Diographkal Memoir of' Count Runijbrd. 227 



meanest artizans, nobly gratifying the public with a constant 

 succession of useful inventions. 



Nothing would have been wanting to his happiness, had the 

 amenity of his behaviour equalled his ardour for public utility. 

 But it must be acknowledged, that he manifested, in his con- 

 versation and in his whole conduct, a feeling which must appear 

 very extraordinary in a man so uniformly well treated by others, 

 and who had himself done so much good. It was without lov- 

 ing or esteeniine: his fellow-creatures, that he had done them all 

 these services. Apparently, the vile passions which he had ob- 

 served in the wretches committed to his care, or those other pas- 

 sions, not less vile, which his good fortune had excited among 

 his rivals, had soured him against human nature. Nor did he 

 think that the care of their own welfare ought to be confided to 

 men in common. That desire, which seems to them so natural, 

 of examining how they are ruled, was in his eyes but a factitious 

 product of false knowledge. He had nearly the same ideas of 

 slavery as a planter, and he considered the Chinese government 

 as the nearest to perfection ; because, in delivering up the peo- 

 ple to the absolute power of men of knowledge alone, and in 

 raising eacli of these in the hierarchy, according to the degree 

 of his knowledge, it made in some measure so many millions of 

 hands the passive organs of the will of a few good heads ; — ^a 

 doctrine which we mention without in any degree pretending to 

 justify it, and which we know to be little adapted to the ideas 

 of European nations. 



Count Rumford himself experienced, more than once, that it 

 is not so easy in the west as in China, to engage other men to 

 be nothing but hands ; and yet no one was so well prepared as he 

 to make good use of the hands that might be submitted to him. 



An empire, such as he conceived, would not have been more 

 difficult for him to manage, than his barracks and poor-houses. 

 For this he trusted especially to the power of order. He called 

 order the necessary auxiliary of genius, the only possible in- 

 strument of real good, and almost a subordinate divinity re- 

 gulating this lower world. He purposed to make it the subject 

 of a work which he thought would be more important than all 

 that he had written ; but of this work there were found among 

 his papers only a few unconnected materials. He himself, in his 



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