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“What? Never heard of a Copperation?” demanded the Hatter. “Mercy! Ever hear of the Mumps, or the Measles, or the Whooping Cough?”

“Yes–but I never knew they were called Copperations,” said Alice.

“Well, they ain’t, but they’re no worse–so they ought to be,” said the Hatter. “Listen here. I’ll tell you what a copperation is.”

And putting his hat in front of his mouth like a telephone the Hatter recited the following poem through it:

THE COPPERATION

A copperation is a beast
With forty leven paws
That doesn’t ever pay the least
Attention to the laws.

It grabs whatever comes in sight
From hansom cabs to socks
And with a grin of mad delight
It turns ’em into stocks

And then it takes a rubber hose
Connected with the sea
And pumps em full of H+2+Os
Of various degree

And when they’re swollen up so stout
You’d think they’d surely bust
They souse ’em once again and out
They come at last a Trust

And when the Trust is ready for
One last and final whack
They let the public in the door
To buy the water back.

“See?” said the Hatter as he finished.

“No,” said Alice. “It sounded very pretty through your hat, but I don’t understand it. Why should people buy water when they can get it for nothing in the ocean?”

“You’re like all the rest,” groaned the Hatter. “Nobody seems to understand but me, and somehow or other I can’t make it clear to other people.”

“You might if you didn’t talk through your hat,” grinned the Cheshire Cat.

“Then I’d have to stop being a public character,” said the Hatter. “I’m not going to sacrifice my career just because you’re too ignorant to see what I’m driving at. I don’t mind telling you though, Alice, that outside of poetry a Copperation is a Creature devised by Selfish Interests to secure the Free Coinage of the Atlantic Ocean.”

“Little drops of water,
Plenty of hot air,
Make a Copperation
A pretty fat affair,”

warbled the March Hare.

“O well,” said Alice, “what about it? Suppose there is such an animal around. What are we going to do about it?”

“We’re going to gerraple with it,” said the Hatter, with a valiant shake of his hat. “We’re going to grab it by its throat, and shake it down, and shackle it so that in forty years it will become as tame as a fly or any other highly domesticated animal.”

“But how?” asked Alice. “You aren’t going to do this yourself, are you? Single handed and alone?”

“Yes,” said the Hatter. “The March Hare and the White Knight and I. We’ve started a city to do it with. We’ve sprinkled our streets with Rough on Copperations until there isn’t one left in the place. Everything in town belongs to the People–street cars, gutters, pavements, theatres, electric light, cabs, manicures, dogs, cats, canary birds, hotels, barber shops, candy stores, hats, umbrellas, bakeries, cakeries, steakeries, shops,–you can’t think of a thing that the city don’t own. No more private ownership of anything from a toothbrush to a yacht, and the result is we are all happy.”

“It sounds fine,” said Alice. “Though I think I should rather own my own toothbrush.”

“You naturally would under the old system,” assented the Hatter. “Under a system of private ownership owning your own teeth you’d prefer to own your own toothbrush, but our Council has just passed a law making teeth public property. You see we found that some people had teeth and other people hadn’t, which is hardly a fair condition under a Republican form of Government. It gave one class of citizens a distinct advantage over other people and the Declaration of Independence demands absolute equality for all. One man owning his own teeth could eat all the hickory nuts he wanted just because he had teeth to crack ’em with, while another man not having teeth had either to swallow em whole, which ruined his digestion, or go without, which wasn’t fair.