those who navigate it successfully are insignificant in numbers. Nor are the prizes so good. The master with his independence, his property privileges and liberties, his dignity, has become a manager, a director, with no dignity and very little honour. He has become merely a rich man, and the glamour which civic office, local influence and general respect used to throw upon riches has gone, and has left them cold, glaring and vulgar. Hence the recent changes in business organisation have altered the nature of the appeal that is made to the ambitious plebeian. A generation or two ago the man rose to honour, and that had a selective effect upon the kind of man who rose; now-a-days the man rises to money, to salary, to warehouse and factory authority, and nothing more, and that also has a selective effect on the kind of man who rises. The second method of selection gives poorer results than the first.
Not only do the facts of wealth distribution contradict the assumption that it is the possession of private property which is the basis of our society, but the kind of enjoyment attached to commercial success which is being evolved by business changes is not so great as that which, so far as social respect and personal liberty are concerned, was the lot of the business man who managed his own capital and felt himself and his wealth integral parts of his town to be spent in the service of the town.
The truth is that society to-day is based on the fact that the majority of people can
