alities of every individual are freely developed, and
'the idea of good' is the animating principle of the whole. Not the
attainment of freedom alone, or of order alone, but how to unite freedom
with order is the problem which he has to solve.

The statesman who places before himself these lofty aims has undertaken
a task which will call forth all his powers. He must control himself
before he can control others; he must know mankind before he can manage
them. He has no private likes or dislikes; he does not conceal personal
enmity under the disguise of moral or political principle: such
meannesses, into which men too often fall unintentionally, are absorbed
in the consciousness of his mission, and in his love for his country and
for mankind. He will sometimes ask himself what the next generation will
say of him; not because he is careful of posthumous fame, but because
he knows that the result of his life as a whole will then be more fairly
judged. He will take time for the execution of his plans; not hurrying
them on when the mind of a nation is unprepared for them; but like the
Ruler of the Universe Himself, working in the appointed time, for
he knows that human life, 'if not long in comparison with eternity'
(Republic), is sufficient for the fulfilment of many great purposes. He
knows, too, that the work will be still going on when he is no longer
here; and he will sometimes, especially when his powers are failing,
think of that other 'city of which the pattern is in heaven' (Republic).

The false politician is the serving-man of the state. In order to govern
men he becomes like them; their 'minds are married in conjunction;' they
'bear themselves' like vulgar and tyrannical masters, and he is their
obedient servant. The true politician, if he would rule men, must make
them like himself; he must 'educate his party' until they cease to be
a party; he must breathe into them the spirit which will hereafter give
form to their institutions. Politics with him are not a mechanism for
seeming what he is not, or for carrying out the will of the majority.
Himself a representative man, he is the representative not of the lower
but of the higher elements of the nation. There is a better (as well as
a worse) public opinion of which he seeks to lay hold; as there is also
a deeper current of human affairs in which he is borne up when the waves
nearer the shore are threatening him. He acknowledges that he cannot
take the world by fo