course not," he said quickly. "I used it to prove to you that
this is one way of looking at a less concrete case. Carry this soft
headed thinking a couple of steps higher. Medical science has made it
possible for the human race to dilute its strength. Epileptics are saved
to breed epileptics; haemophiliacs are preserved, neurotics are ironed
out, weaknesses of all kinds are kept alive to breed their strain of
weakness."

"Just what has this to do with me and my future?" I asked.

"Quite a lot. I'm trying to make you agree that there are quite a lot of
undeserving characters here on Earth."

"Did I ever deny it?" I asked him pointedly, but he took it as not
including present company.

But I could see where Thorndyke was heading. First eliminate the lice on
the body politic. Okay, so I am blind and cannot see the sense of
incarcerating a murderer that has to be fed, clothed, and housed at my
expense for the rest of his natural life. Then for the second step we
get rid of weaklings, both physical and mental. I'll call Step Two
passably okay, but--? Number Three includes grifters, beggars, bums, and
guys out for the soft touch and here I begin to wonder. I've known some
entertaining grifters, beggars, and bums; a few of them chose their way
of life for their own, just as I became a mechanical engineer.

The trouble with this sort of philosophy is that it starts off with an
appeal to justice and logic (I'm quoting myself), but it quickly gets
dangerous. Start knocking off the bilge-scum. Then when the lowest
strata of society is gone, start on the next. Carry this line of
reasoning out to straight Aristotelian Logic and you come up with
parties like you and me, who may have been quite acceptable when
compared to the whole cross-section of humanity, but who now have no one
but his betters to compete with.

I had never reasoned this out before, but as I did right there and then,
I decided that Society cannot draw lines nor assume a static pose.
Society must move constantly, either in one direction or the other. And
while I object to paying taxes to support some rattlehead for the rest
of his natural life, I'd rather have it that way than to have someone
start a trend of bopping off everybody who has not the ability to absorb
the educational level of the scholar. Because, if the trend turned
upward instead of downward, that's where the dividing line would end.

Anarchy at one end, is as bad as tyranny at the other--