He goes on plodding round in his Government mill, grumbling and working still to the end of his active life, when superannuation or a starvation allowance comes, to ease his cares in one way and increase them in another! And, to do him scant justice, he really does work manfully, at a lesser rate of pay, and with fewer incentives to exertion through hopes of advancement, than any other representative person under the sun—I do not care to what class or clique he may belong!

He is the miserable hireling of an ungrateful country, from his cradle to his grave, in fact.

It is all very well for people unacquainted with the machinery of these offices to talk about the idleness of Government clerks generally; and joke at the threadbare subject of “her Majesty’s hard bargains.”

No doubt, some places are sinecures, and that a larger number of clerks are employed in many offices than there is work for them to do; but, we must not go altogether to the foot of the ladder to remedy this state of things!

Why do not such ardent reformers as Mr Childers, and men of his stamp, cut down their own salaries first, before they set about pruning those of poor ill-paid subordinates?

I can tell them, for their private satisfaction, that, if they did so, the onlooking public would have a much stronger belief in the honesty of their reformatory zeal than it at present possesses!

It is not the “little men” that swell the civil list, as the vicar told me before I saw it for myself, but, the “big wigs.”

These are the ones who fatten on the estimates, the root of the evil lying concealed under the snugly-cushioned fauteuils of cabinet ministers and their pampered placeholders and hunters—not, beneath the straight-backed horsehair chairs of miserable clerks. It is unmanly thus for giants to gird at pigmies!

I would advise all the clerks in the various Government offices to form a “union,” in order to obtain redress for their wrongs; and to “strike,” if needs be—you know, that strikes are all the rage now!

You demur to my argument? It would be a conspiracy, you say?

Dear me! You are quite wrong, I assure you. A conspiracy is only a conspiracy so long as it is unsuccessful. When it is triumphant, it is known no longer by that term!

Then, it is styled a “Revolution,” or a 

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