Page:Essays and phantasies by James Thomson.djvu/70

 plan, in brief, is the flourishing modern plan of division of labour carried to its utmost perfection in the moral world.

To make the distinction yet more clear, if possible, and more clear the inestimable superiority of my principle over any other, let me call attention to the very peculiar and almost incredible fashion in which great practical problems are worked out by the reforms and reformers still in vogue. As a very fair type of the reforms I will take the recent Electoral Reform Bill, whose logical outcome is universal suffrage, for greater stake in the country can no one have than dear life. The problem is: Given a vast number of timbers, nearly all more or less rotten, it is required to build a seaworthy ship. To which our Reform Bill answers in triumph: Let us use the whole lot indiscriminately! Or in other terms: Given a foul and deformed body politic, full of all manner of diseases, required to make it pure, handsome and healthy. To which our Reform Bill answers cheerfully: Let us clothe it in fine new constitutional garments, with splints, bandages, padding, a good wig, a glass eye, a few false teeth, and so forth, and a complete cure will doubtless be effected! Now I beg the candid reader to lay his hand upon his heart, and declare upon his honour whether he really can consider these enterprises very hopeful. The ship may turn out a very Great Eastern for hugeness, but she will be at least as unseaworthy as her timbers are rotten, however deftly put together; and the more timbers the less cohesion. The diseased monster may be dressed out to look tolerably well as a dummy, but there will be even less life and health in him than before when he is strangled with ligaments and smothered with padding. The idea of working such stupendous marvels dwelleth not in me. My proposal modestly says: Let us get some sound timbers, and it will not be very hard to build with them a sound ship; let us get the pure, hand-