CHORUS. Laws a' mercy!

PHILOSOPHER (waxing warm). What right had you to marry a poor
woman, and then both of you, with as little forethought as
two--a--dogs, or other brutes--to produce between you such a
multitudinous progeny--

GINX. Civil words, naabor; don't call my family hard names.

PHILOSOPHER. Then let me say, such a monstrous number of
children as thirteen? You knew, as you said just now, that wages
were wages and did not vary much. And yet you have gone on
subdividing your resources by the increase of what must become a
degenerate offspring. (To the Chorus) All you workpeople are
doing it. Is it not time to think about these things and stop
the indiscriminate production of human beings, whose lives you
cannot properly maintain? Ought you not to act more like
reflective creatures and less like brutes? As if breeding were
the whole object of life! How much better for you, my friend, if
you had never married at all, than to have had the worry of a
wife and children all these years.

The philosopher had gone too far. There were some angry murmurs
among the women and Ginx's face grew dark. He was thinking of
"all those years" and the poor creature that from morning to
night and Sunday to Sunday, in calm and storm, had clung to his
rough affections: and the bright eyes, and the winding arms so
often trellised over his tremendous form, and the coy tricks and
laughter that had cheered so many tired hours. He may have been
much of a brute, but he felt that, after all, that sort of thing