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
considerations, as to admit of comparison with the public education
which every citizen of Athens obtained from her democratic
institutions, must make them nevertheless very different beings, in
range of ideas and development of faculties, from those who have
done nothing in their lives but drive a quill, or sell goods over a
counter.
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