nd evil eternally the same."

"True; but I never said that man might not relieve individuals by
individual exertion: though he cannot by abstract theories--nay, even by
practical action in the wide circle--benefit the mass."

"Do you not employ on behalf of individuals the same moral agencies that
wise legislation or sound philosophy would adopt towards the multitude?
For example, you find that the children of your village are happier,
more orderly, more obedient, promise to be wiser and better men in their
own station of life, from the new, and, I grant, excellent system of
school discipline and teaching that you have established. What you have
done in one village, why should not legislation do throughout a kingdom?
Again, you find that, by simply holding out hope and emulation to
industry, by making stern distinctions between the energetic and the
idle, the independent exertion and the pauper-mendicancy, you have found
a lever by which you have literally moved and shifted the little world
around you. But what is the difference here between the rules of a
village lord and the laws of a wise legislature? The moral feelings
you have appealed to exist universally, the moral remedies you have
practised are as open to legislation as to the individual proprietor."

"Yes; but when you apply to a nation the same principles which
regenerate a village, new counterbalancing principles arise. If I give
education to my peasants, I send them into the world with advantages
_superior_ to their fellows,--advantages which, not being common to
their class, enable them to _outstrip_ their fellows. But if this
education were universal to the whole tribe, no man would have an
advantage superior to the others; the knowledge they would have acquired
being shared by all, would leave all as they now are, hewers of wood and
drawers of water: the principle of individual hope, which springs
from knowledge, would soon be baffled by the vast competition that
_universal_ knowledge would produce. Thus by the universal improvement
would be engendered a universal discontent.

"Take a broader view of the subject. Advantages given to the _few_
around me--superior wages, lighter toils, a greater sense of the
dignity of man--are not productive of any change in society. Give these
advantages to the _whole mass_ of the labouring classes, and what in
the small orbit is the desire of the _individual_ to rise becomes in
the large circumference the desire of t