De Imitatione Christi

Comments by a US Republican politician and sometime pastor to the effect that the people of Gaza should be treated as a surrendering power have elicited predictable levels of shock and awe from those who haven't read their Bible. "Exactly what Jesus would do, right?" was one response, apparently not altogether untinged with hostile irony, to the congressman's assertion that the violence in Palestine and Ukraine should be made more violent still, preferably using funds now being wasted on humanitarian aid.

In fact, of course, raining fire and brimstone on the unworthy is exactly what Jesus would do, as your humble correspondent has repeatedly pointed out. As reported in the Gospels, Jesus spent almost His entire ministry boasting about the torments to be inflicted on those who failed to hear Him, and a rather large percentage of the parables have no other moral but the horrid things that will happen to those who don't obey. Indeed, so blatant was the Saviour's genocidal agenda that His Father in Heaven had Him named after Moses' successor, whose humanitarian scruples certainly qualify as proto-Christian.

The Party of Working People's Flag is Only Red in Parts, and Then Only by Coincidence

Reclamation - turning a slur into a badge of pride - can be a liberating and enlightening process, and has been managed successfully in cases ranging from Proudhon's declaration that he was an anarchist to the adoption by non-heterosexuals of the label queer to Ramsey Campbell's maintaining that he just writes horror stories. Unfortunately, Team Starmer's reclamation of the Union Jack from the hard right may still have some small way to go, not least thanks to Team Starmer's open contempt for ethnic minorities, puppy-dog eagerness to join in with anti-woke baying over making the Ingerland Cross look too interesting, and general antipathy to the thought of attracting any voters beyond the Murdoch-reading, car-driving, coal-burning, migrant-baiting, trans-bashing, wog-bombing, Bring Back Boris salt of the English earth. It's difficult to reclaim a symbol from the enemy when one's own real-world values are barely distinguishable.

Some Fairly Survivable Losses

Rodentine maritime evacuation manoeuvres are set to lose our Mother of Parliaments some nine hundred and eighty-seven years' experience of blathering, braying and claiming expenses. Fortunately for the Commons' institutional memory, most of the years composing this near-millennium are concurrent rather than consecutive; and most of the fleeing rodents are Conservatives, few of whom will know more than when they started and none of whom will know better. While most of the retiring Labour MPs are older and longer-serving, almost a third of the evacuations from the bowels of modern Conservatism will be dropping out after less than a decade, despite their doubtless profound flush of privilege in representing their constituents. Hence, in terms of accumulated intelligence and ability the loss to British public life may not be quite so profound as it appears, and perhaps may not appear so even when most of the vacancies are filled by the moderate and sensible apparatchiki of Team Starmer.

Thank You For a Lot of Fun, Sir

Unelected bureaucrats have conspired to sabotage the mayoral aspirations of Laurence Fox, the Dear Leader of the other far-right party whose name starts with Re- and ought to end in an exclamation mark. Fox was unable to corral enough dupes into nominating him, mustered at least three who laboured under the minor electoral handicap of non-existence, failed to complete the necessary forms properly, submitted them too near the deadline for the errors to be rectified, and was subsequently denied his democratic British birthright of saving London from the woke migrant hordes; although his more fundamental British birthright of making a fool of himself remains self-evidently intact. Fox had a squeal on social media about "political corruption" before deleting the squeal, though whether as a result of legal advice or lack of moral fibre your correspondent would not dare presume to speculate. He now has a cunning plan to appeal against the decision, throwing his oppressors off guard by utilising a non-existent process.

Creative Liberty

Faceless bureaucrats at Cambridge city council have ordered the removal of a sculpture representing the late Duke of Edinburgh as an academic incarnation of the Terrible Trivium. The bronze statue is thirteen feet tall and stands outside an office block, ostensibly in order to commemorate the Duke's role as chancellor of the local university although, as usual in such matters, its function as a power-blaring foghorn of corporate bad taste probably ought not to be underestimated. A firm of property developers commissioned the piece for a hundred and fifty thousand before erecting it without the encumbrance of planning permission; but beyond that nobody seems willing to claim responsibility. The supposed artist, whom His Highness would doubtless have dubbed "that damn dago" or something equally worthy of a university chancellor, said it was "an abuse" that his name had been attributed to the work. The chair of the property developers, who had the aesthetic advantage of intimate acquaintance with the price-tag, said that it was "spectacular," but apparently did not publicly express any particular desire to have it in his own back garden.

