tle family herself. The boys gradually get beyond her
control; they are kept in the street to earn something for their
support; they become wild and vagrant, and soon end with being
street-rovers, or petty thieves, or young criminals. The girls are
trained in begging or peddling, and, meeting with bold company, they
gradually learn the manners and morals of the streets, and after a while
abandon the wretched home, and break what was left of the poor mother's
hope and courage, by beginning a life of shame.

This sad history is lived out every day in New York. If any theorists
desire to see what fruits "Free Love" or a weak marriage-bond can bear
among the lowest working-classes, they have only to trace the histories
of great numbers of the young thieves and outcasts and prostitutes in
this city. With the dangerous classes, "elective affinities" are most
honestly followed. The results are suffering, crime, want, and
degradation to those who are innocent.

INHERITANCE.

A most powerful and continual source of crime with the young is
inheritance--the transmitted tendencies and qualities of their parents,
or of several generations of ancestors.

It is well-known to those familiar with the classes, that certain
appetites or habits, if indulged abnormally and excessively through two
or more generations, come to have an almost irresistible force, and, no
doubt, modify the brain so as to constitute almost an insane condition.
This is especially true of the appetite for liquor and of the sexual
passion and sometimes of the peculiar weakness, dependence, and laziness
which make confirmed paupers.

The writer knows of an instance in an alms-house in Western New York,
where four generations of females were paupers and prostitutes. Almost
every reader who is familiar with village life will recall poor families
which have had dissolute or criminal members beyond the memory of the
oldest inhabitant, and who still continue to breed such characters. I
have known a child of nine or ten years, given up, apparently beyond
control, to licentious habits and desires, and who in all different
circumstances seemed to show the same tendencies; her mother had been of
similar character, and quite likely her grandmother. The "gemmules," or
latent tendencies, or forces, or cells of her immediate ancestors were
in her system, and working in her blood, producing irresistible effects
on her brain, nerves, and mental emo