“Theft and murder are considered the blackest of crimes, but neither the law nor the church has raised its voice against the marriage of the unfit, for neither has realized that worse than theft and well-nigh as bad as murder is the bringing into the world, through disregard of parental fitness, of individuals full of disease-tendencies.”

On this point the public conscience needs a thorough rousing.  If a mother deliberately gave her daughter a draught which made her a cripple, or an invalid, or an imbecile, or tuberculous, everybody would cry out with horror, and she would become a social outcast.  But if she inflicts these injuries on her granddaughter, by marrying her daughter to a drunkard, in the hope of reforming him, or to a wealthy degenerate, or an imbecile baron, no one says a word, provided the marriage law has been complied with.

It is owing to these persistent crimes against grandchildren that the human race as a whole is still such a miserable rabble, and that recruiting offices and insurances companies tell such startling tales of degeneracy.  Love would cure this, if there were more of the right kind.  Until there is, much good may be done by accepting it as a guide, and building up a sentiment in favor of its instinctive object and ideal.  I have described in one chapter the obstacles which retarded the growth of love, and in another I have shown how sentiments change and grow.  Most of those obstacles are being gradually removed, and public opinion is slowly but surely changing in favor of love.  Building up a new sentiment is a slow process.  At first it may be a mere hut for a hermit thinker, but gradually it becomes larger and larger as thousands add their mite to the building fund, until at last it stands as a sublime cathedral admonishing all to do their duty.  When the Cathedral of Love is finished the horror of disease and vice will have become as absolute a bar to marriage as the horror of incest is now; and it will be acknowledged that the only true marriage of reason is a marriage of love.

FOOTNOTES: 

[1] Albrecht Weber and other German scholars, while practically agreeing with Hegel regarding the Greeks and Romans, claim, that the amorous poetry of the ancient Hindoo has the sentimental qualities of modern European verse.

[2] In the New York Nation of September 22, and the Evening Post of September 24, 1887.  My reasons for not agreeing with these two distinguished professors will be dwelt on repeatedly in the following pages.  If they are right, then literature is not, as it is universally held to be, a mirror of life.

[3] No important truth is ever born full fledged.  The Darwinian theory was conceived simultaneously by Wallace and Darwin, and both were anticipated by other writers.  Nay, a German professor has written a treatise on the “Greek Predecessors of Darwin.”