I fear you will laugh when I tell you what I conceive to be about the
most essential mental quality for a free people whose liberty is to be
progressive, permanent, and on a large scale: it is much stupidity. Not
to begin by wounding any present susceptibilities, let me take the Roman
character; for with one great exception,--I need not say to whom I
allude,--they are the great political people of history. Now, is not a
certain dullness their most visible characteristic? What is the history
of their speculative mind? a blank; what their literature? a copy. They
have left not a single discovery in any abstract science, not a single
perfect or well-formed work of high imagination. The Greeks, the
perfection of human and accomplished genius, bequeathed to mankind the
ideal forms of self-idolizing art, the Romans imitated and admired; the
Greeks explained the laws of nature, the Romans wondered and despised;
the Greeks invented a system of numerals second only to that now in use,
the Romans counted to the end of their days with the clumsy apparatus
which we still call by their name; the Greeks made a capital and
scientific calendar, the Romans began their month when the Pontifex
Maximus happened to spy out the new moon. Throughout Latin literature,
this is the perpetual puzzle:--Why are we free and they slaves, we
praetors and they barbers? why do the stupid people always win and the
clever people always lose? I need not say that in real sound stupidity
the English are unrivaled: you'll hear more wit and better wit in an
Irish street row than would keep Westminster Hall in humor for
five weeks.
* * * * *
In fact, what we opprobriously call "stupidity," though not an
enlivening quality in common society, is nature's favorite resource for
preserving steadiness of conduct and consistency of opinion; it enforces
concentration: people who learn slowly, learn only what they must. The
best security for people's doing their duty is, that they should not
know anything else to do; the best security for fixedness of opinion is,
that people should be incapable of comprehending what is to be said on
the other side. These valuable truths are no discoveries of mine: they
are familiar enough to people whose business it is to know them. Hear
what a douce and aged attorney says of your peculiarly promising
barrister:--"Sharp? Oh, yes! he's too sharp by half. He is not _safe_,
not a minute, isn't that young man." I extend this, and advisedly
maintain that nations, just as individuals, may be too clever to be
practical and not dull enough to be free....
And what I call a proper stupidity keeps a man from all the defects of
this character: it chains the gifted possessor mainly to his old ideas,
it takes him seven weeks to comprehend an atom of a new one; it keeps
him from being led away by new theories, for there is nothing which
bores him so much; it restrains him within his old pursuits, his
well-known habits, his tried expedients, his verified conclusions, his
traditional beliefs. He is not tempted to levity or impatience, for he
does not see the joke and is thick-skinned to present evils.
Inconsistency puts him out: "What I says is this here, as I was a-saying
yesterday," is his notion of historical eloquence and habitual
discretion. He is very slow indeed to be excited,--his passions, his
feelings, and his affections are dull and tardy strong things, falling
in a certain known direction, fixed on certain known objects, and for
the most part acting in a moderate degree and at a sluggish pace. You
always know where to find his mind. Now, this is exactly what (in
politics at least) you do not know about a Frenchman.