The happiness of the individual and of the family often depends upon the influence and effects of very plain and everyday considerations, and in closing Part First there are a few things which we desire to impress upon the mind of the young husband which to some may seem unimportant, but which, in fact, are very important, and your failure duly to observe any one of which may result in your home, as it has in thousands of others, in the blighting of happiness, in personal injury, in injustice and wrong to wife and children, and even in the wrecking of the home itself.

See to it that you have a pure breath. You have no right to defile your body, or render your breath impure or offensive in any way, and especially by the use of tobacco and liquor. You have no more right to defile the air which your wife is to breathe than you have to defile the water which she is to drink, or to sprinkle some disagreeable or loathsome substance upon the food which she is to eat; and the magnitude of this wrong would be increased in proportion to the extent to which it adds to her discomfort or injures her health. To say the least, the use of tobacco is a selfish habit, and if you desire to be just and equal, you should be willing to apportion to your wife for some personal gratification of her own an amount equal to the money which you daily or annually expend upon yourself for the use of tobacco. The tobacco habit is an expensive one. It not only costs an expenditure of a large amount of money annually, but results almost universally in nervousness and irritability. If you use tobacco in any form and will observe yourself closely, noting the difference between the periods when you omit its use and when, upon the other hand, you do not use it, you will be convinced that it tends very perceptibly to render you sensitive, irritable and uncompanionable. But this is not all. It so permeates your entire being as seriously to affect the children which you beget and bring into the world.

No man, we care not how indifferent he may be to the effect upon himself or to the comfort of his wife, can be so insensible to the effect of his own life in determining the character, happiness and destiny of his children, as to be indifferent to the consideration of the results of the use of tobacco upon his descendants. You may often have noticed that men and women of good physique, and apparently enjoying the best of health, become the parents of weak, nervous and sickly children. It would be both unjust and untrue to assert that in every such instance the result could be accurately traced to the use of tobacco, but the evidence that tobacco is the real cause can be established in at least some instances. Many a child of inferior physical and intellectual capacity has been defrauded of its larger endowment because the father who begot it was addicted to the use of tobacco. If the teachings of the most reliable medical authority upon this subject are to be accepted, it would be possible to select from any community the finest physical and intellectual specimens of men and women and let them both become addicted to the use of tobacco, and then marry among themselves, and in a single generation or two their descendants would fall far below the physical and intellectual average of the children of other parents who do not use the weed in any form.

The subject of intemperance we have fully treated in the preceding volumes of this series, and we must refer the reader to them in that place, especially the book addressed to young men. Liquor is not only a curse to the individual who uses it, but it wrecks the health and happiness of the wife and curses their yet unborn children. It not only affects their morals, health and intelligence, but where the children are not born imbeciles or idiots they often inherit the appetite for drink and become depraved and drunken to the third and fourth generation. The great minds which have shone in the intellectual firmament of the past, or brighten and bless the present generation, were not begotten of parents who were given to excess and dissipation. Many a man whose descendants might have been lustrous and happy, owe their enfeebled minds and blighted happiness to the indiscretion and excess of the parents who brought them into the world. When God designed to raise up a Samson he said to the mother: "Thou shalt conceive and bear a son. Now, therefore, beware, I pray thee, and drink not wine, nor strong drink, and eat not any unclean thing, for the child shall be a Nazarite unto God from the womb, and he shall begin to deliver Israel out of the hands of the Philistines." The same laws of heredity exist to-day, and they cannot be ignored without imperiling the health and the happiness of those who are to come after us.

If you love your wife or value your own happiness, let us urge upon you the duty of fidelity. This is a duty that you owe to your wife in the same proportion that she owes fidelity to you. God has made but one standard of integrity and virtue, and this is enjoined alike upon men and women. God says, "Thou shalt not commit adultery." He does not say women shall not, or that men shall not. There is no discrimination between men and women.

The word "thou" means the person who reads or hears—the person addressed, whether male or female, young or old, king or peasant, high or low, learned or unlearned, rich or poor, white or black, bond or free. It is alike binding upon all, without abatement or modification, regardless of sex, race, class or condition, and without reference to time, place or circumstance.

What is true of this commandment is also true of them all. God has not made one set of laws for men and another for women. Neither does He excuse or condone in men what He condemns in women. He holds both alike answerable to the same unerring standards of social and moral purity. Whatever may be the attitude of those who entertain lax moral views, society has no right to condone in man what it condemns in woman. What is wrong for her is wrong for him, and infidelity or unfaithfulness is a crime in either.

In addition to the moral wrong there is also the great physical risk. The unmarried man who leads a life of vice, to some extent, at least, only imperils himself; but the married man imperils his wife and his children in addition. The most reputable physicians can bear ample testimony to the frequency that women apply to them for relief from aches and ills suffered by themselves and their children, the nature and source of which these wives do not suspect, and the terrible and ineradicable nature of which they are totally ignorant. Such is the terrible punishment inflicted by guilty husbands and fathers upon their innocent and unsuspecting wives and children. Hundreds of cases might be named; but let us give a single illustration, narrated to us by one of the most eminent physicians of this country, whose name and residence are not essential, as somewhat similar instances come frequently to the attention of physicians.

