‘We had Elementary Sex for the first forty minutes,’ she answered. ‘But now it’s switched over to Elementary Class Consciousness.’

The Director walked slowly down the long line of cots. Rosy and relaxed with sleep, eighty little boys and girls lay softly breathing. There was a whisper under every pillow. The D.H.C. halted and, bending over one of the little beds, listened attentively.

‘Elementary Class Consciousness, did you say? Let’s have it repeated a little louder by the trumpet.’

At the end of the room a loud-speaker projected from the wall. The Director walked up to it and pressed a switch.

‘…all wear green,’ said a soft but very distinct voice, beginning in the middle of a sentence, ‘and Delta Children wear khaki. Oh no, I don’t want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They’re too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides, they wear black, which is such a beastly colour. I’m so glad I’m a Beta.’

There was a pause; then the voice began again.

‘Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they’re so frightfully clever. I’m really awfully glad I’m a Beta, because I don’t work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don’t want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They’re too stupid to be able…’

The Director pushed back the switch. The voice was silent. Only its thin ghost continued to mutter from beneath the eighty pillows.

‘They’ll have that repeated forty or fifty times more before they wake; then again on Thursday, and again on Saturday. A hundred and twenty times three times a week for thirty months. After which they go on to a more advanced lesson.’

Roses and electric shocks, the khaki of Deltas and a whiff of asafœtida—wedded indissolubly before the child can speak. But wordless conditioning is crude and wholesale; cannot bring home the finer distinctions, cannot inculcate the more complex courses of behaviour. For that there must be words, but words without reason. In brief, hypnopædia.

‘The greatest moralizing and socializing force of all time.’

The students took it down in their little books. Straight from the horse’s mouth.

Once more the Director touched the switch.

‘…so frightfully clever,’ the soft, insinuating, indefatigable voice was saying. ‘I’m really awfully glad I’m a Beta, because…’

Not so much like drops of water, though water, it is true, can wear holes in the hardest granite; rather, drops of liquid sealing-wax, drops that adhere, incrust, incorporate themselves with what they fall on, till finally the rock is all one scarlet blob.

‘Till at last the child’s mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child’s mind. And not the child’s mind only. The adult’s mind too—all his life long. The mind that judges and desires and decides—made up of these suggestions. But all these suggestions are our suggestions!’ The Director almost shouted in his triumph. ‘Suggestions from the State.’ He banged the nearest table. ‘It therefore follows…’

A noise made him turn round.