But the whole of this class of objections will altogether disappear when we more closely examine what the qualities are on which the production of given social results depends. Let us take a few of these results as examples. Let us take the formulation and the popularising of some particular political demand, by which the whole course of a country’s history is affected, and the increasing and cheapening the supply of some articles of popular consumption—sugar, let us say, or workmen’s boots and clothing. The persons who urge the objections we are now discussing assume that all greatness, other than physical strength and dexterity, must be necessarily ethical or intellectual, and be calculated to excite our ethical or intellectual admiration. But let them consider the qualities requisite to produce such results as have just been mentioned, and they will see that no assumption could be more wide of the truth. A man who should, without underpaying his employees, succeed in manufacturing for the poorer {124} classes boots, jackets, or shirts better in quality and very much less in price than those which they are accustomed to buy now, would probably have to devote a large part of his life to the consideration of a particular kind of seemingly sordid detail. To a man of wide culture and brilliant imagination, the concentration of his faculties on details such as these would be impossible; and if he wished to produce any of the results in question, he would soon discover that he could not. The men who do produce them are rendered capable of doing so, not by the width of their minds, but by the exceptional narrowness. The intellectual stream flows strongly because it is confined in a narrow channel, and thus what to the superficial observer seems a sign of their inferiority, is really, so far as the results are concerned, one of the chief causes of their greatness. The mean man with the little thing to do Sees it and does it; The great man with the great end to pursue Dies ere he knows it. Robert Browning very tersely puts the case thus. We have only to alter his language in one respect. Seeing that the results we have now in view are realised results or nothing, the “_mean man_,” as an agent of material progress, will be the “great man,” and the “great man” will be the little. So, too, with regard to the man who affects {125} the history of his country by formulating and popularising some particular political demand—the secret of such a man’s success, in four cases out of five, will be found to lie in the greatness, not of his intellect, but of his will—in an exceptionally sanguine temperament, in exceptional courage and energy, and very likely in an exaggerated belief in his own nostrums, which, instead of being a sign of great intellectual acuteness, is incompatible with it.