..."
"They want in fact to keep the old system going under the cloak of YOUR
Committee, reduced to a cloak and nothing more?"
"That is what it amounts to. They want to have the air of doing
right--indeed they do want to have the FEEL of doing right--and still
leave things just exactly what they were before. And as I suffer under
the misfortune of seeing the thing rather more clearly, I have to
shepherd the conscience of the whole Committee.... But there is a
conscience there. If I can hold out myself, I can hold the Committee."
He turned appealingly to the doctor. "Why should I have to be the
conscience of that damned Committee? Why should I do this exhausting
inhuman job?.... In their hearts these others know.... Only they won't
know.... Why should it fall on me?"
"You have to go through with it," said Dr. Martineau.
"I have to go through with it, but it's a hell of utterly inglorious
squabbling. They bait me. They have been fighting the same fight within
themselves that they fight with me. They know exactly where I am, that I
too am doing my job against internal friction. The one thing before all
others that they want to do is to bring me down off my moral high
horse. And I loathe the high horse. I am in a position of special moral
superiority to men who are on the whole as good men as I am or better.
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