Steersman

The sailor responsible for steering a ship. A pilot.

"Nothing is nobler than a good king, nothing better, nothing nearer God; equally, nothing is worse than a bad prince, nothing viler, nothing more like the devil. There is something divine about a beneficent prince, but no wild beast is more destructive than a tyrant. And a tyrant is whoever wields power for himself, whatever name his paintings and statues give him. It is not for us to pass judgement, as it were, upon the great ones of the earth, but yet we are obliged--not without sorrow--to feel the lack in Christian princes of that high wisdom of which we have spoken. All these revolutions, treaties made and broken, frequent risings, battle and slaughter, all these threats and quarrels, what do they arise from but stupidity? And I rather think that some part of this is due to our own fault. We do not hand over the rudder of the ship to anyone but a skilled steersman, when nothing is at stake but four passengers or a small cargo; but we hand over the state, in which so many thousands of people are in peril, to the first comer."

Erasmus, Adages ("Aut fatuum aut regem nasci oportere") (1515).

[translated by Margaret Mann Phillips (1967)].