the spread of modern nervous disorders, of toothless youth and
thrice loathsome age among the helot-classes? Do you know that in the
course of my late journey to London, I walked from Piccadilly Circus to
Hyde Park Corner, during which time I observed some five hundred
people, of whom twenty-seven only were perfectly healthy, well-formed
men, and eighteen healthy, beautiful women? On every hand--with a
thrill of intensest joy, I say it!--is to be seen, if not yet
commencing civilisation, then progress, progress--wide as the
world--toward it: only here--at the heart--is there decadence, fatty
degeneration. Brain-evolution--and favouring airs--and the ripening
time--and the silent Will of God, of God--all these in conspiracy seem
to be behind, urging the whole ship's company of us to some undreamable
luxury of glory--when lo, this check, artificial, evitable. Less death,
more disease--that is the sad, the unnatural record; children
especially--so sensitive to the physician's art--living on by hundreds
of thousands, bearing within them the germs of wide-spreading sorrow,
who in former times would have died. And if you consider that the
proper function of the doctor is the strictly limited one of curing the
curable, rather than of self-gloriously perpetuating the incurable, you
may find it difficult to give a quite rational answer to this simple
question: _why?_ Nothing is so sure as that to the unit it is a
cruelty; nothing so certain as that to humanity it is a wrong; to say
that such and such an one was sent by the All Wise, and must
_therefore_ be not merely permitted, but elaborately coaxed and forced,
to live, is to utter a blasphemy against Man at which even the ribald
tongue of a priest might falter; and as a matter of fact, society, in
just contempt for this species of argument, never hesitates to hang,
for its own imagined good, its heaven-sent catholics, protestants,
sheep, sheep-stealers, etc. What then, you ask, would I do with these
unholy ones? To save the State would I pierce them with a sword, or
leave them to the slow throes of their agonies? Ah, do not expect me to
answer that question--I do not know what to answer. The whole spirit of
the present is one of a broad and beautiful, if quite thoughtless,
humanism, and I, a child of the present, cannot but be borne along by
it, coerced into sympathy with it. "Beautiful" I say: for if anywhere
in the world you have seen a sight more beautiful than a group of
ho