It is this that the more imaginative and impatient reformers find out when
they come to themselves, if that calming change ever comes to them.
Oftentimes the most immediate and drastic means of bringing them to
themselves is to elect them to legislative or executive office. That will
reduce over-sanguine persons to their simplest terms. Not because they find
their fellow legislators or officials incapable of high purpose or
indifferent to the betterment of the communities which they represent. Only
cynics hold that to be the chief reason why we approach the millennium so
slowly, and cynics are usually very ill-informed persons. Nor is it because
under our modern democratic arrangements we so subdivide power and balance
parts in government that no one man can tell for much or turn affairs to
his will. One of the most instructive studies a politician could undertake
would be a study of the infinite limitations laid upon the power of the
Russian Czar, notwithstanding the despotic theory of the Russian
constitution--limitations of social habit, of official prejudice, of race
jealousies, of religious predilections, of administrative machinery even,
and the inconvenience of being himself only one man, and that a very young
one, over-sensitive and touched with melancholy. He can do only what can be
done with the Russian people. He can no more make them quick, enlightened,
and of the modern world of the West than he can change their tastes in
eating. He is simply the leader of Russians.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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