Our Children—How We May Add to or Subtract From Their Inheritance

The greatest problem of this and the next generation is the selection of its children and its grandchildren. We have not recognised it as our most sacred duty that we are the builders of the future because we shelter the building blocks out of which the future will be constructed.

Whether or not the boy and the girl of fifty years from now will be better than the boys and girls of today will be decided by the wisdom that is used in putting together the building blocks upon which humanity is built; and I will study with you today some of the means by which we may put together the building blocks of a greater civilization and indicate, if the time will permit, some of the means by which we may destroy what it has taken tens of thousands of years to prepare for the next generation, because we do not handle those building blocks wisely while they are in our jurisdiction and we have the responsibility for them.

Well then, we will approach this study with an emphasis upon motives of life. We have come to think of life as being measurable by the opportunity for service, but primarily the religions of the world have taught people to be selfish, to save their own bodies by escaping an eternal damnation and getting a beautiful reward of some kind. One of the most important messages that has ever come to me came as a rebuke from a very clever thinking, but non-religious man, who said to me, “Dr. Price, my objection to Christianity is that so many of you Christians are living such utterly selfish lives. Your concern is for yourselves. Your interest is to get rewards or to escape punishment.” There is something bigger and something better in life. There is the privilege of bringing God’s kingdom upon the earth by fulfilling his laws.

It set me to thinking. He was not a religious man, not a Christian man; so my first emphasis would be that we shall get the large, new vision of life. It seems to me that the greatest thing we can do is bring about the superman, for which God has been preparing this great source of life and use, and we need not think for a minute that we can go contrary to these laws about use.

And now for a little while let’s study how these laws go together. Let us have a slide at this time, if you please, that will show us a fish called the “butterfish” coiled around its eggs, for that fish has come finally to have within it the instinct of parenthood, the desire to protect its offspring. Do you realize that for great eons of time the forms of life on the earth had no parental instinct? They had three major controlling instincts: one of self-preservation and it was absolutely warfare because the rest of the universe was against that unit, and each unit learned to fight and protect itself. It may be the kind of animal that crawls like a snail and builds tentacles with pin point darts or it may spin on its body, but that fundamental instinct that dominated was the protection of life for each succeeding form of life, one after another on up to the larger forms. And incidentally we are just of the same time in general. We depend upon other forms very largely. In fact, entirely upon other forms because we eat vegetables and animals both.

That first instinct, then, of self-preservation was imbued with the instinct to protect off-spring.

But there were two other forces that had been necessary in the great eons of time, thousands of millions of years of time probably, during which was formed those smaller vegetable forms and smaller animal forms. They had to do some other things besides preserve themselves. They had to get food, and therefore, the instinct, the energy factor of nourishment, nutrition. But there must be one other; if a unit would feed itself well and protect itself well it would have no part in this great program of world building unless it took part in this larger program of procreation, so that reproduction instinet came along with the others, and those three great instincts dominated, and indeed were almost the entire limit of instinctive reaction in all of the earthly forms of life down to and including man of today. That is about the saddest thing I can say. All you need to do is go down any street, on any highway and just notice the signs, and every place you tum, every direction you move in you find the inspiration that dominated the placing of the sign was one of those three major instincts still dominating all of life the instinct to get, and it is money. “Buy this land”, “Go and make your investment in such a place and you will get more and more and more of this world’s goods,” and you go a little farther and you see another greater signboard and here is a beautiful picture of a ham and it is sliced through the bone and you can almost smell the mustard. Was it the instinct to nutrition?

All over this world we see the possibilities of appeal to that instinct in all of mankind through nourishing them and we expand because this is a fundamental thing.

But you don’t go much farther until you see another great signboard, and that is some phase of the sex appeal, and it is calling people to come to the theatres and to things built upon that fundamental instinct, for people will get money by appealing to these three fundamental forces in every human body. Those forces will work and do work. Seventy-five per cent of the people that are in the institution of Massachusetts are there because they tried to get somebody that somebody else had this self-preservation instinct–or the sex instinct.

