128 MARRIAGE AND DISEASE. 



persons inheriting this disposition. If there be any 

 person whose partner should be without taint it is 

 assuredly him that carries within him the germ of 

 such an insidious and degrading disease as this drink 

 crave. 



In this, as in the other insanities, the disease is 

 much more dangerous in the mother than in the 

 father, which is a sound reason why the daughters of 

 drunken parents, often fascinating by their nighty, 

 excitable, vivacious, neurotic manner, should be care- 

 fully avoided by men in search of mothers for their 

 children. The man who marries the daughter of a 

 drunkard, not only endangers his own self-respect 

 and happiness, but entails to his children a wretched 

 inheritance of degradation and suffering. On the 

 other hand, no woman should be induced to marry a 

 confirmed drunkartl, and the disposition and char- 

 acter of the sons of such should be most carefully in- 

 quired into before any engagement is entered upon. 

 This is one of the few instances in which a long 

 engagement is not to be condemned, for frequently 

 the engaged man loses that desire to appear well in 

 the eyes of all women, which actuates most single 

 men, and displays much of his real character. 



Not a few of the best of our women throw them- 

 selves away, and ruin their whole lives, by marrying 

 confirmed rakes and drunkards, in the hope, the almost 

 insane hope, of saving them from the fate to which 

 they have been foreordained by a bad inheritance. The 

 spirit which prompts to such devotion and self-sacrifice 



