On this occasion, however, I ventured to make some
remark on the extreme gentleness and forbearance with which not only
Eveena but the children treated their peevish and exacting brother.
"He is no brother of theirs," said Zulve, the mistress of the house.
"You would hardly find in any family like ours a child with so
irritable a temper or a disposition so selfish, and nowhere a creature
so hardly treated by Nature in body as well as mind."
"Indeed," I said, hardly understanding her answer.
"No," said my host. "It is the rule to deprive of life, promptly and
painlessly, children to whom, from physical deformity or defect, life
is thought unlikely to be pleasant, and whose descendants might be a
burden to the public and a cause of physical deterioration to the
race. It is, however, one of the exceptional tenets to which I have
been obliged to allude, that man should not seek to be wiser than
Nature; and that life should neither be cut short, except as a
punishment for great crimes, nor prolonged artificially contrary to
the manifest intention, or, as our philosophers would say, the common
course of Nature.
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