. Birrell, "is that
a Prime Minister no longer feels himself responsible for good
government. He awaits a 'mandate' from a mob who are watching a football
match."

We have only to compare this order of mind with a mind like Lord
Leverhulme's to perceive how it is that politics in our country tend
more and more in the American direction. The big men are outside.
Politics are little more than a platform for a pugilistic kind of
rhetoric. He who can talk glibly and with occasional touches of such
sentimentalism as one finds in a Penny Reciter is assured of the ear of
the House of Commons, and may fairly count on one day becoming a
Minister of State. But the field for the constructive, imaginative, and
creative minds is the field of commerce.

The danger of the State from this condition of things is, unhappily, not
only the loss of creative statesmanship at the head of the
nation--serious as that is. The danger is greater. Small men are more
likely to fall into dishonest ways than big men. There lies, I think,
our greatest danger. It seems to me, observing our public life with some
degree of intimacy, that there is a growing tendency for the gentleman
to fall out of the political ranks and for his place to be filled by the
professional politician, who in many cases appears to be almost entirely
without moral principle. What can become of such a movement save
eventual corruption? At present our politics are stupid but fairly
honest. There are still representatives of the old school in the House
of Commons. But the conquering advance is from the ranks of
professionalism.

I would not have the reader to suppose that I consider Lord Leverhulme a
heaven-sent genius of statesmanship. The British constitution is twelve
men in a box, and the very spirit of that arrangement is distrust of the
expert. Moreover, there is wisdom in the Eastern legend which says that
in making genius the fairies left out one essential gift--the knowledge
of when to stop.

Whether Lord Leverhulme would have made a better statesman than, let us
say, Sir Henry Campbell Bannerman or Mr. Bonar Law it is surely certain,
I think, that a true statesman would have made every conceivable use of
his unusual mind. This, as I look at things, is the ideal method of
government. I do not believe in the business man as statesman. I believe
in the trained, cultured, and incorruptible gentleman as statesman, and
the business man as his adviser.

But until our polit