ADAM SMITH AND BACON.
[TO TRH ED/TOU Of TUX "SPROTATOZ.1
SIR,--1 was amused at the gibe quoted (at second hand) in your issue of April 3rd which Adam Smith east at "that insidious and crafty animal vulgarly called the statesman or
politician." The phrase struck me the more as I had lately been reading a censure of statesmen which seemed to me stranger because half-sympathetic. After speaking of persons born malevolent, Bacon goes on to say :—
"Such dispositions are the very errors of human nature, and yet they are the fittest timber to make good politics of ; like to knee timber, that is good for ships that are ordained to be tossed, but not for building houses that shall stand firm."
Language like this could not be used nowadays without much qualification. Yet I remember, some thirty years ago, a late eminent historian saying to me that the brightest spot in the political horizon seemed to him to be the advanced age of Gladstone and Disraeli. Of course he did not mean this implied charge of duplicity to be taken quite seriously, and personally I should agree far more with the late Lord Thring, who maintained that the two great statesmen were made of finer clay than any of their followers. Yet, after all, politicians must be politic; and when steering their course through such moral straits as are described in novels like "Quisante," they are fortunate if they can avoid having what Bacon has called "dissimulation in seasonable use, and a power to feign if there be no remedy?' Thus Macaulay, in
expounding the merits of Pitt's eloquence, reckons the following among them : "When he did not wish to be explicit —and no man who is at the head of affairs always wishes to be explicit—lie had a marvellous power of saying nothing in language which left on his audience the impression that he had said a great deal." May it not have been in view of such compromises as are indicated in the words here italicised that Goethe came out with the amazing paradox : " The man of action is always without a conscience" P—I am, Sir, &c., LIONEL A. TOLLEMACRE. Athenmum Club, Pall Mall, S.W.
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