John Hume has spilt a lot of sweat but he never spilt any blood. Indeed the idea that "we should be spilling our sweat and not our blood" is one of the great themes of his career. He seems incapable of making a speech or giving an interview without repeating that simple message, not to mention other favourite dicta like, "you cannot eat a flag" and "you can't have a united territory until you have a united people".
At such times, friends and colleagues smile and roll their eyes to heaven. Undeterred, Hume then goes into total recall about the time he stood on the bridge at Kehl, between France and Germany, and was moved to reflect that if these two peoples, so many times at war, could be united peacefully in the European Union, then why could there not be peace and amity between the two communities in Northern Ireland.
Hume has never been embarrassed by his own repetitions and even joins in the banter about his "single-transferable speech" and "single-transferable interview". Like a one-man Madison Avenue, he believes in the power of reiterating simple messages until the point gets home.
It goes back to his time as a teacher of French and history in Derry. Former pupils recall that, in a period when the strap and the cane were in constant use, Hume forswore the use of force to instil knowledge.
Indeed, his teaching style foreshadowed his later approach to politics: whereas some of his colleagues could be robust and even brutal, using the "leather" freely, Hume was humane, calm and systematic in his approach. He stressed the need to understand the subject rather than learning things off by rote and showed pupils how to isolate the important elements from the extraneous.
It was the same in politics. Throughout his long career, which will continue in the European Parliament and at Westminster, he never resorted to or advocated violence. Nor did he ever cease to be guided by what he saw as the best interests of the people of Derry and the Irish people.
"Constructive nationalism" is one description of the Hume approach and it characterises his career from his early years as a community activist, building the credit union movement in Derry, to his more recent involvement in the Belfast Agreement.
"He may be a pain in the neck but he's one of the truly great men in the history of this country," someone who knows him well said after yesterday's announcement that Hume was stepping down as SDLP leader. Like Daniel O'Connell, Hume has his own set of peccadilloes. His obvious pleasure in telling you the names of the important people he has met in the recent past is taken by some as vanity, whereas he could just as easily be making the point: "See how far the nationalist people have come."
Inclusion may be the hallmark of Hume's political approach but he experienced a great deal of exclusion at the start of his political career. Stormont under one-party unionist rule was never going to do anything for the Bogside so Hume embarked on a programme of self-help through the credit union movement. He had greatness thrust upon him, becoming a politician by accident through the civil rights movement.
If there is a gap or lack in his career it is that he never experienced political power except for his shortlived ministerial role in the Sunningdale powersharing executive. Hume is a visionary but he is also intensely practical and likes to take visitors around his native Derry to show them various projects he helped to secure, often with European funding.
He went into politics to do concrete things for real people and it must be a source of regret that he never had a prolonged period in office with a generous budget and a free hand so that he could leave more monuments of public service behind him.
He was a great party leader on the visionary level but must have been a source of exasperation to colleagues at times. He played his cards close to his chest - I remember once ringing a very senior colleague of his to ask if Hume was going to run for President of Ireland. "Let me know if you hear anything," was the SDLP man's parting request at the end of an uninformative conversation. He could also be criticised for failing to bring on a younger layer of potential leaders in the party.
But Hume is not a conventional politician. The party was a means to an end, which was peace and progress for all the people of Ireland. We know that some SDLP colleagues had the gravest doubts about his involvement in the peace process with Sinn FΘin.
Does John know what he's doing? And what exactly is he up to anyway? "He put country before party," a senior civil servant said yesterday. A lean, fit and youthful-looking Sinn FΘin is overtaking the SDLP as the main nationalist party in the North, in part at least because John Hume opened the door to constitutional politics for Gerry Adams and his friends.
Despite his fame and popularity, Hume has known moments of terrible loneliness and isolation. He had few defenders when he was undergoing savage media criticism of his involvement with Adams. Nowadays, although there are still a few doubters, most people agree he did the right thing.
Patience is another hallmark of the Hume approach. From the late 1960s, he began to articulate the model for resolving the Northern conflict which ultimately found practical expression in the Belfast Agreement. He is an outstanding conceptual thinker. His great strength is looking at the global set of relationships and charting a way forward.
The three strands framework - a more precise rendition of Charles Haughey's "totality of relationships" - came ultimately to be accepted even by the unionists as a basis for bringing peace and the acceptance by almost everyone that progress can only be made by democratic means.
He was ahead of his time but his time eventually came on Good Friday. Hume played a relatively small hands-on role in the run-up to Good Friday. He would appear at the talks but seemed to prefer chatting with reporters than sitting in Castle Buildings trying to focus on the latest government document. Despite their differences of temperament, he was blessed in his choice of deputy leader. Seamus Mallon put flesh on the bones, he provided the detail to implement Hume's grand plan.
His departure, though inevitable, poses a challenge for nationalists. A giant has stepped aside and he will be a hard act to follow. Hume could pick up the phone to Senator Edward Kennedy or the late US Speaker Tip O'Neill and persuade them to make a speech, an announcement or an initiative which would have far-reaching implications for Northern Ireland and British-Irish relations.
He persuaded then-Northern Secretary, Sir Peter Brooke, to make his famous statement that Britain had "no selfish strategic interest" in Northern Ireland. That single remark opened the way that led eventually to the IRA ceasefires.
Fianna Fβil people sometimes found him irritating and one of them called him "Janet" because they said that, like the lady at the end of the Morecambe and Wise Show, he would come on and steal the applause for other people's efforts.
Without his wife, Pat, he would probably not have been able to function and Hume still jokes that, "I am a parcel that she delivers". At the beginning of an era where politicians must, above all, be antiseptic and inoffensive, Hume in his rumpled suit looks like an anachronism. But the achievements are undeniable: many, who do not even know it, owe their very lives to John Hume's brand of aggressive peacemaking. He won't be going away, of course, but in terms of party leaders one can say, "n∅ bheidh a leithΘid ar∅s ann - we shall not see his like again".