many as they would have had if they had
been careless or thoughtless men; and so, upon an average, the issue of
such intellectualised men will be less numerous than those of the
unintellectual.

Now, supposing this philosophical doctrine to be true--and the best
philosophers, I think, believe it--its application to the case in hand
is plain. Nothing promotes intellect like intellectual discussion, and
nothing promotes intellectual discussion so much as government by
discussion. The perpetual atmosphere of intellectual inquiry acts
powerfully, as everyone may see by looking about him in London, upon
the constitution both of men and women. There is only a certain QUANTUM
of power in each of our race; if it goes in one way it is spent, and
cannot go in another. The intellectual atmosphere abstracts strength to
intellectual matters; it tends to divert that strength--which the
circumstances of early society directed to the multiplication of
numbers; and as a polity of discussion tends, above all things, to
produce an intellectual atmosphere, the two things which seemed so far
off have been shown to be near, and free government has, in a second
case, been shown to tend to cure an inherited excess of human nature.

Lastly, a polity of discussion not only tends to diminish our inherited
defects, but also, in one case at least, to augment a heritable
excellence. It tends to strengthen and increase a subtle quality or
combination of qualities singularly useful in practical life-a quality
which it is not easy to describe exactly, and the issues of which it
would require not a remnant of an essay, but a whole essay to elucidate
completely. This quality I call ANIMATED MODERATION.

If anyone were asked to describe what it is which distinguishes the
writings of a man of genius who is also a great man of the world from
all other writings, I think he would use these same words, 'animated
moderation.' He would say that such writings are never slow, are never
excessive, are never exaggerated; that they are always instinct with
judgment, and yet that judgment is never a dull judgment; that they
have as much spirit in them as would go to make a wild writer, and yet
that every line of them is the product of a sane and sound writer. The
best and almost perfect instance of this in English is Scott. Homer was
perfect in it, as far as we can judge; Shakespeare is often perfect in
it for long together, though then, from the defects of a bad ed