other words, that it is the product of the age, or the entire community. [Sidenote ◆1 Further, Socialists contend that Ability is the product of education, and that an equal education would equalise faculties.] [Sidenote ◆2 But this wild theory is in absolute opposition to the most notorious facts;] ◆¹ The socialistic theorist, however, even if he admits the above answer, will by no means admit that it is fatal to his own position. He will still take refuge in the proposition already alluded to, that the Ability of individuals is the child of opportunity, and that Ability is rarer than Labour, and able men are a minority, only because, under existing social circumstances, the opportunities which enable it to develop itself are comparatively few. And if he is pressed to say what these opportunities are, he will say that they may be described generally by the one word education. This argument can be answered in one way only, namely, an appeal to facts; and it is hard to conceive of anything which facts more conclusively disprove. Indeed, of much industrial Ability, it can not only be shown to be false, but it is also, on the very surface of it, absurd. It is plausible as applied to Ability of one kind only, namely, that of the inventor or the discoverer; but this, as we shall see presently, is so far from being Ability as a whole, that it is not even the most important part of it. Let us, however, suppose it to be the whole for a moment, and ask how far the actual facts of life warrant us in regarding it as the child of opportunity and education. Let us first refer to that general kind of experience which is recorded in the memory of everybody who has ever been at a school or college, and which, in the lives of tutors and masters, is repeated every day. Let a hundred individuals from childhood be brought up in the same school, let them all be devoted to the study of the same branch of knowledge, let them enjoy to the fullest what is called “equality of opportunity,” and it will be found that not only is there no equality in the amount of knowledge they acquire, but that there is hardly any resemblance in the uses to which they will be able to put it. Two youths may have worked together in one laboratory. One will never do more than understand the discoveries of others. The other will discover, like Columbus, some new world of mysteries. ◆² Indeed, equality of opportunity, as all experience shows, instead of tending to make the power of all men equal, does but serve to exhibit the extent to which they differ. [Sidenote ◆1 As may be seen by a glance at the lives of some of the most distinguished inventors of the world.]