Now, what our author and others who reason like him forget, is that the
opportunities with which we are here concerned differ in one
all-important particular from those which concern us in the case either
of education or of ordinary employment. If one boy uses his educational
opportunities ill, he does nothing to prejudice the opportunities of
others who use them well. Should a sorter of letters, who, if he had
been sharp and trustworthy, might have risen to the highest and
best-paid post in his department, throw his opportunities away by
inattention or otherwise, the loss resulting is confined to the man
himself. The opportunities open to his fellows remain what they were
before. But when we come to industrial activity of those higher and
rarer kinds, on which the sustained and progressive welfare of the
entire community depends, such as invention, or any form of far-reaching
and original enterprise, the kind of opportunity which a man requires is
not an opportunity of exerting his own faculties in isolation, like a
sorter who is specially expert in deciphering illegible addresses. It is
an opportunity of directing the efforts of a large number of other men.
Apart from the case of craftsmanship and artistic production, all the
higher industrial efforts are reducible to a control of others, and can
be made only by men who have the means of controlling them. Since this
is one of the principal truths that have been elucidated in the present
volume, it is sufficient to reassert it here, without further comment.
If, therefore, a man is to be given the opportunity of embodying and
trying an invention in a really practical form, it will be necessary to
put at his disposal, let us disguise the fact as we may, the services of
a number of other men who will work in accordance with his orders. This,
as we have seen already, is what is done by the ordinary investor
whenever he lends capital to an inventor. He supplies him with the food
by which the requisite subordinates must be fed; and the state, were
the state the capitalist, would do virtually the same thing. It could
give him his opportunity in no other way.

Further, if the invention in question turns out to be successful--here
is another point which has already been explained and emphasised--the
wage-capital which has been consumed by the labourers is replaced by
some productive implement, which is more than the equivalent of the
labour force spent in constructing it. If, on