ery of new instruments and new
things, did not then exist. It is indeed a modern idea, and is peculiar
to a few European countries even yet. In the most intellectual city of
the ancient world, in its most intellectual age, Socrates, its most
intellectual inhabitant, discouraged the study of physics because they
engendered uncertainty, and did not augment human happiness. The kind
of knowledge which is most connected with human progress now was that
least connected with it then.

But a government by discussion, if it can be borne, at once breaks down
the yoke of fixed custom. The idea of the two is inconsistent. As far
as it goes, the mere putting up of a subject to discussion, with the
object of being guided by that discussion, is a clear admission that
that subject is in no degree settled by established rule, and that men
are free to choose in it. It is an admission too that there is no
sacred authority--no one transcendent and divinely appointed man whom
in that matter the community is bound to obey. And if a single subject
or group of subjects be once admitted to discussion, ere long the habit
of discussion comes to be established, the sacred charm of use and wont
to be dissolved. 'Democracy,' it has been said in modern times, 'is
like the grave; it takes, but it does not give.' The same is true of
'discussion.' Once effectually submit a subject to that ordeal, and you
can never withdraw it again; you can never again clothe it with
mystery, or fence it by consecration; it remains for ever open to free
choice, and exposed to profane deliberation.

The only subjects which can be first submitted, or which till a very
late age of civilisation can be submitted to discussion in the
community, are the questions involving the visible and pressing
interests of the community; they are political questions of high and
urgent import. If a nation has in any considerable degree gained the
habit, and exhibited the capacity, to discuss these questions with
freedom, and to decide them with discretion, to argue much on politics
and not to argue ruinously, an enormous advance in other kinds of
civilisation may confidently be predicted for it. And the reason is a
plain deduction from the principles which we have found to guide early
civilisation. The first pre-historic men were passionate savages, with
the greatest difficulty coerced into order and compressed into a state.
For ages were spent in beginning that order and founding that st