Page:Sphere and Duties of Government.djvu/43

23 agreeing to transform his fellow-creatures into mere machines.

2. Further, a second hurtful consequence ascribable to such a policy is, that these positive institutions tend to weaken the power and resources of the nation. For as the substance is annihilated by the form which is externally imposed upon it, so does it gain greater richness and beauty from that which is internally superinduced by its own spontaneous action; and in the case under consideration it is the form which annihilates the substance,—that which is of itself non-existent suppressing and destroying that which really is existent. The grand characteristic of human nature is organization. Whatever is to ripen in its soil and expand into a fair maturity, must first have existed therein as the little germ. Every manifestation of power presupposes the existence of enthusiasm; and but few things sufficiently cherish enthusiasm as to represent its object as a present or future possession. Now man never regards that which he possesses as so much his own, as that which he does; and the labourer who tends a garden is perhaps in a truer sense its owner, than the listless voluptuary who enjoys its fruits. It may be, such reasoning appears too general to admit of any practical application. Perhaps it seems even as though the extension of so many branches of science, which we owe chiefly to political institutions (for the State only can attempt experiments on a scale sufficiently vast), contributed to raise the power of in- tellect, and collaterally, our culture and character in general. But the intellectual faculties themselves are not necessarily ennobled by every acquisition to our knowledge; and though it were granted that these means virtually effected such a result, it does not so much apply to the entire nation, as to that particular portion of it which is connected with the government. The cultivation of the