“You could say, yes. No one with a criminal record or a family record of offending ought to be allowed to breed, if we have a choice.” “So the criminal law is to be the measure of virtue?” “How else can it be measured? The State can’t look into men’s hearts. All right, it’s rough and ready and we’ll disregard small delinquencies. But why breed from the stupid, the feckless, the violent?”
😕
Something horrific going on here can be fully seen in the history of lynching and lynch mobs in my country. These were public events, sometimes advertised in advance, of extrajudicial killing. The bodies of the victims would be held over fires, hung and mutilated -- in some kind of order. I stress the extrajudicial of these events. Everyone, young and old, who attended were murderers and accessories to murder by any basic civil standard. Out of 7,000+ documented lynchings in America from the end of the Civil War (1865) to Jim Crow (1970), not a single person was convicted of murder for these crimes. On the other hand, anyone who was caught up in a lynching and slaughtered was widely considered /de facto/ as a criminal.
But back to the passage at hand. This is what power looks like. Light, arrogant, creepy; Power.
I feel like the text weights it just right in this section.