Before these changes fall suddenly upon us I think we should ponder a little on the way in which they will affect our urban and agricultural life.

Take the House of Commons.  A very large and symbolic knout might occupy the position of the present mace, and from time to time the SPEAKER could take it up and crack it.  As this needs a certain amount of practice it will be necessary to select a fairly horsey man as Speaker, and the Whips, who will follow the same procedure, should also be skilled practitioners.  I see no difficulty in applying the same method to commercial and factory life in general, still less to the packing of the Underground Railway and the loading of motor-omnibuses and trams.

It is rather when we come to scattered rural communities that the system seems likely to break down.  Take the case of George Harrison in this village.  When I first met George Harrison, and he said that he thought the weather was lifting, he was carrying a basket of red plums which he offered to sell me for an old song.  On subsequent occasions I met him—­

1.  Driving cows. (At least I suppose he was driving them; he was sitting sideways on a large horse doing nothing in particular, and some of the cows were going into one field and some into another, and a dog was biting their tails indiscriminately.)

2.  Clearing muck and weeds out of the stream.

3.  Setting a springe for rabbits.

4.  Delivering letters, because the postman doesn’t like walking up the hill.

Now I maintain that there would be insuperable difficulties in making George carry out all these various activities under the lash.  Anyone, I suppose, under a properly constituted Soviet regime might be detailed as George Harrison’s lasher, Mr. SMILLIE, Mr. G.K.  CHESTERTON, Lord CURZON, Mr. CLYNES or the Duke of NORTHUMBERLAND.  Can you imagine Mr. CHESTERTON walking about on guard duty in a rabbit warren while George Harrison set springes in accordance with the principles laid down by the Third Internationale for rabbit-snaring? or the Duke of NORTHUMBERLAND standing in gum-boots in the middle of a stream and flicking George Harrison about the trousers if he didn’t rake out old tin cans at forty to the minute as laid down by the Moscow Code?  Now I ask you.

And then there is this half a herring and boiled bird-seed arrangement.  George Harrison has a sister of eighteen who kindly comes in to do cooking and housework for us every day.  She thinks us frightfully queer, and if we bought some herrings and bird-seed and asked her to cook them for us I have no doubt she would oblige, but, though she doesn’t much care what we eat, there are a lot of things she doesn’t eat herself, and fish is one of them.  Porridge, which, I suppose, is a kind of bird-seed, is another.

Not that Jane calls it eating, by the way.  She calls it “touching,” and there are any number of things that she doesn’t fancy touching.  She will touch enormous platefuls of bacon or sausages or almost any derivative of the domestic pig, and the same applies to puddings and cake.  But beef and mutton she does not touch, nor margarine, and we have to be almost as careful that Jane Harrison has plenty of the right things to touch as about the whole of the rest of the family.