h they have inherited."

Girls sometimes have the idea that a little wildness in a young man is
rather to be admired. On one occasion a young woman left a church
where she had heard a lecture on the evils of using tobacco, saying,
as she went out, "I would not marry a young man if he did not smoke. I
think it looks manly, and I don't want a husband who is not a man
among men."

Years after, when her three babies died, one after the other, with
infantile paralysis, because their father was an inveterate smoker,
the habit did not seem to her altogether so admirable, and when she
herself became a confirmed invalid, because compelled to breathe night
and day a nicotine-poisoned atmosphere, she gave loud voice to her
denunciation of the very habit which in her ignorant girlhood she had
characterized as manly.

CHAPTER XXIX.

EFFECTS OF IMMORALITY ON THE RACE.

There is another influence at work in causing race degeneracy
concerning which the majority of girls are ignorant, and that is
immorality. The prevalent idea that young men must "sow their wild
oats" is accepted by many young women as true, and they think if the
lover reforms before marriage and remains true to them thereafter,
that is all they can reasonably demand. They will not make such
excuses for themselves for lapses from virtue, but they imbibe the
idea that men are not to be held to an absolute standard of purity,
and so think it delicate to shut their eyes to the derelictions of
young men. This chapter of human life is a sorrowful one to read, but
to heed its warnings would save many a girl from sorrow, many a wife
from heartache.

The law of God is not a double law, holding woman to the most rigid
code of a "thou shalt not" and allowing men the liberty of a "thou
mayest."

The penalty inflicted for the violation of moral law is one of the
most severe, both in its effects upon the individual transgressor and
upon his descendants. The most dreadful scourge of physical disease,
as well as moral degeneracy, follows an impure life. This disease,
known as syphilis, is practically incurable. It may temporarily
disappear, only to reappear in some other form later in life; and even
after all signs have become quiescent in the man, they may reappear in
his children in some form of transmission. Even one lapse from virtue
is enough to taint the young man with this dreadful poison, which may
be in after years communicated to his innocent wife or transm