Imitation Duncan Smith

Expenses claimants including the ever-brilliant Iain Duncan Smith and the former Minister for Richard Desmond are fearful for the state of British democracy. While the Conservatives have starved local authorities of funding, disenfranchised many with unnecessary ID checks, and may yet time the election to deprive a few thousand students of the vote, the Heathen Chinee have actually been interfering with British democracy. In typically insidious and treacherous fashion, they have done so using those Babbage computating contraptions with which the British establishment has endured such a long and difficult relationship. One agent was even sufficiently fiendish to imitate Duncan Smith, and it's to be hoped that the agent in question was adequately compensated for their patriotic sacrifice of so many dozen IQ points.

It is of course unprecedented for any nation to attempt the furtherance of its own interests by influencing the internal affairs of another; and recent reforms at the Ministry for Wogs, Frogs, Huns and Hottentots have ensured that Britain's capacity for damage has been to some extent turned back upon its own less deserving subjects. Nevertheless, the righteous indignation of His Majesty's Government has gained moral support from the United States, whose disinterested concern for the sovereignty of lesser breeds is so legendary as to be virtually mythical. If gerrymandering, tax cuts and the War on Woke aren't enough to swing the general election, a war for Western civilisation against the Yellow Peril might just manage it.

Substantial Progress

Astoundingly enough, the absorption of the Ministry for Wogs, Beads and Trinkets into the Ministry for Wogs, Frogs, Huns and Hottentots has been of negative benefit to the global poor; and this despite the fact that the merger took place under the piccaninny-pampering auspices of the National Johnson. Even slashing the pittance which His Majesty's Government pays to keep up the pretence of giving a toss appears somehow to have resulted in a reduced impression that His Majesty's Government gives a toss; and the problem does not seem to have been substantially reduced by either the purging of experts and other pessimists or the redirection of much of the aid budget towards the master race. On the bright side, the National Audit Office has been able to report that, a mere four years on, the department is less confused than it used to be; which should at least keep the National Audit Office from immediately suffering a similar efficientisation.

Decency's Children

Despite being the country that re-elected the Bullingdon Club's glistening pink Head Boy and voted the National Johnson an eighty-seat majority; despite being the country that reads the Murdoch scumbag press and the Rothermere Daily Stürmer; despite our most popular fictional avatar being a priapic thug whose enemies tend strongly towards the physically and psychologically damaged; despite our greatest historical personage being a pompous thug whose idea of good government was grapeshot for the domestic rabble and poison gas for the uncivlised tribes; amd despite the fawning national subordination to the beaner-bashing, towelhead-trashing, gook-smashing, nigger-knocking World Cop by the grace of God, it has taken researchers a mere half-century to confirm that the British love bullies. Almost equally surprisingly, it seems that, in the estimation of at least one moderate and sensible media outlet, this qualifies as news.

Back Seat to FA

Evidently invigorated by having buzzed the fiend Putin and got away with it, at least one incarnation of Grant Shapps has been practising for an election-saving war against the Heathen Chinee. Britain's Minister for Wog-Bombing was flown from Canberra to Adelaine in the back seat of an Australian air force fighter, as the authorities had been given the impression that he was some sort of dignitary. A spokesbeing proclaimed the stunt a demonstration of Australia's defence capability, evidently assuming with similar optimism that either Michael Green or Sebastian Fox is capable of assimilating much more about a Boeing FA-18 Super Hornet than those sweet middle initials.

Shark of the New

Artistic merit is a fragile thing
That stands or falls by price of purchasing;
The cognoscenti therefore tend to rate
Their treasures by the work's completion date.
With trendy youth, good taste does not engage:
Like most investments, art improves with age.

Conceptual consumers are bereaved
To find embalmings dated as conceived.
What Brueghel, Bosch or Goya would be bought
Had it been painted later than was thought?
What vandal, boor or charlatan could wish
To drain sublimity from pickled fish?

