e unwary, _seem_ to see. A quite fatal circumstance, had
you never so many Parliaments! How is your ship to be steered by a Pilot
with no _eyes_ but a pair of glass ones got from the constitutional
optician? He must steer by the _ear_, I think, rather than by the eye;
by the shoutings he catches from the shore, or from the Parliamentary
benches nearer hand:--one of the frightfulest objects to see steering
in a difficult sea! Reformed Parliaments in that case, reform-leagues,
outer agitations and excitements in never such abundance, cannot profit:
all this is but the writhing, and painful blind convulsion of the
limbs that are in bonds, that are all in dark misery till the head be
delivered, till the pressure on the brain be removed.

Or perhaps there is now no heroic wisdom left in England; England, once
the land of heroes, is itself sunk now to a dim owlery, and habitation
of doleful creatures, intent only on money-making and other forms of
catching mice, for whom the proper gospel is the gospel of M'Croudy, and
all nobler impulses and insights are forbidden henceforth? Perhaps these
present agreeable Occupants of Downing Street, such as the parliamentary
mill has yielded them, are the _best_ the miserable soil had grown?
The most Herculean Ten Men that could be found among the English
Twenty-seven Millions, are these? There _are_ not, in any place, under
any figure, ten diviner men among us? Well; in that case, the riddling
and searching of the twenty-seven millions has been _successful_. Here
are our ten divinest men; with these, unhappily not divine enough, we
must even content ourselves and die in peace; what help is there? No
help, no hope, in that case.

But, again, if these are _not_ our divinest men, then evidently there
always is hope, there always is possibility of help; and ruin never is
quite inevitable, till we _have_ sifted out our actually divinest
ten, and set these to try their band at governing!--That this has been
achieved; that these ten men are the most Herculean souls the English
population held within it, is a proposition credible to no mortal. No,
thank God; low as we are sunk in many ways, this is not yet credible!
Evidently the reverse of this proposition is the fact. Ten much diviner
men do certainly exist. By some conceivable, not forever impossible,
method and methods, ten very much diviner men could be sifted
out!--Courage; let us fix our eyes on that important fact, and strive
all thithe