Thus although outward circumstances often decide the character of a disease, inherited infirmity is its primary cause. A being liable to madness, if subjected to anxiety, may, under different conditions, acquire not madness but consumption. A child may fall a victim to the special ailment from which one or both parents suffered; but equally it is possible that disease in him may assume a totally different form. All that can be affirmed with certainty is this: of diseased parents the offspring invariably inherit a constitution liable to “some kind of morbid degeneration, or a constitution destitute of that reserve power necessary to meet the trying occasions of life!” The trying occasions of life have multiplied with every new complexity in social structure; and there has been no corresponding increase of constitutional strength; but, on the contrary, a growing feebleness of physique and instability of nerve-function. “Our children in these times,” remarks Dr. Richardson, “are our reproach. Where is there a healthy child? You may put before me a child showing to the unskilled mind no trace of disease.... It is sure to have some inherited failure. We are as yet unacquainted with all the phenomena of disease that pass in the hereditary line.... We admit, as proved, scrofula or struma, cancer, consumption, epilepsy, rheumatism, gout. It would be wrong to limit the hereditary proclivities of disease to this list. The further my own observations extend, the stronger is the impression made on my mind that the majority of the phenomena of disease have hereditariness of character.” (_Diseases of Modern Life_, p. 38.) Sir James Paget and Sir William Jenner gave evidence of a similar kind before a Committee of the House of Lords in 1882. From the former eminent physician’s speech I may quote one passage: “We now know that certain diseases of the lungs, liver and spleen are all of syphilitic origin, and the mortality from syphilis in its later forms is every year found to be larger and larger, by its being found to be the source of a number of diseases which previously were referred to other origins.” (_The Times_ Report, August 11th, 1882.) In August Bebel’s work on _Woman, her Position in the Past, Present and Future_, this passage occurs: “With regard to the decimating effects of venereal disease, we will only mention that in England between 1857 and 1865 the authenticated cases which ended fatally amounted to over 12,000, among which no fewer than 69 per cent. were children under twelve months, the victims of parental infection.” (p. 101.)