_Pilcher._ I should like to look through those sheets, but----
_Prof._ You shall! I have put the whole argument into the concrete case of Sarah Mumford----
_Prof._ Not watery, but she had a yellow effusion----
_Prof._ They hanged her. They then discovered extensive lesions and this yellow effusion----
_Matt._ Pity they didn't discover that before they hanged her.
_Prof._ My exact point! Where is the justice of punishing a woman whose gray matter functions perversely? It is nothing short of a crime.
_Dolly._ But she had suffocated five dear little babies?
_Matt._ How could she avoid suffocating babies if she had a yellow effusion in her brain?
[_Puts his proofs into_ MATT'S _hands. Points out a passage_. MATT, _a little embarrassed, takes them, looks through them._]
_Prof._ The point I wish to establish is this. While we all allow that extensive or recognizable diseases of, or injuries to, the brain, free a man from responsibility and punishment, how can we logically mete out blame or praise, punishment or reward to our ordinary acts, thoughts, and impulses, seeing that all our acts, thoughts, and impulses, good or bad, virtuous or criminal, are equally the mere expressions of certain inevitable physical changes in the brain, the mere register on the dial plate of consciousness of necessary predetermined complications in the working of certain atoms of the gray matter of our cortex?
_Matt._ Quite so! Quite so! [DOLLY _is about to speak, but_ MATT _hushes her down with a warning look and sign._] The Professor wants to say with Socrates that no man would be such a fool as to do wrong, if he could possibly help it.
_Prof._ Well, if you like to put it that way----
_Pilcher._ And now perhaps we might proceed. Can you remember the exact terms, Mr. Barron?
_Matt._ I am to pay a sovereign for everyone of your hearers who has so far benefited by the wise admonitions of your last year's sermon as to have broken off his bad habits, or some especial bad habit----
_Lucas._ We aren't bound to say what the habit is that we've broken off?
_Matt._ I don't wish to be inquisitive, but if you don't mention the particular bad habit, you will have to give me your word of honor that you've conquered it. [_Putting down proofs on table, taking up the money-box, giving it a shake._] Now, who will be first to step into the confessional? [_Looking round._