ity to-day. "I suppose to-day all the thought, all
the art, all the increments of knowledge that matter, are supplied so
far as the English-speaking community is concerned by--how many?--by
three or four thousand individuals. ('Less,' said Thorns.) To be
more precise, by the mental hinterlands of three or four thousand
individuals. We who know some of the band entertain no illusions as to
their innate rarity. We know that they are just the few out of many, the
few who got in our world of chance and confusion, the timely stimulus,
the apt suggestion at the fortunate moment, the needed training, the
leisure. The rest are lost in the crowd, fail through the defects of
their qualities, become commonplace workmen and second-rate professional
men, marry commonplace wives, are as much waste as the driftage of
superfluous pollen in a pine forest is waste."

"Decent honest lives!" said Dayton to his bread-crumbs, with his chin in
his necktie. "WASTE!"

"And the people who do get what we call opportunity get it usually
in extremely limited and cramping forms. No man lives a life of
intellectual productivity alone; he needs not only material and
opportunity, but helpers, resonators. Round and about what I might
call the REAL men, you want the sympathetic cooperators, who help by
understanding. It isn't that our--SALT of three or four thousand is
needlessly rare; it is sustained by far too small and undifferentiated a
public. Most of the good men we know are not really doing the very
best work of their gifts; nearly all are a little adapted, most are
shockingly adapted to some second-best use. Now, I take it, this is the
very centre and origin of the muddle, futility, and unhappiness that
distresses us; it's the cardinal problem of the state--to discover,
develop, and use the exceptional gifts of men. And I see that best
done--I drift more and more away from the common stuff of legislative
and administrative activity--by a quite revolutionary development of the
educational machinery, but by a still more unprecedented attempt to
keep science going, to keep literature going, and to keep what is
the necessary spur of all science and literature, an intelligent and
appreciative criticism going. You know none of these things have ever
been kept going hitherto; they've come unexpectedly and inexplicably."

"Hear, hear!" from Dayton, cough, nodding of the head, and an expression
of mystical profundity.

"They've lit up a civilisation a