Again, investigation would show you that children go astray, become wild, dissipated, or even criminal, because parents have not known how to train them, how to keep their confidence, how wisely to guide them in ways of righteousness.
We all believe it very important that mothers should know how to direct and govern their children, and yet we do not train the future mothers for this important office. We teach girls how to sew or cook, how to embroider and play the piano. We do not expect them to know, without instruction, how to mingle the ingredients for a cake or pudding, but we imagine that they will know by intuition how to secure the best results in the mingling of heterogeneous compounds in the formation of the characteristics of a human being.
When we speak of the mother's privilege, we think of the actual mother, whose privilege is to care for and guide her real children. But the mother's privilege in fact begins in her own childhood, when by her habits of life and thought she is deciding her own character, and at the same time creating, in great degree, the talents and tendencies of her possible children. It is her privilege to secure a measure of physical vigor for her descendants by her care of her own health in her very girlhood. She can endow them with mental power by not frittering away her own powers of mind in foolish reading or careless methods of study. By her own self-respecting conduct she helps to give them the reverence for self which will insure their acting wisely. All this is the mother's privilege; and still one more great privilege is hers, and that is to choose one-half the ancestry of her descendants. She cannot choose their ancestry that comes to them through herself; that is a fixed fact. Her parents must of necessity be her children's grandparents. Her family characteristics are also their inheritance. The only thing she can do in regard to their inheritance through her is to modify the objectionable traits, and to cultivate the good traits herself, so that family faults may in her be weakened and the probability of transmission lessened, and the family virtues be strengthened and their probable transmission intensified. But she has the power to decide what shall be the paternal ancestry of her household; and if she is duly impressed with the responsibility of this power, she will not allow herself to fall in love and marry a man of whose family she knows nothing, or knows facts that do not promise well for posterity.
CHAPTER XXVII.[ToC]
THE LAW OF HEREDITY.
I once heard of a man who on his death-bed made a singular will. He had no houses or lands to bequeath his children, but he had observed that they had inherited much from him, and so he made a formal bequest to them of that which they already possessed.