ractical, speculative and miscellaneous, is at your disposal! In the
lowest broad strata of the population, equally as in the highest and
narrowest, are produced men of every kind of genius; man for man, your
chance of genius is as good among the millions as among the units;--and
class for class, what must it be! From all classes, not from certain
hundreds now but from several millions, whatsoever man the gods had
gifted with intellect and nobleness, and power to help his country,
could be chosen: O Heavens, could,--if not by Tenpound Constituencies
and the force of beer, then by a Reforming Premier with eyes in his
head, who I think might do it quite infinitely better. Infinitely
better. For ignobleness cannot, by the nature of it, choose the noble:
no, there needs a seeing man who is himself noble, cognizant by internal
experience of the symptoms of nobleness. Shall we never think of this;
shall we never more remember this, then? It is forever true; and Nature
and Fact, however we may rattle our ballot-boxes, do at no time forget
it.

From the lowest and broadest stratum of Society, where the births are by
the million, there was born, almost in our own memory, a Robert Burns;
son of one who "had not capital for his poor moor-farm of Twenty
Pounds a year." Robert Burns never had the smallest chance to got into
Parliament, much as Robert Burns deserved, for all our sakes, to have
been found there. For the man--it was not known to men purblind, sunk
in their poor dim vulgar element, but might have been known to men of
insight who had any loyalty or any royalty of their own--was a born king
of men: full of valor, of intelligence and heroic nobleness; fit for
far other work than to break his heart among poor mean mortals, gauging
beer! Him no Tenpound Constituency chose, nor did any Reforming Premier:
in the deep-sunk British Nation, overwhelmed in foggy stupor, with the
loadstars all gone out for it, there was no whisper of a notion that it
could be desirable to choose him,--except to come and dine with you, and
in the interim to gauge. And yet heaven-born Mr. Pitt, at that period,
was by no means without need of Heroic Intellect, for other purposes
than gauging! But sorrowful strangulation by red-tape, much _tighter_
then than it now is when so many revolutionary earthquakes have tussled
it, quite tied up the meagre Pitt; and he said, on hearing of this Burns
and his sad hampered case, "Literature will take care of itself