delayed, neglected, slurred over,
committed to hands that cannot do it well; that, in a word, the
questions sent thither are not wisely handled, but unwisely; not decided
truly and rapidly, but with delays and wrong at last: which is the
principal character, and the infallible result, of an insufficient
Intellect being set to decide them. Or _second_, what is still fataler,
the work done there may itself be quite the wrong kind of work. Not
the kind of supervision and direction which Colonies, and other such
interests, Home or Foreign, do by the nature of them require from the
Central Government; not that, but a quite other kind! The Sotomayor
correspondence, for example, is considered by many persons not to
be mismanaged merely, but to be a thing which should never have been
managed at all; a quite superfluous concern, which and the like of which
the British Government has almost no call to get into, at this new epoch
of time. And not Sotomayor only, nor Sapienza only, in regard to that
Foreign Office, but innumerable other things, if our witty friend of the
"live coal" have reason in him! Of the Colonial Office, too, it is urged
that the questions they decide and operate upon are, in very great part,
questions which they never should have meddled with, but almost all
of which should have been decided in the Colonies themselves,--Mother
Country or Colonial Office reserving its energy for a quite other class
of objects, which are terribly neglected just now.

These are the two vices that beset Government Offices; both of them
originating in insufficient Intellect,--that sad insufficiency from
which, directly or indirectly, all evil whatsoever springs! And these
two vices act and react, so that where the one is, the other is sure to
be; and each encouraging the growth of the other, both (if some cleaning
of the Augeas stable have not intervened for a long while) will be found
in frightful development. You cannot have your work well done, if the
work be not of a right kind, if it be not work prescribed by the law of
Nature as well as by the rules of the office. Laziness, which lies in
wait round all human labor-offices, will in that case infallibly leak
in, and vitiate the doing of the work. The work is but idle; if the
doing of it will but pass, what need of more? The essential problem,
as the rules of office prescribe it for you, if Nature and Fact say
nothing, is that your work be got to pass; if the work itself is wort