d by a peculiar standard. It is not easy to
compare him fairly with such men as Ximenes and Sully, Richelieu and
Oxenstiern, John de Witt, and Warren Hastings. The means by which those
politicians governed great communities were of quite a different
kind from those which Pitt was under the necessity of employing. Some
talents, which they never had any opportunity of showing that they
possessed, were developed in him to an extraordinary degree. In some
qualities, on the other hand, to which they owe a large part of their
fame, he was decidedly their inferior. They transacted business in their
closets, or at boards where a few confidential councillors sate. It was
his lot to be born in an age and in a country in which parliamentary
government was completely established. His whole training from infancy
was such as fitted him to bear a part in parliamentary government;
and, from the prime of his manhood to his death, all the powers of
his vigorous mind were almost constantly exerted in the work of
parliamentary government. He accordingly became the greatest master
of the whole art of parliamentary government that has ever existed, a
greater than Montague or Walpole, a greater than his father Chatham,
or his rival Fox, a greater than either of his illustrious successors,
Canning and Peel.

Parliamentary government, like every other contrivance of man, has its
advantages and disadvantages. On the advantages there is no need to
dilate. The history of England during the hundred and seventy years
which have elapsed since the House of Commons became the most powerful
body in the state, her immense and still growing prosperity, her
freedom, her tranquillity, her greatness in arts, in sciences, and in
arms, her maritime ascendency, the marvels of her public credit, her
American, her African, her Australian, her Asiatic empires, sufficiently
prove the excellence of her institutions. But those institutions,
though excellent, are assuredly not perfect. Parliamentary government is
government by speaking. In such a government, the power of speaking
is the most highly prized of all the qualities which a politician
can possess: and that power may exist, in the highest degree, without
judgment, without fortitude, without skill in reading the characters of
men or the signs of the times, without any knowledge of the principles
of legislation or of political economy, and without any skill in
diplomacy or in the administration of war. Nay, it