of effulgent youth, the sympathetic partnership in success, the repose
of old age surrounded by filial manhood and womanhood, all go to make a
surplus of pleasure over pain, that no other way of life can possibly
supply.

What is the alternative?

To miss all this and live a barren life and a loveless old age. Perhaps
to bear a child, that, for the need of the educative, elevating
companionship of family mates is consumed by self, inheriting that
vicious selfishness, which he by his birth defeated, and finding all the
forces of nature focussed on his defect, like a pack of hounds that turn
and rend an injured mate.

Or a family of one, after years of parental care and love, education and
expense, dies or turns a rake, and the canker of remorse takes his place
in the broken hearts.

Nature's laws are not broken with impunity--as a great Physician has
said, "She never forgives and never forgets."

Self-preservation and race-preservation together constitute the law of
life, just as Conservation of Matter and Conservation of Energy
constitute the Law of Substance in Haeckels Monistic Philosophy, and the
severest altruism will permit man to follow his highest self-interest in
obedience to these laws. It is only a perverted and vicious
self-interest that would tempt him to infraction.

That the vice of oliganthropy is growing amongst normal and healthy
people is a painful and startling fact. In New Zealand the prevailing