Still, there is hope for the future, and England shows signs of awakening! A truly progressive member of a certain board of guardians recently had the temerity to demand tooth-brushes for the pauper children. The worthy mayor who presided at the meeting was nearly paralysed at the audacity of the request. He not only sternly refused, but he denounced it as pampered luxury and extravagance, and he was so roused by the outrageous proposal that he taunted his brother guardians, and said they themselves had probably not indulged in the sinful luxury of a tooth-brush for forty-five years. Possibly, but at any rate it proves that England is really awakening, and that even an infant pauper may some day look forward to the rapture of possessing a tooth-brush!
Yet even bad teeth sometimes find their Nemesis! A very important public position was recently vacant for which there were some two hundred applicants. These slowly resolved themselves down to two--one an able man, and the other an exceptionally able man. They had to have a deciding interview with the arbiter of their fate, so great a man that he is called a personage, and he gave the position to the able man rather than the exceptionally able man. His explanation for his curious choice was quite simple, "He really had such horrid teeth that I could not bear to have him always about."
Has any historian left his testimony as to the teeth of the ancient Romans, when that great nation fell into decadence? Statues all testify that the deterioration did not affect their noses, but I feel sure that if their rigid marble lips could open we should find the first cause of their historic downfall.
As the extinction of a nation is foreordained in its very inception, so the fall of America is possibly already predestined. Well, it may be owing to trusts, but it will not be owing to teeth. All over the American land is heard the busy wheel of the dentist. Hundreds of thousands of dentists are forever filling and scraping and pulling American teeth, and the American people emerge from their dentist chairs and smile broadly, a source of joy to the beholder and not pain. They pay their dentists, if not with rapture, at least with resignation, because they know that their children will inherit good teeth, and it will be a pleasure to kiss them from their cradle on, at all stages. Nor when their young men go out to war will they be declared by the medical examiners unfit because of their bad teeth. Instead, they will clench their good teeth and fight right pluckily, as only those can who attend strictly to business, undisturbed by pain.