And now from the triumphs of war let us turn to those of peace. “_These_,” says Mr. Spencer, “_unlike the former, make their appearance unobtrusively, without the aid of any king or legislator_.” It may, no doubt, be true that they do appear unobtrusively in the sense that they are not accompanied by trumpets and drums and tom-toms. A factory for the production of toffee, or of trimmings for ladies’ petticoats does not require an Ivan the Terrible to direct it, nor are Mr. Spencer’s sentences as he writes them punctuated by discharges of artillery. But if the essence of kingship and {59} leadership is to command the actions of others, the larger part of the progressive activities of peace, and the arts and products of civilisation, result from and imply the influence of kings and leaders, in essentially the same sense as do the successes of primitive war, the only difference being that the kings are here more numerous, and though they do not wear any arms or uniforms, are incomparably more autocratic than the kings and czars who do. As a particularly clear illustration of this important truth, let us take Mr. Spencer himself, and place him before his own eyes as an autocratic king or ruler. In certain respects he is so; and it is only because he is so that he has been able to give, through his books, his thoughts and theories to the world. For let us examine any one of his volumes and consider what it is, in so far as it differs from any other volume—let us say from a treatise on the cutting of trousers, or an attack on the Spencerian philosophy—which is printed in similar type on pages of the same size. It differs solely in the order in which the letters have been arranged by the hands of the compositors; and its value as a work of philosophy consequently depends altogether on a certain complicated series of movements which the hands of the compositors have made. And how has this prolonged series of minute movements been secured? It has been secured by the fact that Mr. Herbert Spencer, through his manuscript, has given the compositors a prolonged series of orders, which their hands, day after day, have been obliged to obey {60} passively. He has been as absolute a master of all their professional actions as ever was the most arbitrary general of the professional actions of his soldiery; and there is absolutely no difference in point of command and obedience between the compositors who, at Mr. Spencer’s bidding, put into type the words “_homogeneity_” and “_the Unknowable_” and the Guards who charged the French at the bidding of the Duke of Wellington.