little short of eruptive: it would be Boreas blowing AEtna inside them;
and we should have impulse at work in the country, and immense importance
attaching to a man's whether he will or he won't--enough to womanize him.
We should be all but having Parliament for a sample of our choicest
rather than our likest: and see you not a peril in that?

Conceive, for the fleeting instants permitted to such insufferable
flights of fancy, our picked men ruling! So despotic an oligarchy as
would be there, is not a happy subject of contemplation. It is not too
much to say that a domination of the Intellect in England would at once
and entirely alter the face of the country. We should be governed by the
head with a vengeance: all the rest of the country being base members
indeed; Spartans--helots. Criticism, now so helpful to us, would wither
to the root: fun would die out of Parliament, and outside of it: we could
never laugh at our masters, or command them: and that good old-fashioned
shouldering of separate interests, which, if it stops progress, like a
block in the pit entrance to a theatre, proves us equal before the law,
puts an end to the pretence of higher merit in the one or the other, and
renders a stout build the safest assurance for coming through ultimately,
would be transformed to a painful orderliness, like a City procession
under the conduct of the police, and to classifications of things
according to their public value: decidedly no benefit to burly freedom.
None, if there were no shouldering and hustling, could tell whether
actually the fittest survived; as is now the case among survivors
delighting in a broad-chested fitness.

And consider the freezing isolation of a body of our quintessential
elect, seeing below them none to resemble them! Do you not hear in
imagination the land's regrets for that amiable nobility whose
pretensions were comically built on birth, acres, tailoring, style, and