[f. STATE sb. + CRAFT.] The art of conducting state affairs; statesmanship. Sometimes with sinister implication: Crafty or overreaching statesmanship.
1642. Fuller, Holy & Prof. St., IV. v. 263. Some plead that dissembling is Lawfull in the State-craft, upon the presupposition that men must meet with others which dissemble.
1719. Oldisworth, Callipædia, IV. 582.
| Well verst in State-Craft, the mysterious Trade, | |
| They know to gild and paint a pious Fraud. |
1745. Fielding, True Patriot, No. 9, ¶ 16. Nor can I help observing … another piece of state craft…; for while we sent for this troop of singers into England, we left several troops of our soldiers abroad.
1798. W. Taylor, in Monthly Mag., V. 352. To avoid a civil, wage a foreign war, is an old adage of profligate state-craft.
1855. Macaulay, Hist. Eng., xviii. IV. 163. A double treason, such as would have been thought a masterpiece of statecraft by the great Italian politicians of the fifteenth century.
1861. Tulloch, Eng. Purit., I. 2. The English Reformation … was also the creature of statecraft, and royal policy.
1873. Symonds, Grk. Poets, i. 16. The men who rose to the greatest eminence in statecraft are to be reckoned among the primitive philosophers of Greece.
1886. Manch. Exam., 18 Jan., 5/5. It savours more of statecraft than of statesmanship.
1887. Lowell, Democracy, etc. 34. Statecraft is no longer looked upon as a mystery, but as a business.
So State-craftsman, an expert in statecraft.
1809–10. Coleridge, Friend, II. 185. Whatever study or doctrine bears upon … a certain Phantom of a State in toto, which is every where and no where, this shall be deemed most useful and wise; and all else is the state-craftsman’s scorn.
1914. Wells in Engl. Rev., Jan., 202. State-craftsmen sat with their historical candles burning.