A young man of a wealthy family, who had been a couple of times treated for gonorrhoea, married a beautiful bride in a prominent and wealthy family. A couple of weeks after his marriage he came to the physician with one of those small sores called a chancre, which is the unmistakable evidence of the presence of syphilis. Careful investigation disclosed the fact that at the time of his marriage he had a concealed chancre, and which, although unknown to himself, had nevertheless been communicated to his bride. The treatment was prompt and of the most skillful character, but serious results were speedily manifest. The primary sore was followed by its secondary results. Sores appeared upon the different parts of her body, the mucous membrane was affected, and every hair upon the entire person of the wife fell out. She did not have left so much as eyebrows, eyelashes, or even hairs in her nose, and, as in some instances after a serious attack of typhoid fever, months were necessary before the hair started again to grow. When it did grow it returned coarse and wiry, and when about an inch or inch-and-a-half long it very much resembled goat's hair. It could not be combed—nothing could be done with it. She looked like a fright—was an astonishment to her friends and an embarrassment to herself.

With no knowledge of the terrible nature of her disease, it was difficult to induce her to persist through months for a period of at least two years in taking her medicines. At intervals during the years that followed she gave premature birth to children, which, whether born dead, or living for a day or two, were masses of disease and corruption. After four or five of such miscarriages she finally gave birth to a child that at the time of its coming into the world seemed healthy. Not long after the birth of this child the family removed from the community, and the physician was unable to note the effects of the inheritance which no child under such circumstances could possibly escape.

While this case was impressive, it was by no means exceptional. We have learned of instances where persons of unbounded wealth have communicated the syphilis to their wives, and all the skill which wealth could command has not been able to eradicate the disease or deliver the unhappy sufferers from the consequences of the criminal unfaithfulness of the guilty husband.

But there are consequences less manifest to the eye, but no less deadly and destructive in effect, which come to the innocent and unoffending wife as the result of the vice and unfaithfulness of her husband. One of the most eminent physicians of Philadelphia, in conversation with the author, assured us that the effects of gonorrhoea, or clap, which are suffered by the wives is something alarming. Even where the husband has not communicated the disease while it was active in himself, but where the intending husband may have supposed that he was entirely cured of gonorrhoea for a period of two years or more, he may yet communicate the lurking remnants of that disease to the vagina, the effects soon extending up into the womb, out through the Fallopian tubes, oftentimes reaching the ovaries and necessitating their removal, making it necessary to unsex the woman in order to save her from the wretchedness and misery which are inseparable from the death which they so often preface.

An eminent practitioner in New York, when addressing the last annual convention of the State Medical Society, called special attention to the prevalent effects which wives suffer as the result of gonorrhoea contracted by their husbands, and said that a few years ago it was his custom, when women with certain symptoms came to him for consultation, to request a private interview with the husbands in order that he might discover whether past unfaithfulness since marriage or a life of vice prior to marriage was not the cause of the trouble. He said that latterly, however, the best medical authorities were agreed that it was not necessary to subject the husband to this trying inquisition, for the symptoms and conditions which established the correctness of the diagnosis were a sufficient proof of the source of all the wife's troubles. Thousands of husbands who bemoan the fact that their wives are complete physical wrecks are themselves the authors of the ruin which has been wrought.

Nor is this all; fathers have often carried the disease home, and by the use of towels have communicated the virus of the disease to the eyes of their children or some member of the family, from which total blindness has come as the inevitable result. We learned of one instance in which the father communicated the disease to his entire family, including several small children, who took their bath in the same tub, but in different water, after the father had bathed.

For a fuller unfolding of the awful consequences of the diseases which accompany vice we must refer the reader to the book "What a Young Man Ought to Know," from page 93 to 153. All that has there been said in favor of a chaste and pure life can be enjoined with even greater emphasis on those who are married.

But what if a guilty husband and father could escape the dangers of disease, the detection by his wife, and could even escape the lashings of his own guilty conscience, which will smite with sevenfold force as the years advance, yet how terrible for him to remember that transmission is the law of heredity, and that a licentious father is the legitimate predecessor of a vicious child. Is it comforting for a father to anticipate with certainty that all the vices which have corrupted his life, blighted his home and debased his moral nature are to be transmitted to his offspring? How shall he, in the after years, when his own children go wrong, be comforted with the thought that what they are he was, and that what he desires them to be is what he himself should have been. Julia, the daughter of Augustus, was as bad as her father, and gave birth to a child of equally strong propensities. These are the influences which have not only destroyed the happiness of homes, but have wrecked the destinies of nations. By the love you bear your wife, by the love which you have for your children which are and which are to be, by the respect which you have for yourself and the fear that you should have for your God, by all that is sacred in marriage and in home, by all that is desired in this world and in the world to come, we plead with you, for your present, future and eternal good, that you maintain your marriage vow inviolate.

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Part II

CONCERNING HIS WIFE

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