you cannot contend that the death of the body is attended by that of the soul. And yet we notice that your writers frequently express themselves in a very loose manner on this subject, when they say, for instance, "so many souls perished in such a battle or by such an accident." If these infants have souls as you believe, we do these souls a service by freeing them from the bondage of a deformed or imperfect body, in which they would have fretted and chafed away a few years of miserable existence. But the child, we contend, can only be said to become an individual human being when it acquires consciousness; if not allowed to reach the period of consciousness, it may be said that it has not existed. We merely carry out, in a scientific and merciful manner, the process performed in a clumsy and cruel manner by nature, which your learned men term 'the survival of the fittest.' In England you pursue a diametrically opposite course, for while you make frantic efforts to preserve the lives of your lame, your blind, your deaf, your idiots, and your imbeciles, you allow thousands of sound and perfect children to be annually slaughtered by neglect and starvation, or reared in ignorance and crime, because you insist that parents shall bring up all their children, however numerous and however inadequate their means for doing so. That our system is infinitely more humane than yours you may imagine when I tell you that it is very seldom indeed that any defective or diseased child is born in this country, for the parents are all so well shaped and so healthy that they are most unlikely to produce offspring unlike themselves in these respects. Our system has the same effect as the care you exercise in England has on stock-breeding. The parents are examples of all the good points