Velma D. Hyde

Down to Earth

Meteorites are immovable property and belong to those on whose land they happen to fall, according to a judgement by the Swedish appeals court. A thirty-pound iron meteorite which fell in 2020 was appropriated by a couple of geologists, who handed it over to a museum; whereupon the owner of the landing site started legal proceedings. The district court ruled that the meteorite was ownerless; but the appeals court has shown an encouraging degree of Britishness in favouring property values over scientific ones. The judge proclaimed that meteorites have the same legal status as any other stones, because they are composed of the same material; therefore, since iron is present in the Earth's surface, an iron meteorite counts as part of the ground on which it lands. Whether an extraterrestrial visitor whose pseudopodia contained one or more terrestrial elements would automatically owe allegiance to the House of Bernadotte remains as yet undetermined.

Our Rescuers

If further evidence were needed that the brief blip of European cultural dominance is ending, and that the centre of civilisation is moving back to its accustomed Asian home, such evidence may be found in a recent decree by the Prime Minster of Cambodia, who has banned motor vehicles from using musical horns. Should any vehicle be caught with a horn that regurgitates a tunelet and thereby provokes members of the public to inappropriate activity, the police are empowered to enforce summary removal and replacement with a more forthright model. We in the decadent West can only look on with envy, and await the enlightening Asiatic hegemony which may liberate us at last from mobile ringtones and Muzak.

Huge Implications

In its capacity as the mass communications wing of Conservative Central Office, the BBC has grovelled to Reform UK after referring to it as a far-right party and eliciting squeals of lawyerly indignation. Apparently the Board of Directors at Real Provisional Popular Front of the Farage Falange Limited feels that its reputation could be damaged if its purely mainstream blend of Conservative racist thuggishness, Labour racist mendacity, Liberal Democrat adherence to principle and Count Binface polling levels were to be understood as somehow racist and fascistic and thereby essentially un-British. Worse yet, the CEO and his minions might be subjected by Britain's crypto-socialist banking sector to the very same privations that did not befall the strutting Caudillo emeritus at the hard-left hands of Coutts; and perhaps worst of all, at least one place on the BBC's Question Time panel would be vacant every other week and thus vulnerable to woke infiltration.

Plucky Little Natives

Non-governmental and hence necessarily unelected organisations have criticised the Libyan coastguard over its efforts to save British jobs for British workers. Médecins Sans Frontières, whose name incriminatingly combines doctors and lack of border control, was apparently interrupted in its migrant-condoning activities by a coastguard patrol, which despite having a much smaller boat stepped up to the plate in the war against people-traffickers by substantially increasing the chances of the merchandise drowning. Since the present condition of the Libyan state is at least partly to the credit of the Bullingdon Club-Liberal Democrat administration which did so much to bomb it into liberty, the insult by Médecins Sans Frontières could be construed as an insult to Britain's erstwhile Head Boy and current glistening pink Minister for Wogs, Frogs, Huns and Hottentots; particularly as MSF has been so foreign and pro-Palestinian as to invoke, of all things, international law. Whether such defiance of British values makes MSF Muslim enough for the extremism blacklist remains as yet unclear.

Built on Sand

Beachfront property owners in Massachusetts are united in victorious grief after a sacrificial sand dune gave its existence to protect their real estate. Since more solid protections are not allowed, the group paid half a million dollars to pile up fifteen thousand tons of sand, which was washed away within three days. The sponsors of the martyred dune are congratulating themselves on a job well done and, in the great small-state tradition of wealthy Americans, have appealed to Big Government for help. The leader of the Republican minority in the state senate, which the Democrats outnumber nine to one, has been quick to announce that he is personally attempting to find state funding to the value of three further dunes. Given the Trumpster party's disbelief in the climate crisis, the senator no doubt has little concern for protecting the beachfront over nearly a week and a half; nevertheless, the opportunities for steady and reliable employment in creating piles of sand which are regularly washed away can hardly be denied.

Absolutely Astonishing

Greatly to the astonishment of almost nobody at all, an empty slogan has proven to be little more than an empty slogan. "Levelling up" was a guiding principle of the National Johnson régime for at least as long as it took to fool enough of the people enough of the time, and the concept was subsequently delivered unto the proudly inexpert administration of the jabbering homunculus Michael Gove; yet despite these advantages only a tenth of the promised funds have materialised. As might be expected by practically anyone except a professional journalist or a committee drawn from the House of Expenses Claimants, those projects which have been funded are not the low and vulgar sort which might sully their backers by making a difference in the real world; except possibly as regards the fiscal well-being of friendly crooks, chancers and other deserving recipients of Christian forgiveness. Who could possibly have foreseen it?

