Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/399

Rh 's teeth are set on edge," is sternly true. What, then, can we legitimately expect to be manifested in the next generation? Further, if children are taught to frequent taverns, and drink there on holidays and Sundays, by their fond but foolish parents, what effect must this exert upon the character during the plastic period of youth and growth? How far are the inherited mental constitution and nervous system, already depraved to start with, still further modified by such experience of the individual in childhood, when "wax to receive but marble to retain?" Conditions already hard enough upon the child are aggravated by indiscretions perpetrated toward the infant before its own free will and choice can be called into play, before it is responsible for its own actions. Not only have its parents given it an imperfect organization, but they are prejudicing its chances of self-evolution before it has had an opportunity of forming its own decision—it is handicapped alike by descent and by mischievous early training.

The habit of frequenting taverns, of drinking, and of feeling the self-satisfaction so induced, leads to still further indulgence in alcohol by half-grown youths; and so the inherited character is still further deteriorated. The increasing loss of self-control leaves such beings less and less capable of resisting the temptations, the allurements of the public-house. The impulsive and less perfectly controlled nervous system craves more and more for the alcoholic stimulant; and the longings are intensified accordingly. The repeated visits to the tavern grow into a custom, and what commences as an irregular practice becomes crystallized into a habit.

Nor is it in youths alone that the drinking customs of the day are seen in their evil and sombre aspects. The number of respectable girls seen now at public bars is a contrast to what obtained but a few years ago. Up to a recent period, if a girl were known to frequent taverns, her character was gone; and it was rarely that a well-conducted girl was seen in a public-house, and then only with her sweetheart or some male relatives. But now it is sadly different. From familiarity with bars as an outcome of excursions, and even more from the associations of the music-hall, girls, capable of better things, are not now apparently conscious of any impropriety in being in a public-house without male friends; and the painful spectacle of seeing young girls under twenty treating each other at a public bar is a sadly too common occurrence. How can a girl, with the mobile nervous system of her sex, be fitted to be a mother, and to counteract the evil tendencies of alcoholic indulgence in the father, if she herself have been subjected to the same influence? With the facts of inheritance before us, what may we expect, what must we apprehend as to the condition—the future prospects—of the generation following immediately after this one? As our forefathers insensibly and unconsciously built up the character of the present generation, so it, in its turn, is fashioning the character of its successors, its unborn offspring. No wonder, then, that the morale as