reviated labor, to get itself
sent home again to its partridge-shootings, fox-huntings, and above all,
to its rat-catchings, if it could but understand the time of day, and
know (as our indignant Crabbe remarks) that "the real Nimrod of this
era, who alone does any good to the era, is the rat-catcher!"

The notion that any Government is or can be a No-Government, without
the deadliest peril to all noble interests of the Commonwealth, and
by degrees slower or swifter to all ignoble ones also, and to the
very gully-drains, and thief lodging-houses, and Mosaic sweating
establishments, and at last without destruction to such No-Government
itself,--was never my notion; and I hope it will soon cease altogether
to be the world's or to be anybody's. But if it be the correct
notion, as the world seems at present to flatter itself, I point out
improvements and abbreviations. Dismiss your National Palaver; make the
_Times_ Newspaper your National Palaver, which needs no beer-barrels or
hustings, and is _cheaper_ in expense of money and of falsity a thousand
and a million fold; have an economical red-tape drilling establishment
(it were easier to devise such a thing than a right _Modern
University_);--and fling out your orange-skin among the graduates, when
you want a new Premier.

A mighty question indeed! Who shall be Premier, and take in hand the
"rudder of government," otherwise called the "spigot of taxation;" shall
it be the Honorable Felix Parvulus, or the Right Honorable Felicissimus
Zero? By our electioneerings and Hansard Debatings, and ever-enduring
tempest of jargon that goes on everywhere, we manage to settle that; to
have it declared, with no bloodshed except insignificant blood from
the nose in hustings-time, but with immense beershed and inkshed
and explosion of nonsense, which darkens all the air, that the Right
Honorable Zero is to be the man. That we firmly settle; Zero, all
shivering with rapture and with terror, mounts into the high saddle;
cramps himself on, with knees, heels, hands and feet; and the horse
gallops--whither it lists. That the Right Honorable Zero should attempt
controlling the horse--Alas, alas, he, sticking on with beak and claws,
is too happy if the horse will only gallop any-whither, and not throw
him. Measure, polity, plan or scheme of public good or evil, is not
in the head of Felicissimus; except, if he could but devise it, some
measure that would please his horse for the moment, and enc