I almost thought that there was irony in his tone; but he met my gaze steadily, challengingly, as if to say, “If these are not your views, declare them.”
“One thing I want to know is this,” I said. “The history books make no mention of the blues and the whites. On what do you base the division of the State into these two groups of citizens?”
“That is Doctor Sanson’s doing,” he answered. “The blues are the defectives, the whites the perfect specimens of the race. The whites alone are admitted to posts of responsibility. But most of them prefer not to labor, and live in seclusion upon State pensions for the sake of the race.
“This is considered Doctor Sanson’s crowning achievement for humanity,” David continued. “Before his advent to power, defectives had been living among the normal population since the dawn of history unrecognized. We have now an intricate system of points of deficiency whereby they can be detected infallibly, based partly upon heredity, partly on measurements, partly craniometry and the Binet-Sanson tests.
“Doctor Sanson has long been anxious to pass his sterilization measure, but he has been unable to persuade the Council to face the fierce, ignorant, popular resentment that it would incur, although this practice is of respectable antiquity in China and the Mohammedan world, and was reintroduced to the Occident by progressive America a whole century ago. Of course, the morons and all below a certain grading are not allowed to reproduce their kind; but Sanson wishes to include the high-grade defectives also. However, that would reduce the total productivity, and thus the question bristles with difficulties.”
As I listened to all this jargon I felt more and more bewildered.
“You appear to have created a new aristocracy, then, based on physical perfection,” I said.
“No, there you are wrong, Arnold,” said David. “Our democracy will never endure hereditary privileges. What it has introduced is hereditary disabilities. We simply disqualify from the white, or normal class, the ninety-five per cent who are below the standard. It was progressive America that first conceived the plan of raising man to the level of the hound and the blooded horse.
“Yet,” he continued, “defectives do crop up, even among the offspring of the whites. They are hard to discover; but by the Sanson tests we can discover defectives who are, to all appearance, flawless. This class exists especially among those of unusual mental power, which is in itself a stigma of deficiency. Then there are the men who write our books and paint our pictures in the art factories. They present an anarchical longing for personal license. But they are isolated and never allowed to mingle with the world. Yes, there are odd kinks in the human brain. For instance, there still exists a preposterous sense of nationality, which is being remedied by a system of forced emigration. The Prophet Wells did not entirely estimate in its exactness the tenacity of this illogical notion.
“Then there was that extraordinary outbreak, the Name War. Who could have anticipated that human beings would object to being classified under letters and numbers, for the sake of statistical simplicity? Yet a misguided fifty thousand chose to meet death rather than give up their names. However, Britain is said to be the province of compromises, and it was agreed that the whites should retain two names, and the blues one.”