238 FRESH FIELDS 



half frozen on the Patagonian cliffs, or admonished 

 into shivers by your iceberg councilors and sent 

 sheer down to Davy Jones, and will never get 

 around Cape Horn at all! Unanimity on board 

 ship; — yes, indeed, the ship's crew may be very 

 unanimous, which, doubtless, for the time being, 

 will be very comfortable to the ship's crew and to 

 their Phantasm Captain, if they have one; but if 

 the tack they unanimously steer upon is guiding 

 them into the belly of the Abyss, it will not profit 

 them much! Ships, accordingly, do not use the 

 ballot-box at all; and they reject the Phantasm 

 species of Captain. One wishes much some other 

 Entities — since all entities lie under the same rig- 

 orous set of laws — could be brought to show as 

 much wisdom and sense at least of self-preservation, 

 the first command of nature. Phantasm Captains 

 with unanimous votings, — this is considered to be 

 all the law and all the prophets at present." 



This has the real crushing Carlylean wit and pic- 

 turesqueness of statement, but is it the case of 

 democracy, of universal suffrage fairly put? The 

 eternal verities appear again, as they appear every- 

 where in our author in connection with this sub- 

 ject. They recur in his pages like "minute-guns," 

 as if deciding, by the count of heads, whether 

 Jones or Smith should go to Parliament or to Con- 

 gress was equivalent to sitting in judgment upon 

 the law of gravitation. What the ship in doubling 

 Cape Horn would very likely do, if it found itself 

 ofiicerless, would be to choose, by some method 



