◆¹ These facts speak plainly enough for themselves; and the conscience of most men will add its own witness to what they teach us—which is this. So far as industrial progress is concerned, the majority of mankind are passive. They labour as the conditions into which they are born compel them to labour; but they do nothing, from their cradle to their grave, so to alter these conditions that their own labour, or Labour generally, shall produce larger or improved results. The most progressive race in the world—or in other words the English race—has progressed as it has done only because it has produced the largest minority of men fitted to lead, and has been quickest in obeying their orders; but apart from these men it has had no appreciable tendency to move. Let the average Englishman ask himself if this is not absolutely true. Let him imagine himself arraigned before the Deity at the Day of Judgment, and the Deity saying this to him: “You found when you entered the world that a man’s labour on the average produced each year such and such an amount of wealth. Have you done anything to make the product of the same labour greater? Have you discovered or applied any new principle to any branch of industry? Have you guided industry into any new direction? Have the exertions of any other human being been made more efficacious owing to your powers of invention, of enterprise, or of management?” There is not one man in a hundred who, if thus questioned at the Judgment-seat, would be able, on examining every thought and deed of his life, to give the Judge any answer but, “No. So far as I am concerned, the powers of Labour, are as I found them.” CHAPTER IV _The Conclusion arrived at in the preceding Book restated. The Annual Amount produced by Ability in the United Kingdom._ [Sidenote ◆1 The more, then, that we examine the question, the more clearly do we see the magnitude of the work performed by Ability of the few.] ◆¹ In spite, then, of the arguments which Socialists have borrowed from psychology, and with which, by transferring them to the sphere of economics, and so depriving them of all practical meaning, they have contrived to confuse the problem of industrial progress, the facts of the case, when examined from a practical point of view, stand out hard and clear and unambiguous. Industrial progress is the work not of society as a whole but of a small part of it, to the entire exclusion of the larger part; the reason of this being that the faculties to which this progress is due—the faculties which I have included under the name of Industrial Ability—are found to exist only in a small percentage of individuals, and are practically absent from the minds, characters, and temperaments of the majority of the human race. Ability is, in fact, a narrow natural monopoly.