they themselves know of. The regulations which restricted to fixed
processes all the leading branches of French manufactures were the
work of the great Colbert.

Very different is the state of the human faculties where a human being
feels himself under no other external restraint than the necessities
of nature, or mandates of society which he has his share in imposing,
and which it is open to him, if he thinks them wrong, publicly to
dissent from, and exert himself actively to get altered. No doubt,
under a government partially popular, this freedom may be exercised
even by those who are not partakers in the full privileges of
citizenship; but it is a great additional stimulus to any one's
self-help and self-reliance when he starts from even ground, and has
not to feel that his success depends on the impression he can make
upon the sentiments and dispositions of a body of whom he is not one.
It is a great discouragement to an individual, and a still greater one
to a class, to be left out of the constitution; to be reduced to plead
from outside the door to the arbiters of their destiny, not taken into
consultation within. The maximum of the invigorating effect of freedom
upon the character is only obtained when the person acted on either
is, or is looking forward to becoming, a citizen as fully privileged
as any other. What is still more important than even this matter of
feeling is the practical discipline which the character obtains from
the occasional demand made upon the citizens to exercise, for a time
and in their turn, some social function. It is not sufficiently
considered how little there is in most men's ordinary life to give any
largeness either to their conceptions or to their sentiments. Their
work is a routine; not a labor of love, but of self-interest in the
most elementary form, the satisfaction of daily wants; neither the
thing done, nor the process of doing it, introduces the mind to