Such a routine would destroy individuality if anything could. Yet
individuals come out from it as different as Pitt from Fox, as Lord
Russell from Lord Gurzon, as Mr Winston Churchill from Lord Robert
Cecil. This acceptance of the congenital character of the individual
as the determining factor in his destiny had been reinforced by the
Lamarckian view of Evolution. If the giraffe can develop his neck by
wanting and trying, a man can develop his character in the same way. The
old saying, 'Where there is a will, there is a way,' condenses Lamarck's
theory of functional adaptation into a proverb. This felt bracingly
moral to strong minds, and reassuringly pious to feeble ones. There was
no more effective retort to the Socialist than to tell him to reform
himself before he pretends to reform society. If you were rich, how
pleasant it was to feel that you owed your riches to the superiority
of your own character! The industrial revolution had turned numbers
of greedy dullards into monstrously rich men. Nothing could be more
humiliating and threatening to them than the view that the falling of a
shower of gold into their pockets was as pure an accident as the falling
of a shower of hail on their umbrellas, and happened alike to the just
and unjust.
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