Mother. "Your cousin Jim has offered to take you to dinner and a theatre to-night. Aren't you pleased?"
Daughter. "Oh, it's all right, but he looks so rottenly respectable."
GEORGE, JANE AND LENIN.
Now that Soviet rule in England is apparently so imminent it seems to me that we ought to consider a little more closely the application of its practical machinery. The morning papers reach this village at three o'clock in the afternoon, so that nobody is in to read them, and when one comes back in the evening one is generally too lazy, but a couple of rather startling sentences about the coming Communist régime have recently caught my eye.
"The people of England, like the people of Russia," runs the first, "will soon be working under the lash." And the second, so far as I remember, says, "Our rations will no doubt be reduced to half a herring and some boiled bird-seed, which is all the unhappy Russians are getting to eat."
Before these changes fall suddenly upon us I think we should ponder a little on the way in which they will affect our urban and agricultural life.
Take the House of Commons. A very large and symbolic knout might occupy the position of the present mace, and from time to time the Speaker could take it up and crack it. As this needs a certain amount of practice it will be necessary to select a fairly horsey man as Speaker, and the Whips, who will follow the same procedure, should also be skilled practitioners. I see no difficulty in applying the same method to commercial and factory life in general, still less to the packing of the Underground Railway and the loading of motor-omnibuses and trams.
It is rather when we come to scattered rural communities that the system seems likely to break down. Take the case of George Harrison in this village. When I first met George Harrison, and he said that he thought the weather was lifting, he was carrying a basket of red plums which he offered to sell me for an old song. On subsequent occasions I met him—