But not only should political science be a prominent study in every republic, in consequence of its immense importance and universal application, but it demands the most assiduous cultivation, because of the intrinsic difficulties which belong to it. There is no science in which we are more likely to ascribe effects to wrong causes than in politics--there is none which demands a more constant exercise of reason and observation, and in which first impressions are so likely to be false. The moral and political sciences, particularly the latter, are much more difficult than the physical and mathematical. There is scarcely any intellect, no matter how common, which may not, by severe study and close application, be brought at last to master mere physical and mathematical science. Eminence here is rather a proof of labor than of genius.[9] [Footnote 9: A very able reviewer in Blackwood, of Allison's History of the French Revolution, says of Napoleon, in attempting to disprove his precocious greatness, "even his faculty for mathematics, which has been frequently adduced as one of the most sufficient proofs of his future fame as a soldier, fails; perhaps no faculty of the human mind is less successful in promoting those enlarged views, or that rapid and vigorous comprehension of the necessities of the moment, which form the essentials of the great statesman or soldier. The mathematician is generally the last man equal to the sudden difficulties of situation, or even to the ordinary problems of human life. Skill in the science of equations might draw up a clear system of tactics on paper. But it must be a mental operation, not merely of a more active, but of a totally different kind, which constructed the recovery of the battle at Marengo, or led the march to Ulm."]