“Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life.” From them no small part of the world is likely to remain hidden. To not a little that men have thought and felt they remain insensible. They can form a right judgment of those who differ from them only in opinion, but they find it hard to understand any who go further than this, and differ from them also in sentiment. Lord Macaulay had this defect in a striking degree, and yet he had been brought up in a wider circle than the life of a provincial town, and his mind ranged within no narrow bounds.[69] “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Some of the greatest benefactors of mankind would have held that, however true this might be of Horatio, it could not rightfully be addressed to themselves. When all that is needed is an appeal to reason and not to sentiment, then in such men prejudices may quickly fall away. Like many another ardent and honest reformer of those days, Rowland Hill had in his youth formed a harsh judgment of the ruling classes. His father had belonged to a small political club, which met once a week at the houses of the members. “The conversation,” writes one of the brothers, “very commonly took a political turn, the opinions on all sides savouring of the extreme, so that my father was, by comparison, a moderate. It is notorious that men, very remote from power, with its duties and responsibilities, are apt to be extravagant in expectations and demands; and so it certainly was here. ‘I would do thus,’ or ‘I would have this,’ were put forth in full ignorance of what was practicable, sometimes of what was even desirable. Such discourse could not but assist the bias already in our minds, so that we grievously underrated the great actual advantages and high comparative freedom which our country enjoyed.”