Searchlights on Health: The Science of EugenicsJefferis, B. G. (Benjamin Grant)
Philosophy
Searchlights on Health: The Science of Eugenics
Jefferis, B. G. (Benjamin Grant)
Eugenics; Hygiene; Marriage; Medicine, Popular; Sexual ethics
2. BOYHOOD TIMIDITY OVERCOME.--Too often a common boy's timidity is
overcome by chance or by seduction, which is rarely lacking in great
cities where prostitution is flourishing, and thus numbers of boys
immediately after the transition period of youth, in accordance with
the previous secret practice, accustom themselves to the association
with prostitute women, and there young manhood and morals are soon
lost forever.
3. MARRIAGE-BED RESOLUTIONS.--Most men of the educated classes enter
the marriage-bed with the consciousness of leaving behind them a whole
army of prostitutes or seduced women, in whose arms they cooled their
passions and spent the vigor of their youth. But with such a past the
married man does not at the same time leave behind him its influence
on his inclinations. The habit of having a feminine being at his
disposal for every rising appetite, and the desire for change
inordinately indulged for years, generally make themselves felt again
as soon as the honeymoon is over. Marriage will not make a morally
corrupt man all at once a good man and a model husband.
4. THE INJUSTICE OF MAN.--Now, although many men are in a certain
sense "not worthy to unloose the latchet of the shoes" of the
commonest woman, much less to "unfasten her girdle," yet they make
the most extravagant demands on the feminine sex. Even the greatest
debauchee, who has spent his vigor in the arms of a hundred
courtesans, will cry out fraud and treachery if he does not receive
his newly married bride as an untouched virgin. Even the most
dissolute husband will look on his wife as deserving of death if his
daily infidelity is only once reciprocated.
5. UNJUST DEMANDS.--The greater the injustice a husband does to his
wife, the less he is willing to submit to from her; the oftener he
becomes unfaithful to her, the stricter he is in demanding
faithfulness from her. We see that despotism nowhere denies its own
nature: the more a despot deceives and abuses his people, the more
submissiveness and faithfulness he demands of them.
6. SUFFERING WOMEN.--Who can be astonished at the many unhappy
marriages, if he knows how unworthy most men are of their wives? Their
virtues they rarely can appreciate, and their vices they generally
call out by their own. Thousands of women suffer from the results of
a mode of life of which they, having remained pure in their thought,
have no conception whatever; and many an unsuspecting wife nurses her
husband with tenderest care in sicknesses which are nothing more than
the consequences of his amours with other women.
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