ies, the
spiritual Vampires and obscene Nightmares, under which England lies in
syncope;--this is what you need; and if you cannot get it, you must die,
my poor friend!

Like people, like priest. Priest, King, Home Office, all manner of
establishments and offices among a people bear a striking resemblance to
the people itself. It is because Bull has been eating so much dirt that
his Home Offices have got into such a shockingly dirty condition,--the
old pavements of them quite gone out of sight and out of memory, and
nothing but mountains of long-accumulated dung in which the poor cattle
are sprawling and tumbling. Had his own life been pure, had his own
daily conduct been grounding itself on the clear pavements or actual
beliefs and veracities, would he have let his Home Offices come to such
a pass? Not in Downing Street only, but in all other thoroughfares and
arenas and spiritual or physical departments of his existence, running
water and Herculean scavengerism have become indispensable, unless the
poor man is to choke in his own exuviae, and die the sorrowfulest death.

If the State could once get back to the real sight of its essential
function, and with religious resolution begin doing that, and putting
away its multifarious imaginary functions, and indignantly casting out
these as mere dung and insalubrious horror and abomination (which they
are), what a promise of reform were there! The British Home Office,
surely this and its kindred Offices exist, if they will think of it,
that life and work may continue possible, and may not become impossible,
for British men. If honorable existence, or existence on human terms
at all, have become impossible for millions of British men, how can
the Home Office or any other Office long exist? With thirty thousand
Needlewomen, a Connaught fallen into potential cannibalism, and the Idle
Workhouse everywhere bursting, and declaring itself an inhumanity and
stupid ruinous brutality not much longer to be tolerated among rational
human creatures, it is time the State were bethinking itself.

So soon as the State attacks that tremendous cloaca of Pauperism, which
will choke the world if it be not attacked, the State will find its real
functions very different indeed from what it had long supposed them!
The State is a reality, and not a dramaturgy; it exists here to render
existence possible, existence desirable and noble, for the State's
subjects. The State, as it gets into the tr