down the insurrection! So
we are badgered about New Zealanders and Hottentots, as if they were
identical with men in clean shirts at Camberwell, and were to be bound
by pen and ink accordingly. So Exeter Hall holds us in mortal submission
to missionaries, who (Livingstone always excepted) are perfect
nuisances, and leave every place worse than they found it.

Of all the many evidences that are visible of our being ill-governed, no
one is so remarkable to me as our ignorance of what is going on under
our Government. What will future generations think of that enormous
Indian Mutiny being ripened without suspicion, until whole regiments
arose and killed their officers? A week ago, red tape, half-bouncing and
half pooh-poohing what it bounced at, would have scouted the idea of a
Dublin jail not being able to hold a political prisoner. But for the
blacks in Jamaica being over-impatient and before their time, the whites
might have been exterminated, without a previous hint or suspicion that
there was anything amiss. _Laissez aller_, and Britons never, never,
never!----

Meantime, if your honour were in London, you would see a great
embankment rising high and dry out of the Thames on the Middlesex shore,
from Westminster Bridge to Blackfriars. A really fine work, and really
getting on. Moreover, a great system of drainage. Another really fine
work, and likewise really getting on. Lastly, a muddle of railways in
all directions possible and impossible, with no general public scheme,
no general public supervision, enormous waste of money, no fixable
responsibility, no accountability but under Lord Campbell's Act. I think
of that accident in which I was preserved. Before the most furious and
notable train in the four-and-twenty hours, the head of a gang of
workmen takes up the rails. That train changes its time every day as the
tide changes, and that head workman is not provided by the railway
company with any clock or watch! Lord Shaftesbury wrote to me to ask me
what I thought of an obligation on railway companies to put strong walls
to all bridges and viaducts. I told him, of course, that the force of
such a shock would carry away anything that any company could set up,
and I added: "Ask the minister what _he_ thinks about the votes of the
railway interest in the House of Commons, and about his being afraid to
lay a finger on it with an eye to his majority."

I seem to be grumbling, but I am in the best of humours. All goes