

2l6 DEGENERACY. 



earlier of these children will doubtless be physically healthy, but 

 they will inherit the accumulated mental and moral obliquities of 

 their parent. The sexual passions of such a parent lead to sexual 

 excesses, to exhaustion and to disease, with the result that the later 

 children are even worse than the first. We then have launched upon 

 the world another family of "Jukes" or "Ishmaels" with all of 

 the consequences that such families involve upon the community. 



Although this hypothetical case does not represent any defi- 

 nitely known instance, it is no fancy sketch but an actual representa- 

 tion of what may and does occur. Every one knows of some such 

 instance of early reproduction, and it would not be at all remark- 

 able to have two of them unite to produce a third. 



Among the better classes, especially the better educated classes, 

 such early reproductions are rare, though not always non-existing, 

 but in the slums of our large cities, and in many groups of our 

 laboring classes, they are quite common. It is from the females 

 of these early reproductions that are recruited the great mass of our 

 prostitutes, and it is due to the sterility engendered by prostitution 

 that the spread of degeneracy is checked. If we could save these 

 girls from prostitution and get them early married, we would soon 

 have a decaying race of people. 



