[X]
LOW-GRADE CITIZENS
Cooper was in a confidential mood.
"Isn't it true," he said, "that once so often every one of us feels impelled to go out and assassinate a college professor?"
"Why shouldn't one?" said Harding. "No one would miss a professor except, possibly, his wife and the children."
"That's just it, his children," said Cooper. "That's what makes a man hesitate. The particular college professor I have in mind recently published an article on Social Decadence in the North American Review. He deplored the tendency among our well-to-do classes toward small families. At the same time he deplored the mistaken zeal of our low-income classes in trying to more than make up for the negligence of their betters. He said, 'The American population may, therefore, be increasing most rapidly from that group least fitted by heredity or by income to develop social worth in their offspring. Such a process of "reversed selection" must mean, for the nation, a constant decrease in the social worth of each succeeding generation.' He brought forward a good many figures, but I have been so angry that I am quite unable to recall what they are."
"In that case," Harding said, "you should lose no time in seeking out the man and slaying him before his side of the case comes back to you."
"People," said Cooper, with that happy gift of his for dropping a subject to suit his own convenience, "have fallen into the habit of saying that the art of letter-writing is extinct. They say we don't write the way Madame de Sévigné did or Charles Lamb. This is not true.
"For instance, on April 26, 1913, Charles Crawl, a low-income American residing in the soft-coal districts of western Pennsylvania, wrote a letter which I have not been able to get out of my mind. With that unhappy predilection for getting into tight places which is one of the characteristics of our improvident, low-income classes, Charles Crawl happened to be in one of the lower workings of the Cincinnati mine when an explosion of gas—unavoidable, as in all mine disasters—killed nearly a hundred operatives. Charles Crawl escaped injury, but after creeping through the dark for two days he felt his strength going from him, and so, with a piece of chalk, on his smudgy overalls, he wrote the following letter: