ential to society, to develop and use their capacities to "the
fullest extent possible"; and this is merely another way of saying that,
without the motive provided by the possibility of accumulation and
bequest, the exceptional faculties would not be developed or used at
all. Moreover, the amounts which may be accumulated and bequeathed,
although they will be strictly limited, must, "X" says, be
considerable. He suggests that incomes should be allowed up to L8,000,
and bequeathable property up to L200,000. And here we come to a question
which is still more pertinent than the preceding. Why must the
permissible amounts of income and of bequeathable property be of
proportions such as those which he contemplates? Why does he not take
his bill and write down quickly L200 of income instead of L8,000, and
limit bequeathable property to L2,000 instead of L200,000? Because he
evidently recognises that the men whose possible services to society are
"immensely and incalculably greater" than those of the majority of their
fellow citizens would not be tempted by a reward which, reduced to its
smallest proportions, would not be very largely in excess of what was
attainable by more ordinary exertions. In his formal statement of his
case, he says that the amount of the reward would be entirely determined
by what _ought_ to be sufficient for the purpose in the estimation of
the voting majority; and he mentions the sums in question as those on
which they would probably fix. And it is, of course, quite imaginable
that the majority, in making either these or any other estimates, might
be right. But what "X" fails altogether to see is that, if the majority
of the citizens _were_ right, such sums would not be sufficient because
the majority of citizens happened to think that they ought to be. They
would be sufficient because they were felt to be sufficient by the
minority who were invited to earn them, at whose feelings the majority
would have made a shrewd or a lucky guess. A thousand men with
fishing-rods might meet in an inn parlour and vote that such and such
flies were sufficient to attract trout. But it lies with the trout to
determine whether or no he will rise to them. It is a question, not of
what the fishermen think, but of what the trout thinks; and the
fishermen's thoughts are effective only when they coincide with the
trout's.

So long, then, as society desires to get the best work out of its
citizens, and so long as some men a