organizing, and the better the mode of organization, the better will
be the government.

We have now, therefore, obtained a foundation for a twofold division
of the merit which any set of political institutions can possess. It
consists partly of the degree in which they promote the general mental
advancement of the community, including under that phrase advancement
in intellect, in virtue, and in practical activity and efficiency, and
partly of the degree of perfection with which they organize the moral,
intellectual, and active worth already existing, so as to operate with
the greatest effect on public affairs. A government is to be judged by
its action upon men and by its action upon things; by what it makes of
the citizens, and what it does with them; its tendency to improve or
deteriorate the people themselves, and the goodness or badness of the
work it performs for them, and by means of them. Government is at once
a great influence acting on the human mind, and a set of organized
arrangements for public business: in the first capacity its beneficial
action is chiefly indirect, but not therefore less vital, while its
mischievous action may be direct.

The difference between these two functions of a government is not,
like that between Order and Progress, a difference merely in degree,
but in kind. We must not, however, suppose that they have no intimate
connection with one another. The institutions which insure the best
management of public affairs practicable in the existing state of
cultivation tend by this alone to the further improvement of that
state. A people which had the most just laws, the purest and most
efficient judicature, the most enlightened administration, the most
equitable and least onerous system of finance, compatible with the
stage it had attained in moral and intellectual advancement, would be