It is similarly impossible for men of the socialistic temperament to understand the general process of industry, or to judge how it can and how it can not be altered, from the purely spectacular impressions which its intricate parts produce on them.
But the ingrained inability of such men to understand that which they would revolutionise does not reveal itself in their errors of theory only.

It reveals itself still more strikingly in their own relations to life.

If we allow for exceptional cases, such as that of Robert Owen, who was in his earlier days a competent man of business, we shall find that the theorists who desire to socialise wealth are generically deficient in the higher energies that produce it.

Though they doubtless could, like most men who are not cripples or idiots, make a living by some form of manual labour, they have none of them done anything to enlarge the powers of industry, or even to sustain them at their present pitch of efficiency.

They have never made two blades of grass grow where one blade grew before.