Visit our almshouses and reformatories, our orphanages, our idiot asylums, and get a few of the histories of the little inmates; trace them back for three, four or five generations, and see how unmistakably woe has generated woe, crime begotten crime, and disease brought forth disease.
Let us study this, the dark side of the picture of heredity, and seriously ask ourselves if it isn’t time a new reform was instituted and the heart of philanthropy set to beating in sympathy, not only with this great army of robbed, disinherited children, but as well with the yet unborn generations. The great work for them must be done now, not after they are ushered into a depraved, diseased existence.
“There is a story of one neglected little girl, poor Margaret, who never had a home, and who grew up a wretched outcast, living a life of sin and shame. After seventy-five years it was reckoned that her descendants numbered twelve hundred; two hundred and eighty of whom were paupers, and one hundred and forty habitual criminals, while most of the whole degraded family cursed the country with vice, crime, pauperism, and insanity.”
Finally for gospel, we have the indisputable fact that we may by prayerful thought and systematic study make our children what we will. Read the story of the angel’s appearance to the mother of Samson, when the child was promised, and remember his direction. “And Manoah said, How shall we order the child and how shall we do unto him? And the angel of the Lord said unto Manoah, of all that I said unto the woman let her beware. She may not eat of anything that cometh of the vine, neither let her drink wine nor strong drink, nor eat any unclean thing; all that I commanded her let her observe.” (Judges 13: 13, 14.)
A sweet story is told that illustrates the gospel side of heredity in a marvelous way. A traveller in the west came to the house of a settler in a remote frontier district, and asked for shelter for the night. The parents had come from the east in an early day, and were people of ordinary intelligence only. Among the children born to them in this western home were several sons, coarse, boorish, and altogether what their birth and environment would indicate. The traveller was struck with the remarkable beauty and refinement of one child, a daughter. So different was she from her brothers that he made bold to ask the mother, if she could explain why the daughter was so different from her brothers, and how in her surroundings she had developed such grace and beauty.
The mother looked up quickly with an intelligent smile, pleased that her child should receive such appreciation. “Yes, I can tell you, I think, why she differs so, and to me it is a strange thing and I have often wondered if I have thought aright. Several months before my child was born, one day there came to our cabin a colporteur with a variety of books for sale. I was not much of a reader, but my life was a lonely one, shut out from all society as I was, with nothing of comfort or beauty about me. Only one of the books attracted my attention, a little blue-and-gold copy of Scott’s Lady of The Lake. It was illustrated, and as I turned it over in my hands, and caught now and then a word that explained an illustration, I was possessed with a desire to have the book. We were poor and I knew that my husband would not understand the wish I had to own it. I handed it back to the man and he went on his way. I could not get the thought of the book out of my mind, and did not sleep an hour that night. As soon as the first peep of day began to show itself, I rose and with the price of the book in my hand started for the nearest neighbor, the next cabin where I thought the book agent must have stopped for the night. I found him and got the book and came home. Through all the months before the little one came that book was my constant companion. I read it and reread it, until I knew much of it by heart. Every scene of the book was as vivid as a reality to me. When the daughter came she was the Lady of The Lake over again, and was always just what you see her now.”
Dr. Holbrook says, “Every child born into the world is essentially an experiment; we cannot tell what its chief characteristics will be; these depend upon the potentialities stored up in the germ-plasm.” Then how much depends upon the parents, that the germ-plasm be of fine quality, and so insure fine products in their children. In his book on Stirpiculture, Dr. Holbrook says, “The common people often get at truths in a rude way long before the scientists do. Many parents tell us their children are strongly influenced by some particular occupation of the mother during pregnancy. So strong is this belief that many mothers are in our time trying to influence the characters of their unborn children by special modes of life, by cultivating music, or art, or science, in order to give the child a love for these pursuits.”
Apropos to this statement, we can attest many instances that have come under our immediate observation. Study and research along certain lines, and in special directions have brought the results desired, and the children have become what they were trained to be in intra-uterine life.
“What do you expect to do when you get to America?” asked a fellow-passenger of a woman who was crossing the Atlantic about a century ago. “Do? why raise governors for them.” And she was as good as her word, for she became the mother of General John Sullivan, the chief magistrate of New Hampshire, and of James Sullivan, governor of Massachusetts. “She who thinks skim milk will transmit skim milk; she who thinks cream will transmit cream.” This woman thought cream and lived it and transmitted the best to her children.
Young women do not stop in your research with the few thoughts that can be given in a chapter like this, but go on in the study until you know what it has to teach you and what you may give to your unborn children, by painstaking study and culture of yourself. Begin by weeding out the habits and tendencies that you would not wish to transmit, and by cultivating the qualities and accomplishments, which you would delight to see repeated in your children.