for the pleasure of the pursuit. There will be a bureaucracy, and
persons in training for the bureaucracy, who will be taught at least
some empirical maxims of government and public administration. There
may be, and often has been, a systematic organization of the best
mental power in the country in some special direction (commonly
military) to promote the grandeur of the despot. But the public at
large remain without information and without interest on all greater
matters of practice; or, if they have any knowledge of them, it is but
a _dilettante_ knowledge, like that which people have of the
mechanical arts who have never handled a tool. Nor is it only in their
intelligence that they suffer. Their moral capacities are equally
stunted. Wherever the sphere of action of human beings is artificially
circumscribed, their sentiments are narrowed and dwarfed in the same
proportion. The food of feeling is action; even domestic affection
lives upon voluntary good offices. Let a person have nothing to do for
his country, and he will not care for it. It has been said of old that
in a despotism there is at most but one patriot, the despot himself;
and the saying rests on a just appreciation of the effects of absolute
subjection even to a good and wise master. Religion remains; and here,
at least, it may be thought, is an agency that may be relied on for
lifting men's eyes and minds above the dust at their feet. But
religion, even supposing it to escape perversion for the purposes of
despotism, ceases in these circumstances to be a social concern, and
narrows into a personal affair between an individual and his Maker, in
which the issue at stake is but his private salvation. Religion in
this shape is quite consistent with the most selfish and contracted
egoism, and identifies the votary as little in feeling with the rest
of his kind as sensuality itself.

A good despotism means a government in which, so far as depends on the