the toad-eating school of publicists, that this governing temper
was an hereditary gift transmitted by a long line of ancestors,
who in their successive generations had possessed it, and had used
it on a large scale in the governance of England. "How natural,"
they exclaimed, "that Lord Nozoo, whose ancestors have ruled half
Loamshire since the Conquest, should have more notion of governing
men than that wretched Bagman, whose grandfather swept out the
shop, and who has never had to rule anyone except a clerk and a
parlourmaid!"

This sounded plausible enough, especially in the days when heredity
was everything, and when ancestral habit was held to explain, and if
necessary extenuate, all personal characteristics; but experience
and observation proved it false. Pitt was, I suppose, the greatest
Minister who ever ruled England; but his pedigree would have moved a
genealogist to scorn. Peel was a Minister who governed so effectually
that, according to Gladstone, who served under him, his direct
authority was felt in every department, high or low, of the
Administration over which he presided; and Peel was a very recent
product of cotton. Abraham Lincoln was, perhaps, the greatest ruler
of the modern world, and the quality of his ancestry is a topic fit
only to be handled in a lecture on the Self-Made Men of History.

When we regard our own time, I should say that Joseph Chamberlain had,
of all English statesmen I have ever known, both the most satisfactory
ideal of government and the greatest faculty for exercising it. But
the Cordwainers' Company was the school in which his forefathers
had learnt the art of rule. Ancestral achievements, hereditary
possessions, have nothing to do with the matter. What makes a man
a ruler of men, and enables him to set his face as a flint against