+Hereditary effects of dishonesty.+--So deeply does the vice of dishonesty eat into the moral nature that mental and moral deterioration is handed down to offspring. The scientific study of heredity shows that the deterioration resulting from this cause is more sure and fatal than that following many forms of insanity. The son or daughter of a mean, dishonest man is handicapped with tendencies toward moral turpitude and anti-social conduct for which no amount of his ill-gotten gains, received by inheritance, can be an adequate compensation. Says Maudsley, "I cannot but think that the extreme passion for getting rich, absorbing the whole energies of a life, predisposes to mental degeneracy in the offspring, either to moral defect, or to intellectual deficiency, or to outbursts of positive insanity." And the same author says elsewhere: "The anti-social, egoistic development of the individual predisposes to, if it does not predetermine, the mental degeneracy of his progeny; he, alien from his kind by excessive egoisms, determines an alienation of mind in them. If I may trust in that matter my observations, I know no one who is more likely to breed insanity in his offspring than the intensely narrow, self-sensitive, suspicious, distrustful, deceitful, and self-deceiving individual, who never comes into sincere and sound relations with men and things, who is incapable by nature and habit of genuinely healthy communion with himself or with his kind. A moral development of that sort, I believe, is more likely to predetermine insanity in the next generation than are many forms of actual derangement in parents: for the whole moral nature is essentially infected, and that goes deeper down, and is more dangerous, _quâ_ heredity, than a particular derangement. A mental alienation is a natural pathological evolution of it."
What food is to the body, that knowledge is to the mind. It is the bread of intellectual life. Without knowledge of agriculture and the mechanic arts we should be unable to provide ourselves with food and clothing and houses and ships and roads and bridges. Without knowledge of natural science we should be strangers in the world in which we live, the victims of the grossest superstitions. Without knowledge of history and political science we could have no permanent tranquility and peace, but should pass a precarious existence, exposed to war and violence, rapine and revolution. Knowledge unlocks for us the mysteries of nature; unfolds for us the treasured wisdom of the world's great men; interprets to us the longings and aspirations of our hearts.