170 MARRIAGE AND DISEASE. 



only country in which such marriages are striven 

 after and hailed with loud approval. Too many of the 

 lady patrons of our own asylums for the crippled and 

 deformed in mind and body, from some mistaken 

 notion that even in the case of a dumb man or blind 

 woman a single life must necessarily be incomplete, 

 depraved, and sinful, are only too ready to encourage 

 marriage among those who themselves require the 

 assistance of others to enable them to live. These 

 ladies should understand that all such marriages are 

 outrages against Nature's benign laws, and that their 

 promoters must be suspected of the same morbid 

 feeling which fills a church to witness the wedding 

 of a Tom Thumb or some monster from one of Barnum's 

 side-shows. 



Professor Bell says : " Philanthropy in this country 

 [America] is doing everything possible to encourage 

 marriage among deaf-mutes. . . . Unless this system 

 of management is changed, we shall certainly have 

 a deaf variety of the human race." But of this I can 

 see no danger. By encouraging these unhappy crea- 

 tures to marry and inter-marry, we certainly can in- 

 crease the numbers of the idiotic, blind, deaf, insane, 

 scrofulous, deformed, and otherwise degenerate, and 

 so increase vastly the already too great amount of 

 human suffering. But few such families will long 

 survive, and none of them will live in posterity. 

 Were the absence of the sense of hearing the only 

 fault in the stock from which our deaf-mutes spring, 

 there is no reason why, under the artificial conditions 



