ail to
cure the house of smoke: not if _they_ vote and agitate forever, and
bestir themselves to the length even of street-barricades, will the
_smoke_ in the least abate: how can it? Their passion exercised in such
ways, till Doomsday, will avail them nothing. Let their passion rage
steadily against the existing major-domos to this effect, "_Find_ us
men skilled in house-building, acquainted with the laws of atmospheric
suction, and capable to cure smoke;" something might come of it! In the
lucky circumstance of having one man of real intellect and courage to
put at the head of the movement, much would come of it;--a New Downing
Street, fit for the British Nation and its bitter necessities in this
Now Era, would come; and from that, in answer to continuous sacred
fidelity and valiant toil, all good whatsoever would gradually come.
Of the Continental nuisance called "Bureaucracy,"--if this should alarm
any reader,--I can see no risk or possibility in England. Democracy
is hot enough here, fierce enough; it is perennial, universal, clearly
invincible among us henceforth. No danger it should let itself be flung
in chains by sham secretaries of the Pedant species, and accept their
vile Age of Pinchbeck for its Golden Age! Democracy clamors, with its
Newspapers, its Parliaments, and all its twenty-seven million throats,
continually in this Nation forevermore. I remark, too, that, the
unconscious purport of all its clamors is even this, "Find us men
skilled,"--_make_ a New Downing Street, fit for the New Era!
Of the Foreign Office, in its reformed state, we have not much to say.
Abolition of imaginary work, and replacement of it by real, is on all
hands understood to be very urgent there. Large needless expenditures
of money, immeasurable ditto of hypocrisy and grimace; embassies,
protocols, worlds of extinct traditions, empty pedantries, foul
cobwebs:--but we will by no means apply the "live coal" of our witty
friend; the Foreign Office will repent, and not be driven to suicide! A
truer time will come for the Continental Nations too: Authorities based
on truth, and on the silent or spoken Worship of Human Nobleness,
will again get themselves established there; all Sham-Authorities, and
consequent Real-Anarchies based on universal suffrage and the Gospel
according to George Sand, being put away; and noble action, heroic
new-developments of human faculty and industry, and blessed fruit as
of Paradise getting itself conqu
|