He had come to himself—­to the full realization of his powers, the true and clear perception of what it was his mind demanded for its satisfaction.  His faculties were consciously stretched to their right measure, were at last exercised at their best.  He felt the keen zest, not of success merely, but also of honor, and was raised to a sort of majesty among his fellow-men, who attended him in death like a dead sovereign.  He had died dwarfed had he not broken the bonds of mere money-getting; would never have known himself had he not learned how to spend it; and ambition itself could not have shown him a straighter road to fame.

This is the positive side of a man’s discovery of the way in which his faculties are to be made to fit into the world’s affairs, and released for effort in a way that will bring real satisfaction.  There is a negative side also.  Men come to themselves by discovering their limitations no less than by discovering their deeper endowments and the mastery that will make them happy.  It is the discovery of what they can not do, and ought not to attempt, that transforms reformers into statesmen; and great should be the joy of the world over every reformer who comes to himself.  The spectacle is not rare; the method is not hidden.  The practicability of every reform is determined absolutely and always by “the circumstances of the case,” and only those who put themselves into the midst of affairs, either by action or by observation, can known what those circumstances are or perceive what they signify.  No statesman dreams of doing whatever he pleases; he knows that it does not follow that because a point of morals or of policy is obvious to him it will be obvious to the nation, or even to his own friends; and it is the strength of a democratic polity that there are so many minds to be consulted and brought to agreement, and that nothing can be wisely done for which the thought, and a good deal more than the thought, of the country, its sentiment and its purpose, have not been prepared.  Social reform is a matter of cooperation, and if it be of a novel kind, requires an infinite deal of converting to bring the efficient majority to believe in it and support it.  Without their agreement and support it is impossible.

V

It is this that the more imaginative and impatient reformers find out when they come to themselves, if that calming change ever comes to them.  Oftentimes the most immediate and drastic means of bringing them to themselves is to elect them to legislative or executive office.  That will reduce over-sanguine persons to their simplest terms.  Not because they find their fellow-legislators or officials incapable of high purpose or indifferent to the betterment of the communities which they represent.  Only cynics hold that to be the chief reason why we approach the millennium so slowly, and cynics are usually very ill-informed persons.  Nor is it because under our modern democratic