of-the-world style, with excessive moderation, with a trained
horror of the enthusiasm that swayed him.

These fifteen men who ruled the British Empire were curiously unlike
anything I had expected, and I watched them intently whenever my
services were not in request. They made a peculiar class at that
time, these English politicians and statesmen, a class that has
now completely passed away. In some respects they were unlike the
statesmen of any other region of the world, and I do not find that
any really adequate account remains of them. . . . Perhaps you are
a reader of the old books. If so, you will find them rendered with
a note of hostile exaggeration by Dickens in "Bleak House," with
a mingling of gross flattery and keen ridicule by Disraeli, who
ruled among them accidentally by misunderstanding them and pleasing
the court, and all their assumptions are set forth, portentously,
perhaps, but truthfully, so far as people of the "permanent
official" class saw them, in the novels of Mrs. Humphry Ward. All
these books are still in this world and at the disposal of the
curious, and in addition the philosopher Bagehot and the picturesque
historian Macaulay give something of their method of thinking, the
novelist Thackeray skirts the seamy side of their social life, and
there are some good passages of irony, personal descriptions, and
reminiscence to be found in the "Twentieth Century Garner" from the
pens of such writers, for example, as Sidney Low. But a picture of
them as a whole is wanting. Then they were too near and too great;
now, very rapidly, they have become incomprehensible.

We common people of the old time based our conception of our
statesmen almost entirely on the caricatures that formed the most
powerful weapon in political controversy. Like almost every main
feature of the old condition of things these caricatures were an
unanticipated development, they were a sort of parasitic outgrowth
from, which had finally altogether replaced, the thin and vague
aspirations of the original democratic ideals. They presented
not only the personalities who led our public life, but the most
sacred structural conceptions of that life, in ludicrous, vulgar,
and dishonorable aspects that in the end came near to destroying
entirely all grave and honorable emotion or motive toward the State.
The state of Britain was represented nearly always by a red-faced,
purse-proud farmer with an enormous belly, that fine dream
of fre