eaken) the intellect;--we may join at once, with the
privation which I have been noticing, a delusion equally common. It is
this: that practical Statesmen assume too much credit to themselves for
their ability to see into the motives and manage the selfish passions of
their immediate agents and dependants; and for the skill with which they
baffle or resist the aims of their opponents. A promptness in looking
through the most superficial part of the characters of those men--who,
by the very circumstance of their contending ambitiously for the rewards
and honours of government, are separated from the mass of the society to
which they belong--is mistaken for a knowledge of human kind. Hence,
where higher knowledge is a prime requisite, they not only are
unfurnished, but, being unconscious that they are so, they look down
contemptuously upon those who endeavour to supply (in some degree) their
want.--The instincts of natural and social man; the deeper emotions; the
simpler feelings; the spacious range of the disinterested imagination;
the pride in country for country's sake, when to serve has not been a
formal profession--and the mind is therefore left in a state of dignity
only to be surpassed by having served nobly and generously; the
instantaneous accomplishment in which they start up who, upon a
searching call, stir for the Land which they love--not from personal
motives, but for a reward which is undefined and cannot be missed; the
solemn fraternity which a great Nation composes--gathered together, in a
stormy season, under the shade of ancestral feeling; the delicacy of
moral honour which pervades the minds of a people, when despair has been
suddenly thrown off and expectations are lofty; the apprehensiveness to
a touch unkindly or irreverent, where sympathy is at once exacted as a
tribute and welcomed as a gift; the power of injustice and inordinate
calamity to transmute, to invigorate, and to govern--to sweep away the
barriers of opinion--to reduce under submission passions purely evil--to
exalt the nature of indifferent qualities, and to render them fit
companions for the absolute virtues with which they are summoned to
associate--to consecrate passions which, if not bad in themselves, are
of such temper that, in the calm of ordinary life, they are rightly
deemed so--to correct and embody these passions--and, without weakening
them (nay, with tenfold addition to their strength), to make them worthy
of taking their pl