In this pacific attitude, increasingly urgent and increasingly far-reaching and apprehensive, the administration appears to be speaking for the common man rather than for the special interests or the privileged classes. Such would appear, on the face of the returns, to be the meaning of the late election. It is all the more significant on that account, since in the long run it is after all the common man that will have to pass on the expediency of any settled line of policy and to bear the material burden of carrying it into effect. It may seem rash to presume that a popularly accredited administration in a democratic country must approximately reflect the effectual changes of popular sentiment and desire. Especially would it seem rash to anyone looking on from the point of view of an undemocratic nation, and therefore prone to see the surface fluctuations of excitement and shifting clamor. But those who are within the democratic pale will know that any administration in such a country, where official tenure and continued incumbency of the party rest on a popular vote,--any such administration is a political organisation and is guided by political expediency, in the tawdry sense of the phrase. Such a political situation has the defects of its qualities, as has been well and frequently expounded by its critics, but it has also the merits of its shortcomings. In a democracy of this modern order any incumbent of high office is necessarily something of a politician, quite indispensably so; and a politician at the same time necessarily is something of a demagogue. He yields to the popular drift, or to the set of opinion and demands among the effective majority on whom he leans; and he can not even appear to lead, though he may surreptitiously lead opinion in adroitly seeming to reflect it and obey it. Ostensible leadership, such as has been staged in this country from time to time, has turned out to be ostensible only. The politician must be adroit; but if he is also to be a statesman he must be something more. He is under the necessity of guessing accurately what the drift of events and opinion is going to be on the next reach ahead; and in taking coming events by the forelock he may be able to guide and shape the drift of opinion and sentiment somewhat to his own liking. But all the while he must keep within the lines of the long-term set of the current as it works out in the habits of thought of the common man.