“Well, my boy, you have the making of a social reformer in you. I don’t know that I ever gave the subject much thought. I have been too busy with—”
“Too busy trying to cure results to inquire into causes, eh, doctor?”
“Why, I—that is, not exactly,” I stammered, “you know, my boy, that—”
“Oh, yes, I understand, old fellow, you are not quite blind to such things, but you don’t propose either to pose as a Hercules cleaning out the Augean stables, or expose yourself to the same sort of ridicule as did Don Quixote when he challenged the wind-mills. Shame on you, doctor! Be a good Philistine and snap your fingers at conventionalities!”
“See here, my young friend, I am practicing medicine for a livelihood, and I can’t afford to be radical in my views. It’s all well enough to scarify society, if you don’t depend upon it for bread and butter—but in my case it’s different, and I must be careful.”
Young Smith shrugged his shoulders somewhat contemptuously, and replied:
“What a queer world! You fellows work like a dog in a treadmill all your lives, trying to make enough hay while the sun is shining, to enable you to take some comfort by and by. When the ‘by and by’ comes, you have lost the capacity for enjoyment. You slave from morning till night, to acquire a competency—and the brains—that will enable you to be independent in thought and action. Then, when the wished-for time does come, you—well, you roll over like a fish and die. Always going to have a good time—some day; always going to be a Philistine—some day; always looking ahead into that undiscovered country where lies—the grave. Your ambition ends in six feet of earth. Pshaw! how you people irritate me! Why not learn to labor and to loaf?”
My visitor’s words impressed me more than I would have been willing to acknowledge.
“Heigho!” I exclaimed, “I don’t know but you are right, my boy, and yet, I don’t exactly see how I can help matters much.”
“There’s one thing you can do, doctor, you can at least make the effort to impress upon the public the necessity of treating human beings with the same degree of intelligence and consideration that you bestow upon animals. Get rid of that idiotic, sentimental moonshine about ‘joining two souls in wedlock’ and come down to the common-sense basis of a union for a specific, organic purpose between two bipeds, that are or should be, subject to the same laws as other animals. Do this and there will be fewer hideous heads and miserable legs like mine.”