TOPICS OF THE DAY. ,
MEN FOR THE TIMES.
IT is not a constitution, so much as a man, that is wanted in France. The National Assembly takes its time about a constitu- tion ; but the slightest glimpse of a man equal to the times is hailed with exuberant delight. M. de Lamartine, who could fold his arms before an enraged multitude and improvise finished little orations to any sort of deputation, from the patriots of Italy to the pork-butchers of Paris, was seized upon as national pro- perty, and hastily counted among the great. M. Clement Tho- mas draws his sword with promptitude and vigour, and he is hurried to the command of the National Guard. Still there wants a man—the man who can be perfectly " master of the situation." All sorts of persons offer themselves—royalties legi- timate and illegitimate, old officers, statesmen out of place; and " gents " of every description ; every man of the Bonaparte family has hopes, and Prince Louis Napoleon goes back to France as the moth goes back to the candle. All these persons " want situations" ; but not one of them is master of the situa- tion. The most that the Brummagem Napoleon can do is to raise a little passing trouble,—unless, indeed, among his great works be counted his having evoked a new man. The coming of the Napoleon created some undue alarm for the Republic, until the terse and energetic words of General Cavaignac restored confidence to the Assembly. They did more : the Assembly not only felt assured against being swallowed up by the Napoleon, but also hastened to the delightful conclusion that at last it had found a man.
Perhaps it may be so. General Cavaignac has not the worse chance as a statesman for having been familiar with the sword. France has had enough of literary statesmen. M. Guizot's de- parture is not regretted; M. Thiers's return is not welcomed. It is not critics that France wants, or commentators.
0 There is scarcely a land in Europe where the same urgent want is not felt—the want of a man. Prussia, hesitating between King Frederick William and King Maximilian, is scarcely a more hum- bling spectacle for the nations, than England hesitating between Lord John Russell and Lord George Bentinck. The art of states- manship seems almost defunct in Western Europe, or degenerated into the mere trick of bureaucracy. A competent knowledge of clerkship—" the diplomatic art of keeping office." There are reasons for this degeneracy. One is the excessive complication of public affairs, with that division of employments that has ensued on the growth of commercial ideas. Till a very recent period the great statesmen have been men of action as well as men of council ; and often, too, they have been among the leading minds of their country—have belonged to that class which is now represented by the literary class. Our extreme subdivision of employments has .separated -our men of council from our men of thought and our men of action ; a division that is by no means an unmixed advantage. If you scamper over the names of the greatest statesmen—those who have wielded the destinies of kingdoms or founded empires—such men as Solomon, Lycurgus, Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, Macehiavelli, Alfred the Great, Cromwell, Leopold of Austria, Washington, Bona- parte—you will find men of council who have mostly been fami- liar with the sword, or in habits of closest intimacy with warriors and practically acquainted with military affairs; and you will find that almost all of them—all perhaps of the greatest—have been men of books, if not familiar with the pen. Great states- men to the most recent times have been men who brought to the practical conduct of affairs habits of philosophic study, however bold and rapid, and habits also of vindicating their purpose by the roughest means. They were men who brought into the office some theory from the closet, and from the field a hand strengthened in the bending of other wills by the exercise of the sword--a head to shape, and a hand to force.
We feel the effect of the later subdivision in what seems the impossibility among our statesmen of grasping the affairs of the nation as a whole, and of enforcing their own determination. It seems as though our statesmen could only contemplate parts of public affairs, departmental business ; their minds are mechanized to a routine ; they cannot escape from technical usage ; they are incapable of taking up a subject from its beginning, and they can- not carry it out to the end. They can make speeches, and they can introduce bills ; but they have so far forgotten the real art of statesmanship, that they affect to repudiate books and ?he sword of power.
We have among us, indeed, one statesman who has been a man of action, and he is a man of personal influence ; but from the want of that warmth of intellectual temperament which is called enthusiasm, it so happens that he is a man incapable of imparting his own emotions to others. He remains a fact : the estimation in which he is held induces many to follow him on specificmea- sures, and he has been known to hold a pocketful of " proxies " ; but he has no effect in changing the emotions or creating the opinions of any class of statesmen around him.
We have another who cannot be said to be a man of action,
who is not given to abstract studies, and who for those reasons probably did not awaken until a late period in his career to a sense of his own power. He has done a good portion of work— more than his own share as it might be allotted amongst hying men : but he is the only specimen amongst us of the statesman trained in the conduct of affairs who brings to them official habits, broad historical views,. and the will to act. We have no other. Perhaps it is Italy in which there is the greatest promise of men equal to the times; and there we observe too, that, by the concurrence of various fortunate circumstances, the statesmen are men of action and men of cultivated mind. The statesmen of Italy in 1848 may be painted, as so many statesmen were in other times, with a sword in one band and a book in the other. The long peace, with its elaborately developed commerce, has brought us many blessings : we ought to be alive to some of its disadvantages.
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