be met.  Passing by the kindred and usually accompanying influence of birth in a certain rank—­and, where education has been pre-defined from childhood for the express purpose of future political power, the tendency of such education to warp (and therefore weaken) the intellect;—­we may join at once, with the privation which I have been noticing, a delusion equally common.  It is this:  that practical Statesmen assume too much credit to themselves for their ability to see into the motives and manage the selfish passions of their immediate agents and dependants; and for the skill with which they baffle or resist the aims of their opponents.  A promptness in looking through the most superficial part of the characters of those men—­who, by the very circumstance of their contending ambitiously for the rewards and honours of government, are separated from the mass of the society to which they belong—­is mistaken for a knowledge of human kind.  Hence, where higher knowledge is a prime requisite, they not only are unfurnished, but, being unconscious that they are so, they look down contemptuously upon those who endeavour to supply (in some degree) their want.—­The instincts of natural and social man; the deeper emotions; the simpler feelings; the spacious range of the disinterested imagination; the pride in country for country’s sake, when to serve has not been a formal profession—­and the mind is therefore left in a state of dignity only to be surpassed by having served nobly and generously; the instantaneous accomplishment in which they start up who, upon a searching call, stir for the Land which they love—­not from personal motives, but for a reward which is undefined and cannot be missed; the solemn fraternity which a great Nation composes—­gathered together, in a stormy season, under the shade of ancestral feeling; the delicacy of moral honour which pervades the minds of a people, when despair has been suddenly thrown off and expectations are lofty; the apprehensiveness to a touch unkindly or irreverent, where sympathy is at once exacted as a tribute and welcomed as a gift; the power of injustice and inordinate calamity to transmute, to invigorate, and to govern—­to sweep away the barriers of opinion—­to reduce under submission passions purely evil—­to exalt the nature of indifferent qualities, and to render them fit companions for the absolute virtues with which they are summoned to associate—­to consecrate passions which, if not bad in themselves, are of such temper that, in the calm of ordinary life, they are rightly deemed so—­to correct and embody these passions—­and, without weakening them (nay, with tenfold addition to their strength), to make them worthy of taking their place as the advanced guard of hope, when a sublime movement of deliverance is to be originated;—­these arrangements and resources of nature, these ways and means of society, have so little connection with those others upon which a ruling minister of a long-established government