Chapter 10

CHAPTER 10

Containing the whole Science of Government

The Circumlocution Office was (as everybody knows without being
told) the most important Department under Government. No public
business of any kind could possibly be done at any time without the
acquiescence of the Circumlocution Office. Its finger was in the
largest public pie, and in the smallest public tart. It was
equally impossible to do the plainest right and to undo the
plainest wrong without the express authority of the Circumlocution
Office. If another Gunpowder Plot had been discovered half an hour
before the lighting of the match, nobody would have been justified
in saving the parliament until there had been half a score of
boards, half a bushel of minutes, several sacks of official
memoranda, and a family-vault full of ungrammatical correspondence,
on the part of the Circumlocution Office.

This glorious establishment had been early in the field, when the
one sublime principle involving the difficult art of governing a
country, was first distinctly revealed to statesmen. It had been
foremost to study that bright revelation and to carry its shining
influence through the whole of the official proceedings. Whatever
was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand
with all the public departments in the art of perceiving--HOW NOT
TO DO IT.

Through this delicate perception, through the tact with which it
invariably seized it, and through the genius with which it always
acted on it, the Circumlocution Office had risen to overtop all the
public departments; and the public condition had risen to be--what
it was.

It is true that How not to do it was the great study and object of
all public departments and professional politicians all round the
Circumlocution Office. It is true that every new premier and every
new government, coming in because they had upheld a certain thing
as necessary to be done, were no sooner come in than they applied
their utmost faculties to discovering How not to do it. It is true
that from the moment when a general election was over, every
returned man who had been raving on hustings because it hadn't been
done, and who had been asking the friends of the honourable
gentleman in the opposite interest on pain of impeachment to tell
him why it hadn't been done, and who had been asserting that it
must be done, and who had been pledging himself that it should be
done, began to devise, How it was not to be done. It is true that
the debates of both Houses of Parliament the whole session through,
uniformly tended to the protracted deliberation, How not to do it.
It is true that the royal speech at the opening of such session
virtually said, My lords and gentlemen, you have