For productive faculties of the highest order, which not only minister to progress, but initiate it, and which make, as if by a conjuring trick, the hands of the average labourer produce new commodities of which he never would have dreamed himself—for faculties such as these, the demand is always unlimited. There are productive faculties also, exceptional although they are inferior, the demand for which is usually greater than the supply. But with regard to those faculties or accomplishments which are only exceptional accidentally, and which might be, like reading, conceivably made universal, the case is precisely opposite, and it is so for two reasons. In the first place, these accomplishments, which anybody might conceivably acquire—knowledge of French, for instance, or of book-keeping—though they may minister to the business of wealth-production, yet have no tendency in themselves to make the business grow. The number of persons, then, possessing these accomplishments who at any given time can put them to a productive use is limited by the condition in which production at that time is. Thus the number of clerks which a mercantile firm can employ is limited by the business which the firm happens to be doing; and though this business might be enlarged by the enterprise of one new {334} partner, it would not be enlarged, when there were no letters to copy, by the accession of ten young men who could copy letters beautifully. In the second place, even at times when the national business is growing, and the demand for these accomplishments is for the moment greater than the supply, any attempt by the State to make their development general would produce a supply indefinitely greater than the demand. Thus to multiply the number of labourers’ sons possessing accomplishments that would fit them for the work of clerks would not be to increase the number of young men who would wear black coats, and sit on stools in offices, instead of working in factories, or laying bricks, or ploughing. Instead of raising the position of the plough-boy to the same level as the clerk’s, it would lower the clerk’s salary to the level of the plough-boy’s wages; and clerk and plough-boy would be alike sufferers by the process.