Mr.Brunel's descendants have, I believe, still in their possession, a collection of drawings, sent him by a variety of inventors, and representing all sorts of devices by which the launching might be accomplished.

All were, as the draughtsmanship was enough to show, the work of men of high technical training; but the practical suggestions embodied in one and all of them could not have been more grotesque had they emanated from a home for madmen.

To have given an equality of opportunity to all this tribe of inventors of putting their devices to the test would have probably cost more than the building of the ship itself, and the ship at the end would have been stranded in the dock still.

This curious case is representative, and is sufficiently illustrative of the fact that opportunity of this costly kind could be conceded to a few only of those who would demand, and believe themselves to deserve it; and the state, as the trustee of the public, would have, unless it were prepared to ruin the nation, to be incomparably more cautious than any private investor.[28] Of the general doctrine, then, that the opportunities of all should be equal, we may repeat that, as an abstract proposition, it is one which could be contested by nobody; but we have seen that, when applied to societies of unequal men, and to the various tasks of life, its original simplicity is lost, and it does not become even intelligible until we divest it of a large part of its implications.

Economic or industrial opportunity is, we have seen, of three kinds: firstly, educational opportunity; secondly, the opportunity of performing and receiving the full equivalent of an ordinary task or service, such as that of a postman, the value of which depends on its conformity to a prescribed pattern or schedule; and thirdly, opportunity of directing the work of others, thereby initiating new enterprises or realising new inventions--a kind of opportunity requiring the control of capital, which capital, whether provided by the state or otherwise, would be lost to the community unless it were used efficiently.
With regard to educational opportunity--it has been seen that it is possible to equalise this, approximately if not entirely, at a given time in the early lives of all, but that it would be possible to maintain the equality for a short time only.
With regard to opportunities of earning a livelihood subsequently by performing one or other of those ordinary and innumerable tasks which must always fall to the lot of four men out of every five, we may say that an equalisation of opportunities of this kind is the admitted object of every reformer and statesman who believes that the prosperity of a country is synonymous with the welfare of its inhabitants.