em, in a manner
becoming mine. He asked me if I really thought that men who were totally
inexperienced in the affairs of government could conduct matters
properly,--an old and favourite appeal with the disciples of political
exclusion. I endeavoured to persuade him that the art of administering
was no great art; that there was more danger of rulers knowing _too
much_ than of their knowing _too little_, old soldiers proverbially
taking better care of themselves than young soldiers; that he must not
expect too much, for they that know the practices of free governments,
well know it is hopeless to think of keeping pure and disinterested men
long in office, even as men go, there being a corrupting influence about
the very exercise of power that forbids the hope; and that all which
shrewd observers look for in popular institutions is a greater check
than common on the selfishness of those to whom authority is confided. I
told him the man who courts popular favour in a republic, would court a
prince in a monarchy, the elements of a demagogue and a courtier being
exactly the same; and that, under either system, except in extraordinary
instances, it was useless to attempt excluding such men from authority,
since their selfishness was more active than the feelings of the
disinterested; that, in our own case, so long as the impetus of the
revolution and the influence of great events lasted, we had great men in
the ascendant, but, now that matters were jogging on regularly, and
under their common-place aspects, we were obliged to take up with merely
clever managers; that one of the wisest men that had ever lived (Bacon)
had said, that "few men rise to power in a state, without a union of
_great_ and _mean_ qualities," and that this was probably as true at
Berne as it is at Washington, and as true at Paris as at either; that
the old system in his country savoured too much of the policy of giving
the milk of two cows to one calf, and that he must remember it was a
system that made very bad as well as very good veal, whereas for
ordinary purposes it was better to have the same quantity of merely good
veal; and, in short, that he himself would soon be surprised at
discovering how soon the new rulers would acquire all the useful habits
of their predecessors, and I advised him to look out that they did not
acquire some of their bad ones too.

I never flattered myself with producing a change of opinion in the
captain, who always listened