’How is it we meet people brave as lions before an enemy, and rank cowards where there’s a botheration among their friends at home?  And tell me, too, if you’ve thought the thing over, what’s the meaning of this?  I ’ve met men in high places, and they’ve risen to distinction by their own efforts, and they head the nation.  Right enough, you’d say.  Well, I talk with them, and I find they’ve left their brains on the ladder that led them up; they’ve only the ideas of their grandfather on general subjects.  I come across a common peasant or craftsman, and he down there has a mind more open—­he’s wiser in his intelligence than his rulers and lawgivers up above him.  He understands what I say, and I learn from him.  I don’t learn much from our senators, or great lawyers, great doctors, professors, members of governing bodies—­that lot.  Policy seems to petrify their minds when they ’ve got on an eminence.  Now explain it, if you can.’

‘Responsibility has a certain effect on them, no doubt,’ said Weyburn.  ’Eminent station among men doesn’t give a larger outlook.  Most of them confine their observation to their supports.  It happens to be one of the questions I have thought over.  Here in England, and particularly on a fortnight’s run in the lowlands of Scotland once, I have, like you, my lady, come now and then across the people we call common, men and women, old wayside men especially; slow-minded, but hard in their grasp of facts, and ready to learn, and logical, large in their ideas, though going a roundabout way to express them.  They were at the bottom of wisdom, for they had in their heads the delicate sense of justice, upon which wisdom is founded.  That is what their rulers lack.  Unless we have the sense of justice abroad like a common air, there ’s no peace, and no steady advance.  But these humble people had it.  They reasoned from it, and came to sound conclusions.  I felt them to be my superiors.  On the other hand, I have not felt the same with “our senators, rulers, and lawgivers.”  They are for the most part deficient in the liberal mind.’

‘Ha! good, so far.  How do you account for it?’ said Lady Charlotte.

’I read it in this way:  that the world being such as it is at present, demanding and rewarding with honours and pay special services, the men called great, who have risen to distinction, are not men of brains, but the men of aptitudes.  These men of aptitudes have a poor conception of the facts of life to meet the necessities of modern expansion.  They are serviceable in departments.  They go as they are driven, or they resist.  In either case, they explain how it is that we have a world moving so sluggishly.  They are not the men of brains, the men of insight and outlook.  Often enough they are foes of the men of brains.’

‘Aptitudes; yes, that flashes a light into me,’ said Lady Charlotte.  ’I see it better.  It helps to some comprehension of their muddle.  A man may be a first-rate soldier, doctor, banker—­as we call the usurer now-a-days—­or brewer, orator, anything that leads up to a figure-head, and prove a foolish fellow if you sound him.  I ’ve thought something like it, but wanted the word.  They say themselves, “Get to know, and you see with what little wisdom the world is governed!” You explain how it is.  I shall carry “aptitudes” away.’