The herald. [microfilm reel] (Los Angeles [Calif.]) 1893-1900, 1897-07-17

develop our inherited tendencies will
determine in large part whether hered-
ity shall be our slave-driver or our COM
panion in the race for life, liberty ard
the pursuit of happiness, and whether
we will pass on to our children better
or worse, a weakened or a strength
ened inheritance. Let us understand al
the start that no environment can Gre
ate what is not within the individuality
that heredity has absolutely fixed laws
but that environment does and must
act as the one tremendous vital power
to develop or to control the inheritance
which parents stamp upon their children
You are personally responsible for the
trend, the added power and developmen nj
you give to much that you inherit. You
are personally responsible to the COM
ing generation for the fight it will have
to make and for the strength you trans
init to it to make that fight.
Many father and mother transmit
ted to their fallen" daughter the weak
ness and the tendency to commit the
acts which they and their fellows whine
about afterward as furnishing the fam
lily honor" And let me emphasize here
that l do not attribute all of the moral
and physical disasters of the race to
the fathers of the race. By no means.
believe with all my heart that the
mothers have to answer for their full
share of the vice, sorrow and suffering
Of humanity. Woman has not perhaps
been such an active agent, and much o.
the wrong che has done to her children
has been compassed through what have
been regarded as her very virtues-her
sweetest qualities-submissio compli-
ance, self-abnegation, ignorance of the
sterner facts of the world
ARTIFICIAL CONDITIONS
In so far as the mothers of the race
have been weakly subservient, in that
far have they a terrible score against
them in the transmission of qualities
which has made the race too weak to 90
the best that it knew-too cowardly to
be honest even with its own soul. 1 co
not believe that the sexes, in a normal
state, would differ materially in moral
tone. Why? Simply because throughout
all nature there is no line of demarka-
ton between the sexes on moral grounds
/ do not believe that women are (under
natural and equal condtions) better or
purer than men; do not believe that men
are (under natural and equal conditions)
wiser and ADLER than women. These are
all artificially built up conditions, and
they have fixed upon the race a very
large share of its sorrow, it's crime, its
insanity, its disease, and its despair.
They have weakened women and brutal
lied men.
Children have been born from two par
ents; one is weakly, self-effacing and
trivial, narrow in outlook and petty in
interests-a dependent, and therefore
servile; while the other parent is I'M
clean, unjust, self-assertive and willing
to demand more than he is willing to
give. These conditions have morally
perverted the race so that it will con-
tinue long to need those evidences
against instead of for civilization
almshouses, insane asylums, reforma-
tories and prisons. We don't want our
country covered with magnificently
equipped hospitals, asylums, poorhouses
and prisons. What we want is intelli-
gent and wise parentage which shall de-
populate eleemosynary, charitable, and
penal institutions. We want men and
women on this continent who shall be
we'll and intelligent, and free, and wise
enough to see that not numbers but
quality in population will solve the ques-
tons that perpleX the souls of men. We
want parents who are wise and self
controlled enough to refuse to curse the
world and their own helpless children
with vitiated lives, and who if they can
not give whole, clean, fine children to
the world, will refuse to give it any.
POWER OF MATERNITY
Maternity is an awful power; and the
race which is born of mothers VINO are
harassed. bullied, subordinated, or made
the victims of blind passion or power, or
of mothers who are simply too pretty
and self-debased to feel their subject
status, cannot fail to continue to give
the horrible spectacles we have always
had of war, of vice, of trickery of crime,
of double-dealing, of pretense, of lying,
of arrogance, of subserviency, of brutal
ity of incompetency and alas, of in
sanity, idiocy and disease We begin
to wonder that man has been so slow in
learning to read the message that nature
has telegraphed to him in letters of fire,
and photographed with terrible persis-
tence upon the distorted diseased bodies