Chapter II: Part 2

The following illustrates the fearful consequences of sexual indulgence during pregnancy:

“Charlotte and I were school-mates and dear friends ever since I can remember anything,” said the young woman. “Our parents had been friends before us. I think we were equals in every sense, except that Lotty was handsomer than I. We became engaged and were married on the same day, when I was twenty-one and she twenty-two years of age. Our husbands are both honorable and kind men, and so far as our married lives are concerned, we have both been well situated.

“In about the usual time after marriage we found ourselves pregnant, and as we lived not far distant from each other, we made our babies’ wardrobes in company, anticipating, with much pleasure, the already dear children.

“We had passed the fifth month, when Lotty, for the first time, alluded to her most private life with her husband, saying she was so glad that she could respond so fully to his demands. It had not been so at first, but now the relation occurred almost every night, and she experienced quite as much emotion as he did, to his very great satisfaction.

“I made an exclamation of surprise, and then was silent. My own experience had been entirely opposed to hers, but I knew nothing of right or wrong in such matters; I had nothing to reply.

“In due time, to our great delight, we each held a daughter in our arms. Other children followed pretty close on their track, and our meetings, though no less cordial, became less frequent. The years flew past on swift wing. Our eldest children were thirteen years old; mine a refined, conscientious, reliable girl; hers too mature bodily, and with a rather handsome, but positive, sensual face. In order--as they intended--to check the forwardness of her manners, she was sent to boarding-school. Here she climbed out of the window at night, and having had an intrigue with a boy belonging to an academy near by, was expelled from the institution. The parents entreated, bribed, threatened, with no signs of improvement on her part. Finally, when this poor child wanted two months of reaching her fifteenth year, she left her home, and of her own free will became the inmate of a brothel. Once or twice, through the help of a detective, she was recovered; but only to escape again to follow the life that suited her organization.

“Her father’s head was bowed with grief. The mother became hard and irritable, growing to hate the child who had brought on them so much sorrow and shame. I grieved for them, but I never understood the case till I heard you speak of the mother’s power over her unborn child. Now I see that Maria was the victim of her parents’ ignorance.”[2]

[2] Dr. Sanger, who is authority on the subject of prostitution,
says that the observation of years among the abandoned class,
has led him to the conclusion that only one woman in a thousand
is brought to adopt the life of a prostitute from the same
sensual proclivities that make a man consort with the
abandoned. Seduction by a lover, followed by the rejection
of society, poverty, inability to labor, desire for elegant
clothing, and various other causes, have brought the other
nine hundred and ninety-nine into this bitter degradation.
The young girl alluded to above was one of the exceptions.
Since while pregnant--women, sad to say, have been constantly
forced to yield their persons to the lusts of the husband,
they have in spirit rebelled against the unnatural demand,
instead of heartily assenting.

VIOLATION OF SEXUAL LAW DURING PREGNANCY.

I will briefly refer to another instance where the child so fatally endowed was a boy.

The sisters of this boy--women of some presence--were already married, and mothers, when their mother found herself pregnant at forty-five. The husband was much gratified at the prospect of becoming a father at sixty, and expressed this satisfaction in frequent relations with his wife. It so happened that their pecuniary circumstances were easier than at any previous time, and the wife employed “help,” which relieved her of all the severer household duties. She was not an intellectual or cultivated woman, and the unaccustomed leisure did not prove a boon, since it left her with unspent strength to meet and respond to the demands made upon her quite up to the time of the infant’s arrival. Thus, you see, the boy had imparted to him over-active amativeness, combined with small mental activities. How should he when a man restrain _his_ passions, when during all his ante-natal life his parents had put no restraint on theirs? He did not. He showed himself a low bully among his school-mates, and the dread of the younger girls, before he had reached his “teens.” After that, his sensual, brutal behavior actually repelled his boy-companions. When a man, he barely escaped being the inmate of a prison, as he had been already of worse places.

The man who is dominated by this one quality is very often handsome, magnetic, and attractive to women. He boasts privately, if not publicly, of his conquests, holding no reputation sacred.

Perhaps to common observation he is a gentleman, and you hear of his liasons in a whisper. Alas! for the wives of these gay cavaliers. They lead a lonely life, since he spends the best of himself--his suave manners and good nature--in fact, _all_ of himself elsewhere.

Suddenly and all unexpectedly you hear that this attractive man, not forty-five, is sinking down with some insidious disease. It is called neuralgia in the head, or paralysis, and the doctor has the promise of a long job. It is, in fact, softening of the brain, caused by excessive passional excitement and the undue drain on his vital forces. He may live years, his digestive organs holding out better, because having drifted into idiocy there is no longer any wear and tear of the mind.

This man has been “successful” with women, and this is the finale.

