ing to theory, for extreme use
on a critical occasion, but which he can in law use on any occasion. He
can dissolve; he can say to his Minister, in fact, if not in words,
"This Parliament sent you here, but I will see if I cannot get another
Parliament to send some one else here." George III. well understood
that it was best to take his stand at times and on points when it was
perhaps likely, or at any rate not unlikely, the nation would support
him. He always made a Minister that he did not like tremble at the
shadow of a possible successor. He had a cunning in such matters like
the cunning of insanity. He had conflicts with the ablest men of his
time, and he was hardly ever baffled. He understood how to help a
feeble argument by a tacit threat, and how best to address it to an
habitual deference.

Perhaps such powers as these are what a wise man would most seek to
exercise and least fear to possess. To wish to be a despot, "to hunger
after tyranny," as the Greek phrase had it, marks in our day an
uncultivated mind. A person who so wishes cannot have weighed what
Butler calls the "doubtfulness things are involved in". To be sure you
are right to impose your will, or to wish to impose it, with violence
upon others; to see your own ideas vividly and fixedly, and to be
tormented till you can apply them in life and practice, not to like to
hear the opinions of others, to be unable to sit down and weigh the
truth they have, are but crude states of intellect in our present
civilisation. We know, at least, that facts are many; that progress is
complicated; that burning ideas (such as young men have) are mostly
false and always incomplete. The notion of a far-seeing and despotic
statesman, who can lay down plans for ages yet unborn, is a fancy
generated by the pride of the human intellect to which facts give no
support. The plans of Charlemagne died with him; those of Richelieu
were mistaken; those of Napoleon gigantesque and frantic. But a wise
and great constitutional monarch attempts no such vanities. His career
is not in the air; he labours in the world of sober fact; he deals with
schemes which can be effected--schemes which are desirable--schemes
which are worth the cost. He says to the Ministry his people send to
him, to Ministry after Ministry, "I think so and so; do you see if
there is anything in it. I have put down my reasons in a certain
memorandum, which I will give you. Probably it does not exhaust the
subject,