The beneficial effects, then, to be looked for from an equalisation of opportunity have been exaggerated by democratic thinkers because they have failed to perceive those facts. They have confounded the development of accomplishments which might conceivably be acquired by all with the development of faculties which, even potentially, are possessed by a few only. They see that education can increase the number of possible clerks, and they have therefore imagined that it can, with similar ease and certainty, increase the number of efficient men of genius. It must, however, be distinctly stated that {335} the error in their conclusion is one of exaggeration only. There is much exceptional talent which, though not of the highest order, will, when opportunity is given it, increase the wealth of the community, but which will, without the educational help of the State, be lost; and it may frankly be admitted that, within certain limits, the equalising of educational opportunity plays a very important part in supplying the community with exceptionally efficient citizens. But the main difficulties involved in the artificial equalisation of opportunity are not concerned with the problem of how to produce good results by it. They are connected with the problem of how to avoid producing bad results. Let us consider what the possible bad results of it are. In a general way they are indicated, or indirectly implied, in the saying so dear to the sterner and more thoughtless of the Conservatives—that popular education does nothing but promote discontent. Sweeping statements of this kind, however, though they may have an element of truth in them, are valueless till they have been carefully qualified; for what we have to ask about them is not whether they are true, but how far they are true, and in what precise senses. Thus, though it is true that the danger of diffusing education lies in the discontent that may thereby be promoted, some kinds of discontent are not dangerous—they are beneficial; therefore the danger of diffusing education lies in its tendency to promote not discontent generally, but {336} discontent of certain special kinds; and it is necessary to discriminate carefully what these kinds are. Now the kind of discontent which Conservatives generally have in view, when they denounce education because they think it tends to promote it, is by no means that from which danger really arises. What they generally have in view is a discontent with his circumstances which they think education will produce in the average working man. In reality, however, the primary danger of education is not to be looked for in its effects upon average men at all. It is to be looked for in its effects upon men who are distinctly exceptional.