The role of the leader would be easier to define if it were agreed to give separate meanings to two very common words. I mean the words “politician” and “statesman.” In popular usage a vague distinction is recognized: to call a man a statesman is eulogy, to call him a politician is to be, however faintly, disparaging. The dictionary, in fact, defines a politician as one who seeks to subserve the interests of a political party _merely_; as an afterthought it defines him as one skilled in political science: a statesman. And in defining a statesman the [p280] dictionary says that he is a political leader of distinguished ability. These definitions can, I think, be improved upon by clarifying the meanings which are vaguely intended in popular usage. When we think offhand of a politician we think of a man who works for a partial interest. At the worst it is his own pocket. At the best it may be his party, his class, or an institution with which he is identified. We never feel that he can or will take into account all the interests concerned, and because bias and partisanship are the qualities of his conduct, we feel, unless we are naively afflicted with the same bias, that he is not to be trusted too far. Now the word ‘statesman,’ when it is not mere pomposity, connotes a man whose mind is elevated sufficiently above the conflict of contending parties to enable him to adopt a course of action which takes into account a greater number of interests in the perspective of a longer period of time. It is some such conception as this that Edmund Burke had in mind when he wrote that the state “ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco, or some other such low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary interest and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties.... It is a partnership in a higher and more permanent sense—a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are dead and those who are to be born.” [p281]