eir congenital
characters, the strength of their romantic wishes bears naturally some
proportion to their own capacities for attempting to satisfy these
wishes for themselves. Few men, for example, have naturally a strong
wish for conditions which will enable them to exercise exceptional
power, unless they are conscious of possessing exceptional powers to
exercise. Hence, though this consciousness is in many cases deceptive,
the struggle of men for power is confined within narrow limits, and the
disappointments which embitter those who fail to attain it are naturally
confined within narrow limits also. So long as matters stand thus, the
majority of men are unaffected. But wishes which are naturally confined
to exceptional men, who are more or less capable of realising them, are
susceptible by education of indefinite extension to others who are not
so qualified; and in the case of these last, the results which they
produce are different. They multiply the number of those who demand
preferential opportunities, in order that they may enter on a struggle
in which they must ultimately fail.

They multiply the number of those, to a still greater extent, who demand
that positions or possessions shall be somehow provided for them by
society, without reference to any struggle on their own part at all. The
artificial diffusion of "wish" among these two distinguishable classes
is thus accomplished by education in somewhat different ways; but the
_modus operandi_ is in one respect the same in both. It consists of an
artificial enlarging, in the case of all individuals alike, of the ideas
entertained by them of their natural social rights; and an active
craving is thus generalised for possessions and modes of life, which
nine men out of ten would otherwise have never wasted a thought upon,
and which not one out of ten can possibly make his own. How easily this
idea of rights is susceptible of enlargement by teaching, and how
efficient it is in creating a desire where none would have existed
otherwise, is vividly illustrated by those not infrequent cases in which
men, who for half their lives have considered themselves fortunate in
the possession of moderate affluence, have suddenly been led to suppose
themselves the heirs of peerages or great estates, and have died insane
or bankrupt in consequence of their vain endeavours to secure rank or
property which, had it not been for a purely adventitious idea, would
have affected their hop