THE FATHER’S INFLUENCE THROUGH THE WIFE.

Mr. Z., a man of thirty-five, of a refined, intellectual, but rather cold nature, married his ward, an amiable, immature girl of fifteen. Her attraction for him lay in her youthful affection and her healthy, handsome, physical characteristics. She had in her the “makings” of a thoughtful, self-reliant woman; but development in natural order was arrested by her being placed in so false a position--a wife at scarcely fifteen.

Very soon after the marriage she found herself pregnant. Meanwhile, Mr. Z. for love of her and for the sake of companionship, earnestly endeavored to awaken in her some intellectual tastes. He read to her, explaining and illustrating as he went along, many of the standard English poets and essayists. She listened, received, and grew _en rapport_ with him.

Under these favorable auspices their first child was born. She was the child of the father, and wore his features, toned to greater delicacy of outline and purer colors. Her mind as she grew to womanhood was of a quite superior order, but wanted the breadth and generosity which more warmth in the father, and greater ripeness in the mother, would have secured to her.

This infant once in the mother’s arms there could be no further leisure for literary or poetic culture. And as it was not possible for intellectual habits to be formed in the short space of twelve months, the young girl naturally slid back to her former plane of life. This was the more inevitable as their pecuniary circumstances made it necessary for Mrs. Z. to take sole charge of her little one.

Two years from this time another child was born to them--a girl also; but in whom Mrs. Z.’s mental calibre was represented, while her fine physical traits were omitted.

With the more all-engrossing cares of the young wife, the daily life of herself and husband grew insensibly apart. And now a new personage appeared on the scene--a lady of a brilliant, comprehensive, and highly cultivated mind, to which was added a keen and comprehensive interest in the most important reform movement of the day, for which Mr. Z. had signally failed to enlist his wife’s sympathy.

Now it was but natural that Mrs. Z., observing the eagerness with which her husband became engrossed in conversation with his guest, argument following argument, constant reference made at breakfast, dinner, supper to events and personages of which she was wholly ignorant, should grow uncomfortable, depressed, jealous. The talented lady was oblivious to the impression she was making, but she had too noble a nature to willingly make trouble between man and wife.

The new year came, and the fascinating guest departed. The husband, reviewing the past months, charged himself with gross neglect of his wife, and sought, by the most delicate and considerate attention, to atone for his neglect. Mrs. Z. was now nearing her twentieth year, and was _enciente_ with her third child. She was overjoyed to have her husband all to herself again, and _expressed that satisfaction_ in responding passionately to the almost nightly embrace. In due time a son was born--a handsome animal he proved to be. “What a pity that excellent people like the Z.’s should be cursed with so vile a son!” was the common remark when the young man’s reputation as a libertine had become fully established.

ILL EFFECTS OF MORAL COWARDICE.

The common, ideal woman is a weak, disingenuous, cowardly creature. She has no earnest convictions, no purpose, no sincerities within her. Happily, this worthless ideal is breaking up, or is treasured only by weak-kneed clerks in city stores, and lads still in their teens. Rosa Hosmer had a dozen of this kind calling on her. Their self-love was gratified by the slight contrast between their weak-mindedness and hers. The vanity of an obtuse, illiterate man is piqued by the superiority of a woman, while a large-natured, chivalrous man feels honored in her regard. “_How_ weak-minded must a woman be to meet with your approbation!” said a lady in a stage coach of some fellow-passengers who were inveighing against strong-minded women. They looked at one another perplexed, and slightly ashamed of the absurdity of their position, and one of the number who recovered his senses before the others, replied: “I believe you’ve got the best of us, ma’am. I guess none of us would want a particularly silly wife.”

I met once, in New York, a young man of very remarkable acquirements, with great decision of character and large self-esteem. “If I ever marry,” he remarked, “my wife will always have to yield implicit obedience to my commands, or there will be open warfare in the house.”

“Your children will be a stalwart set, then,” I replied, “with their mother a mere mush of concession.”

He did not see what she had to do with it. The children would be _his_ children, and being his, would do him credit. He was not wanting in clear reasoning powers, and having great family pride--pride of race, I _should_ say--after considerable argument, was honest enough to admit that there must be truth on my side.

UNIMPRESSIBILITY.

There are some cold, narrow, positive women so impervious to the influence of others, so insensitive that the husband, if he is superior, can hardly ever represent himself in his children.

I am acquainted with a gentleman conspicuous among his fellows for grace of soul and nobility of nature. He has the tenderness of a woman combined with masculine heroism. Of his six children not one equals the father. The mother, self-willed and external in character (though, of course, violently opposed to woman’s rights and strong-minded women), had children much alike, and all like herself. A very faulty, but sympathetic woman, has often finer children than those frigidly virtuous mothers who are never stirred to the depths by any event or consideration.

