Nor are the English supersensitive. Their complacency, which upholds them in more important things, inclines them to believe that if their fathers muddled along with bad teeth so can they. It does not take away, they think, from the charms of their best girl if she smiles at them with a gap in her teeth, or if in colour they shade into the darkest of greys. As for a man, he can always lie in ambush behind his moustache, or at worst he can draw down his upper lip and leave the unseen a mystery.
Still, there is hope for the future, and England shows signs of awakening! A truly progressive member of a certain board of guardians recently had the temerity to demand tooth-brushes for the pauper children. The worthy mayor who presided at the meeting was nearly paralysed at the audacity of the request. He not only sternly refused, but he denounced it as pampered luxury and extravagance, and he was so roused by the outrageous proposal that he taunted his brother guardians, and said they themselves had probably not indulged in the sinful luxury of a tooth-brush for forty-five years. Possibly, but at any rate it proves that England is really awakening, and that even an infant pauper may some day look forward to the rapture of possessing a tooth-brush!
Yet even bad teeth sometimes find their Nemesis! A very important public position was recently vacant for which there were some two hundred applicants. These slowly resolved themselves down to two—one an able man, and the other an exceptionally able man. They had to have a deciding interview with the arbiter of their fate, so great a man that he is called a personage, and he gave the position to the able man rather than the exceptionally able man. His explanation for his curious choice was quite simple, "He really had such horrid teeth that I could not bear to have him always about."
Has any historian left his testimony as to the teeth of the ancient Romans, when that great nation fell into decadence? Statues all testify that the deterioration did not affect their noses, but I feel sure that if their rigid marble lips could open we should find the first cause of their historic downfall.
As the extinction of a nation is foreordained in its very inception, so the fall of America is possibly already predestined. Well, it may be owing to trusts, but it will not be owing to teeth. All over the American land is heard the busy wheel of the dentist. Hundreds of thousands of dentists are forever filling and scraping and pulling American teeth, and the American people emerge from their dentist chairs and smile broadly, a source of joy to the beholder and not pain. They pay their dentists, if not with rapture, at least with resignation, because they know that their children will inherit good teeth, and it will be a pleasure to kiss them from their cradle on, at all stages. Nor when their young men go out to war will they be declared by the medical examiners unfit because of their bad teeth. Instead, they will clench their good teeth and fight right pluckily, as only those can who attend strictly to business, undisturbed by pain.
One hears England called the freeest republic in the world, and that here, as nowhere else, every man has his chance. Well, England may be, to all intents and purposes, a republic, but to rise from the ranks is only for the man of commanding talent, and for him there is always room at the top—everywhere—all over the world. But for the ordinary man who has ordinary abilities, and yet is not without ambition, America is the land.
He may start as a day labourer and have luck and his son may one day be President of the United States; or he may grace any one of those innumerable offices which are in the gift of a grateful party! That keeps self-respect lively in a man, and is what makes him know not only his own trade, but just a little more. How one suffers because the British workman only does what he is obliged to—and not that. How often one rebels because the subordinate English official knows just what he is obliged to know, and not a hair's breadth more! That same man set down in America will learn to the fullest extent of his intelligence.
Tooth-brushes make for health, health makes for intelligence, and it is the intelligent man the world wants and pays for; which proves the incalculable importance of tooth-brushes in the progress of the world. Possibly the atmosphere of a republic is more conducive to good teeth; but, really, England should make a supreme effort to save her waning power from falling into the grasp of the great republic, which it is inevitably bound to do if England does not go to the dentist.
In the political economy of nations the tooth-brush is of much more importance than the sword, and toothpowder is infinitely more important than gunpowder. As England never considers the millions she annually spends in gunpowder, why does she not pause in her martial career and spend a few thousand pounds in toothpowder?