opinion authorising him to do
whatever he pleased next, the Hatter decided that he would give Alice a
demonstration of the workings of the Municipaphone.

[Illustration: "YOU CAN TALK ALL YOU PLEASE"]

"Which," said he proudly, "I consider to be the most Democraticising
thing I have ever invented. You can talk all you please about Universal
Brotherhood, Unlimited Sisterhood, and the Infinity of Unclehood, but
all of these movements put together haven't done as much to promote the
equality of everybody as that Municipaphone idea of mine."

Alice thought the Cheshire Cat's grin expanded slightly as the Hatter
spoke, but she was not sure, although he most assuredly did wink at her.

"I should admire to see it," she said. "What is it, just?"

"It is the result of the Municipal Ownership of the Telephone," returned
the Hatter proudly. "We have taken over everything that works by
electricity--electric lighting, the telegraph, the telephone----"

"Even the thunder and lightning," interrupted the White Knight. "And
under our management everything runs so smoothly that even the
lightning doesn't strike any more. That's a great thing in Municipal
Ownership. There aren't any more strikes under it."

"What he says is true, my child," said the Hatter, "and in time we
expect to get the thunder itself under control so that it will serve
some useful purpose--I don't know yet exactly what, but I am having
experiments made in storage batteries which will catch and hold the
thunder with the idea of saving the noise it makes for fire-crackers, or
Presidential salutes, or other things and occasions where the fracturing
of silence seems desirable. Surely if we can take electricity and under
suitable Municipal supervision make it serve as a substitute for a
tallow dip, why shouldn't we extract the reverberance with which it is
fraught to add to the general clangour of joyous occasions?"

"No reason at all," said Alice. "I wonder no one has ever thought of
that before. Just think of all the magnificent noises that go to waste
in a thunderstorm."

"You will discover in time, my dear child, that only under the Municipal
Ownership of Brains such as we have here, can such great ideas be seized
from the infinity of nothingness and turned into an irresistible
propaganda," said the Hatter loftily.

"He's the biggest gander of the bunch," whispered the March Hare.

"But it isn't what we are going to do, but what we have done that we
propo