An artist of no mean powers took to wife a gentle, characterless girl. He did not _wish_ his wife to be intellectual, and decidedly she was not. They had children “fast,” and it was not long before her amiability changed to fretfulness. She flung all her cares on her husband, had a doctor in the house continually, and at thirty was a faded, complaining, old woman. At thirty-four her seventh child was laid in her arms. The father, despairing of the others, stuck a paint brush in the tiny fist of the latest born, and vowed he should be a painter. In vain,--this son, it is true, dabbled in paints, but had no more genius than the others, notwithstanding that he was a seventh child.

ASKING FOR MONEY.

Mrs. Myrtle was a lovely young woman, lovely in mind and body, but for one defect--viz., a want of firmness and self-esteem. She was surrounded by all the comforts and elegancies that wealth could procure, and was yet the abject slave of a gentlemanly tyrant. She could not receive or pay visits, go shopping, or to a _matinée_ without first obtaining permission from her master. And she was always giving an account of herself in a pacificatory manner. When she suffered humiliation, she blamed her husband, and not the standard she had given him. Mrs. M. had three boys, and they were the most inveterate liars. How could it be otherwise, when their mother spent half her time in eluding inspection, and half in making confession, while she regularly searched Mr. M.’s pockets for coins that could be spent without explaining “what for.”

* * * * *

I could draw another picture where the husband, as soon as his means permitted, placed money in the bank in his wife’s name, that she might feel the interest was more really hers to spend as she pleased without any sense of obligation.

REPRESSED EXTERNAL ACTIVITIES.

A very remarkably superior woman, but without quick, external perceptive faculties to give her insight into character, mistook a handsome, unprincipled brute for a man and gentleman. What she endured for six months after her marriage could not be written. When she found herself _enciente_, for the sake of the child she sought refuge with an humble friend at a distance from her unhappy home. Being pinched for means, she earned money by her needle, endeavoring, at the same time, to banish from her memory the recollection of her late cruel experience.

Day after day this regal woman sat sewing with Elizabeth Browning’s poems open on a chair beside her committing to memory the most interior of those religious strains as she stitched, stitched in the solitude of the low-roofed cottage by the river. No exhilarating rides on horseback, such as had been her wont, no genial, social company, no brisk walks and happy communion with nature, were possible in her peculiar circumstances. She must forego the healthy, harmonious, external life of her past, and live solely within the inmost chambers of her soul.

At two years old the little girl born of these untoward conditions was lovely, large-eyed, thoughtful, considerate, and tender in her ways as any lady. “Where are your wings, Mary?” said a gentleman who noticed the radiant face at the mother’s garden gate. For these seemed only necessary to prove her a seraph.

Alas! to her mother’s infinite sorrow, she very soon departed to more blissful realms. The constantly repressed emotions of her mother, and her sedentary life, had caused an imperfect action of the lungs, and a low vital tone generally. Grief shortens the breathing as joy expands the lungs. Little Mary was extremely narrow-chested, with sloping shoulders, and hence quite unable to supply sufficient sustenance for so very large a brain, whose weight she bent under, and died, shortly after completing her second year, of acute hydrocephalus.

BEAUTY.

Beauty of form and feature should not be, as it is now, exceptional. It should be the rule. And there will come a time when parents will be held as much responsible for an ill-favored, ungainly child, as they are beginning to be for their dishonest or vicious children.

The English nobility are celebrated the world over for personal beauty and elegant manners. What cause or causes lie back of this significant fact?

So far as manners are concerned, we know that they are the result of generations of culture, confirmed by generations of use. They suppose leisure and good manners for company, as Emerson has suggested. The bustle and hurry of the work-a-day-world afford no room for polished manners, and only when co-operation shall have taken the place of our present wasteful and cruel competition, shall we have time for graceful living. Hard labor and worry will in time wear out the most charming and inbred politeness.

With regard to the personal beauty of the class alluded to, let us turn to its past--the past of this hereditary nobility. The blood which held courage, self-respect, and the ability to control others, deserved in a sense the deference and admiration it commanded. Then, as these qualities, in themselves and their retroactive effects, favored the production of the more masculine and striking forms of beauty, that type was repeated through successive generations until in the later times it has been modified by the increasing deference to human rights, and refined by intellectual and moral culture. The hereditary transmission of superior personal traits was the more certain because the wife of the lord was a lady, and the wife of the duke a duchess, and as lady and duchess, they believed that the very marrow in their bones excelled in worth that of every man and woman ranking below them in the social scale. And this saved them from the belittling consciousness so debasing to their children, that, as _women_, they were inferior to men.

