Colonial Offices,Foreign,Home and other Offices,got together under these strange circumstances,can well be expected to be the best that human ingenuity could devise;the wonder rather is to see them so good as they are.Who made them,ask me .
Made they clearly were;for we see them here in a concrete condition,writing despatches,and drawing salary with a view to buy pudding.But how those Offices in Downing Street were made;who made them,or for what kind of objects they were made,would be hard to say at present.Dim visions and phantasmagories gathered from the Books of Horace Walpole,Memoirs of Bubb Doddington,Memoirs of my Lady Sundon,Lord Fanny Hervey,and innumerable others,rise on us,beckoning fantastically towards,an answer,but some conceivable intimations of an answer,and proclaiming very legibly the old text,"Quam parva sapientia ,"in respect of this hard-working much-subduing British Nation;giving rise to endless reflections in a thinking Englishman of this day.Alas,it is ever so:each generation has its task,and does it better or worse;greatly neglecting what is immediately its task.Our poor grandfathers,so busy conquering Indias,founding Colonies,inventing spinning-jennies,kindling Lancashires and Bromwichams,took thought about the government of all that;left it all to be governed by Lord Fanny and the Haer Succession,or how the gods pleased.And we the poor grandchildren find that it will stick together on these terms any longer;that our sad,dangerous and sore task is to discover some government for this big world which has been conquered to us;that the red-tape Offices in Downing Street are near the end of their rope;that if we can get hing better,in the way of government,it is all over with our world and us.How the Downing-Street Offices originated,and what the meaning of them was or is,let Dryasdust,when in some lucid moment the whim takes him,instruct us.Egh for us to k and see clearly,with urgent practical inference derived from such insight,That they were made for us or for our objects at all;that the devouring Irish Giant is here,and that he can be fed with red-tape,and will eat us if we can feed him.
On the whole,let us say Felicissimus made them;--or rather it was the predecessors of Felicissimus,who were so dreadfully hunted,sticking to the wild and ever more desperate Sleswicker in the leafy labyrinth of lanes,as he is.He,I think,will never make anything;but be combed off by the elm-boughs,and left sprawling in the ditch.But in past time,this and the other heavy-laden red-tape soul had withal a glow of patriotism in him;and then,in his whirling element,a gleam of human ingenuity,some eye towards business that must be done.At all events,for him and every one,Parliament needed to be persuaded that business was done.By the contributions of many such heavy-laden souls,driven on by necessity outward and inward,these singular Establishments are here.Contributions--who ks how far back they go,far beyond the reign of George the Second,or perhaps the reign of William Conqueror.le and genuine some of them were,many of them were,I need doubt:for there is human edifice that stands long but has got itself planted,here and there,upon the basis of fact;and being built,in many respects,according to the laws of statics:standing edifice,especially edifice of State,but has had the wise and brave at work in it,contributing their lives to it;and is "cemented,"whether it k the fact or ,"by the blood of heroes!"e;even the Foreign Office,Home Office,still less the National Palaver itself.William Conqueror,I find,must have had a first-rate Home Office,for his share.The Domesday Book ,done in four years,and done as it is,with such an admirable brevity,explicitness and completeness,testifies emphatically what kind of under-secretaries and officials William had.Silent officials and secretaries,I suppose;wasting themselves in parliamentary talk;reserving all their intelligence for silent survey of the huge dumb fact,silent consideration how they might compass the mastery of that.Happy secretaries,happy William!
But indeed ody ks what inarticulate traditions,remnants of old wisdom,priceless though quite aymous,survive in many modern things that still have life in them.Ben Brace,with his taciturnities,and rugged stoical ways,with his tarry breeches,stiff as plank-breeches,I perceive is still a kind of Lod-brog (Loaded-breeks)in more senses than one;and derives,little conscious of it,many of his excellences from the old Sea-kings and Saxon Pirates themselves;and how many Blakes and Nelsons since have contributed to Ben!"Things are so false always as they seem,"said a certain Professor to me once:"of this you will find instances in every country,and in your England more than any--and I hope will draw lessons from them.
