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drama-but that it is a fiction is self-evident, and it is the part of science to assert its fictitious character.*

It would thus seem to be fairly established that the child owes nothing to its mother in return for her agency in calling it into existence. As for the father, we place him entirely outside of the question. A young infant cares nothing at all about its father; often cries when first put into his arms; frequently will not endure his presence for months after birth, and makes his acquaintance just as he does any stranger's-only after a hard-won familiarity.

Indeed, so far from being born in debt to its parents, it is often the reverse. In some cases it is more consonant with strict justice to regard the parents as being indebted to the child. For though existence has its compensations when obtained without conditions, it has not when saddled with any sort of parental incubus-such as that of a bad name, a despised class, etc. For this extra load which the child is obliged to carry through life, its parents are responsible. The child is therefore to be regarded as being born not only free from obligation to its parents, but as being sometimes even more or less their creditor by reason of their debts to society which custom has compelled it to involuntarily assume, and which it will have to pay some day or other. This great principle being once established, see how many important consequences flow from it. Not only is the enslavement of human offspring at once deprived of justification, if indeed it ever had any, but the Rights of Women and the Rights of Children at once advance to the front rank of principles to be maintained and reforms to be effected.

The young mother, who has just left school, to encounter, unprepared, all the trials of early maternity; the poor, ignorant, doting little puss, whose passionate endearments to her first-born, returned by certain seraphic crows and sounds of an inarticulate nature, she would fain believe to be an inter

A curious physiological proof that moral and physical traits, so far as they are inherited, are due less to the peculiarities of parents than to the peculiarities of Wet-nurses, is adduced in the December number of the London Social Science Review, in an article upon that subject.

change of filial and maternal affinity, whose source was buried in the mysterious and the sacred, is not prepared for such a doctrine. She declares it to be savage, brutal, cold blooded, materialistic. It looks as though, to put faith in it, she were compelled to bid adieu to the tenderest of emotions, the sweetest of sufferings, the dearest of consolations, the very holy of holies of her fond beliefs. But this is not the case. Let us reassure her.

"Madam, a time will come, and before many months, too, when this helpless infant, whom you have borne, and nursed, and lavished so much care upon, will have other wants, will stand in need of other cares. Then, one of two things will happen. Either, as is most likely the case, you have never given any reflection to the subject, and will fail to perceive this change in your child, or you have, and you will perceive the change. In the former case, you will cry when you observe that he seldom looks to you, except for that protection which maternal sympathy is ever sure to afford him. When his food, his comfort, and his pleasure is derived from other sources, and his love and gratitude find their object in some laughing nursery-maid, you will rock yourself in despair, and ask heaven why it had been so unjust to you, why your child's love was turned away from you, why you do not die, etc., etc. Thus you will make yourself unnecessarily miserable, and lose an excellent opportunity to renew the affection that should exist between you. Perhaps you fall into another error. You take your baby to your heart again. You make him a nursling long after he has ceased to be a nursling, and continue his dependence upon you, in order that you may still reap his smiles and his love. All this is the clearest possible acknowledgment of the principle we are contending for; but what does it lead to? The child's growth, both mental and physical, is stunted; progress and development are at once retarded. Is this your design? Surely not. Either you do these things because you have never given any reflection to the subject, having been transferred from performing the duties of a school girl to those of a mother, without any intermediate preparation, or you have reflected upon it, and believing as you do,

that the child is indebted to you for its existence, and bound to you by some mysterious tie of nature, attribute his conduct to the wiles of servantgalisın.

"In the latter case, you will discharge some faithful domestic, whose only crime has been that she has deserved the gratitude of your infant, and employ a stranger in her place, who will try the other method, and ruin your child's temper by her moroseness and neglect. Perhaps you ascribe the child's conduct to his own perversity. In this case you will spoil him yourself, by making him a martyr to your fanciful code of filial ethics.

"Are these the alternatives you wish to encounter? On the one hand, make yourself miserable, or retard the child's development; on the other, do injustice to faithful domestics, and encourage bad ones who will ruin your child's temper ? Or would you ruin it yourself? Will you hug this idea to your breast, which you will discern some day to be a delusion; or will you throw aside false sentimentality and imaginary emotions, to welcome truth in a knowledge of those laws of our existence which it is the task of philosophy to unfold?

