They are very jealous of
any attempt to exercise power over them not sanctioned by long usage
and by their own opinion of right; but they in general care very
little for the exercise of power over others. Not having the
smallest sympathy with the passion for governing, while they are but
too well acquainted with the motives of private interest from which
that office is sought, they prefer that it should be performed by
those to whom it comes without seeking, as a consequence of social
position. If foreigners understood this, it would account to them
for some of the apparent contradictions in the political feelings of
Englishmen; their unhesitating readiness to let themselves be governed
by the higher classes, coupled with so little personal subservience to
them, that no people are so fond of resisting authority when it
oversteps certain prescribed limits, or so determined to make their
rulers always remember that they will only be governed in the way they
themselves like best. Place-hunting, accordingly, is a form of
ambition to which the English, considered nationally, are almost
strangers. If we except the few families or connections of whom
official employment lies directly in the way, Englishmen's views of
advancement in life take an altogether different direction- that of
success in business, or in a profession. They have the strongest
distaste for any mere struggle for office by political parties or
individuals: and there are few things to which they have a greater
aversion than to the multiplication of public employments: a thing, on
the contrary, always popular with the bureaucracy-ridden nations of
the Continent, who would rather pay higher taxes than diminish by
the smallest fraction their individual chances of a place for
themselves or their relatives, and among whom a cry for retrenchment
never means abolition of offices, but the reduction of the salaries of
those which are too considerable for the ordinary citizen to have
any chance of being appointed to them.
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