For political life is indeed in America a most
valuable school, but it is a school from which the ablest teachers are
excluded; the first minds in the country being as effectually shut out
from the national representation, and from public functions generally,
as if they were under a formal disqualification. The Demos, too, being
in America the one source of power, all the selfish ambition of the
country gravitates towards it, as it does in despotic countries
towards the monarch: the people, like the despot, is pursued with
adulation and sycophancy, and the corrupting effects of power fully
keep pace with its improving and ennobling influences. If, even with
this alloy, democratic institutions produce so marked a superiority of
mental development in the lowest class of Americans, compared with the
corresponding classes in England and elsewhere, what would it be if
the good portion of the influence could be retained without the bad?
And this, to a certain extent, may be done; but not by excluding
that portion of the people who have fewest intellectual stimuli of
other kinds from so inestimable an introduction to large, distant, and
complicated interests as is afforded by the attention they may be
induced to bestow on political affairs. It is by political
discussion that the manual labourer, whose employment is a routine,
and whose way of life brings him in contact with no variety of
impressions, circumstances, or ideas, is taught that remote causes,
and events which take place far off, have a most sensible effect
even on his personal interests; and it is from political discussion,
and collective political action, that one whose daily occupations
concentrate his interests in a small circle round himself, learns to
feel for and with his fellow citizens, and becomes consciously a
member of a great community.
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