HEREDITY.
Vitality largely rests upon inherited qualities. A child born of weak parents, those parents having received their weakness by inheritance, will itself be weak in the same way. Idiots breed idiots. Whatever improvement the child may enjoy, must rest upon its inherited foundation. If a child inherits brown eyes they must stay brown, no amount of cultivation may change their color, but inherited weak sight may be improved to a greater or less degree. Two forces, therefore, control vitality, namely, conditions preceding birth and conditions during life. In other words, the foundations of vitality are wholly inherited, and may be cultivated to the degree the inherited foundations will permit.
A perfectly sound physical and mental inheritance is rare and is the greatest of all assets. The highest development of a nation will begin when the human law conforms to God’s law of development and parenthood is denied to defectives. Prisons and asylums are now sufficiently numerous, as it is evidence of defectiveness of the masses to conduct our affairs so as to necessitate their increase. Indiana now has five great insane asylums, each representing about one million dollars, and there are enough insane in jails, poorhouses and in homes to fill another one. Our population increased 16 per cent. in the last decade and insanity increased 29 per cent. There is a business problem for you.
To go along in the future as in the past, permitting, even fostering the production of the hereditary insane, of the hereditary pauper and criminal, of the hereditary idiot and feeble-minded, and then building great palaces in parks to care for them, will mean we have not the common horse-sense necessary for the proper conduct of our affairs. (Applause.)
HYGIENE.
We must look to hygiene, the science of health, to conserve human vitality. The term includes every necessary force to prevent disease, to increase strength and endurance, and to prevent the production of the unfit.
The ponderous and oppressively costly courts have been grinding for centuries and crime increases. Punishment and fear of punishment restrain evil doing, but does not eradicate the tendency to evil. This and other defects we must, as far as possible breed out of the race, and science can find a valid answer for every objection which obstructionists can raise to this proposition. Fostering insanity, crime, pauperism and imbecility, is not evidence of understanding and of high ability.
The divisions of hygiene are: Federal, State, Municipal, Institutional, School, Domiciliary and Personal.
Hygiene not only makes for greater physical strength and endurance but it makes for greater moral strength. It is the essence of charity, kindliness, patience and truth.
When, through hygiene, defectives, delinquents and dependents are no longer propagated, when simplicity and frugality of living are achieved, voluntary celibacy and voluntary childlessness will become discreditable, and sickness, disease and premature death will disappear before temperance and sanitized homes.