As I understand the word “politician,” it means a man who, whatever his other engagements in life may be, and however he may earn his daily bread, feels above all things deeply interested, feels that he is bound to be deeply interested, and to take as active a part as he can, in the public affairs of his country. I believe that every Englishman, if he is worth anything at all, is bound to be a politician, and can’t for the life of him help taking a deep interest in the public affairs of his country. The object of politics is the well-being of the nation, or in other words to make “a wise and understanding people.” Now, what are the means by which a wise and an understanding people is to be made? Well, of course, the chief means of making a wise and understanding people is by training them up in wisdom and understanding. The State wants men who are brave, truthful, generous; the State wants women who are pure, simple, gentle. By what means is the State to get citizens of that kind? Such a politician looking around him and seeing how the national conscience is to be touched—for unless the national conscience be touched you can never raise citizens of that kind—finds that the great power which alone can do it, is that which goes by the name of religion. CXLVII. The true work of the Liberal Party in a Liberal age is, with singleness of purpose and all its might, to lift the people to a fair and full share of all the best things of this life,—its highest culture, hopes, aspirations, burdens—as well as its loaves and fishes—and, setting before them a truly noble ideal of citizenship, to help them to attain it. Whatever goes beyond that, or beside that, savors of Jacobinism, for then comes in that jealousy which is the bane of true democracy. The true democrat has no old scores to pay, covets no man’s good things, wants nothing for himself which is not open to his neighbors, will destroy nothing which others value merely because he doesn’t value it himself, unless it is palpably and incurably unjust and unrighteous. I need not go on to contrast the Jacobin with him, beyond saying that the one is before all things constructive, the other destructive. CXLVIII. A liberal politician is a man who looks to the future and not to the past; he looks for progress; he desires to see the whole nation raised; he desires to go on from better things to better things, and he is not afraid of new things; he holds that every institution must be tried by its worth and its value to the nation;—he holds above all things that there should be equality before the law for every institution, for every society, and for every individual citizen. CXLIX.