We have learned in these days that blood runs out as well as in (on the very principle I am seeking to prove), and the nobleman and woman of genius appear quite as often outside the charmed circle of hereditary distinction as within it. Still, the law is inflexible, and never evaded. Beauty is not born of cowardice, subserviency, or grief. The more culture, the more the blood is worked over, the finer the types, provided we grow more related to humanity, and less to a class.

Pure, unselfish love is in very fact the mother of beauty, as happiness is the mother of song. And what can awaken gladness in a wife so certainly as the ever-watchful kindness of her husband?

DAISY B----.

I was at one time intimate with a couple who were noticeably plain and angular in appearance. He, from ill-health, had an irritable disposition. She was easily excited. But they were truly mated, and whatever of these peculiarities appeared in society, they disappeared before the door-step of the home was reached. A perfect confidence existed between them, and the unvarying respect and courtesy shown by the husband toward his wife did honor to them both.

It was a late marriage, and one daughter alone came to bless them. A child lovely from her birth, bearing scarce any resemblance to either parent. A delicate, oval face, creamy complexion, soft, intelligent black eyes, a sweet mouth, and a shower of golden curls; not an angle about her, simply a beauty from babyhood to womanhood.

“You think it unaccountable,” said the father to me, “that my wife and I, who are both so plain, should have so pretty a child as Daisy. But I have studied it out, and I settle it this way. My great-grandmother was a famous beauty and a noted belle in her day, and it is _her_ features that have cropped out in Daisy.”

“And let me tell you,” I answered, with equally impressive gesture of the forefinger. “Let me tell you that both of your great-grandmothers might have been as handsome as the Venus de Medici and the Venus of Milo in one, but if you had not bestowed the most chivalrous attention on your excellent wife while she was bearing Daisy--if you had not made her so thoroughly happy by your loving words and thoughtful care, there would have been no cropping out of beauty in the little daughter. Sweet and lovely thoughts resolve themselves into symmetry of form and face. Mental and physical traits do undoubtedly reappear in the same family after a longer or shorter period, but never without the right conditions for their re-incarnation. You may take at least half the credit of Daisy’s good looks to yourself, and the other half belongs to her good mother.”

MINISTERS’ CHILDREN.

There is a common proverb which says that ministers’ children are worse than other people’s. We shall not inquire into the case, but we would suggest that there is no power without freedom, and no deep sentiment without solitude, and the minister’s wife can enjoy neither freedom nor solitude where the parishioners provide the salary; for she is considered the property of the parish--her words and actions are forever criticised. She must conciliate the easily offended, steer clear of church factions, abstain from downrightness of speech. The dangers of her situation are permanently impressed upon her, for is not the bread they eat dependent on unanimity of opinion in the society respecting their worth? If she can think her own thoughts, she certainly must not express them. If she has any doubt concerning any part of the creed, she must force it back and make believe that the strait-jacket is as easy as a knitted shirt.

Children born amid these petty oppressions are not likely to be patterns of perfection. Then they are not allowed to be bad like other children, and to get, by degrees, rid of their inharmony. If they break windows or punch noses, they are considered fearfully depraved, and to reflect on the father. So they learn to consult appearances, and give up the only experience that would make men of them. Too much catechism and formal prayer during their early years must give a disgust for the solemnities, and create a distrust of earnest living and thinking, integrity and sincerity. Just in proportion to the degree of irrationality of the creed, are the chances for damaging the characters of the minister’s children.

Love of Truth expands the soul;
Fear of Evil cramps it.

The most unproductive use one can put one’s mind and heart to, is hatred of evil, of meanness, falsehood, ugliness in others. It does not even prove that we possess the opposite virtues. Especially if we would convey to our children generosity, ingenuousness, and beauty, let our hearts be filled with admiration of these divine qualities. As I have shown, we reproduce that which most impresses us. If it is ugliness, _and we hate it_, still we reproduce it, because we have dwelt on it. Do not then, when _enciente_, permit yourself to analyze or dislike imperfections of either mind or body, for this puts the unborn _en rapport_ with that imperfection.

VALUE OF TEMPORARY EFFORT.

It certainly ought to encourage any mother to know, that no matter what her particular faults may be, she can lessen if not obliterate them in her child, by making a great effort in the right direction for so short a period as nine or even six months.

That she should make _herself over entirely_ would appear a too formidable undertaking, but with such a motive she could aid her child. She may have, for instance, a quick temper, which she will determine to control; or she may lack order, or a good memory; or she may be wanting in quiet self-esteem (though she have inward self-respect). Either of these deficiences may be greatly lessened.

