Apparently this was an example of “dry” Scotch humour.  A neighbouring city had previously banned The Merchant of Venice from its schools on the ground that the character of Shylock was a libel on the Jewish race.  If Jewish children no longer had to pay for school editions of The Merchant of Venice should Scottish infants still have to squander their bawbees on a play that insulted their forbears?  Perish the thought!  “We consider,” they declared, “that if a Jewish gabardine is to be cleaned by American Boards of Education the stain should likewise be removed from the Scottish kilt.”  And if there are no reliable cleaners in the U.S.A. it should be sent to Perth.

The example thus nobly set is being widely followed.  The members of the Southern Jazz-band Union met yesterday way down in Tennessee, and passed a resolution demanding the elimination of Othello from the educational curriculum.  The proposer declared with some heat that “no coloured gentleman would spifflicate his missus wid a bolster on de word of a mean white thief like dat Iago.”  The mere suggestion was dam foolishness and an insult to the most prominent section of the freeborn citizens of the U.S.A.  “If dey gwine whitewash de Scotchman, why not de man ob colour too?”

At a representative meeting of Welshmen Mr. Jones ap Jones moved that, as a protest against SHAKSPEARE’S treatment of Fluellen and the Cymric vegetable symbol, Henry V. “be no longer taught in Welsh schools or read at Jesus College, Oxford, whateffer.”

At a recent meeting of the S.P.R. it was proposed by Sir A. CONAN DOYLE, of Oliver Lodge, Ether, Surrey, “that the Board of Education be asked, in the interests of scientific truth, to suspend the teaching of Hamlet until the scenes in which the Ghost appears shall have been emended in the light of modern research by a committee of psychical experts appointed for the purpose.  The proposer quoted the line spoken by Hamlet to the apparition:—­

  “Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damn’d,”

and said he would like to substitute for it, “Be thou a subjective hallucination arising from an uprush of inhibited emotional disturbance from the subliminal consciousness, or the objectivisation of a telepathic communication from the extra-corporeal sphere of being, or, finally, a manifestation to sensory perception of some supra-normal undulatory movement of the ether.”

He had always deprecated, he said, the meddling of untrained amateurs with the details of psychic phenomena, and felt that the rule should be made retrospective.  An amendment was carried to add Julius Caesar and Richard III. to the motion for similar reasons.

The Labour Party have decided to ask Mr. FISHER to ban Coriolanus on the ground that many of the speeches of the chief character betray an anti-democratic bias, out of keeping with the ideals that should be set before the rising generation.  Phrases like “The mutable rank-scented many,” applied to the proletariat, could only foster the bourgeois prejudices of jaundiced reactionaries and teach the young scions of the capitalist classes to look down upon the manual worker.