The curious 'counting boys,' the arithmetical prodigies, who can work by a strange innate faculty the most wonderful sums, lose that faculty, always partially, sometimes completely, if they are taught to reckon by rule like the rest of mankind.
Bagehot illustrates how innate abilities, like those of 'counting boys,' can fade when conventional methods are taught.
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Now it is not conceivable that a race of beings with valuable instincts supporting their existence and supplying their wants would need these simple tools.
He gave an excellent moral example to his contemporaries, but he is an instance of those whose good dies with them, while their evil lives after them.
One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.
The United States could not have become monarchical, even if the Constitutional Convention had decreed it, even if the component States had ratified it.
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