to the understanding of every voter what are the reasons and aims
of every act of Legislation, Home Administration, and Foreign
Policy? If you do not find out some way to do this he may turn
round upon you--I hope he may-- and insist on annually-elected
parliaments, and thus oblige ambitious state-mongers, in the
rivalry of place, to come to him and declare more often their
wishes and objects. Other attractions may be found in that
solution: such as the untying of some knots of electoral
difficulty, and removing incitements to corruption. Ten thousand
pounds for one year's power were a high price even to a
contractor. Think then whether at any cost some general
political education must not be attempted, since there is a
spirit breathing on the waters, and how it shall convulse them is
no indifferent matter to you or to me. Everywhere around us are
unhewn rocks stirred with a strange motion. Leave these chaotic
fragments of humanity to be hewn into rough shape by coarse
artists seeking only a petty profit, unhandy, immeasurably
impudent; or dress them by your teaching--teaching which is the
highest, noblest, purest, most efficient function of Government,
which ought to be the most lofty ambition of statesmanship--to be
civic corner-stones polished after the similitude of a palace.



V.--Reasons and Resolves.

Ginx has been waiting through three chapters to explain his
truculence upon the birth of his twelfth child. Much explanation
is not necessary. When he looked round his nest and saw the many
open mouths about him, he might well be appalled to have another