620 Life of Count Rumford. 



China as coming nearest to perfection, because in giving over 

 the people to the absolute control of their only intelligent men, 

 and in lifting each of those who belonged to this hierarchy on 

 the scale according to the degree of his intelligence, it made, so 

 to speak, so many millions of arms the passive organs of the 

 will of a few sound heads, a notion which I state without 

 pretending in the slightest degree to approve it, and which, as 

 we know, would be poorly calculated to find prevalence among 

 European nations. 



" M. de Rumford had cause for learning bv his own experi- 

 ence that it is not so easy in the West as it is in China to induce 

 other people to consent to be only arms ; and that no one is so 

 well prepared to turn these arms of others to his own service as 

 is one who has reduced them in subjection to himself. An 

 empire such as he conceived would not have been more difficult 

 for him to manage than were his barracks and poorhouses. 

 He relied wholly on the principle of rigid system and order. 

 He called order the necessary auxiliary of genius, the only 

 possible instrument for securing any substantial good, and, in 

 fact, almost a subordinate deity, for the government of this 

 lower world. He intended to make Order the subject of a book 

 which he thought would be the most important of all that he 

 had written ; but we find among his papers only imperfect parts 

 of it. As for himself, he was in his own person, at all points 

 and in all imaginable respects, the model of order. His wants, 

 his pleasures, his toils, were as exactly arranged as were his 

 experiments. He drank nothing but water ; he ate only broiled 

 or roast meat, because boiled meats yielded a less amount of 

 aliment. He indulged himself in no superfluity, not even in a 

 step or a word, and it was in the strictest sense that he used the 

 word superfluity. 



"This was without doubt a means of helping him to devote 

 all his energies most directly to good works ; but it was not a 

 method likely to make him agreeable in the society of his equals. 

 Society likes a little more abandon. And so it happens that a 

 certain hauteur of perfection seems often a defect, when as 

 great efforts are not made to dissemble it as to exercise it. 