I will here insert a letter which I received some time ago from a young woman who had become greatly interested in the subject before us, and who was remarkably wanting in what the phrenologist calls “concentrativeness,” and also in consecutiveness of thought:

“You know what a day-dreamer I have always been. This has
helped to confirm my ‘scatterbrains’ tendency. At first it
did not seem to me reasonable that _intentional_ activity in
any direction could have the desired effect. If circumstance
_outside of one’s self_ aroused in a woman one or another set
of faculties, naturally enough they might be prominent in the
child. But this going to work with _malice prepense_, I feared,
would avail but little. However, I made up my mind to give my
child the benefit of the doubt.

“Every day I obliged myself to explain certain problems in
geometry. This would favor continuity of thought, I decided.
Then I began to recall continually the ideas that just flitted
into my mind and out again. They would return, and I would
dwell a little more on them--see other sides to them; the
connection in which they stood to some other idea. Then, after
a little I felt tired, and let them go, but still held my
mind in readiness for their return. It really both amused and
astonished me to see them come trooping back. Why, thought is
a series of pictures! I exclaimed. It is all illustration.
The ‘fetching myself up standing’ in this way was rather hard
work the first two months, but it became easier, and I grew
to enjoy my own improvement wonderfully. Of course there were
interruptions and discouragements, but I held on bravely, and
I am sure successfully, for Walter, at three years old, would
fix his mind on a person or a picture in a book, and keep his
attention on it to the amusement of all observers; and now if
you tell him to make his slate full of figures, he pegs away at
it till there is not room for one more.”

MUSICAL ABILITY.

During the winter which followed the summer of their union the X.’s became members of a coterie, with which dancing was held in high esteem. Mrs. X. was _enciente_, but showed her condition scarcely at all, and so danced, and afterward played for the dancers at the hebdomadal reunions, up to within a month of her confinement.

She had left school with fair musical powers fairly cultivated, and with a voice sweet, but not powerful. The lover who had praised her singing, when her husband, spoke in thoughtless, disparaging strain of its quality. This so wounded and discouraged her that no inducement could make her open her lips again. But, as I have said, she continued to play on the piano-forte, more or less on each occasion, “dance music” already at her fingers’ ends, and short, easy, gay compositions with which she was familiar before leaving school, and which needed no notes as reminders. At home she read and studied no new music, or music of a higher character. This was partly because her musical taste was uncultivated, and partly because the new draft on her energy was attended by depression, and she felt justified in yielding to her feelings, and dropping all mental and bodily effort. “I will be more studious, more orderly and hospitable after baby is born. But now I shall drop everything--let things slide.”

The boy born of these ante-natal circumstances resembled his father in his coarser mental calibre, while he lacked the ambition and steady purpose which characterized the latter. He, however, took to the keys of the piano as a duck takes to water. When a lad, his fingers grasped the chords and flew swiftly through the scales. This endless series of polkas, schottisches, and cotillions wearied the entire household. He hated classical music, and cared little for vocal melody or harmony.

Two years after the birth of this boy, a younger sister of Mrs. X. made them a visit of some months’ duration, and she insisted that Clara should take part with her in duets, notwithstanding that her unused voice and pregnant state promised little success from the effort. As soon as Mr. X. was quite out of sight on the way to his business (for the old criticism still rankled in her mind, and the mutual performance was kept a secret from him), the two would be at the instrument with Mendelssohn, Wallace, and others before them, making delicious harmony. There is nothing like singing to free the soul, and awaken its heights and depths. Nothing could have been more fortunate for little Clara, who made her entry into the world before her aunt’s departure, than the antecedent occupation of her mother. In time her voice proved to be as sweet and far stronger than her mother’s, and in all her nature she realized the inspiring effect of those hours when persuaded by her sister, her mother had lost sight of herself in the pure emotions and thoughts of those famous masters.

GRIEF.

The _cause_ of grief very seriously affects its character. If it is based on a sense of wrong, as in the case of a husband’s unfaithfulness, then indignation, anger, malice make a part of it, and a pregnant wife, distracted by these emotions, conveys to her child, as we have shown, the violent emotions she herself experienced.

If the bad, the unprincipled conduct of a son from whom we had expected reverence and manliness bows us down, a sense of wrong and shame, a feeling that it _might have been avoided_, mixes with our grief and embitters it.

But if death, from natural causes, which no woman’s eye could foresee and provide against, strikes down one near and dear to us, we simply mourn, and this grief may open the inner chambers of the soul hitherto closed.

Thus Mrs. W., an external, worldly-minded woman, not wanting in common benevolence or sense of duty, simply without dignity or elevation of character, was married to an energetic, sensible, practical man, the manager and owner of a large foundry. Their circumstances were, therefore, quite easy. An inferior kind of social life occupied much of Mrs. W.’s time, and amid these conditions their first child, a girl, was born. This child, on the principle that inferior fruit ripens early, was as mature as she would ever be at sixteen. At twenty she was shallow, pretentious, illiterate, which last her mother was not.

