Sugar Islands are pretty well "emancipated" now? My clear
opinion farther is, we had better quit the Scoundrel-province of
Reform; better close that under hatches, in some rapid summary
manner, and go elsewhither with our Reform efforts. A whole
world, for want of Reform, is drowning and sinking; threatening
to swamp itself into a Stygian quagmire, uninhabitable by any
noble-minded man. Let us to the well-heads, I say; to the chief
fountains of these waters of bitterness; and there strike home
and dig! To puddle in the embouchures and drowned outskirts,
and ulterior and ultimate issues and cloacas of the affair: what
profit can there be in that? Nothing to be saved there; nothing
to be fished up there, except, with endless peril and spread of
pestilence, a miscellany of broken waifs and dead dogs! In the
name of Heaven, quit that!


[April 1, 1850.] No. III. DOWNING STREET.

From all corners of the wide British Dominion there rises one
complaint against the ineffectuality of what are nicknamed our
"red-tape" establishments, our Government Offices, Colonial
Office, Foreign Office and the others, in Downing Street and the
neighborhood. To me individually these branches of human
business are little known; but every British citizen and
reflective passer-by has occasion to wonder much, and inquire
earnestly, concerning them. To all men it is evident that the
social interests of one hundred and fifty Millions of us depend
on the mysterious industry there carried on; and likewise that
the dissatisfaction with it is great, universal, and continually
increasing in intensity,--in fact, mounting, we might say, to the