Please Keep Off the Nation

Last year, in one of its more understated cultural assaults, His Majesty's Government renamed England's areas of outstanding natural beauty as "national landscapes," in recognition that they are not merely beautiful but an asset of the master race. There are thirty-four such areas in England, of which the majority are more than ninety per cent out of bounds to the public, who must rest content with residing for the most part within a convenient travelling distance of the proud patriotic vistas. Nevertheless, certain elements protest that the right to roam should be assumed, despite the obvious dangers to our ever more robust British democracy; for there are, as we forget to our peril, right and wrong ways to want your country back. There is the sensible and moderate, legitimate and understandable way of wanting borders controlled, migrants deported, foreigners reminded who won the war, and reality in general put in its proper place; and there is the extremist way of demanding that the plebs be granted more or less unlimited access to the geographical resources of their betters.

Putin Fails Again

Anonymous sources within His Majesty's Government, which are doubtless as reliable as anyone concerning their well-informed and genuine beliefs, are squealing about the GPS signal on board an RAF aircraft being jammed when it buzzed Russian territory. Unlike aggressor nations with legitimate security concerns, Russia does not have the right to react when closely approached by military aircraft belonging to a hostile alliance. A spokesbeing from the Ministry of Wog-Bombing shrieked that, while the master race can of course take anything the pathetic Russian military throws at it, the jamming was inexcusable, dangerous and wildly irresponsible. Given that at least one of Grant Shapps' aliases was aboard the aircraft, and that their safety was not threatened in any way, it would be difficult for any reasonable person to disagree.

British News for British Readers

Faced with the possibility that certain dusky foreigns are prepared to pay good money for the Maily Toryguff, His Majesty's Government has had a sudden attack of market interventionism. It's one thing to flog off public assets to private companies based outside the UK; it is quite another to allow a traditionally Conservative and now dementedly far-right rag to fall into the hands of a bunch of greasy wogs, however forthright and pragmatic their attitude to human rights. The Toryguff is in imminent peril of being taken over by an unholy hybrid of private investment and foreign government; which would clearly darken its British values far beneath those of the London Evening Tory with its KGB family standards, let alone those of that free and fearless majority of our national Press controlled by the Australo-American paragon whose supreme leadership encompasses alike the Government, the Opposition, and the Plebs.

It Was Good Enough For Eichmann

In yet another paroxysm of toxic un-Britishness, the union for senior civil servants has threatened to use, of all things, the law to determine whether the will of the people and the whims of ministers can be trumped by vexatious legalisms. Britain's sovereign parliament is expected soon to rubber-stamp the Government's wog transportation bill, which incidentally states that ministers have the right to override international law on as limited and specific a basis as seems convenient at the time. The civil service code obliges officials to comply with the law, which even in Global Britain includes international law; and the union, under the leadership of the incriminatingly-surnamed Dave Penman, has raised concerns that the we were only obeying orders defence, famously if unsuccessfully utilised by some patriots at Nuremberg, may not prove altogether effective should civil servants run into trouble for following illegal instructions. Even a clarification by the top civil servant at the Ministry for Wog Control and a senior civil servant in the Ministry of Ministerial Ministrations, to the effect that little people should do as they're told, has not entirely resolved the matter.

Cash Flow

One of Britain's biggest, dirtiest and most profligate moisture provision profiteers has refused to commit any funds to an industry drive towards reducing sewage dumping. Somebody hinted that officials were disappointed, and something called Steve was so disappointed that it had a bit of a burble about the state of the nation's rivers somehow being completely unacceptable, despite fourteen years of upkeep on its own party's watch and despite our recent liberation from the ungreenly Strasbrussels straitjacket. Not only has the Government suddenly noticed that allowing profiteers to dump sewage means that profiteers will dump sewage, but it plans on pushing the water companies to do better by deploying cutting-edge technology and artificial intelligence; either because something called Steve has seen those words in the headlines this week, or else because Fishy Rishi wants to remind Elon Musk that he exists.

