“How merciless science is!” Alistair observed presently. “Science is not so merciless as the old religion,” the scientist was not sorry to respond. “At least, it does not reproach you for what you cannot help. Its sentence is not pronounced vindictively, like a bad-tempered judge denouncing crimes which he himself was never tempted to commit. And when it forbids you to pass on your evil inheritance to the unborn, it is acting, not without mercy for you, but with greater mercy for them.” And then, while Alistair remained quiet, listening dully without the power of resistance, the other went on to draw the picture of tainted life passing from generation to generation, the terrible theme of the dramatists from Æschylus to Ibsen, figured by superstition as a curse from the gods, traced by science to the cruel thoughtlessness of men. He described the great army of the victims, as he himself had reviewed it in his medical practice. In addition to those whose misfortunes were the subject of public notice and public charity, there were the innumerable secret sufferers, the cause and meaning of whose sufferings was most often unknown to themselves. There were the drunkards, the gamblers, the adulterers, with whom the world dealt so much more harshly than with its cripples and consumptives. There were the neuropaths and hysterical subjects, little better than maniacs, yet struggling to keep their place among the sane, endowed with the gift of reason, held responsible as reasonable beings, and yet tortured with the consciousness that their infirmity betrayed them at every moment into conduct which only madness could excuse. He touched on the terrible case of those who go through life with the dark shadow of paralysis hanging over them, never knowing at what day or hour it will strike them down. And all these evils, and the lesser ones, as they are called, though it may be doubted if they are really lesser, the infirmities of temper, of idleness, of defective memory--in short, every human frailty and affliction, except the insignificant damage of war and accident and pestilence--truly insignificant in comparison--he traced to the one cause. And in a world of healthy, rational men there would be no war and no pestilence, and very few accidents. So that true religion and true science, the religion of Humanity and the science of Nature, were at one in denouncing as the greatest of all crimes--indeed, the only real crime--the bringing of unhealthy children into the world. When he had finished the listener gave him a questioning look. “But if there are no children?” Vanbrugh frowned for the first time, and his voice hardened. “I have lived a hard and abstemious life,” he said; “I have been stricter with myself than with anyone else. My reward is to have a child in whom I have never detected a weak spot. I have a right that she shall make a happy marriage, and receive a woman’s crown of honour--a happy motherhood.”