The Wesleyan Methodist says, “The open and absolute assertion that every wife has the absolute right to determine her relationship to motherhood may make trouble, but it is the kind of trouble which must come in some homes before wifehood becomes anything more than a form of the basest kind of slavery.”
Dr. Winfield Scott Hall, in Reproduction and Sexual Hygiene, says, “There is another sacrifice, if it be so called, which the husband is called upon to make during the pregnancy of his wife; namely, to abstain absolutely from sexual intercourse. All other animals observe this period of continence. Nature demands that man observe it. The author submits this question to all fair-minded men; is it not due the wife that she be not asked to satisfy the recurring sexual desires of the husband during the period when her life and its energies are so sacred to the race, to society and to the family? The author submits this question because some men are known to transgress this law of nature.”
Prof. N. N. Riddell says, “The present ethics of marriage licenses that which degrades the affections and destroys the possibilities of harmony. The abuse of the generative function is the chief cause of domestic inharmony, divorce and shame, inherited lascivious tendencies and the vices and crime which follow. Three-fourths of the race have their origin in uncontrolled desire, while less than one-half of the remainder are as well-born as they might have been.”
A suggestion.—The author would suggest that the reader pause one moment before he criticises or rejects the opinions of the great and godly men. What right has a married man to preach, teach and demand continence among young people, his sons and daughters, if he cannot practice self-restraint on a level with the savage and the lower animals? The violations of the laws of sex are the chief causes of human degeneracy. Where married people have been falsely educated in the idea that marriage means unrestricted indulgence and under this delusion have created unnatural demand, a horde of evils will follow. If this unfortunate class care only for a selfish pleasure, the children will follow each other closely and will receive a poor heredity. If they use preventive means to restrict the size of the family, the few children born into the home will receive an unfortunate heredity. Excess in marriage impoverishes the body, mind and soul and unfits for true parentage. Every device used to prevent conception or to destroy unwelcome life will injure the parents and the occasional accidental and unwelcome child will receive a most unfortunate heredity.
The mental and moral states, as well as the physical condition of the parents, for months before and at the initial moment and during gestation, must necessarily become a part of the child.
CHAPTER XLVIII
DELINQUENCY—CAUSES AND REMEDIES
Purity, a nation’s strength.—The strength and perpetuity of a nation consist not in its standing army, mighty navy, millions of population, strong fortifications, inexhaustible resources of wealth, but in the purity and strength of its manhood and womanhood. Babylon, Greece and Rome did not fall because of a shortage of men, weakness of fortifications, exhausted resources or lack of warships, but because of a degenerate manhood and womanhood.
The home threatened.—Are there agencies of degeneracy operating in our social fabric that threaten our nation’s strength and perpetuity? We shall see. The greatest social problems of the church and state must be solved in the home. Whatever agencies destroy the home will ultimately destroy society, the church and the nation.
The divorce problem.—That God-ordained and God-honored institution, the home—in its purity, strength, and influence, was never more in danger than now. The home is an organized institution, consisting of husband, wife and one or more children, bound by the most sacred vows, the purest love and harmony. The home, the basis of society, the church and the nation is in danger. Homes are being wrecked nearly as fast as they are being built. Divorce is on the increase; marriage and births are on the decrease. In 1870, we had one divorce to every thirty-eight marriages. In 1900, we had one divorce to every fourteen and one-quarter marriages. Now we are having one to every eleven marriages. Last year Canada had only seventeen divorces. An Ohio daily gave one county in that state the credit of one hundred and thirty-two divorces in twelve months. Canada has better social customs, better marriage and better divorce laws than we have. There, a girl rarely keeps company with a young man before she is eighteen and rarely gets married until after she is twenty. Here, she is often teased about sweethearts when she is five, taught to avoid being an old maid when she is seven, when ten she is making goo-goo eyes at the boys, when eleven she is passing notes to every Tom, Dick and Harry in the schoolroom, when twelve she is desperately in love, when thirteen she is engaged and goes buggy riding and roams the streets at late hours with boys, when fifteen she is in the divorce court, and six months later she has her second husband.
Social dangers.—A nation whose social customs encourage innocent, playful, fourteen-and fifteen-year-old girls to enter society and meet the temptations and dangers incident to matured womanhood need not be surprised when she finds that one-half of her 300,000 erring women fell before they were seventeen and that one-half of her divorces are among women who married before they were seventeen. Our social customs should be changed so as to safeguard the virtue of our boys and girls during the stormy period of early adolescence.