Psychological Welfare

Although His Majesty's Government treats the mental health of native shirkers and scroungers with characteristic contempt, it has apparently developed a touching concern for the emotional well-being of the swarming hordes. An enemy of the people has criticised the Idleness Police for their efficient and ultimately fatal exacerbation of a benefits claimant's anxiety issues; by contrast, the Ministry for Wog Warehousing has confirmed that it routinely withholds information from relatives when asylum seekers die in custody. Since there is no evidence of a link between foreign mental illness and His Majesty's Government chalking up another migrant bag, the Ministry has stated that such disclosures would endanger the mental health of the deceased's relatives. In defence of British values, it is expected that Team Starmer will respond with righteous indignation to the idea that the families of migrants should be treated with such excessive consideration while people who have chosen a life on benefits are being placed in a state of permanent economic inactivity.

Indirect Sale

Descendants of the man who allegedly killed England's second Norman king are offering a triptych depicting the Conquest, the king's death and the supposed perpetrator's escape. William II, called Rufus, had little respect for conventional pieties and did not marry or breed, thus making himself odious to the Church and abhorrent to God and provoking rumours of sodomy. Having received brief mention among the denizens of the Gallows and Glockenspiel, he died from an arrow wound which he received while hunting. The arrow was supposedly fired by one Walter Tirel, the son of a knight who had participated in the Battle of Hastings, though the question whether it was carried to the royal lung by God's design or man's has never been satisfactorily resolved. The triptych, which may or may not be authentically Norman, has elicited offers of purchase by potential buyers in Saudi Arabia and the USA; but Tirel's family say they would prefer to reach an agreement with a British public authority about donating it to a museum, which might then be able to stay open for another year or two by selling it to someone in Saudi Arabia or the USA.

Where Charity Begins

In a touching gesture of faith, the Archbishop of Canterbury has taken to carrying a personal alarm to protect him from his brothers in Christ. As the head of an organisation which began with a rabid fundamentalist's urge to destroy the world and which famously loved its enemies to death, the Archbishop took to the pages of a hard-right rag to convey how shocked, shocked, shocked he is that Anglicans are abusing each other instead of sinners, schismatics and immigrants. Apparently the enmity and divisions within society have somehow found their way into the Church, despite the Church's interminable scruples about people's sex lives and despite the Archbishop himself meticulously regurgitating all those moderate and sensible slogans about controlling the swarming hordes and removing the mote in the eye of social media. What can possibly have gone wrong?

Anyone Worth Denouncing is Worth Denouncing Properly

History, even British political history, is full of fine ideas that didn't quite work out in practice. The party of Peel and Disraeli became that of Johnson and Truss; the party of Gladstone and Lloyd George became that of Clegg and Davey; the party of Keir Hardie became that of Keir Starmer. By a miraculous reversion of this process of moral entropy, the Prevent programme has been exalted from its first just cause to encompass ever more expansive vistas of virtue.

Introduced by the Reverend Sir Tony of the Garter after the terrorist response to his personal liberation of the Middle East, Prevent was intended mainly as a Muslim-baiting enterprise, "encouraging" teachers and other public servants to spy out children and teenagers who might one day need their citizenship clipped. A recent review by a Windsor-sniffer and waterboarding enthusiast has predictably led to increased radicalisation, with the definition of potential terrorists expanded to include such eminently Blairite targets as socialism, communism and anti-fascism. In order to ensure a proportionate response, those wishing to nominate someone eligible for "support" must provide the beneficiary's "name, religion, social media name, ethnicity, nationality, main language, immigration or asylum status, and any additional family details," and official materials make clear that no quaint old rules about confidentiality will hinder the sharing of information about neurodivergence, mental and emotional health or "cultural factors." With the exceptions of Mr Churchill's conquest of Europe, and the move to private profiteering that has made the hated National Health Service what it is today, it would be difficult to find a more glorious example of a British political project fulfilling and surpassing its original aim.

Diplomat Dave

Britain's glistening pink Minister for Wogs, Huns and Hottentots, whose statesmanship contributed so much to putting Britain and Libya where they are today, is to take on the mantle of Head Boy for the civilised world and give a minister of the Righteous State a bit of a talking-to on behalf of the World Cop. The beneficiary of this moral uplift will be a political enemy of the Netanyahoo who has taken it upon himself to go absent without official leave in Washington and London. Although Lord Cameron of Piggywick showed little enough interest in preventing conflict, starvation or disease when commencing his party's decade and a half of poor-bashing, cripple-kicking and race-baiting on the mainland, the situation in Gaza has apparently become a bit dreadful nowadays. Indeed, if unelected civil servants were to advise that the Righteous State is in breach of international law, the master race might be forced to interfere with the free market in weapons exports; so clearly the consequences of the Israeli rampage are beginning to verge upon the inconvenient. Nevertheless, even the more saintly factions of the Righteous State remain reluctant to accept a ceasefire in return for the mere resumption of the bantustan solution condoned by Western values; and it is as yet unclear whether the seismic wobbling of his Lordship's moral fibre will prove sufficient to persuade them otherwise.

