mire their
cleverness? 'Nay, some of them are stupid enough to believe what the
people tell them.' And when all the world is telling a man that he is
six feet high, and he has no measure, how can he believe anything
else? But don't get into a passion: to see our statesmen trying their
nostrums, and fancying that they can cut off at a blow the Hydra-like
rogueries of mankind, is as good as a play. Minute enactments are
superfluous in good states, and are useless in bad ones.

And now what remains of the work of legislation? Nothing for us; but to
Apollo the god of Delphi we leave the ordering of the greatest of all
things--that is to say, religion. Only our ancestral deity sitting upon
the centre and navel of the earth will be trusted by us if we have any
sense, in an affair of such magnitude. No foreign god shall be supreme
in our realms...

Here, as Socrates would say, let us 'reflect on' (Greek) what has
preceded: thus far we have spoken not of the happiness of the citizens,
but only of the well-being of the State. They may be the happiest of
men, but our principal aim in founding the State was not to make them
happy. They were to be guardians, not holiday-makers. In this pleasant
manner is presented to us the famous question both of ancient and modern
philosophy, touching the relation of duty to happiness, of right to
utility.

First duty, then happiness, is the natural order of our moral ideas. The
utilitarian principle is valuable as a corrective of error, and shows
to us a side of ethics which is apt to be neglected. It may be admitted
further that right and utility are co-extensive, and that he who makes
the happiness of mankind his object has one of the highest and noblest
motives of human action. But utility is not the historical basis of
morality; nor the aspect in which moral and religious ideas commonly
occur to the mind. The greatest happiness of all is, as we believe, the
far-off result of the divine government of the universe. The greatest
happiness of the individual is certainly to be found in a life of virtue
and goodness. But we seem to be more assured of a law of right than we
can be of a divine purpose, that 'all mankind should be saved;' and
we infer the one from the other. And the greatest happiness of the
individual may be the reverse of the greatest happiness in the ordinary
sense of the term, and may be realised in a life of pain, or in a
voluntary death. Further, the word 'happiness' has sev