Some persons have attributed these evils to the oppression of middlemen, others to the galling pressure of the tithes, and some to the debasing influence of penal statutes and political degradation; but while it is admitted that middlemen, and tithes, and penal statutes have produced their full proportion of the general calamity, the principal source of the evil is the gross ignorance and consequent incapacity of the people, and until this in some degree be removed, all the efforts to improve Ireland, though not useless, will prove totally inadequate.

In the third place, the education of the inferior orders of the people becomes peculiarly necessary in all manufacturing countries. This necessity arises from the circumstances in which the inferior orders of the people are placed in all countries of this description. These evidently, if they do not directly produce imbecility of judgement, present few objects by which its powers are exercised, and can scarcely. be considered as favourable either to the purity or polish of the manners. The mechanic who has been confined from his earliest years to the same unvaried employment, and who has only to perform the same operation, unacquainted with difficulty, may be subservient to national opulence, but cannot greatly improve his mind. Indeed, the monotonous sameness

of his occupation, as it renders unnecessary all mental exertion, must have a tendency to destroy the force of his intellectual faculties, and induce a powerful inaptitude to every work that is arduous and liberal, to every feeling that is generous, and tender, and manly. If men are treated all their life time as children, or, what amounts nearly to the same thing, if their situation requires little more than the mechanical labour of which children are capable, it is not probable that they will ever be able to form the vigorous conceptions of matured understandings. This, however, is the condition of thousands who spend their life in the shops of the manufacturer. Here there is no object to call forth the energies of their mind, no excitement applied to the inventive powers, no intricacies to be unravelled, no difficulties to be removed; some mechanical dexterity, applied in the same dull direction, is all that is required.

The reverse is the case in the pastoral and agricultural life; where new objects are daily presenting themselves to the view; where, in the latter state of society especially, by every changing combination of circumstances, the mental powers are employed and strengthened, and where it is impossible for the experience of the past to furnish, in many cases, an accurate

directory for the future. "In such societies, the varied occupations of every man oblige every man to exert his capacity, and to invent expedients for removing difficulties which are continually occurring. Invention is kept alive, and the mind is not suffered to fall into that drowsy stupidity, which, in a civilized society, seems to benumb the understanding of almost all the inferior orders of the people. In these barbarous societies, as they are called, every man it has already been observed, is a warrior. Every man too is in some measure a statesman, and can form a tolerable judgment concerning the interest of the society, and the conduct of those who govern it. How far their chiefs are good judges in peace, or good leaders in war, is obvious to the observation of almost every single man among them. In such a society, indeed, no man can well acquire that improved and refined understanding, which a few men sometimes possess in a more civilized state. Though in a rude society there is a good deal of variety in the occupations of every individual, there is not a great deal in those of the whole society. Every man does, or is capable of doing, almost every thing which any other man does, or is capable of doing. Every man has a considerable degree of knowledge, ingenuity

and invention; but scarcely any man has a great degree. The degree, however, which is commonly possessed, is generally sufficient for conducting the whole simple business of the society. In a civilized state, on the contrary, though there is little variety in the occupation of the greater part of individuals, there is an almost infinite variety in those of the whole society. These varied occupations present an almost infinite variety of objects to the contemplation of those few, who, being attached to no particular occupation themselves, have leisure and inclination to examine the occupations of other people. The contemplation of so great a variety of objects necessarily exercises their minds in endless comparisons and combinations, and renders their understandings, in an extraordinary degree, both acute and comprehensive.-Notwithstanding the great abilities of those few, all the nobler parts of the human character may be, in a great measure, obliterated and extinguished in the great body of the people."*

Hence it is that in all rude society, the difference between the chieftain and his vassal, in point of intellectual attainment and accomplishment, is really very little. The one is exercised

* Smith's Wealth of Nations, v iii,
G

in the same school of discipline, enured to the same hardships, accustomed to the same patience and vigilant exertion, the same foresight, fortitude, and contempt of death, as the other. In this case, there is no danger of falling into that state of torpid insensibility, or of mental vacuity, which a consciousness of total incapacity and perpetual neglect have a tendency to produce. The vassal feels his own importance, not merely as connected with a powerful chieftain, but as an useful if not a necessary instrument in carrying his enterprising designs into execution. His manners and address are thus greatly improved; and those manly feelings, which in every state of society are essential to true politeness, and from which, what is called good breeding in modern times chiefly takes its rise, acquire a predominant and permanent influence. Both the intellectual and moral powers. are thus strengthened, and the character though far from being perfect, approaches nearer to perfection than that of persons of the same rank, placed in different circumstances. For in proportion as society advances in civilization, and the division of labour is multiplied, in the same proportion will be the retrograde motion of the inferior orders of the people as to all mental endowment-as to all the tender feelings of refined delicacy to the other sex, and as to every plea