The object of this present work, so far as the question of wealth and its distribution is concerned, has been to show how absolutely false to fact are the theories to which this impracticable discontent is due, and how intellectually ludicrous is the position of the school of thinkers who imagine that such theories represent accurate science. These thinkers, in their dealings with property and capital, in spite of the esoteric admissions of a certain number of them to the contrary, touch the truth in their more popular utterances, only by the process of inverting it, or of putting the cart before the horse. They represent the employing classes as possessing exceptional strength merely because they are accidentally the possessors of capital. The actual truth is that these classes are possessors of capital because they themselves or their fathers have possessed exceptional strength. The arrows of Ulysses were more formidable than those of the suitors because Ulysses shot with a stronger bow than they; but he shot with a stronger bow for the very simple reason that he was strong enough to bend it and they were not. The employing classes contribute to the processes of production not less than the employed; in certain senses they contribute incalculably more, {372} and in every sense they contribute as truly; and they contribute not primarily because they possess capital, but because as a class they possess exceptional faculties, of which the capital possessed by them is at once the creation and the instrument. In other words, the inequalities which socialists regard as accidental are the natural result of the inequalities of human nature, and constitute also the sole social conditions under which men’s unequal faculties can co-operate towards a common end.