yet survives; and might
help itself by better methods. In England heroic wisdom is not yet dead,
and quite replaced by attorneyism: the honest beaver faculty yet abounds
with us, the heroic manful faculty shows itself also to the observant
eye, not dead but dangerously sleeping. I said there were many _kings_
in England: if these can yet be rallied into strenuous activity, and set
to govern England in Downing Street and elsewhere, which their function
always is,--then England can be saved from anarchies and universal
suffrages; and that Apotheosis of Attorneyism, blackest of terrestrial
curses, may be spared us. If these cannot, the other issue, in such
forms as may be appropriate to us, is inevitable. What escape is there?
England must conform to the eternal laws of life, or England too must
die!

England with the largest mass of real living interests ever intrusted to
a Nation; and with a mass of extinct imaginary and quite dead interests
piled upon it to the very Heavens, and encumbering it from shore to
shore,--does reel and stagger ominously in these years; urged by the
Divine Silences and the Eternal Laws to take practical hold of its
living interests and manage them: and clutching blindly into its
venerable extinct and imaginary interests, as if that were still the way
to do it. England must contrive to manage its living interests, and quit
its dead ones and their methods, or else depart from its place in this
world. Surely England is called as no Nation ever was, to summon out its
_kings_, and set them to that high work!--Huge inorganic England, nigh
choked under the exuviae of a thousand years, and blindly sprawling amid
chartisms, ballot-boxes, prevenient graces, and bishops' nightmares,
must, as the preliminary and commencement of organization, learn to
_breathe_ again,--get "lungs" for herself again, as we defined it. That
is imperative upon her: she too will die, otherwise, and cough her last
upon the streets some day;--how can she continue living? To enfranchise
whatsoever of Wisdom is born in England, and set that to the sacred
task of coercing and amending what of Folly is born in England: Heaven's
blessing is purchasable by that; by not that, only Heaven's curse is
purchasable. The reform contemplated, my liberal friends perceive, is
a truly radical one; no ballot-box ever went so deep into the roots: a
radical, most painful, slow and difficult, but most indispensable reform
of reforms!

How short and