ore work than
is required. But I believe I am justified in shutting the door on this
vista of argument, instead of opening it. For this book is not designed
to prove the case for Peasant Proprietorship, but to prove the case
against modern sages who turn reform to a routine. The whole of this
book has been a rambling and elaborate urging of one purely ethical
fact. And if by any chance it should happen that there are still some
who do not quite see what that point is, I will end with one plain
parable, which is none the worse for being also a fact.

A little while ago certain doctors and other persons permitted by modern
law to dictate to their shabbier fellow-citizens, sent out an order that
all little girls should have their hair cut short. I mean, of course,
all little girls whose parents were poor. Many very unhealthy habits are
common among rich little girls, but it will be long before any doctors
interfere forcibly with them. Now, the case for this particular
interference was this, that the poor are pressed down from above into
such stinking and suffocating underworlds of squalor, that poor people
must not be allowed to have hair, because in their case it must mean
lice in the hair. Therefore, the doctors propose to abolish the hair. It
never seems to have occurred to them to abolish the lice. Yet it could
be done. As is common in most modern discussions the unmentionable thing
is the pivot of the whole discussion. It is obvious to any Christian man
(that is, to any man with a free soul) that any coercion applied to
a cabman's daughter ought, if possible, to be applied to a Cabinet
Minister's daughter. I will not ask why the doctors do not, as a matter
of fact apply their rule to a Cabinet Minister's daughter. I will not
ask, because I know. They do not because they dare not. But what is the
excuse they would urge, what is the plausible argument they would use,
for thus cutting and clipping poor children and not rich? Their argument
would be that the disease is more likely to be in the hair of poor
people than of rich. And why? Because the poor children are forced
(against all the instincts of the highly domestic working classes)
to crowd together in close rooms under a wildly inefficient system of
public instruction; and because in one out of the forty children there
may be offense. And why? Because the poor man is so ground down by the
great rents of the great ground landlords that his wife often has
to work as