[Sidenote ◆1 Equality of education and opportunity, instead of equalising characters, displays their differences.] [Sidenote ◆2 Ability, then, is a natural monopoly; because few people are born with it.] Now if, as we have seen, it is entirely contrary to experience to suppose that inventive Ability is produced by educational opportunity, much more is it contrary to experience—it is contrary even to common sense—to suppose that Ability of character can be produced in the same way. ◆¹ Education, as applied to the rousing and the training of the intellect, is like a polishing process applied to various stones, which may give to all of them a certain kind of smoothness, but brings to light their differences far more than their similarity. Education may make all of us write equally good grammar, but it will not make all of us write equally good poetry, any more than cutting and polishing will turn a pebble into an emerald. And if this is true of education applied to intellect, of education applied to character it is truer still. Character consists of such qualities as temperament, strength of will, imagination, perseverance, courage; ◆² and it is as absurd to expect that the same course of education will make a hundred boys equally brave or imaginative, as it is to expect that it will make them equally tall or heavy, or decorate all of them with hair of the same colour. [Sidenote ◆1 And now let us again compare its action with that of the mass of men surrounding it.] Ability, then, is rare as compared with Labour, not because the opportunities are rare which are favourable or necessary to its development, but because the minds and characters are rare which can turn opportunity to account. ◆¹ And now let us turn again to the more general form of the Socialistic fallacy—the general proposition that the Age, or Society, or the Human Race is the true inventor, and let us test this by a new order of facts. [Sidenote ◆1 Do able men in any sense represent the tendencies and intelligence of their average contemporaries? Let us turn for an answer to the history of the three chief industrial triumphs of this country: (1) the iron manufacture, (2) the cotton manufacture, (3) the steam-engine.]