The adherents of the second school of political thought argue as follows: “The average man is God’s noblest invention. He is a sovereign in his own right, unsurpassed in wisdom, prudence and the loftiness of his motives. He is perfectly capable of looking after his own interests, but those committees through which he tries to rule the universe are proverbially slow when it comes to handling delicate affairs of state. Therefore, the masses ought to leave all executive business to a few trusted friends who are not hampered by the immediate necessity of making a living and who can devote all their time to the happiness of the people.”
Needless to say the apostles of this glorious ideal are the logical candidates for the job of oligarch, dictator, first consul and Lord protector.
They work hard and build roads and barracks, but the cathedrals they turn into jails.
But there is a third group of people. They contemplate man with the sober eye of science and accept him as he is. They appreciate his good qualities, they understand his limitations. They are convinced from a long observation of past events that the average citizen, when not under the influence of passion or self-interest, tries really very hard to do what is right. But they make themselves no false illusions. They know that the natural process of growth is exceedingly slow, that it would be as futile to try and hasten the tides or the seasons as the growth of human intelligence. They are rarely invited to assume the government of a state, but whenever they have a chance to put their ideas into action, they build roads, improve the jails and spend the rest of the available funds upon schools and universities. For they are such incorrigible optimists that they believe that education of the right sort will gradually rid this world of most of its ancient evils and is therefore a thing that ought to be encouraged at all costs.
And as a final step towards the fulfillment of this ideal, they usually write an encyclopedia.
Like so many other things that give evidence of great wisdom and profound patience, the encyclopedia-habit took its origin in China. The Chinese Emperor K’ang-hi tried to make his subjects happy with an encyclopedia in five thousand and twenty volumes.
Pliny, who introduced encyclopedias in the west, was contented with thirty-seven books.
The first fifteen hundred years of the Christian era produced nothing of the slightest value along this line of enlightenment. A fellow-countryman of Saint Augustine, the African Felix Capella, wasted a great many years of his life composing something which he held to be a veritable treasure house of miscellaneous knowledge. In order that people might the more easily retain the many interesting facts which he presented to them, he used poetry. This terrible mass of misinformation was duly learned by heart by eighteen successive generations of medieval children and was held by them to be the last word in the fields of literature, music and science.
Two hundred years later a bishop of Sevilla by the name of Isidore wrote an entirely new encyclopedia and after that, the output increased at the regular rate of two for every hundred years. What has become of them all, I do not know. The book-worm (most useful of domestic animals) has possibly acted as our deliverer. If all these volumes had been allowed to survive, there would not be room for anything else on this earth.