A
government is to be judged by its action upon men, and by its action
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.
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