Page:Eminent English liberals in and out of Parliament.djvu/181



F all Swift's bitter sayings, the bitterest, perhaps, was his observation that mankind are about as well fitted for flying as for thinking. If this be true,—and it is not necessary to be much of a misanthrope to admit, that, generally speaking, the human mind is a very imperfect instrument,—nothing can be more deplorable than the slight esteem in which the ablest thinkers are held by the majority of English electors.

"Thirty millions of people, mostly fools," and without so much as the capacity to discern the importance of putting the helm of the state into the hands of the least foolish! Howbeit, the phenomenon is not new. "There was a little city, and few men within it; and there came a great king against it, and besieged it, and built great bulwarks against it. Now, there was found in it a poor wise man, and he by his wisdom delivered the city; yet no man remembered that same poor man." The true "saviours of society" are, after all, its original thinkers. Of these England has at no time been 167