from Olympus, then of course History had no scientific basis, but was dependent upon the arbitrary caprices of the Gods, and Homer's Iliad was a specimen of accurate descriptive sociology. If on the other hand the great man was a natural phenomenon, the theory stopped short half way toward its goal, for it gave us no explanation of the genesis of the Great Man nor of the reasons for the superhuman influence that it attributed to him.
Mallock, one of the most servile literary apologists of capitalism, has recently in a book called "Aristocracy and Evolution" attempted to revive and revise this theory and give it a scientific form. He still attributes all progress to Great Men, but with the brutal frankness of modern bourgeois Capitalism, gives us a new definition of Great Men. According to Mallock, the great man is the man who makes money. This has long been the working theory of bourgeois society, but Mallock is the first of them who has had the cynicism or the stupidity to confess it. But mark you, by this confession he admits the truth of the fundamental premise of modern scientific socialism, our Socialism, viz., that the economic factor is the dominant or determining factor in the life of
