irts, and ulterior and ultimate issues and
cloacas of the affair: what profit can there be in that? Nothing to be
saved there; nothing to be fished up there, except, with endless peril
and spread of pestilence, a miscellany of broken waifs and dead dogs! In
the name of Heaven, quit that!

No. III. DOWNING STREET. [April 1, 1850.]

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 known; 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 now to this doleful creature,
now 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; not 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 not by any means precisely get to know;
believes that it does not itself in the least precisely know. Believes
that nobody knows;--that i