The Dominance of “Don't.”

All children are born with a chuckleurge, but as soon as they can walk and talk they learn the dominance of “Don't.” They are denied all the simple pleasures of life such as dipping the cat in the coffee pot, chewing soot, and lighting fires under the sofa. All the joy is don'ted out of life. It's don't do this and don't do that. Don't express legitimate joy when father skids on the soap; don't give way to natural merriment when the gas man gets tangled in the clothes line; don't wake the welkin when the parson drops baby-brother Basil into the font at the christening; in fact, don't be human at all.

This Don'tism can only result in the gradual decline of the functions of the funny-bone culminating in ass's elbow or ossification of the occiput.

Thus the criminal earnestness of the egotistic promulgators of pomposity—the European nabobs of neocrasy who are striving to-day to make the world fit for horrors.