ble, spoken or not!--Unless perhaps the
Voluntary Principle will still help us through? Perhaps this Irish leak,
in such a rotten distressed condition of the Ship, with all the crew so
anxious about it, will be kind enough to stop of itself?--

Dismiss that hope, your Lordship! Let all real and imaginary Governors
of England, at the pass we have arrived at, dismiss forever that
fallacious fatal solace to their do-nothingism: of itself, too clearly,
the leak will never stop; by human skill and energy it must be stopped,
or there is nothing but the sea-bottom for us all! A Chief Governor of
England really ought to recognize his situation; to discern that, doing
nothing, and merely drifting to and fro, in however constitutional a
manner, he is a squanderer of precious moments, moments that perhaps are
priceless; a truly alarming Chief Governor. Surely, to a Chief Governor
of England, worthy of that high name,--surely to him, as to every
living man, in every conceivable situation short of the Kingdom of the
Dead--there is _something_ possible; some plan of action other than that
of standing mildly, with crossed arms, till he and we--sink? Complex as
his situation is, he, of all Governors now extant among these distracted
Nations, has, as I compute, by far the greatest possibilities. The
Captains, actual or potential, are there, and the million Captainless:
and such resources for bringing them together as no other has. To these
outcast soldiers of his, unregimented roving banditti for the present,
or unworking workhouse prisoners who are almost uglier than banditti;
to these floods of Irish Beggars, Able-bodied Paupers, and nomadic
Lackalls, now stagnating or roaming everywhere, drowning the face of the
world (too truly) into an untenantable swamp and Stygian quagmire, has
the Chief Governor of this country no word whatever to say? Nothing but
"Rate in aid," "Time will mend it," "Necessary business of the Session;"
and "After me the Deluge"? A Chief Governor that can front his Irish
difficulty, and steadily contemplate the horoscope of Irish and British
Pauperism, and whitherward it is leading him and us, in this humor, must
be a--What shall we call such a Chief Governor? Alas, in spite of old
use and wont,--little other than a tolerated Solecism, growing daily
more intolerable! He decidedly ought to have some word to say on this
matter,--to be incessantly occupied in getting something which he could
practically say!--Perhaps