he
one real "governing" of them on this God's-Earth:--an enterprise not to
be achieved by beaver intellect, but by other higher and highest kinds.
This is deficit _first_. And then _secondly_, Governments have, really
to a fatal and extraordinary extent, neglected in late ages to supply
themselves with what intellect was going; having, as was too natural
in the dim time, taken up a notion that human intellect, or even beaver
intellect, was not necessary to them at all, but that a little of
the _vulpine_ sort (if attainable), supported by routine, red-tape
traditions, and tolerable parliamentary eloquence on occasion, would
very well suffice. A most false and impious notion; leading to fatal
lethargy on the part of Governments, while Nature and Fact were
preparing strange phenomena in contradiction to it.

These are two very fatal deficits;--the remedy of either of which would
be the remedy of both, could we but find it! For indeed they are vitally
connected: one of them is sure to produce the other; and both once in
action together, the advent of darkness, certain enough to issue in
anarchy by and by, goes on with frightful acceleration. If Governments
neglect to invite what noble intellect there is, then too surely all
intellect, not omnipotent to resist bad influences, will tend to become
beaverish ignoble intellect; and quitting high aims, which seem shut up
from it, will help itself forward in the way of making money and such
like; or will even sink to be sham intellect, helping itself by methods
which are not only beaverish but vulpine, and so "ignoble" as not
to have common honesty. The Government, taking no thought to choose
intellect for itself, will gradually find that there is less and less
of a good quality to choose from: thus, as in all impieties it does,
bad grows worse at a frightful _double_ rate of progression; and your
impiety is twice cursed. If you are impious enough to tolerate darkness,
you will get ever more darkness to tolerate; and at that inevitable
stage of the account (inevitable in all such accounts) when actual light
or else destruction is the alternative, you will call to the Heavens and
the Earth for light, and none will come!

Certainly this evil, for one, has _not_ "wrought its own cure;" but
has wrought precisely the reverse, and has been hourly eating away what
possibilities of cure there were. And so, I fear, in spite of rumors to
the contrary, it always is with evils, with solecism