In due course, the Man Who Knew All About It was elected to the School Board. He secured this by publishing handbills declaring his intention to squander the rate-payers' money like water, and provide free food, clothing, lodging, sweets, tobacco, drinks, theatres, and pianos to all the Board school children and their parents, relatives, and friends. The public judged by the proceedings of past candidates, all of whom had deliberately broken their promises on coming into office; and they concluded that this one would do so as well, and refuse to spend a penny. The Board were compelled to choose him as Chairman; and he at once commenced his work of reform.
Genius took the place of all the former studies at the Board schools: no pupil was permitted to leave until he had passed the fifth standard, which turned him out a full-fledged genius; and he had to attend until he could pass it, even if he became old and decrepit. This was a wise step; for, had this rule been relaxed, those unable to pass the standard would have joined the ranks of the originators, and thus flooded the market.
"THE GENIUS CLASS AT THE BOARD SCHOOL."
Young Bansted Downs now set himself to steadily forgetting all the genius he had learned, feeling that it would be nothing but an incumbrance in his new career; and he succeeded so well that in the course of a few years he had become as dull as ditch-water.
Meanwhile a new public were growing up, a public of such brilliant perceptions—so great a faculty of appreciation—that they were quite bewildered with the excellences they perceived in everything around them.
To take the sense of humour alone: they possessed it to so marvellous an extent that they could perceive a joke in the passing cloud, facetiousness in the growth of flowers, a choice witticism in the rates and taxes, an incentive to mirth in strikes. Not that they were incessantly giggling—that would have argued a something wanting; no, they drank in and appreciated and enjoyed the universal humour, and their eyes were bright.
So, when young Bansted Downs was middle-aged Bansted Downs he started all over again in quite a different way: he just wrote twaddle, and painted twaddle, and composed twaddle; and went on to a platform and twaddled about twaddle: and the public genius detected the brilliancy lurking in it all, and they were in ecstacies.
A terrible thing happened to the Boom Department of the Press. One day the public arose as one man and remarked that they were capable of finding out merit for themselves and no longer required the Department; and they took large stones, and bad eggs, and dead cats, and fagots of wood, and proceeded to the Boom Department; and it was in vain that the head of the Department came out on the balcony and pleaded that the Booming System, as practised by the Press, had nothing to do with the finding-out of merit; for the public smashed the windows and burned the offices, and abolished the Boom Department.
