In this work of restoration, we were told, our women voters and legislators would play a leading part. What part are they in truth playing? Their main object apparently is still further to embitter the Drink question, although if they would only put a little more bitter into our national beverage they might help to lubricate matters. Is it not a significant fact that the slackness evidenced in every phase of industry manifests itself at a time when it becomes more and more difficult to get a decent drink? In this respect our progress is not so much to the dogs as to the cats, who sneak along on the padded paws of Prohibition.
The crazy conditions to be observed in the industrial world are well matched by the state of anarchy that prevails in the sphere of the arts. Take music, for example. I do not lay claim to more than a nodding acquaintance with Euterpe, and at a classical concert, I am afraid, the nodding character of the relation becomes especially marked. To me the sweetest music in the world is the roar of a fifteen-inch gun on a day when the visibility is good and plentiful. But I do know enough to be able to say that the wild asses who with their jazz-bands "stamp o'er our heads and will not let us sleep" (slightly to amend my old friend FitzGerald) are nothing less than musical Trotskys.
Music was once regarded as the staple nourishment of the tender passion, and in my younger days the haunting strains of "The Blue Danube" assisted many a budding love-affair to blossom. But these non-stop stridencies of the modern ballroom, even if they left a man with breath enough to propose, would effectually prevent the girl from catching the drift of the avowal. You can't roar, "Will you be mine?" into a maiden's ear as if you were conversing from the quarterdeck, and if you did she'd only think you were ecstatically emulating the coloured gentleman in the orchestra with the implements of torture and the misguided voice.
I will pass over in the silence of despair such other symptoms of national decadence as zigzag painting, whirlpool poetry, cinema star-gazing and the impossibility of procuring a self-respecting Stilton (which assuredly is not "living at this hour"). Nor can I trust myself to speak of the spirit of Bolshevism that seems to animate our so-called Labour Party, though I comfort myself with the conviction that this doctrine will not wash, any more than will its authors.
I will conclude these few reflections by drawing attention to the manners of the modern girl, who is so busily engaged in kicking over the traces that formerly kept her in her proper place. Nowadays flappers who should still be in the schoolroom consider themselves called upon to teach their grandmothers how to conduct their lives; and, to complete the chaos, the grandmothers are eagerly lapping it up, and in the matter of dress and deportment are even bettering the instruction. Si vieillesse savait!
Oh for a prophet's tongue to lash our visionless leaders into a realisation of the rocks on to which we are drifting! We need the scourge of a Savonarola, but all we get is the boom of a Bottomley.
"Gone are our country's glories.
O tempora, O mores!"