Oh Goody, Another One

Of course it is always a pleasure when Team Starmer makes a new promise, especially when its source is Michael Gove. The shadow farming minister has proclaimed that a Labour government would end the use of thiomexotham, a pesticide which kills bees, thereby fulfulling a pledge made by the jabbering homunculus during the first rah-rah on the sunlit uplands and broken by the Government four years later. The ban has been submitted for inclusion as a manifesto policy, which might well qualify it as the sort of thing about which Team Starmer would think very seriously and look thoroughly solemn before dismissing it as fiscally heretical and pragmatically unsensible. Meanwhile, there remain slightly more than twenty-eight billion other little reasons for not getting too excited just yet.

Tuned Out

Forty-seven young musicians, exiled from Afghanistan by the heirs of Western civilisation, have concluded a tour of Europe by being refused visas to trouble the peace of the realm with their cacophonous Asiatic dissonances; and in a rare time-saving touch the Ministry for Wog Control has simultaneously refused to consider an appeal against the refusal. The youth orchestra's members have refugee status in Portugal, which must indubitably have counted against them; perhaps almost as much as the hygiene risk of performing freely before the non-English-speaking peoples and the moral taint of holding a concert at the Hamas-run Human Rights Council, whose presence in Geneva constitutes so blatant an insult to the banks and their sacred Nazi gold. Patriots on the mainland will no doubt rejoice that standards of decency and fair play at the Ministry for Wog Control have now attained such exalted levels of Britishness as to rival those of the Taliban.

Thirty Thousand

How blest are we who starve and thirst
For righteousness, and now are filled
By bombs that profitably burst
Until the terrorists are stilled.

Though lacking appetite to stop
The butchery, our virtue flies
On wings of righteousness to drop
A snack or so for each demise.

Hap E Meale

Treason of the Grocers

Despite the benefits of the Japanese Marmite trade and the incalculable advantages of exchanging the beastly Euro-wog market for some whelk stalls in the South Pacific, certain elements of the food industry continue to align themselves with the woke metropolitan Islamist hard-left élite. The Elizabeth the Great Accords brought in to keep Northern Ireland in the civilised world provide for meat and dairy products to be labelled Not for EU when sent from Great Britain to be sold in the absolutely-not-a-colony. This is to prevent sellers bypassing inferior EU quality controls and thus inflicting superior foodstuffs on people too foreign to appreciate them. However, at the insistence of the Conservatives' chums in the Democratic Unionist Party, from October the labelling will apply to all meat and dairy products sold in the UK, and from July 2025 to fruit and vegetables as well, ministers of the Crown presumably exempted. Wilfully unmindful of the benefits to the British consumer, an unpalatable cabal of producers, manufacturers and retailers is protesting about the extra costs, and has even threatened to involve those well-known enemies of the people in the courts should there fail to be, of all things, sensible alternatives.

Let Sleeping Dags Lie

Since those with nothing to hide have nothing to fear, the United Kingdom and one of its chums are apparently withholding evidence to an inquiry into the death of Dag Hammarskjöld, the United Nations secretary general whose plane crashed during his intervention in the 1960s Congo crisis. Although the UN was not at that time entirely controlled by Hamas, the original verdict of pilot error remains controversial and the case was re-opened seven years ago at the behest of a hundred and forty-two UN members who were out of step with the democratic mainstream. Sweden, Zimbabwe and Belgium, which had been the colonial power in the Congo, have all made serious efforts to unearth the relevant records; but the master race and its favourite ally "showed contempt for the UN inquiry," according to the Institute of Commonwealth Studies and the Westminster United Nations Association. Of course the lack of co-operation is understandable, given that the UK has no civil service left and that neither the British nor the American ruling class knows or cares what evidence is; but it still seems curious that nobody has yet thought of going to the government of the Righteous State for its own infallible word on the matter.