It is very certain, anyhow, that the Ministry of Brains made at this time too many. No Ministry could have kept so many. There was, for instance, the Pledge to the Married Women, that the unmarried women should be called up for their Mind Training Course before they were. There was the Pledge to the Mining Engineers, that unskilled labour should take the Course before skilled. There was the Pledge to the Parents of Five, that, however high the baby taxes were raised, the parents of six would always have to pay more on each baby. There was the Pledge to the Deficient, that they would not have to take the Mind Training Course at all. This last pledge was responsible for much agitation in Parliament. Distressing cases of imbeciles harried and bullied by the local Brains Boards were produced and enquired into. (Question, "Is it not the case that the Ministry of Brains has become absolutely soulless in this matter of harrying the Imbecile?" Answer, "I have received no information to that effect." Question, "Are enquiries being made into the case of the deficient girl at Perivale Halt who was rejected three times as unfit for the Course and finally examined again and passed, and developed acute imbecility and mumps half-way through the Course?" Answer, "Enquiries are being made." And so on, and so on, and so on.)
But, in the eyes of the general public, the chief testimony to the soullessness of the Ministry was its crushing and ignoring of the claims of the human heart. What could one say of a Ministry who deliberately and coldly stood between lover and lover, and dug gulfs between parent and unborn child, so that the child was either never born at all, or abandoned, derelict, when born, to the tender mercies of the state, or retained and paid for so heavily by fine or imprisonment that the parents might well be tempted to wonder whether after all the unfortunate infant was worth it?
"Him to be taxed!" an indignant parent would sometimes exclaim, admiring her year-old infant's obvious talents. "Why he's as bright as anything. Just look at him.... And little Albert next door, what his parents got a big bonus for, so as you could hear them for a week all down the street drinking it away, he can't walk yet, nor hardly look up when spoke to. Deficient, _I_ calls him. It isn't fair dealing, no matter what anyone says."