ejaculates “Good God, master, you are setting class against class!”
and then rushes off into the servants’ hall, and delivers a long
and melting oration on that wicked feeling.
I now come to the third objection, which is common among young
gentlemen who are not particularly fit for anything but spending
money which they have not got. It is usually comprised in the
observation, “How very extraordinary it is that these
Administrative Reform fellows can’t mind their own business.” I
think it will occur to all that a very sufficient mode of disposing
of this objection is to say, that it is our own business we mind
when we come forward in this way, and it is to prevent it from
being mismanaged by them. I observe from the Parliamentary debates
– which have of late, by-the-bye, frequently suggested to me that
there is this difference between the bull of Spain the bull of
Nineveh, that, whereas, in the Spanish case, the bull rushes at the
scarlet, in the Ninevite case, the scarlet rushes at the bull – I
have observed from the Parliamentary debates that, by a curious
fatality, there has been a great deal of the reproof valiant and
the counter-check quarrelsome, in reference to every case, showing
the necessity of Administrative Reform, by whomsoever produced,
whensoever, and wheresoever. I daresay I should have no difficulty
in adding two or three cases to the list, which I know to be true,
and which I have no doubt would be contradicted, but I consider it
a work of supererogation; for, if the people at large be not
already convinced that a sufficient general case has been made out
for Administrative Reform, I think they never can be, and they
never will be. There is, however, an old indisputable, very well
known story, which has so pointed a moral at the end of it that I
will substitute it for a new case: by doing of which I may avoid,
I hope, the sacred wrath of St. Stephen’s. Ages ago a savage mode
of keeping accounts on notched sticks was introduced into the Court
of Exchequer, and the accounts were kept, much as Robinson Crusoe
kept his calendar on the desert island. In the course of
considerable revolutions of time, the celebrated Cocker was born,
and died; Walkinghame, of the Tutor’s Assistant, and well versed in
figures, was also born, and died; a multitude of accountants, bookkeepers,
and actuaries, were born, and died. Still official
routine inclined to these notched sticks, as if they were pillars
of the constitution, and still the Exchequer accounts continued to
be kept on certain splints of elm wood called “tallies.” In the
reign of George III. an inquiry was made by some revolutionary
spirit, whether pens, ink, and paper, slates and pencils, being in
existence, this obstinate adherence to an obsolete custom ought to
be continued, and whether a change ought not to be effected.
All the red tape in the country grew redder at the bare mention of
this bold and original conception, and it took till 1826 to get
these sticks abolished. In 1834 it was found that there was a
considerable accumulation of them; and the question then arose,
what was to be done with such worn-out, worm-eaten, rotten old bits
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of wood? I dare say there was a vast amount of minuting,
memoranduming, and despatch-boxing, on this mighty subject. The
sticks were housed at Westminster, and it would naturally occur to
any intelligent person that nothing could be easier than to allow
them to be carried away for fire-wood by the miserable people who
live in that neighbourhood. However, they never had been useful,
and official routine required that they never should be, and so the
order went forth that they were to be privately and confidentially
burnt. It came to pass that they were burnt in a stove in the
House of Lords. The stove, overgorged with these preposterous
sticks, set fire to the panelling; the panelling set fire to the
House of Lords; the House of Lords set fire to the House of
Commons; the two houses were reduced to ashes; architects were