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- 



