e will have victory so far as it can do that; so far as it
cannot, defeat.

In the New Downing Street, discerning what its real functions are, and
with sacred abhorrence putting away from it what its functions are not,
we can fancy changes enough in Foreign Office, War Office, Colonial
Office, Home Office! Our War-soldiers _Industrial_, first of all;
doing nobler than Roman works, when fighting is not wanted of them.
Seventy-fours not hanging idly by their anchors in the Tagus, or off
Sapienza (one of the saddest sights under the sun), but busy, every
Seventy-four of them, carrying over streams of British Industrials to
the immeasurable Britain that lies beyond the sea in every zone of the
world. A State grounding itself on the veracities, not on the semblances
and the injustices: every citizen a soldier for it. Here would be new
_real_ Secretaryships and Ministries, not for foreign war and diplomacy,
but for domestic peace and utility. Minister of Works; Minister of
Justice,--clearing his Model Prisons of their scoundrelism; shipping his
scoundrels wholly abroad, under hard and just drill-sergeants (hundreds
of such stand wistfully ready for you, these thirty years, in the
Rag-and-Famish Club and elsewhere!) into fertile desert countries;
to make railways,--one big railway (says the Major [Footnote: Major
Carmichael Smith; see his Pamphlets on this subject]) quite across
America; fit to employ all the able-bodied Scoundrels and efficient
Half-pay Officers in Nature!

Lastly,--or rather firstly, and as the preliminary of all, would there
not be a Minister of Education? Minister charged to get this English
People taught a little, at his and our peril! Minister of Education;
no longer dolefully embayed amid the wreck of moribund "religions," but
clear ahead of all that; steering, free and piously fearless, towards
his divine goal under the eternal stars!--O heaven, and are these things
forever impossible, then? Not a whit. To-morrow morning they might all
begin to be, and go on through blessed centuries realizing themselves,
if it were not that--alas, if it were not that we are most of us
insincere persons, sham talking-machines and hollow windy fools! Which
it is not "impossible" that we should cease to be, I hope?

Constitutions for the Colonies are now on the anvil; the discontented
Colonies are all to be cured of their miseries by Constitutions. Whether
that will cure their miseries, or only operate as a Godfrey's