The Sun.
London, England, 1868-01-03 00:00:00

LEADERS OF THE PEOPLE.

(From Fraser's Magazine.)
Among the feudal beauties that we cannot bring
back is, I repeat, an aristocracy which shall supply
the natural leaders of the people. The force of
circumstances has repealed the heavy protective
duty on natural gifts, without which an hereditary
aristocracy, such as that of old England, cannot
exist. Even yet, no doubt, we are a considerable
distance from free trade in qualities of heart and
brain. , Even yet the aristocracy have the best
chance of getting the readiest and most pro-
fitable Market for their statesman-like and
soldierly wares. If two wen of equal abi-
lity, one the son of a duke, the other the son
of a grocer, enter Parliament, the scion of nobility
has the prospect of a seat in the Cabinet 20 years
before the other ; the one has a good chance of
some day being Prime Minister, the other has
almost none. On the other hand, the son of the
duke is much less likely to be a hard worker than
the son of the grocer. At Eton and at Oxford he
finds it difficult to become a reading man, when
boating and cricketing offer so many immediate
rewards. When, on coming to town, he takes
chambers in the Temple, and reads law as a pre-
paration for political life, he has to stand a host of
temptations to idleness, to dissipation, and to
vice. Contact with some of the ablest young
men in the country soon tells him also that nothing
short of eight or ten hours' hard work a-day for
years will put him on an intellectual level with his
plebeian rivals. The prizes for which those men
struggle at the bar, or in Parliament, are so bril-
liant that, in sporting phrases, the " pace is tre-
mendous;" and if a young fellow has a title, ail
assured position in society, a handsome allowance
from his father, and the certainty of falling heir to
some thousands a year, we cannot wonder that he
declines to work like a dray horse in King's Bench
Walk, Inner Temple, or in the committee-rooms
of the House of Commons. Nor can we wonder
that his ambition lessees with advancing years. If
at twenty he aims at the premiership, at twenty-
two his ambition is very likely to soar no higher
than a secretaryship of state. At twenty-five
it may have come down to a junior lord-
ship of the Admiralty, whose chief duty is "to
cheer the Minister." At thirty it is, perhaps, con-
tent with a seat for one of the family boroughs,
and with the prospect of place at some future time
when billiards have lost their charm, and a blue-
book shall have more fascinations than the Racing
Calendar. So, between late hours, brandy and
seltzer, Pall Mall and Newmarket, the chances are
that the son of a duke, instead of going to the
Treasury bench, will go to a very different sort of
place. That is one of the merciful provisions by
which nature guards the poor multitude against
the tyranny of the rich few. Nothing is more
clear than that, in the long run, circumstances make
men. Take a thousand men of equal ability ;
put five hundred to the blacksmith's forge, so
that their muscles shall be exercised all day long,
and their brains never ; put the other five hundred
into a philosophical class-room, or the House of
Commons, so that their wits shall be sharpened by
constant practice; and if no malign influence come
in to defeat the experiment, a few years will place
as great a difference between the ability of the hand
workers and the brain-workers as there is between
a mechanic and a North American Indian. Nor
will the distance remain stationary. Day by
day it will grow ; for while intellectual work
affords a constant stimulus to mental development,
manual labour stimulates only up to a certain
point. Manual work demands thought dur-
ing the process of learning, and then becomes
mechanical. The intellectual benefit which a skilled
mechanic reaps from his toil is mostly got during
the years of apprenticeship, and not during the
years when the hand has become attuned to obey
the impulses of the mind with the regularity of a
machine. Nor does even that fact measure the
disadvantages of toil. The children of the black-
smith will nut start on an intellectual level with the
children of the thinkers, though the two sets of
parents were originally equal in natural endowments.
Physiology has left no doubt that the one class will
begin life with a much finer intellectual fibre than
the other ; with a better made, better oiled,
more powerful brain-machine. And even if that
fact be denied, an incontestible and hardly less

signal advantage rests with the scholarly families.
The blacksmiths on the one hand, and the thinkers
on the other, have been generating an atmosphere
of ideas ; but while the ideas of the one are

poor and closely connected with the anvil, those of
the other are a mighty crowd, rich, subtle, highly

organised, and running up into every crevice of human
life. In each case they form links of association
with problems which the full-grown utan has to
solve ; they are seeds which will fructify and grow
under the heat of active life ; they are the primary
materials with which thought is to work. Hence
by the time that the children of the 500 black-
smiths and the children of the 500 students begin
the task of formal education, they are already sepa-
rated by a mighty intellectual distance. The one
set understand nothing beyond the forge ; and if a
thoughtful book be put into their hands, they have
not light enough in their own minds to see its
meaning. The other are so richly dowered with
links of association that they easily find their way
through intellectual labyrinths in which their poor
relatives would be hopelessly lost. Since they pos-
sess the materials of thought in abundance, the
suggestion of au event, or a word, or a sound, or an
image, leads them, as if by instinct, to fresh ideas,
which, in turn, form new starting points. Hence, if
an malign influence check the growth of those men,
they will reach a higher mental stature than their
fathers ; and in like manner their children will
attain ahigher stature than themselves. Now, brain-
power rules in despite of laws passed to handicap it
in the race with mediocrity ; and since the offspring
of our five hundred students would always be grow-
ing more able than the offspring of our five hundred
blacksmiths, it follows that, in the absence of any
malign influence, we should in time have an aristo-
cracy which should be the lord and master of the
inferior caste , which should hardly need to chal-