een wealth and
culture, and have preferred to be governed by the rich from the belief
that they are likely to be better informed, and better situated for
intellectual activity of a disinterested kind, than those members of the
community whose time and thoughts are almost entirely occupied in
winning their daily bread by the incessant labor of their hands. And if
you go out into the world, if you mix with men of very different
classes, you will find that in a broad average way (I am not speaking
just now of the exceptions) the richer classes are much more capable of
entering into the sort of thinking which may be called intellectual
than those whose money is less plentiful, and whose opportunities have
therefore been less abundant. Indeed it may be asserted, roughly and
generally, that the narrowness of men's ideas is in direct proportion to
their parsimony in expenditure. I do not mean to affirm that all who
spend largely attain large intellectual results, for of course we know
that a man may spend vast sums on pursuits which do not educate him in
anything worth knowing, but the advantage is that with habits of free
expenditure the germs of thought are well tilled and watered, whereas
parsimony denies them every external help. The most spending class in
Europe is the English gentry, it is also the class most strikingly
characterized by a high general average of information;[5] the most
parsimonious class in Europe is the French peasantry; it is also the
class most strikingly characterized by ignorance and intellectual
apathy. The English gentleman has cultivated himself by various reading
and extensive travel, but the French peasant will not go anywhere except
to the market-town, and could not pardon the extravagance of buying a
book, or a candle to read it by in the evening. Between these extremes
we have various grades of the middle classes in which culture usually
increases very much in proportion to the expenditure. The rule is not
without its exceptions; there are rich vulgar people who spend a great
deal without improving themselves at all--who only, by unlimited
self-indulgence, succeed in making themselves so uncomfortably sensitive
to every bodily inconvenience that they have no leisure, even in the
midst of an unoccupied life, to think of anything but their own bellies
and their own skins--people whose power of attention is so feeble that
the smallest external incident distracts it, and who remember nothing of