the population of Britain consists of so many millions, ‘mostly fools,’ he conveys a quite wrong impression.  No doubt there are some who are silly out and out, who are always fools, and essentially fools.  No doubt almost all, if you questioned them on great matters of which they have hardly thought, would express very foolish and absurd opinions.  But then these absurd opinions are not the staple production of their minds.  These are not a fair sample of their ordinary thoughts.  Their ordinary thoughts are, in the main, sensible and reasonable, no doubt.  Once upon a time, while a famous criminal trial was exciting vast interest, I heard a man in a railway-carriage, with looks of vast slyness and of special stores of information, tell several others that the judge and the counsel on each side had met quietly the evening before to arrange what the verdict should be; and that though the trial would go on to its end to delude the public, still the whole thing was already settled.  Now, my first impulse was to regard the man with no small interest, and to say to myself, There, unquestionably, is a fool.  But, on reflection, I felt I was wrong.  No doubt he talked like a fool on this point.  No doubt he expressed himself in terms worthy of an asylum for idiots.  But the man may have been a very shrewd and sensible man in matters with which he was accustomed to deal:  he was a horse-dealer, I believe, and I doubt not sharp enough at market; and the idiotic appearance he made was the result of his applying his understanding to a matter quite beyond his experience and out of his province.  But a man is not properly to be called a fool, even though occasionally he says and does very foolish things, if the great preponderance of the things he says and does be reasonable.  No doubt Mr. Carlyle is right in so far as this:  that in almost every man there is an element of the fool.  Almost all have a vein of folly running through them, and cropping out at the surface now and then.  But in most men that is not the characteristic part of their nature.  There is more of the sensible man than of the fool.

For the forms of unsoundness in those who are mental screws of the commonplace order; they are endless.  You sometimes meet an intellectual defect like that of the conscientious blockhead James II., who thought that to differ from him in opinion was to doubt his word and call him a liar.  An unsoundness common to all uneducated people is, that they cannot argue any question without getting into a rage and roaring at the top of their voice.  This unsoundness exists in a good many educated men too.  A peculiar twist of some minds is this—­that instead of maintaining by argument the thesis they are maintaining, which is probably that two and two make five, they branch off and begin to adduce arguments which do not go to prove that, but to prove that the man who maintains that two and two make four is a fool, or even a ruffian.  Some good men are subject to this infirmity—­that