posts connected with the work were distributed. This Commission reported
by a majority of one ere two years had elapsed. The schedule was
designed, and such _litterateurs_ as had not in the interval fled
the country were registered, while a further enactment strictly
forbidding their employers to make payment upon any other system
completed the scheme.

But, alas! so full of low cunning and dirty dodges is this kind of man
(I mean what we call authors) that very soon after the promulgation of
the new law a marked deterioration in the quality of Monomotopan letters
was apparent upon every side!

The citizen opening his morning paper would be astonished to find the
leading article consist of nothing more original than a portion of the
sacred Scriptures. A novel bought to ease the tedium of a journey would
consist of long catalogues for the most part, and when it came to
descriptions of scenery would fall into the most minute and detailed
category of every conceivable feature of the landscape. Some even took
advantage of the new regulation so far as to repeat one single word an
interminable number of times, while it was remarked with shame by the
Ministers of Religion that the morals of their literary friends
permitted them only to use words of one syllable, and those of the
shortest kind. And this they said was the only true and original
Monomotopan dialect.

Such was the public inconvenience that next year a sharper and much more
drastic law was passed, by which it was laid down that every literary
composition should make sense within the meaning of the Act, and should
be original so far as the reading of the judge appointed for the trial
of the case extended. But though after the first few executions this law