When five months pregnant with her second child, the news was suddenly brought to Mrs. W. that her husband, whom business had called several hundred miles from his home, had been stricken down with yellow fever, and, among total strangers, had passed away, in his delirium calling wildly on his wife for help. The loss made a more profound impression on Mrs. W. than it would have done had she not been pregnant. She had accepted Mr. W. from sentiments of gratitude, and now she was moved to make a strict self-examination as to her imperfect appreciation of his love and kindness. Worldly motives and thoughts were silenced. Conscience and finer judgment were active.

The second child, modified by these four grave, earnest months, was made up of sincerity, earnest thought, and unfailing benevolence. Her early disregard for appearances, as compared to realities, made a wide gulf that could never be bridged between the two sisters. There was absolutely no relationship between them. Marian’s plain, honest, eager, affectionate face was grand beside the empty, pretty one of her elder sister. The younger was slow in developing her whole nature, which was transcendent in its interior moral characteristics. The blow came too late to seriously injure the physical. There was just the unavoidably less degree of robustness between herself and sister, which, with the absence of hope and common gayety, favored gravity in the former.

THE BLACK SHEEP.

The black sheep of a family is to be pitied rather than hated. He is the wronged, as well as the wrong-doer. Many years ago such an one came frequently under my observation. The family consisted of five boys and three girls, all but the one in question remarkably good-looking, gentle-hearted, fairly intelligent, thoroughly temperate, and honest. The third, in order, of the boys, was a coarse, brutal, unprincipled fellow, the dread and despair of his timid mother, whose money, and even clothing, he would steal (the latter to pawn), and whose life he would constantly threaten when a mere lad. He was at home only in a groggery, and that not so much on account of a love of liquor, as from his need of companions on his own plane. He was more than once in prison; oftener escaped through the prayers and management of his mother. Who, now, was responsible for this dangerous member of society?

The father was an amiable, inefficient, illiterate, temperate man; a waster of other people’s time; an interminable talker of nothings. The mother, an amiable, industrious, capable woman, who patched and knitted and made a few dollars by nursing, at the call of the village doctor--a most tender and devoted mother, a too generous neighbor. Passing the unfinished habitation one day, I stopped to admire the double hollyhocks and breathe the perfume from the beds of herbs. At the same moment I heard a loud cry for help, and the old lady came hurriedly round the corner of the house, followed by her son, with a hoe in his hand upraised to strike her. Seeing me, he flung the hoe aside and walked sullenly out of the gate. Sitting on the doorstep wiping her tears away with the corner of her apron, the unhappy woman apologized for her evil son in this wise:

“We were always poor, living from hand to mouth. My husband never had any faculty for making a living. I strove and strove to keep my children from want, and keep them looking decent. There were now six of them, and I was nearly distracted when I found I was going to have another. At this point, late in the fall, my husband went off and stayed four months with a well-to-do uncle of his, leaving me and the six children without food or fire-wood. I had endured all patiently till then, but this made me full of bitterness and anger. I was just raving--quite beside myself all the time. A neighbor helped me, and trusted me a little, so that we kept from starving; but this did not prevent me from feeling indignation, almost _hatred_, toward a father who could be so unfatherly. Thomas showed the same disposition from a child.”

“MY CONSOLATION.”

Here is a counterpart to the preceding narrative.

We had gone to visit an invalid friend who himself had climbed these mountain heights to escape the fogs below on the sea-shore. Here, cosily sheltered by the summit, surrounded by peach and cherry-trees, and looking down on wooded heights and gorges, we found a most excellent hotel. The host, a mild, intelligent man, was himself quite delicate; his wife, on the contrary, was one of those rarely met with, magnetic, generous-natured women, whose coming affects one like the ocean breezes. She had, so she told us, nine children living and one dead. Only such a brave, bounteous creature could have been equal to this, and never in one instance bring reproach on her motherhood. It is of the tenth I would speak, now a lad of sixteen, observing whom the invalid remarked: “I shall get well just looking at that boy. What a manly, affectionate fellow!”

“I call him my consolation,” said his mother. “He can do _anything_, and he does it so easily, so quietly.” And, indeed, the way in which this refined lad handed you your plate, your glass of milk, or cup of coffee, gave a dignity to the meal, while conferring honor on all parties concerned. The phrase “menial labor” had no significance when he was basting the meat or ironing the “belated” table-cloths for his mother.

Usually, when a woman in very straitened circumstances has an extremely large family, she presently becomes oppressed and discouraged. Her ambition is foiled. She can neither clothe, educate, nor train the children properly, and the latest comers are apt to have a poorer make-up--a fag-end sort of air. Here, on the contrary, was the flower of the flock, a youth full of _faculty_, at home on the piano-forte stool as at the knife-board, _determined to sustain his mother_ at all hazards.

