In particular cases this
may not be true; such men may even have many children--they may be
men in all ways of unusual power and vigour. But they will not have
their maximum of posterity--will not have so 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.
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