- ness toward the idea of reform.[1] Henry Little wades
through and climbs over all sorts of official obstacles until "he had done, in sixty days, what a true inventor will do in twenty-four hours, whenever the various metallic ages shall be succeeded by the age of reason."[2] A prison inspector is finally confronted with actual facts of a horrifying nature:[3]
"How unreal and idle appeared now the twenty years gone
in tape and circumlocution! Away went his life of shadows—his
career of watery polysyllables meandering through the
great desert into the Dead Sea."
But more subtle and vital than all these errors,—the
error indeed at the root of them all,—is the failure of the
State to utilize the fine material placed at its disposal,
potentially if not actually, in the lives of noble and capable
youth. No one before Lytton could have laid at the
- ↑ He reflects, "I had not the hardihood to suggest to Dora's father that possibly we might even improve the world a little, if we got up early in the morning, and took off our coats to the work; but I confessed that I thought we might improve the Commons." David Copperfield, II, 44. The counter argument brought forward to dampen his enthusiasm was that more good was done to the sinecurists than harm to the public,—whose ignorance was its bliss. "Under the Prerogative Office, the country had been glorious. Insert the wedge into the Prerogative Office, and the country would cease to be glorious, He considered it the principle of a gentleman to take things as he found them."
- ↑ Put Yourself in his Place, 401.
- ↑ Never too Late to Mend, 411. In the same story Reade lays great stress on the importance of the inspector's duty: "Only for this task is required, not the gullibility that characterizes the many, but the sagacity that distinguishes the few." 360. It was this sagacity, combined with keen imagination, quick sympathy, and prompt and efficient action, that rendered the chaplain Eden a success under discouraging difficulties. The very foundation of his success was laid when he insisted on experiencing for himself the straight jacket and the solitary confinement, to the unbounded but amused mystification of the jail officials. And the shrewd coup d'état by which he converted one of them revealed the profound truth that "ignorance is the mother of cruelty."