I sought eagerly the explanation of this phenomenon, and the happy mother in full, varied, and affectionate tones, gladly replied to my inquiries.

“When I found myself pregnant with my tenth child, the nine were living and all at home. My husband’s salary--he was a preacher--was between three and four hundred dollars a year. Fortunately, we owned the little place on which we lived, and yet, if you will recall those Eastern winters, you will realize the great difficulty I had in keeping us all clothed as well as fed. It seemed to me not a virtue, but a sin, to bring more children into the world, and I made up my mind that _this_ should be the _very last_. I would take matters into my own hands.

“But the thing now to be thought of was a little clothing for the expected baby. I had not a rag to make over, not a dollar for the purpose.

“At this juncture a gentleman, an agent for some religious publication house, called, and as the custom was, I asked him to spend the day, which he did, and I had considerable talk with him. He left, and returned while I was preparing supper, and seemed greatly surprised to find that I had no help. ‘What! _nine_ children to cook and sew for, and no help!’ He had never supposed such a thing possible. I explained that I had a _primitive_ constitution, but still I found myself giving way lately. Whenever I had a trifle ready to pay out, which was very seldom, I employed, it was true, a woman poorer than myself, but less burdened, to do the washing. His astonishment, however, continued.

“A week or two after this visit, I received a letter from a distant city, saying that my case had made a profound impression on him, and that having met with a coterie of ladies belonging to a certain congregation who were anxious to assist some missionary, or help in some other good cause, he had mentioned me and my circumstances, and they were of one mind, eager to help me, and wished to know if I would accept a present in the spirit in which it was offered; and if so, would I indicate what things would be most useful to me.

“I was glad, and willing to accept anything, and in replying mentioned infants’ wear and children’s clothes as most needed.

“In return came a large box with every sort of child’s garments, a roll of flannel, and a complete infant’s wardrobe of the nicest material and most beautifully made--embroidered flannel, dresses prettily tucked and edged--things lovely to look at.

“An immense load was taken off my mind. I was actually filled with delight whenever I thought of these delicate, pretty things, and how comfortable my baby would be. I went about my tasks after this in a spirit of love and thanksgiving. You see Paul! He has been my consolation since his babyhood. No temptation could make him less positively good, less conscientious, or less affectionate than he is.”

As this large-hearted woman related to me these interesting facts, I could not help wishing that the kind ladies who had been instrumental in bringing about so happy a result, as well as the gentleman who had given the impetus to their benevolence, could know how valuable had been the effects.

KLEPTOMANIA.

The word kleptomania is used to indicate the habit of stealing, by those persons with whom wealth precludes the ordinary temptation to the act. Certain women of position are regularly watched by clerks in stores because they are known to carry off laces, ribbons, etc., when they fancy themselves unobserved. Such women have very inferior minds independent of this one vice. In the mother of such an one the desire to get and to keep things of material value, must have been exceedingly prominent. Many an honest mother mourns over the unscrupulous dishonesty of her son, while all unwittingly she conveyed to him the overpowering impulse; or there was not rigid probity enough in her own life to overrule the dishonest tendency conveyed by her husband.

In the first case, her desire to get and to keep would be harmless and justifiable as a temporary state of mind, if she were not pregnant. She knows, although she does not often dwell on the fact, that she is working assiduously for legitimate ends. But as she is, in truth, mainly engrossed in getting and saving, thus using a very limited part of her mind, she does the harm. The selfish, grasping spirit increases on itself through generations of similar experience. On the same principle, the _remarkable_ singer is the product of two or three generations of love of song.

A childish inclination to appropriate that which belongs to another, yields readily to wise treatment, where the intellect, the nature, is not cramped and dull.

SPECULATIVE INTELLECT.

The habit of reasoning independently, of investigating without reference to authority, is by no means a common one. Most people have their thinking done for them, and are content to quote their clergyman, their doctor, or their great-grandmother, as the case may require. We say a man or woman is “original” when they seek Truth wherever she may be found, regardless of popular opinion.

My friend, though quite practical, loved dearly to wander in the higher regions of thought. Such an one is apt to suffer for the want of sympathy, and situated as she was in an obscure inland town, where living literature was unappreciated and congenial companionship did not exist, her first year of married life was not all that she had anticipated. Her husband was “_all business_,” but he wanted his wife to be happy, and he induced her to send for an old schoolmate “for company.”

After Miss Wood’s arrival there was no time for morbid regrets or dissatisfaction. She brought a year’s later news of the old circle of friends, was full of piquant personal reminiscence, could discuss the merits of the latest noteworthy literature, and entered heartily into the political reform movements of England and Italy. The days were now only too short for the duties and sympathy that had to be crowded into them.

