alf reproach from the same quarter for alleged
unkindly sentiments to the House of Lords, he repelled with vehement
warmth; insisting on his great regard for individual members, and
declaring that there was no man in England he respected more in his
public capacity, loved more in his private capacity, or from whom he had
received more remarkable proofs of his honour and love of literature,
than Lord Russell.[298] In Birmingham shortly after, discoursing on
education to the members of the Midland Institute, he told them they
should value self-improvement not because it led to fortune but because
it was good and right in itself; counselled them in regard to it that
Genius was not worth half so much as Attention, or the art of taking an
immense deal of pains, which he declared to be, in every study and
pursuit, the one sole, safe, certain, remunerative quality; and summed
up briefly his political belief.--"My faith in the people governing is,
on the whole, infinitesimal; my faith in the People governed is, on the
whole, illimitable." This he afterwards (January 1870) explained to mean
that he had very little confidence in the people who govern us ("with a
small p"), and very great confidence in the People whom they govern
("with a large P"). "My confession being shortly and elliptically
stated, was, with no evil intention I am absolutely sure, in some
quarters inversely explained." He added that his political opinions had
already been not obscurely stated in an "idle book or two"; and he
reminded his hearers that he was the inventor "of a certain fiction
called the Circumlocution Office, said to be very extravagant, but which
I _do_ see rather frequently quoted as if there were grains of truth at
the bottom of it." It may nevertheless be suspected, with some
confidence, that the construction of his real meaning was not far wrong
which assumed it as the condition precedent to his illimitable faith,
that the people, even with the big P, should be "governed." It was his
constant complaint that, being much in want of government, they had only
sham governors; and he had returned from his second American visit, as
he came back from his first, indisposed to believe that the political
problem had been solved in the land of the free. From the pages of his
last book, the bitterness of allusion so frequent in the books just
named was absent altogether; and his old unaltered wish to better what
was bad in English institutions, carried w