never a relief, only a not-exactly) and writing pamphlets, or answers to letters which, if left long enough, would surely answer themselves, as is the way of letters, and all to improve the Brains of the Nation. Bother the Brains of the Nation, thought Miss Grammont, only she used a stronger word, as was the custom in what Mrs. Delmer called her unfortunate family. Black doubt sometimes smote her as to not so much the efficacy of the work of her Department as its desirability if ever it should be perfectly accomplished. Did brains matter so greatly after all? Were the clever happier than the fools? Miss Grammont, whose university career had been a brilliant intellectual adventure, felt competent to speak for both these types of humanity. She knew herself to be happier when playing the fool than when exerting her highly efficient brain; the lunatic-asylum touch gave her more joy than the studious, and she wore learning like a cap and bells. But stupidity was, of course, a bore. It must, of course, be mitigated, if possible. And anyhow the object of the Ministry of Brains was not to make people happy (that could be left to the Directorate of Entertainments), nor to make them good (that was up to the Church, now, to the great benefit of both, divorced from the State), but to further social progress and avert another Great War.
Miss Grammont yawned, because the day was yet so young, and followed Miss Delmer up the steps of the hotel.
4
The Ministry of Brains, a vast organisation, had many sections. There was the Propaganda Section, which produced pamphlets and organised lectures and cinema shows (Miss Grammont had been lent temporarily to this section by her own branch); there was the Men's Education Section, the Women's, and the Children's; the Section which dealt with brain-tests, examinations, certificates, and tribunals, and the Section which was concerned with the direction of the intellects of the Great Unborn. Ivy Delmer was attached to this section, and Mr. Delmer, when he heard about it, was not altogether sure it was quite nice for her.
"She surely shouldn't know they have any," he had said to his wife, who was weeding, and replied absently, "Any what, dear? Who?"
"Intellects," the vicar said. "The Unborn. Besides, they haven't." He was frowning, and jerking out dandelions from the lawn with a spud.
"Oh, that's not it, dear," Mrs. Delmer reassured him vaguely. "Not the just unborn, you know. The—the ever so long unborn. All this arrangement of who ought to marry who. Quite silly, of course, but no harm for Ivy in that way. After all, there's no reason why she shouldn't know that children often inherit their brains from their parents."
The vicar admitted that, even for their precious and very young Ivy, there was no great harm in this.
The Section in question was, as Mrs. Delmer had stated, concerned with the encouragement and discouragement of alliances in proportion as they seemed favourable or otherwise to the propagation of intelligence in the next generation. There were numerous and complicated regulations on the subject, which could not, of course, be enforced; the Ministry's methods were those of stimulation, reward and punishment, rather than of coercion. There were bonuses on the births of the babies of parents conforming to the regulations, and penal taxes on unregulated infants, taxes increasing in proportion to the flagrancy of the parents' disobedience, so that the offspring of parents of very low mental calibre brought with them financial ruin. Everyone held a Ministry of Brains form, showing his or her mental category, officially ascertained and registered. If you were classified A, your brains were certified to be of the highest order, and you were recommended to take a B2 or B3 partner (these were the quite intelligent). To ally yourself with another A or a B1 was regarded as wasteful, there not being nearly enough of these to go round, and your babies would receive much smaller bonuses. If you were classed C1, C2, or C3, your babies would receive no encouragement, unless you had diluted their folly with an A partner; if you chose to unite with another C they were heavily fined, and if you were below C3 (i.e. uncertificated) they were fined still more heavily, by whomsoever diluted, and for the third and subsequent infants born under such conditions you would be imprisoned. (Only the Ministry had not been working long enough for anyone to have yet met with this fate. The children of unions perpetrated before the Mental Progress Act were at present exempt.) Families among the lower grades and among the uncertificated were thus drastically discouraged. You were uncertificated for matrimonial purposes not only if you were very stupid, but if, though yourself of brilliant mental powers, you had actual deficiency in your near family. If you were in this case, your form was marked "A (Deficiency)."
And so on: the details of the regulations, their intricacies and tangled knots, the endless and complicated special arrangements which were made with various groups and classes of persons, may be easily imagined, or (rather less easily, because the index is poor) found in the many volumes of the Ministry of Brains Instructions.
Anyhow, to room number 13, which was among the many rooms where this vast and intricate subject was dealt with, Ivy Delmer was summoned this Monday morning to take down a letter for Vernon Prideaux.
5
Vernon Prideaux was a fair, slim, neat, eye-glassed young man; his appearance and manners were approved by Ivy Delmer's standards and his capabilities by the heads of his department. His intellectual category was A; he had an impatient temper, a ready tongue, considerable power over papers (an important gift, not possessed by all civil servants), resource in emergency, competence in handling situations and persons, decided personal charm, was the son of one of our more notorious politicians, and had spent most of the war in having malaria on the Struma front, with one interesting break when he was recalled to England by his former department to assist in the drawing up of a new Bill, dealing with a topic on which he was an expert. He was, after all this, only thirty now, so had every reason for believing, as he did, that he would accomplish something in this world before he left it. He had been sucked into the activities of the new Ministry like so many other able young men and women, and was finding it both entertaining and not devoid of scope for his talents.
Ivy Delmer admired him a good deal. She sat at his side with her notebook and pencil, her soft, wide mouth a little parted, waiting for him to begin. He was turning over papers impatiently. He was in a rather bad temper, because of his new secretary, of whom he only demanded a little common sense and did not get it, and he would have to get rid of her, always a tiresome process. He couldn't trust her with anything, however simple; she always made a hash of it, and filled up the gaps, which were profound, in her recollection of his instructions with her own ideas, which were not. He had on Saturday given her some forms to fill up, stock forms which were always sent in reply to a particular kind of letter from the public. The form was supposed merely to say, "In reply to your letter with reference to your position as regards the tax [or bonus] on your prospective [or potential, or existing] infant, I am to inform you that your case is one for the decision of the Local Tribunals set up under the Mental Progress Act, to whom your application should have been made." Miss Pomfrey, who was young and full of zeal for the cause (she very reasonably wished that the Mental Progress Act had been in existence before her parents had married), had added on her own account to one such letter, "It was the stupidity of people like you who caused the Great War," and put it this morning with the other forms on Prideaux's table for signing. Prideaux had enquired, fighting against what he knew to be a disproportionate anger with her, didn't she really know better by now than to think that letters like that would be sent? Miss Pomfrey had sighed. She did not know better than that by now. She knew hardly anything. She was not intelligent, even as B3's went. In fact, her category was probably a mistake. Her babies, if ever she had any, would be of a mental calibre that did not bear contemplation. They would probably cause another Great War.
So Prideaux, who had also other worries, was out of temper.
"Sorry, Miss Delmer.... Ah, here we are." He fidgeted about with a file, then began to dictate a letter, in his quick, light, staccato voice. Ivy, clenching the tip of her pink tongue between her teeth, raced after him.
"Sir,
