We have only to compare this order of mind with a mind like Lord Leverhulme's to perceive how it is that politics in our country tend more and more in the American direction. The big men are outside. Politics are little more than a platform for a pugilistic kind of rhetoric. He who can talk glibly and with occasional touches of such sentimentalism as one finds in a Penny Reciter is assured of the ear of the House of Commons, and may fairly count on one day becoming a Minister of State. But the field for the constructive, imaginative, and creative minds is the field of commerce. The danger of the State from this condition of things is, unhappily, not only the loss of creative statesmanship at the head of the nation--serious as that is. The danger is greater. Small men are more likely to fall into dishonest ways than big men. There lies, I think, our greatest danger. It seems to me, observing our public life with some degree of intimacy, that there is a growing tendency for the gentleman to fall out of the political ranks and for his place to be filled by the professional politician, who in many cases appears to be almost entirely without moral principle. What can become of such a movement save eventual corruption? At present our politics are stupid but fairly honest. There are still representatives of the old school in the House of Commons. But the conquering advance is from the ranks of professionalism. I would not have the reader to suppose that I consider Lord Leverhulme a heaven-sent genius of statesmanship. The British constitution is twelve men in a box, and the very spirit of that arrangement is distrust of the expert. Moreover, there is wisdom in the Eastern legend which says that in making genius the fairies left out one essential gift--the knowledge of when to stop. Whether Lord Leverhulme would have made a better statesman than, let us say, Sir Henry Campbell Bannerman or Mr. Bonar Law it is surely certain, I think, that a true statesman would have made every conceivable use of his unusual mind. This, as I look at things, is the ideal method of government. I do not believe in the business man as statesman. I believe in the trained, cultured, and incorruptible gentleman as statesman, and the business man as his adviser. But until our politics are of a higher order we can hardly expect the best minds in the nation to feel any attraction to a political career. More and more the professional politician, the narrow man, the man of the loud voice and the one idea, the man who has few instincts of honesty in his mind and no movement of high and disinterested patriotism in his soul, will press himself upon the attention of democracy and by intimidating his leaders and brow-beating his opponents force his way onward to office. The consideration of this grave peril to the moral character of our public life brings me to my brief conclusion. CONCLUSION CHAPTER XIV CONCLUSION