self
had he not learned how to spend it; and ambition itself could not have
shown him a straighter road to fame.

This is the positive side of a man's discovery of the way in which his
faculties are to be made to fit into the world's affairs and released for
effort in a way that will bring real satisfaction. There is a negative side
also. Men come to themselves by discovering their limitations no less than
by discovering their deeper endowments and the mastery that will make them
happy. It is the discovery of what they can _not_ do, and ought not to
attempt, that transforms reformers into statesmen; and great should be the
joy of the world over every reformer who comes to himself. The spectacle is
not rare; the method is not hidden. The practicability of every reform is
determined absolutely and always by "the circumstances of the case," and
only those who put themselves into the midst of affairs, either by action
or by observation, can know what those circumstances are or perceive what
they signify. No statesman dreams of doing whatever he pleases; he knows
that it does not follow that because a point of morals or of policy is
obvious to him it will be obvious to the nation, or even to his own
friends; and it is the strength of a democratic polity that there are so
many minds to be consulted and brought to agreement, and that nothing can
be wisely done for which the thought, and a good deal more than the
thought, of the country, its sentiment and its purpose, have not been
prepared. Social reform is a matter of cooeperation, and, if it be of a
novel kind, requires an infinite deal of converting to bring the efficient
majority to believe in it and support it. Without their agreement and
support it is impossible.

It is this that the more imaginative and impatient reformers find out when
they come to themselves, if that calming change ever comes to them.
Oftentimes the most immediate and drastic means of bringing them to
themselves is to elect them to legislative or executive office. That will
reduce over-sanguine persons to their simplest terms. Not because they find
their fellow legislators or officials incapable of high purpose or
indifferent to the betterment of the communities which they represent. Only
cynics hold that to be the chief reason why we approach the millennium so
slowly, and cynics are usually very ill-informed persons. Nor is it because
under our modern democratic arrangements we so subdivide power and