Hence a consciousness of power ever present and supreme, extending to
all that has been left him of the common relations of life,--to the hour
of business and the hour of repose, to the hall of audience and the
garden-walk, and giving equally its deceptive coloring to the thoughts
that stir him when borne on the shoulders of men through a prostrate
crowd, and those that flit dimly through his brain as he lays a weary
head upon a solitary pillow. And hence, too, he becomes for himself, as
well as for others, an object of constant contemplation,--valuing things
as they contribute to his pleasure, and men as they subject themselves
to his will,--not always cruel in heart, even when his acts are cruel,
nor unfeeling when he inflicts unmerited suffering and needless pain,
but seeming both cruel and unfeeling, because education and habit have
dried up within him that fount of human sympathies which Nature has set
in the heart of man at his birth, that he might ever bear something
about him to remind him of a mother's tenderness and a father's pride.
If that be the best government wherein all the moral and intellectual
faculties of the governed receive their fullest development, and the
responsibility of the sovereign is made so immediate that he can neither
lose sight of it nor escape from its obligations, that surely must be
the worst in which one man thinks and judges for all, and, by an
unnatural union of spiritual and temporal attributes, is raised above
all human responsibility,--a theocracy, with man to interpret the will
of God, and to enforce his own interpretations.
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