Bull grumbles audibly:"The money you have cost me these five-and-thirty years,during which you have stood elaborately ready to fight at any moment,without at any moment being called to fight,is surely an astonishing sum.The National Debt itself might have been half paid by that money,which has all gone in pipe-clay and blank cartridges!"Yes,Mr.Bull,the money can be counted in hundreds of millions;which certainly is something:--but the "strenuously organized idleness,"and what mischief that amounts to,--have you computed it?A perpetual solecism,and blasphemy (of its sort),set to march openly among us,dressed in scarlet!Bull,with a more and more sulky tone,demands that such solecism be abated;that these Fighting Establishments be as it were disbanded,and set to do some work in the Creation,since fighting there is e for them.This demand is irrefragably just,is growing urgent too;and yet this demand can be complied with,--yet while the State grounds itself on unrealities,and Downing Street continues what it is.
The old Romans made their soldiers work during intervals of war.
The New Downing Street too,we may predict,will have less and less tolerance for idleness on the part of soldiers or others.
Nay the New Downing Street,I foresee,when once it has got its "Industrial Regiments"organized,will make these mainly do its fighting,what fighting there is;and so save immense sums.Or indeed,all citizens of the Commonwealth,as is the right and the interest of every free man in this world,will have themselves trained to arms;each citizen ready to defend his country with his own body and soul,--he is worthy to have a country otherwise.In a State grounded on veracities,that would be the rule.Downing Street,if it can bethink itself of returning to the veracities,will have to vanish altogether!
To fight with its neighbors never was,and is less than ever,the real trade of England.For far other objects was the English People created into this world;sent down from the Eternities,to mark with its history certain spaces in the current of sublunary Time!Essential,too,that the English People should discover what its real objects are;and resolutely follow these,resolutely refusing to follow other than these.The State will have victory so far as it can do that;so far as it can,defeat.
In the New Downing Street,discerning what its real functions are,and with sacred abhorrence putting away from it what its functions are ,we can fancy changes egh in Foreign Office,War Office,Colonial Office,Home Office!Our War-soldiers Industrial ,first of all;doing ler than Roman works,when fighting is wanted of them.Seventy-fours hanging idly by their anchors in the Tagus,or off Sapienza (one of the saddest sights under the sun),but busy,every Seventy-four of them,carrying over streams of British Industrials to the immeasurable Britain that lies beyond the sea in every zone of the world.A State grounding itself on the veracities,on the semblances and the injustices:every citizen a soldier for it.Here would be new real Secretaryships and Ministries,for foreign war and diplomacy,but for domestic peace and utility.Minister of Works;Minister of Justice,--clearing his Model Prisons of their scoundrelism;shipping his scoundrels wholly abroad,under hard and just drill-sergeants (hundreds of such stand wistfully ready for you,these thirty years,in the Rag-and-Famish Club and elsewhere!)into fertile desert countries;to make railways,--one big railway (says the Major [Foote:Major Carmichael Smith;see his Pamphlets on this subject])quite across America;fit to employ all the able-bodied Scoundrels and efficient Half-pay Officers in Nature!
Lastly,--or rather firstly,and as the preliminary of all,would there be a Minister of Education?Minister charged to get this English People taught a little,at his and our peril!
Minister of Education;longer dolefully embayed amid the wreck of moribund "religions,"but clear ahead of all that;steering,free and piously fearless,towards his divine goal under the eternal stars!--O heaven,and are these things forever impossible,then?a whit.To-morrow morning they might all begin to be,and go on through blessed centuries realizing themselves,if it were that--alas,if it were that we are most of us insincere persons,sham talking-machines and hollow windy fools!Which it is "impossible"that we should cease to be,I hope?
Constitutions for the Colonies are on the anvil;the discontented Colonies are all to be cured of their miseries by Constitutions.Whether that will cure their miseries,or only operate as a Godfrey's-cordial to stop their whimpering,and in the end worsen all their miseries,may be a sad doubt to us.One thing strikes a remote spectator in these Colonial questions:the singular placidity with which the British Statesman at this time,backed by M'Croudy and the British moneyed classes,is prepared to surrender whatsoever interest Britain,as foundress of those establishments,might pretend to have in the decision.