Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/225

 child might be, and indeed ought to be, an advance upon the parents; nor was public opinion, about this time, slow to pronounce, if the result were noticeably otherwise. A good father with a bad son aroused unfavourable comment upon the former rather than the latter; while to serve out the offending junior by finally "cutting him off with a shilling" was now regarded as but scant parental justice and reparation. Pious parents, troubled with unruly family nests, got scant public sympathy in this cause-seeking time; for there had obviously been either bad parental condition, or else most culpable negligence. Intermittent parental health, unsteady character, intervals of devious or doubtful purposes, require all to be intelligently guarded from transmission; nor can subsequent parental physical restoration, or after reformation or penitence, however personally edifying and saving, hail backwards to the offspring's like benefit.

The State, as already hinted, did something more than take only a medical interest in the great and ubiquitous marriage question. While medical science was constantly expounding, in language as plain, and yet as delicately select as the subject would admit of, those qualities of mind and body which would unite in the best and happiest marriage, the State had itself begun to give practical effect to theory, by intervening in the promotion of suitable unions. Our statesmen of that day, relieved, as they happily were, from countless old cares and anxieties, in naval and military superintendence, criminal jurisdiction, and ever possible international differences, jealousies, and general susceptibilities, could not better employ their resulting official leisure to useful public account. By