en animated by it
can take a real interest. All matters fall out of sight, or at least
fall into a secondary place, which do not bear more or less directly and
patently upon the material and structural welfare of the community. In
this way the members of the community miss the most bracing, widening,
and elevated of the whole range of influences that create great
characters. First, they lose sincere concern about the larger questions
which the human mind has raised up for itself. Second, they lose a
fearless desire to reach the true answers to them, or if no certain
answers should prove to be within reach, then at any rate to be
satisfied on good grounds that this is so. Such questions are not
immediately discerned by commonplace minds to be of social import.
Consequently they, and all else that is not obviously connected with the
machinery of society, give way in the public consideration to what is so
connected with it, in a manner that cannot be mistaken.

Again, even minds that are not commonplace are affected for the worse by
the same spirit. They are aware of the existence of the great
speculative subjects and of their importance, but the pressure of the
political spirit on such men makes them afraid of the conclusions to
which free inquiry might bring them. Accordingly they abstain from
inquiry, and dread nothing so much as making up their minds. They see
reasons for thinking that, if they applied themselves seriously to the
formation of true opinions in this or that department, they would come
to conclusions which, though likely to make their way in the course of
some centuries, are wholly unpopular now, and which might ruin the
influence of anybody suspected of accepting, or even of so much as
leaning towards, them. Life, they reflect, is short; missionaries do
not pass for a very agreeable class, nor martyrs for a very sensible
class; one can only do a trifling amount of good in the world, at best;
it is moral suicide to throw away any chance of achieving even that
trifle; and therefore it is best not only not to express, but not to
take the trouble to acquire, right views in this quarter or that, and to
draw clear away from such or such a region of thought, for the sake of
keeping peace on earth and superficial good will among men.

It would be too harsh to stigmatise such a train of thought as
self-seeking and hypocritical. It is the natural product of the
political spirit, which is incessantly thinking of p