Chester was of opinion that, give the Ministry of Brains its chance, let it work for, say, fifty years, and even governments might at the end of that time have become intelligent enough to acquire such elementary pieces of knowledge. If only the Ministry _were_ given its chance, if it could weather the present unrest, let the country get used to it.... Custom: that was the great thing. People settled down under things at last. All sorts of dreadful things. Education, vaccination, taxation, sanitation, representation.... It was only a question of getting used to them. 2 Though the authorities were prepared for trouble, they did not foresee the events of Boxing-day, that strange day in the history of the Ministry. The Ministry were so busy that many of the staff took no holiday beyond Christmas Day itself. Bank Holidays are, as everyone who has tried knows, an excellent time for working in one's office, because there are no interruptions from the outside world, no telephoning, no visitors, no registry continually sending up incoming correspondence. The clamorous, persistent public fade away from sound and sight, and ministries are left undistracted, to deal with them for their good in the academic seclusion of the office. If there was in this world an eternal Bank Holiday (some, but with how little reason, say that this awaits us in heaven) ministries would thrive better; governing would then become like pure mathematics, an abstract science unmarred by the continual fret and jar of contact with human demands, which drag them so roughly, so continually, down to earth. On Boxing Day the Minister himself worked all day, and about a quarter of the higher staff were in their places. But by seven o'clock only the Minister remained, talking to Prideaux in his room. The procession, at first in the form of four clouds each no bigger than a man's hand, trailed from out the north, south, east and west, and coalesced in Trafalgar Square. From there it marched down Whitehall to Westminster, and along the Embankment. It seemed harmless enough; a holiday crowd of men and women with banners, like the people who used to want Votes, or Church Disestablishment, or Peace, or Cheap Food. The chief difference to be observed between this and those old processions was that a large number in this procession seemed to fall naturally and easily into step, and marched in time, like soldiers. This was a characteristic now of most processions; that soldier's trick, once learnt, is not forgotten. It might have set an onlooker speculating on the advantages and the dangers of a nation of soldiers, that necessary sequence to an army of citizens.