Underfed and overworked for generations, starved from birth, starved before birth, we drive and harry and crush them, the weakling and his weaker sons; we exploit them, gull them, poison them, lie to them, filch from them.  We crowd them into our money mills; we deny them youth, we deny them rest, we deny them opportunity, we deny them hope, or any hope of hope; and we provide for age—­the poorhouse.  So that charity is become of all words the most feared, most hated, most loathed and loathsome; worse than crime or shame or death.  We have left them from the work of their hands enough, scantly enough, to keep breath within their stunted bodies.  “All the traffic can bear!”—­a brazen rule.  Of such sage policy the result can be seen in the wizened and undersized submerged of London; of nearer than London.  Man, by not taking thought, has taken a cubit from his stature.

Meantime we prate comfortable blasphemies, scientific or other; natural selection or the inscrutable decrees of God.  Whereas this was manifestly a Hobson’s selection, most unnatural and forced, to choose want of all that makes life sweet and dear; to choose gaunt babes, with pinched and livid lips—­unlovely, not unloved; and these iniquitous decrees are most scrutable, are surely of man’s devising and not of God’s.  Or we invent a fire-new science, known as Eugenics, to treat the disease by new naming of symptoms:  and prattle of the well born, when we mean well fed; or the degenerate, when we might more truly say the disinherited.

It is even held by certain poltroons that families have been started gutterward, of late centuries, when a father has been gloriously slain in the wars of the useless great.  That such a circumstance, however glorious, may have been rather disadvantageous than otherwise to children thereby sent out into the world at six or sixteen years, lucky to become ditch-diggers or tip-takers.  That some proportion of them do become beggars, thieves, paupers, sharpers, other things quite unfit for the ear of the young person—­a disconcerting consideration; such ears cannot be too carefully guarded.  That, though the occupations named are entirely normal to all well-ordered states, descendants of persons in those occupations tend to become “subnormal”—­so runs the cant of it—­something handicapped by that haphazard bullet of a lifetime since, fired to advance the glorious cause of—­foreign commerce, or the like.

* * * * *

Mr. Mitchell occupied five rooms lined with law books and musty with the smell of leather.  These rooms ranged end to end, each with a door that opened upon a dark hallway; a waiting-room in front, the private office at the rear, to which no client was ever admitted directly.  Depressed by delay, subdued by an overflow of thick volumes, when he reaches a suitable dejection he is tip-toed through dismal antechambers of wisdom, appalled by tall bookstacks, ushered into the leather-chaired