The Power of Persiflage.

But one day world-wide education will end this menace of earnestness. Children in their prattling primers will be taught the cleansing quality of frivolity. There will be chortling classes, laughing lessons, marks for merriment and prizes for persiflage. Flippancy in secondary schools will be a primary industry. Jocularity will embody—in fact, annihilate—world affears. The universities will have Chairs of Joviality occupied by suitable professors such as Laurel and Hardy, Wheeler and Wolsley, Potash and Perlmutter, Comin' and Cohen, Clapham and Dwyer and the Brothers Boloney. The degree LL.B. will mean “laugh like billyhoo”; and M.A. and B.A. will bear the cheerful significance of “most affable” and “backchat artist” disrespectively. In time the peoples of the earth will become so proficient in persiflage that they will learn to laugh even at themselves and—lo!—their eyes will be opened and they will see themselves as they would have been had they not made themselves what they are.

When all the world laughs every day,
Despair and disaster will fade away,
And peace and plentitude abound,
For laughter makes the world go round.

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