The knowledge thus obtained comes pouring in by lightning and steam, and
is scattered over the world within the reach of the poorest by means of
the printing press. The man of to-day is a citizen of the world; he
seems to be ubiquitous. It is as though he had a thousand eyes and ears,
and, alas! only one mind. Thought has two conditions: first, knowledge,
as food and stimulus; second, time for distributing and digesting that
knowledge. But the first is so superabundantly fufilled that it entirely
obliterates the second. Knowledge comes pouring in from all quarters so
rapidly, that the man can hardly receive, much less arrange and think
out, the enormous mass of facts daily accumulating upon him. The boasted
age of printing presses and newspapers, of penny magazines, and penny
cyclopaedias, is not necessarily the age of thought. There is a world-
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will be the result; but to the working-man division of labor is mental
death. The ancients might call these masses the _ignobile vulgus_, the
French nobles might sneer at them as _sans-culottes_, we may deride them
as the 'common herd,' all attempting to ignore their existence in
history or politics; but it will be all in vain--for in the end it is
the people that rule, be the government of the surface what it may.
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