are citizens, but not necessarily fullgrown men and women. Politics is the art or business of adjusting these common affairs, and to be politically minded is to have a natural or acquired interest in this task of management or government.

During long periods of human history, especially during or after times of great social disturbance, or in times when the social equipment was being rapidly developed, the art of government has been generally regarded as the supreme art, and the perfection of external organization has been considered the chief and almost only test of civilization. The rulers of men, whether monarchs or statesmen, soldiers or civilians, have filled the history-books with their achievements and the market-places of cities and townships with their statues. Darwin, living quietly in a London suburb while he was revolutionizing the outlook of his generation, was almost abashed at receiving a visit from Gladstone, while it was Goethe the Hofrat of Weimar quite as much as Goethe the poet who preserved his self-respect while Napoleon was sweeping through his country. But we of the twentieth century, brought sharply into contact with civilizations which have succeeded where ours have failed and failed where ours have succeeded, are beginning to alter our standard of valuation. We are beginning to realize that politics and government are only one side, if an important side, of the work of civilization; that they involve certain qualities and a certain training which are unevenly distributed throughout the world, unevenly distributed even through the civilized countries. It is perhaps in Russia, which we may call "backward" or

Two peoples in the roll of history have shown conspicuous aptitude for government, the Romans and the English. Other nations, some of whom it would be invidious to mention, have been strikingly successful in what may be called pseudo-government; that is, in employing political means for other than political purposes, in using "the public thing" for private and personal ends. But "politics" in that sense of the term has nothing to do with government or politics proper: the corrupt politician is as different from a statesman as a medieval alchemist was from a chemist, or as is the vender of a worthless drug from a conscientious physician, or a vaudeville performer from a great classical actor. Indeed, the vaudeville performer is pursuing a far more honorable calling than the politician, for he is frank and open in the acceptance of a second-class and imitative activity, while the politician is deceiving the people, and often himself as well, in reducing one of the most difficult and responsible of human activities into a competition in commercial bargaining and adroit intrigue.

What are the qualities which brought success to the Romans and the English in their work of government and enabled central Italy and southern Great Britain to become centers of great empires? Governor Hadley, in his study of "Rome and the World To-day," has lately drawn attention to the remarkable similarity in physiognomy between the old Roman

rulers and the American governing type of to-day; and there is no doubt that the work of organization carried on by Roman public men and their compeers in Great Britain and America has left its imprint in their faces. The distinctive qualities required for such work may perhaps be summarized in two characteristics, public spirit and judgment.

What we call "public spirit" is a moral quality, a particular and highly specialized form of unselfishness. It involves a concentration upon the public welfare of a zeal and a devotion which the non-political man, whether he be more intense or merely more sluggish in his attachments, prefers to bestow elsewhere. What we call "judgment," on the other hand, is an intellectual quality, a particular and highly specialized form of intellectual activity. It involves the power of taking a mass of facts, together constituting a "political situation," surveying them as a whole and framing a practical decision-a decision leading to action. To have a good judgment about a situation is not the same thing as to have an understanding of such a situation in all its bearings. Englishmen have not governed India by understanding her, nor did they quell the great Mutiny in 1857, which would assuredly have proved fatal to their rule had they been differently constituted, by their power of comprehending the motives which produced it. They held their ground by their power to comprehend not the underlying facts, but the urgent facts, and by their ability to decide as to "the next step." Just as public spirit, in its most concentrated form, involves a certain emotional abdication, so judgment, especially in an emergency, involves an intellectual

abdication. The statesman, faced by the necessity of framing a practical decision, cannot afford to look too deeply into causes or to cultivate too nice a sense of intellectual consistency.

To sit on a committee is, for any one who has a keen intellectual life of his own, to suffer a species of martyrdom; in the process of arriving at a decision all the fine edges of the mind have to be rubbed off; or, if the victim resists, he earns the reputation of a bore who turns a business meeting into a philosophic dialogue, and seeks to apply to the world of mundane affairs, to drains and dispensaries and school management, the speculations that wiser men, who put things in their proper places, reserve for an evening discussion over the fragrance of a cigar.

A good illustration of the way in which these distinctively political gifts were employed in the building up of the British Empire is afforded by the story of Rajah Brooke of Sarawak. In the year 1839, James Brooke, a young military officer of the British East India Company, who had retired from that service on inheriting a large fortune, was visiting the Malay Archipelago in his private yacht, and arrived at the territory of Sarawak, on the north coast of Borneo. Finding a civil war in progress, he interested himself in the matters at issue and made his influence felt so successfully that he was invited to take over the government. This he at first refused to do, but after he had succeeded, with a few Europeans, in putting an end to the fighting, the offer was renewed with the assent of both parties to the recent hostilities, and in 1842 James Brooke became Rajah of Sarawak. He died in 1868, bequeathing the position to his son, who left it to his nephew, with the

result that, so observant a judge as Mr. Alleyne Ireland could write after a two months' visit up and down the country, that "in no country which I have ever visited are there to be observed so many signs of a wise and generous rule, such abundant indications of good government, as are to be seen on every hand in Sarawak."

