# Ethel Churchill/Chapter 66

CHAPTER XXXI.
THE INTERVIEW.
"Go see Sir Robert! P.—See Sir Robert! hum— And never laugh, for all my life to come! Seen him I have, but in his happier hour Of social pleasure ill exchanged for power; Seen him encumbered with a venal tribe, Smile without art, and win without a bribe. Would he oblige me? Let me only find He does not think me what he thinks mankind. Come, come! at all I laugh he laughs, no doubt; The only difference is, I dare laugh out!"—Pope.
It was a small, but luxurious room, the open windows of which looked to a garden sloping down to the river, clear and sunny, as if the metropolis had been an hundred miles away. Pots, crowded with rare and fragrant exotics, were on the terrace, and filled the apartment with their odours, and the walls around were hung with some of the choicest productions ​of the Italian school of art: the eye could not be raised but it must look on a flower or a picture. In the midst stood a table, covered with papers tied up with red tape, books of accounts, and open letters. At one end, that facing the window, sat England's all-powerful minister, wrapped in a loose morning-gown of purple cloth. He was a man of large size, in an indolent attitude, and with that flushed complexion which usually accompanies excess. At the first glance, you only saw one who appeared the idle and good-humoured voluptuary, whose chief attention was given to decide on the merit of rival clarets, and whose chief care was to ward off an attack of gout. Not such was the impression produced by a second and more scrutinising look, or when the face before you was lighted by expression. There was decision on the firmly compressed lip, whose subtle smile spoke a world of sarcasm; there was thought on the bold, high forehead, and the mind kindled the depths of those piercing gray eyes.
Sir Robert Walpole was essentially the man ​of his time: no other minister could have maintained the House of Hanover on its then tottering throne. It was opposed to the principles of the many, and entwined with the picturesque prejudices of none. The two first Georges were not men to either dazzle or to interest a people. They were narrow-minded foreign soldiers, fettered by the small etiquettes of small courts; and looked on their accession to the British throne rather as coming into a large property, than as entering on a high and responsible office.
Sir Robert Walpole saw at once that loyalty and enthusiasm must be put out of the question; the appeal must be made to common sense, and to self-interest. A man with less worldly shrewdness would never have seen how things really stood; a man with less pliability could never have adapted himself to them. It must always be remembered, that his whole administration was one long struggle: he had to maintain his master on the throne, and himself in the ministry; and this was done by sheer force of talent. ​He had no alliance among the great nobility on the one hand; and, at all events at first, was no personal favourite with the sovereign on the other; yet he kept his high post through one of the longest and most prosperous administrations that England has ever known. His faults were those of his day, a day singularly deficient in all high moral attributes.
Disbelief in excellence is the worst soil in which the mind can work; we must believe, before we can hope. The political creed, of which expediency is the alpha and the omega, can never know the generous purpose, or the high result. It sees events through a microscope; the detail is accurate, but the magnificent combination, and the glorious distance, are wholly lost. His age looked not beyond to-day; it forgot what it had received from the past, and what it owed to the future. Rochefoucauld says, and most truly, that hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue; now, in Walpole's time, it was not worth vice's while to pay even the poor homage of hypocrisy. Political virtue was laughed at; or, at ​best, considered a sort of Utopian dream that no one was bound to realise. Human interest will always mingle with human motive. To this hour, the great science and duty of politics is lowered by the petty leaven of small and personal advantage: still, no one can deny the vast advance that has been made. Our views are loftier, because more general; and individual selfishness is corrected by the knowledge, that good is only to be worked out on a large scale. The many have taken the place of the few; and a great principle gives something of its own strength to the mind that entertains it.
The union of philanthrophy and of political science belongs to our own age: every hour the conviction is gaining ground, that happiness should be the object of legislation; and that power is given for responsibility, not for enjoyment. Power is a debt to the people: but as yet we walk with the leading-strings of prejudice, strong to confine the steps, which they never should attempt to guide. Let the child and the nation alike feel their own ​way; the very stumbles will teach not only caution, but their own strength to recover from them. There is a long path yet before us; but the goal, though distant, is glorious. The time may come, when that intelligence, which is the sunshine of the moral world, will, like the sunshine of the physical world, kindle for all. There will be no tax on the window-lights of the mind. Ignorance, far more than idleness, is the mother of all the vices; and how recent has been the admission, that knowledge should be the portion of all? The destinies of the future lie in judicious education; an education that must be universal, to be beneficial.
The state of the poor in our country is frightful; and ask any one in the habit of coming in contact with the lower classes, to what is this distress mainly attributable? The answer will always be the same—the improvidence of the poor. But, in what has this improvidence originated?—in the neglect of their superiors. The poor have been left in that state of wretched ignorance, which ​neither looks forward nor back; to them, as to the savages, the actual moment is every thing: they have never been humanised by enjoyment, nor subdued by culture.
The habits of age are hopeless, but how much may be done with the children? Labour, and severe labour, is, in some shape or other, the inevitable portion of mankind; but there is no grade that has not its moments of mental relaxation, if it but know how to use them. Give the children of the poor that portion of education which will enable them to know their own resources; which will cultivate in them an onward-looking hope, and give them rational amusement in their leisure hours: this, and this only, will work out that moral revolution, which is the legislator's noblest purpose. One great evil of highly civilised society is, the immense distance between the rich and the poor; it leads, on either side, to a hardened selfishness. Where we know little, we care little; but the fact once admitted, that there can be neither politically nor morally a good which is not universal, that we cannot ​reform for a time, or for a class, but for all and for the whole, and our very interests will draw us together in one wide bond of sympathy. A mighty change, and, I believe, improvement, is at this moment going on in the world; but the revolution, to work out its great and best end, must be even more moral than political, though the one inevitably leads to the other. Nothing can be permitted to the few; rights and advantages were sent for all: but the few were at the fountain-head in Sir Robert Walpole's time. It is but justice to him to note how much he was in its advance. Nothing could be more enlightened than the encouragement he gave to our manufactories and colonies. Look, also, at his steady preservation of peace; what rest and what prosperity he gave to England. The great want of his administration was, as we have said before, the want of high principle: it was the ideal of common sense, but it was nothing more. Now, mere common sense never does any thing great; the noblest works of our nature, its exertions, its sacrifices, need ​some diviner prompting: the best efforts of humanity belong to enthusiasm; but Sir Robert's was not the age of enthusiasm. The revolution, and the exile of the Stuarts, seemed to have exhausted that ardour, and that poetry, which are essentially the characteristics of English history: the chivalric, the picturesque, and the romantic, were put aside for a time to awaken into the higher hope, and more general enthusiasm, of the present. The best proof of their exalting presence among us is, that we believe and hope, where our grandfathers ridiculed and doubted. But we are keeping the fair petitioners waiting; a fault Sir Robert himself would not have committed.