thoughts or feelings extending beyond individuals; if instructive
books are within their reach, there is no stimulus to read them; and,
in most cases, the individual has no access to any person of
cultivation much superior to his own. Giving him something to do for
the public supplies, in a measure, all these deficiencies. If
circumstances allow the amount of public duty assigned him to be
considerable, it makes him an educated man. Notwithstanding the
defects of the social system and moral ideas of antiquity, the
practice of the dicastery and the ecclesia raised the intellectual
standard of an average Athenian citizen far beyond any thing of which
there is yet an example in any other mass of men, ancient or modern.
The proofs of this are apparent in every page of our great historian
of Greece; but we need scarcely look further than to the high quality
of the addresses which their great orators deemed best calculated to
act with effect on their understanding and will. A benefit of the same
kind, though far less in degree, is produced on Englishmen of the
lower middle class by their liability to be placed on juries and to
serve parish offices, which, though it does not occur to so many, nor
is so continuous, nor introduces them to so great a variety of
elevated considerations as to admit of comparison with the public
education which every citizen of Athens obtained from her democratic
institutions, makes them nevertheless very different beings, in range
of ideas and development of faculties, from those who have done
nothing in their lives but drive a quill, or sell goods over a
counter. Still more salutary is the moral part of the instruction
afforded by the participation of the private citizen, if even rarely,
in public functions. He is called upon, while so engaged, to weigh
interests not his own; to be guided, in case of conflicting claims, by
another rule than his private partialities; to apply, at every turn,
principles and maxims which have for their reason of existence the