DOCTOR. It is the fact that there are a hundred thousand who are not for the moment visibly affected by their complaint. But thousands have passed through our hospitals, victims to the most frightful ravages that our poor bodies can endure. You do not see them: they do not exist for you. Again, if it were only yourself who was in question, you might take that line well enough. But what I affirm, and repeat with all the strength of my conviction, is that you have no right to expose a human being to this appalling chance. The chance is rare, I know: I know still better how terrible it is. What have you to say now? GEORGE. Nothing. I suppose you are right. I don’t know what to think. DOCTOR. Is it as if I were forbidding you ever to marry when I forbid you to marry now? Is it as if I were telling you that you will never be cured? On the contrary, I give you every hope. Only I ask a delay of three or four years, because in that time I shall be able to ascertain whether you are one of those unhappy wretches for whom there is no hope, and because during that time you will be a source of danger to your wife and children. The children: I have not spoken to you about them. [_Very gently and persuasively_] Come, my dear sir, you are too young and too generous to be insensible to pity. There are things that cannot fail to move you: it is incredible that I should not be able to touch or to convince you. Indeed, I feel most deeply for you; but on that account I implore you all the more earnestly to consider what I say. You have admitted you have no right to expose your wife to such torture: but there is not only your wife—there are her children, your children, whom you may contaminate too. For the moment I will not think of you or of her: it is in the name of those innocent little ones that I appeal to you; it is the future of the race that I am defending. Listen to me. Of the twenty marriages I spoke of only fifteen produced children. They produced twenty-eight. Do you know how many of them survived? Three: three out of twenty-eight. Above all else syphilis is a child-murderer. Ah, yes! Every year produces a fresh massacre of the innocents: Herod still reigns in France and all the world over. And though it is my business to preserve life, I tell you that those who die are the lucky ones. If you want to see the children of syphilitic parents, go round the children’s hospitals. We know the type: it has become classical. Any doctor can pick them out from the rest; little creatures old from their birth, stamped with the marks of every human infirmity and decay. You will find children with every kind of affliction: hump-backed, deformed, club-footed, hare-lipped, ricketty, with heads too big and bodies too small, with congenital hip-disease. A large proportion of all these are the victims of parents who were married in ignorance of what you now know. If I could, I would cry it aloud from the housetops. [_A slight pause_] I have told you all this