After the birth of Mrs. Roche’s first child her friend married, and moved on to a farm some miles away. Mrs. R. had more domestic occupation, but a close communication was kept up. Then the anti-slavery agitation was beginning to be felt all over the country, and Mr. R., to his wife’s great delight, flung himself with all his compact executive energy into it. During this period another child, a girl, was born. Suddenly and unexpectedly business losses occurred, which obliged a removal to a new place.

“It so happened,” said Mrs. R., referring long years later to the marked difference in her children, “that the months before Cecil’s birth, I met with no book or person that appealed to me, and I was always so helplessly dependent on outside influences when I was _enciente_. The dear boy, in his early youth, gave evidence of the absence of the speculative intellect. He hates discussion and theories of every sort. Philosophy is his abomination. The day is good enough for him without analysis. He likes a fine poem, and adores Ruskin, and his order and system make him invaluable to his father. But in comprehensiveness, in capacity for ideas, he ranks far below his brother and his sister.”

INTEMPERANCE.

In the preceding pages I have endeavored to show what manner of living favors the transmission of noble and beautiful qualities from mother to child; what conditions tend to produce unbalanced, vicious, unlovely character. I have dwelt principally on the moral aspects of maternity, because that is the side hitherto overlooked. But I can not close without saying a word respecting the baleful influence of intoxicating drinks.

Nothing is more certain than that the desire for alcoholic drinks is inherited, and all degrees of mental dullness and incapacity, from one grade below the parental endowment, to idiocy, may be distinctly referred to habits of intoxication.

We have seen that the abnormal sensibility of a pregnant woman insures large effects (on the child) from small causes. Thus a joy is absorbed by the young life that the mother outgrows; and depression that was but temporary with her, leaves its mark on the temperament and disposition of her offspring.

Thus the habit of taking just a drop to sustain your fainting spirits during the day, and a glass of something hot at night, added, most likely, to the father’s moderate drinking, gives the child an uncontrollable passion for stimulants. Now, the life you live may be all that is desirable, but if your brain is put under this influence occasionally, all the good is weakened, vitiated, undermined. Alcohol breaks down the WILL, and what is a human being without a will? A vacillating, unreliable creature. It deadens the mental sensibilities and arouses the passions.

Friends will often advise a pregnant woman to drink beer or spirits, assuming that nature at such times requires it. Now, nature is equal to her own emergencies, and pregnancy is not a disease. The brooding mother needs plenty of sunlight and fresh air, abundant sleep, moderate exercise, wholesome food, and congenial surroundings. _Let her listen to no one who prescribes a stimulant which holds disease in itself._

There is such a thing as intemperance in eating, and I would counsel any woman to demand of herself a perfect self-control at the table. Nothing less than this, with entire abstinence on her part, will suffice to neutralize in most cases the desire for liquor, communicated, in so many cases, by the father; and the firmness exercised by her in denying the appetite, will give _her child_ the firmness to resist the temptation to drink. Without this _will_ in the matter, the inclination would be communicated and not the power to resist, as, for instance, if she merely abstained because she could not obtain what she longed for.

The Germans sodden their brains with lager-beer; the English brutify themselves on gin and porter. We ruin soul, body, and worldly prospects on adulterated whisky.

Our husbands and fathers license thousands of groggeries, corner groceries, saloons, that they may be free to indulge out of sight of home. In this way they prepare places wherein their sons may be initiated into vice. Thus the crop of drunkards never fails in village, town, or city, nor the supply of criminals, large and small, made criminals by these means provided.

The “deficient” child and the predestined drunkard, are cradled as softly as are the children of temperance. The mother handing her babe round for the admiration of her neighbors, is shaken by no prevision of what it will one day become. Her fair, rosy-cheeked boy destined to be the inmate of an inebriate asylum? She will not believe it. Yet only obedience to the higher law on her part will have saved him from it.

CONCLUSION.

It has been clearly demonstrated in these modern days that nothing is to be had without paying the full price. The more valuable the thing desired, the greater the price to be paid. Thus the satisfactions and joys of parentage can only be had by the study of, and obedience to, natural and spiritual law, at the cost of much effort, self-denial, and self-control. (Self-indulgence and indifference do not produce fine offspring).

It has also been proved, to the simplest observation, that woman has the large balance of power in the formation of character, and it is for her to assume the responsibility. Genius is dependent on a combination of influences outside our control, but good sense, integrity, generosity, and chastity take their growth from thoughts, emotions, and _acts_, over which we have control to a very great extent. Let women take courage. The larger their responsibility, the nobler their reward.

Transcriber’s Notes:

--Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).

--Punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.

--Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.

--Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.