738 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



all have some one or more of the scrofula's varied physical degrada- 

 tions or sickening deformities, and occasionally one of them goes out 

 like an ill-made candle. 



A few years ago the people of Holland were threatened with a 

 most serious calamity. Depraved heredity, unwise sexual selection, 

 or some other controlling cause, had resulted in the production, as the 

 Prince of Orange the crown prince of an individual of a weak, in- 

 ferior, and depraved nature. His was such a nature as, on a throne, 

 becomes a fountain of numberless oppressions and evils, and rarely 

 fails to goad the unhappy subjects into rebellion, attended with the 

 usual frightful losses of life and property and vast sorrows. Fortu- 

 nately, he had destructive vices. The appetites of these led him to 

 Paris. A few years of riot and debauchery sapped away the dan- 

 gerous life of " Lemons," as his worthless boon companions nicknamed 

 him, and he died as the fool dieth. The only harm he was able to 

 do was the indirect damage of a bad example, and the good people of 

 the Netherlands were rid of a possible Louis XV, at no greater cost 

 than that of some years of extravagant life in the French capital. 

 His father's youthful excesses and present penchant for pretty ballet- 

 girls have rendered it wholly improbable that there will be any other 

 heirs to the Dutch throne, and so the country will shortly glide into a 

 republic, without any of the wrench and sanguinary convulsions that 

 usually attend such political transitions. The superior economy and 

 other advantages of a Parisian brothel over civil war as a political 

 means are obvious to the naked eye. 



The most commendable feature of this self-pruning of the objec- 

 tionable growths in society is that the victims destroy themselves 

 under the hallucination that they are drinking the richest wine of 

 earthly pleasure. When execution can be made a matter of keen 

 relish to the condemned, certainly nothing is wanting on the score of 

 humanity. 



I anticipate the objection that slaying bad men by means of their 

 own vicious propensities brings much misery to those connected with 

 them. But then all innocent persons connected with bad men are 

 fated to suffer in exact proportion to the closeness of the connection, 

 whether the bad men are destroyed or not. Weak, selfish, perverted, 

 and criminal men always inflict misery upon their relatives and asso- 

 ciates. This is not usually intensified by their being also drunkards, 

 or debauches. It is also true that no one of Nature's methods of ex- 

 tinction is pleasant to those connected with the victim. A thief or a 

 thug providentially dying with the delirium tremens is certainly quite 

 as bearable a sight to those before whose eyes it may come as the 

 spectacle of a virtuous man, the sole support of his family, slowly 

 wasting away with consumption, in spite of all that loving services 

 and agonizing sympathy can do to retain for him a life that is of so 

 much value to all. 



