He smiled bitterly as he paced about, strong hands clasped behind his back. Up in the mountains a young man soon would be facing a grinning spectre that threatened to ruin his life, and the girl who loved him would be looking on in horror, unable to save him, forced to witness the ghastly thing that was taking place before her eyes. Close at hand an ignorant old man waited for the doctor to perform a trifling operation that promised renewed vigor and the semblance of youth, which would place at the mercy of his selfish desire a ripe girl-woman, pulsing with the warm springtime of maturity. He had not yet set eyes on this old gargoyle of a man, but he pictured him uncouth, cunning, repulsive, terrifying, as he gloated over his defenceless and shrinking prey. What right had this old monster to demand of life the replenished fires of youth which he had quenched in the soul-warping fight for wealth? Was it consistent with progress that this old man, because he had the means, should be allowed to regain his physical vigour, and perhaps perpetuate his kind in a world already hampered with such as he? Sheep glands substituted for his own worthless organs would not serve to purge his corroded soul nor wipe from his fading mind the cobwebs of superstition and ignorance and prejudice that put him out of step in the march of progress. Such as he should be left to die and be forgotten; it seemed a crime to help him to perpetuate himself, and bring into the world stupid offspring handicapped by heredity from the very start! No, the hope of progress lay in new blood. Let the old generation, with its ignorance and its out-of-tune ideas, become extinct. Let science better the youth of the age, if possible, but refrain from prolonging the life of that arch enemy of Youth and Advancement--Old Age! The scientist was not only a strong advocate of birth control, but at times he went even further and longed to see the race die out entirely. This, of course, in his bitterest moments, when he realized what a fiasco man had made of life. War and slavery; disease and pestilence; poverty and greed; the stupidity of Labour and the tyranny of Capital; the arrogance of the Church and the cowardice of thinkers; Science devoted to the problem of disassociating atoms one from another so that the world need not search for new oil and coal fields, but neglecting to discover cures for pyorrhea and catarrh; people suffering for the want of food and clothes in a world filled to overflowing with the necessities of life; the timber on a million hills laid low and wasted in a few short years, and families without shelter for their heads!--why prolong this hideous nightmare of confusion? Let the race die out; let the old world groan once more in the travail of a new upheaval; and when it cooled, let protoplastic man be born again in the slime and begin all over from the bottom!