"The hardest ever," asserted the Hatter. "But the White Knight there gave me a clue to the solution--he's our Copperation Council--and I put it up to him for an opinion, and after thinking it over for two months he reported. The only way to prevent collisions, said he, is to cut the ends off the cars. That was it, wasn't it, Judge?" he added, turning to the White Knight. "Yes," said the Knight, "only I put it in poetry. My precise words were "The only way that I can find To stop this car colliding stunt Is cutting off the end behind And likewise that in front." "Splendid!" cried Alice, clapping her hands in glee. "That's fine." "Thank you," said the White Knight. "You see, Miss Alice, I made a personal study of collisions. The Mayor here ordered a fresh one every day for me to investigate, and I noticed that whenever two cars bunked into each other it was always at the ends and never in the middle. The conclusion was inevitable. The ends being the venerable spot, abolish them. "A very careful and conscientious public servant," whispered the March Hare aside to Alice. "When we have Municipal Ownership of the Federal Government we're going to put him on the Supreme Court Bench. He means vulnerable when he says venerable, but you mustn't mind that. When we have Municipal Ownership of the English Language we'll make the words mean what we want 'em to." [Illustration: "THE CHIEF ENGINEER"] "Then of course the question arose as to how we could do this," said the Hatter. "I got the Chief Engineer of our Department of Public Works to make some experiments, and would you believe it, when we cut the ends on the cars, there were still other ends left? No matter how far we clipped 'em, it was the same. It's a curious scientific fact that you can't cut off the end of anything and leave it endless. We tried it with a lot of things--cars, lengths of hose, coils of wire, rope--everything we could think of--always with the same result. Ends were endless, but nothing else was. As a matter of fact they multiplied on us. One car that had two ends when we began was cut in the middle, and then was found to have four ends instead of two." "That's so, isn't it!" cried Alice. [Illustration: "IT CAME TO ME LIKE A FLASH"]