gets the start of his avarice only half a neck, if he has ever
thought or read anything upon the subject, it will most probably be the
ruin of him. He will turn theoretical or experimental farmer, and
no more need be said. Mr. Cobbett, who is a sufficiently shrewd and
practical man, with an eye also to the main chance, had got some
notions in his head (from Tull's _Husbandry_) about the method of
sowing turnips, to which he would have sacrificed not only his estate at
Botley, but his native county of Hampshire itself, sooner than give up
an inch of his argument. 'Tut! will you baulk a man in the career of
his humour?' Therefore, that a man may not be ruined by his humours, he
should be too dull and phlegmatic to have any: he must have 'no figures
nor no fantasies which busy thought draws in the brains of men.' The
fact is, that the ingenuity or judgment of no one man is equal to that
of the world at large, which is the fruit of the experience and ability
of all mankind. Even where a man is right in a particular notion,
he will be apt to overrate the importance of his discovery, to the
detriment of his affairs. Action requires co-operation, but in general
if you set your face against custom, people will set their faces against
you. They cannot tell whether you are right or wrong, but they know
that you are guilty of a pragmatical assumption of superiority over them
which they do not like. There is no doubt that if a person two hundred
years ago had foreseen and attempted to put in practice the most
approved and successful methods of cultivation now in use, it would
have been a death-blow to his credit and fortune. So that though the
experiments and improvements of private individuals from time to time
gradually go to enrich the public stock of information and reform the
general practice, they are mostly the ruin of the person who makes them,
because he takes a part for the whole, and lays more stress upon the
single point in which he has found others in the wrong than on all the
rest in which they are substantially and prescriptively in the right.
The great requisite, it should appear, then, for the prosperous
management of ordinary business is the want of imagination, or of any
ideas but those of custom and interest on the narrowest scale; and as
the affairs of the world are necessarily carried on by the common run
of its inhabitants, it seems a wise dispensation of Providence that
it should be so. If no one could rent a