* "Alienists bold, in general, that a large proportion of mental diseases is the result of degeneracy; that is, they are the offspring of drunken, insane, syphilitic and consumptive parents, and suffer from the action of heredity."--Dr. MacDonald; author of Criminology.
"Who has sinned, this man or his parents that he was blind?"
Self-abnegation, subserviency to man--whether he be father, lover, or husband--is the most dangerous that can be taught to, or forced upon her, whose character shall mould the next generation! She has no right to transmit a nature and a character that is subservient, subject, inefficient, undeveloped--in short, a slavish character, which is either blindly obedient or blindly rebellious and is therefore set, as is a time-lock, to prey or to be preyed upon by society in the future!
If woman is not brave enough personally to demand, and to obtain, absolute personal liberty of action, equality of status and entire control of her great and race-endowing function of maternity, she has no right to dare to stamp upon a child, and to curse a race with the descendants of a servile, a dwarfed, a time-and-master-serving character.
We have been taught that it is an awful thing to commit murder--to take a human life. There are students of anthropology and heredity who think that it is a far more awful thing to thrust, unasked, upon a human being a life that is handicapped before he gets it. It is a far more solemn responsibility to give than to take a human life! In the one case you invade personal liberty and put a stop to an existence more or less valuable and happy, but at least all pain is over for that invaded individuality. In the other case--in giving life--you invade the liberty of infinite oblivion and thrust into an inhospitable world another human entity to struggle, to sink, to swim, to suffer or to enjoy. Whether the one or the other no mortal knows, but surely knows it must contend not only with its environment but with its heredity--with itself.
Not long ago a great man, who is successful beyond most human units, who is wealthy, socially to be envied, who enjoys almost ideal family relations, who is in all regards a man of broad intellect, of large heart, who is beloved, successful and powerful--not long ago this man said to me, when talking of life and its chances, its joys and its burdens and wrongs: