236 FRESH FIELDS 



is partial and unscientific. We can stand, and have 

 stood, any amount of mediocrity in our appointed 

 rulers ; and perhaps in the ordinary course of events 

 mediocrity is the safest and best. We could no longer 

 surrender ourselves to great leaders, if we wanted 

 to. Indeed, there is no longer a call for great lead- 

 ers; with the appearance of the people upon the 

 scene, the hero must await his orders. How often 

 in this country have the people checked and cor- 

 rected the folly and wrong-headedness of their 

 rulers! It is probably true, as Carlyle says, that 

 "the smallest item of human Slavery is the oppres- 

 sion of man by his Mock-Superiors ; '^ but shall we 

 accept the other side of the proposition, that the 

 grand problem is to find government by our Keal 

 Superiors? The grand problem is rather to be 

 superior to all government, and to possess a nation- 

 ality that finally rests upon principles quite beyond 

 the fluctuations of ordinary politics. A people pos- 

 sessed of the gift of Empire, like the English stock, 

 both in Europe and in America, are in our day 

 beholden very little to their chosen rulers. Other- 

 wise the English nation would have been extinct 

 long ago. 



"Human virtue," Carlyle wrote in 1850, "if we 

 went down to the roots of it, is not so rare. The 

 materials of human virtue are everywhere abundant 

 as the light of the sun." This may well offset his 

 more pessimistic statement, that "there are fools, 

 cowards, knaves, and gluttonous traitors, true only 

 to their own appetite, in immense majority in every 



