ditto and popular
clamors. Respectable men of office: respectably commonplace in
facility,--while the situation is becoming terribly original! Rendering
their outlooks, and ours, more ominous every day.

Indisputably enough the meaning of all reform-movement, electing and
electioneering, of popular agitation, parliamentary eloquence, and all
political effort whatsoever, is that you may get the ten Ablest Men in
England put to preside over your ten principal departments of affairs.
To sift and riddle the Nation, so that you might extricate and sift
out the true ten gold grains, or ablest men, and of these make your
Governors or Public Officers; leaving the dross and common sandy or
silty material safely aside, as the thing to be governed, not to govern;
certainly all ballot-boxes, caucuses, Kennington-Common meetings,
Parliamentary debatings, Red Republics, Russian Despotisms, and
constitutional or unconstitutional methods of society among mankind, are
intended to achieve this one end; and some of them, it will be owned,
achieve it very ill!--If you have got your gold grains, if the men
you have got are actually the ablest, then rejoice; with whatever
astonishment, accept your Ten, and thank the gods; under this Ten your
destruction will at least be milder than under another. But if you have
_not_ got them, if you are very far from having got them, then do not
rejoice at all, then _lament_ very much; then admit that your sublime
political constitutions and contrivances do not prove themselves
sublime, but ridiculous and contemptible; that your world's wonder of a
political mill, the envy of surrounding nations, does not yield you real
meal; yields you only powder of millstones (called Hansard Debatings),
and a detestable brown substance not unlike the grindings of dried
horse-dung or prepared street-mud, which though sold under royal
patent, and much recommended by the trade, is quite unfit for culinary
purposes!--

But the disease at least is not mysterious, whatever the remedy be. Our
disease,--alas, is it not clear as the sun, that we suffer under what is
the disease of all the miserable in this world, _want of wisdom_; that
in the Head there is no vision, and that thereby all the members are
dark and in bonds? No vision in the head; heroism, faith, devout insight
to discern what is needful, noble courage to do it, greatly defective
there: not seeing eyes there, but spectacles constitutionally ground,
which, to th