g since such eyes were much in the habit
of looking steadfastly at any department of our affairs; and poor
commonplace creatures, helping themselves along, in the way of
makeshift, from year to year, in such an element, do wonderful works
indeed. Such creatures, like moles, are safe only underground, and their
engineerings there become very daedalean. In fact, such unfortunate
persons have no resource but to become what we call Pedants; to ensconce
themselves in a safe world of habitudes, of applicable or inapplicable
traditions; not coveting, rather avoiding the general daylight of
common-sense, as very extraneous to them and their procedure; by long
persistence in which course they become Completed Pedants, hidebound,
impenetrable, able to _defy_ the hostile extraneous element; an alarming
kind of men, Such men, left to themselves for a century or two, in any
Colonial, Foreign, or other Office, will make a terrible affair of it!

For the one enemy we have in this Universe is Stupidity, Darkness of
Mind; of which darkness, again, there are many sources, every _sin_ a
source, and probably self-conceit the chief source. Darkness of mind,
in every kind and variety, does to a really tragic extent abound: but of
all the kinds of darkness, surely the Pedant darkness, which asserts
and believes itself to be light, is the most formidable to mankind! For
empires or for individuals there is but one class of men to be trembled
at; and that is the Stupid Class, the class that cannot see, who alas
are they mainly that will not see. A class of mortals under which as
administrators, kings, priests, diplomatists, &c., the interests
of mankind in every European country have sunk overloaded, as under
universal nightmare, near to extinction; and indeed are at this moment
convulsively writhing, decided either to throw off the unblessed
superincumbent nightmare, or roll themselves and it to the Abyss. Vain
to reform Parliament, to invent ballot-boxes, to reform this or that;
the real Administration, practical Management of the Commonwealth,
goes all awry; choked up with long-accumulated pedantries, so that your
appointed workers have been reduced to work as moles; and it is one vast
boring and counter-boring, on the part of eyeless persons irreverently
called stupid; and a daedalean bewilderment, writing "impossible" on all
efforts or proposals, supervenes.

The State itself, not in Downing Street alone but in every department of
it, ha