h
nothing, or little or an uncertain quantity, what more can gods or men
require of it, or, above all, can I who am the doer of it require, but
that it be got to pass?

And now enters another fatal effect, the mother of ever-new mischiefs,
which renders well-doing or improvement impossible, and drives bad
everywhere continually into worse. The work being what we see, a stupid
subaltern will do as well as a gifted one; the essential point is, that
he be a quiet one, and do not bother me who have the driving of him.
Nay, for this latter object, is not a certain height of intelligence
even dangerous? I want no mettled Arab horse, with his flashing glances,
arched, neck and elastic step, to draw my wretched sand-cart through the
streets; a broken, grass-fed galloway, Irish garron, or painful ass with
nothing in the belly of him but patience and furze, will do it safelier
for me, if more slowly. Nay I myself, am I the worse for being of a
feeble order of intelligence; what the irreverent speculative, world
calls barren, red-tapish, limited, and even intrinsically dark and
small, and if it must be said, stupid?--To such a climax does it come
in all Government and other Offices, where Human Stupidity has once
introduced itself (as it will everywhere do), and no Scavenger God
intervenes. The work, at first of some worth, is ill done, and becomes
of less worth and of ever less, and finally of none: the worthless
work can now _afford_ to be ill done; and Human Stupidity, at a
double geometrical ratio, with frightful expansion grows and
accumulates,--towards the unendurable.

The reforming Hercules, Sir Robert Peel or whoever he is to be, that
enters Downing Street, will ask himself this question first of all, What
work is now necessary, not in form and by traditionary use and wont, but
in very fact, for the vital interests of the British Nation, to be done
here? The second question, How to get it well done, and to keep the
best hands doing it well, will be greatly simplified by a good answer to
that. Oh for an eye that could see in those hideous mazes, and a heart
that could dare and do! Strenuous faithful scrutiny, not of what is
_thought_ to be what in the red-tape regions, but of what really is
what in the realms of Fact and Nature herself; deep-seeing, wise and
courageous eyes, that could look through innumerable cobweb veils,
and detect what fact or no-fact lies at heart of them,--how invaluable
these! For, alas, it is lon