humanity through the long past is not
a cheerful one to contemplate. What can be done to mitigate the
miseries of the masses? This thought rests heavily and with increasing
weight on the hearts of all who love justice, liberty, and equality.
The same law of inheritance that hands down the vices of ancestors,
hands down their virtues also, and in a greater ratio, for good is
positive, active, ever vigilant, its worshippers swim up stream
against the current. Could we make all men and women feel their
individual responsibility in the chain of influences that tell on all
time, we could solemnize in our own day such vows for nobler lives as
to make this seeming herculean work light as the wings of angels. If,
henceforward, all the thought, the money, the religious enthusiasm
dedicated to the regeneration of the race, could be devoted to the
generation of our descendants, to the conditions and environments of
parents and children, the whole face of society might be changed
before we celebrate the next centennial of our national life. Science
has vindicated our right to discuss freely whether our ancestors were
apes; let it be as free to ask whether our posterity shall be idiots,
dwarfs, and knaves, and if not, by what change, if any, in our social
institutions, such wretched results may be avoided. Gatton in his work
on "Heredity," says our present civilization is growing too
complicated for our best minds even to grasp, and to meet successfully
the issues of the hour, humanity must be lifted up a few degrees, as
speedily as possible. And where must this radical work begin? The best
hope for the progress of the race in political, religious, and social
life lies in the right birth, education, and development of our
children. Here is the true starting-point for the philosopher.

Let the young man who is indulging in all manner of excesses remember
that in considering the effect of the various forms of dissipation on
himself, his own happiness or danger, he does not begin to measure the
evil of his life. As the high priest at the family altar, his deeds of
darkness will inflict untold suffering on generation after generation.
One of the most difficult lessons to impress on any mind is the power
and extent of individual influence; and parents above all others
resist the belief that their children are exactly what they make
them, no more, no less; like produces like. The origin of ideas was
long a disputed point with different sc