And enters aher fatal effect,the mother of ever-new mischiefs,which renders well-doing or improvement impossible,and drives bad everywhere continually into worse.The work being what we see,a stupid subaltern will do as well as a gifted one;the essential point is,that he be a quiet one,and do bother me who have the driving of him.Nay,for this latter object,is a certain height of intelligence even dangerous?I want mettled Arab horse,with his flashing glances,arched,neck and elastic step,to draw my wretched sand-cart through the streets;a broken,grass-fed galloway,Irish garron,or painful ass with hing in the belly of him but patience and furze,will do it safelier for me,if more slowly.Nay I myself,am I the worse for being of a feeble order of intelligence;what the irreverent speculative,world calls barren,red-tapish,limited,and even intrinsically dark and small,and if it must be said,stupid?--To such a climax does it come in all Government and other Offices,where Human Stupidity has once introduced itself (as it will everywhere do),and Scavenger God intervenes.The work,at first of some worth,is ill done,and becomes of less worth and of ever less,and finally of e:the worthless work can afford to be ill done;and Human Stupidity,at a double geometrical ratio,with frightful expansion grows and accumulates,--towards the unendurable.
The reforming Hercules,Sir Robert Peel or whoever he is to be,that enters Downing Street,will ask himself this question first of all,What work is necessary,in form and by traditionary use and wont,but in very fact,for the vital interests of the British Nation,to be done here?The second question,How to get it well done,and to keep the best hands doing it well,will be greatly simplified by a good answer to that.Oh for an eye that could see in those hideous mazes,and a heart that could dare and do!Strenuous faithful scrutiny,of what is thought to be what in the red-tape regions,but of what really is what in the realms of Fact and Nature herself;deep-seeing,wise and courageous eyes,that could look through innumerable cobweb veils,and detect what fact or fact lies at heart of them,--how invaluable these!For,alas,it is long since such eyes were much in the habit of looking steadfastly at any department of our affairs;and poor commonplace creatures,helping themselves along,in the way of makeshift,from year to year,in such an element,do wonderful works indeed.Such creatures,like moles,are safe only underground,and their engineerings there become very daedalean.In fact,such unfortunate persons have resource but to become what we call Pedants;to ensconce themselves in a safe world of habitudes,of applicable or inapplicable traditions;coveting,rather avoiding the general daylight of common-sense,as very extraneous to them and their procedure;by long persistence in which course they become Completed Pedants,hidebound,impenetrable,able to defy the hostile extraneous element;an alarming kind of men,Such men,left to themselves for a century or two,in any Colonial,Foreign,or other Office,will make a terrible affair of it!
For the one enemy we have in this Universe is Stupidity,Darkness of Mind;of which darkness,again,there are many sources,every sin a source,and probably self-conceit the chief source.
Darkness of mind,in every kind and variety,does to a really tragic extent abound:but of all the kinds of darkness,surely the Pedant darkness,which asserts and believes itself to be light,is the most formidable to mankind!For empires or for individuals there is but one class of men to be trembled at;and that is the Stupid Class,the class that can see,who alas are they mainly that will see.A class of mortals under which as administrators,kings,priests,diplomatists,&c.,the interests of mankind in every European country have sunk overloaded,as under universal nightmare,near to extinction;and indeed are at this moment convulsively writhing,decided either to throw off the unblessed superincumbent nightmare,or roll themselves and it to the Abyss.Vain to reform Parliament,to invent ballot-boxes,to reform this or that;the real Administration,practical Management of the Commonwealth,goes all awry;choked up with long-accumulated pedantries,so that your appointed workers have been reduced to work as moles;and it is one vast boring and counter-boring,on the part of eyeless persons irreverently called stupid;and a daedalean bewilderment,writing "impossible"on all efforts or proposals,supervenes.
The State itself,in Downing Street alone but in every department of it,has altered much from what it was in past times;and it will again have to alter very much,to alter Ithink from top to bottom,if it means to continue existing in the times that are coming and come!
The State,left to shape itself by dim pedantries and traditions,without distinctness of conviction,or purpose beyond that of helping itself over the difficulty of the hour,has become,instead of a lumis vitality permeating with its light all provinces of our affairs,a most monstrous agglomerate of inanities,as little adapted for the actual wants of a modern community as the worst citizen need wish.The thing it is doing is by means the thing we want to have done.What we want!
