These are the kind of men we want;these,the nearest possible approximation to these,are the men we must find and have,or go bankrupt altogether;for the concern as it is will evidently hold long together.How true is this of Crabbe:"Men sit in Parliament eighty-three hours per week,debating about many things.Men sit in Downing Street,doing protocols,Syrian treaties,Greek questions,Portuguese,Spanish,French,Egyptian and AEthiopian questions;dexterously writing despatches,and having the ho to be.a question of them is at all pressing in comparison with the English question.Pacifico the miraculous Gibraltar Jew has been hustled by some populace in Greece:--upon him let the British Lion drop,very rapidly indeed,a constitutional tear.Radetzky is said to be advancing upon Milan;--I am sorry to hear it,and perhaps it does deserve a despatch,or friendly letter,once and away:but the Irish Giant,named of Despair,is advancing upon London itself,laying waste all English cities,towns and villages;that is the interesting Government despatch of the day!I ice him in Piccadilly,blue-visaged,thatched in rags,a blue child on each arm;hunger-driven,wide-mouthed,seeking whom he may devour:he,missioned by the just Heavens,too truly and too sadly their 'divine missionary'come at last in this authoritative manner,will throw us all into Doubting Castle,I perceive!That is the phee worth protocolling about,and writing despatches upon,and thinking of with all one's faculty day and night,if one wishes to have the ho to be--anything but a Phantasm Gover of England just !I entreat your Lordship's all but undivided attention to that Domestic Irish Giant,named of Despair,for a great many years to come.Prophecy of him there has long been;but by the rot of the potato (blessed be the just gods,who send us either swift death or some beginning of cure at last!),he is here in person,and there is denying him,or disregarding him any more;and woe to the public watchman that iges him,and sees Pacifico the Gibraltar Jew instead!"What these strange Entities in Downing Street intrinsically are;who made them,why they were made;how they do their function;and what their function,so huge in appearance,may in net-result amount to,--is probably kn to mortal.The uficial mind passes by in dark wonder;pretending to k.The official mind must blab;--the official mind,restricted to its own square foot of territory in the vast labyrinth,is probably itself dark,and unable to blab.We see the outcome;the mechanism we do see.How the tailors clip and sew,in that sublime sweating establishment of theirs,we k :that the coat they bring us out is the sorrowfulest fantastic mockery of a coat,a mere intricate artistic network of traditions and formalities,an embroiled reticulation made of web-listings and superannuated thrums and tatters,endurable to grown Nation as a coat,is mournfully clear!--Two kinds of fundamental error are supposable in such a set of Offices;these two,acting and reacting,are the vice of all inefficient Offices whatever.--First ,that the work,such as it may be,is ill done in these establishments.That it is delayed,neglected,slurred over,committed to hands that can do it well;that,in a word,the questions sent thither are wisely handled,but unwisely;decided truly and rapidly,but with delays and wrong at last:which is the principal character,and the infallible result,of an insufficient Intellect being set to decide them.Or second ,what is still fataler,the work done there may itself be quite the wrong kind of work.the kind of supervision and direction which Colonies,and other such interests,Home or Foreign,do by the nature of them require from the Central Government;that,but a quite other kind!The Sotomayor correspondence,for example,is considered by many persons to be mismanaged merely,but to be a thing which should never have been managed at all;a quite superfluous concern,which and the like of which the British Government has almost call to get into,at this new epoch of time.And Sotomayor only,Sapienza only,in regard to that Foreign Office,but innumerable other things,if our witty friend of the "live coal"have reason in him!Of the Colonial Office,too,it is urged that the questions they decide and operate upon are,in very great part,questions which they never should have meddled with,but almost all of which should have been decided in the Colonies themselves,--Mother Country or Colonial Office reserving its energy for a quite other class of objects,which are terribly neglected just .
These are the two vices that beset Government Offices;both of them originating in insufficient Intellect,--that sad insufficiency from which,directly or indirectly,all evil whatsoever springs!And these two vices act and react,so that where the one is,the other is sure to be;and each encouraging the growth of the other,both (if some cleaning of the Augeas stable have intervened for a long while)will be found in frightful development.You can have your work well done,if the work be of a right kind,if it be work prescribed by the law of Nature as well as by the rules of the office.
Laziness,which lies in wait round all human labor-offices,will in that case infallibly leak in,and vitiate the doing of the work.The work is but idle;if the doing of it will but pass,what need of more?The essential problem,as the rules of office prescribe it for you,if Nature and Fact say hing,is that your work be got to pass;if the work itself is worth hing,or little or an uncertain quantity,what more can gods or men require of it,or,above all,can I who am the doer of it require,but that it be got to pass?
