uld be let in. I would put
these people for a time in a place by themselves where the people who
want to keep them from trying or learning, could not get at them.

Then I would let them try.

I would put the humdrum people in another place by themselves and let
them humdrum, the respectable people by themselves and let them
respectabilize.

Then after my try-world had tried, and got well started and the people
in it had finished off some things and knew what they wanted, I would
allow the humdrums and the respectabilities to be let in--to do what
they were told.

Doing what they are told is what they like. So they would be happy.

Of course doing what they are told is what is the matter with them. But
what is the matter with them would be useful.

And everybody would be happy.

* * * * *

When the Titanic went down a little while ago and those few quiet men on
deck began their duty in that soft, gracious moonlit night, of sorting
out the people who should die from the people who should live--if one
was a woman one could live. If one was a man one could die.

No one will quarrel with the division as the only possible or endurable
one that could have been made.

But if God himself could have made the division or some super-man ship's
officer who could have represented God, could have made it, it is not
hard to believe that a less superficial, a more profound and human
difference between people would have been used in sorting out the people
who should live from the people who should die than a difference in
organs of reproduction.

The women were saved first because the men were men and because it was
the way the men felt. It expressed the men who were on the deck that
night that the women should be saved first; it was the last chance they
had to express themselves like men and they wanted to do it.

But if God himself could have made the division with the immediate and
conclusive knowledge of who everybody was, of what they really were in
their hearts, and of what they and their children and their children's
children would do for the world if they lived no one would have
quarrelled with God for making what would have seemed at the moment, no
doubt, very unreasonable and ungallant and impossible-looking
discriminations in sorting out the people who should live from the
people who should die.

Possibly even Man (using the word with a capital), acting from the point
of view of