Immature parents.—Experienced stock raisers will not breed inferior or immature stock. If one or both animals to be used for breeding purposes be young, immature, the offspring will be inferior. All leading physiologists place man’s maturity at about twenty-four and a woman’s at about twenty. If continence in thought and life controlled our social relations, it would be best for the human family if marriage did not take place until maturity. Under existing social conditions, sexual dissipation, and its dangers, it is perhaps best, in some cases, that they marry a few years younger. But for fifteen-and sixteen-year-old girls and nineteen-and twenty-year-old boys to marry is a decided physiological and psychological mistake. Children can no more parent normal children than can pigs, colts, and kids parent normal young. A great sociologist says that four to six per cent. more children whose mothers married at sixteen will die in their first year than among children whose mothers married at twenty; and that six to ten per cent. more children whose fathers married at twenty will die in their first year than among children whose fathers married at twenty-four.
An ideal family.—At the close of a lecture on heredity in a college town, a gentleman invited me to take dinner at his home the next day. I accepted his invitation. From eleven o’clock to twelve he and I sat in front of his little cottage home chatting pleasantly. When the college bell announced the noon hour, he turned and said, “When my two boys and my girl return home for dinner I want you to study them as examples of intelligently applied laws of parental preparation, prenatal training, good environment and the Grace of God.”
A few minutes later my attention was called to the rattling of the gate. Turning, I beheld two fine specimens of physical manhood and an equally fine specimen of physical womanhood. On closer acquaintance I found they were leaders in all their classes, leaders in the best circles of society and leaders in church work.
Dinner over, the young people returned to college; dishes were cleared away, and father, mother and I sat in front of that same cottage home; the conversation naturally drifted to heredity and to the young people. The father humbly but proudly said, “Professor, if wife and I should sell all we have, including our wardrobe, we could not raise $1,500. We have never been ambitious for broad acres of land, a palatial home or heavy deposits in the bank. We have had just one all-controlling purpose in our married life, and that has been to give to the world a family of children who will honor us after we are dead, be a blessing to the world and glorify God.” My reply was, “You have certainly erected to your memory three splendid monuments, monuments far grander than if you had worn out your muscle and brains in the production of sordid silver and gold and had left to your children a round million, and they, out of their gratitude, had erected to your memory a marble shaft piercing the very sky.”
I said it then, I have repeated it many times since, “I wish I had the money to pay the transportation and hotel bills of this family on my lecture trips and at the close of a lecture on heredity, could call this family to the platform as a living example of intelligently applied principles of eugenics.” If the initial moment of every child born into this world were intelligently planned for, its prenatal rights respected, its advent warmly welcomed, its environments wisely chosen and it were early led to accept Christ, every family would be equal to this family, and the next generation much superior to this. Will you, gentle reader, model your ideals after this home, teach these truths to others, and teach them to teach these truths to still others? If you will, then you will have done your part towards the world’s redemption.
CHAPTER XLV
CHOOSING A COMPANION
Indications of constitutional degeneracy.—Feeble-mindedness, epilepsy, insanity, scrofula, cancer, rheumatism and gout are the outward indications of constitutional degeneracy and inherited tendencies which are often transmitted from one generation to another of a deteriorating family. These conditions in nearly every instance were due either to strong drink or to sexual sin. In most cases consumption may be added to the above list.
Choosing a degenerate companion.—If you and your family have a clear record of physical, mental and moral health, you can form habits of vice or marry into a family addicted to vice or into a family constitutionally degenerate and hand down to your posterity hereditary conditions and tendencies.
A clear bill of health to your children.—If you and your family have a bad record of health, you can, by a virtuous and temperate life, strict observance of the laws of health, and an intelligent choice of a companion, largely overcome the effects of bad heredity and environment in yourself and transmit a clean bill of health to your children.
Neurotics.—Don’t marry into a neurotic family. Your partner might become insane and your children be afflicted.