And where, now, is the evil he is incurring or causing, during this progress of violating, step after step, the circumscription by which the aristocratic compasses were again and again, with small reluctant extensions to successive greater distances, defining the scope of the knowledge proper for a man of his condition? It is a bad thing, is it, that he has a multiplicity of ideas to relieve the tedium incident to the sameness of his course of life; that, with many things which had else been but mere insignificant facts, or plain dry notions and principles, he has a variety of interesting associations; like woodbines and roses wreathing round the otherwise bare, ungraceful forms of erect stones or withered trees; that the world is an interpreted and intelligible volume before his eyes; that he has a power of applying himself to _think_ of what it becomes at any time necessary for him to understand? Is it a judgment upon him for his temerity, in "seeking and intermeddling with wisdom" with which he had no business, that he has so much to impart to his children as they are growing up, and that if some of them are already come to maturity, they know not where to find a man to respect more than their father? Or if he takes a part in the converse and devotional exercises of religious society, is no one there the better for the clearness and the plenitude of his thoughts and the propriety of his expression?--But there would be no end of the preposterous suppositions fairly attachable to the notion, that the mental improvement of the common people has some proper limit of arbitrary prescription, on the ground simply of their _being_ the common people, and quite distinct from the restriction which their circumstances may invincibly impose on their ability.
Taken in this latter view, we acknowledge that their condition would be a subject for most melancholy contemplation,--if we did not hope for better times. The benevolent reflector, when sometimes led to survey in thought the endless myriads of beings with minds within the circuit of a country like this, will have a momentary vision of them as they would be if all improved to the highest mental condition to which it is _naturally possible_ for them to be exalted a magnificent spectacle; but it instantly fades and vanishes. And the sense is so powerfully upon him of the unchangeable economy of the world, which, even if the fairest visions of the millennium itself were realized, would still render such a thing _actually_ impossible, that he hardly regrets the bright scene was but a beautiful _mirage_, and melts away. His imagination then descends to view this immense tribe of rational beings in another, and comparatively moderate state of the cultivation of their faculties, a state not one-third part so lofty as that in which he had beheld all the individuals improved to the utmost of their natural capacity; and he thinks, that the condition of man's abode on earth _might_ admit of their being raised to _this_ elevation. But he soon sees that, till a mighty change shall come on the management of the affairs of nations, this too is impossible; and with regret he sees even this inferior ideal spectacle pass away, to rest on an age in distant prospect. At last he takes his imaginary stand on what he feels to be a very low level of the supposed improvement of the general popular mind; and he says, Thus much, at the least, should be a possibility allowed by the circumstances of the people under _any_ tolerable disposition of national interests;--and then he turns to look down on an actual condition in which care, and toil, and distress, render it impossible for a great proportion of the people to reach, or even approach, this his last and lowest conception of what the state of their minds ought to be.