over which he presided; and Peel was a very recent
product of cotton. Abraham Lincoln was, perhaps, the greatest ruler
of the modern world, and the quality of his ancestry is a topic fit
only to be handled in a lecture on the Self-Made Men of History.

When we regard our own time, I should say that Joseph Chamberlain had,
of all English statesmen I have ever known, both the most satisfactory
ideal of government and the greatest faculty for exercising it. But
the Cordwainers' Company was the school in which his forefathers
had learnt the art of rule. Ancestral achievements, hereditary
possessions, have nothing to do with the matter. What makes a man
a ruler of men, and enables him to set his face as a flint against
wrong-doing; is a faculty born in himself--"the soul that riseth
with him, his life's star."

And it has no more to do with politics than with pedigree. Sydney
Smith, though he was as whole-hearted a reformer as ever breathed, knew
that sternness towards crime was an essential part of government, and
after the Bristol Riots of 1831 he warned Lord Grey against flaccidity
with great plainness of speech. "Pray do not be good-natured about
Bristol. I must have ten people hanged, and twenty transported,
and thirty imprisoned. You will save lives by it in the end."

It was a Tory Government which in the London Riots of 1866 made, as
Matthew Arnold said, "an exhibition of mismanagement, imprudence,
and weakness almost incredible." Next year the Fenians blew up
Clerkenwell Prison, and the same acute critic observed: "A Government
which dares not deal with a mob, of any nation or with any design,
simply opens the floodgates to anarchy. Who can wonder at the Irish,
who have cause to hate us, and who do not own their allegiance
to us, making war on a State and society which has shown itself
irresolute and feeble?"

But the head of that feeble State, the leader of that irresolute
society, was the fourteenth Earl of Derby, whose ancestors had
practised the arts of government for eight hundred years.

In Ireland the case is the same. Both parties have succeeded in
governing it, and both have failed. Mr. Balfour has been justly
praised for his vigour in protecting property and restoring order;
but it was Lord Spencer and Sir George Trevelyan who, four years
before, had caught and hanged the assassins of the Phoenix Park, and
had abolished agrarian murder. It was, alas! a Liberal Government
that tolerated the Ulster tre