erve that the art of government, while in some
respects tending to improve, has in others a tendency to degenerate, as
institutions become more popular. Governing for the people cannot easily
be combined with governing by the people: the interests of classes are
too strong for the ideas of the statesman who takes a comprehensive view
of the whole. According to Socrates the true governor will find ruin or
death staring him in the face, and will only be induced to govern from
the fear of being governed by a worse man than himself (Republic). And
in modern times, though the world has grown milder, and the terrible
consequences which Plato foretells no longer await an English statesman,
any one who is not actuated by a blind ambition will only undertake from
a sense of duty a work in which he is most likely to fail; and even
if he succeed, will rarely be rewarded by the gratitude of his own
generation.

Socrates, who is not a politician at all, tells us that he is the only
real politician of his time. Let us illustrate the meaning of his words
by applying them to the history of our own country. He would have
said that not Pitt or Fox, or Canning or Sir R. Peel, are the real
politicians of their time, but Locke, Hume, Adam Smith, Bentham,
Ricardo. These during the greater part of their lives occupied an
inconsiderable space in the eyes of the public. They were private
persons; nevertheless they sowed in the minds of men seeds which in
the next generation have become an irresistible power. 'Herein is that
saying true, One soweth and another reapeth.' We may imagine with
Plato an ideal statesman in whom practice and speculation are perfectly
harmonized; for there is no necessary opposition between them.
But experience shows that they are commonly divorced--the ordinary
politician is the interpreter or executor of the thoughts of others, and
hardly ever brings to the birth a new political conception. One or two
only in modern times, like the Italian statesman Cavour, have created
the world in which they moved. The philosopher is naturally unfitted for
political life; his great ideas are not understood by the many; he is a
thousand miles away from the questions of the day. Yet perhaps the lives
of thinkers, as they are stiller and deeper, are also happier than the
lives of those who are more in the public eye. They have the promise
of the future, though they are regarded as dreamers and visionaries by
their own contemporaries. A