I entertain no doubt myself that the answer to the first question should be in the affirmative. Democracy is an excellent thing; but, though quite consistent with progress, it is not progressive _per se_. Its value is regulative not dynamic; and if it meant (as it never does) substantial uniformity, instead of legal equality, we should become fossilised at once. Movement may be controlled or checked by the many; it is initiated and made effective by the few. If (for the sake of illustration) we suppose mental capacity in all its many forms to be mensurable and commensurable, and then imagine two societies possessing the same average capacity--but an average made up in one case of equal units, in the other of a majority slightly below the average and a minority much above it, few could doubt that the second, not the first, would show the greatest aptitude for movement. It might go wrong, but it would go. The second question--how is this originality (in its higher manifestations called genius) effectively produced? is not so simple. Excluding education in its narrowest sense--which few would regard as having much to do with the matter--the only alternatives seem to be the following: Original capacity may be no more than one of the ordinary variations incidental to heredity. A community may breed a minority thus exceptionally gifted, as it breeds a minority of men over six feet six. There may be an average decennial output of congenital geniuses as there is an average decennial output of congenital idiots--though the number is likely to be smaller. But if this be the sole cause of the phenomenon, why does the same race _apparently_ produce many men of genius in one generation and few in another? Why are years of abundance so often followed by long periods of sterility? The most obvious explanation of this would seem to be that in some periods circumstances give many openings to genius, in some periods few. The genius is constantly produced; but it is only occasionally recognised. In this there must be some truth. A mob orator in Turkey, a religious reformer in seventeenth century Spain, a military leader in the Sandwich islands, would hardly get their chance. Yet the theory of opportunity can scarcely be reckoned a complete explanation. For it leaves unaccounted for the _variety_ of genius which has in some countries marked epochs of vigorous national development. Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries, Florence in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Holland in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, are the typical examples. In such periods the opportunities of statesmen, soldiers, orators, and diplomatists, may have been specially frequent. But whence came the poets, the sculptors, the painters, the philosophers and the men of letters? What peculiar opportunities had _they_?