SEXUAL HYGIENE 153 



miserly money-catcher must marry a woman equally 

 sordid and stingy. Then together they could hoard up 

 —for moths and rust to destroy, or for interested rela- 

 tives to quarrel over— their beloved greenbacks and 

 their glittering dollars, each scrimping the other down 

 to the finest point above starvation and freezing, and 

 finally dying, to be forgotten by their fellowmen as 

 soon as dead, and sent among the goats at the great 

 Assizes. A shiftless spendthrift must choose for a 

 helpmeet an equally slovenly, thriftless wife. A man 

 with a crotchet should select a partner with the same 

 morbid fancy. A man whose whole mental composi- 

 tion gravitates behind his ears, must find a mate with 

 the same animal disposition. An individual whose 

 mental organization is sadly unbalanced, is advised to 

 seek for a wife a woman with the same deficiencies and 

 abnormalities. 



Any one can see at a glance the domestic disasters 

 which such a plan of proceeding would entail. Men 

 and women of unbalanced temperaments would become 

 more unbalanced. An individual of erroneous tenden- 

 cies, instead of having the constant check of the exam- 

 ple and admonitions of a mate of opposite tendencies, 

 would be, by constant example, hastened onward in 

 his sinful ways. Thus, to all but a very small propor- 

 tion of humanity, the married state would be one of 

 infelicity and degeneration. 



And what would be the progeny of such unions? 

 The peculiarities and propensities of the parents, in- 

 stead of being modified and perhaps obliterated in the 

 children by corresponding differences in character, 

 would be doubly exaggerated. The children of selfish 

 parents would be thieves; those of spendthrifts, beg- 

 gars; those of crotchety parents, monomaniacs; those 



