amiss the habitual impulse of French people is to say, "ll faut de
la patience"; and of English people, "What a shame." The people who
think it a shame when anything goes wrong- who rush to the conclusion
that the evil could and ought to have been prevented, are those who,
in the long run, do most to make the world better. If the desires
are low placed, if they extend to little beyond physical comfort,
and the show of riches, the immediate results of the energy will not
be much more than the continual extension of man's power over material
objects; but even this makes room, and prepares the mechanical
appliances, for the greatest intellectual and social achievements; and
while the energy is there, some persons will apply it, and it will
be applied more and more, to the perfecting not of outward
circumstances alone, but of man's inward nature. Inactivity,
unaspiringness, absence of desire, are a more fatal hindrance to
improvement than any misdirection of energy; and are that through
which alone, when existing in the mass, any very formidable
misdirection by an energetic few becomes possible. It is this, mainly,
which retains in a savage or semi-savage state the great majority of
the human race.

  Now there can be no kind of doubt that the passive type of character
is favoured by the government of one or a few, and the active
self-helping type by that of the Many. Irresponsible rulers need the
quiescence of the ruled more than they need any activity but that
which they can compel. Submissiveness to the prescriptions of men as
necessities of nature is the lesson inculcated by all governments upon
those who are wholly without participation in them. The will of
superiors, and the law as the will of superiors, must be passively
yielded to. But no men are mere instruments or materials in the
hands of their rulers who have will or spirit or a spring of
internal activity in the rest of their proceedings: and any
manifestation of these qualities, instead of receiving encouragement
from despots, has to get itself forgiven by them. Even when
irresponsible rulers are not sufficiently conscious of danger from the
mental activity of their subjects to be desirous of repressing it, the
position itself is a repression. Endeavour is even more effectually
restrained by the certainty of its impotence than by any positive
discouragement. Between subjection to the will of others, and the
virtues of self-help and self-government, there is a natural
incompatibility. This is more or less complete, according as the
bondage is strained or relaxed. Rulers differ very much in the
length to which they carry the control of the free agency of their
subjects, or the supersession of it by managing their business for
them. But the difference is in degree, not in principle; and the
best despots often go the greatest lengths in chaining up the free
agency of their subjects. A bad despot, when his own personal
indulgences have been provided for, may sometimes be willing to let
the people alone; but a good despot insists on doing them good, by
making them do their own business in a better way than they themselves
know of. The regulations which restricted to fixed processes all the
leading branches of French manufactures were the work of the great
Colbert.

  Very different is the state of the human faculties where a human
being feels himself under no other external restraint than the
necessities of nature, or mandates of society which he has his share
in imposing, and which it is open to him, if he thinks them wrong,
publicly to dissent from, and exert himself actively to get altered.
No doubt, under a government partially popular, this freedom may be
exercised even by those who are not partakers in the full privileges
of citizenship. But it is a great additional stimulus to any one's
self-help and self-reliance when he starts from even ground, and has
not to feel that his success depends on the impression he can make
upon the sentiments and dispositions of a body of whom he is not
one. It is a great discouragement to an individual, and a still
greater one to a class, to be left out of the constitution; to be
reduced to plead from outside the door to the arbiters of their
destiny, not taken into consultation within. The maximum of the
invigorating effect of freedom upon the character is only obtained
when the person acted on either is, or is looking forward to becoming,
a citizen as fully privileged as any other.

  What is still more important than even this matter of feeling is the
practical discipline which the character obtains from the occasional
demand made upon the citizens to exercise, for a time and in their
turn, some social function. It is not sufficiently considered how
little there is in most men's ordinary life to give any largeness
either to their conceptions or to their sentiments. Their work is a
routine; not a labour of love, but of self-interest in the most
elementary form, the satisfaction of daily wants; neither the thing
done, nor the process of doing it, introduces the mind to thoughts
or feelings extending beyond individuals; if instructive books are
within their reach, there is no stimulus to read them; and in most
cases the individual has no access to any person of cultivation much
superior to his own. Giving him something to do for the public,
supplies, in a measure, all these deficiencies. If circumstances allow
the amount of public duty assigned him to be considerable, it makes
him an educated man. Notwithstanding the defects of the social
system and moral ideas of antiquity, the practice of the dicastery and
the ecclesia raised the intellectual standard of an average Athenian
citizen far beyond anything of which there is yet an example in any
other mass of men, ancient or modern. The proofs of this are
apparent in every page of our great historian of Greece; but we need
scarcely look further than to the high quality of the addresses
which their great orators deemed best calculated to act with effect on
their understanding and will. A benefit of the same kind, though far
less in degree, is produced on Englishmen of the lower middle class by
their liability to be placed on juries and to serve parish offices;
which, though it does not occur to so many, nor is so continuous,
nor introduces them to so great a variety of elevated