Page:Randolph, Paschal Beverly; Eulis! the history of love.djvu/103

98 to me that there should be schools of marriage; that is, institutions with professorships, expressly to teach the laws which alike, everywhere, underlie human happiness. As it is to-day, pretty faces win male stupidity, and disaster invariably follows. Above all, our system of nervous life, the good food poorly cooked, the way we eat, drink, sleep,—all are axes laid at the roots of the tree of domestic life!

There's not one sound man in five hundred; nor a woman in a thousand, who does not have the doctor's care for ills resulting from this false life. The food we eat, and what we drink, a£t upon our souls, our emotions, and our loves, quite as much as upon our mere bodies; and I had rather have one meal cooked by a good, loving old mother, than all the hotels of earth, with golden plate, could furnish; because such food is seasoned with goodness.

LVI. I am satisfied that sleeping together, and too frequent yielding to the impulses incident to the chemically fevered state we are in, produces a peculiar nervous exhaustion which, if long continued, always results in a chronic morbidity closely verging upon actual insanity,—indeed, in most cases, upon some points, it is insanity itself; for what else can that state be called which sees nothing at all but ill, dark-omened shadows continually floating over the sky of life; and which beholds, in the wife or husband, nothing but demons or gorgons; chatters about him, or her; exposes faults, magnifies mole-hills into rocky mountains; and only breathes venom, spite, and malignant hate, upon one sworn at the altar to be loved and cherished till death 'did them part. This is sheer madness; down-right insanity; and in that mood what worlds of wrong are daily done, and that, too, by people in whose hearts angels slumber, and long to be awakened, that their wings might fan the fevered brow, and lull the weary souls to rest. This insanity has its rise in satiety, and non-reciprocity in the more intimate relations of husband and wife; and is akin to that which falls like a leaden pall sooner or later upon the onanist and debauchee.

Owing to the imperfect marriages of to-day, and the few past decades, millions of half-children, or unsound ones, have been born: crooked, angular, violent, unreliable, impulsive, vagarious, and