This is a duty from which all weak Governments shrink.  If a Minister is not very sure of his position; if he is backed, not by a united party, but by a haphazard coalition; if he is unduly anxious about his own official future; if his eye is nervously fixed on the next move of the jumping cat, he always fails to govern.  He neither protects the law-abiding citizen nor chastises the criminal and the rebel.  In this particular, there is no distinction of party.  Tories can show no better record than Whigs, nor Liberals than Conservatives.  It is a question of the governing temper, which is as absolutely requisite to the character of the ruler as courage to the soldier or incorruptibility to the Judge.

It used to be held, and perhaps still is held, by what may be styled 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 wrong-doing; is a faculty born in himself—­“the soul that riseth with him, his life’s star.”

And it has no more to do with politics than with pedigree.  Sydney Smith, though he was as whole-hearted a reformer as ever breathed, knew that sternness towards crime was an essential part of government, and after the Bristol Riots of 1831 he warned Lord Grey against flaccidity with great plainness of speech.  “Pray do not be good-natured about Bristol.  I must have ten people hanged, and twenty transported, and thirty imprisoned.  You will save lives by it in the end.”