In order that he might speak freely on the subject, it had been necessary to restrict the audience entirely to parents, or those who stood in their stead, and who might be expected, for that reason, to treat a serious matter in a serious spirit. There was a seriousness about himself which was combined with but little acuteness: he almost threatened them. He did not in the least perceive how horrified this meeting of provincial townspeople at once became; he took their embarrassment for a kind of awe, for something of the solemn feeling of a meeting in church. He continued: "Not alone for woman's sake must this subject be seriously approached, but for man's sake as well. All take care of themselves, men as well as women, but women had the incentive to watch over her own interests, so she stood higher as a companion and in society. "It was in this that the school ought, better than before, to aid her. "The venerable man who sat on his right once said to him, that only those families succumbed to drunkenness whose nerves had first been thoroughly weakened by a dissolute life. In such families the habit of drunkenness very easily becomes hereditary; I think that more than this can be traced to the same cause. Addiction to pleasure--that undoubtedly often grows in vigorous soil; but a man may appear vigorous enough and still be excessively enervated. That characterlessness which is incapable of overcoming opposition is, as a rule, the result of the forefathers' sensuality with the addition of his own; every kind of moral and intellectual looseness and dulness, when it spreads in a family which has at one time taken a foremost place, can, for the most part, be traced back to this cause. At all events, it is the strongest among several. Our passion, our hastiness, our impatience, our exaggeration, our irritability--unless, indeed, they can be traced to some accident in our bringing up, some purely accidental state of health--find their strongest cause here. "All such are weaknesses contracted in the course of several generations; perhaps increased in the later ones. "The investigations on this subject are so recent that we cannot yet bring forward such strong proofs as we believe to exist; it is only lately that the work of seriously minded men and women has been concentrated on this object, as the most important possible. But those who realise that this is the case are still few. Therefore schools are not by any means able to cope with the subject; especially girls' schools, which are absolutely bad.