Oftentimes the most immediate and drastic means of bringing them to
themselves is to elect them to legislative or executive office. That
will reduce over-sanguine persons to their simplest terms. Not because
they find their fellow-legislators or officials incapable of high
purpose or indifferent to the betterment of the communities which they
represent. Only cynics hold that to be the chief reason why we approach
the millennium so slowly, and cynics are usually very ill-informed
persons. Nor is it because under our modern democratic arrangements we
so subdivide power and balance parts in government that no one man can
tell for much or turn affairs to his will. One of the most instructive
studies a politician could undertake would be a study of the infinite
limitations laid upon the power of the Russian Czar, notwithstanding the
despotic theory of the Russian constitution--limitations of social
habit, of official prejudice, of race jealousies, of religious
predilections, of administrative machinery even, and the inconvenience
of being himself only one man, caught amidst a rush of duties and
responsibilities which never halt or pause. He can do only what can be
done with the Russian people. He cannot change them at will. He is
himself of their own stuff, and immersed in the life which forms them,
as it forms him. He is simply the leader of the Russians.

An English or American statesman is better off. He leads a thinking
nation, not a race of peasants topped by a class of revolutionists
and a caste of nobles and officials. He can explain new things to
men able to understand, persuade men willing and accustomed to make
independent and intelligent choices of their own. An English
statesman has an even better opportunity to lead than an American
statesman, because in England executive power and legislative
initiative are both intrusted to the same grand committee, the
ministry of the day. The ministers both propose what shall be law