tepped forward to sum up the case. "You must not
think, your Honour, that it is our desire to embarrass your
administration. Bad as conditions are, we would have continued to suffer
in silence, because, you see, there are still little flashes of freedom
left to us children. But we have learned that there is now on foot in
England a movement which threatens to reduce us to unmitigated slavery.
We understand that Mr. Sidney Webb, Mr. Francis Galton, Professor Karl
Pearson, and Mr. Bernard Shaw are advocating a scheme of state endowment
for motherhood. Now you can see for yourself what that would mean. In
politics it would mean the establishment of a motherhood suffrage with
plural voting based on the size of the family. In the economic sphere it
would mean that we shall be supporting our papas and mammas. In art,
which must reflect the actualities of life, it would mean almost the
elimination of the element of love, since the world is to be a
children's world. In other words, as I have already said, the entire
social fabric will come to press on our shoulders alone. It is against
the mere possibility of such an unnatural state of affairs that we are
here to protest."

"But what is it you want?" asked the mayor, somewhat nettled because
O'Brien, instead of backing him up, was busy piling three million
golden dollars on the floor in stacks two and a half feet high.

"We want to be left alone!" The reply came in a chorus of trebles,
pipings, quavers, and adolescent falsettos that caused the mayor to lift
his hands to his forehead entreating silence. "We want our old
privileges again. We want to be allowed just to grow up."

"Yassir," shrilled one voice above the others, "jist to grow up."

The mayor raised himself in his chair and his eyes lit up with surprise
at the sight of a well-known black little face at the very end of the
second row.

"What, Topsy, you here?" he called out. "Haven't you done growing all
these sixty years, nearly?"

"Yassir," answered Topsy, inserting an index finger into her mouth. "Ah
was shure growin' fas'; but Massa Booker Washin'ton he says that ah and
the likes of me was charged with th' future of the negro race. An' that
skyeered me so ah made up mah mind ah wouldn' grow no further."

The mayor turned to Helen. "You understand of course, my dear, that I
cannot lay a proposition of so vague a nature before the Board of
Aldermen. They are a rather unimaginative set of men."

"We have draw