So great
and world-wide a dearth of high utterance attends our age.
Can it be,' he continued, 'we are to accept the common cant
that democracy is the nursing mother of genius, and that great
men of letters flourish and die with it? For freedom, they say,
has the power to cherish and encourage magnanimous minds, and
with it is disseminated eager mutual rivalry and the emulous
thirst to excel. Moreover, by the prizes open under a popular
government, the mental faculties of orators are perpetually
practised and whetted, and as it were, rubbed bright, so that
they shine free as the state itself. Whereas to-day,' he went
on, 'we seem to have learnt as an infant-lesson that servitude
is the law of life; being all wrapped, while our thoughts are
yet young and tender, in observances and customs as in
swaddling clothes, bound without access to that fairest and
most fertile source of man's speech (I mean Freedom) so that we
are turned out in no other guise than that of servile
flatterers.
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