The Speaker

The Speaker

I think we are all now aware of the dangerous talk concerning the banning of the use of children as chimney sweeps. I think it’s disgraceful that people who should know better seek to deprive children of their main source of income. Some say that all the soot is bad for them and the unclean jobs children are generally employed to do can lead to premature death.

A recent report suggested that as many as 60% die before the age of 10. To have only a 40% chance of seeing your eleventh birthday looks bad on paper, but I have happily backed horses with much worse odds than that so it can’t be that bad. So in response to this threat, I have launched the “Keep Children Up Chimneys” campaign which involves a group of like-minded fellows and I patrolling the streets of our great city looking for children not up chimneys. When we find them we all shout “Up a chimney, damn you” in unison while we encourage them up the nearest chimney with the aid of long sticks.

There is a school of thought these days that the reason that the poor lead such wretched lives is due to them being exploited by factory owners and other captains of industry. This is just utter nonsense. The lower class, plain and simply, are just a lesser breed of the human race. It is their biological make-up that stops them earning money.

Is it not apparent that like sheep, goats or any other dumb beast of the world they choose to stay in their slum surrounding with others that they feel a likeness to, when surely any decent fellow would be appalled by such a fiendish place and go to live in Kensington. So, on behalf of all those who choose to live in Whitechapel, I say no to rebuilding their slums. I have observed men, women and children who look happy dressed in grimy rags, and see nothing wrong with using an open sewer in the middle of their street.

I conclude that the lower classes enjoy nothing more than festering in their own filth, and that surely this is the strongest possible proof that they are a differing derivative from decent middle or upper class persons. Indeed, the mill owner who only pays his staff enough for a hand-to-mouth existence is doing the pauper a favour, as that is what the lower class worker is used to. He does not possess a brain capable of handling more than one day’s events at a time and to give him more would just confuse him. As classic example I recall a time I was in the East End, and on offering a charming slip of a girl the chance to earn a quick few extra pence, she just ran off in tears.

Another manifestly absurd idea that seems to have become popular among the chattering classes is that women should be allowed to have rights. Some have laughably suggested that within a mere 50 years women will be allowed to vote for parliamentary candidates.

Now I’m not one of those oldfashioned types that believes women should be chained to the kitchen sink. Good quality rope is generally enough and doesn’t leave such unsightly marks. But to think that a woman, a creature who becomes bored due the mental effort involved in such simple tasks as washing and cooking, would be able to decide on the relative merits of conflicting political agendas within a modern colonial empire such as ours, is one that I would have to refute most strongly.

Of course there are some women who give the impression that they could be intelligent. But what so many people fail to realise is that women’s brains are made out of straw. When I have had the misfortune to be cornered by lower class wenches I always say “Madam, you have a brain made from straw” which leaves them perplexed. “What do you mean?” they say, being too stupid to take it in. In middle and upper class women this straw is sometimes replaced with cloth or felt, which leads to a liking of hats which they mistakenly believe will make them more intelligent. Felt is a good indicator that the woman you are speaking to is upper class. Many a time I have tested this theory by asking well-to-do women “Madam, correct me if I am wrong, but your brains are not made from either straw or cloth are they?”. Never have I been contradicted.