Perhaps such powers as these are what a wise man would most seek to exercise and least fear to possess.  To wish to be a despot, “to hunger after tyranny,” as the Greek phrase had it, marks in our day an uncultivated mind.  A person who so wishes cannot have weighed what Butler calls the “doubtfulness things are involved in”.  To be sure you are right to impose your will, or to wish to impose it, with violence upon others; to see your own ideas vividly and fixedly, and to be tormented till you can apply them in life and practice, not to like to hear the opinions of others, to be unable to sit down and weigh the truth they have, are but crude states of intellect in our present civilisation.  We know, at least, that facts are many; that progress is complicated; that burning ideas (such as young men have) are mostly false and always incomplete.  The notion of a far-seeing and despotic statesman, who can lay down plans for ages yet unborn, is a fancy generated by the pride of the human intellect to which facts give no support.  The plans of Charlemagne died with him; those of Richelieu were mistaken; those of Napoleon gigantesque and frantic.  But a wise and great constitutional monarch attempts no such vanities.  His career is not in the air; he labours in the world of sober fact; he deals with schemes which can be effected—­schemes which are desirable—­schemes which are worth the cost.  He says to the Ministry his people send to him, to Ministry after Ministry, “I think so and so; do you see if there is anything in it.  I have put down my reasons in a certain memorandum, which I will give you.  Probably it does not exhaust the subject, but it will suggest materials for your consideration.”  By years of discussion with Ministry after Ministry, the best plans of the wisest king would certainly be adopted, and the inferior plans, the impracticable plans, rooted out and rejected.  He could not be uselessly beyond his time, for he would have been obliged to convince the representatives, the characteristic men of his time.  He would have the best means of proving that he was right on all new and strange matters, for he would have won to his side probably, after years of discussion, the chosen agents of the commonplace world—­men who were where they were, because they had pleased the men of the existing age, who will never be much disposed to new conceptions or profound thoughts.  A sagacious and original constitutional monarch might go to his grave in peace if any man could.  He would know that his best laws were in harmony with his age; that they suited the people who were to work them, the people who were to be benefited by them.  And he would have passed a happy life.  He would have passed a life in which he could always get his arguments heard, in which he could always make those who have the responsibility of action think of them before they acted—­in which he could know that the schemes which he had set at work in the world were not the casual accidents of an individual idiosyncrasy, which are mostly much wrong, but the likeliest of all things to be right—­ the ideas of one very intelligent man at last accepted and acted on by the ordinary intelligent many.