Ch. 4: The New Downing Street - Page 2

Governments have, really to a fatal and extraordinary extent, neglected in late ages to supply themselves with what intellect was going; having, as was too natural in the dim time, taken up a notion that human intellect, or even beaver intellect, was not necessary to them at all, but that a little of the vulpine sort (if attainable), supported by routine, red-tape traditions, and tolerable parliamentary eloquence on occasion, would very well suffice. A most false and impious notion; leading to fatal lethargy on the part of Governments, while Nature and Fact were preparing strange phenomena in contradiction to it.

These are two very fatal deficits;--the remedy of either of which would be the remedy of both, could we but find it! For indeed they are vitally connected: one of them is sure to produce the other; and both once in action together, the advent of darkness, certain enough to issue in anarchy by and by, goes on with frightful acceleration. If Governments neglect to invite what noble intellect there is, then too surely all intellect, not omnipotent to resist bad influences, will tend to become beaverish ignoble intellect; and quitting high aims, which seem shut up from it, will help itself forward in the way of making money and such like; or will even sink to be sham intellect, helping itself by methods which are not only beaverish but vulpine, and so "ignoble" as not to have common honesty. The Government, taking no thought to choose intellect for itself, will gradually find that there is less and less of a good quality to choose from: thus, as in all impieties it does, bad grows worse at a frightful double rate of progression; and your impiety is twice cursed. If you are impious enough to tolerate darkness, you will get ever more darkness to tolerate; and at that inevitable stage of the account (inevitable in all such accounts) when actual light or else destruction is the alternative, you will call to the Heavens and the Earth for light, and none will come!

Certainly this evil, for one, has not "wrought its own cure;" but has wrought precisely the reverse, and has been hourly eating away what possibilities of cure there were. And so, I fear, in spite of rumors to the contrary, it always is with evils, with solecisms against Nature, and contradictions to the divine fact of things: not an evil of them has ever wrought its own cure in my experience;--but has continually grown worse and wider and uglier, till some good (generally a good man) not able to endure the abomination longer, rose upon it and cured or else extinguished it. Evil Governments, divested of God's light because they have loved darkness rather, are not likelier than other evils to work their own cure out of that bad plight.

It is urgent upon all Governments to pause in this fatal course; persisted in, the goal is fearfully evident; every hour's persistence in it is making return more difficult. Intellect exists in all