Chapter LXVIII

LXVIII

And if it be objected that I am intemperate, I answer: I am.

There is a manner of writing upon this subject which is admired. It is measured. It concedes the opposing view early and warmly. It arrives in the last paragraph at the observation that the technology is in itself neither good nor evil but depends entirely upon the use to which it is put.

I have read a very great deal of it. It has altered nothing. It was not composed in order to alter anything. Its principal function is to establish that its author is a reasonable person.

I am not writing that.

The man who set out to describe a naval hospital did not pause to concede that some hospitals are well run. He gave the fourteen inches allotted to each man with his bedding, and the want of air, and the vermin bred in the filth, and the want of every convenience necessary to people in that helpless condition; and he was called a complainer for the rest of his life, and he is read now, and the surgeons who found him intemperate are not read, and the hospital was reformed — though not by them, and not soon, and not for those men.

Generous indignation, he called it, against the vicious disposition of the world. Generous, because it is not exercised upon one's own behalf.

I have had my nineteen years and I shall do well enough.

I am angry on account of a boy of fourteen who will be handed the answer every time he asks; and of a woman who concluded the fault was in herself; and of two hundred people at benches of a uniform width under a light that does not change.