ridiculing—and very justly—the socialistic idea that the State can be endowed with any talent or wisdom beyond what happens to be possessed by the individual functionaries who compose the State. These functionaries, he says, are merely “_a cluster of men_,” which, like any other cluster taken at hap-hazard, will comprise “_a few clever individuals, many ordinary, some decidedly stupid_”; and he devotes pages to showing by means of multiplied examples, how incapable the ordinary statesman, to say nothing of the decidedly stupid, has been of promoting progress in even the simplest ways. Mankind at large, then, according to Mr. Spencer, may, roughly speaking, be divided into three classes—the “_clever_” who are few, the “_ordinary_” who are the bulk of the population, and the “_decidedly stupid_” who form a considerable residuum; and it will appear from what he says of that representative “_cluster_,” the State, that whilst all real progress is the work of the clever few, the “_ordinary men_” do nothing to promote it, and “_the decidedly stupid men_” impede it. {114} Now it must be perfectly obvious to the reader that in this description of mankind we have the fundamental facts before us which the great-man theory formulates. For let us begin by supposing that the entire human race contained no individuals superior to the “_decidedly stupid_,” who, whenever they are placed in official positions, do nothing, Mr. Spencer declares, but commit the most pernicious blunders, either by their irrational conservatism, or their still more irrational innovations. It is obvious that in this case the world would never have progressed at all. Let us next suppose that in addition to the “_decidedly stupid_” men, the human race comprises also a large proportion of “_ordinary_” men, but not a single man who deserves to be called more than “_ordinary_.” Could social progress, as we know it, have taken place even then? Could thought, for example, ever have made any advances, had everybody been as incapable as Mr. Spencer’s “_ordinary_” man is of taking a rational view of human affairs—had everybody been enslaved, like him, “_to unwarranted opinions_,” and been, like him, entirely lacking in the faculty which enables a man to comprehend “_assembled propositions in their totality_”? Or to put the whole matter in terms of a single instance, could Mr. Spencer’s own system of philosophy have been written if he himself had not been immensely superior not only to “_ordinary_” men, but even to those rival thinkers whom, in every one of his volumes, he treats with such supreme disdain? {115}