The government examiner then stepped forward:
“Very well,” said this gentleman, briskly smiling, and folding his arms. “That’s a horse. Now let me ask you girls and boys, would you paper a room with representations of horses?”
After a pause, one half the children cried in chorus, “Yes, sir!” Upon which the other half, seeing in the gentleman’s face that “Yes” was wrong, cried out in chorus, “No, sir!”—as the custom is in these examinations.
“Of course, no. Why wouldn’t you?”
A pause. One corpulent slow boy, with a wheezy manner of breathing, ventured the answer, because he wouldn’t paper a room at all, but would paint it.
“You must paper it,” said the gentleman rather warmly.
“You must paper it,” said Thomas Gradgrind, “whether you like it or not. Don’t tell us you wouldn’t paper it. What do you mean, boy?”
“I’ll explain to you, then,” said the gentleman, after another and a dismal pause, “why you wouldn’t paper a room with representations of horses. Do you ever see horses walking up and down the sides of rooms in reality—in fact? Do you?”
“Yes, sir!” from one half, “No, sir!” from the other.
“Of course, no,” said the gentleman, with an indignant look at the wrong half. “Why, then, you are not to see anywhere what you don’t see in fact; you are not to have anywhere what you don’t have in fact. What is called taste is only another name for fact.”