"You mean the effort to increase and better the stock?"
"No. One thousand no's. The success in decreasing it."
"My dear sir——"
The doctor waved his hands. He drank no alcohol, he said; only some wine of the country, red; but of this, heavily diluted by water, he was drinking copiously.
"Attend, monsieur. I know well, my God, these good people who go to England and have international congresses and, between the dinners given by Her Grace of Dulpuddle and the lawn parties, when one permits them to enter the park of the Castle Cad, indulge in a debauch of scientific verbosity. But yes; I know them! I have been to their meetings and heard one of these savants talk while ten snored. 'Nature, nature!' they cry, and all the time, all the time they forget Nurture. What do I to them say? I, Paul Achille Boussingault?" The doctor struck his heart, and breathed: "I say one word: 'Environment!'—and they silence themselves."
Before this volley Stainton felt dismayed.
"I had always thought," he said, "that this aim was excellent. Their purpose is the improvement of the race."
"Purpose? But yes. Good. But their Nature, she makes only effects. How do they, my God, go to attain it, their purpose? By to make more good the chance now miserable of the oppressed to bring to life some strong sons and some robust daughters? Jamais! Rather by to continue the present process of crowding to the grave the class that their class has made unfit, by to encourage breeding—million thunders, yes, among those very oppressors, truly, whose abuse of power already unfits them!"
Stainton was a trifle nervous at the fear that the talk would soon turn to subjects of which a young wife is supposed to be ignorant. He glanced at Muriel, but he saw that she was engaged solely with the cut of canard sauvage that lay on her plate, and he concluded that since she must some day learn of these things of which the doctor and he were talking, it was as well for her to learn of them from her husband and a physician. Nevertheless, he wavered.
"I thought, doctor," he said, "that in France they offered money to the poor to increase the population?"