of the conduct of a colonial governor, the complainant was announced as a
returned convict. An amelioration of the criminal code was discountenanced
because a search in the parish register of an obscure village proved that
the proposer had not been born in wedlock. A relaxation of the commercial
system was denounced because one of its principal advocates was a
Socinian. The inutility of Parliamentary Reform was ever obvious since Mr.
Rigby was a member of the House of Commons.

To us, with our _Times_ newspaper every morning on our breakfast-table,
bringing, on every subject which can interest the public mind, a degree of
information and intelligence which must form a security against any
prolonged public misconception, it seems incredible that only five-and-
twenty years ago the English mind could have been so ridden and
hoodwinked, and that, too, by men of mean attainments and moderate
abilities. But the war had directed the energies of the English people
into channels by no means favourable to political education. Conquerors of
the world, with their ports filled with the shipping of every clime, and
their manufactories supplying the European continent, in the art of self-
government, that art in which their fathers excelled, they had become
literally children; and Rigby and his brother hirelings were the nurses
that frightened them with hideous fables and ugly words.

Notwithstanding, however, all this successful mystification, the Arch-
Mediocrity who presided, rather than ruled, over this Cabinet of
Mediocrities, became hourly more conscious that the inevitable transition
from fulfilling the duties of an administration to performing the
functions of a government could not be conducted without talents and
knowledge. The Arch-Mediocrity had himself some glimmering traditions of
political science. He was sprung from a laborious stock, had received some
training, and though not a statesman, might be classed among those whom