upon things; by what it makes of the citizens, and what it does with
them; its tendency to improve or deteriorate the people themselves,
and the goodness or badness of the work it performs for them, and by
means of them. Government is at once a great influence acting on the
human mind, and a set of organised arrangements for public business:
in the first capacity its beneficial action is chiefly indirect, but
not therefore less vital, while its mischievous action may be direct.

  The difference between these two functions of a government is not,
like that between Order and Progress, a difference merely in degree,
but in kind. We must not, however, suppose that they have no
intimate connection with one another. The institutions which ensure
the best management of public affairs practicable in the existing
state of cultivation tend by this alone to the further improvement
of that state. A people which had the most just laws, the purest and
most efficient judicature, the most enlightened administration, the
most equitable and least onerous system of finance, compatible with
the stage it had attained in moral and intellectual advancement, would
be in a fair way to pass rapidly into a higher stage. Nor is there any
mode in which political institutions can contribute more effectually
to the improvement of the people than by doing their more direct
work well. And, reversely, if their machinery is so badly
constructed that they do their own particular business ill, the effect
is felt in a thousand ways in lowering the morality and deadening
the intelligence and activity of the people. But the distinction is
nevertheless real, because this is only one of the means by which
political institutions improve or deteriorate the human mind, and
the causes and modes of that beneficial or injurious influence
remain a distinct and much wider subject of study.

  Of the two modes of operation by which a form of government or set
of political institutions affects the welfare of the community- its
operation as an agency of national education, and its arrangements for
conducting the collective affairs of the community in the state of
education in which they already are; the last evidently varies much
less, from difference of country and state of civilisation, than the
first. It has also much less to do with the fundamental constitution
of the government. The mode of conducting the practical business of
government, which is best under a free constitution, would generally
be best also in an absolute monarchy: only an absolute monarchy is not
so likely to practise it. The laws of property, for example; the
principles of evidence and judicial procedure; the system of
taxation and of financial administration, need not necessarily be
different in different forms of government. Each of these matters
has principles and rules of its own, which are a subject of separate
study. General jurisprudence, civil and penal legislation, financial
and commercial policy, are sciences in themselves, or rather, separate
members of the comprehensive science or art of government: and the
most enlightened doctrines on all these subjects, though not equally
likely to be understood, or acted on under all forms of government,
yet, if understood and acted on, would in general be equally
beneficial under them all. It is true that these doctrines could not
be applied without some modifications to all states of society and
of the human mind: nevertheless, by far the greater number of them
would require modifications solely of details, to adapt them to any
state of society sufficiently advanced to possess rulers capable of
understanding them. A government to which they would be wholly
unsuitable must be one so bad in itself, or so opposed to public
feeling, as to be unable to maintain itself in existence by honest
means.

  It is otherwise with that portion of the interests of the
community which relate to the better or worse training of the people
themselves. Considered as instrumental to this, institutions need to
be radically different, according to the stage of advancement
already reached. The recognition of this truth, though for the most
part empirically rather than philosophically, may be regarded as the
main point of superiority in the political theories of the present
above those of the last age; in which it customary to claim
representative democracy for England or France by arguments which
would equally have proved it the only fit form of government for
Bedouins or Malays. The state of different communities, in point of
culture and development, ranges downwards to a condition very little
above the highest of the beasts. The upward range, too, is
considerable, and the future possible extension vastly greater. A
community can only be developed out of one of these states into a
higher by a concourse of influences, among the principal of which is
the government to which they are subject. In all states of human
improvement ever yet attained, the nature and degree of authority
exercised over individuals, the distribution of power, and the
conditions of command and obedience, are the most powerful of the
influences, except their religious belief, which make them what they
are, and enable them to become what they can be. They may be stopped
short at any point in their progress by defective adaptation of
their government to that particular stage of advancement. And the
one indispensable merit of a government, in favour of which it may
be forgiven almost any amount of other demerit compatible with
progress, is that its operation on the people is favourable, or not
unfavourable, to the next step which it is necessary for them to take,
in order to raise themselves to a higher level.

  Thus (to repeat a former example), a people in a state of savage
independence, in which every one lives for himself, exempt, unless
by fits, from any external control, is practically incapable of making
any progress in civilisation until it has learnt to obey. The
indispensable virtue, therefore, in a government which establishes
itself over a people of this sort is, that it make itself obeyed. To
enable it to do this, the constitution of the government must be
nearly, or quite, despotic. A constitution in any degree popular,
dependent on the voluntary surrender by the different members of the