is a great
difference between power and influence. Nor do we read that Burke, after
this, headed the opposition. That position was shared by Charles James
Fox, who ultimately supplanted his master as the leader of his party;
not because Burke declined in wisdom or energy, but because Fox had more
skill as a debater, more popular sympathies, and more influential
friends. Burke, like Gladstone, was too stern, too irritable, too
imperious, too intellectually proud, perhaps too unyielding, to control
such an ignorant, prejudiced, and aristocratic body as the House of
Commons, jealous of his ascendency and writhing under his rebukes. It
must have been galling to the great philosopher to yield the palm to
lesser men; but such has ever been the destiny of genius, except in
crises of public danger. Of all things that politicians hate is the
domination of a man who will not stoop to flatter, who cannot be bribed,
and who will be certain to expose vices and wrongs. The world will not
bear rebukes. The fate of prophets is to be stoned. A stern moral
greatness is repulsive to the weak and wicked. Parties reward mediocre
men, whom they can use or bend; and the greatest benefactors lose their
popularity when they oppose the enthusiasm of new ideas, or become
austere in their instructions. Thus the greatest statesman that this
country has produced since Alexander Hamilton, lost his prestige when
his conciliating policy became offensive to a rising party whose
watchword was "the higher law," although, by his various conflicts with
Southern leaders and his loyalty to the Constitution, he educated the
people to sustain the very war which he foresaw and dreaded. And had
that accomplished senator from Massachusetts, Charles Sumner, who
succeeded to Webster's seat, and who in his personal appearance and
advocacy for reform strikingly resembled Burke,--had he remained
uninjured to our day, with increasing intellectual powers and profounder
moral wisdom, I doubt whether even he would have had much influence with
our present legislators; for he had all the intellectual defects of both
Burke and Webster, and never was so popular as either of them at one
period of their career, while he certainly was inferior to both in
native force, experience, and attainments.

The chief labors of Burke for the first ten years of his parliamentary
life had been mainly in connection with American affairs, and which the
result proved he comprehended better than