Page:Earl Canning.djvu/50

44 to guide it in safe channels, and repress its undue violence; and his task had to be performed under conditions well calculated to disturb the most steadfast equilibrium. There were great topics on which the fate of an Empire hung; but little topics swarmed about him — like a cloud of midges — all the more irritating, possibly, for their minuteness. A convulsion which breaks down all ordinary barriers and overrides all ordinary rules of discipline, is certain to entail official blunders and collisions. Stupidity, decently latent in times of peaceful routine, leaps to light. There will be a misapprehension of duties, quarrels more acute than usual; the excited man who does too much; the nervous man who is afraid to do anything; the wrong-headed man who does the wrong thing. Sometimes, moreover. Nature seems to have provided that the men who have greatest capacity for blundering have the largest gifts of insistency in self-defence. Many such men now crossed Lord Canning's path. Many such questions — whose intrinsic insignificance is no measure of the toil and vexation they occasion to those who have to decide them, beset him.

His temperament was that which treats small things and large with the same precise and conscientious care, and so renders official life a burthen too heavy for the strongest shoulders. There is a habit of mind, well known to the student of official pathology, which shrinks in aversion from the rude expedients by which some men get through a vast amount of work. The