England, Their England by A. G. Macdonell

Author:A. G. Macdonell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Satire
Publisher: Reading Essentials
Published: 1933-06-30T00:00:00+00:00

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The President of the Committee for the Suppression of Social Abuses was the senior Caspian delegate, and he was enabled to carry through the sections on the agenda which dealt with the traffic in dangerous drugs with great expedition, being himself a lifelong addict to heroin, which he injected subcutaneously into his arm, just as Sherlock did, with a silver hypodermic syringe, encrusted with carved turquoises. His expert knowledge enabled him to correct several of the delegates when their rhetoric about the dismal after-effects of drugging carried them out of the sphere of reality into the sphere of imagination. It was the President also who threw a great deal of cold water upon the fervour of the Swiss representative, when that gentleman was affirming with a vast amount of eloquence that Switzerland had entirely extirpated the villainous crew of drug-traffickers from her free and snowy soil. For, having only that very morning run out of his indispensable heroin, the President had approached a gendarme, courteously touched his red fez and enquired whether there was a drug-seller in the vicinity. The gendarme, according to the President, had courteously saluted and replied, "Does your Excellency perceive that house along the street with pink shutters and an advertisement for the Sun Insurance Company above its door? Your Excellency does? Good. That is the only house in this vicinity that I know of, at which drugs are not procurable."

But when the drug sections of the agenda had been satisfactorily dealt with and the consideration of a number of important resolutions postponed until the following year, the President's efficiency fell off considerably. This was partly owing to his lack of interest in the subjects, and partly that, between injections, he was inclined to drop off for forty winks. This habit led to one very unfortunate incident.

The item on the agenda which was being discussed was the advisability of compiling a register of deaths from bubonic plague in the ports of Macao, Bangkok, Wei-hai-Wei, and one or two fishing harbours at the southern end of the island of Formosa, and the Yugo-Slav delegate, having caught the President's eye just before the latter fell into a quiet snooze, delivered a slashing harangue. He stated, with all the emphasis at his command, that while approving in principle of the register of deaths from bubonic plague, for his Government yielded to none in its loyal adherence to all measures for the pacific betterment of humanity, at the same time he felt that he ought to draw the attention of the Committee to the barbarous conduct of the Hungarian Army in Yugo-Slavia during the Great War. The Hungarian delegate protested warmly, but the President, who was dreaming of the Mahometan Paradise, only smiled sweetly, and the Yugo-Slav continued.

"Libraries, often containing as many as sixty or seventy books," he cried, "were burnt. Castles were razed to the ground. Pictures were stolen, including a whole set of reproductions of the works of Rubens in the house of a baron; statues

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