Having spent so much time in the study of principles and laws, we will now return to the discussion of this concrete case. What can you decide in regard to this individual young man to whom you think you have given your heart? What is he in his inheritance? What is he in himself? I do not ask that he shall have inherited wealth, for that often proves a young man's ruin, but does he come of an honest, industrious family? Have you just reason to suppose that he will make a fair success of life? Is his father shiftless, lazy, improvident? If so, it will be harder for him to be provident, business-like. Has he true ideas of the dignity of life and his own responsibility? Is he looking for an "easy job," or does he purpose to give a fair equivalent for all that he receives? Would he rather toil at honest manual labor than be supported by a rich father-in-law? What are his ideas as to his responsibility in the founding of a home? How will he look upon his wife? As an equal, a companion, or as a plaything, a petted child, or a sort of upper servant? What value does he put upon the wife's labor in the conducting of the household? Will he consider that the money he hands over to her is a gift from him, or only a fair recognition of the value of her work, a rendering to her of her share in the family purse? What is his estimate of woman? Is she an individual with rights, with intellect and heart, with a judgment to be consulted, opinions worthy of recognition, or only an appendage to man, created for his comfort and to be held in her "sphere" by his will? What are his defects of temper, or his weaknesses of body? Of course, to you now he seems perfection, and yet he is a human being, fallible and imperfect. If his faults are similar to yours, you double the possibility of their inheritance by your children. If you both have a tendency to lung trouble, the probabilities are that your children will have consumption. If you both are of rheumatic proclivities, you may expect a manifestation of the same early in the life of your children. If you both are "nervous" or irritable in temper, both jealously inclined, or are morbid and melancholy, you need not be surprised at an intensifying of these qualities in your little ones. If there are more serious family traits, such as insanity, epilepsy, alcoholism and the like, it might even be your duty never to run the risk of their transmission. I once spoke on heredity when in the audience sat a young man by the side of his _fiancée_, who, I was afterwards told, had been in an insane asylum three times, and yet he purposed marrying her. I know a clergyman who has wisely dedicated himself to a celibate life because there is marked insanity in his family.