indulgences appear irrational and unallowable, may make them pause and reflect, and may contribute to bringing, with time, their individual reason into harmony with right reason.  But in no country, owing to the want of intellectual flexibility above mentioned, is the leaning which is our natural one, and, therefore, needs no recommending to us, so sedulously recommended, and the leaning which is [138] not our natural one, and, therefore, does not-need dispraising to us, so sedulously dispraised, as in ours.  To rely on the individual being, with us, the natural leaning, we will hear of nothing but the good of relying on the individual; to act through the collective nation on the individual being not our natural leaning, we will hear nothing in recommendation of it.  But the wise know that we often need to hear most of that to which we are least inclined, and even to learn to employ, in certain circumstances, that which is capable, if employed amiss, of being a danger to us.

Elsewhere this is certainly better understood than here.  In a recent number of the Westminster Review, an able writer, but with precisely our national want of flexibility of which I have been speaking, has unearthed, I see, for our present needs, an English translation, published some years ago, of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s book, The Sphere and Duties of Government.  Humboldt’s object in this book is to show that the operation of government ought to be severely limited to what directly and immediately relates to the security of person and property.  Wilhelm von Humboldt, one of the [139] most beautiful and perfect souls that have ever existed, used to say that one’s business in life was, first, to perfect oneself by all the means in one’s power, and, secondly, to try and create in the world around one an aristocracy, the most numerous that one possibly could, of talents and characters.  He saw, of course, that, in the end, everything comes to this,—­that the individual must act for himself, and must be perfect in himself; and he lived in a country, Germany, where people were disposed to act too little for themselves, and to rely too much on the Government.  But even thus, such was his flexibility, so little was he in bondage to a mere abstract maxim, that he saw very well that for his purpose itself, of enabling the individual to stand perfect on his own foundations and to do without the State, the action of the State would for long, long years be necessary; and soon after he wrote his book on The Sphere and Duties of Government, Wilhelm von Humboldt became Minister of Education in Prussia, and from his ministry all the great reforms which give the control of Prussian education to the State,—­the transference of the management of public schools from their old boards of trustees to the [140] State, the obligatory State-examination for schools, the obligatory State-examination for schoolmasters, and the foundation of the great State University of Berlin,—­take