The contention that Coleridge’s rejection of Rousseau’s ‘Reason’ as a political principle is based on a deep-seated prejudice can be clearly established if we analyse further the roots of his own political position. Just as his plea for more adequate communication of truth is ultimately a petition for administrative reform, the nature of ‘truth’ itself being analysed at this stage only in terms of the difference between what is self-evident and what must be demonstrated (55f), so his definition of politics is ultimately a reduction to ‘administration’, to how things ‘ought to be managed’ (214). That this conveniently forgets that politics is also about policies, i.e. about morality—a position that Coleridge will otherwise argue for—is clear from the use of the term ‘political’ in his criticism of Cartwright: that he ‘confounds the sufficiency of the conscience to make every person a moral and amenable Being, with the sufficiency of judgment and experience requisite to the exercise of political Right’ (207). This position has its epistemological roots in his distinction between the ‘truths’ of science and the ‘probability’ of facts of experience (158)— a distinction which holds politically, provided one genuinely acknowledges the equal validity of quite different ‘experience’. The practical outcome of Coleridge’s position is a politics which can meet an argument that the expenditure on one naval operation to destroy nine French ships could have provided instead £100 for 2,000 poor families or built a new town in every English county, by the response: ‘These men know that it is not practicable’ (244).