Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 19th century; Social problems
What England wants, and will require to have, or sink in nameless
anarchies, is not a Reformed Parliament, meaning thereby a Parliament
elected according to the six or the four or any other number of "points"
and cunningly devised improvements in hustings mechanism, but a Reformed
Executive or Sovereign Body of Rulers and Administrators,--some improved
method, innumerable improvements in our poor blind methods, of getting
hold of these. Not a better Talking-Apparatus, the best conceivable
Talking-Apparatus would do very little for us at present;--but an
infinitely better Acting-Apparatus, the benefits of which would be
invaluable now and henceforth. The practical question puts itself with
ever-increasing stringency to all English minds: Can we, by no industry,
energy, utmost expenditure of human ingenuity, and passionate invocation
of the Heavens and Earth, get to attain some twelve or ten or six men to
manage the affairs of this nation in Downing Street and the chief posts
elsewhere, who are abler for the work than those we have been used to,
this long while? For it is really a heroic work, and cannot be done by
histrios, and dexterous talkers having the honor to be: it is a heavy
and appalling work; and, at the starting of it especially, will
require Herculean men; such mountains of pedant exuviae and obscene
owl-droppings have accumulated in those regions, long the habitation
of doleful creatures; the old _pavements_, the natural facts and real
essential functions of those establishments, have not been seen by eyes
for these two hundred years last past! Herculean men acquainted with the
virtues of running water, and with the divine necessity of getting down
to the clear pavements and old veracities; who tremble before no amount
of pedant exuviae, no loudest shrieking of doleful creatures; who
tremble only to live, themselves, like inane phantasms, and to leave
their life as a paltry _contribution_ to the guano mountains, and not as
a divine eternal protest against them!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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