What a Young Woman Ought to Know Part 12

And he, too, begins to manifest a deeper interest in you. You see this with a certain pride in the fact that he is not self-deceived He knows you, has seen you in your daily life, has sounded the depth of your intellect, knows of your religious beliefs, and in all he has found you coming up to his ideals. His eye meets yours with a new tenderness in its glance that touches you, because you know it is not an earthly fire of pa.s.sion that glows therein. It is you, the real, immortal you, that he seeks; not merely the pleasures of sense through you; and feeling the response in your own heart, your glance kindles with the same divine fire, and your true selves have spoken to each other. You have gradually grown into the knowledge of love. You have not fallen in love. And yet there have been no words, and in maiden shyness you await his speech. Your womanly reserve has won his respect, and he makes no attempts to win privileges of endearments before he confesses his love, but frankly and manfully pleads his suit and wins.

Oh, my dear child, this has been no matter for jesting; it has been serious, and we who have watched this dawning love have realized that the great drama of life, so full of tragic possibilities, is being here enacted. We do not laugh, nor jest, but with the tenderest prayers we welcome you into the possibilities of G.o.d's divinest gift of human love.

CHAPTER XXVI.

RESPONSIBILITY IN MARRIAGE.

You are beginning to feel a peculiar interest in one young man more than in any other. You think of him in his absence; you welcome his coming; his eyes seem to caress you; the clasp of his hand thrills you; you begin to think that you have pa.s.sed from the domain of friendship into that of love.

Before you really make that admission, let us "reason together." Let us take a fair look at matters, and see whether it is wiser to pa.s.s the border line, or to remain only friends. Who is this young man? You tell me his name, but that means nothing. Who is he? What is he in himself? What are his talents, capacities, habits, inherited tendencies? Who is his father, his mother? What is their worth? I do not mean in money, but in themselves? What ancestral diseases or defects may he transmit to his posterity, which will be your posterity if he becomes your husband? Are the family tendencies such that you would be willing to see them repeated in your children?

There is no indelicacy in asking yourself these questions, nor in making the investigations which will enable you to answer them satisfactorily. The woman who marries, marries not only _into_ her husband's family, she also marries his family; she is to become one of it, to live with it in closer and closer companionship as her children, bearing the family temperament, disposition and tendencies, gather one by one around her hearth.

Is the family one of the type that she will desire to a.s.sociate with intimately all the days of her life? You may feel that it does not matter if you do not love your husband's mother, or admire his sisters; no matter if you do not have respect for his father, you will live so far away from them that it will not be oftener than once in several years that you will be obliged to meet them. It might even happen that you would never see them, and yet it be a very serious matter that they were not respectable or lovable people, for they const.i.tute one-half of the ancestry of your children. Their most undesirable characteristics may, perchance, be the endowment of your sons and daughters, and your heart ache, or even break, over the habits, or, it may be, criminality, which may disgrace your home through the paternal inheritance that you chose for them. Viewed in this light, marriage becomes a most serious matter. It is unfortunate that girls generally have the idea that it is not modest to think of marriage further than the ceremony. Of the responsibilities and duties they are not only ignorant, but think it ladylike to remain uninformed until experience teaches them, and that teaching is often accompanied by heart-breaking sorrow. If you should make inquiry you would discover that a large proportion of mothers have buried their firstborn children, and should you ask them why, they would in all probability say, almost without exception, that it was because they did not know how to give them a dower of health, or how to care for their physical needs.

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.

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.

He wrote: "I bequeath to my son John my big bony frame and the slouching gait I acquired by carelessness, also my inherited tendency to consumption. To my daughter Mary I bequeath my sallow complexion and torpid liver, which are the result of my gross living; also my melancholy disposition and tendency to look on the dark side of life.

To my son Samuel I give my love for alcoholic liquors and my irritable disposition; to my daughter Jane my coa.r.s.eness of thought and my unwillingness to be restrained in my desires, and also my tendency to commit suicide."

"A very strange will," said everybody, and yet it was a will that was probated long before the testator's death. That it gave perfect satisfaction I will not a.s.sert, but it was never contested and paid no fees to lawyers.

Just such wills are being made daily by the lives and conduct of young people, though they are not put into writing. Some time in the future, however, they will be written into "living epistles, known and read of all men."

Other wills are being made daily that through sober, virtuous, youthful lives will bequeath to posterity dowers of health, strength, purity and power.

This being true, it seems only a part of prudent foresight to study in youth the law that governs the transmission of personal characteristics to the future "denizens of life's great city." This law is known as Heredity, and its first written record is in the first chapter of Genesis, where it is written that "Every plant and animal shall bring forth after its kind." We are so accustomed to seeing the results of this law that we give it little or no thought. We see that gra.s.s springs up each year on our lawns and meadows. We know that if we put the seeds of a certain flower in the ground, that kind of flower will always spring up, never another kind. The farmer is not anxious, after he sows wheat, for fear that the crop will be rye or barley. We expect that the young of cats will be kittens, of geese will be goslings, of men will be human children, and we are never disappointed. The law holds good under all circ.u.mstances.

We see, too, that there are certain race characteristics that maintain. The Mongolian race has peculiar high cheek-bones, sallow complexions and eyes set in bias, and we recognize the j.a.panese or Chinese at once, even though dressed in the garb of our country. So, too, we recognize the African or the Caucasian by certain marked characteristics. This transmission of racial traits we call race heredity.