So those three great forces are dominating our children and us whether we recognize it or not, and they are going to dominate the next generation, but there came a time and there comes a time in each of our lives when, just as this fish understands how to protect itself, we have enough parental instinct to protect our children. But we don’t have enough knowledge along with that instinct to teach our boys and girls how to make their children more safe than they are because they are our children.

Now, if we would follow this line just a little farther we would very quickly find the laws of society can build up, and I will not take more time now on that, but I hope I may have a few minutes to come back to it in the closing part of my address, because I want to take up the mechanism we must use if we are going to utilize forces to best advantage.

We take one hour a week on Sundays to come here for these studies. I mean our Sunday school studies; and we think we are building Christian character and spiritual lives. If I interpret these data correctly, it means the time is coming when we will not have one hour or two but one day or two will be spent by everyone in working out these, the means, for adapting that life to the great forces of the world; and then in another generation the time will come when that same spirit will dominate every hour of their every day of every week of their lives.

I say this thing can not be divided into two great problems–one hour on Sunday and the rest can be neglected then for the rest of the week, as though there was any difference between the secular and the divine, the spiritual and the purely physical. They are so intimate they are inseparable.

So now we take our next slide and note for a moment how the particular mother that is selected for that coming child, or the father that is selected for that child that is to be born, may determine very largely what that first and next generation is going to be. Let us see among five hundred Oxford graduates, in which institution they have six honor grades, and every boy who has ever had the honor to be in the first honor group has had a noble ancestry, for thirty-six per cent of his grandparents were on the honor list of Oxford before. Oh, if we didn’t have any other information than this on that chart we would get a wonderful inspiration, for when we go down that chart and those young people that had to take second place in it had only thirty-two per cent of their fathers in the honor group; those in the third place had twenty-nine per cent; fourth place twenty-four per cent; fifth place thirteen per cent; sixth place only twelve.

I say the biggest problem any father or mother will have or can have will be to bring to their child the information that will help them to decide their responsibilities for this great future. If we will think of a great race that is taking a million years to run, and it is a relay race, and one individual carries that message through his lifetime and puts it into the hands of the son or daughter of the next generation, and they travel on through life, and so on; and what will happen if someone in that great relay race sits down by the way and is careless in passing on that wand or talent they have–why, it spoils all the work of the preceding generations that have been faithful. And if any boy or girl can see that his place in the universe is to try to bring about the superman by not only bringing the talent that has been brought to him, but by making it better while it is in his possession and carrying it forward.

It is now probably definitely established that it is possible to transmit–and I think we can prove it in this or any other audience–characters that have been built up by our ancestors.

So if we take this then as a general background, then every boy or girl should have in mind to have their boy or girl that is to be born to them have an ancestry that not only is good enough, but is getting better than that which they themselves had. How can it be? How can it for any boy be better for his child then he is? If he will select a wife, a mate, that has a certain factor that will reinforce his, he may multiply that factor which is strong within himself in a very definite way; or on the contrary if he has weak points in his character and she has weak points in her character, they may intensify them and make it worse than in either one of them; and if on the other hand, they shall so blend their lives that one furnishes what the other does not furnish, they make up better and more rounded character.

Some day that is going to be a very fundamental part of religion; just as essential that I shall escape fire or that I shall get a great prize of some kind, will be my responsibility to teach my boy and girl how they can make this development of the God-man, the superman more readily because of their lives.

Let’s take the next slide, for here we have the means, the machinery by which we transfer action. We have the chromosomes of the human. There are twenty-four chromosomes in the human cell, and those twenty-four are made up twenty-four from each the father and twenty-four from the mother, and these chromosomes come to the fertilizing egg, one-half through the sperm from the father and the other half through the ovum in the mother.

Now there are certain characteristics. This network forms in every cell so that every cell of the body will carry that chromosome figure. It may finally build itself up into a network which I do not have time to go into in detail, but these units are very definitely twenty-four, and each one of these twenty-four will carry certain of our individual characteristics, such as the size of the nose, color of the hair, the stature and all those physical forms will be built up, and we take a certain dimension that is established by the mother and blend with that a certain characteristic with the same sex cell in the father, and you get a definite effect in the off-spring.

