It is no child's play to deal with these
permanent officials. The private happiness and
public career of thousands may depend, humanly
speaking, on their decisions upon subjects of
which they know nothing, and will consent to
learn nothing. They will not endure in the
Foreign Office any man who has ever exercised,
even under their own patronage, one of these
consular judgeships, and they contemptuously
toss aside all practical suggestions for their
improvement. There is nothing to prevent them
from calmly reviving in the Foreign Office the
ancient procedure of the Star Chamber,
unknown to the common law of England since the
time of Charles the First. They can institute
secret inquiries upon secret information and
gossip letters of the agents' customers seeking
promotion. They may order domiciliary visits
without warrant or authority; they may cause
papers, public and private, to be seized at a
moment's notice; they have been known to
discharge officers holding distant posts from
their employment, by telegram, without, an
hour's warning or a word of explanation. The
unexplained suppression of the Abyssinian letter
shows that they may possibly be able to intercept
the Queen's letters.

Such is the Foreign Office of Great Britain
in the year 1867-8. We are governed by an
old worn-out absurd system which, for want of
a better name, may be called "King Rusty."
He is a pitiful king, without experience or
magnanimity; taking pleasure in the pain and
humiliation of others for wanton tyranny's sake,
and most haughty as to his deportment; stolid,
also, to a degree beyond human credibility.
Abolition, suppression, and entire annihilation
represent the only possible cure for such a
king; forbearance, patience, hope of amendment,
being all exhausted to the last squeeze with him.

King Rusty has his courtiers who koo-too
before him, and do his bad bidding. They are
noxious sort of midges, who buzz about clubs
and dinner-tables, fetching and carrying, and
staining where they settle. They maintain
petty rancours for years and years, sting and
bite at them constantly till they fester. They
have cunning traditions to confound the simple.
Abuses which are commonly supposed to have
died out in England long ago crop up again
rankly in King Rusty. Let us take an instance:

It is their fashionable defence to say that
they must not be censured in parliament or
their conduct questioned, because they are not
present to defend themselves. But surely this
argument is not true of the press. Any man
can defend himself there. Why do not they
give an intelligible account of their public
career in writing, in answer to the
statements of the Morning Post, the Pall Mall
Gazette, and The Examiner. The newspapers
would be glad to have it, the public would be
glad to read it, and they might state their own
case under the advice and with the assistance of
the law officers of the crown to keep them from
tripping. It is probable that nothing can be a
greater comfort to them than not to be in
parliament; for they would soon get turned inside
out, mentally or morally, if they were. But this
excuse is worn threadbare, and any of them
who is able to speak up for himself and his
friends must now do so, or let judgment go by
default. The country will not be any longer cajoled
by such shallow artifices as heretofore into attaching
blame to the wrong persons. It will not
allow King Rusty to shelve his victims, nor
to send them to Coventry far from human speech
and counsel. The whole story must come fairly
out now. Public attention is roused never to
sleep again till we know who are our masters
and who are not. It is a stale trick to tell us
again the old stupid story about the sin of
personalities. Personality, when justly and properly
directed, is the only possible remedy for such
complaints as ours. Our wounds have grown rank
and foul; nothing but actual cautery will cleanse
them. " Poor dear man!" society is wont to
say of King Rusty in its wishy-washy jargon,
"Poor dear man! you know he is beneath
argument. He is not worth so much honest
indignation. Besides" (this is always thought a
clincher), " he is really no worse than hosts of
others."

Now, when Society has said this, and added
that it will not countenance attacks on
individuals, it goes off to dinner, satisfied that it has
settled the whole question, while, in fact, it
has hitherto and effectually silenced all useful
inquiry in any direction whatever. The truth
is, attacks against some abstract system convey
no meaning to the Public mind whatever; and
a system, however faulty, has always some
stupid or wicked man, or some man who is
both stupid and wicked, at the bottom of it.
What would be the use of a barrister thundering
against theft, if the burglar who had
robbed his client was suffered to listen to his
pleadings, an amused and unconcerned spectator
of his own trial? The outcry against personalities
is merely part of the cunning, which sets
detection and punishment at defiance. If we
wish to do any good by this movement, we
must have out the real culprits, and compel
them to tell us all about themselves and their
doings before we condone the past. We should
know what we have to forgive before we pardon
them, and should use their confessions to
protect us against similar misdoings for the
future. Society—that is to say, the uncles
and nephews and aunts and nieces of the
permanent clerks—will not like it. But there
are times when Secret Societies of this kind
must be taught their duty. They are at all
times narrow creatures, and they never respond
to the honest throbs of the great national heart
which lies so much deeper than their petty
coteries and limited minds can fancy. Even
now they are mustering in their meeting-houses
to talk down the inquiries which are being
made about them. They insolently and even
gaily defy the country to convict them. And
unless the whole question is taken up in an
earnest, truthful, resolute spirit by some member
of parliament who will fight it out in spite