This story, which in its details reads almost like a romance, is a beautiful illustration of English political mindedness. It was his public spirit which induced Brooke to interest himself in the obscure details of an intertribal Malay war; it was his sound judgment which enabled him to play the successful counselor; it was his public spirit again which secured him the confidence of the population; and it was his judgment which enabled him and his successors to rule over them. In the exercise of these qualities and of the tasks to which they led him on Brooke gave up a comfortable life on his English estate for residence in a tropical climate, surrendered a large part of his private fortune to make a success of his governmental experiment, and, to use his own words, dedicated himself to the task-how laborious and ungrateful to any one less politically minded! -of introducing "better laws and customs" and securing that the rights of the people of Sarawak "can never in the future be wantonly infringed." This is imperialism at its best. Its limitations are plain enough; yet who of us, secure in the comforts of the temperate zone, can rail at it with an easy conscience?

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The Roman and the Englishman both founded empires created by the genius of a single people and inspired,

if not governed, from a single center. But the age of empires is passing. The Empire of England has become, in designation and already in large part in fact, a multi-national "British commonwealth" and the other large-scale and heterogeneous dominions, the French, the Dutch, and, in its own distinctive way, the American, are grappling with similar problems. The true imperialist to-day is an internationalist. His scope can extend to nothing less than the whole planet. Augustus drew his frontier at the Rhine, and even twenty years ago Cecil Rhodes set limits to his statesman's vision; but the modern Cæsar, surveying the problems of the post-war world, must needs let his gaze travel round the globe. For while the qualities required of statesmen have remained unchanged, while public spirit and sound judgment are as indispensable to a Hoover and a Robert Cecil, to a Poincaré and a Mussolini, as they were to Augustus or James Brooke or the British makers of modern India, the nature of the material for which those qualities are required has changed beyond recognition. The industrial revolution and the consequent interdependence of the parts and peoples of mankind have changed the whole conditions of political activity. The problems of the modern world are no longer local, but large-scale, no longer concerned with the broils and prejudices of neighbors, but with forces which, in the vast sweep of their incidence, affect millions of men in all parts of the globe. We are only just beginning to realize that the age in which Alsace-Lorraine or the Irish question were first-class political problems has passed away beyond recall, and that in the new era which has dawned the distinctive problems,

which hold the keys of peace and war and command the daily vigilance of statesmen, are of a different order.

Two or three of these may be indicated, if only to illustrate the type. No topic of discussion in the chancelleries contains so much material for controversy and possible warfare as that of the conservation of the world's mineral resources. Oil and tungsten, nickel and radium, involve no nationality problem. They are political, largescale international material in the full sense of the words; and the statesmen who handle the practical issues of world-housekeeping-or, to put the words into Greek, "political economy" -arising out of them can do so without a trace, in their plans and policies, of that national flavor which attracted the French and German students in their interchange of ideas. Here we are alone with Martha and her specialized tasks and technic.

The same is true of another great set of problems that is bound to assume increasing importance in the work of government-those relating to public wealth. Plague and cholera and syphilis, trachoma and malaria, know no national distinctions: there is no American health and English health, but only health; no Italian plague or Polish plague, but only plague; and as the problem is international, calling for uniformity in diagnosis, treatment, and preventive methods, so also must be the outlook and organization of the governing minds who deal with it.

A third and thornier instance is commercial policy. Much national passion and prejudice have gathered

round tariffs, but trading, with all that pertains to it, is essentially an international profession, and the problems arising out of it, from the fraudulent dealings of individual merchants to the self-regarding policies of peoples, are becoming riper every day for treatment on an international scale: that is, by statesmen who can look beyond the local issues involved to the wider interests of the world as a whole. "The time may even come," writes one who is not an idealist, but a hardened official, "when no minister will frame a tariff affecting the trade of other countries without previous consultation with the countries which it affects, and without being prepared to defend it in Council with his colleagues of those countries and on grounds which he can justify before the whole world."

The handling of these and similar problems must necessarily be keeping pace with the growth of the network of private contacts between country and country and continent and continent. The broad effect of modern statesmanship must inevitably be to bring about world unity, but a unity in the realm of Martha. When our modern Cæsars have taken the twentiethcentury world, diagnosed its ills, and provided appropriate treatment, when they have policed and doctored and made decent and habitable a world organized and knit together for plain people to live in with safety and comfort, they will have done no more than lay the foundation of a civilized world society. What remains—and it is the better half-is of the realm of Mary.