se
their possessors from household cares, while the women of the merely
well-to-do and poorer classes lived and died martyrs to them."

"Yes," said Mrs. Leete, "I have read something of that; enough to
convince me that, badly off as the men, too, were in your day, they
were more fortunate than their mothers and wives."

"The broad shoulders of the nation," said Dr. Leete, "bear now like a
feather the burden that broke the backs of the women of your day.
Their misery came, with all your other miseries, from that incapacity
for cooperation which followed from the individualism on which your
social system was founded, from your inability to perceive that you
could make ten times more profit out of your fellow men by uniting
with them than by contending with them. The wonder is, not that you
did not live more comfortably, but that you were able to live together
at all, who were all confessedly bent on making one another your
servants, and securing possession of one another's goods."

"There, there, father, if you are so vehement, Mr. West will think you
are scolding him," laughingly interposed Edith.

"When you want a doctor," I asked, "do you simply apply to the proper
bureau and take any one that may be sent?"

"That rule would not work well in the case of physicians," replied Dr.
Leete. "The good a physician can do a patient depends largely on his
acquaintance with his constitutional tendencies and condition. The
patient must be able, therefore, to call in a particular doctor, and
he does so just as patients did in your day. The only difference is
that, instead of collecting his fee for himself, the doctor collects
it for the nation by pricking off the amount, according to a regular
scale for medical attendance, from the patient's credit card."

"I can imagine," I said, "that if the fee is always the same, and a
doctor may not turn away patients, as I suppose he may not, the good
doctors are called constantly and the poor doctors left in idleness."

"In the first place, if you will overlook the apparent conceit of the
remark from a retired physician," replied Dr. Leete, with a smile, "we
have no poor doctors. Anybody who pleases to get a little smattering
of medical terms is not now at liberty to practice on the bodies of
citizens, as in your day. None but students who have passed the severe
tests of the schools, and clearly proved their vocation, are permitted
to practice. Then, too, you will observe that there i