Facts and Fictions of Life

by Helen H. Gardener

It is undoubtedly true that, do what we will, labor as we may, heredity has established beyond the possibility of doubt that an apple cannot be cultivated into a peach. Once an apple always an apple. That is the power of heredity. That is the foundation of the house. But there is another story. Plant your apple tree in hard and rugged soil; give it too little light and too much rain; let some one hack its bark with a knife from time to time; when the boys climb the tree let them strain and break it; let Bridget throw all sorts of liquids about its roots,—in short, let it take "pot luck" on a barren farm with Ignorance for an owner and Shiftlessness for his wife, and the best apple tree in the world will not remain so for many years. The apples will not degenerate into potatoes, however; heredity will attend to this. But they will become hard and knotty and sour and feeble and few as to apples; environment will see to that.

Now suppose you had sold that farm to Intelligence and given him for a wife Observation or Thrift. Suppose that they had dug and fertilized and nourished and pruned that tree (I do not mean after it had been ruined, but from the start). It is quite true that you need never expect it to bear Malaga grapes. Heredity will still hold its own, and the kind of fruit was determined at birth (if I maybe permitted the form of speech), but very much of the quality of the fruit will depend upon the conditions under which it grew—the environment. So while it is true that our heredity is as certain as the eternal hills, and, as a famous biologist recently said in my hearing, dates back of the foundation of the Sierra Nevada mountain range, so that each of us carries within us mementos of an age when language was not and, as he humorously said, "Man has in his anatomy a collection of antiques—we are full of reminiscences"; still it is equally true that the power of environment, the conditions under which we develop or restrict our inherited tendencies, will determine in large part whether heredity shall be our slave-driver or our companion in the race for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Let me illustrate in another way. Suppose that you are born from a family which has for its heritage a history of many and early deaths from consumption. Suppose that you have discovered that the tendency is strong within yourself. Is it for that reason absolutely necessary that you buy a coffin-plate to-morrow and proceed to die with lung trouble? By no means. Knowing your inherited weakness you guard with jealous care the health you have, and it may be that your intelligent consideration may secure to you, in spite of your undoubted inheritance, the threescore years and ten; while your robust neighbor, with lungs like a bellows and the inheritance from a race of athletes, may succumb to the March winds which he braved and you did not. Maybe "quick consumption" will carry him off while you remain to mourn his loss, and quite possibly leave with your posterity a growing tendency toward strong lungs.

I know a man in New York City who had what is called a "family history" of consumption, who was rejected on that account by every life insurance company in this country thirty years ago. Well, that frightened him within an inch of his life; but with that inch he set to work to build his house "facing the other way," as he expressed it to me when I met him ten years ago, when he was, as he still is, a hale, hearty old gentleman. He is not and never could have been exactly robust; but he is as well, as happy and as content as the average man who has not inherited his unfortunate potentiality. It is true that nothing but intelligent and wise care all these years, nothing but his temperate and judicious life, could have compassed this end. I use the word temperate in its general sense. So far as I know he has not denied himself any of the best of life, which he has been amply able to secure; but he has at all times kept his house "facing the other way." His hereditary threat, while it has not driven him with a lash, has, it is true, lived in the back yard—which it does and will and must with us all, no matter what our environment or wisdom may be; but we need not foolishly throw open the windows, swing back the doors and invite it to take possession, while our own individuality moves down into the coal cellar.

I have taken as illustrations in both of these papers inherited disease and its developments, but this is done only for convenience and because it will explain more fully, clearly and easily to most people what is meant. That our heredity is equally strong and certain in its mental and moral potentialities and tendencies is also true.* It is likewise true that the environment—the conditions under which we develop, curb or direct our natural tendencies—has a great and modifying rôle to play.

