ent themselves here: on the most of
which we must resolutely for the present forbear to speak at all. As
Burke said that perhaps fair _Trial by Jury_ was the Soul of
Government, and that all legislation, administration, parliamentary
debating, and the rest of it, went on, in 'order to bring twelve
impartial men into a jury-box;'--so, by much stronger reason, may I
say here, that the finding of your _Ableman_ and getting him invested
with the _symbols of ability_, with dignity, worship (_worth_-ship),
royalty, kinghood, or whatever we call it, so that _he_ may actually
have room to guide according to his faculty of doing it,--is the
business, well or ill accomplished, of all social procedure whatsoever
in this world! Hustings-speeches, Parliamentary motions, Reform Bills,
French Revolutions, all mean at heart this; or else nothing. Find in
any country the Ablest Man that exists there; raise _him_ to the
supreme place, and loyally reverence him: you have a perfect
government for that country; no ballot-box, parliamentary eloquence,
voting, constitution-building, or other machinery whatsoever can
improve it a whit. It is in the perfect state: an ideal country. The
Ablest Man; he means also the truest-hearted, justest, the Noblest
Man: what he _tells us to do_ must be precisely the wisest, fittest,
that we could anywhere or anyhow learn;--the thing which it will in
all ways behove us, with right loyal thankfulness, and nothing
doubting, to do! Our _doing_ and life were then, so far as government
could regulate it, well regulated; that were the ideal of
constitutions.

Alas, we know very well that Ideals can never be completely embodied
in practice. Ideals must ever lie a very great way off; and we will
right thankfully content ourselves with any not intolerable
approximation thereto! Let no man, as Schiller says, too querulously
'measure by a scale of perfection the meagre product of reality' in
this poor world of ours. We will esteem him no wise man; we will
esteem him a sickly, discontented, foolish man. And yet, on the other
hand, it is never to be forgotten that Ideals do exist; that if they
be not approximated to at all, the whole matter goes to wreck!
Infallibly. No bricklayer builds a wall _perfectly_ perpendicular,
mathematically this is not possible; a certain degree of
perpendicularity suffices him; and he, like a good bricklayer, who
must have done with his job, leaves it so. And yet if he sway _too
much_ from