The Improvement of Offspring.
Why Bring Into the World Idiots, Fools, Criminals and Lunatics?
1. The Right Way.—When mankind will properly love and marry and then rightly generate, carry, nurse and educate their children, will they in deed and in truth carry out the holy and happy purpose of their Creator. See those miserable and depraved scape-goats of humanity, the demented simpletons, the half-crazy, unbalanced multitudes which infest our earth, and fill our prisons with criminals and our poor-houses with paupers. Oh! the boundless capabilities and perfections of our God-like nature and, alas! its deformities! All is the result of the ignorance or indifference of parents. As long as children are the accidents of lust instead of the premeditated objects of love, so long will the offspring deteriorate and the world be cursed with deformities, monstrosities, unhumanities and cranks.
2. Each After Its Kind.—"Like parents like children." "In their own image beget" they them. In what other can they? "How can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit?" How can animal propensities in parents generate other than depraved children, or moral purity beget beings other than as holy by nature as those at whose hands they received existence and constitution?
3. As Are the Parents, physically, mentally and morally when they stamp their own image and likeness upon progeny, so will be the constitution of that progeny.
4. "Just as the Twig Is Bent the Tree's Inclined."—Yet the bramble cannot be bent to bear delicious peaches, nor the sycamore to bear grain. Education is something, but parentage is everything; because it "dyes in the wool" and thereby exerts an influence on character almost infinitely more powerful than all other conditions put together.
5. Healthy and Beautiful Children.—Thoughtless mortal! Before you allow the first goings forth of love, learn what the parental conditions in you mean, and you will confer a great boon upon the prospective bone of your bone, and flesh of your flesh! If it is in your power to be the parent of beautiful, healthy, moral and talented children instead of diseased and depraved, is it not your imperious duty then, to impart to them that physical power, moral perfection, and intellectual capability, which shall ennoble their lives and make them good people and good citizens?
6. Pause and Tremble.—Prospective parents! Will you trifle with the dearest interests of your children? Will you in matters thus momentous, head-long rush