demand, and thus actually produces an effect on the arts of life, this practical result takes place only because, and in so far as, the number of artisans whose action is influenced by the inventor increases. The inventor, in other words, is an agent of “_social progression_” only because the particularised knowledge of which his invention consists is embodied either in models, or drawings, or written or spoken orders, and thus affects the technical action of whole classes of other men, just as Mr. Spencer affects, by means of his manuscript, the technical actions of the compositors who put his treatises into type. {140} Material progress, however, depends not only on the inventor and his machine. It depends also on the uses to which his machine is to be put. Here we shall find a new kind of greatness to be necessary—that which is called business ability; and we shall find that this operates precisely like the greatness of the inventor, through the influence which its possessor exercises over other men. All progress or development in commerce and in the arts of production is in proportion to the correspondence in every place and season of the goods brought into the market with the contemporary wants of the buyers. If it were not for this correspondence of the economic supply with the demand, progress in production would not be social progress at all; for just as a community does not become materially civilised by the mere act of wanting what it cannot get, so it does not become materially civilised by being presented with what it does not want—clothes, for example, which it could not possibly wear, and books in an unknown language, which it could not possibly read, or diminutive houses and furniture fit only for dolls. Now in any progressive community the wants of the buyers are in constant process not only of development but fluctuation, and are rarely quite the same in any two localities simultaneously. In order, therefore, that what is supplied may be in correspondence with what is wanted, it is necessary that in each industry the nature of the commodities produced be continually modified by men with a {141} special sort of knowledge of the world; and also, since want, in the sense of efficient demand, depends on the price at which these commodities can be supplied, it is necessary, just as it is in the case of the manufacture of machinery, that the army of men whose labour is involved in producing them shall be subject to men who, by their powers of industrial generalship, will be able to reduce the cost of reproduction to a minimum. Every business, in fact, and every industrial enterprise, succeeds or fails, not according to the amount of average labour involved in it, but according to the talents and energy by which this labour is directed. Thus in the economic domain, even more than in the intellectual, the great man is seen to be an agent of “_social progression_,” in virtue not of the results which