“Not at all. I would simply stimulate them to work; if they were unfit to work, they must die. I would not prevent anybody giving them food and shelter, though I would teach people that by so doing they were hindering the great law of Nature—the survival of the fittest.” “What about hospitals for consumptives, asylums for idiots and other shelters for hopeless cases?” “Oh! while there was a reasonable chance of restoring a consumptive person to health, and enabling him to work, I would do what I could for him. If his case became quite hopeless, I would have him mercifully despatched, that he might not burden the State. As for idiots, the subjects of incurable mental disease, cripples that could do nothing useful, and all other maimed and useless people, I would get rid of them in the same way—of course under the most careful restrictions against abuse.” “Don’t you think the State should refuse permission to marry to people who cannot produce a certificate of perfect health from a physician employed by the Government, with a view of checking the multiplication of consumptive and ill-developed folk?” “Certainly; that is in my scheme for an ideal republic.” “I think I know,” said Elsworth, “many beautiful souls whose work in the world is of the highest value to our day and generation, who would not have been here had any such regulation been in force.” “That may be,” replied the advanced one; “but there would be no room for their energies in my ideal world. Where all were strong and healthful, all mentally well developed, there would be no weakness, disease, or sorrow to assist.” “And the highest perfection of man would be extinct in a selfish, unfeeling strength;” said Elsworth, turning to a pretty little girl at a table, who was bending over a dish of wild flowers. “Are you botanising, Miss Gordon?” “No; I was listening to your conversation, and thinking how unlovely a place all these new ideas will make the world when they come to predominate. Beauty will be eliminated. Don’t you think flowers were meant to delight us as well as the insects?” “Of course; and I agree with Emerson that ‘flowers are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.’” “This is such a dreadfully utilitarian age that one has almost to apologise for holding such sentiments,” said she. “Not at all, if we hold with Ruskin that the most perfectly useful is always the most perfectly beautiful thing—there is direct relation between the two. It is ever these half-statements which are the greatest lies. Truth is full-orbed; it is the broken arcs that are half in shadow.” He is not very wise who has never erred; and, if the truth must be told, our hero was, to say the least, wasting his time in a society composed of vain and unreal people, who could teach him nothing but that we are “only cunning casts in clay.”