ar his own burdens, for it is
only in so doing that the muscles of his body grow strong and that the
energies of his spirit become keen. It is by the qualities of the
individual alone that work is sound and that initiative is possible. All
trade and commerce, every practical affair of life, depend for success
on the personal ability of individuals.[253] It is not only so in the
everyday affairs of life, it is even more so on the highest planes of
intellectual and spiritual life. The supreme great men of the race were
termed by Carlyle its "heroes," by Emerson its "representative men,"
but, equally by the less and by the more democratic term, they are
always individuals standing apart from society, often in violent
opposition to it, though they have always conquered in the end. When any
great person has stood alone against the world it has always been the
world that lost. The strongest man, as Ibsen argued in his _Enemy of the
People_, is the man who stands most alone. "He will be the greatest,"
says Nietzsche in _Beyond Good and Evil_, "who can be the most solitary,
the most concealed, the most divergent." Every great and vitally
organized person is hostile to the rigid and narrow routine of social
conventions, whether established by law or by opinion; they must ever be
broken to suit his vital needs. Therefore the more we multiply these
social routines, the more strands we weave into the social web, the more
closely we draw them, by so much the more we are discouraging the
production of great and vitally organized persons, and by so much the
more we are exposing society to destruction at the hands of such
persons.

Beneath Socialism lies the assertion that society came first and that
individuals are indefinitely apt for education into their place in
society. Socialism has inherited the maxim, which Rousseau, the
uncompromising Individualist, placed at the front of his _Social
Contract_: "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." There is
nothing to be done but to strike off the chains and organize society on
a social basis. Men are not this or that; they are what they have been
made. Make the social conditions right, says the thorough-going
Socialist, and individuals will be all that we could desire them to be.
Not poverty alone, but disease, lunacy, prostitution, criminality are
all the results of bad social and economic conditions. Create the right
environment and you have done all that is necessary. To some