many parts of our administration the effect of our extreme ignorance is at once plain.  The foreign policy of England has for many years been, according to the judgment now in vogue, inconsequent, fruitless, casual; aiming at no distinct pre-imagined end, based on no steadily pre-conceived principle.  I have not room to discuss with how much or how little abatement this decisive censure should be accepted.  However, I entirely concede that our recent foreign policy has been open to very grave and serious blame.  But would it not have been a miracle if the English people, directing their own policy, and being what they are, had directed a good policy?  Are they not above all nations divided from the rest of the world, insular both in situation and in mind, both for good and for evil?  Are they not out of the current of common European causes and affairs?  Are they not a race contemptuous of others?  Are they not a race with no special education or culture as to the modern world, and too often despising such culture?  Who could expect such a people to comprehend the new and strange events of foreign places?  So far from wondering that the English Parliament has been inefficient in foreign policy, I think it is wonderful, and another sign of the rude, vague imagination that is at the bottom of our people, that we have done so well as we have.

Again, the very conception of the English Constitution, as distinguished from a purely Parliamentary Constitution is, that it contains “dignified” parts—­parts, that is, retained, not for intrinsic use, but from their imaginative attraction upon an uncultured and rude population.  All such elements tend to diminish simple efficiency.  They are like the additional and solely-ornamental wheels introduced into the clocks of the Middle Ages, which tell the then age of the moon or the supreme constellation; which make little men or birds come out and in theatrically.  All such ornamental work is a source of friction and error; it prevents the time being marked accurately; each new wheel is a new source of imperfection.  So if authority is given to a person, not on account of his working fitness, but on account of his imaginative efficiency, he will commonly impair good administration.  He may do something better than good work of detail, but will spoil good work of detail.  The English aristocracy is often of this sort.  It has an influence over the people of vast value still, and of infinite value formerly.  But no man would select the cadets of an aristocratic house as desirable administrators.  They have peculiar disadvantages in the acquisition of business knowledge, business training, and business habits, and they have no peculiar advantages.