WORTH-WHILE WORRY

Northern Advocate, 26 March 1926, Page 4

WORTH-WHILE WORRY

It has been frequently remarked that in these modern days every large community seems to include an excessive number of men wearing an air of worry. With care-furrowed features they bend over their desks or they rush hither and thither. What is it all about? Most of the men are trying to make money, not for themselves so much as for their children. What the average husband and father worries over is provision for the family's future. He would like to leave them some little inheritance, the most precious form of which he considers to be money. Everybody admits the indispensability of money, although thefaet that some of the saddest tragedies in life arise from young people entering into an inheritance of money may not be overlooked. The Melbourne “Age" discusses this matter at length, and argues that the thing over which parents should worry is giving their children an inheritance' of health and character rather than money. Marriage, says the “Age,” is probably the most fertile source of civilisation's illhealth; oh the physical side the influ-, enee of heredity is not to be denied. The evils' incidental to ill-considered marriages form so great an aggregate that society is being driven to sit up and take notice. There is a growing tendency to regard marriage with a degree of reason that is not incompatible with true affection. Marriage is an institution that has been regarded as sacred, but under its sanctity many who have entered it have escaped criticism, although they thoroughly deserved it. For centuries society has been paying heavily on account _ of marriage abuses. It .is now beginning to adopt a different attitude towards the marriage of the palpably unfit and the feeble-minded. Public opinion is moving in the direction of imposing a veto on degenerate forms of procreation. Prisons, asylums, hospitals, harbour an enormous number of those human but impossible beings who are the direct products of alliances that are marital, but that are never more than animal, and that have not even the animal merit of physical vigor. This question of the unfit is, however, I a problem apart. Less hideous, but not less serious, phases of the same j problem are to be found on a higher plane. Even among the eminently respectable and externally healthy members of society there is much marrying and giving in marriage that should never take place. Choice of mate continues to be sexual rather than rational; it is a matter of emotion without intelligent regard for the future and for the new lives that the future normally brings forth. President Roosevelt urged people to keep their cradles full; the excellence of such a performance is entirely dependent on the quality of the cradles' contents. - There are well-known diseases with .

which many persons arc quite innocently tainted. By abstinence from marriage the victims could prevent these taints from being- perpetuated. The young man and maiden who cannot obtain a medical guarantee of physical fitness for marriage should be compelled to ask how far marriage is for them warranted. In these days of i plain speech and propaganda, says our Melbourne contemporary, there is no excuse for men and women being ignorant of what will happen in the following generation if they persist in marrying though branded with hereditary disease. That is a cowardly but inescapable heritage to hand on to their children. Many a family who have been left the inheritance of ft [monetary fortune would have been far more grateful, and far more happy, if, along -with the certificate of their parents’ marriage, they could also have seen a certificate attesting their parents’ fitness for marriage. The time is surely approaching when society will begin' legislating to prevent the obviously unfit from mating. But there is equal need for normal men and women contemplating marrying voluntarily seeking and showing a certificate of health attesting their fitness to procreate fresh life.