The Belmont chronicle, and farmers, mechanics and manufacturers advocate. [volume] (St. Clairsville, Ohio) 1848-1855, 1854-10-20
MISC ELL AN EOUS.
E DU @ A T 10 N

by HORACE MANN.

Every deceased man who bequeaths his
maladies to his offspring; every drunkard who
rears children from infiamed and corrupted
blood; every licentious man who transmits
his weakness and his wickedness as an inher-
itance Of suffering, is another repetition of
the fall of man.
From such causes, by adamantine laws,
and through unalterable predestinations, has
come our present diluted and depleted hu-
manity. efete, diseased and corrupt of blood,
abnormal, wasted and short-lived; with its
manliness so evaporated and it's native fires
SO quenched, that our present world, compa-
red with what it should be and what it might
be, is but Lazar house of disease, and an
asylum for the feeble minded. The imbeciie
races of Italy and Spain, the grown millions
of India and Mexico, like river mouths, are
only the foul drainage of ancestral continents,
all gushing with fountains of deblitatng and
cerrupting vices.
When l reflect that, as the number Of an
cestors doubles, at each ascending remove,
two parents, four grand parents, eight great
grand parents, and so onward-there are,
even only at the tenth degree, more than
Thousand conduits of whose united streams
each child is the receptacle; and how ,wolen
with the feculence of all transmissabe malig-
mites. both of body and mind, must be his
blood and brain. }
Why then should wo wonder that all our
animal prepens:ties are represented in our
ethics; that Mammoh has been the Lycurgus
of much of our civil policy, and that deuial
of the great law of Human Brotherhood SO Of
ten finds refuge and resting place in our pop
tular theology.
1t has been somewhat generally conjectur-
ed that the early generations had some meth
cd Of computing time very different from US, &.
hence, that the patriarchs from Adam to No.
ah, (with one or two exceptions) did2not, &C.
cording to the literal records, live to the age
Of between 800 and 1000 years-alterwarC
gradually tapering down to between 100 and
800 years, at the time of the Egyptian vassa.
lage. But tits strong if not conclusive ar.
gument in favor of literal version, that, il
the race had not been created with ten times
more force than it now possesses, its known
violation of all the laws Of health and life
would long ere this, have extnguished it al
together. So rapidly it run down, that al
the time ofDavid, about half way from Adam
to the present day-he spoke, of the average
Of human life as only three score and ten
Now. gsk the bills of mortality and the Life
Insurance companies what its average is, ant
they will tell you that in Europe and the Uni
ted States it is but thirty years; and in grea
cities but twenty years. . .-.
Awful and unspeahabe violations of God
laws havs done this work. 1t is the violation
of the laws Of health and life, enphatical
repeat, which has cut down the years of maj
to this contemplate brevity and harrow
those years with pain; which surrounds tn
cradle with diseases that spring like wolve,
upon the infant at his birth, and which, in
instead of the Odss days when no child wa