"Certain doctors and other persons permitted by law to dictate to their shabbier fellow-citizens sent out an order that all little girls should have their hair cut short. I mean of course, all little girls whose parents were poor. Now the case for this particular interference was this, that the poor are pressed down from above into such stinking and suffocating underworlds of squalor, that the poor people must not be allowed to have hair, because in their case it must mean lice in the hair. Therefore, the doctors propose to abolish the hair. It never seems to have occurred to them to abolish the lice...the lesson of lice in the slums is the wrongness of slums, not the wrongness of hair...it is only by eternal institutions like hair that we can test passing institutions like empires." - "What's Wrong with the World" by G.K. Chesterton, 1910 ---------------------------------------------------------------- This is the Neither public email list, open for the public and general discussion. To unsubscribe click here Mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Subject=unsubscribe To subscribe click here Mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Subject=subscribe For information on [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.neither.org/lists/public-list.htm For archives http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]
