Of course, then, if a man poison his body and mind by sexual vices, which are more transmissible to posterity than any other, he gives to his heirs pillars which are rotten. A chaste man holds his head high; obscenity does not percolate from him, and he is strong in the assurance of a perfect, unimpaired manhood; he is apt to beget not weaklings, but a vigorous and lusty race.
On the other hand, the progeny of the impure are likely to siiffer on account of the impaired and vitiated vigor of the parental reproductive functions; thus they are liable to have a proneness to sin organic fault, or physical and moral damage they inherit a neurasthenic sexual predisposition, a slight resisting power against many morbid tendencies, a constitutionally impaired physical and moral stamina, and, in innumerable cases, the awful blight of congenital syphilis. Not only tne sons of the profligate, but also his daughters, inherit the evil legacy, and whatever appears as beautiful in them must chiefly be referred, not to him, but to other ancestors, and to the wholesome influences of education and environment.
Every rational man, who is alive to the importance and reality of the transmissions of hereditary strain, must come unreservedly to the conclusion that irregular indulgence of "Heredity with Variation," Prof. D. K. Shute. New York Medical Journal, those very functions by which progeny is begotten is an unmitigated evil without a single excuse.
Intercourse with women who receive other men's embraces is disgustingly vulgar to any one who at all appreciates the corruptness and putridity of such a practice; and yet if a man strive to avoid this filthiness by procuring a woman who will be true to him alone, he may contract a liaison which will entangle him in such complications of sexual bondage that he will be compelled to marry her. Such women being almost invariably of low social station, a marriage of this nature might blast a man's whole career.
These women, not sympathizing with the fugitive attachments of such men, have frequently been known to make away with their paramours who have jilted them; and juries seldom deal harshly with them. Can money pay for the destruction of a woman's character, the violation of her affections, or the abandonment of her offspring? Few women have ever lived who would be so cruel to a man under similar circumstances.
The more we understand women, the more we must respect them; even an outcast prostitute has much genuine tenderness and love in her nature; she will love and cherish her illegitimate child of uncertain paternity, spending her all on it, while the father abandons them both, flattering himself that another is the father and that no responsibility rests on him. There is strong reason to believe that, after all, a woman is the finest work of creation, when we consider her large endowment of love and constancy and faithfulness!
In some respects she is the weaker vessel, and is often led astray by the decoys which men lay for her under the cloak of love and promise of future repara tkm; but we must blush for our sex when we consider the amount of harm which many of us do, men being almost invariably the aggressors, and licentious men far outnumbering the women who are impure. Men have sought for every possible device whereby they
can worship at the shrine of Venus without contracting disease ; but, as might be expected, their efforts have resulted in uniform failure, as all efforts will which are contrary to natural law.
Opponents may be relied upon to say that there is nothing unnatural in promiscuous fornication, citing the lower animals as examples; but the debased element in the human race has never followed a course in any way parallel with that which the instincts of the brutes dictate. In whatever community sexual irregularities are much practised, there may be found a large number of individuals of both sexes who are irritable and nervous wrecks in the sexual domain; and by hereditary transmission the evil increases, by a process somewhat akin to fermentation, so that in a very short space of time all naturalness has disappeared.