This is not the same, of course, as having been universally loved: but he was intelligent enough to know that universal approbation is not an appropriate goal for a politician. Many detested him for his authoritarianism which, however, fell far short of despotism; no one could deny his achievement in turning an unpromising colonial entrepôt into one of the most prosperous and efficient small states in the world.
Indeed, the very efficiency with which it is now administered is one of the reproaches against him; it now seems almost intimidatingly tidy and well-organized, with little scope for the free expression of the crookedness of the timber from which Kant thought that mankind is made, and in which he delighted .... http://www.city-journal.org
