l count
for an aggravation rather than a palliative; when a higher conception of
the duties of humanity, familiarised by the practice of adoption as well
as by the spread of both rational and compassionate considerations as to
the blameless little ones, shall have expelled what is surely as some
red and naked beast's emotion of fatherhood. What may be an excellent
reason for repudiating a woman, can never be a reason for abandoning a
child, except with those whom reckless egoism has made willing to think
it a light thing to fling away from us the moulding of new lives and the
ensuring of salutary nurture for growing souls.

We are, however, dispensed from entering into these questions of the
greater morals by the very plain account which the chief actor has given
us, almost in spite of himself. His crime like most others was the
result of heedlessness, of the overriding of duty by the short dim-eyed
selfishness of the moment. He had been accustomed to frequent a tavern,
where the talk turned mostly upon topics which men with much
self-respect put as far from them, as men with little self-respect will
allow them to do. "I formed my fashion of thinking from what I perceived
to reign among people who were at bottom extremely worthy folk, and I
said to myself, Since it is the usage of the country, as one lives here,
one may as well follow it. So I made up my mind to it cheerfully, and
without the least scruple."[140] By and by he proceeded to cover this
nude and intelligible explanation with finer phrases, about preferring
that his children should be trained up as workmen and peasants rather
than as adventurers and fortune-hunters, and about his supposing that in
sending them to the hospital for foundlings he was enrolling himself a
citizen in Plato's Republic.[141] This is hardly more than the talk of
one become famous, who is defending the acts of his obscurity on the
high principles which fame requires. People do not turn citizens of
Plato's Republic "cheerfully and without the least scruple," and if a
man frequents company where the despatch of inconvenient children to the
hospital was an accepted point of common practice, it is superfluous to
drag Plato and his Republic into the matter. Another turn again was
given to his motives when his mind had become clouded by suspicious
mania. Writing a year or two before his death he had assured himself
that his determining reason was the fear of a destiny for his children a
tho