Ideas, in and of themselves, are not necessarily the greatest good. A successful businessman recently prefaced his address to a luncheon group with the statement that all economists should be sent to the hospitals for the mentally deranged where they and their theories might rot together. Will his words come to be treasured and quoted through the years?

Frequently we are given assurance that automatically all ideas will be sifted and resifted and in the end only the good ones will survive. But is that not like going to a chemistry laboratory and blindly pouring out liquids and powders from an array of bottles and then, after stirring, expecting a new wonder drug inevitably to result?

What of the efficiency of this natural instrument of free discussion? Is there some magic in it that assures results?

When Peter B. Kyne (Pride of Palomar, 43) informed us in 1921 that we had an instinctive dislike for the Japanese, did the heated debates of the Californians settle the truth or falsity of the proposition?

The Leopard's Spots came from the pen of Thomas Dixon in 1902, and in this he announced an ``unchangeable'' law. If a child had a single drop of Negro blood, he would revert to the ancestral line which, except as slaves under a superior race, had not made one step of progress in 3000 years. That doctrine has been accepted by many, but has it produced good results?

In the same vein, a certain short-story plot has been overworked. The son and heir of a prominent family marries a girl who has tell-tale shadows on the half-moons of her finger nails. In time she presents her aristocratic husband with a coal-black child. Is the world better for having this idea thrust upon it? Will argument and debate decide its truth or falsity?