all, marriages with some grave
hereditary physical or mental disease or some great natural defect, may
bring happiness to the parents, but can scarcely fail to entail a
terrible penalty upon their children. It is clearly recognised that one
of the first duties of parents to their children is to secure them in
early life not only good education, but also, as far as is within their
power, the conditions of a healthy being. But the duty goes back to an
earlier stage, and in marriage the prospects of the unborn should never
be forgotten. This is one of the considerations which in the ethics of
the future is likely to have a wholly different place from any that it
has occupied in the past.

A kindred consideration, little less important and almost equally
neglected in popular teaching, is that it is a moral offence to bring
children into the world with no prospect of being able to provide for
them. It is difficult to exaggerate the extent to which the neglect of
these two duties has tended to the degradation and unhappiness of the
world.

The greatly increased importance which the Darwinian theory has given to
heredity should tend to make men more sensible of the first of these
duties. In marriage there are not only reciprocal duties between the two
partners; there are also, more than in any other act of life, plain
duties to the race. The hereditary nature of insanity and of some forms
of disease is an indisputable truth. The hereditary transmission of
character has not, it is true, as yet acquired this position; and there
is a grave schism on the subject in the Darwinian school. But that it
exists to some extent few close observers will doubt, and it is in a
high degree probable that it is one of the most powerful moulding
influences of life. No more probable explanation has yet been given of
the manner in which human nature has been built up, and of the various
instincts and tastes with which we are born, than the doctrine that
habits and modes of thought and feeling indulged in and produced by
circumstances in former generations have gradually become innate in the
race, and exhibit themselves spontaneously and instinctively and quite
independently of the circumstances that originally produced them.
According to this theory the same process is continually going on. Man
has slowly emerged from a degraded and bestial condition. The pressure
of long-continued circumstances has moulded him into his special type;
but new fe