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Updated: June 29, 2025
It is a formal monument to the state-craft of federalism, hardly the biography of a person. Sometimes people create their own facade when they think they are revealing the interior scene. The Repington diaries and Margot Asquith's are a species of self-portraiture in which the intimate detail is most revealing as an index of how the authors like to think about themselves.
It was soul-stirring when the great King himself came striding in, perhaps full of wrath over some bit of state-craft gone wrong, perhaps joyous with the prospect of another battle; perhaps in as happy and more peaceful a mood, when he would seize the harp of Blondel and sweep the strings with massive, yet practised hands, and send his great voice rolling across the encampment in thundering song, like the impetuous Frenchman that he was.
By sowing dissensions among her own children, by inflaming party against party, by watching with care the oscillations of France so than none of the great divisions should obtain preponderance by alternately caressing and massacring the Huguenots, by cajoling or confronting Philip, by keeping, as she boasted, a spy in every family that possessed the annual income of two thousand livres, by making herself the head of an organized system of harlotry, by which the soldiers and politicians of France were inveigled, their secrets faithfully revealed to her by her well-disciplined maids of honour, by surrounding her unfortunate sons with temptation from earliest youth, and plunging them by cold calculation into deepest debauchery, that their enervated faculties might be ever forced to rely in political affairs on the maternal counsel, and to abandon the administration to the maternal will; such were the arts by which Catharine had maintained her influence, and a great country been governed for a generation Machiavellian state-craft blended with the more simple wiles of a procuress.
While obtaining the guarantee of a large measure of self-government for the New World, Sir Edwin Sandys and his co-patriots were unable to secure that which even savored of liberal administration in the Old. James the first of the Stuart Dynasty was upon the English throne. In narrow, selfish state-craft his is possibly in the long list of sovereigns without a rival.
The great master of state-craft could more easily have borne to hear himself condemned as a ruler than to see his work of art despised. A man who is sure of having done some thing great can smile at blame, but he, who is not confident in himself has reason to dread it, and is easily drawn into hating the critic who utters it.
He was nearly sixty, a thorough disciple of Epicurus, a heavy player, rich, eloquent, a master of state-craft, highly popular at Genoa, and well acquainted with the hearts of men, and still more so with the hearts of women. He had spent a good deal of time at Venice to be more at liberty, and to enjoy the pleasures of life at his ease.
In Paris, after Culloden, he bought Macchiavelli's works, probably in search of practical hints on state-craft. In spite of a proclamation by Charles, which Montesquieu applauded, he certainly had no claim to a seat in the French Academy, which Montesquieu playfully offered to secure for him.
The Politics which they had taught were found too general; nor were these wandering men, without fixed home, or familiarity with the intricacies of special constitutions, likely to give practical lessons to Greece citizens in the art of state-craft.
It was supposed he was so entirely unacquainted with state-craft, that he would be a pliant tool an automaton, to dance to their wire-pulling. How little they understood him, and how well he understood them! At once he let them know he was President, and was determined to take the responsibility of administering the Government in the true spirit of its institutions.
Accustomed to an atmosphere of practical state-craft in the Norman court, with faculties sharpened from boyhood by vigilance and meditation, he exercised an extraordinary influence over the simple understandings of the homely clergy and the uncultured thegns.
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