During the Civil War we are told that 13 per cent. of all men examined were excluded as unfit for military service. We are now told that 31 per cent. are found to be unfit. Nearly one-third of the young men found physically incompetent to be soldiers! From what cause? Certainly tobacco must bear a large share of the blame. Some years ago Major Houston, of the Naval School at Annapolis, made the statement that one-fifth of the boys who applied for admittance were rejected on account of heart disease, and that 90 per cent. of these had produced the heart difficulty by the use of tobacco. Dr. Pidduch asserts that "the hysteria, the hypochondriasis, the consumption, the dwarfish deformities, the suffering lives and early deaths of the children of inveterate smokers, bear ample testimony to the feebleness of constitution which they have inherited." Girls sometimes have the idea that a little wildness in a young man is rather to be admired. On one occasion a young woman left a church where she had heard a lecture on the evils of using tobacco, saying, as she went out, "I would not marry a young man if he did not smoke. I think it looks manly, and I don't want a husband who is not a man among men." Years after, when her three babies died, one after the other, with infantile paralysis, because their father was an inveterate smoker, the habit did not seem to her altogether so admirable, and when she herself became a confirmed invalid, because compelled to breathe night and day a nicotine-poisoned atmosphere, she gave loud voice to her denunciation of the very habit which in her ignorant girlhood she had characterized as manly. CHAPTER XXIX. EFFECTS OF IMMORALITY ON THE RACE. There is another influence at work in causing race degeneracy concerning which the majority of girls are ignorant, and that is immorality. The prevalent idea that young men must "sow their wild oats" is accepted by many young women as true, and they think if the lover reforms before marriage and remains true to them thereafter, that is all they can reasonably demand. They will not make such excuses for themselves for lapses from virtue, but they imbibe the idea that men are not to be held to an absolute standard of purity, and so think it delicate to shut their eyes to the derelictions of young men. This chapter of human life is a sorrowful one to read, but to heed its warnings would save many a girl from sorrow, many a wife from heartache. The law of God is not a double law, holding woman to the most rigid code of a "thou shalt not" and allowing men the liberty of a "thou mayest."