“The answer was State rearing, Arnold, as had been urged by many men and some women of liberal and progressive minds. We tried that in 2002. Elizabeth was torn from me. For six months we had public crèches in every city. There was much public dissatisfaction, though the children were not taken from their mothers till they had been weaned. That was the time when the Guard was formed, consisting of Janissaries trained from youth by the Council and pledged to them. However, what caused the abandonment of the crèche system was a quite unexpected happening. Despite the utmost care, despite a process of automatic feeding in germ-proof incubators, which made it impossible for any of the little inmates to lack the advantages of the latest hygienic theories, the children died. “This phenomenon was never explained satisfactorily, and the mortality, which ranged from eighty to ninety per cent, shocked the Province profoundly, for it meant an intolerable lessening in the productivity of the next generation. The children were returned to their parents. Elizabeth, who was above the age curve of maximum mortality, came back to me, and, in spite of rigorous inspection by the officials of the Children’s Bureau, I have managed to keep her. “But I must be brief, Arnold. I have told you that it was decreed no faith was to be kept with defectives. The net was cast over all who, trusting to the proclamation, had returned from the forests and waste places, and from abroad. Gradually they were sorted out and ascribed. Many records of heredity had disappeared during the Revolution, but they had my father’s in the Bureau of Pedigrees and Relationships. Since then I have waited in suspense daily. They know it, and, if I have not been condemned to the workshops, it is through Lembken’s favor, for he was head of the Strangers’ Bureau before the assassination of Boss Rose, and I worked under him.” “But is there no law?” I cried. “Is there no charter of liberty at all?” “Why, yes, Arnold. We still have Magna Charta, and Habeas Corpus, and many other documents, and occasionally these are invoked. There is an old man in the paper shops who has appealed against imprisonment and carried his case through twenty or thirty courts since he was shut up as a boy, and if he lives long enough his appeal will come before the Council. But you see, Arnold, one of the first acts of the victorious democracy was to institute the election and the recall of judges. “They think I fear for my own liberty,” he continued, beginning to pace the floor. “They do not know—happily they do not know.” Then he went on to tell me that which concerned the girl’s arrest that afternoon.