"Well, then, somebody posts back his Election Address with 'This is
pitiful balderdash and most ungrammatical' written plainly at the bottom
of it. What would be your feelings if you got a thing like that?"
"I shouldn't like it," I said.
"Of course you wouldn't. You'd want to kick the writer, or at the very
least you'd want to write back to him and tell him what you thought of
him. But you can't do it, because of course he hasn't signed his name or
given any hint of his address. It's the same way with anonymous letters
of abuse. You can't answer them. So you 're done. You feel as if you'd
tried to walk up a step where there wasn't a step, and your temper
suffers. That's where the Association comes in. All you've got to do is
to write to us, enclosing fee. For half-a-guinea we send down to any
address in England one of our experts from the Assault-and-Battery
Department, and you're entitled to kick him once--we guarantee him
boot-proof, so you can kick as hard as you like. Or, if you prefer
writing to kicking, you can write to me as if I'd written the anonymous
letter or article or whatever it may be, and you can abuse me to your
heart's content for half-a-crown. For three shillings you can call me a
pro-German. Anyhow, the result is that your temper recovers and you feel
perfectly satisfied. It's well worth the money, isn't it? I'm thinking
of starting a Subscriptions' Department, to which you could write a
refusal of any application for money, even if you have to subscribe in
the end. It will give a man a pleasant glow to write to a clergyman, for
instance (I shall keep a dozen or so on the premises), and say he'll be
immortally jiggered if he'll subscribe to the Church Building Fund. But
the anonymous letter business will always be my chief source of profit.
Here's our prospectus, with all details. If you think any more of it
perhaps you'll let me know. I get out here. Good-bye."
* * * * *
[Illustration: _Kaiser (reading English news of wood-pulp
restrictions)._ "HIMMEL! THEY'LL THINK MORE THAN EVER OF THEIR PRECIOUS
'SCRAPS OF PAPER'!"]
* * * * *
Kipling Revised.
"Men of all castes had rallied to the Flag, and truly we had
witnessed the truth of what the poet told us. 'The East is West
and the West is East.'" _Surrey Mirror._
* * * * *
"Alfred Billinger and Albert Robson, miners ... were fined 20s.
each for trespassing in search of fame." _Provincial Paper._
Well, now they've got it.
* * * * *
"In the Metropolitan Police District the employment of special
constables has resulted in a saving of five-eighths of a
penny."--_Yorkshire Evening Post._
Very disappointing! Not even a whole copper.
* * * * *