Now we have forty-eight half chromosomes, twenty-four of the father and twenty-four of the mother, arranged in that order, and they are so characteristic that the experts working in biological fields can tell very often when a new character has entered or when a modification has entered. They can see in the chromosome the change that is going to make a change in the color of the wing, for example, or some change in the sex cell that is a characteristic change.

Now in the negro there is a difference in certain of these sex cells. I want to call your attention to that. In each of these male cells there will be two chromosomes, an X and a Y. I should say that in each cell of the male there will be these two cells of the male, but in the division of the cell the X always goes to one pole and the Y always goes to the other pole of the cell, and so the cell is made up only of half cells so each carries only that part of the X or Y combination which would make it male or female. Therefore, if a Y has migrated to the pole, it means a female and if that is the sperm that fertilizes the ovum, why it is of necessity a female, and similarly with the Y.

It is now definitely related to these particular chromosomes that they carry the ability to transfer into the coming individual, whether it is a plant or whether it is an animal or human or whatnot, these various unit characteristics. Now, as we pass a little farther we will see how they work in the developing of character.

In the next slide you see corn. Corn may be white, yellow or purple, and it may have white leaves, green leaves or purple leaves. Now if that chromosome that establishes for the purpose of leaves is transferred in the germ cell of even the white one, why then all of the leaves of all the com that is ever produced by that grain of corn or its descendants will have purple leaves, so that all the different kinds of corn have been made to have purple leaves.

Just to show how mechanical it is and how definite it is, it can be seen in the microscope, and it is definite and exact and it works out so that people can tell by going into the study that the unborn son or daughter of Mr. and Mrs. So and So living over in such a part of the country will have certain characteristics, or that a person living in one part of the city is related to someone in another part. It is the same in humans as in the com.

If now we take this a little farther and see where this information is located, we find it is in the sex cell and it isn’t possible by changing the physical form of the body to change the energy factor in those chromosomes that have been transferred on through large generations, but it can be done very easily so far as that individual is concerned by changing that sex cell. For example, a guinea pig, white guinea pigs let us say, will produce white off-spring according to this law, but in this particular case it didn’t work and probably it is the first case in the history of the world that didn’t work, because this female guinea pig had her form of ovaries removed and the ovary of a black guinea pig put in. The white guinea pig became pregnant and there were two families of black guinea pigs.

That law quickly and easily demonstrates that this energy factor, this force, is carried into the sex cells, and shows that the sex cells carry a whole line of energy factors that go back through many generations.

In the next slide here we have a white guinea pig mated with a black, and in the next generation we have only black guinea pigs, because black is dominant over white. Now we may have the dominant characteristics or we may have recessive characteristics, which I will not go into. Here again we have black mated with white. Now in the next generation we have two black guinea pigs, but they carry determiners in their sex cells which will be in the order of three of the black to one white, so in the next generation there will be three black to one white. In the next one five blacks to three whites. Now that law then for that particular character is just as mechanical and fixed as that.

Now passing quickly so we see how character is built, we see immediately an interesting case here showing feeble-mindedness of a typical recessive character. The squares represent the males. Now the interesting thing is that here an individual that in the first generation this female mated with this male, produced relatively normals, but they carried determiners for defects and in the next generation, in the grandchildren, the defects came up. Here we have this female marrying an alcoholic, and all of their off-spring in the first generation are defective, and all in the second generation are defective. Immediately a bad condition is made worse by adding to it that superimposed condition of alcoholism which influenced the determiner in that particular life.

