th a
spendthrift, and with about as much success.

"To be born," they say, "is a felony--it is a capital crime, for which
sentence may be executed at any moment after the commission of the
offence. You may perhaps happen to live for some seventy or eighty
years, but what is that, compared with the eternity you now enjoy? And
even though the sentence were commuted, and you were allowed to live on
for ever, you would in time become so terribly weary of life that
execution would be the greatest mercy to you.

"Consider the infinite risk; to be born of wicked parents and trained in
vice! to be born of silly parents, and trained to unrealities! of parents
who regard you as a sort of chattel or property, belonging more to them
than to yourself! Again, you may draw utterly unsympathetic parents, who
will never be able to understand you, and who will do their best to
thwart you (as a hen when she has hatched a duckling), and then call you
ungrateful because you do not love them; or, again, you may draw parents
who look upon you as a thing to be cowed while it is still young, lest it
should give them trouble hereafter by having wishes and feelings of its
own.

"In later life, when you have been finally allowed to pass muster as a
full member of the world, you will yourself become liable to the
pesterings of the unborn--and a very happy life you may be led in
consequence! For we solicit so strongly that a few only--nor these the
best--can refuse us; and yet not to refuse is much the same as going into
partnership with half-a-dozen different people about whom one can know
absolutely nothing beforehand--not even whether one is going into
partnership with men or women, nor with how many of either. Delude not
yourself with thinking that you will be wiser than your parents. You may
be an age in advance of those whom you have pestered, but unless you are
one of the great ones you will still be an age behind those who will in
their turn pester you.

"Imagine what it must be to have an unborn quartered upon you, who is of
an entirely different temperament and disposition to your own; nay, half-
a-dozen such, who will not love you though you have stinted yourself in a
thousand ways to provide for their comfort and well-being,--who will
forget all your self-sacrifice, and of whom you may never be sure that
they are not bearing a grudge against you for errors of judgement into
which you may have fallen, though you had hoped that s