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

“He bears the same relation to Municipal Poetry that a White Wing bears to the Street Cleaning Department,” explained the Hatter. “Two years ago the City took over all the Verse-making enterprises of Blunderland, appointed a Municipalaureat, otherwise a Commissioner of Public Verse, and started him along with a Department. He employs 16,743 poets who provide all the poetry that is consumed by our people. It has resulted in great good for everybody. Poetry is cheaper by eight cents a line than it used to be, and, as you may have guessed from what the March Hare has just said, we give larger measure than was the custom under the private ownership of Pegasus. Quatrains have been increased from four lines to twenty-three, and the old stingy fourteen-line sonnet has been enlarged to fifty-four lines. We have also passed an ordinance requiring that poems shall say what they mean, which is a vast improvement on the old private control method whereunder anybody was allowed to write rhymes which nobody could understand–like that thing of Miss Arethusa Spink’s, for instance, called Aspiration. Remember that?”

“I don’t think I ever heard it,” said Alice.

“Well it went this way,” said the Hatter, and striking a graceful attitude he recited the following lines called:

ASPIRATION

By Arethusa Spink

Down by the purple opalescent sea,
Flung like a ribbon limp athwart the sky,
A rose lay blooming on the restless lea,
While sundry birds came chattering sweetly by.
‘Twas then my soul that all too long had slept,
Awoke from out its iridescent nap,

crept
Down where the pink-cheeked crocus blossoms
From out fair Nature’s over-bounteous lap,
And cried aloud “Alas! What hath betode?
What dream is this that like the ambient brook
Forbids the mind to face the solemn goad
And know itself forsook!”

The Hatter paused.

“Well?” said Alice, slightly puzzled.

“That’s all there was to it,” said the Hatter. “It was printed in one of our Magazines and within forty-eight hours the ambulance from the Insane Asylum was called out 737 times by people who had gone crazy trying to find out what it meant. It capped the climax. I called a special meeting of the Common Council to take the matter up purely as a matter of public health, and before I went to bed that night they had passed and I had signed an Act giving the control of the Verse Industry to the City and taking it out of the hands of irresponsible, unlicensed independent poets.

“And a good job it was too,” said the March Hare.

“And you chose one of the best poets in town for the Commissioner, I suppose?” suggested Alice.

“No we didn’t,” said the Hatter. “I didn’t want any Moonshine in a City Department and no poet is a good business man. I picked out a very successful Haberdasher in the Sixth Ward for the delicate business of organising the Department, and he has done most excellent work. We found that just as a first class confectioner made a splendid manager of our gas plant, and a successful Hoki-Poki merchant had the required push to keep our trolley systems going, so the Haberdasher had the precise kind of genius to manage the poets. He won’t stand any nonsense from them, and any poem that he can’t understand is immediately thrown into the Civic Waste-Basket, taken to the Municipal Ferry and used for fuel to run the boats. I guess we burn nineteen tons of refuse verse a day, don’t we, Alderman?”

“About that–on the average,” said the March Hare. “Sometimes it gets as high as twenty tons and occasionally it falls off to sixteen–but using these rejected manuscripts in place of coal has reduced the loss on the Ferry about thirty-eight dollars a year in real money.”

“How much is that in bonds?” asked Alice slyly.