but it will suggest materials for your consideration." By
years of discussion with Ministry after Ministry, the best plans of the
wisest king would certainly be adopted, and the inferior plans, the
impracticable plans, rooted out and rejected. He could not be uselessly
beyond his time, for he would have been obliged to convince the
representatives, the characteristic men of his time. He would have the
best means of proving that he was right on all new and strange matters,
for he would have won to his side probably, after years of discussion,
the chosen agents of the commonplace world--men who were where they
were, because they had pleased the men of the existing age, who will
never be much disposed to new conceptions or profound thoughts. A
sagacious and original constitutional monarch might go to his grave in
peace if any man could. He would know that his best laws were in
harmony with his age; that they suited the people who were to work
them, the people who were to be benefited by them. And he would have
passed a happy life. He would have passed a life in which he could
always get his arguments heard, in which he could always make those who
have the responsibility of action think of them before they acted--in
which he could know that the schemes which he had set at work in the
world were not the casual accidents of an individual idiosyncrasy,
which are mostly much wrong, but the likeliest of all things to be
right--the ideas of one very intelligent man at last accepted and acted
on by the ordinary intelligent many.

But can we expect such a king, or, for that is the material point, can
we expect a lineal series of such kings? Every one has heard the reply
of the Emperor Alexander to Madame de Stael, who favoured him with a
declamation in praise of beneficent despotism. "Yes, Madame, but it is
only a happy accident." He well knew that the great abilities and the
good intentions necessary to make an efficient and good despot never
were continuously combined in any line of rulers. He knew that they
were far out of reach of hereditary human nature. Can it be said that
the characteristic qualities of a constitutional monarch are more
within its reach? I am afraid it cannot. We found just now that the
characteristic use of an hereditary constitutional monarch, at the
outset of an administration, greatly surpassed the ordinary competence
of hereditary faculties. I fear that an impartial investigation will
establish the same