The real question which we have to deal with here is why both balloons lift their aeronauts at least three miles into the clouds, while other men who have no balloon to lift them can get no higher than the top of the church steeple.

Or to come back to literal fact, our problem must be expressed thus: Let us take the present population of Great Britain or America, and, having noted the wealth at present annually produced by it, ask ourselves what would happen if some duly qualified angel were to pick out and kill, or otherwise make away with, every man, who, in virtue of his assimilated scientific knowledge, his inventive gifts, his constructive and practical imagination, his energy, his initiative, and his natural powers of leadership, was better able to direct others than the other nine were to direct themselves?
We cannot make this experiment in precisely the way described; but history will provide us with equivalents which are sufficiently accurate for our purpose.

There are, for example, in the case of Great Britain, data which have enabled statisticians with a considerable degree of unanimity to estimate the values produced per head of the industrial population at various periods from the reign of Charles II.

till to-day, and to reduce these values to comparable terms of money.

Now, we need not insist too much on the accuracy of the figures in question; but one broad fact is unmistakably shown by them--that the product per head towards the close of the nineteenth century was, to say the least of it, from four to five times as great as it was towards the close of the sixteenth.