or almost nothing will be done with excessive rapidity.  Each kind of persons will have their spokesman; each spokesman will have his characteristic objection and each his characteristic counter-proposition:  and so in the end nothing will probably be done, or at least only the minimum which is plainly urgent.  In many cases this delay may be dangerous, in many cases quick action will be preferable; a campaign, as Macaulay well says, cannot be directed by a “debating society,” and many other kinds of action also require a single and absolute general:  but for the purpose now in hand—­that of preventing hasty action and insuring elaborate consideration—­there is no device like a polity of discussion.

The enemies of this object—­the people who want to act quickly—­see this very distinctly:  they are forever explaining that the present is “an age of committees,” that the committees do nothing, that all evaporates in talk.  Their great enemy is parliamentary government:  they call it, after Mr. Carlyle, the “national palaver”; they add up the hours that are consumed in it and the speeches which are made in it, and they sigh for a time when England might again be ruled, as it once was, by a Cromwell,—­that is, when an eager absolute man might do exactly what other eager men wished, and do it immediately.  All these invectives are perpetual and many-sided; they come from philosophers each of whom wants some new scheme tried, from philanthropists who want some evil abated, from revolutionists who want some old institution destroyed, from new-eraists who want their new era started forthwith:  and they all are distinct admissions that a polity of discussion is the greatest hindrance to the inherited mistake of human nature,—­to the desire to act promptly, which in a simple age is so excellent, but which in a later and complex time leads to so much evil.

The same accusation against our age sometimes takes a more general form:  it is alleged that our energies are diminishing, that ordinary and average men have not the quick determination nowadays which they used to have when the world was younger, that not only do not committees and parliaments act with rapid decisiveness, but that no one now so acts; and I hope that in fact this is true, for according to me it proves that the hereditary barbaric impulse is decaying and dying out.  So far from thinking the quality attributed to us a defect, I wish that those who complain of it were far more right than I much fear they are.  Still, certainly, eager and violent action is somewhat diminished, though only by a small fraction of what it ought to be; and I believe that this is in great part due, in England at least, to our government by discussion, which has fostered a general intellectual tone, a diffused disposition to weigh evidence, a conviction that much may be said on every side of everything which the elder and more fanatic ages of the world wanted.  This is the real reason why