Then each race has its own traits, physical or mental, which we recognize as national, and so speak of them. We always mention thrift as an attribute of the Teutonic nations; the Irishman we characterize as witty and pugnacious; the Frenchman as polite; the American as progressive.

Each individual has not only his human inheritance, his race inheritance and his national characteristics, but he has also an endowment of family traits.

But we are not made up of odds and ends of ancestral belongings alone.

We have in ourselves something that is original, that makes us different from each other, and from all others. I have sometimes thought that we are somewhat like patchwork quilts, the parti-colored blocks being set together by some solid-colored material; or, better still, we are like "hit and miss" rag carpets, with a warp of our own individuality, filled in with a woof made of qualities and capacities of all those who have preceded us. You know, in making "hit and miss"

rag carpets we take little strips and bits of various materials and all colors, and sew them together without regard to order or arrangement, and these long strips are woven back and forth in the warp until the carpet is woven, showing no set pattern, but a mingling of tints and shades that is sometimes crude and unsightly, sometimes soft and artistic.

I used, in childhood, to find great delight in seeking among the blended colors in the carpet for sc.r.a.ps of clothing which I recognized as having belonged to father or mother, or perhaps even to grandparents. Even now, in my maturer years, I am interested in finding in myself the physical, mental or moral characteristics of those same ancestors; and you, no doubt, can do the same, while some of your traits seem to be yours entirely, const.i.tuting individual variations upon ancestral inheritances.

Nature has been doing for centuries, unheeded, what the photographer of to-day thinks is a modern discovery, that is, making composite photographs of us all.

Through this law of inheritance have arisen the intellectual, the moral or the criminal types of humanity, and the process is continuing; the types are becoming more and more marked, or modifying influences are being brought in to change the type.

These influences are also the result of law, even though we may not be able to trace them to their cause. Knowing this, however, we begin to see that heredity is not fatality; that the power to modify the endowments of future generations is ours. To know how to employ it, we should study the law as far as we have opportunity.

This subject is a large one, and no doubt you will some day want to give it a thorough investigation. Just now, however, you will have to accept my statements. I will not make them technical, but strictly practical to you as a young woman desiring that knowledge which shall best fit you for the responsibilities of future life.

A superficial study is rather discouraging. We see with what certainty evil characteristics are transmitted, and we feel that the law is a cruel one; but if we have patience we shall find that, like all laws of G.o.d, its purpose is for the benefit of the race. Before we begin to take comfort from the law let us first learn its warnings, one of which is that all weakening of the individual, either in bodily strength, in intellectual power or moral fiber, tends to produce a like weakness in posterity. This is why I say to you that the young people of the present have in their hands the welfare of the future.

Their habits to-day are moulding the possibilities of the race. Young women may feel that their individual violation of the laws of health is of no importance, but when they realize that the girls of to-day are the mothers of the future, and that the physical strength or weakness of each individual girl affects the average health of the nation, not only now, but it may be through her posterity for centuries, we can see that each girl's health is a matter of national and of racial importance.

But it is not alone in the physical organization that we can trace the law of heredity in the transmission of undesirable qualities. We find that evil traits and tendencies of mind or morals are transmissible.

Galton finds that a bad temper is quite sure to be pa.s.sed on from one generation to the next, and any peculiarity of disposition in either parents is quite likely to become an inheritance of the child. This fact makes our little faults seem of vastly more importance than otherwise. We can endure them in ourselves, but they strike us very unpleasantly when we are obliged to see them manifested in our children. As the poet says:

"Little faults unheeded, which I now despise; For my baby took them with her hair and eyes."

It may not strike us very unpleasantly when we speak disrespectfully to our parents, but when our own children show us lack of courtesy and cheerful obedience it cuts deeply, and all the more deeply if we see in their conduct but a repet.i.tion of our own.

Of course, if these minor faults are transmissible, we will not be surprised that graver moral defects are pa.s.sed on. The grandson of a thief began to steal at three years of age, and at fourteen was an expert pickpocket. The police records show the same family names recurring year after year.

These cases are so grave as to attract attention, while we overlook the fact that the smaller immoralities are as apt to be transmitted, and perhaps with increased power. I should be afraid that slight lack of strict integrity in the father might appear as actual crime in the son.

I would not omit to mention also the law of Atavism, in this discussion of heredity. This is that expression of the law in the omission of one generation in the transmission of a quality. We sometimes see the peculiarities or defects of a man or woman not manifested in their children, but reappearing in their grandchildren.

Not long ago I was in a family where both parents and all the children had dark hair but one, and she had long, bright auburn ringlets. I asked, "Where did you get your hair?"

"From my red-headed grandmother," she answered, with a laugh, indicating that the matter had been so often discussed in her hearing that she understood it quite fully.

To cover the whole scope of the law of heredity would take more time than we have to spare. You can follow out the line of thought, and make practical application of the facts and principles here laid down.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

HEREDITARY EFFECTS OF ALCOHOL, TOBACCO, ETC.

Civilized life in its progress is accompanied by certain customs and habits which are detrimental to the individual health, and therefore to national health. The dress of women is not merely an unimportant matter, to be made the subject of sneers or jests. Fashions often create deformities, and are therefore worthy of most philosophic consideration, especially when we know that the effects of these deformities may be transmitted.