ship is as good as a wreck.
One real pilot on board may save you; all the bellowing from the banks
that ever was, will not, and by the nature of things cannot. Nay your
pilot will have to succeed, if he do succeed, very much in spite of said
bellowing; he will hear all that, and regard very little of it,--in a
patient mild-spoken wise manner, will regard all of it as what it is.
And I never doubt but there is in Parliament itself, in spite of its
vague palaverings which fill us with despair in these times, a dumb
instinct of inarticulate sense and stubborn practical English insight
and veracity, that would manfully support a Statesman who could take
command with really manful notions of Reform, and as one deserving to
be obeyed. Oh for one such; even one! More precious to us than all the
bullion in the Bank, or perhaps that ever was in it, just now!

For it is Wisdom alone that can recognize wisdom: Folly or Imbecility
never can; and that is the fatalest ban it labors under, dooming it to
perpetual failure in all things. Failure which, in Downing Street and
places of _command_ is especially accursed; cursing not one but hundreds
of millions! Who is there that can recognize real intellect, and do
reverence to it; and discriminate it well from sham intellect, which is
so much more abundant, and deserves the reverse of reverence? He that
himself has it!--One really human Intellect, invested with command, and
charged to reform Downing Street for us, would continually attract real
intellect to those regions, and with a divine magnetism search it out
from the modest corners where it lies hid. And every new accession of
intellect to Downing Street would bring to it benefit only, and would
increase such divine attraction in it, the parent of all benefit there
and elsewhere!

"What method, then; by what method?" ask many. Method, alas! To secure
an increased supply of Human Intellect to Downing Street, there will
evidently be no quite effectual "method" but that of increasing the
supply of Human Intellect, otherwise definable as Human Worth, in
Society generally; increasing the supply of sacred reverence for it, of
loyalty to it, and of life-and-death desire and pursuit of it, among
all classes,--if we but knew such a "method"! Alas, that were simply the
method of making all classes Servants of Heaven; and except it be devout
prayer to Heaven, I have never heard of any method! To increase the
reverence for Human Intellect or