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.
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