ould be from the desire
for wealth, or from the love of an English home. The life of a cotton
manufacturer, who personally attends to his business with that close
supervision which has generally conducted to success, leaves scarcely
any margin for intellectual pleasure or spare energy for intellectual
work. After ten hours in the mill, it is difficult to sit down and
study; and even if there were energy enough, the mind would not readily
cast off the burden of great practical anxieties and responsibilities so
as to attune itself to disinterested thinking. The leaders of industry
often display mental power of as high an order as that which is employed
in the government of great empires; they show the highest administrative
ability, they have to deal continually with financial questions which on
their smaller scale require as much forethought and acumen as those that
concern the exchequer; but the ability they need is always strictly
practical, and there is the widest difference between the practical and
the intellectual minds. A constant and close pressure of practical
considerations develops the sort of power which deals effectually with
the present and its needs but atrophies the higher mind. The two minds
which we call intelligence and intellect resemble the feet and wings of
birds. Eagles and swallows walk badly or not at all, but they have a
marvellous strength of flight; ostriches are great pedestrians, but they
know nothing of the regions of the air. The best that can be hoped for
men immersed in the details of business is that they may be able, like
partridges and pheasants, to take a short flight on an emergency, and
rise, if only for a few minutes, above the level of the stubble and the
copse.

Without, therefore, desiring to imply any prejudiced contempt for trade,
I do desire to urge the consideration of its inevitable effects upon the
mind. For men of great practical intelligence and abundant energy, trade
is all-sufficing, but it could never entirely satisfy an intellectual
nature. And although there is drudgery in every pursuit, for even
literature and painting are full of it, still there are certain kinds of
drudgery which intellectual natures find to be harder to endure than
others. The drudgery which they bear least easily is an incessant
attention to duties which have no intellectual interest, and yet which
cannot be properly performed mechanically so as to leave the mind at
liberty for its own specula