Roger Seaton smiled enigmatically.

"Only a trifle"--he answered--"Just health! It's a sort of
talisman;--germ-proof, dust-proof, disease-proof! No microbe of
mischief, however infinitesimal, can exist near it, and a few drops,
taken into the system, revivify the whole."

"If that's so, your fortune's made"--said Gwent, "Give your
discovery, or recipe, or whatever it is, to the world---"

"To keep the world alive? No, thank you!" And the look of dark scorn
on Seaton's face was astonishing in its almost satanic expression--
"That is precisely what I wish to avoid! The world is over-ripe and
over-rotten,--and it is over-crowded with a festering humanity that
is INhuman, and worse than bestial in its furious grappling for self
and greed. One remedy for the evil would be that no children should
be born in it for the next thirty or forty years--the relief would
be incalculable,--a monstrous burden would be lifted, and there
would be some chance of betterment,--but as this can never be, other
remedies must be sought and found. It's pure hypocrisy to talk of
love for children, when every day we read of mothers selling their
offspring for so much cash down,--lately in China during a spell of
famine parents killed their daughters like young calves, for food.
Ugly facts like these have to be looked in the face--it's no use
putting them behind one's back, and murmuring beautiful lies about
'mother-love' and such nonsense. As for the old Mosaic commandment
'Honour thy father and mother'--it's ordinary newspaper reading to
hear of boys and girls attacking and murdering their parents for the
sake of a few dollars."