s my
inability to carry the war into the enemy's country, and make my fortune
out of the English companies. I have the appetite but not the power;
and, after all, it would hardly make up for Flodden.

I like this sort of life much better than assorting cargoes and
superintending the arrival of sugar casks. There is no want of society,
for I find myself here surrounded by the old familiar faces. I do not
think there is a soul in this hotel except townsmen of our own. You meet
in the committee rooms the same excellent fellows whom you have daily
encountered for the last ten years on the Exchange, and they are all
getting fatter upon their work. Edinburgh, too, has furnished her quota.
We have Writers to the Signet by the score, and a sprinkling of the
young Advocates whom we are accustomed to meet upon circuit. Poor lads!
it does one good to see them thriving. This must be a very different
sort of business from the weariful Parliament House, and the two square
yards of processes, with a fee of three guineas for many an interminable
condescendence. I believe they would have no objection if the Session of
Parliament were declared perpetual; and for that matter no more would I.

Certainly, of all tribunals ever invented by the ingenuity of man, a
Parliamentary Committee is the most extraordinary. It is a court of
enquiry consisting of five members, whose principal qualification is
absolute previous ignorance of the localities and conflicting interests
with regard to which they must decide. Of their impartiality, therefore,
there can be no doubt. You or I might just as well sit down at a
moment's notice, and adjudicate upon the merits of three competing lines
between Pekin and Canton, with an equal chance of arriving at a
satisfactory conclusion. Of course they must be guided entirely by
evidence, and have plenty of materials laid before them from which they
may pick and choose. It is the richest thing in the world to see two
crack engineers pitted against each other. The first, who appears on
behalf of the line, does not know and cannot conceive the slightest
engineering difficulty. If a mountain stands in his way, he plunges
fearlessly into its bowels, finds in the interior strata of surpassing
mineral wealth, yet marvellously adapted for the purposes of a four-mile
tunnel, and brings you out sound and safe at the opposite side, as
though he had been perforating a gigantic cheese instead of hammering
his path through whins