"My dear Julian," replied the doctor, "it is sometimes a little difficult for me to quite get your point of view of our institutions."
"I should think it ought to be easy enough in this case. I feel as if I were an object of public charity."
"Ah!" said the doctor, "you feel that the nation has done you a favor, laid you under an obligation. You must excuse my obtuseness, but the fact is we look at this matter of the economic provision for citizens from an entirely different standpoint. It seems to us that in claiming and accepting your citizen's maintenance you perform a civic duty, whereby you put the nation--that is, the general body of your fellow-citizens--under rather more obligation than you incur."
I turned to see if the doctor were not jesting, but he was evidently quite serious.
"I ought by this time to be used to finding that everything goes by contraries in these days," I said, "but really, by what inversion of common sense, as it was understood in the nineteenth century, do you make out that by accepting a pecuniary provision from the nation I oblige it more than it obliges me?"
"I think it will be easy to make you see that," replied the doctor, "without requiring you to do any violence to the methods of reasoning to which your contemporaries were accustomed. You used to have, I believe, a system of gratuitous public education maintained by the state."
"Yes."
"What was the idea of it?"
"That a citizen was not a safe voter without education."
"Precisely so. The state therefore at great expense provided free education for the people. It was greatly for the advantage of the citizen to accept this education just as it is for you to accept this provision, but it was still more for the interest of the state that the citizen should accept it. Do you see the point?"