If we would make a place for it we must begin by realizing this. The painter, like the lover, is a law unto himself, with his little picture—the poet, also, with his little rhyme—his atelier his universe, his attic his field of battle, his weapons the utensils of his craft—he himself his own Providence. It is not so in the world of action, where the conditions are directly reversed; where the one player contends against many players, seen and unseen; where each move is met by some counter-move; where the finest touches are often unnoted of men or rudely blotted out by a mysterious hand stretched forth from the darkness. “I wish I could be as sure of anything,” said Melbourne, “as Tom Macaulay is of everything.” Melbourne was a man of affairs, Macaulay a man of books; and so throughout the story the men of action have been fatalists, from Cæsar to Napoleon and Bismarck, nothing certain except the invisible player behind the screen. Of all human contrivances the most imperfect is government. In spite of the essays of Bentham and Mill the science of government has yet to be discovered. The ideal statesman can only exist in the ideal state, which has never existed. The politician, like the poor, we have always with us. As long as men delegate to other men the function of acting for them, of thinking for them, we shall continue to have him. He is a variable quantity. In the crowded centers his distinguishing marks are short hair and cunning; upon the frontier, sentiment and the six-shooter! In New York he becomes a boss; in Kentucky and Texas, a fighter and an orator. But the statesman—the ideal statesman—in the mind’s eye, Horatio! Bound by practical limitations such an anomaly would be a statesman minus a party, a statesman who never gets any votes or anywhere—a statesman perpetually out of a job. We have had some imitation ideal statesmen who have been more or less successful in palming off their pinchbeck wares for the real; but looking backward over the history of the country we shall find the greatest among our public men—measuring greatness by real and useful service—to have been while they lived least regarded as idealists; for they were men of flesh and blood, who amid the rush of events and the calls to duty could not stop to paint pictures, to consider sensibilities, to put forth the deft hand where life and death hung upon the stroke of a bludgeon or the swinging of a club. Washington was not an ideal statesman, nor Hamilton, nor Jefferson, nor Lincoln, though each of them conceived grandly and executed nobly. They loved truth for truth’s sake, even as they loved their country. Yet no one of them ever quite attained his conception of it.