Ciceronian idea of government by the best that produced the long
line of New England statesmen. They chose men to represent them
because they wanted to be well represented, and they chose the
best they had. Thus Boston chose Daniel Webster, and Webster
took, not as pay, but as honorarium, the cheques raised for him
by Peter Harvey from the Appletons, Perkinses, Amorys, Searses,
Brookses, Lawrences, and so on, who begged him to represent them.
Edward Everett held the rank in regular succession to Webster.
Robert C. Winthrop claimed succession to Everett. Charles Sumner
aspired to break the succession, but not the system. The Adamses
had never been, for any length of time, a part of this State
succession; they had preferred the national service, and had won
all their distinction outside the State, but they too had
required State support and had commonly received it. The little
group of men in Mount Vernon Street were an offshoot of this
system; they were statesmen, not politicians; they guided public
opinion, but were little guided by it.

The boy naturally learned only one lesson from his saturation
in such air. He took for granted that this sort of world, more or
less the same that had always existed in Boston and Massachusetts
Bay, was the world which he was to fit. Had he known Europe he
would have learned no better. The Paris of Louis Philippe,
Guizot, and de Tocqueville, as well as the London of Robert Peel,
Macaulay, and John Stuart Mill, were but varieties of the same
upper-class bourgeoisie that felt instinctive cousinship with the
Boston of Ticknor, Prescott, and Motley. Even the typical
grumbler Carlyle, who cast doubts on the real capacity of the
middle class, and who at times thought himself eccentric, found
friendship and alliances in Boston -- still more in Concord. The