Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Politics volume 4 .djvu/150

138 power is the genius for legislation, which.can enact justice and eternal right into treaties and statutes, codifying the divine thought into human laws, making absolute religion common life and daily custom, and balancing the centripetal power of the mass, with the centrifugal power of the individual, into a well-proportioned state, as God has balanced these two conflicting forces into the rhythmic ellipses above our heads. It need not be disguised, that politics are the highest business for men of this class, nor that a great statesman or legislator is the greatest example of constructive skill. It requires some ability to manage the brute forces of Nature, or to combine profitably nine-and-thirty clerks in a shop; how much more to arrange twenty millions of intelligent, free men, not for a special purpose, but for all the ends of universal life! Such is the second class of great men; the organizers, men of constructive heads, who form the institutions of the world, the little and the great.

The next class consists of men who administer the institutions after they, are founded. To do this effectually and even eminently, it requires no genius for original organization of truths freshly discovered, none for the discovery of truths, outright. It requires only a perception of those truths, and an acquaintance with the institutions wherein they have become incarnate; a knowledge of details, of formulas, and practical methods, united with a strong will and a practised understanding—what is called a turn for affairs, tact, or address; a knowledge of routine and an acquaintance with men. The successs of such men will depend on these qualities; they "know the ropes" and the soundings, the signs of the times; can take advantage of the winds and the tides.

In a shop, farm, ship, factory, or army, in a Church or a State, such men are valuable; they cannot be dispensed with ; they are wheels to the carriage; without them cannot a city be inhabited. They are always more numerous than both the other classes; more such are needed, and therefore born. The American mind, just now, runs eminently in this direction. These are not men of theories, or of new modes of thought or action, but what are called practical men, men of a few good rules.