One great tap-root of our national increase has been the growth of self-government, or government by deliberative bodies, representing opposed principles and conflicting interests.  With the system of self-government has grown the habit—­not of tolerance precisely, for Englishmen when in earnest are as little in love with tolerance as Frenchmen or any other people, but—­of giving way to the will of the majority, so long as they remain a majority.  This has come to pass for the simple reason that, on any other terms, the participation of large numbers of people in the control and arrangement of public affairs immediately becomes unworkable.  The gradual concentration of power in the hands of a supreme deliberative body, the active share of so many thousands of persons in choosing and controlling its members, the close attention with which the proceedings of parliament are followed and watched, the kind of dignity that has been lent to parliamentary methods by the great importance of the transactions, have all tended in the same direction.  They have all helped both to fix our strongest and most constant interests upon politics, and to ingrain the mental habits proper to politics, far more deeply than any other, into our general constitution and inmost character.

Thus the political spirit has grown to be the strongest element in our national life; the dominant force, extending its influence over all our ways of thinking in matters that have least to do with politics, or even nothing at all to do with them.  There has thus been engendered among us the real sense of political responsibility.  In a corresponding degree has been discouraged, what it is the object of the present chapter to urge, the sense of intellectual responsibility.  If it were inevitable that one of these two should always enfeeble or exclude the other, if the price of the mental alacrity and open-mindedness of the age of Pericles must always be paid in the political incompetence of the age of Demosthenes, it would be hard to settle which quality ought to be most eagerly encouraged by those who have most to do with the spiritual direction of a community.  No doubt the tone of a long-enduring and imperial society, such as Rome was, must be conservative, drastic, positive, hostile to the death to every speculative novelty.  But then, after all, the permanence of Roman power was only valuable to mankind because it ensured the spread of certain civilising ideas.  And these ideas had originated among people so characteristically devoid of the sovereign faculty of political coherency as were the Greeks and the Jews.  In the Greeks, it is true, we find not only ideas of the highest speculative fertility, but actual political institutions.  Still we should hardly point to Greek history for the most favourable examples of their stable working.  Practically and as a matter of history, a society is seldom at the same time successfully energetic both in temporals and spirituals; seldom prosperous alike