Thirdly, with regard to equality of opportunity for those whose main ambition is not to be provided with some task-work performable by their 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 equality of expectation. In order to elucidate the nature of this fact, and its significance, I cannot do better than quote a passage from Ruskin, admirable for its trenchant felicity, which, since it occurs in a book much admired by socialists, may be commended to their special attention.[29] Economic demand, Ruskin says, is the expression of economic desires; but the constitution of human nature is such that these desires are divisible into two distinct kinds--desires for the commodities which men "need," and desires for commodities which they "wish for." The former arise from those appetites and appetencies in respect of which all are equal. They are virtually a fixed quantity, and the economic commodities requisite for their healthy satisfaction constitute a minimum which is virtually the same for all men. The latter, instead of being fixed, are capable of indefinite variation, and in these--the desires for what men "wish for" but do not "need"--we have the origin "of three-fourths of the demands existing in the world." "These demands are," he proceeds, "romantic. They are founded on visions, idealisms, hopes, and affections, and the regulation of the purse is, in its essence, regulation of the imagination and the heart."