Alice in Blunderland: An Iridescent Dream Page 4

  CHAPTER III

  THE AROMATIC GAS PLANT

  After the little party had descended from the marvellous trolley,concerning which the March Hare observed, most properly, that underprivate ownership nothing so safe and sane would ever have been thoughtof, they walked along a beautiful highway, bordered with rosebushes,oleanders and geraniums, until they came to a lovely little park at theentrance to which was a huge sign announcing that within was

  THE BLUNDERLAND GAS PLANT.

  To tell the truth Alice had not cared particularly to visit the GasWorks, because she had once been driven through what was known at homeas the Gas-House district on her way to the ferry, and herrecollections of it were not altogether pleasant. As she recalled it itwas in a rather squalid neighbourhood, and the odours emanating from itwere not pleasing to what she called her "oil-factories." But here inBlunderland all was different. Instead of the huge ugly retorts risingup out of the ground, surrounded by a quality of air that one could notbreathe with comfort, was as beautiful a garden as anyone could wish towander through, and at its centre there stood a retort, but not one thatlooked like a great iron skull cap painted red. On the contrary theMunicipally Owned retort had architecturally all the classic beauty of aCarnegie Library.

  "We call it the Retort Courteous," said the Hatter pridefully as hegazed at the structure, and smiled happily as he noted Alice's veryevident admiration for it. "You see, in urban affairs, as a mere matterof fitness, we believe in cultivating urbanity, my child, and inconsequence everything we do is conceived in a spirit of courtesy. Thegas-houses under private ownership have not been what you would callpolite. They were almost invariably heavy, rude, staring structures thatreared themselves offensively in the public eye, and our first effortwas to subliminate----"

  "Ee-liminate," whispered the March Hare.

  "I beg your pardon, Mr. Hare," retorted the Hatter. "I did not meanee-liminate, which means to suppress, but subliminate, which means tosublimify or make sublime. I guess I know my own language."

  "Excuse me," said the March Hare meekly. "I haven't studied the M. O.Dictionary beyond the letter Q, Mr. Mayor, and I was not aware that theCommon Council had as yet passed favourably upon subliminate, either,"he added with some feeling.

  "That is because it was not until yesterday that the CopperationCouncil decided that subliminate was a constitutional word," said theHatter sharply. "In view of his report to me, which I wrote myself andtherefore know the provisions of, he states that subliminate is aperfectly just and proper word involving no infringement upon the rightsof others, and in no wise impairing the value of innocent vestedinterests, and is therefore legal. Therefore, I shall use it whether theCommon Council approves it or not. If they resolve that it is not a goodword, I shall veto the resolution. If you don't like it I'll send youyour resignation."

  "That being the case," said the March Hare, "I withdraw my objections."

  "Which," observed the Hatter triumphantly, turning to Alice, "shows you,my dear young lady, the very great value of the Municipal Ownership ideaas applied to the Board of Aldermen. As the White Knight put it in oneof his poetical reports printed in Volume 347, of the CopperationCouncil's Opinions for October, 1906, page 926,

  "A City may not own its Gas, Its Barber Shops, or Cars It may not raise Asparagrass, Or run Official Bars; It may not own a big Hotel Or keep a Public Hen, But it will always find it well To own its Aldermen.

  "When Aldermen were owned by private interests the public interestssuffered, but in this town where the City Fathers belong to the Citythey have to do what the City tells them to, or get out."

  "It sounds good," was all that Alice could think of to say.

  "What I was trying to tell you when the Alderman interpolated--" theHatter went on.

  "There he goes again!" growled the March Hare.

  "Was that the first thing we did when we took over the Gas Plant was tosublimify the externals of the works along lines of Architectural andOlfactoreal beauty both to the eye and to the nose, two organs of thehuman structure that private interests seldom pay much attention to. Iasked myself two questions. First, is it necessary for a gas works to beugly? Second, is it necessary for gas works to be so odourwhifferousthat the smell of the Automobile is a dream of fragrant beauty alongsideof it? To both these questions the answer was plain. Of course it ain't.Beauty can be applied to the lines of a gas-tank just as readily as tothe lines of a hippopotamus, and as for the odours, they are due to thefact that gas as it is now made does not smell pleasantly, but there isno reason why it should not be so manufactured that people would bewilling to use it on their handkerchiefs. I learned that ProfessorBurbank of California had developed a cactus plant that could be usedfor a sofa cushion--why, I asked myself, could he not develop agas-plant that will put forth flowers the perfume of which should makethat of the violet, and the rose, sink into inoculated desoupitude?"

