y are, without the aid of capriciously adopted precedents and
fantastical analogies.

[Footnote 1: The Church did not fare so very ill, after all. The
State, in 1790, undertook the debts of the Church to the tune of
130,000,000 livres, and assured it an annual Budget of rather more
than that amount.--Boiteau's _Etat de la France_, p. 202.]

Parallels from France, or anywhere else, may supply literary
amusement; they may furnish a weapon in the play of controversy. They
shed no light and do no service as we confront the solid facts of the
business to be done. Lewis the Fourteenth was the author of a very
useful and superior commonplace when he wrote: "No man who is badly
informed can avoid reasoning badly. I believe that whoever is rightly
instructed, and rightly persuaded of _all the facts_, would never do
anything else but what he ought." Another great French ruler, who,
even more than Lewis, had a piercing eye for men and the world
of action, said that the mind of a general ought to be like a
field-glass, and as clear; to see things exactly as they are, _et
jamais se faire des tableaux_,--never to compose the objects before
him into pictures. The same maxim is nearly as good for the man who
has to conquer difficulties in the field of government; and analogies
and parallels are one way of substituting pictures for plans and
charts. Just because the statesman's problem is individual, history
can give him little help. I am not so graceless as to depreciate
history or literature either for public or for private persons. "You
are a man," Napoleon said to Goethe; and there is no reason why
literature should prevent the reader of books from being a man; why it
should blind him to the great practical truths that the end of life
is not to think but to will; that everything in the world has its
decisive moment, which statesmen know and seize; that the genius of
politics, as a great man of letters truly wrote, has not "All or
Nothing" for its motto, but seeks on the contrary to extract the
greatest advantage from situations the most compromised, and never
flings the helve after the hatchet. Like literature the use of history
in politics is to refresh, to open, to make the mind generous and
hospitable; to enrich, to impart flexibility, to quicken and nourish
political imagination and invention, to instruct in the common
difficulties and the various experiences of government; to enable a
statesman to place himself at a general a