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 difficulties. But we are all of us conscious of the difference between what we would do and what we can do. Everybody who sits on a committee comes away feeling that he could have managed its business better by himself. But the use even of a committee is to show you what available resources a particular line of action can command; and you generally depart with a conviction that it is only the second-best policy which has any chance of immediate success. Statesmen in the past suffered under the same limitations. The possession of supreme power by rulers is only apparent. Somehow or other they had to discover what the nation was likely to do, and more than that they could not venture to undertake. Improvements in the mechanism of government are of use as they enable statesmen to gauge more accurately the forces on which they can rely. There is one lesson that comes from reading diplomatic records: it is that rulers were always trying to make the best of a bad business. Parliamentary obstruction is only a condensed form of what had always to be reckoned with. The outward expression of tendencies has changed, rather than the tendencies themselves.

It is very difficult to clothe with any appearance of interest abortive attempts which came to nothing, which were put forward in ambiguous language, and were often cloaks to some further purpose behind. Yet, as a matter of fact, these constituted the main activity of many statesmen, and, if we leave them untraced or unmentioned, we are missing the point of their laborious lives. There is no more widespread