  "It hardly seems possible, does it?" said Alice.

  "To a private mind it presents insuperable difficulties," said theHatter, "but to a public mind like my own nothing is impossible. If aman can do a seemingly impossible thing with one plant there is noreason why he shouldn't do a seemingly impossible thing with anotherplant, so I immediately wrote to Professor Burbank offering him ahundred thousand dollars in Blunderland Deferred Debenture GasImprovement Bonds a year to come here and see what he could do totransmogrify our gas-plant."

  "Oh, I am so glad," cried Alice delightedly. "I should so love to meetMr. Burbank and thank him for inventing the coreless apple----"

  "You don't means the Corliss Engine, do you?" asked the White Knight.

  "Well, I'm sorry," said the Hatter, "but Mr. Burbank wouldn't comeunless we'd pay him real money, which, although we don't publish thefact broadcast, is not in strict accord with the highest principles ofMunicipal Ownership. We contend that when people work for the commonweal they ought to be satisfied to receive their pay in the commonwealth, and under the M. O. system the most common kind of wealth isrepresented by Bonds. Consequently we wrote again to Mr. Burbank, andexpressed our regret that a man of his genius should care more for hisown selfish interests than for the public weal, and as a sort of sarcasmon his meanness I enclosed five of our 2963 Guaranteed Extension fourper cents to pay for the two-cent stamp he had put upon his letter."

  "What are the 2963 Guaranteed Extension four per cents?" asked Alice.

  "STUDYING THE ECONOMIC THEORIES OF DR. WACK."]

  "They are sinking fund bonds payable in 2963, only we guarantee to extendthe date of payment to 3963 in case the sinking fund has sunk so low wedon't feel like paying them in 2963," explained the Hatter. "It's aningenious financial idea that I got from studying the economic theoriesof Dr. Wack, Professor of Repudiation and Other Political Economies atthe Wack Business College at Squantumville, Florida. It is the onlyeconomic theory I know of that absolutely prevents debt from becoming aburden. But that aside, when Mr. Burbank showed that he preferredfooling with such futile things as pineapples and hollyhocks, to thereally uplifting work of providing the people with gas that was redolentof the spices of Araby, I resolved to do the thing myself."

  "He is a man of real inventive genius," said the March Hare, anxious,apparently, to square himself with the Hatter again.

  "Thank you, Alderman," said the Hatter. "It is a real pleasure to findmyself strictly in accord with your views once more. But to resume, MissAlice--as I say I resolved to tackle the problem myself."

  "Fine," said Alice. "So you went in and studied how to make gas the oldway and then----"

  "Not at all," interrupted the Hatter. "Not at all. That would have beenfatal. I found that everybody who knew how to make gas the old way saidthe thing was impossible. Hence, I reasoned, the man who will find itpossible must be somebody who never knew anything about the old way ofmaking gas, and nobody in the whole world knew less about it than I.Manifestly then I became the chosen instrument to work the reform, so Iplunged in and you really can't imagine how easy it all turned out. Ihad no old prejudices in gas-making to overcome, no set, finicky ideasto serve as obstacles to progress, and inside of a week I had it. Ifilled the gas tanks half full of cologne, and then pumped hot airthrough them until they were chock full. I figured it out that colognewas nothing more than alcohol flavoured with axiomatic oils----"

  "Aromatic," interrupted the March Hare, forgetting himself for themoment.

  "THE WHITE KNIGHT INTERFERED"]

  The Hatter frowned heavily upon the Alderman, and there is no tellingwhat would have happened had not the White Knight interfered to protectthe offender.

