In the first place, society as society does not naturally need a head at all.  Its constitution, if left to itself, is not monarchical, but aristocratical.  Society, in the sense we are now talking of, is the union of people for amusement and conversation.  The making of marriages goes on in it, as it were, incidentally, but its common and main concern is talking and pleasure.  There is nothing in this which needs a single supreme head; it is a pursuit in which a single person does not of necessity dominate.  By nature it creates an “upper ten thousand”; a certain number of persons and families possessed of equal culture, and equal faculties, and equal spirit, get to be on a level—­and that level a high level.  By boldness, by cultivation, by “social science” they raise themselves above others; they become the “first families,” and all the rest come to be below them.  But they tend to be much about a level among one another; no one is recognised by all or by many others as superior to them all.  This is society as it grew up in Greece or Italy, as it grows up now in any American or colonial town.  So far from the notion of a “head of society” being a necessary notion, in many ages it would scarcely have been an intelligible notion.  You could not have made Socrates understand it.  He would have said, “If you tell me that one of my fellows is chief magistrate, and that I am bound to obey him, I understand you, and you speak well; or that another is a priest, and that he ought to offer sacrifices to the gods which I or any one not a priest ought not to offer, again I understand and agree with you.  But if you tell me that there is in some citizen a hidden charm by which his words become better than my words, and his house better than my house, I do not follow you, and should be pleased if you will explain yourself.”

And even if a head of society were a natural idea, it certainly would not follow that the head of the civil Government should be that head.  Society as such has no more to do with civil polity than with ecclesiastical.  The organisation of men and women for the purpose of amusement is not necessarily identical with their organisation for political purposes, any more than with their organisation for religious purposes; it has of itself no more to do with the State than it has with the Church.  The faculties which fit a man to be a great ruler are not those of society; some great rulers have been unintelligible like Cromwell, or brusque like Napoleon, or coarse and barbarous like Sir Robert Walpole.  The light nothings of the drawing-room and the grave things of office are as different from one another as two human occupations can be.  There is no naturalness in uniting the two; the end of it always is, that you put a man at the head of society who very likely is remarkable for social defects, and is not eminent for social merits.