oom to guide
according to his faculty of doing it,--is the business, well or
ill accomplished, of all social procedure whatsoever in this world!
Hustings-speeches, Parliamentary motions, Reform Bills, French
Revolutions, all mean at heart this; or else nothing. Find in any
country the Ablest Man that exists there; raise _him_ to the supreme
place, and loyally reverence him: you have a perfect government for
that country; no ballot-box, parliamentary eloquence, voting,
constitution-building, or other machinery whatsoever can improve it a
whit. It is in the perfect state; an ideal country. The Ablest Man; he
means also the truest-hearted, justest, the Noblest Man: what he _tells
us to do_ must be precisely the wisest, fittest, that we could anywhere
or anyhow learn;--the thing which it will in all ways behoove US, with
right loyal thankfulness and nothing doubting, to do! Our _doing_ and
life were then, so far as government could regulate it, well regulated;
that were the ideal of constitutions.

Alas, we know very well that Ideals can never be completely embodied in
practice. Ideals must ever lie a very great way off; and we will right
thankfully content ourselves with any not intolerable approximation
thereto! Let no man, as Schiller says, too querulously "measure by a
scale of perfection the meagre product of reality" in this poor world
of ours. We will esteem him no wise man; we will esteem him a sickly,
discontented, foolish man. And yet, on the other hand, it is never to be
forgotten that Ideals do exist; that if they be not approximated to at
all, the whole matter goes to wreck! Infallibly. No bricklayer builds a
wall _perfectly_ perpendicular, mathematically this is not possible;
a certain degree of perpendicularity suffices him; and he, like a good
bricklayer, who must have done with his job, leaves it so. And yet if he
sway _too much_ from the perpendicular; above all, if he throw plummet
and level quite away from him, and pile brick on brick heedless, just
as it comes to hand--! Such bricklayer, I think, is in a bad way. He has
forgotten himself: but the Law of Gravitation does not forget to act on
him; he and his wall rush down into confused welter of ruin--!

This is the history of all rebellions, French Revolutions, social
explosions in ancient or modern times. You have put the too _Un_able
Man at the head of affairs! The too ignoble, unvaliant, fatuous man. You
have forgotten that there is any rule, or nat