This demand made by the exceptional producer rests on exactly the same basis as does that of the average customer.

It rests on the tastes and characters of the men who make it; and it is just as impossible for the many to decide by legislation that the few shall put forth the whole of their exceptional powers for the sake of one reward, when what they want is another, as it is for the few to make the many buy snuff when they want tobacco, or buy green coats when they want black.[16] That such is the case will, to those who may be inclined to doubt it, become more evident if they consider with more attention than they are generally accustomed to exercise what the main attraction of great wealth is for the men who in the modern world are the producers of it on the greatest scale.

Socialists and similar reformers--the people who principally busy themselves with discussing what this attraction is--are the people who are least capable of forming any true opinion about it.
They not only have, as a rule, no experience of wealth themselves, but they are further generically distinguished by a deficiency of those powers that create it.

They are like men with no muscles, who reason about the temperament of a prize-fighter; and their conception of what wealth means for those who produce and possess it is apt, in consequence, to be of the most puerile kind.

It is founded, apparently, on their conception of what a greedy boy, without pocket-money, feels when he stares at the tarts lying in a pastry-cook's window.