d, ready to start learning
immediately.

"Yes. I pointed one of them out to you some time ago: emotional
involvement with local groups. You began sympathizing with the servile
class here almost immediately. I don't think either of us learned
anything about them that the other didn't, yet I found them despicable,
one and all. Why did you think them worthy of your sympathy?"

"Why, because...." For a moment, that was as far as he could get. His
motivation had been thalamic rather than cortical and he was having
trouble externalizing it verbally. "They were _slaves_. They were being
exploited and oppressed...."

"And, of course, their exploiters were a lot of heartless villains, so
that made the slaves good and virtuous innocents. That was your real,
fundamental, mistake. You know, Obray, the downtrodden and
long-suffering proletariat aren't at all good or innocent or virtuous.
They are just incompetent; they lack the abilities necessary for overt
villainy. You saw, this afternoon, what they were capable of doing when
they were given an opportunity. You know, it's quite all right to give
the underdog a hand, but only one hand. Keep the other hand on your
pistol--or he'll try to eat the one you gave him! As you may have
noticed, today, when underdogs get up, they tend to turn out to be
wolves."

"What do you think this Commonwealth will develop into, under Chmidd and
Hozhet and Khouzhik and the rest?" Lanze Degbrend asked, to keep the
lecture going.

"Oh, a slave-state, of course; look who's running it, and whom it will
govern. Not the kind of a slave-state we can do anything about," he
hastened to add. "The Commonwealth will be very definite about
recognizing that sapient beings cannot be property. But all the rest of
the property will belong to the Commonwealth. Remember that remark of
Chmidd's: 'It will belong to everybody, but somebody will have to take
care of it for everybody. That will be you and me.'"

Erskyll frowned. "I remember that. I didn't like it, at the time. It
sounded...."

Out of character, for a good and virtuous proletarian; almost Masterly,
in fact. He continued:

"The Commonwealth will be sole employer as well as sole property-owner,
and anybody who wants to eat will have to work for the Commonwealth on
the Commonwealth's terms. Chmidd's and Hozhet's and Khouzhik's, that is.
If that isn't substitution of peonage for chattel slavery, I don't know
what the word peonage means. But you'll do no