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. CHAPTER XI THE STORMING OF THE HOTEL 1 In December Dora did a foolish thing. It is needless to say that she did other foolish things in other months; it is to be feared that she had been born before the Brains Acts; her mental category must be well below C3. But this particular folly is selected for mention because it had a disastrous effect on the already precarious destiny of the Ministry of Brains. Putting out a firm and practised hand, she laid it heavily and simultaneously upon four journals who were taking a rebellious attitude towards the Brains Act--the _Nation_, _Stop It_, the _Herald_, and the _Patriot_. Thus she angered at one blow considerable sections of the Thoughtful, the Advanced, the Workers (commonly but erroneously known as the proletariat) and the Vulgar. "Confound the fools," as Chester bitterly remarked; but the deed was then done. "How long," Vernon Prideaux asked, "will it take governments to learn that revolutionary propaganda disseminated all over the country don't do as much harm as this sort of action?"