own genius made for them. Arkwright, Cartwright, Watt, Stephenson, the intrepid and enduring adventurers who, in the teeth of prolonged