s
as superior to them all. This is society as it grew up in Greece or
Italy, as it grows up now in any American or colonial town. So far from
the notion of a "head of society" being a necessary notion, in many
ages it would scarcely have been an intelligible notion. You could not
have made Socrates understand it. He would have said, "If you tell me
that one of my fellows is chief magistrate, and that I am bound to obey
him, I understand you, and you speak well; or that another is a priest,
and that he ought to offer sacrifices to the gods which I or any one
not a priest ought not to offer, again I understand and agree with you.
But if you tell me that there is in some citizen a hidden charm by
which his words become better than my words, and his house better than
my house, I do not follow you, and should be pleased if you will
explain yourself."

And even if a head of society were a natural idea, it certainly would
not follow that the head of the civil Government should be that head.
Society as such has no more to do with civil polity than with
ecclesiastical. The organisation of men and women for the purpose of
amusement is not necessarily identical with their organisation for
political purposes, any more than with their organisation for religious
purposes; it has of itself no more to do with the State than it has
with the Church. The faculties which fit a man to be a great ruler are
not those of society; some great rulers have been unintelligible like
Cromwell, or brusque like Napoleon, or coarse and barbarous like Sir
Robert Walpole. The light nothings of the drawing-room and the grave
things of office are as different from one another as two human
occupations can be. There is no naturalness in uniting the two; the end
of it always is, that you put a man at the head of society who very
likely is remarkable for social defects, and is not eminent for social
merits.

The best possible commentary on these remarks is the history of English
history. It has not been sufficiently remarked that a change has taken
place in the structure of our society exactly analogous to the change
in our polity. A Republic has insinuated itself beneath the folds of a
Monarchy. Charles II. was really the head of society; Whitehall, in his
time, was the centre of the best talk, the best fashion, and the most
curious love affairs of the age. He did not contribute good morality to
society, but he set an example of infinite agreeableness. He
c