[p. 119]
|119| thorough talent often becomes known sooner to private friendship and is in the case of being able to arrive at the place due to it only through individual magnanimity, which, for lack of fortune and family connection, it would otherwise perhaps not attain from the mass of the citizens of a town or county. But such examples can be ascribed to the realm of contingencies, where one probability can easily be set against another, a possible advantage against a possible disadvantage. – Related to this is another alleged consequence of greater importance, to which the Duke of Wellington drew attention, who indeed has not the repute of an orator, because he lacks the fluent, hours-long entertaining garrulity, so rich in self-ostentation, by which many members of Parliament have attained so great a reputation for eloquence, but whose speeches, despite the brokenness of the sentences, for which he is reproached, do not lack a content and points of view hitting the essence of the matter. He expresses, namely, the apprehension that in the place of those men to whom the conduct of the public interest is now entrusted in Parliament quite other men will step, and asks on another occasion whether the shopkeepers, of whom, as stated earlier, the greater mass of the electors will according to his view consist as a result of the new Bill, are the people who are to elect the members for the great council of the nation, which has to decide on domestic and foreign affairs, on the interests of agriculture, of the colonies and of manufactures. – The Duke speaks from the observation of the English Parliament, in which above the mass of incapable and ignorant members, with the varnish of the usual prejudices and of a culture drawn from conversation, often not even provided with this, there stands a number of talented men devoting themselves wholly to political activity and to the interest of the state. To the greater part
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