•382 Bureau of Farmers' Institutes. 



That is true; but from some far-off ancestor may have come 

 the very noble qualities that saved him. As Mrs. Whitney says: 



We do not always know just where our ties and braces are." It is 

 often said that no one is wholly bad, and we have as good a chance 

 to inherit the good qualities as the bad ones. 



The Bible speaks of the sins of the fathers being visited on the 

 children, even to the third and fourth generation. 



That used to seem to me a bitter, cruel judgment on the chil- 

 dren. Now I do not look on it as a judgment, but as a conse- 

 quence, based on the law of heredity. 



I cannot believe that we inherit direct evil, but we may, and 

 do, inherit natures susceptible in a marked degree to certain good 

 or evil influences. I cannot say that I believe a boy inherits 

 drunkenness, but he can inherit a social nature, a weak will, small 

 conscientiousness and a nervous organization that renders him an 

 easy victim to drink, as his father may have been before him. 

 And what a struggle he has before him if he conquers ; as he can 

 and should. 



We all pity the man with a weak, shallow, vain, heartless, shift- 

 less wife, or the woman with a coarse, brutal, selfish husband; 

 but may God pity the children of such, for He only knows how 

 they have been robbed of their birthright; the heaven-born right 

 of innocent childhood to such sweet, pure, noble influences as shall 

 fit them for the higher life. 



I ought to believe in heredity; my grandparents on the maternal 

 side were cousins. Among the prominent family traits were im- 

 pulsiveness, plain speaking, and a keen sense of the ludicrous. 

 Don't I know how hard it has been all my life to think a thing 

 strongly, and not say it, and of the times when I have been 

 overcome with a sense of the ludicrous, even amid the gravest sur- 

 roundings, and probably shocked many staid, sober people, per- 

 haps by laughing in meeting. Of course, they blamed me, never 

 realizing that I was the victim of the concentrated natures of 

 my ancestors ; hut, as Henry "Ward Beecher once said, they 

 wouldn't have censured me so much for what I said or did, if 

 thev had known what a deal I kept back. 



Well, I don't lay all my foolishness to my poor grandparents. 

 They probably never anticipated such results; but this subject is 

 one in which every parent, every young man or woman, old enough 

 to tli ink understandingly, should take n serious interest. 



I do not believe there is a right-minded young man or woman, 



