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56 galton.org
56 
Inquiries into Human Faculty
another by innumerable ties, into a strong, tense, and elastic organisation.
The character of the corporate action of a nation in which each man
judges for himself, might be expected to possess statistical constancy. It
would be the expression of the dominant character of a large number of
separate members of the same race, and ought therefore to be remarkably
uniform. Fickleness of national character is principally due to the several
members of the nation exercising no independent judgment, but allowing
themselves to be led hither and thither by the successive journalists,
orators, and sentimentalists who happen for the time to have the chance of
directing them.
Our present natural dispositions make it impossible for us to attain the
ideal standard of a nation of men all judging soberly for themselves, and
therefore the slavishness of the mass of our countrymen, in morals and
intellect, must be an admitted fact in all schemes of regenerative policy.
The hereditary taint due to the primeval barbarism of our race, and
maintained by later influences, will have to be bred out of it before our
descendants can rise to the position of free members of an intelligent
society: and I may add that the most likely nest at the present time for
self-reliant natures is to be found in States founded and maintained by
emigrants.
Servility has its romantic side, in the utter devotion of a slave to the
lightest wishes and the smallest comforts of his master, and in that of a
loyal subject to those of his sovereign; but such devotion cannot be called
a reasonable self-sacrifice; it is rather an abnegation of the trust imposed
on man to use his best judgment, and to act in the way he thinks the
wisest. Trust in authority is a trait of the character of children, of weakly
women, and of the sick and infirm, but it is out of place among members
of a thriving resolute community during the fifty or more years of their
middle life. Those who have been born in a free country feel the
atmosphere of a paternal government very oppressive. The hearty and
earnest political and individual life which is found when every man has a
continual sense of public
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