"Start with the correct principle, and nothing will happen amiss. You will perceive the new wants of your child; you will supply them yourself, and you will earn that love which you so much covet, and which never can be obtained unless it is earned. Remember that, in becoming a mother, you have gone into an enterprise-an enterprise by which you cannot earn your living, to be sure-that duty pertains to your husband--but an enterprise by which you may earn an immense store of happiness for both of you-happiness, however, which is only to be reaped by diligently sowing that crop of tender and loving equivalents with which your sex is so beautifully and bountifully provided."

The child has therefore a Right to liberty-a Right to be born free. And this includes the Right to come into the world without taint, without blemish, without an heritage which must be to it either a source of mental or physical disquietude. It is not contended, should the child be born either tainted in character or blemished in health, that the parents thereby

forfeit all right to his tutelage and maintenance; because in order that the child may be born free from hereditary disability a certain amount of self-abnegation is demanded of the parents, and this should have some reward. Furthermore, the taint or blemish inherited by the child will be sure some day or other to prove a source of unhappiness to the parents. But though the punishment of depriving the parents of their child whose right to be born free they have disregarded, is not demanded; yet the punishment brought upon them by the mental or physical deformity of the child should never be sought to be lifted from their shoulders in such cases. Let us now show how such mental and physical deformity is brought about by neglect or misconduct in parents.

Dr. Johnson, in his charming Rasselas, somewhere utters a caution against contracting marriage with persons in ill-health. No matter how much we feel drawn toward such persons; no matter how interesting and affecting their condition may appear to us by very reason of their delicate health or other physical misfortune, it is a duty we owe to our expected offspring that they shall be born without the liability of thus inheriting disease.

Ill-health in the parents is not the only physical defect which is almost certain to be inherited by the children. Intemperance, proneness to religious excitement, and ill-temper, &c., are also heritable. These misfortunes, when they once become common to the parents, manifest themselves in certain physical traits of the children. We shall presently see from the statistics of insanity what bearing these disabilities have upon the welfare of offspring.

Consanguineous marriages are a fruitful source of misfortune to offspring. Strange that we should be willing to devote so much attention to the crossing of breeds in cattle, and so little to the same subject, with human beings! Any stableman or drover can preach you an entire volume on blood-horses, Devon cows, Southdown sheep, and mettled hounds; yet the highest in the land pay no sort of attention to the immensely more important subject of consanguineous marriages. The Greeks had something of a correct idea when they sought with

particular solicitude to perpetuate the race of their hardiest warriors, and a long line of distinguished posterity was the consequence-a race of heroes, of men who produced a civilization centuries in advance of their time. But their system was incomplete the women were entirely left out of their calculations. It was a system of concubinage, doomed sooner or later to degeneracy and self-destruction.

In all countries and at all times certain degrees of consanguinity were forbidden to intermarry. But very little regularity has prevailed upon this all-important topic. Until modern days it has been considered totally within ecclesiastical jurisdiction; and as religions have differed, so have the physiological laws which they have seen fit to enforce. "The disposition to degeneracy, in some form, in the offspring of marriages of cousins or others near of kin," says the Introduction to the Census, "has long been known, but comparatively recent investigations in both Europe and the United States, and particcularly those of MM. Boudin and Devay, in France, and Dr. Bemiss, of Kentucky, have more fully illustrated the subject and more satisfactorily demonstrated the fact." "Dr. Dahl states," we quote from the same volume, "that in Norway the most abundant sources of insanity are hereditary predisposition, the intermarriages of near relatives, and the use of spirituous drinks." Here we are introduced to a new source of misery to offspring hereditary predisposition. We are disposed to pass this over-believing that no person would marry another where even a remote fear existed that the other might become liable to insanity. We are willing to ascribe the origin of the insanity thus stated to be so prominently imparted to offspring, to a period long after marriage. Yet not a few marriages of persons who prove to be insane, do occur; and we advert to the fact merely in order to induce greater caution in contracting alliances. But it has been shown by Darwin in his "Selection of Species by Affinity," that every marked peculiarity of an individual becomes intensified by marriage, and that unless these

Population of the United States in 1860: compiled from the original returns of the Eighth Census, under the direction of the Secretary of the Interior. By Joseph C. G. Kennedy. Washington: 1864.

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