But the difficulty of keeping a good legislature is evidently secondary to the difficulty of first getting it.  There are two kinds of nations which can elect a good parliament.  The first is a nation in which the mass of the people are intelligent, and in which they are comfortable.  Where there is no honest poverty, where education is diffused and political intelligence is common, it is easy for the mass of the people to elect a fair legislature.  The ideal is roughly realized in the North American colonies of England, and in the whole free States of the Union:  in these countries there is no such thing as honest poverty,—­physical comfort, such as the poor cannot imagine here, is there easily attainable by healthy industry; education is diffused much, and is fast spreading,—­ignorant emigrants from the Old World often prize the intellectual advantages of which they are themselves destitute, and are annoyed at their inferiority in a place where rudimentary culture is so common.  The greatest difficulty of such new communities is commonly geographical:  the population is mostly scattered; and where population is sparse, discussion is difficult.  But in a country very large as we reckon in Europe, a people really intelligent, really educated, really comfortable, would soon form a good opinion.  No one can doubt that the New England States, if they were a separate community, would have an education, a political capacity, and an intelligence such as the numerical majority of no people equally numerous has ever possessed:  in a State of this sort, where all the community is fit to choose a sufficient legislature, it is possible, it is almost easy, to create that legislature.  If the New England States possessed a cabinet government as a separate nation, they would be as renowned in the world for political sagacity as they now are for diffused happiness.

WHY EARLY SOCIETIES COULD NOT BE FREE

From ‘Physics and Politics’

I believe the general description in which Sir John Lubbock sums up his estimate of the savage mind suits the patriarchal mind:  “Savages,” he says, “have the character of children with the passions and strength of men."...

And this is precisely what we should expect.  “An inherited drill,” science says, “makes modern nations what they are; their born structure bears the trace of the laws of their fathers:”  but the ancient nations came into no such inheritance,—­they were the descendants of people who did what was right in their own eyes; they were born to no tutored habits, no preservative bonds, and therefore they were at the mercy of every impulse and blown by every passion....