Nor was Commerce backward in the cause. Every daily paper contained advertisements from our more prominent emporiums, such as "Get tickets for the M.T. Course at Selfswank's. Every taker of a ticket will receive a coupon for our great £1000 lottery. The drawing will be performed in a fortnight from to-day, by the late Prime Minister's wife." (To reassure the anxious it should be said that the late Prime Minister was not deceased but abolished; the country was governed by a United Council, five minds with but a single thought—if that.) "By taking our tickets you benefit yourself, benefit posterity, benefit your country, and stand a good chance of winning A CASH PRIZE."
And every patriotic advertiser of clothes, furs, jewellery, groceries, or other commodities, tacked on to his advertisement, "Take a ticket this week for the M.T. Course." And every patriotic letter-writer bought a Brains Stamp, and stamped his envelopes with the legend "Improve your Brains now."
Railway bookstalls were spread with literature on the subject. The Queen, the Gentlewoman, the Sketch, and other such periodicals suited, one imagines, to the simpler type of female mind, had articles on "Why does a woman look old sooner than a man?" (the answer to this was that, though men are usually stupid, women are often stupider still, and have taken even less pains to improve their minds), "Take care of your mind and your complexion will take care of itself," "Raise yourself to category A, and you enlarge your matrimonial field," "How to train Baby's intellect," and so forth. Side by side with these journals was the current number of the Cambridge Magazine, bearing on its cover the legend "A Short Way with Fools; Pogrom of the Old Men. Everyone over forty to be shot." "We have always said," the article under these head-lines very truly began, "and we do not hesitate to say it again, that the only way to secure an intelligent government or citizenship in any nation is to dispose, firmly but not kindly, of the old and the middle-aged, and to let the young have their day. There will then be no more such hideous blunders as those with which the diplomacy of our doddering elders has wrecked the world again and again during the past centuries."
The Evening News had cartoons every day of the Combing Out of the Stupid, whom it was pleased to call Algies and Dollies. The New Witness, on the other hand, striking a different note, said that it was the fine old Christian Gentile quality of stupidity which had made Old England what it was; the natives of Merrie England had always resented excessive acuteness, as exhibited in the Hebrew race at their expense. The Herald, however, rejoiced in large type in the Open Door to Labour; the Church Times reported Brains Sunday sermons by many divines (in most of them sounded the protest raised by the vicar of Little Chantreys against interference with domestic rights, the Church was obviously going to be troublesome in this matter) and the other journals, from the Hidden Hand down to Home Chat, supported the cause in their varying degrees and characteristic voices.
Among them lay the Ministry of Brains pamphlets, "Brains. How to get and keep them," "The cultivation of the Mind," etc. In rows among the books and papers hung the Great Thoughts from Great Minds series—portraits of eminent persons with their most famous remarks on this subject inscribed beneath them. "It is the duty of every man, woman, and child in this country so to order their lives in this peace crisis as to make the least possible demand upon the intelligence of others. It is necessary, therefore, to have some of your own." (An eminent minister.) "I never had any assistance beyond my wits. Through them I am what I am. What that is, it is for others rather than for myself to judge." (A great journalist.) "It was lack of brains (I will not say whose, but it occurred before the first Coalition Government, mind you) which plunged Europe into the Great War. Brains—again, mark you, I do not say whose—must make and keep the Great Peace." (One of our former Prime Ministers.) "I have always wished I had some." (A Royal Personage.) "I must by all means have a Brains Ministry started in Liberia." (The Liberian Ambassador.) Then, after remarks by Shakespeare, Emerson, Carlyle, Mr. R. J. Campbell, Henry James, President Wilson, Marcus Aurelius, Solomon, Ecclesiasticus ("What is heavier than lead, and what is the name thereof but a fool?") and Miss Ella Wheeler Wilcox, the portrait gallery concluded with Mr. Nicholas Chester, the Minister of Brains, looking like an embittered humorist, and remarking, "It's a damned silly world."
2
"Amen to that," Miss Kitty Grammont remarked, stopping for a moment after buying Truth at the bookstall and gazing solemnly into the Minister's disillusioned eyes. "And it would be a damned dull one if it wasn't." She sauntered out of Charing Cross tube station and boarded an Embankment tram. This was the Monday morning after Brains Week had run its course.
The fact had to be faced by the Ministry: Brains Week had proved disappointing. The public were not playing up as they should.
"We have said all along," said The Times (anticipating the Hidden Hand, which had not yet made up its mind), "that the Government should take a strong line in this matter. They must not trust to voluntary effort; we say, and we believe that, as always, we voice the soundest opinion in the country, that it is up to the Government to take the measures which it has decided, upon mature consideration, to be for the country's good. Though we have given every possible support to the great voluntary effort recently made, truth compels us to state that the results are proving disappointing. Compulsion must follow, and the sooner the Government make up their minds to accept this fact the better advised it will be. Surely if there is one thing above all others which the Great War (so prolific in lessons) has taught us, it is that compulsion is not tyranny, nor law oppression. Let the Government, too long vacillating, act, and act quickly, and they will find a responsive and grateful nation ready to obey."
Thus The Times, and thus, in a less dignified choice of language, many lesser organs. To which the Herald darkly rejoined, "If the Government tries this on, let it look to itself."