people_ is most alive.

But the mania for giving an immediate political and practical
application to all these fine ideas of the reason was fatal. Here an
Englishman is in his element: on this theme we can all go on for hours.
And all we are in the habit of saying on it has undoubtedly a great deal
of truth. Ideas cannot be too much prized in and for themselves, cannot
be too much lived with; but to transport them abruptly into the world of
politics and practice, violently to revolutionize this world to their
bidding,--that is quite another thing. There is the world of ideas and
there is the world of practice; the French are often for suppressing the
one and the English the other; but neither is to be suppressed. A member
of the House of Commons said to me the other day: "That a thing is an
anomaly, I consider to be no objection to it whatever." I venture to
think he was wrong; that a thing is an anomaly _is_ an objection to it,
but absolutely and in the sphere of ideas: it is not necessarily, under
such and such circumstances, or at such and such a moment, an objection
to it in the sphere of politics and practice. Joubert has said
beautifully: "C'est la force et le droit qui règlent toutes choses dans
le monde; la force en attendant le droit."[29] (Force and right are the
governors of this world; force till right is ready.) _Force till right
is ready_; and till right is ready, force, the existing order of things,
is justified, is the legitimate ruler. But right is something moral, and
implies inward recognition, free assent of the will; we are not ready
for right,--_right_, so far as we are concerned, _is not ready_,--until
we have attained this sense of seeing it and willing it. The way in
which for us it may change and transform force, the existing order of
things, and become, in its turn, the legitimate ruler of the world,
should depend on the way in which, when our time comes, we see it and
will it. Therefore for other people enamored of their own newly