[31] About the 20th of May, 1863.
It appears that the Admiralty wisely adopted the principle enunciated by Mr. Gladstone.
It may, however, not unreasonably have caused dissatisfaction to those who had no interest to back them on finding that such large sums are pocketed by those who are blessed with influential friends in high quarters.
If the Commissioners had really wished to have obtained a suitable building at a fair price their course was simple and obvious. They need only have stated the nature and amount of accommodation required, and then have selected half a dozen of the most eminent firms amongst our great contractors, who would each have given them an estimate of the plans they respectively suggested.
The Commissioners might have made it one of the conditions that they should not be absolutely bound to give the contract to the author of the plan accepted. But in case of not employing him a sum previously stipulated should have been assigned for the use of the design.
By such means they would have had a choice of various plans, and if those plans had, previously to the decision of the Commissioners, been publicly exhibited for a few weeks, they might have been enlightened by public criticism. Such a course would have prevented the gigantic job they afterwards perpetrated. It could therefore find no support from the Commissioners.
The present Commissioners, however, are fit successors to those who in 1851 ignored the existence of the author of the “Economy of Manufactures” and his inventions. They seem to have been deluded into the belief that they possessed {164} the strength, as well as the desire, quietly to strangle the Difference Engine.
It would be idle to break such butterflies upon its matchless wheels, or to give permanence to such names by reflecting them from its diamond-graven plates.[32] Though the steam-hammer can crack the coating without injuring the kernel of the filbert it drops upon—the admirable precision of its gigantic power could never be demonstrated by exhausting its energy upon an empty nut-shell.
[32] For the purpose of testing the steadiness and truth of the tools employed in forming the gun-metal plates, I had some dozen of them turned with a diamond point. The perfect equality of its cut caused the reflected light to be resolved into those beautiful images pointed out by Frauenhofer, and also so much admired in the celebrated gold buttons produced by the late Mr. Barton, the Comptroller of the Mint.
Peace, then, to their memory, aptly enshrined in unknown characters within the penetralia of the temple of oblivion.