  "It's still an open question, Mr. Mayor," he observed, "if axiomaticapplied to a scent is constitutional. If an odour should becomeaxiomatic we could never get rid of it you see, and I think the Aldermanhas distinguished authority for his correction, which----"

  "O very well," said the Hatter. "Let it go. I prefer axiomatic, but theprivate predilections of an official should not be permitted toinfluence his official actions. I intend always to operate within thelimits of the law, so if the law says aromatic, aromatic be it. Ifigured that cologne was nothing more than alcohol flavoured witharomatic oils, and that inasmuch as both alcohol and oil burn readily,there was no reason why hot air passed through them should not burnalso, and carry oil some of the aroma as well."

  "It certainly was a very pretty idea," said Alice.

  "All the M. O. ideas are pretty," said the March Hare. "It is only thequestion of reducing beauty to the basis of practical utility thatconfronts us."

  "And how did it work?" asked Alice, very much interested.

  "IN THE MATTER OF PERFUME IT WAS FINE"]

  "Beautifully," said the Hatter. "Only it wouldn't burn--just why Ihaven't been able to find out. But in t
he matter of perfume it was fine.People who turned on their jets the first night soon found their housessmelling like bowers of roses, and a great many of them liked it so muchthat they turned on every jet in the house, and left them turned on allday, so that in the mere matter of consumption twice as much of myaromatic illuminating air was used in a week as the companies hadcharged for under the old system, and we used the same metres, too. Inaddition to this, as a mere life-saving device, my invention proved tohave a wonderful value. In the first place nobody could blow it out andbe found gas-fixturated the next morning----"

  "NOBODY COULD BE GAS-FIXTURATED"]

  "Good word that--so much more expressive than the old privately owneddictionary word asphyxiated," said the March Hare.

  The Hatter nodded his appreciation of the March Hare's compliment, andadmitted him once more to his good graces.

  "And nobody could commit suicide with it the way they used to do withthe old kind of gas, because, you see, it was, after all, only hot air,which is good for the lungs whichever way it's going, in or out. We usehot air all the time in our Administration and it is wonderful whatresults you can get from it," he went on. "But it wouldn't light. Infact when anybody tried to light it, such was the pressure, it blew outthe match, which I regard, as an additional point in its favour. If wehave gas that blows out matches the minute the match is applied to it,does not that reduce the chance of fire from the careless habit somepeople have of throwing lighted matches into the waste-basket?"

  "It most certainly does," said the White Knight gravely, and in suchtones of finality that Alice did not venture to dispute his assertion.

  "We're all agreed upon that point," said the Hatter. "But there werecomplaints of course. Some people, mostly capitalists who were richenough to have libraries of their own, complained that they couldn'tread nights because the gas wouldn't light. I replied that if theywanted to read they could go to the Public Library, where there wereoil lamps, and electric lights. Besides reading at night is bad for theeyes. Others objected that they couldn't see to go to bed. The answer tothat was simple enough. People don't need to see to go to bed. They mayneed to see when they are dressing in the morning, but when they go tobed all they have to do is to take their clothes off and go, and I addedthat people who didn't know enough to do that had better have nurses.Finally some of the chief kickers got up a mass-meeting and protestedthat the new gas wasn't gas at all, and in view of that fact refused topay their gas tax."

  "Oho!" said Alice. "That was pretty serious I should think."

  "It seemed so at first," said the Hatter, "but just then the beauty ofthe Municipal Ownership scheme stepped in. I called a special meeting ofthe Common Council and they settled the question once for all."

  "Good!" cried Alice "How did they do it?"

  "They passed a resolution," said the Hatter, "unanimously declaring thearomatic hot-air to be gas of the most excellent quality, and made it amisdemeanor for anybody to say that it wasn't. I signed the ordinanceand from that minute on our gas was gas by law."

  "Still," said Alice, "those people had already said it wasn't. Did theyback down?"

  "Most of 'em did," laughed the Hatter. "And the rest were fined $500apiece and sent to jail for six months. You see we made the lawsufficiently retroactive to grab the whole bunch. Since then there havebeen no complaints."

  Whereupon the Hatter invited Alice to stroll through the gas-plant withhim, which the little girl did, and declared it later to have beensweeter than a walk through a rose-garden, which causes me to believethat the Mayor's scheme was a pretty wonderful one after all, and quiteworthy of a Hatter thrust by the vagaries of politics into the difficultbusiness of gas making.