r years can diminish
the ready firmness, as I doubt the fitness of a man of his education,
habits, and political principles, for the guidance of an intellectual
age.

I dislike Toryism, because I think it an unjust, exacting, and
pernicious thing, which tends to keep the interests of the many in
perpetual subjection to those of the few; but far be it from me, in
common modesty, to dislike those who have been brought up in its
principles, and taught to think them good,--far less such of them as
adorn it by intellectual or moral qualities, and who justly claim for
it, under its best aspect in private life, that ease and urbanity of
behaviour which implies an acknowledgment of its claims to respect,
even where those claims are partly grounded in prejudice. I heartily
grant to the privileged classes, that, enjoying in many respects the
best educations, they have been conservators of polished manners, and of
the other graces of intercourse. My quarrel with them is, that the
inferior part of their education induces them to wish to keep these
manners and graces to themselves, together with a superabundance, good
for nobody, of all other advantages; and that thus, instead of being the
preservers of a beautiful and genial flame, good for all, and in due
season partakeable by all, they would hoard and make an idolatrous
treasure of it, sacred to one class alone, and such as the diffusion of
knowledge renders it alike useless and exasperating to endeavour to
withhold.

I will conclude this Postscript with quotations from three writers of
the present day, who may be fairly taken to represent the three
distinct classes of the leaders of knowledge, and who will show what is
thought of the feasibility of putting an end to war,--the Utilitarian,
or those who are all for the tangible and material--the Metaphysical, or
those who recognize, in addition, the spiritual and imaginative wants of
mankind--and lastly (in no offensive sense), the Men of the World, whose
opinion will have the greatest weight of all with the incredulous, and
whose speaker is a soldier to boot, and a man who evidently sees fair
play to all the weaknesses as well as strengths of our nature.

The first quotation is from the venerable Mr Bentham, a man who
certainly lost sight of no existing or possible phase of society, such
as the ordinary disputants on this subject contemplate. I venture to
think him not thoroughly philosophical on the point, especially in what