nnounced
that he would "set his face" against a certain policy and then
gave way, "Yes, the deer 'set his face,' but he did not 'set it
as a flint'--rather _as a pudding_."

To set one's face as a pudding is the characteristic action of all
weak Governments. Lord Randolph Churchill once attracted notice
by enouncing the homely truth that "the business of an Opposition
is to oppose." A truth even more primary is that the duty of a
Government is to govern; to set its face, not as a pudding, but as
a flint, against lawlessness and outrage; to protect the innocent
and to punish the wrong-doer.

This is a duty from which all weak Governments shrink. If a Minister
is not very sure of his position; if he is backed, not by a united
party, but by a haphazard coalition; if he is unduly anxious about
his own official future; if his eye is nervously fixed on the next
move of the jumping cat, he always fails to govern. He neither
protects the law-abiding citizen nor chastises the criminal and
the rebel. In this particular, there is no distinction of party.
Tories can show no better record than Whigs, nor Liberals than
Conservatives. It is a question of the governing temper, which is
as absolutely requisite to the character of the ruler as courage
to the soldier or incorruptibility to the Judge.

It used to be held, and perhaps still is held, by what may be styled
the toad-eating school of publicists, that this governing temper
was an hereditary gift transmitted by a long line of ancestors,
who in their successive generations had possessed it, and had used
it on a large scale in the governance of England. "How natural,"
they exclaimed, "that Lord Nozoo, whose ancestors have ruled half
Loamshire since the Conquest, should have more notion of governing
men than that wretched Bagman, whose grandfather swept out the
shop, and who has never had to rule anyone except a clerk and a
parlourmaid!"

This sounded plausible enough, especially in the days when heredity
was everything, and when ancestral habit was held to explain, and if
necessary extenuate, all personal characteristics; but experience
and observation proved it false. Pitt was, I suppose, the greatest
Minister who ever ruled England; but his pedigree would have moved a
genealogist to scorn. Peel was a Minister who governed so effectually
that, according to Gladstone, who served under him, his direct
authority was felt in every department, high or low, of the
Administration