hame and dastardliness of heart are not
written as legibly on every rivet of your iron armour as the strength of
the right hands that forged it? Friends, I know not whether this thing
be the more ludicrous or the more melancholy. It is quite unspeakably
both. Suppose, instead of being now sent for by you, I had been sent for
by some private gentleman, living in a suburban house, with his garden
separated only by a fruit-wall from his next door neighbour's; and he
had called me to consult with him on the furnishing of his drawing room.
I begin looking about me, and find the walls rather bare; I think such
and such a paper might be desirable--perhaps a little fresco here and
there on the ceiling--a damask curtain or so at the windows. 'Ah,' says
my employer, 'damask curtains, indeed! That's all very fine, but you
know I can't afford that kind of thing just now!' 'Yet the world credits
you with a splendid income!' 'Ah, yes,' says my friend, 'but do you
know, at present, I am obliged to spend it nearly all in steel-traps?'
'Steel-traps! for whom?' 'Why, for that fellow on the other side the
wall, you know: we're very good friends, capital friends; but we are
obliged to keep our traps set on both sides of the wall; we could not
possibly keep on friendly terms without them, and our spring guns. The
worst of it is, we are both clever fellows enough; and there's never a
day passes that we don't find out a new trap, or a new gun-barrel, or
something; we spend about fifteen millions a year each in our traps,
take it all together; and I don't see how we're to do with less.' A
highly comic state of life for two private gentlemen! but for two
nations, it seems to me, not wholly comic? Bedlam would be comic,
perhaps, if there were only one madman in it; and your Christmas
pantomime is comic, when there is only one clown in it; but when the
whole world turns clown, and paints itself red with its own heart's
blood instead of vermilion, it is something else than comic, I think.

Mind, I know a great deal of this is play, and willingly allow for that.
You don't know what to do with yourselves for a sensation: fox-hunting
and cricketing will not carry you through the whole of this unendurably
long mortal life: you liked pop-guns when you were schoolboys, and
rifles and Armstrongs are only the same things better made: but then the
worst of it is, that what was play to you when boys, was not play to the
sparrows; and what is play to you now,