“You don’t know,” drawled he out, in mimicry of my tone: “are you so conceited about your paltry craft that you fancy the world cares for the manner of it, or that there is really any excellence in the cookery? Not a bit of it, man. We are bores both of us; and what’s worse—far worse—we are bygones. Can’t you see that when a man buys a canister of prepared beef-tea, he never asks any one to pour on the boiling water—he brews his broth for himself? This is what people do with the telegrams. They don’t want you or me to come in with the kettle: besides, all tastes are not alike; one man may like his Bombardment of Charleston weaker; another might prefer his Polish Massacre more highly flavoured. This is purely a personal matter. How can you suit the capricious likings of the million, and of the million—for that’s the worst of it—the million that don’t want you? What a practical rebuke, besides, to prosy talkers and the whole long-winded race, the sharp, short tap of the telegraph! Who would listen to a narrative of Federal finance when he has read ‘Gold at 204—Chase rigged the market’? Who asks for strategical reasons in presence of ‘Almighty whipping—lost eighty thousand—Fourth Michigan skedaddled ‘?
“How graphic will description become—how laconic all comment! You will no more listen to one of the old circumlocutionary conversers than you would travel by the waggon, or make a voyage in a collier.
“How, I would ask, could the business of life go on in an age active as ours if all coinage was in copper, and vast transactions in money should be all conducted in the base metal? Imagine the great Kings of Finance counting over the debts of whole nations in penny-pieces, and you have at once a picture of what, until a few years ago, was our intellectual condition. How nobly Demosthenic our table-talk will be!—how grandly abrupt and forensic!
“There is nothing, however, over which I rejoice more than in the utter extinction of the anecdote-mongers—the insufferable monsters who related Joe Millers as personal experiences, or gave you their own versions of something in the morning papers. Thank heaven they are done for!
“Last of all, the unhappy man who used to be sneered at for his silence in company, will now be on a par with his fellows. The most bashful will be able to blurt out, ‘Poles massacred,’ ‘Famine in Ireland,’ ‘Feast at the Mansion House,’ ‘Collision at Croydon,’ ‘Bank discount eleven.’
“Who will dare to propagate scandal, when all amplification is denied him? How much adulteration will the liquor bear which is measured by drop? Nor will the least of our benefits be the long, reflective pauses—those brilliant ‘flashes of silence’ which will supersede the noise, turmoil, and confusion of what we used to call conversation. No, no, Corneli mi. The game is up. ‘Our own Correspondent’ is a piece that has run its course, and there’s nothing to do but take a farewell benefit and quit the boards.”
“If I could fall back on my pension like you, I’d perhaps take the matter easier,” said I, gruffly.
“Well, I think you ought to be pensioned. If I was a Minister, I’d propose it. My notion is this: The proper subjects for pension are those who, if not provided for by the State, are likely to starve. They are, consequently, the class of persons who have devoted their lives to an unmarketable commodity—such as poonah-painting, Berlin-wool work, despatch-writing, and suchlike. I’d include ‘penny-a-lining’—don’t be offended because you get twopence, perhaps. I’d pension the whole of them—pretty much as I’d buy off the organ-man, and request him to move on.”
“As, however,” said I, “we are not fortunate enough to figure in the Estimates, may I ask what is the grand scheme you propose for our employment?”
“I’m coming to it. I’d have reached it ere this, if you had not required such a positive demonstration of your utter uselessness. You have delayed me by what Guizot used to call ‘an obstructive indisposition to believe.’”