I am sorry for the man who took his typewriter on the Underground and was made to buy a bicycle-ticket for it. But I have no doubt he deserved it. I am sure that he did it in spiritual pride. He was trying to make himself equal to the manual labourer who carries large bags of tools on the Tube and sighs heavily as he lays them on your foot. I am sure that he was tired of being scornfully regarded by manual labourers, and was determined to make it quite clear that he too had done, or was about to do, a day's labour, and manual labour at that. It was a sinful motive and it deserved to be punished; but it was natural. Nowadays we all feel like that. We caught it from the War, when the great thing was to show that you were doing more work than anybody else.

I take from a recent copy of Hansard[1] the following brisk and delicate piece of dialogue:—

"Mr. Macquisten: You Labour men have forgotten what sweat is.

Mr. W. Thorne: I have never seen many lawyers sweat, anyhow.

Mr. Speaker: This discussion is becoming intemperate.

An Hon. Member: The Hon. Member for Springburn never sweated in his life.

Mr. Macquisten: Yes, I have laboured in the docks."

That is it, you see. Sweating is the great criterion of usefulness to-day. If you cannot show that you have sweated in the past, you must at least show that you are sweating now, or have every intention of sweating in a moment or two. Personally, as a private secretary, I find it very difficult, though I do my best. As a private secretary I labour in a rich house in the notoriously idle neighbourhood of South Kensington, where nobody would believe that anybody laboured, much less perspired over it. So when I pass, on the way to my rich house, a builder's labourer or a milkman or a dustman, I have to exhibit as clearly as I can all the signs of a harsh employment and industrial fatigue. I take great pains about this; I walk much faster; I frown heavily and I look as pale as possible. In the Tube I close my eyes. I hope all this is effective, but as far as I can see the milkman never looks at me, and the builder is always saying to another builder, "'E says to me, 'Wot abaht it?' 'e says, and I says to 'im, 'Yus, wot abaht it?' I says." But it is worth the effort.

Well, that is why that poor man was carrying a typewriter. I wonder why everybody else in the Tube carries an "attachÉ-case." It has been calculated that if all the attachÉ-cases which get on to the train at Hammersmith at 9 a.m. were left on the platform, six men or twelve women or three horses could take their place in every car. That means about ninety more men or one-hundred-and-eighty more women or forty-five more horses could leave Hammersmith between 9 a.m. and 9.30. So that if attachÉ-cases were forbidden the traffic problem would be practically solved.

Why shouldn't they be forbidden? It depends, of course, on what is inside the cases; and nobody knows that for certain. But one can guess. I have been guessing for a long time. At first I thought they were full of very confidential papers. In the old days the attachÉ-case was the peculiar trademark of private secretaries and diplomats and high-up people like that. Even attachÉs carried them sometimes. The very lowest a man with an attachÉ-case could be was a First-Class Civil Servant; and one was justified in imagining confidential papers inside, or, at any rate, home-work of the first importance. But nowadays there are too many of them for that. The attachÉ-case has been degraded; it is universal. This might be because there is practically no male person alive just now who has not been an adjutant at one time or another, and pinched at least one attachÉ-case from the orderly-room. But most of the cases in the Tube are carried by females, so that theory is no good.

Well, then, I imagined sandwiches or knitting or powder-puffs or tea; but those also are rotten hypotheses. I have too much faith in the good sense of my fellow-countrywomen to believe that they would cart a horrible thing like a cheap attachÉ-case about simply in order to convey a sandwich or a powder-puff from one end of London to the other. So I had to fall back on my own experience.

I know, at any rate, what is inside mine. There are some rather grubby envelopes which I borrowed from the House of Commons, and some very grubby blotting-paper from the same source, and either a ream of foolscap or a quire of foolscap, whichever is which; some pipe-cleaners and a few pieces of milk-chocolate; and a letter from the Amalgamated Association of Fish-Friers which ought to have been answered a long time ago; and a memorandum on Hog-Importing which I am always going to read while waiting at the station; and a nice piece of thick string with which I have tied a bowline on a bight; and two broken pencils and some more envelopes; and a Parliamentary Whip of last year and a stationery bill of the year before; and several bills of my employer, not to mention a cheque for ninety-seven pounds which I suppose he would like me to send to the bank; and a great deal of fluff and a pipe or two and four or five stamped letters which it is now too late to post. That is all there is in my case.

But I carry it backwards and forwards, in and out, to and fro, day after day; and the only time it is ever opened at either end of the journey is when, in addition to the articles previously mentioned, it contains bottles. But I do not carry it for the sake of bottles; far from it. I am one of those men who do not mind going about with a comparatively naked bottle. I carry it simply because it is the tool of my trade, and because, if you don't carry a tool of some kind on the Underground, at any moment you may be taken for an idle rich, if not actually a parasite, who never sweated in his life.

And that, I am persuaded, is why everybody else carries theirs.

But this is a very serious conclusion. It will be a terrible thing if everyone is going to carry the tools of his trade about with him to show that he has a trade; the barrister his briefs, the doctor his stethoscope or his shiny black bag; the butcher his chopper; the dentist—but no, we cannot have that. There must be other ways. We might wear badges, as we did in the War, only they would be office badges and trade badges, instead of regimental badges or discharged badges. Then we should have again the dear old war-game of trying to read what was on them without being rude. That is what one really misses in public places in these days of Peace—that and the uniforms.

It was easy to make conversation in a restaurant in the old days, when people kept on coming in in curious uniforms, and the ladies wondered what they were and the men pretended they knew all about them. But all that is dead now, and I think these sweat-badges would supply a serious want.

But what will the author wear? And who will believe that he ever breaks into beads of perspiration at his labour?

A. P. H.