practical mind would consider, of all human pursuits), if “idle star-gazers” had not watched long and carefully the motions of the heavenly bodies,—­our modern astronomy would have been impossible, and without our astronomy “our ships, our colonies, our seamen,” all which makes modern life modern life, could not have existed.  Ages of sedentary, quiet, thinking people were required before that noisy existence began, and without those pale preliminary students it never could have been brought into being.  And nine-tenths of modern science is in this respect the same:  it is the produce of men whom their contemporaries thought dreamers, who were laughed at for caring for what did not concern them, who as the proverb went “walked into a well from looking at the stars,” who were believed to be useless if any one could be such.  And the conclusion is plain that if there had been more such people, if the world had not laughed at those there were, if rather it had encouraged them, there would have been a great accumulation of proved science ages before there was.  It was the irritable activity, the “wish to be doing something,” that prevented it,—­most men inherited a nature too eager and too restless to be quiet and find out things:  and even worse, with their idle clamor they “disturbed the brooding hen”; they would not let those be quiet who wished to be so, and out of whose calm thought much good might have come forth.

If we consider how much science has done and how much it is doing for mankind, and if the over-activity of men is proved to be the cause why science came so late into the world and is so small and scanty still, that will convince most people that our over-activity is a very great evil; but this is only part and perhaps not the greatest part, of the harm that over-activity does.  As I have said, it is inherited from times when life was simple, objects were plain, and quick action generally led to desirable ends:  if A kills B before B kills A, then A survives, and the human race is a race of A’s.  But the issues of life are plain no longer:  to act rightly in modern society requires a great deal of previous study, a great deal of assimilated information, a great deal of sharpened imagination; and these prerequisites of sound action require much time, and I was going to say much “lying in the sun,” a long period of “mere passiveness.”

[Argument to show that the same vice of impatience damages war, philanthropy, commerce, and even speculation.]

But it will be said, What has government by discussion to do with these things? will it prevent them, or even mitigate them?  It can and does do both, in the very plainest way.  If you want to stop instant and immediate action, always make it a condition that the action shall not begin till a considerable number of persons have talked over it and have agreed on it.  If those persons be people of different temperaments, different ideas, and different educations, you have an almost infallible security that nothing