e world a
sickly and half-developed offspring; or owing to the very conditions
of their existence, they become emaciated and hand on a similar life
to their descendants. But who can oppose the voice of prudence to the
'mightiest passions of mankind' (Laws), especially when they have
been licensed by custom and religion? In addition to the influences of
education, we seem to require some new principles of right and wrong in
these matters, some force of opinion, which may indeed be already heard
whispering in private, but has never affected the moral sentiments
of mankind in general. We unavoidably lose sight of the principle of
utility, just in that action of our lives in which we have the most need
of it. The influences which we can bring to bear upon this question
are chiefly indirect. In a generation or two, education, emigration,
improvements in agriculture and manufactures, may have provided the
solution. The state physician hardly likes to probe the wound: it is
beyond his art; a matter which he cannot safely let alone, but which he
dare not touch:

'We do but skin and film the ulcerous place.'

When again in private life we see a whole family one by one dropping
into the grave under the Ate of some inherited malady, and the parents
perhaps surviving them, do our minds ever go back silently to that day
twenty-five or thirty years before on which under the fairest auspices,
amid the rejoicings of friends and acquaintances, a bride and bridegroom
joined hands with one another? In making such a reflection we are not
opposing physical considerations to moral, but moral to physical; we are
seeking to make the voice of reason heard, which drives us back from the
extravagance of sentimentalism on common sense. The late Dr. Combe is
said by his biographer to have resisted the temptation to marriage,
because he knew that he was subject to hereditary consumption. One who
deserved to be called a man of genius, a friend of my youth, was in the
habit of wearing a black ribbon on his wrist, in order to remind him
that, being liable to outbreaks of insanity, he must not give way to the
natural impulses of affection: he died unmarried in a lunatic asylum.
These two little facts suggest the reflection that a very few persons
have done from a sense of duty what the rest of mankind ought to have
done under like circumstances, if they had allowed themselves to think
of all the misery which they were about to bring into the world. If