"Oh, as soon as a couple passes the P. D. and receives the P. C. they
appear in the illustrated papers—especially the ladies' papers.
'Graduates of the Week' is the heading. And then there is the P. T.—the
Pathological Tree."
I looked at the publisher in perplexity.
"Gracious! I forget this is your first visit to Ante-land," he said, apologetically. "Look! Here are some P. Ts. my lawyer has just been looking over for me, the property of parents whose advertisements for children I have been answering. My friends are rather anxious I should incarnate."
I surveyed the parchment roll with curiosity. It was a tree, on the model of a genealogical tree, but tracing the hygienic record of the family.
"In our sect," said Marindin impressively, "it will become the pride of the family to have an unblemished pedigree, and any child who gets himself born into such a family will do so with the responsibility of carrying on the noble tradition of the house and living up to the sanitary scutcheon—santé oblige. When children begin to be fastidious about the families they are born into, parents will have to improve, or die childless. And, as the love of offspring springs eternal in the human breast, this will have an immense influence upon the evolution of the race to higher goals. I do not know any force of the future on which we can count more hopefully than on the refinement resulting from the struggle for offspring and the survival of the fittest to be parents. Undesirable families will become extinct. The unborn will subtly mould the born to higher things. Childlessness will become again what it was in the Orient—a shame and a reproach."
"Yes," asserted the publisher, smoothing out the P. Ts.; "the old unreasoned instinct and repugnance will be put on a true basis when it is seen that childlessness is a proof of unworthiness—a brand of failure."
"As old-maidenhood is, less justly, to-day," I put in.
"Quite so," said Marindin eagerly. "In their anxiety to be worthy of selection by Posterity, parents will rise to heights of health and holiness of which our sick generation does not dream. If they do not, woe to them! They will be remorselessly left to die out without issue.
"The change has begun; our sect is spreading fast. In the course of a century or two physical and mental deformities will vanish from the earth." His eye flashed prophetic fire.
"So soon?" I said, with a sceptical smile.