Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 2.djvu/481

Rh inefficient that citizens dread employing it, lest, instead of getting succor in their distress, they should bring on themselves new sufferings. And then—startling comment on the system, if we could but see it—there spring up private voluntary combinations for doing the business which the State should do, but fails to do. Here in London there is now proposed a Tribunal of Commerce, for administering justice among traders, on the pattern of that which in Paris settles many thousands of cases a year.

Even after finding the State perform so ill this vital function, one might have expected that it would perform well such a simple function as the keeping of documents. Yet, in the custody of the national records, there has been a carelessness such as "no merchant of ordinary prudence" would show in respect to his account-books. One portion of these records was for a long time kept in the White Tower, close to some tons of gunpowder, and another portion was kept close to a steam-engine in daily use. Some records were deposited in a temporary shed at the end of "Westminster Hall, and thence, in 1830, they were removed to other sheds in the King's Mews, Charing Cross, where, in 1836, their state is thus described by the Report of a Select Committee:

Thus, if we array in order the facts daily brought to light, but which, unhappily, drop out of men's memories as fast as others are added, we find a like history throughout. Now the complaint is of the crumbling walls of the Houses of Parliament, which, built of stone chosen by a commission, nevertheless begin to decay in parts first built before other parts are completed. Now the disclosure is about a new fort at Seaford, based on the shingle so close to the sea that a storm washes a great part of it away. And now there comes the account of a million and a half spent in building the Alderney harbor, which, being found worse than useless, threatens to entail further cost for its destruction. Scarcely a journal can be taken up that has not some blunder referred to in a debate, or brought to light by a Report, or pointed out in a letter, or commented on in a leader. Do I need an illustration? I take up the Times of this morning (November 13th), and read that the new bankruptcy law, substituted for the bankruptcy