§ 6.

After the difficulty of finding out the thing to be done, there comes the other difficulty of finding out the way to do it. Let us excuse the expediency-philosopher one half of his task—let us for the occasion assume something to be unanimously agreed to as a proper undertaking; and now suppose we enquire of him—How about your means of accomplishing it? Edition: current; Page: [288] Are you quite sure they will answer? Are you quite sure that your apparatus will not break down under its work? quite sure that it will produce the result you wish? quite sure that it will not produce some very different result? quite sure that you will not get into one of those imbroglios that so many have lost themselves in? There is no lack of warnings. “Let us put down usury,” said to themselves the rulers of the middle ages: they tried; and did just the reverse of what they intended; for it has turned out, that “all regulations interfering with the interest of money render its terms more rigorous and burdensome.” “We will exterminate Protestantism,” whispered the continental Catholics to each other: they tried; and instead of doing this they planted in England the germs of a manufacturing organization which has to a great extent superseded their own. “It will be well to give the labouring classes fixed settlements” thought the Poor Law legislators; and having acted out this thought there eventually grew up the clearance system, with its overcrowded cottages, and non-resident labour-gangs. “We must suppress these brothels,” decided the authorities of Berlin in 1845: they did suppress them; and in 1848, the registrar’s books and the hospital returns proved matters to be considerably worse than beforea. “Suppose we compel the London parishes to maintain and educate their pauper children in the country,” said statesmen in the time of George III; “’it would greatly tend to the preservation of the lives of the infant parish poor:’” so they passed the 7 Geo. III., c. 39; and by-and-by there began the business of child-farming, ending in the Tooting tragedy. Are not such warnings worthy of attention? Or does the expediency-philosopher value those facts only which are embodied in Blue-books and Board of Trade tables?

Then as to his administrative mechanisms—can be answer for the satisfactory working of them? The common remark that public business is worse managed than all other business, is not altogether unfounded. To-day he will find it illustrated in Edition: current; Page: [289] the doings of a department which makes a valuable estate like the New Forest, a loss to the country of £3000 a year; which allowed Salcey Forest to be wholly cut down and made away with by a dishonest agent; and which, in 1848, had its accounts made up to March, 1839, only. To-morrow he may read of Admiralty bunglings—of ships badly built, pulled to pieces, re-built and patched—of nearly a million spent on iron war-steamers which are now found not to stand cannon shot—and of a sluggishness which puts the national dockyards “about seven years” behind all others. Now the exposure is of an extravagance which builds gaols at a cost of £1200 per prisoner; and now of a carelessness which permits important legal records to rot amongst rubbish. Here is a sailor of whom the State demanded sixpence a month towards a hospital which was never provided, and whose pension from the Merchant-Seamen’s Fund is nothing like what it would have been from an ordinary assurance society; and there, on the other hand, is a Mint moneyer who gets more than £4000 a year for doing what a tithe of the amount would amply pay for. Official delay is seen in the snail-paced progress of the Museum Catalogue; official mismanagement in the building of Houses of Parliament not fit for speaking in; and official perversity in the opposition uniformly made to improvement by the Excise, the Customs, and the Post Office authorities. Does the expediency-philosopher feel no apprehensions on contemplating such evidence? Or, as one specially professing to be guided by experience, does he think that on the whole experience is in his favour?

Perhaps he has not heard that of ten mechanical inventions, usually some nine fail; and that, before the tenth can be made to answer, endless obstacles that had never been dreamed of have to be surmounted. Or, if he has heard this, does he think that the properties of humanity being so much easier to understand than those of iron and brass, and an institution constructed of living men being a simple thing as compared with an inanimate mechanism, legislative schemes are not likely thus to miscarry?

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