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Trumantia Resource Directory 06
Page 06
Melbourne can hardly be called a very great man,--he had not the purpose or tenacity for that, and he thought both too contemptuously and too indulgently of human nature,--but I know of no historical figure who is more wholly transfused and penetrated by the aroma of charm. Everything that he did and said had some distinction and unusualness: perceptive observation, ripe wisdom, and, with it all, the petulant attractiveness of the spoiled and engaging child. And yet even so, one is baffled, because it is not the profundity or the gravity of what he said that impresses; it is rather the delicate and fantastic turn he gave to a thought or a phrase that makes his simplest deductions from life, his most sensible bits of counsel, appear to have something fresh and interesting about them, though prudent men have said much the same before, and said it heavily and solemnly.
Frogs and other amphibians stand higher in the scale of life than fish; they have acquired legs in place of fins, and lungs instead of gills; they can hop about on shore with perfect freedom. Now, frogs still produce a great deal of spawn, as every one knows: but the eggs in each brood are numbered in their case by hundreds, or at most by a thousand or two, not by millions as with many fishes. The spawn hatches out as a rule in ponds, and we have all seen the little black tadpoles crowding the edges of the water in such innumerable masses that one would suppose the frogs to be developed from them must cover the length and breadth of England. Yet what becomes of them all? Hundreds are destroyed in the early tadpole stage--eaten up or starved, or crowded out for want of air and space and water: a few alone survive or develop four legs, and absorb their tails and hop on shore as tiny froglings. Even then the massacre of the innocents continues. Only a tithe of those which succeeded in quitting their native pond ever return to it full grown, to spawn in due time, and become the parents of further generations.
The campaign in Bucharest was at first attended by a certain measure of success, owing to the attitude of M. Bratiano, the Premier; of M. Carp, a former Prime Minister, and of M. Marghiloman, the present leader of the Conservative Opposition. But many influential Liberals have already associated themselves with the programme of the action advocated by M. Take Jonesco, the chief of the Conservative-Democratic Party, and of M. Filipescu, a former Conservative Minister, whose advocacy of a forward policy threatens to cause a split in the Conservative camp. The great bulk of the political world desires to profit by the European crisis to secure Transylvania, the only difference of opinion being with regard to the advisability of immediate action. The consultative committee of the Conservative Party has passed a resolution demanding the abandonment of neutrality.
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