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Again, the exceptional position of a Cabinet minister cannot possibly be a just criterion of a correspondingly exceptional share of natural gifts, because statesmanship is not an open profession. It was much more so in the days of pocket boroughs, when young men of really high promise were eagerly looked for by territorial magnates, and brought into Parliament, and kept there to do gladiatorial battle for one or other of the great contending parties of the State. With those exceptions, parliamentary life was not, even then, an open career, for only favoured youths were admitted to compete. But, as is the case in every other profession, none, except those who are extraordinarily and peculiarly gifted, are likely to succeed in parliamentary life, unless engaged in it from their early manhood onwards. Dudley North, of whom I spoke in the chapter on Judges, was certainly a great success; so, in recent times, was Lord George Bentinck; so, in one way or another, was the Duke of Wellington; and other cases could easily be quoted of men beginning their active parliamentary life in advanced manhood and nevertheless achieving success; but, as a rule, to which there are very few exceptions, statesmen consist of men who had obtained-it little matters how-the privilege of entering Parliament in early life, and of being kept there. Every Cabinet is necessarily selected from a limited field. No doubt it always contains some few persons of very high natural gifts, who would have found their way to the front under any reasonably fair political régime, but it also invariably contains others who would have fallen far behind in the struggle for place and influence, if all England had been admitted on equal terms to the struggle.

Two selections of men occurred to me as being, on the whole, well worthy of confidence. One, that of the Premiers, begun, for convenience' sake, with the reign of George III.; their number is 25, and the proportion of them who cannot

claim to be much more than "eminently" gifted, such as Addington,

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'Pitt is to Addington as London to Paddington,”

is very small. The other selection is Lord Brougham's "Statesmen of the Reign of George III." It consists of no more than 53 men, selected as the foremost statesmen in that long reign. Now of these, II are judges and, I may add, 7 of those judges were described in the appendix to the last chapter, viz. Lords Camden, Eldon, Erskine, Ellenborough, King, Mansfield, and Thurlow. The remaining 4 are Chief Justices Burke and Gibbs, Sir William Grant, and Lord Loughborough. Lord Brougham's list also contains the name of Lord Nelson, which will be more properly included among the Commanders; and that of Earl St. Vincent, which may remain in this chapter, for he was a very able administrator in peace as well as naval commander. In addition to these, are the names of 9 Premiers, of whom one is the Duke of Wellington, whom I count here, and again among the Commanders, leaving a net balance, in the selection made by Lord Brougham, of 31 new names to discuss. The total of the two selections, omitting the judges, is 57.

The average natural ability of these men may very justly be stated as superior to class F. Canning, Fox, the two Pitts, Romilly, Sir Robert Walpole (whom Lord Brougham imports into his list), the Marquess of Wellesley, and the Duke of Wellington, probably exceed G. It will be seen how extraordinary are the relationships of these families. The kinship of the two Pitts, father and son, is often spoken of as a rare, if not a sole, instance of high genius being hereditary; but the remarkable kinships of William Pitt were yet more widely diffused. He was not only son of a premier, but nephew of another, George Grenville, and cousin of a third, Lord

Grenville. Besides this, he had the Temple blood. His pedigree, which is given in the appendix to this chapter, does scant justice to his breed. The Fox pedigree is also very remarkable in its connexion with the Lords Holland and the Napier family. But one of the most conspicuous is that of the Marquess of Wellesley, a most illustrious statesman, both in India and at home, and his younger brother, the great Duke of Wellington. It is also curious, from the fact of the Marquess possessing very remarkable gifts as a scholar and critic. They distinguished him in early life and descended to his son, the late Principal of New Inn Hall, at Oxford, but they were not shared by his brother. Yet, although the great Duke had nothing of the scholar or art-critic in him, he had qualities akin to both. His writings are terse and nervous, and eminently effective. His furniture, equipages, and the like were characterised by unostentatious completeness and efficiency under a pleasing form.

I do not intend to go seriatim through the many names mentioned in my appendix. The reader must do that for himself, and he will find it well worth his while to do so; but I shall content myself here with throwing results into the same convenient statistical form that I have already employed for the Judges, and arguing on the sa me bases that the relationships of the Statesmen abundantly prove the hereditary character of their genius.

In addition to the English statesmen of whom I have have been speaking, I thought it well to swell their scanty numbers by adding a small supplementary list, taken from various periods and other countries. I cannot precisely say how large was the area of selection from which this list was taken. I can only assure the reader that it contains a considerable proportion of the names, that seemed to me the most conspicuous among those that I found described at length, in ordinary small biographical dictionaries.

TABLE I.

SUMMARY OF RELATIONSHIPS OF 35 ENGLISH STATESMEN GROUPED INTO 30 FAMILIES.

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Two or three relations (or three or four in the family).

2. Bedford, Duke of, and gr.-gr.-grandson, Earl Russell
Bentinck (Duke of Portland)
Canning

Jenkinson (Earl of Liverpool)
Jervis (Earl St. Vincent).
Lamb (Viscount Melbourne)

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Four or more relations (or four or more in the family).

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SUPPLEMENTARY LIST OF 13 GREAT STATESMEN OF VARIOUS

PERIODS AND COUNTRIES GROUPED INTO 9 FAMILIES.

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2. De Witt, John, and brother Cornelius Adams

3. Cecil, Robt.; father, Lord Burleigh; and cousin,

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B.

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S. P.

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First, have the ablest statesmen the largest number of able relatives? Table I. answers this in the affirmative. There can be no doubt, that its third section contains more illustrious names than the first; and the more the reader will take the pains of analysing and "weighing" the relationships, the more, I am sure, will he find this truth. to become apparent. Again, the Statesmen, as a whole,

1 For explanation refer to the similar table in p. 61.

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