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Rh  idea of statesmanship was made by Mazzini, whom Lord Beaconsfield would probably deny to be a statesman at all. He, if anyone ever did, represented an idea, not indeed an idea which led him to power, in the sense in which Lord Beaconsfield understands power, since it doomed him to imprisonment, exile, and poverty. Still it was one which he impressed on the mind and conscience of his country, with which he identified himself, and which he developed. In Lord Beaconsfield's sense, Mazzini was a greater statesman than Cavour. In the same sense, Burke was a statesman when he raged in prophetic fury against the French Revolution, carrying the national feeling with him in his frenzy, but not when he framed and carried his scheme of economic reform. Cobden, as a freetrader, was a statesman and Peel was not. Mr. Bright, in his agitation for household suffrage, showed a statesmanship which Lord Beaconsfield did not display in passing the bill for which that agitation prepared the way and created the necessity. The fact probably is that statesmanship, as a merely practical art, does not deserve the high intellectual rank sometimes assigned to it. Original ideas are out of place in it. The statesman in modern times and in quiet days is four or five removes from originality. This was so with Peel. The originator, so far as English theory and practice is concerned, of sound economic ideas was Adam Smith. Between him and Sir Robert Peel, popular exponents of economic doctrine, such as Bastiat in France, and Colonel Perronet Thompson in England, authors of "Economic Sophisms" and "Catechisms of Free-Trade," have first to be interposed. But they are only the first link in the chain. Then came the popular agitation of Cobden and Bright, and the Parliamentary advocacy of Mr. Villiers. Last in the chain, and dragged along by it, conquered rather than conquering, comes the successful minister with whose name the hardly-won reform is associated. The discoverer, the expositor, the agitator, the Parliamentary leader — educated opinion, popular opinion, House of Commons opinion, and ministerial conversion or apostasy — two words for the same thing looked at with hostile or friendly eyes — these are the stages by which a vital political idea struggles into realization. To complain that a statesman does not originate is to utter treason against the doctrine of the division of labor. He simply delivers the article that others have made. If Sir Robert Peel had originated anything in theory, he would probably have failed directly to accomplish anything in practice. He would have been Adam Smith and not Sir Robert Peel. He was the convert, the honest convert, of public opinion. His mind by a sort of pre-established harmony was so constituted as to see what ought to be done just when the moment for doing it had arrived, but not a moment too soon nor a moment too late. Such an intelligence is not of the highest order. But it is useful in the conduct of life. The proper contrast is not that which Lord Beaconsfield draws between the adapting and adopting statesman and the originator; but between the statesman who gives effect to tardy and yet timely convictions, and the trading politician who resists measures which he knows in his heart to be just and expedient in order to humor a faction or to gratify personal spite and ambition. The Conservative party has within a generation had leaders of both sorts. It is worth noting by those who think that in politics we still have judgment here, that Sir Robert Peel died an exile from his party, distrusted and hated by them; and that Lord Beaconsfield is able to boast of unwavering majorities in both Houses, of the confidence of the crown, and of the enthusiastic support of the mobs and music halls which he supposes to represent the country.

 

 From The Cornhill Magazine.

the little town of Vevey, in Switzerland, there is a particularly comfortable hotel. There are, indeed, many hotels; for the entertainment of tourists is the business of the place, which, as many travellers will remember, is seated upon the edge of a remarkably blue lake — a lake that it behoves every tourist to visit. The shore of the lake presents an unbroken array of establishments of this order, of every category, from the "grand hotel" of the newest fashion, with a chalk-white front, a hundred balconies, and a dozen flags flying from its roof, to the little Swiss pension of an elder day, with its name inscribed in German-looking lettering upon a pink or yellow wall and an awkward summerhouse in the angle of the garden. One of the hotels at Vevey, however, is famous, even 