Now even if the conclusions we are discussing did involve in reality all those consequences which would be so depressing to the majority of mankind, yet to prove the conclusions depressing would not be to prove them false; and few enthusiasts will deny that the object of sociological inquiry is not to reach conclusions which are inspiriting, but to reach conclusions which are true. As a matter of fact, however, the conclusions now in question have by no means that depressing tendency which the radical and the socialist will impute to them. For, in the first place, none of the arguments contained in the present work have been invoked to prove, or have any tendency to prove, that the many, as distinct from the few, in any progressive country, may not reasonably look forward to a continuous improvement in their condition—to a greater command of the comforts and luxuries of life, together with a lightening or a lessening of the labour necessary to procure them. On the contrary, the majority may look forward to an improvement in their circumstances which it is as impossible for us to imagine distinctly at the present time as it would have been for our grandfathers to imagine the telephone or the phonograph. All that has been urged in this work is as follows: That whatever may be the new advantages which the majority of mankind attain, they will attain them {354} not by any development in their own productive powers, but solely by the talents and activity of an exceptionally gifted minority, who will enable the ordinary man to earn more whilst labouring for fewer hours, because they will, by directing his labour to more and more advantage, secure from equal labour an ever-increasing product. The conclusion, therefore, is not that the majority in any progressive community may not look forward to indefinitely better conditions, but merely that their condition will not depend on themselves, and that, though the conditions of all may be bettered, they will never be even approximately equal. What, then, of the argument that, however conditions may be bettered, yet if exceptional conditions are still objects of exceptional desire, the want of these objects of desire will cause a sense of privation amongst the majority? To this really important question there are two answers.