From all corners of the wide British Dominion there rises one complaint against the ineffectuality of what are nicknamed our "red-tape"establishments,our Government Offices,Colonial Office,Foreign Office and the others,in Downing Street and the neighborhood.To me individually these branches of human business are little kn;but every British citizen and reflective passer-by has occasion to wonder much,and inquire earnestly,concerning them.To all men it is evident that the social interests of one hundred and fifty Millions of us depend on the mysterious industry there carried on;and likewise that the dissatisfaction with it is great,universal,and continually increasing in intensity,--in fact,mounting,we might say,to the pitch of settled despair.
Every colony,every agent for a matter colonial,has his tragic tale to tell you of his sad experiences in the Colonial Office;what blind obstructions,fatal indolences,pedantries,stupidities,on the right and on the left,he had to do battle with;what a world-wide jungle of red-tape,inhabited by doleful creatures,deaf or nearly so to human reason or entreaty,he had entered on;and how he paused in amazement,almost in despair;passionately appealed to this doleful creature,to that,and to the dead red-tape jungle,and to the living Universe itself,and to the Voices and to the Silences;--and,on the whole,found that it was an adventure,in sorrowful fact,equal to the fabulous ones by old knights-errant against dragons and wizards in enchanted wildernesses and waste howling solitudes;achievable except by nearly superhuman exercise of all the four cardinal virtues,and unexpected favor of the special blessing of Heaven.His adventure achieved or found unachievable,he has returned with experiences new to him in the affairs of men.What this Colonial Office,inhabiting the head of Downing Street,really was,and had to do,or try doing,in God's practical Earth,he could by any means precisely get to k;believes that it does itself in the least precisely k.Believes that ody ks;--that it is a mystery,a kind of Heathen myth;and stranger than any piece of the old mythological Pantheon;for it practically presides over the destinies of many millions of living men.
Such is his report of the Colonial Office:and if we oftener hear such a report of that than we do of the Home Office,Foreign Office or the rest,--the reason probably is,that Colonies excite more attention at present than any of our other interests.The Forty Colonies,it appears,are all pretty like rebelling just ;and are to be pacified with constitutions;luckier Constitutions,let us hope,than some late ones have been.Loyal Canada,for instance,had to quench a rebellion the other year;and this year,in virtue of its constitution,it is called upon to pay the rebels their damages;which surely is a rather surprising result,however constitutional!--Men have rents and moneys dependent in the Colonies;Emigration schemes,Black Emancipations,New-Zealand and other schemes;and feel and publish more emphatically what their Downing-Street woes in these respects have been.
Were the state of poor sallow English ploughers and weavers,what we may call the Sallow or Yellow Emancipation interest,as much in object with Exeter-Hall Philanthropists as that of the Black blockheads all emancipated,and going at large without work,or need of working,in West-India clover (and fattening very much in it,one delights to hear),then perhaps the Home Office,its huge virtual task better understood,and its small actual performance better seen into,might be found still more deficient,and behind the wants of the age,than the Colonial itself is.
How it stands with the Foreign Office,again,one still less ks.Seizures of Sapienza,and the like sudden appearances of Britain in the character of Hercules-Harlequin,waving,with big bully-voice,her huge sword-of-sharpness over field-mice,and in the air making horrid circles (horrid catherine-wheels and death-disks of metallic terror from said huge sword),to see how they will like it,--do from time to time astonish the world,in a pleasant manner.Hercules-Harlequin,the Attorney Triumphant,the World's Busybody:e of these are parts this Nation has a turn for;she,if you consulted her,would rather play these parts,but aher!Seizures of Sapienza,correspondences with Sotomayor,remonstrances to Otho King of Athens,fleets hanging by their anchor in behalf of the Majesty of Portugal;and in short the whole,or at present very nearly the whole,of that industry of protocolling,diplomatizing,remonstrating,admonishing,and "having the ho to be,"--has sunk justly in public estimation to a very low figure.
For in fact,it is reasonably asked,What vital interest has England in any cause deciding itself in foreign parts?Once there was a Papistry and Protestantism,important as life eternal and death eternal;more lately there was an interest of Civil Order and Horrors of the French Revolution,important at least as rent-roll and preservation of the game;but what is there?