Englishmen when in earnest are as little in love with tolerance as
Frenchmen or any other people, but--of giving way to the will of the
majority, so long as they remain a majority. This has come to pass for
the simple reason that, on any other terms, the participation of large
numbers of people in the control and arrangement of public affairs
immediately becomes unworkable. The gradual concentration of power in
the hands of a supreme deliberative body, the active share of so many
thousands of persons in choosing and controlling its members, the close
attention with which the proceedings of parliament are followed and
watched, the kind of dignity that has been lent to parliamentary methods
by the great importance of the transactions, have all tended in the same
direction. They have all helped both to fix our strongest and most
constant interests upon politics, and to ingrain the mental habits
proper to politics, far more deeply than any other, into our general
constitution and inmost character.

Thus the political spirit has grown to be the strongest element in our
national life; the dominant force, extending its influence over all our
ways of thinking in matters that have least to do with politics, or even
nothing at all to do with them. There has thus been engendered among us
the real sense of political responsibility. In a corresponding degree
has been discouraged, what it is the object of the present chapter to
urge, the sense of intellectual responsibility. If it were inevitable
that one of these two should always enfeeble or exclude the other, if
the price of the mental alacrity and open-mindedness of the age of
Pericles must always be paid in the political incompetence of the age of
Demosthenes, it would be hard to settle which quality ought to be most
eagerly encouraged by those who have most to do with the spiritual
direction of a community. No doubt the tone of a long-enduring and
imperial society, such as Rome was, must be conservative, drastic,