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own hand, but to achieve some position which will enable them to
prescribe tasks to others, and thus do justice to their real or supposed
talents by the construction of great machines, or the organisation of
great enterprises--in other words, with regard to those persons whose
ambition is to obtain what are called the prizes of life, and who think
themselves treated unjustly if they find themselves unable to gain
them--we have seen that to provide equal opportunities for all or even
for most of these, is in the very nature of things impossible. The
fundamental reason of this, let me say once more, is the fact that the
number of men possessing sufficient talent to conceive ambitious schemes
of one kind or another far exceeds the number of those whose talents are
capable of producing any useful results; and to give to this majority
opportunities of testing their projects by experiment would be merely to
deplete the resources of the entire nation for the sake of demonstrating
to one particular class that abortive talents are worse than no talents
at all.

Here we are in the presence of a fact far wider than this special
manifestation of it. In the animal and the vegetable world, no less than
in the human, the successes of nature are the siftings of its partial
failures; and in order to secure such services as are really productive
it must always be necessary to squander opportunities to a certain
extent in the testing of talents which ultimately turn out to be barren.
But cases of this kind may, at all events, be reduced to a minimum; and
the reduction of their number is possible, because they are largely an
artificial product. In order to understand how this is, we must go back
again to the question of equality of opportunity in education, and
consider it under an aspect which has not yet engaged our attention.

We started with supposing the establishment of a system of education
which would offer to all the same books and teachers, and also--for this
was part of our assumption--equal leisure to profit by them; and we
noted how soon opportunities would cease to be equal on account of the
different uses which would be made of them by different students. What
must now be noted is that as matters have been conducted hitherto,
attempts to make educational opportunities equal do tend to produce an
equality of a certain kind. Though they have no tendency to equalise
powers of achievement, they tend to produce an artificial e