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“That’s it exactly,” said the Hatter. “As Alderman March Hare puts it, we M. O. people are after the comfort and safety of the people first, last and all the time. Everything else is a tertiary consideration merely.”

“What’s tertiary?” asked Alice.

“Third,” said the Hatter. “To come in third. It’s a combination of turtle and dromedary.”

Just at this moment a man walking through the car stopped and requested the Hatter to crack a filbert for him, which the Hatter cheerfully did. The passer-by thanked him and paid him a cent, which the Hatter immediately rang up on a small cash register on his vest, as required by the laws of Blunderland.

“That’s the way the Municipal Ownership of Teeth works,” said the Hatter as the man passed on, and then he resumed. “This street railway business, however, was a much harder proposition than the Municipal Ownership of Teeth. When we took the railways over of course we had to run ’em on the old system until we’d learned the business. The first thing we did was to get educated men for Motormen and Conductors–polite fellows, you know, who’d stop a car when you asked ’em to, and when they started wouldn’t do it with such a jerk that in nine cases out of ten it was only the back door that kept the car from being yanked clean from under your feet, letting you land in the street behind.”

“I know,” said Alice. “Like a game of snap the whip.”

“Exactly,” said the Hatter. “Under the old method of starting a car you never knew, when you were going home nights, whether you’d land in the bosom of your family or in a basket of eggs somebody was bringing home from market. So we advertised for polite motormen and conductors, and we got a great lot of them, mostly retired druggists, floor-walkers, poets and fellows like that, with a few ex-politicians thrown in to give tone to the service, and we put them on, but they didn’t know anything about motoring, unfortunately. Somehow or other good manners and expert motoring didn’t seem to go together, and in consequence we had a fearful lot of collisions at first. I don’t think there was a whole back platform in the outfit at the end of the week, no matter which way the car was going.”

“Must have been awful,” said Alice.

“It was,” said the Hatter, “and the public began to complain. One man who got his nose pinched between two cars sued us for damages and we had to return his fare. Finally one day one of the old bobtail cars got running away, and the first we knew it banged into the car ahead and went right through it, coming out in front still going like mad after the next car, and we knew something had to be done.”

“Mercy!” cried Alice. “I should think the passengers in the first car would have sued you for that.”

“They would have,” said the Hatter, “if they could have scraped enough of themselves together again to appear in court.”

“It was a hard problem,” said the March Hare.

“The hardest ever,” asserted the Hatter. “But the White Knight there gave me a clue to the solution–he’s our Copperation Council–and I put it up to him for an opinion, and after thinking it over for two months he reported. The only way to prevent collisions, said he, is to cut the ends off the cars. That was it, wasn’t it, Judge?” he added, turning to the White Knight.

“Yes,” said the Knight, “only I put it in poetry. My precise words were

“The only way that I can find
To stop this car colliding stunt
Is cutting off the end behind
And likewise that in front.”

“Splendid!” cried Alice, clapping her hands in glee. “That’s fine.”

“Thank you,” said the White Knight. “You see, Miss Alice, I made a personal study of collisions. The Mayor here ordered a fresh one every day for me to investigate, and I noticed that whenever two cars bunked into each other it was always at the ends and never in the middle. The conclusion was inevitable. The ends being the venerable spot, abolish them.