cal
disease, before we pronounce sentence against the human _nature_. If it
ever becomes an established and universally recognized principle, as
fixed and unquestionable as the right and wrong of theft and murder,
that it is a sin against God, a crime against the State, an outrage upon
the helpless victim of their ignorance or wickedness, for an unhealthy
man or woman to become the parent of a child, I think our creeds would
presently undergo modification. Disease seems to me a more fertile
source of evil than depravity; at least it is a more tangible source. We
must have a race of healthy children, before we know what are the true
characteristics of the human race. A child suffering from scrofula gives
but a feeble, even a false representation of the grace, beauty, and
sweetness of childhood. Pain, sickness, lassitude, deformity, a
suffering life, a lingering death, are among the woful fruits of this
dire disease, and it is acknowledged to be hereditary. Is not, then,
every person afflicted with any hereditary disease debarred as by a fiat
of the Almighty from becoming a parent? Every principle of honor forbids
it. The popular stolidity and blindness on these subjects are
astonishing. A young woman whose sisters have all died of consumption,
and who herself exhibits unmistakable consumptive tendencies, is
married, lives to bear three children in quick succession, and dies of
consumption. Her friends mourn her and the sad separation from her
bereaved little ones, but console themselves with the reflection that
these little ones have prolonged her life. But for her marriage, she
would have died years before. Of the three children born of this
remedial marriage, two die in early girlhood of consumption. One left, a
puny infant, languishes into a puny maturity. Even as a remedy, what is
this worth? To die in her youth, to leave her suffering body in the dust
and go quickly to God, with no responsibility beyond herself, or to pine
through six years, enduring thrice, besides all her inherited debility,
the pain and peril, the weariness and terror of child-bearing, to be at
last torn violently and prematurely away from these beloved little
ones,--which is the disease, and which the remedy? And when we look
farther on at the helpless little innocents, doomed to be the recipients
of disease, early deprived of a mother's care, for which there is no
substitute, dragging a load of weakness and pain, and forced down into
the Valley