willing, for the sake of the argument, to concede all this; but I must
point out how great the concession is; how much more is needed to
produce even an approximation to these results than is conveyed in the
simple expression, a good despot. Their realisation would in fact
imply, not merely a good monarch, but an all-seeing one. He must be at
all times informed correctly, in considerable detail, of the conduct
and working of every branch of administration, in every district of
the country, and must be able, in the twenty-four hours per day
which are all that is granted to a king as to the humblest labourer,
to give an effective share of attention and superintendence to all
parts of this vast field; or he must at least be capable of discerning
and choosing out, from among the mass of his subjects, not only a
large abundance of honest and able men, fit to conduct every branch of
public administration under supervision and control, but also the
small number of men of eminent virtues and talents who can be
trusted not only to do without that supervision, but to exercise it
themselves over others. So extraordinary are the faculties and
energies required for performing this task in any supportable
manner, that the good despot whom we are supposing can hardly be
imagined as consenting to undertake it, unless as a refuge from
intolerable evils, and a transitional preparation for something
beyond. But the argument can do without even this immense item in
the account. Suppose the difficulty vanquished. What should we then
have? One man of superhuman mental activity managing the entire
affairs of a mentally passive people. Their passivity is implied in
the very idea of absolute power. The nation as a whole, and every
individual composing it, are without any potential voice in their
own destiny. They exercise no will in respect to their collective
interests. All is decided for them by a will not their own, which it
is legally a crime for them to disobey.

  What sort of human beings can be formed under such a regimen? What
development can either their thinking or their active faculties attain
under it? On matters of pure theory they might perhaps be allowed to
speculate, so long as their speculations either did not approach
politics, or had not the remotest connection with its practice. On
practical affairs they could at most be only suffered to suggest;
and even under the most moderate of despots, none but persons of
already admitted or reputed superiority could hope that their
suggestions would be known to, much less regarded by, those who had
the management of affairs. A person must have a very unusual taste for
intellectual exercise in and for itself, who will put himself to the
trouble of thought when it is to have no outward effect, or qualify
himself for functions which he has no chance of being allowed to
exercise. The only sufficient incitement to mental exertion, in any
but a few minds in a generation, is the prospect of some practical use
to be made of its results. It does not follow that the nation will
be wholly destitute of intellectual power. The common business of
life, which must necessarily be performed by each individual or family
for themselves, will call forth some amount of intelligence and
practical ability, within a certain narrow range of ideas. There may
be a select class of savants, who cultivate science with a view to its
physical uses, or for the pleasure of the pursuit. There will be a
bureaucracy, and persons in training for the bureaucracy, who will
be taught at least some empirical maxims of government and public
administration. There may be, and often has been, a systematic
organisation of the best mental power in the country in some special
direction (commonly military) to promote the grandeur of the despot.
But the public at large remain without information and without
interest on all greater matters of practice; or, if they have any
knowledge of them, it is but a dilettante knowledge, like that which
people have of the mechanical arts who have never handled a tool.

  Nor is it only in their intelligence that they suffer. Their moral
capacities are equally stunted. Wherever the sphere of action of human
beings is artificially circumscribed, their sentiments are narrowed
and dwarfed in the same proportion. The food of feeling is action:
even domestic affection lives upon voluntary good offices. Let a
person have nothing to do for his country, and he will not care for
it. It has been said of old, that in a despotism there is at most
but one patriot, the despot himself; and the saying rests on a just
appreciation of the effects of absolute subjection, even to a good and
wise master. Religion remains: and here at least, it may be thought,
is an agency that may be relied on for lifting men's eyes and minds
above the dust at their feet. But religion, even supposing it to
escape perversion for the purposes of despotism, ceases in these
circumstances to be a social concern, and narrows into a personal
affair between an individual and his Maker, in which the issue at
stake is but his private salvation. Religion in this shape is quite
consistent with the most selfish and contracted egoism, and identifies
the votary as little in feeling with the rest of his kind as
sensuality itself.

  A good despotism means a government in which, so far as depends on
the despot, there is no positive oppression by officers of state,
but in which all the collective interests of the people are managed
for them, all the thinking that has relation to collective interests
done for them, and in which their minds are formed by, and
consenting to, this abdication of their own energies. Leaving things
to the Government, like leaving them to Providence, is synonymous with
caring nothing about them, and accepting their results, when
disagreeable, as visitations of Nature. With the exception, therefore,
of a few studious men who take an intellectual interest in speculation
for its own sake, the intelligence and sentiments of the whole
people are given up to the material interests, and, when these are
provided for, to the amusement and ornamentation, of private life. But
to say this is to say, if the whole testimony of history is worth
anything, that the era of national decline has arrived: that is, if
the nation had ever attained anything to decline from. If it has never
risen above the condition of an Oriental people, in that condition