"For twenty years past, my friend, I have been studying
the question of hereditary transmission of qualities; and I have
found vices and diseases descending more frequently to children
than virtue and health. I don't stop to ask why: there is no end
to that sort of curiosity. What I have observed is what I tell
you; no more and no less. You will say this is a horribly
discouraging result of experience, for it tends to show that
children come into the world at a disadvantage on the day of
their birth. Of course they do. Children are born deformed;
children are born deaf, dumb, or blind; children are born with
the seeds in them of deadly diseases. Who can account for the
cruelties of creation? Why are we endowed with life--only to end
in death? And does it ever strike you, when you are cutting your
mutton at dinner, and your cat is catching its mouse, and your
spider is suffocating its fly, that we are all, big and little
together, born to one certain inheritance--the privilege of
eating each other?"

"Very sad," I admitted. "But it will all be set right in another
world."

"Are you quite sure of that?" the Doctor asked.

"Quite sure, thank God! And it would be better for you if you
felt about it as I do."

"We won't dispute, my dear Governor. I don't scoff at comforting
hopes; I don't deny the existence of occasional compensations.
But I do see, nevertheless, that Evil has got the upper hand