Statesman vs Politician
American journalist and poet WC Bryant numbered Richard Cobden MP among the world’s statesmen, not our politicians.
1866
Queen Victoria 1837-1901
American journalist and poet WC Bryant numbered Richard Cobden MP among the world’s statesmen, not our politicians.
1866
Queen Victoria 1837-1901
William Cullen Bryant was one of nineteenth-century America’s great men. For many years he served as editor of the New York Evening Post, and was a popular ‘fireside poet’. He was also active in politics, an opponent of slavery who threw his weight behind the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. His praise for England’s Richard Cobden, for an American edition of his writings, was quite an accolade.
THERE are two classes of politicians — statesmen the world generally agrees in calling them, though that title, in its proper and nobler sense, belongs to but one of them. One class keeps studiously in sight the rules of justice and humanity, as the principles of legislation and government upon which it conscientiously supposes the welfare of the community to depend. The other class, which is found in all countries and in all political parties, aims at securing and promoting certain minor interests upon one specious pretext or another, which is taken up or laid aside as it may serve or fail to serve the occasion.*
I need not say that Mr Cobden belonged to the former of these classes, and was a statesman in the highest sense of the term. In all the public measures which he discussed, he regarded mainly their consequences to the people at large, or, in other words, the good of the human race.
From a preface by William Cullen Bryant to ‘The Political Writings of Richard Cobden’ Volume 1 (1867).
* See also My Standard of a Statesman by Edmund Burke MP.
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.