"Worse'n here?"
"Much worse," said Justin. "Though I judge we're about where they were eighty or ninety years ago."
"I was in London last week, gov'ment trip. This Hindu diplomat was blamin' us for their troubles."
Justin guessed what was coming and smiled. Hackett went on:
"He said we went over there a century or so ago with our bloody doctors and our bloody anti-biotics and our bloody surplus food and cured their diseases and filled their tummies. We cut down their death rate and now, where they'd had at least a place to lie down, there's hardly room to stand. He claimed it wasn't moral."
"I suppose," murmured Justin, "we should have let them keep on dying like flies."
"That's what I told him, but he said we coulda educated 'em first and maybe they'da turned to family planning."
Justin was grinning.
"Education on an empty stomach? Like which comes first, the chick or the egg? Rats! Education wasn't the answer. We had more schools than anywhere, but it happened here. We had two hundred million people back in 1975 and today we've got a billion. Which just proves that old Tom Malthus was right: the population outruns the food supply every time if you don't keep it down with war, famine, disease or sexual discipline."
"And I guess," grunted Hackett, "we can't put a cop in every bedroom." He colored. "Sorry, Doris."