This field of investigation is a broad one, and even if you never have an opportunity to study the subject scientifically you can still be of incalculable benefit to humanity by ever remembering that you are living for an earthly, as well as for a heavenly immortality. The young people who to-day are in the Land of the Teens are they who are determining the characteristics of the men and women of the Twentieth Century, creating the standards of thought and action, the methods of business, the level of morals, in fact the whole status of society in the world of a hundred years to come.
It is a very wonderful fact that God has so created us that the result of our deeds is not limited to our own lives, but makes its impress upon those who are to come after us. We are not separate units, but are links in a living chain of endless transmission. This fact makes our lives of far greater consequence than if, in their results, they were limited to ourselves. If we are anxious concerning the future of our country, we may take to heart the thought that it will be what we ourselves have made it. The Bible expresses the same idea in many ways. “Whatsoever a man soweth, 30 that shall he also reap,” does not mean merely that his own future will be influenced by his conduct, but that his future in his children will be a record which he himself has made.
Men often make their wills and bequeath to their children their gold or houses and lands, but sometimes against their wills they bequeath to their children a bodily dwelling of inferior material, and so poor in construction that it very soon falls into decay through disease, or in very early life becomes a tottering ruin. It would seem rather amusing to us if one should sit down and write his will and say: “I bequeath to my daughter Mary my yellow, blotched and pimpled complexion, resulting from my own bad habits of life. I bequeath to my son John, the effects of my habits of dissipation in my youth, with a like love for alcoholic liquors and tobacco. I bequeath to my son Harry my petulant, irritable disposition, and the rheumatic gout which I have brought upon myself by disobedience to physical law; and to my daughter Elizabeth, my trembling nerves and weak moral nature.” But this is, in truth, what many parents do, and the children find it a sad, instead of an amusing fact.
On the other hand, if one has led a life of uprightness and morality, and has obeyed physical law, his children will inherit his physical vigor, and his moral stamina. It becomes of exceeding great importance that these facts should be known to the young, in order that they may endeavor to overcome their own weaknesses, and strengthen their own good qualities for the sake of future generations.
This heredity, the transmission of the qualities of the parent to the child, is found among plants and animals as well as in the human race. The seed of a plant produces another plant of the same kind, and the farmer knows when he sows wheat, that his harvest will be wheat, and he should know just as certainly that if he “sows wild oats” in his youth he may expect “wild oats” in his children. The character of the food we eat, the air we breathe, the occupations we follow, the habits we create, are the forces which shape not only our own destiny, but create the tendencies of our children.
With these thoughts in mind, the question of the use of narcotics becomes one of great importance. There are few, if any, tobacco users who are anxious that their boys should early begin the use of the weed. But they do not realize the fact that in their own use of it they may have diminished the vital force of these boys, transmitting a tendency to disease, or perhaps an appetite for the tobacco itself, and not only will the boys feel the effects, but the girls as well. As the thought of men is turned in this direction, proofs are accumulating of the evil results to the children of tobacco-using parents. A prominent physician says: “I have never known an habitual tobacco user whose children did not have deranged nerves, and sometimes weak minds. Shattered nervous systems, for generations to come, may be the result of this indulgence. The children of tobacco-using parents frequently die with infantile paralysis. I have known two cases in which the crying of the baby could not be stopped until the tobacco-pipe was placed between its lips.” Dr. Pidduck asserts that in no instance is the 32 sin of the father more strikingly visited upon his children than the sin of tobacco using. “The enervation, the hypochondriasis, the hysteria, the insanity, the dwarfish deformities, the consumption, the suffering lives, and early deaths of the children of inveterate smokers bear ample testimony to the feebleness and unsoundness of the constitution transmitted by this pernicious habit.”
The effect of alcohol upon the child is equally marked, and from all sides comes the testimony that the degenerations do not stop with the individual, but pass on to succeeding generations. Sometimes the influence is seen in the stunting of the growth, both mentally and physically. Dr. Langden Downe reports several cases of this sort where the children had lived to be twenty-two years old and still remained infants, symmetrical in form, just able to stand beside a chair, utter a few monosyllabic sounds, and to be amused with toys. Dr. F. R. Lees, referring to the injury inflicted upon the liver by alcohol, says: “And recollect, whatever injury you inflict upon this organ, to your posterity the curse descends, and as is the father, so are the children.” Dr. Kerr asserts that the effects of injury to the mind and body may not always show themselves in the drinker himself, yet it is doubtful if his children ever entirely escape the effects in one form or another. These effects may be manifest in insanity, or in a tendency to diseases of the stomach, liver, bowels, lungs, or other organs; or with a like love for alcoholic stimulants. Not only may the child be weak in body but also in intellect. It is the statement of a score of observant physicians that 33 the children of intemperate parents are apt to be feeble in body and weak in mind.
Another very striking thought in this connection is that while the physical effects may not show in the individual himself, nor in his children, they may be manifest in the deterioration of his grandchildren and great-grandchildren. A prominent temperance advocate who was laid up with rheumatic gout, which is apt to be the result of alcoholic indulgence, replied to a friend who wondered that he, a drinker of cold water, should suffer with this disease, “Yes, my ancestors drank the liquor and I foot the bills.” In 1834 the Parliament of the British House of Commons made a report of intemperance in which they stated that the evils of alcoholism “are cumulative in the amount of injury they inflict, as intemperate parents, according to high medical testimony, give a taint to their offspring before birth, and the poisonous stream of spirits is conveyed through the milk of the mother to the infant at the breast; so that the fountain of life, through which nature supplies that pure and healthy nutriment of infancy, is poisoned at its very source, and a diseased and vitiated appetite is thus created, which grows with its growth, and strengthens with its increasing weakness and decay.”
A tendency to commit suicide seems to be a marked bequest of an inebriate parent to his children, and it is well to state that in the opinion of medical men who are dealing with all forms of inebriety, the evils resulting to the children may be transmitted by parents who have never been noted for drunkenness. Continual moderate drinking 34 keeps the body so constantly under the influence of alcohol that a crowd of nervous difficulties and disorders may be transmitted even more surely than from the parent who has occasional sprees with long intervals of sobriety between. It is not only through the drinking father that injury is done to the children, but the mother may have a vitiated inheritance from her father and transmit it to her children.