But of all nations in the world the English are perhaps the least a nation of pure philosophers.  It would be a very serious matter to us to change every four or five years the visible head of our world.  We are not now remarkable for the highest sort of ambition; but we are remarkable for having a great deal of the lower sort of ambition and envy.  The House of Commons is thronged with people who get there merely for “social purposes,” as the phrase goes; that is, that they and their families may go to parties else impossible.  Members of Parliament are envied by thousands merely for this frivolous glory, as a thinker calls it.  If the highest post in conspicuous life were thrown open to public competition, this low sort of ambition and envy would be fearfully increased.  Politics would offer a prize too dazzling for mankind; clever base people would strive for it, and stupid base people would envy it.  Even now a dangerous distinction is given by what is exclusively called public life.  The newspapers describe daily and incessantly a certain conspicuous existence; they comment on its characters, recount its details, investigate its motives, anticipate its course.  They give a precedent and a dignity to that world which they do not give to any other.  The literary world, the scientific world, the philosophic world, not only are not comparable in dignity to the political world, but in comparison are hardly worlds at all.  The newspaper makes no mention of them, and could not mention them.  As are the papers, so are the readers; they, by irresistible sequence and association, believe that those people who constantly figure in the papers are cleverer, abler, or at any rate, somehow higher, than other people.  “I wrote books,” we heard of a man saying, “for twenty years, and I was nobody; I got into Parliament, and before I had taken my seat I had become somebody.”  English politicians are the men who fill the thoughts of the English public:  they are the actors on the scene, and it is hard for the admiring spectators not to believe that the admired actor is greater than themselves.  In this present age and country it would be very dangerous to give the slightest addition to a force already perilously great.  If the highest social rank was to be scrambled for in the House of Commons, the number of social adventurers there would be incalculably more numerous, and indefinitely more eager.

A very peculiar combination of causes has made this characteristic one of the most prominent in English society.  The middle ages left all Europe with a social system headed by Courts.  The Government was made the head of all society, all intercourse, and all life; everything paid allegiance to the sovereign, and everything ranged itself round the sovereign—­what was next to be greatest, and what was farthest least.  The idea that the head of the Government is the head of society is so fixed in the ideas of mankind that only a few philosophers regard it as historical and accidental, though when the matter is examined, that conclusion is certain and even obvious.