"Impossible!" said the Bibliomaniac, chuckling over his opportunity.
"Green-eyed monster!" smiled the Idiot. "But speaking of this overcrowding of the profession, it is a surprise to me, Doctor, that so many young men are taking up medicine these days, when competent observers everywhere tell us that the world is getting better all the time.
"If that is true, and the world really is getting better all the time, it is fair to assume that some day it will be entirely well, and then, let me ask you, what is to become of all the doctors? It will not be a good thing for Society ever to reach a point where it has such an army of unemployed on its hands, and especially that kind of an army, made up as it will be of highly intelligent but desperately hungry men, face to face with starvation, and yet licensed by the possession of a medical diploma to draw, and have filled, prescriptions involving the whole range of the materia medica, from Iceland moss and squills up to prussic acid and cyanide of potassium.
"It makes me shudder to think of it!" said Mr. Brief, the lawyer, with a grin at the Doctor.
"Shudder isn't the word!" said the Idiot. "The bare idea makes my flesh creep like a Philadelphia trolley car! Coxey's Army was bad enough, made up as it was of a poor, miserable lot of tramps and panhandlers, all so unused to labor as to be really jobshy; but in their most riotous moods the worst those poor chaps could do was to heave a few bricks or a dead cat through a millinery shop window, or perhaps bat a village magnate on the back of the head with a bed slat. There was nothing insidiously subtle about the warfare they waged upon Society.
"But suppose that, laboring under a smarting sense of similar wrongs, there should come to be such a thing as old Doctor Pepsin's Army of Unemployed Physicians and Surgeons, marching through the country, headed for the White House in order to make an impressive public demonstration of their grievances! What a peril to the body politic that would be! Not only could the surgeons waylay the village magnates and amputate their legs, and seize hostile editors and cut off the finger with which they run their typewriting machines, and point with alarm with; but the more insidious means of upsetting the public weal by pouring calomel into our wells, putting castor oil in our reservoirs, leaving cholera germs and typhoid cultures under our door mats, or transferring a pair of jackass's legs to the hind-quarters of an old family horse, found grazing in the pasture, would transform a once smiling countryside into a scene of misery and desolation."
"Poor, poor Dobbin!" murmured the Bibliomaniac.
"Indeed, Mr. Bib, it will be poor, poor Dobbin!" said the Idiot. "I don't think that many people besides you and myself realize how desperately serious a menace it is that hangs over us; and I feel that one of the first acts of the Administration, after it has succeeded in putting grape juice into the Constitution as our national tipple, and constructed a solid Portland cement wall across the Vice President's thorax to insure that promised four years of silence, should be an effort to control this terrible situation."
"You talk as if it could be done," said the Doctor doubtfully.
"Of course it can be done," said the Idiot. "Doctors being engaged in Inter-State Commerce—"