A word as to the title of this work, which may seem vague, or even foolish. Its source I have given. Food Orders we all know; What Not was not defined by the user of the phrase, except by the remark that it upset the country. The businesses described in this tale fulfil that definition; and, if they be not What Not, I do not know what is. _April, 1918._ CONTENTS I. THE MINISTRY II. LITTLE CHANTREYS III. BRAINS SUNDAY IV. OUR WEEK V. THE EXPLANATION CAMPAIGN VI. THE SIMPLE HUMAN EMOTIONS VII. THE BREAKING POINT VIII. ON FIXED HEARTS AND CHANGING SCENES IX. _THE COMMON HERD_ X. A MINISTRY AT BAY XI. THE STORMING OF THE HOTEL XII. DEBRIS WHAT NOT CHAPTER I THE MINISTRY 1 After the Great War (but I do not say how long after), when the tumult and the shouting had died, and those who were left of the captains and the kings had gone either home or to those obscure abodes selected for them by their more successful fellows (to allay anxiety, I hasten to mention that three one-time Emperors were among those thus relegated to distance and obscurity), and humanity, released from its long torment, peered nervously into a future darkly divined (nervously, and yet curiously, like a man long sick who has just begun to get about again and cannot yet make anything coherent of the strange, disquieting, terrifying, yet enchanting jumble which breaks upon his restored consciousness)--while these things happened, the trains still ran through the Bakerloo tube, carrying people to their day's work. Compartments in tube trains are full of variety and life--more so than in trains above ground, being more congested, and having straps, also no class snobbery. Swaying on adjacent straps were a fluffy typist, reading "The Love He Could Not Buy," in the _Daily Mirror_, a spruce young civil servant on his way to the Foreign Office, reading _The Times_, a clergyman reading the _Challenge_, who looked as if he was interested in the Life and Liberty movement, another clergyman reading the _Guardian_, who looked as if he wasn't, an elderly gentleman reading the _Morning Post_, who looked patriotic but soured, as if he had volunteered for National Service during the Great War and had found it disappointing, a young man reading the _Post-War_, the alert new daily, and a citizen with a law-abiding face very properly perusing the _Hidden Hand_. The _Hidden Hand_ was the Government daily paper. Such a paper had for long been needed; it is difficult to understand why it was not started long ago. All other papers are so unreliable, so tiresome; a government must have one paper on which it can depend for unfailing support. So here was the _Hidden Hand_, and its readers had no excuse for ignorance of what the government desired them to think about its own actions.