He had to begin by acquiring the difficult art of "taking people," and this--as the King himself admits--he only acquired gradually. However, he possessed an inborn genius for the business of ruler. By nature he is a practical realist whose insatiable appetite for facts, _faits politiques_, crowds out most other interests. So he quickly profited by experience, which, added to an independence of judgment which he always possessed, has made him an opportunist whose opportunity always means the welfare of his country. In dealing with public questions he endeavours to start with the Gladstonian open mind: _i.e._, by having no fixed opinion of his own. He listens to all--forms his own opinion in doing so--and invariably finishes by impressing and influencing others. He even indirectly manipulates public opinion by constantly seeing and conversing with a vast number of people. For in Roumania there is no class favouritism so far as access to the monarch is concerned. Anybody may be presented at Court, and on any Sunday afternoon all are at liberty to call and see the King even without the formality of an audience paper to fix an appointment. Personal favouritism has never existed under him. In fact, so thoroughly has he realised and carried into practice what he considers to be his duty of personal impartiality, that he once vouchsafed the following justification of an apparent harshness: that a ruler must take up one and drop another as the interests of the country require. In other words, he must not allow personal feeling to sway him--whereas in private life he should never forsake a friend. And yet withal King Charles is anxiously intent upon avoiding personal responsibility--not from timidity, but from an idea that it is irreconcilable with the dignity of a constitutional king to put himself forward in this way. Thus not "Le Roi le veut," but rather "I hold it to be in the public interest that such and such a thing should be done" is his habitual form of speech in council with his Ministers. One of the King's favourite aphorisms is singularly suggestive in our talkative age: "It is not so much by what a prince _does_ as by what he _says_ that he makes enemies!" Like all men of true genius--or what the Germans call "geniale Naturen"--King Charles is of simple, unaffected nature;[3] without a taint of the histrionic in his composition, yet gifted with great reserve force of self-repression, and rare powers of discernment and well-balanced judgment. [3] Lord Macaulay cites the Earl of Chatham in the following words as the exception to this invariable rule, thus: "He was an almost solitary instance of a man of real genius, and of brave, lofty, and commanding spirit, without simplicity of character."--(William Pitt, Earl of Chatham.) Macaulay's "Critical and Historical Essays."