more open--he's wiser in his intelligence than
his rulers and lawgivers up above him. He understands what I say, and I
learn from him. I don't learn much from our senators, or great lawyers,
great doctors, professors, members of governing bodies--that lot. Policy
seems to petrify their minds when they 've got on an eminence. Now
explain it, if you can.'

'Responsibility has a certain effect on them, no doubt,' said Weyburn.
'Eminent station among men doesn't give a larger outlook. Most of them
confine their observation to their supports. It happens to be one of the
questions I have thought over. Here in England, and particularly on a
fortnight's run in the lowlands of Scotland once, I have, like you, my
lady, come now and then across the people we call common, men and women,
old wayside men especially; slow-minded, but hard in their grasp of
facts, and ready to learn, and logical, large in their ideas, though
going a roundabout way to express them. They were at the bottom of
wisdom, for they had in their heads the delicate sense of justice, upon
which wisdom is founded. That is what their rulers lack. Unless we have
the sense of justice abroad like a common air, there 's no peace, and no
steady advance. But these humble people had it. They reasoned from it,
and came to sound conclusions. I felt them to be my superiors. On the
other hand, I have not felt the same with "our senators, rulers, and
lawgivers." They are for the most part deficient in the liberal mind.'

'Ha! good, so far. How do you account for it?' said Lady Charlotte.

'I read it in this way: that the world being such as it is at present,
demanding and rewarding with honours and pay special services, the men
called great, who have risen to distinction, are not men of brains, but
the men of aptitudes. These men of aptitudes have a poor conception of
the facts of life to meet the necessities of modern expansion. They are
serviceable in departments. They go as they are driven, or they resist.
In either case, they explain how it is that we have a world moving
so sluggishly. They are not the men of brains, the men of insight and
outlook. Often enough they are foes of the men of brains.'

'Aptitudes; yes, that flashes a light into me,' said Lady Charlotte. 'I
see it better. It helps to some comprehension of their muddle. A man
may be a first-rate soldier, doctor, banker--as we call the usurer
now-a-days--or brewer, orator, anything that leads up to a figure-he