f civics.

If we would make a place for it we must begin by realizing this.
The painter, like the lover, is a law unto himself, with his little
picture--the poet, also, with his little rhyme--his atelier his
universe, his attic his field of battle, his weapons the utensils of
his craft--he himself his own Providence. It is not so in the world of
action, where the conditions are directly reversed; where the one player
contends against many players, seen and unseen; where each move is met
by some counter-move; where the finest touches are often unnoted of
men or rudely blotted out by a mysterious hand stretched forth from the
darkness.

"I wish I could be as sure of anything," said Melbourne, "as Tom
Macaulay is of everything." Melbourne was a man of affairs, Macaulay a
man of books; and so throughout the story the men of action have been
fatalists, from Caesar to Napoleon and Bismarck, nothing certain except
the invisible player behind the screen.

Of all human contrivances the most imperfect is government. In spite of
the essays of Bentham and Mill the science of government has yet to be
discovered. The ideal statesman can only exist in the ideal state, which
has never existed.

The politician, like the poor, we have always with us. As long as men
delegate to other men the function of acting for them, of thinking for
them, we shall continue to have him.

He is a variable quantity. In the crowded centers his distinguishing
marks are short hair and cunning; upon the frontier, sentiment and the
six-shooter! In New York he becomes a boss; in Kentucky and Texas, a
fighter and an orator. But the statesman--the ideal statesman--in the
mind's eye, Horatio! Bound by practical limitations such an anomaly
would be a statesman minus a party, a statesman who never gets any votes
or anywhere--a statesman perpetually out of a job. We have had some
imitation ideal statesmen who have been more or less successful in
palming off their pinchbeck wares for the real; but looking backward
over the history of the country we shall find the greatest among our
public men--measuring greatness by real and useful service--to have been
while they lived least regarded as idealists; for they were men of flesh
and blood, who amid the rush of events and the calls to duty could not
stop to paint pictures, to consider sensibilities, to put forth the
deft hand where life and death hung upon the stroke of a bludgeon or the
swinging of a club.

Washin