[INTEMPERANCE.]
In the preceding pages I have endeavored to show what manner of living favors the transmission of noble and beautiful qualities from mother to child; what conditions tend to produce unbalanced, vicious, unlovely character. I have dwelt principally on the moral aspects of maternity, because that is the side hitherto overlooked. But I can not close without saying a word respecting the baleful influence of intoxicating drinks.
Nothing is more certain than that the desire for alcoholic drinks is inherited, and all degrees of mental dullness and incapacity, from one grade below the parental endowment, to idiocy, may be distinctly referred to habits of intoxication.
We have seen that the abnormal sensibility of a pregnant woman insures large effects (on the child) from small causes. Thus a joy is absorbed by the young life that the mother outgrows; and depression that was but temporary with her, leaves its mark on the temperament and disposition of her offspring.
Thus the habit of taking just a drop to sustain your fainting spirits during the day, and a glass of something hot at night, added, most likely, to the father’s moderate drinking, gives the child an uncontrollable passion for stimulants. Now, the life you live may be all that is desirable, but if your brain is put under this influence occasionally, all the good is weakened, vitiated, undermined. Alcohol breaks down the WILL, and what is a human being without a will? A vacillating, unreliable creature. It deadens the mental sensibilities and arouses the passions.
Friends will often advise a pregnant woman to drink beer or spirits, assuming that nature at such times requires it. Now, nature is equal to her own emergencies, and pregnancy is not a disease. The brooding mother needs plenty of sunlight and fresh air, abundant sleep, moderate exercise, wholesome food, and congenial surroundings. Let her listen to no one who prescribes a stimulant which holds disease in itself.
There is such a thing as intemperance in eating, and I would counsel any woman to demand of herself a perfect self-control at the table. Nothing less than this, with entire abstinence on her part, will suffice to neutralize in most cases the desire for liquor, communicated, in so many cases, by the father; and the firmness exercised by her in denying the appetite, will give her child the firmness to resist the temptation to drink. Without this will in the matter, the inclination would be communicated and not the power to resist, as, for instance, if she merely abstained because she could not obtain what she longed for.
The Germans sodden their brains with lager-beer; the English brutify themselves on gin and porter. We ruin soul, body, and worldly prospects on adulterated whisky.
Our husbands and fathers license thousands of groggeries, corner groceries, saloons, that they may be free to indulge out of sight of home. In this way they prepare places wherein their sons may be initiated into vice. Thus the crop of drunkards never fails in village, town, or city, nor the supply of criminals, large and small, made criminals by these means provided.
The “deficient” child and the predestined drunkard, are cradled as softly as are the children of temperance. The mother handing her babe round for the admiration of her neighbors, is shaken by no prevision of what it will one day become. Her fair, rosy-cheeked boy destined to be the inmate of an inebriate asylum? She will not believe it. Yet only obedience to the higher law on her part will have saved him from it.