well as he. Therefore she has no time to look after
the children, therefore one in forty of them is dirty. Because the
workingman has these two persons on top of him, the landlord sitting
(literally) on his stomach, and the schoolmaster sitting (literally) on
his head, the workingman must allow his little girl's hair, first to be
neglected from poverty, next to be poisoned by promiscuity, and, lastly,
to be abolished by hygiene. He, perhaps, was proud of his little girl's
hair. But he does not count.

Upon this simple principle (or rather precedent) the sociological doctor
drives gayly ahead. When a crapulous tyranny crushes men down into the
dirt, so that their very hair is dirty, the scientific course is clear.
It would be long and laborious to cut off the heads of the tyrants;
it is easier to cut off the hair of the slaves. In the same way, if
it should ever happen that poor children, screaming with toothache,
disturbed any schoolmaster or artistic gentleman, it would be easy to
pull out all the teeth of the poor; if their nails were disgustingly
dirty, their nails could be plucked out; if their noses were indecently
blown, their noses could be cut off. The appearance of our humbler
fellow-citizen could be quite strikingly simplified before we had done
with him. But all this is not a bit wilder than the brute fact that a
doctor can walk into the house of a free man, whose daughter's hair may
be as clean as spring flowers, and order him to cut it off. It never
seems to strike these people that the lesson of lice in the slums is the
wrongness of slums, not the wrongness of hair. Hair is, to say the least
of it, a rooted thing. Its enemy (like the other insects and oriental
armies of whom we have spoken) sweep upon us but seldom. In truth, it
is only by eternal institutions like hair that we can test passing
institutions like empires. If a house is so built as to knock a man's
head off when he enters it, it is built wrong.

The mob can never rebel unless it is conservative, at least enough to
have conserved some reasons for rebelling. It is the most awful thought
in all our anarchy, that most of the ancient blows struck for freedom
would not be struck at all to-day, because of the obscuration of the
clean, popular customs from which they came. The insult that brought
down the hammer of Wat Tyler might now be called a medical examination.
That which Virginius loathed and avenged as foul slavery might now be
praised as f