GINX. Haw, Haw, Haw! How came I to have so many? Why my old woman's a good un and---- In fact, after searching his mind for some clever way of putting a comical rejoinder, Ginx laughed boisterously. There are two aspects of a question. PHILOSOPHER. I am serious, my friend. Did it never occur to you that you had no right to bring children into the world unless you could feed and clothe and educate them? CHORUS. Laws a' mercy! GINX. I'd like to know how I could help it, naabor. I'm a married man. PHILOSOPHER. Well, I will go further and say you ought not to have married without a fair prospect of being able to provide for any contingent increase of family. CHORUS. Laws a' mercy! PHILOSOPHER (waxing warm). What right had you to marry a poor woman, and then both of you, with as little forethought as two--a--dogs, or other brutes--to produce between you such a multitudinous progeny-- GINX. Civil words, naabor; don't call my family hard names. PHILOSOPHER. Then let me say, such a monstrous number of children as thirteen? You knew, as you said just now, that wages were wages and did not vary much. And yet you have gone on subdividing your resources by the increase of what must become a degenerate offspring. (To the Chorus) All you workpeople are doing it. Is it not time to think about these things and stop the indiscriminate production of human beings, whose lives you cannot properly maintain? Ought you not to act more like reflective creatures and less like brutes? As if breeding were the whole object of life! How much better for you, my friend, if you had never married at all, than to have had the worry of a wife and children all these years. The philosopher had gone too far. There were some angry murmurs among the women and Ginx's face grew dark. He was thinking of “all those years” and the poor creature that from morning to night and Sunday to Sunday, in calm and storm, had clung to his rough affections: and the bright eyes, and the winding arms so often trellised over his tremendous form, and the coy tricks and laughter that had cheered so many tired hours. He may have been much of a brute, but he felt that, after all, that sort of thing was denied to dogs and pigs. Before he could translate his thoughts into words or acts a shrewd-looking, curly-haired stonemason, who stood by with his tin on his arm, cut into the discussion. STONEMASON. Your doctrines won't go down here, Mr. Philosopher. I've 'eard of them before. I'd just like to ask you what a man's to do and what a woman's to do if they don't marry: and if they do, how can you honestly hinder them from having any children? The stonemason had rudely struck out the cardinal issues of the question. PHILOSOPHER. Well, to take the last point first, there are physical and ethical questions involved in it, which it is hard to discuss before such an audience as this. STONEMASON. But you must discuss 'em, if you wish us to change our ways, and stop breeding.