With regard, then, to exceptional men, the object of education should be to stimulate the ambitions of those of them whose talents are efficient, whilst discouraging the ambitions of those whose talents are inherently defective. The stronger the ambitions of the former are, the better for themselves and for the community. Men like these are the true gold-mines of their country. The stronger the ambitions and the larger the opportunities of the latter, the more will the health and strength of the social organism be interfered with. With regard to the average man, the object of education should be to develop in him such tastes or accomplishments as will assist him in the work by which he is to live, and enable him to make the most of such means of enjoyment as are within his reach, whilst leaving him untormented with a desire for enjoyments that are beyond it; and the crucial fact on which it is necessary to insist is that the circumstances of different classes are permanently and necessarily different, and that for the average man of each class the education that will make the most of his life is necessarily different also. In other words, the only true equality of educational opportunity is an equal opportunity for each, not of acquiring the same knowledge or developing the same faculties, but of acquiring the knowledge and of developing the faculties which, given his circumstances and given his natural capacities, will {350} do most to make him a useful, a contented, and a happy man. Unfortunately these conclusions, simple and obvious as they seem, run directly counter to that entire theory of society which, with more or less consciousness, and with more or less precision, is held by the school of writers, reformers, and politicians, who suppose themselves, in some exclusive sense, to have social progress at heart; and also to that mass of diffused sentiment which, though not expressing itself formally in any theoretical propositions, has that theory as its foundation, and bears to it, as a political force, the same relation that vapour bears to water. These conclusions, therefore, which imply inequality in capacity as the cause of social progress, and inequality in social circumstances as the necessary and permanent conditions of it, are, like most of the other conclusions put forward in this work, certain to be met with objections of the most vehement kind, which it will now be necessary for us fairly and carefully to consider. We shall find that, as we do so, the entire arguments of the present work are summed up and brought together before us; and however incompatible they may be with the false conception of progress, of class relationships, and of the structure of society generally, which are at present mischievously popular, they form the foundation of hopes, for all classes, far more solid than those, the fallacy of which they aim at demonstrating. {351} CHAPTER IV INEQUALITY, HAPPINESS, AND PROGRESS