What Not: A Prophetic Comedy

by Rose Macaulay

But Chester did not really see Kitty very often in these days, because he had to see and confer with so many others—the Employers' Federation, and the Doctors, and the Timber Cutters, and the Worsted Industries, and the Farmers, and the Cotton Spinners, and the Newspaper Staffs, and the Church, and the Parents, and the Ministerial Council, and the Admiralty, and the Board of Education, and the War Office, and the Ministry of Reconstruction, and the Directorate of Propaganda. And the A.S.E.

It is much to be hoped that conferences are useful; if they are not, it cannot, surely, be from lack of practice.

Prideaux also, and the other heads of sections, on their humbler scale received deputations and conferred. Whether or not it was true to say of the Ministry (and to do Ministries justice, these statements are usually not true) that it did not try to enter sympathetically into the difficulties and grievances of the public, it is anyhow certain that the difficulties and grievances entered into the Ministry, from 9.30 a.m. until 7 p.m. After 7 no more difficulties were permitted to enter, but the higher staff remained often till late into the night to grapple with those already there.

Meanwhile the government laid pledges in as many of the hands held out to them as they could. Pledges, in spite of a certain boomerang quality possessed by them, are occasionally useful things. They have various aspects; when you give them, they mean a little anger averted, a little content generated, a little time gained. When you receive them, they mean, normally, that others will (you hope) be compelled to do something disagreeable before you are. When others receive them, they mean that there is unfair favouritism. When (or if) you fulfil them, they mean that you are badly hampered thereby in the competent handling of your job. When you break them, they mean trouble. And when you merely hear about them from the outside they mean a moral lesson—that promises should be kept if made, but certainly never, never made.

It is very certain, anyhow, that the Ministry of Brains made at this time too many. No Ministry could have kept so many. There was, for instance, the Pledge to the Married Women, that the unmarried women should be called up for their Mind Training Course before they were. There was the Pledge to the Mining Engineers, that unskilled labour should take the Course before skilled. There was the Pledge to the Parents of Five, that, however high the baby taxes were raised, the parents of six would always have to pay more on each baby. There was the Pledge to the Deficient, that they would not have to take the Mind Training Course at all. This last pledge was responsible for much agitation in Parliament. Distressing cases of imbeciles harried and bullied by the local Brains Boards were produced and enquired into. (Question, "Is it not the case that the Ministry of Brains has become absolutely soulless in this matter of harrying the Imbecile?" Answer, "I have received no information to that effect." Question, "Are enquiries being made into the case of the deficient girl at Perivale Halt who was rejected three times as unfit for the Course and finally examined again and passed, and developed acute imbecility and mumps half-way through the Course?" Answer, "Enquiries are being made." And so on, and so on, and so on.)

But, in the eyes of the general public, the chief testimony to the soullessness of the Ministry was its crushing and ignoring of the claims of the human heart. What could one say of a Ministry who deliberately and coldly stood between lover and lover, and dug gulfs between parent and unborn child, so that the child was either never born at all, or abandoned, derelict, when born, to the tender mercies of the state, or retained and paid for so heavily by fine or imprisonment that the parents might well be tempted to wonder whether after all the unfortunate infant was worth it?

"Him to be taxed!" an indignant parent would sometimes exclaim, admiring her year-old infant's obvious talents. "Why he's as bright as anything. Just look at him.... And little Albert next door, what his parents got a big bonus for, so as you could hear them for a week all down the street drinking it away, he can't walk yet, nor hardly look up when spoke to. Deficient, I calls him. It isn't fair dealing, no matter what anyone says."

"All the same," said Nicholas Chester to his colleagues, "there appears to me to be a considerably higher percentage of intelligent looking infants of under three years of age than there were formerly. Intelligent looking, that is to say, for infants. Infants, of course, are not intelligent creatures. Their mental level is low. But I observe a distinct improvement."

A distinct improvement was, in fact, discernible.

But, among the Great Unimproved, and among those who did not want improvement, discontent grew and spread; the slow, aggrieved discontent of the stupid, to whom personal freedom is as the breath of life, to whom the welfare of the race is as an idle, intangible dream, not worth the consideration of practical men and women.