 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 over-top 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 a considerable stroke
