THE DESCENT OF BAD TRAITS AND GOOD. 261 



law of nature since the career of man opened. 

 The fiat as to co-equal heredity, exhibited in the 

 earliest historic documents, has certainly not been 

 changed for sixty centuries. God has been express- 

 ing his mind as to social arrangements these six 

 thousand years. From the beginning he has uttered 

 but one voice. He has always maintained the law of 

 co-equal heredity, and by it has maintained the law 

 of monogamy as the natural ideal. [Applause.] I 

 defy any man who reveres the scientific method, or 

 who loves to think boldly, north, south, east, and 

 west, to look into the arrangements of nature on this 

 topic, and find support for any other party than 

 God's own, as a guide for future civilization. I 

 should be almost willing, were men sure to obey 

 wholly the dictates of what we call nature, to leave 

 the justification of monogamy exclusively to those 

 who correctly understand co-equal and initial hered- 

 ity. 



Did Shakspeare know of what he was talking 

 when he spoke of the green-eyed monster called 

 jealousy? Have the poets in all ages been blind 

 when they have asserted that there are passions 

 through which the words " mine " and " thine " obtain 

 terrific emphasis inside the range of social and 

 family life? If the law of co-equal heredity pro- 

 claims monogamy, so does that of initial heredity. If 

 there is to be a supreme affection, there is, of course, 

 to be a guarding of it; and if the poets, if the phil- 

 osophers, if all who have studied the human heart, 

 are not wrong in assigning to jealousy a force suffi- 



