NOBODY, SOMEBODY, AND EVERYBODY.

THE power of Nobody is becoming so enormous
in England, and he alone is responsible
for so many proceedings, both in the way of
commission and omission; he has so much to
answer for, and is so constantly called to
account; that a few remarks upon him may
not be ill-timed.

The hand which this surprising person
had in the late war is amazing to  consider.
It was he who left the tents behind, who left
the baggage behind, who chose the worst
possible ground for encampments, who provided
no means of transport, who killed the
horses, who paralysed the commissariat, who
knew nothing of the business he professed to
know and monopolised, who decimated the
English army. It was Nobody who gave out
the famous unroasted coffee, it was Nobody who
made the hospitals more horrible than language
can describe, it was Nobody who occasioned
all the dire confusion of Balaklava
harbor, it was even Nobody who ordered the
fatal Balaklava cavalry charge. The non-relief
of Kars was the work of Nobody, and
Nobody has justly and severely suffered for
that infamous transaction.

It is difficult for the mind to span the
career of Nobody. The sphere of action
opened to this wonderful person, so enlarges
every day, that the limited faculties of
Anybody are too weak to compass it.
Yet, the nature of the last tribunal expressly
appointed for the detection and
punishment of Nobody may, as a part of
his stupendous history, be glanced at
without winking.

At the Old Bailey, when a person under
strong suspicion of mal-practices is tried, it
is the custom (the rather as the strong suspicion
has been found, by a previous enquiry,
to exist), to conduct the trial on stringent
principles, and to confide it to impartial hands.
It has not yet become the practice of the
criminal, or even of the civil courts— but
they, indeed, are constituted for the punishment
of Somebody— to invite the prisoner's
or defendant's friends to talk the matter over
with him in a cosy, tea-and-muffin sort of
way, and make out a verdict together, that
shall be what a deposed iron king called
making things "pleasant." But, when
Nobody was shown within these few weeks to
have occasioned intolerable misery and loss
in the late war, and to have incurred a vast
amount of guilt in bringing to pass results
which all morally sane persons can understand
to be fraught with fatal consequences,
far beyond present calculation, this cosy
course of proceeding was the course pursued.
My Lord, intent upon establishing the responsibility
of Nobody, walked into court, as he
would walk into a ball-room; and My Lord's
friends and admirers toadied and fawned
upon him in court, as they would toady him
and fawn upon him in the other assembly. My
Lord carried his head very high, and took
a mighty great tone with the common people;
and there was no question as to anything My
Lord did or said, and Nobody got triumphantly
fixed. Ignorance enough and incompetency
enough to bring any country that
the world has ever seen to defeat and
shame, and to lay any head that ever was in
it low, were proved beyond question; but,
My Lord cried, " On Nobody's eyes be it!"
and My Lord's impaneled chorus cried,
"There is no impostor but Nobody; on him
be the shame and blame!"

Surely, this is a rather wonderful state of
things to be realising itself so long after
the Flood, in such a country as England.
Surely, it suggests to us with some force, that
wherever this ubiquitous Nobody is, there
mischief is and there danger is. For, it is
especially to be borne in mind that wherever
failure is accomplished, there Nobody
lurks. With success, he has nothing to do.
That is Everybody's business, and all
manner of improbable people will invariably
be found at the bottom of it. But,
it is the great feature of the present epoch
that all public disaster in the United
Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland is
assuredly, and to a dead certainty, Nobody's
work.

We have, it is not to be denied, punished
Nobody, with exemplary rigor. We have, as a
nation, allowed ourselves to be deluded by no
influences or insolences of office or rank, but
have dealt with Nobody in a spirit of equal
and uncompromising justice that has moved
the admiration of the world. I have had
some opportunities of remarking, out of
England, the impression made on other