* "Alienists hold, in general, that a large proportion of
mental diseases are the result of degeneracy; that is, they
are the offspring of drunken, insane, syphilitic and
consumptive parents, and suffer from the action of
heredity."—Dr. Arthur McDonald, author of "Criminology."
It is sometimes asked, if children were changed in the
cradle, and those of fortunate parentage carried to the
slums to be nurtured and taught and those from the slums.
"To one at all familiar with the external aspect of insanity
in its various forms, it seems incredible that its physical
nature was not sooner realized. Had the laws of heredity
been earlier understood, it would have been seen that mental
derangements, like physical diseases and tendencies, were
transmitted."—Prof. Edward S. Morse.

If placed in the cradles of luxury, would not all trace of mental, moral and physical heredity of a fortunate type disappear from the darlings of Murray Hill in their adopted environment of squalor and vice; and would not the haggard and half-starved, ill-nurtured waifs of Mulberry Bend blossom as the rose in strength and virtue in their new environment of luxury and of wholesome and healthful surroundings? Just here a digression seems necessary; for while I have no doubt that the change (even on the terms usually implied) would work wonders in both sets of infants, still it is to be remembered that for such a test to tell anything of real value to science, the exchange would need to be made upon another basis from that which is generally used as an argument, because it is incorrectly assumed that the children of luxury (as a rule) are born with clean and lofty heredity. This is, alas, so far from the case that it is almost a truism that "the highest and the lowest" (meaning the richest and the poorest) are "nearest together in action and farthest apart in appearance, only." They both frequently give to their children tainted mental, moral and physical natures with which to contend. The self-indulgence of the young men of the "upper classes" leaves a burned-out, undermined and tainted physical heredity almost a certainty for their children, while the ethical tone of such men—their moral fibre—is higher only in appearance and the ability to do secretly that which puts the tough of Mulberry Bend in the penitentiary because he has not the gold to gild his vices and to dazzle the eyes of society. The exchanged children, therefore, would not be so totally different in inherited qualities, after all. They would have alike a tainted ancestry. Their physical natures are the hotbeds of vices or diseases that are to be developed or curbed according as environment shall determine. But the foundation in both cases—the ground—both mental, moral and physical, is sowed down and harrowed in with the tainted heredity. The mother in both instances, as a rule, is but an aimless puppet who dances to the tune played by her male owner—a mere weak transmitter or adjunct of and for and to his scale of life. Therefore to point to the fact that to change these classes of infants in the cradle is to exchange (by means of their environment only) their mature development, also, from that of a Wall Street magnate to a Sing Sing convict, tells nothing whatever against the power and force of heredity. It tells only what is always claimed for fortunate or unfortunate environment—that "It gilds the straitened forehead of the fool," or that

"Through tattered clothes small vices do appear;
Robes and furr'd gowns hide all; plate sin with gold,
And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks;
Arm it with rags, a pigmy's straw doth pierce it."

Let us start fair. Let us understand that no environment can create what is not within the individuality—that heredity has fixed this; but that environment does and must act as the one tremendous and vital power to develop or to control the inheritance which parents stamp upon their children. Notwithstanding, you are personally responsible for the trend, the added power and development you give to much that you inherit. You are personally responsible to the coming generation for the fight it will have to make and for the strength you transmit to it to make that fight. Many a father and mother transmitted to their "fallen" daughter the weakness and the tendency to commit the acts which they and their fellows whine about afterward as "tarnishing the family honor." If they had tied her hand and foot and cast her into the midst of the waves of the sea expecting her to save herself they would be no more truly responsible for her death, be it moral or physical.

And let me emphasize here that I do not attribute all of the moral and physical disasters of the race to the fathers of the race. By no means. I believe with all my heart that the mothers have to answer for their full share of the vice, sorrow and suffering of humanity. Woman has not, perhaps, been such an active agent, and much of the wrong she has done to her children has been compassed, through what have been regarded as her very virtues—her sweetest qualities—submission, compliance, self-abnegation! In so far as the mothers of the race have been weakly subservient, in that far have they a terrible score against them in the transmission of the qualities which has made the race too weak to do the best that it knew—too cowardly to be honest even with its own soul.