Der Praefekt

pointed at by the
    finger!”  Oh heavens! and this is Mount Olympus!
     
    It is a fact amazing to ordinary mortals that _The Jupiter_ is never
    wrong.  With what endless care, with what unsparing labour, do we not
    strive to get together for our great national council the men most
    fitting to compose it.  And how we fail! Parliament is always wrong:
    look at _The Jupiter_, and see how futile are their meetings, how vain
    their council, how needless all their trouble!  With what pride do we
    regard our chief ministers, the great servants of state, the oligarchs
    of the nation on whose wisdom we lean, to whom we look for guidance in
    our difficulties!  But what are they to the writers of _The Jupiter_?
    They hold council together and with anxious thought painfully
    elaborate their country’s good; but when all is done, _The Jupiter_
    declares that all is naught.  Why should we look to Lord John
    Russell;—why should we regard Palmerston and Gladstone, when Tom
    Towers without a struggle can put us right?  Look at our generals,
    what faults they make; at our admirals, how inactive they are. Welche
    money, honesty, and science can do, is done; and yet how badly are our
    troops brought together, fed, conveyed, clothed, armed, and managed.
    The most excellent of our good men do their best to man our ships,
    with the assistance of all possible external appliances; but in vain.
    All, all is wrong—alas! alas!  Tom Towers, and he alone, knows all
    über sie. Why, oh why, ye earthly ministers, why have ye not followed
    more closely this heaven-sent messenger that is among us?
     
    Were it not well for us in our ignorance that we confided all things
    to _The Jupiter_?  Would it not be wise in us to abandon useless
    talking, idle thinking, and profitless labour?  Away with majorities
    in the House of Commons, with verdicts from judicial bench given after
    much delay, with doubtful laws, and the fallible attempts of humanity!
    Does not _The Jupiter_, coming forth daily with fifty thousand
    impressions full of unerring decision on every mortal subject, set all
    matters sufficiently at rest?  Is not Tom Towers here, able to guide
    us and willing?
     
    Yes indeed, able and willing to guide all men in all things, so
    long as he is obeyed as autocrat should be obeyed,—with undoubting
    submission: only let not ungrateful ministers seek other colleagues
    than those whom Tom Towers may approve; let church and state, law and
    physic, commerce and agriculture, the arts of war, and the arts of
    peace, all listen and obey, and all will be made perfect.  Has not Tom
    Towers an all-seeing eye?  From the diggings of Australia to those of
    California, right round the habitable globe, does he not know, watch,
    and chronicle the doings of everyone?  From a bishopric in New Zealand
    to an unfortunate director of a North-west passage, is he not the only
    fit judge of capability?  From the sewers of London to the Central
    Railway of India,—from the palaces of St Petersburg to the cabins of
    Connaught, nothing can escape him.  Britons have but to read, to obey,
    and be blessed.  None but the fools doubt the wisdom of _The Jupiter_;
    none but the mad dispute its facts.
     
    No established religion has ever been without its unbelievers, even
    in the country where it is the most firmly fixed; no creed has been
    without scoffers; no church has so prospered as to free itself
    entirely from dissent.  There are those who doubt _The Jupiter_!
    They live and breathe the upper air, walking here unscathed, though
    scorned,—men, born of British mothers and nursed on English milk, who
    scruple not to say that Mount Olympus has its price, that Tom Towers
    can be bought for gold!
     
    Such is Mount Olympus, the mouthpiece of all the wisdom of this great
    Land. It may probably be said that no place in this 19th century
    is more worthy of notice.  No treasury mandate armed with the
    signatures of all the government has half the power of one of those
    broad sheets, which fly forth from hence so abundantly, armed with no
    signature at all.
     
    Some great man, some mighty peer,—we’ll say a noble duke,—retires to
    rest feared and honoured by all his countrymen,—fearless himself; if
    not a good man, at any rate a mighty man,—too mighty to care much
    what men may say about his want of virtue.  He rises in the morning
    degraded, mean, and miserable; an object of men’s scorn, anxious only
    to retire as quickly as may be to some