Bureaucracy -- Fiction; England -- Fiction; Satire; Science fiction
Railway bookstalls were spread with literature on the subject. The
_Queen_, the _Gentlewoman_, the _Sketch_, and other such periodicals
suited, one imagines, to the simpler type of female mind, had articles
on "Why does a woman look old sooner than a man?" (the answer to this
was that, though men are usually stupid, women are often stupider still,
and have taken even less pains to improve their minds), "Take care of
your mind and your complexion will take care of itself," "Raise yourself
to category A, and you enlarge your matrimonial field," "How to train
Baby's intellect," and so forth. Side by side with these journals was
the current number of the _Cambridge Magazine_, bearing on its cover the
legend "A Short Way with Fools; Pogrom of the Old Men. Everyone over
forty to be shot." "We have always said," the article under these
head-lines very truly began, "and we do not hesitate to say it again,
that the only way to secure an intelligent government or citizenship in
any nation is to dispose, firmly but not kindly, of the old and the
middle-aged, and to let the young have their day. There will then be no
more such hideous blunders as those with which the diplomacy of our
doddering elders has wrecked the world again and again during the past
centuries."
The _Evening News_ had cartoons every day of the Combing Out of the
Stupid, whom it was pleased to call Algies and Dollies. The _New
Witness_, on the other hand, striking a different note, said that it was
the fine old Christian Gentile quality of stupidity which had made Old
England what it was; the natives of Merrie England had always resented
excessive acuteness, as exhibited in the Hebrew race at their expense.
The _Herald_, however, rejoiced in large type in the Open Door to
Labour; the _Church Times_ reported Brains Sunday sermons by many
divines (in most of them sounded the protest raised by the vicar of
Little Chantreys against interference with domestic rights, the Church
was obviously going to be troublesome in this matter) and the other
journals, from the _Hidden Hand_ down to _Home Chat_, supported the
cause in their varying degrees and characteristic voices.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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