‘This is your duty, which I most abjectly entreat you to do,’ is pretty nearly the form of the supplication.

How if, instead of the solicitation of the thousands by the unit, the meritorious unit were besought by rushing thousands?—­as a mound of the plains that is circumvented by floods, and to which the waters cry, Be thou our island.  Let it be answered the questioner, with no discourteous adjectives, Thou fool!  To come to such heights of popular discrimination and political ardour the people would have to be vivified to a pitch little short of eruptive:  it would be Boreas blowing AEtna inside them; and we should have impulse at work in the country, and immense importance attaching to a man’s whether he will or he won’t—­enough to womanize him.  We should be all but having Parliament for a sample of our choicest rather than our likest:  and see you not a peril in that?

Conceive, for the fleeting instants permitted to such insufferable flights of fancy, our picked men ruling!  So despotic an oligarchy as would be there, is not a happy subject of contemplation.  It is not too much to say that a domination of the Intellect in England would at once and entirely alter the face of the country.  We should be governed by the head with a vengeance:  all the rest of the country being base members indeed; Spartans—­helots.  Criticism, now so helpful to us, would wither to the root:  fun would die out of Parliament, and outside of it:  we could never laugh at our masters, or command them:  and that good old-fashioned shouldering of separate interests, which, if it stops progress, like a block in the pit entrance to a theatre, proves us equal before the law, puts an end to the pretence of higher merit in the one or the other, and renders a stout build the safest assurance for coming through ultimately, would be transformed to a painful orderliness, like a City procession under the conduct of the police, and to classifications of things according to their public value:  decidedly no benefit to burly freedom.  None, if there were no shouldering and hustling, could tell whether actually the fittest survived; as is now the case among survivors delighting in a broad-chested fitness.

And consider the freezing isolation of a body of our quintessential elect, seeing below them none to resemble them!  Do you not hear in imagination the land’s regrets for that amiable nobility whose pretensions were comically built on birth, acres, tailoring, style, and an air?  Ah, that these unchallengeable new lords could be exchanged for those old ones!  These, with the traditions of how great people should look in our country, these would pass among us like bergs of ice—­a pure Polar aristocracy, inflicting the woes of wintriness upon us.  Keep them from concentrating!  At present I believe it to be their honest opinion, their wise opinion, and the sole opinion common to a majority of them, that it is more salutary, besides more diverting, to