Suppose your boy and girl were put up against the proposition, “I like that boy pretty well but I know he likes to hit the bottle.” We may think that isn’t much of a problem because it isn’t among our boys and girls here, but Mr. Merville knows that doesn’t mean that because it isn’t in our group of boys it isn’t in the boys and girls that form a great majority that are present in Cleveland. The girl of today in Cleveland has the decision to make whether she is going to degrade herself because she loves a boy who likes liquor, and that boy may have in him just this much of an influence as we see here, or the sex instinct may be over-developed in that life, that girl’s children and grandchildren. Does she know that? So you should see that she is taught that. Is it part of the teachings of our Church to teach our boys and girls that? Have we so much prudery that that is a thing that must never be mentioned? Some think that if God takes care of it, it will be all right. All those that can not go along and help to make the better quality must exterminate itself. That is a cruel way to do, and we are defeating the very purpose of our lives, as we have the purpose of our children’s lives, if we let then make a failure of their lives, as we have made a failure of our own lives, because the thing we are trying to do is not what we can accomplish ourselves but what we accomplish in bringing about God’s Kingdom.

Let us take the next slide. Let us take a particular family. This particular family’s name was Rough, the father Aaron Rough, who moved into Western Pennsylvania. He had a wife that wasn’t very intelligent and just as likely as not, as so often happens, not only in the low-grade classes but in the upper classes, this boy never would have picked out that kind of a feeble-minded girl if society wasn’t built that way, because he got her in trouble and this man now starting out in this community with this kind of a girl; and of the people that stayed in this community that were dependants, there were probably some nine hundred people descended from that man and girl. Ninety-five percent of those who stayed in the community were defective physically and mentally, and only four of the eight per cent were physically fit to go out and encounter society; and yet that boy threw away his life by allowing himself to be tied up with that unworthy woman.

Are we arming our boys and girls so that they will see what they may be doing for this future part in posterity? Somehow God has put into human souls an instinct to get out and get away from such an environment as that, so in the off-spring family there were none who wanted to get away from that influence and they went as far as fifteen miles, and those that had that much energy were strong enough to pick better mates, and seventy-two per cent of their off-spring only were defective, and that is sad enough. There were a few in there that wanted to get clear beyond and out of that mess and they went out into other countries and toward the Northwest. There is something about the tonic of that air that gives people an inspiration to go into greater usefulness. There seems to be something in the grass that grows there that puts more vitamines into the dairy on the products, if I had time to tell you about it. Out there on the prairies where there are great herds of buffalo, there are stalwart men as well as animals. Well, those that went out to that far country, their descendants have been strong enough so that ninety-eight per cent of them have been efficient. Oh, what a wonderful thing! How wonderful to get away from a mess like that. Have we suggested to our boys and girls how they are going to get out of a mess like that? Does our religion? Do our creeds today spread out their influence large enough so that they can take in the great problems like that? If not, we had better reorganize.

But let’s take a look at genius. Here we have the great line of descendants of the old times and the Goldtons and the Darwins, and all those black figures you see here were people who had some great characteristic that they were made Fellows of the Royal Society, than which there is no greater honor that can be given to any man in this world; and when you see in a single line of descendants as many people as that that got great distinction–Oh, if I could say to every boy and girl that has the problem of going out and getting a mate so that their future may contribute to the building up of this universe, “look at this picture and study and study it and see if you can not add to that great force that comes down to you something that will add to it and help you build the superman for the future.”

Oh, but cousin marriages didn’t destroy. How do you suppose the finest stock of white rats that have ever been developed have been produced? Not by taking a white rat out of this family and another out of that family, no relation, and trying to keep relations apart, but by taking the best pair of brother and sister rats out of each succeeding generation and letting them become the parents of another generation, and dropping all the rest. You see the application of it? If we drown all our infants and just loop the best, we could soon build up a superrace. Somehow it doesn’t work very well in the human schedule. That is the way it is done, and they built up a stock of rats that are so much bigger and better than normal rats that they are several times as heavy, live longer, have larger ears, lighter ears and in every particular are better. How did they do it? Why did they do it?

They just simply picked out those rats that had the chromosomes with the determiners for good qualities and those that didn’t have, they drowned, and it didn’t hurt them at all to come together as brother and sister, let alone cousins, and they were only concerned with the good qualities. By so doing they developed a stock of rats that resisted disease, were capable of more vitality in all its phases.

Now we see immediately a lesson from that. Why, it is the same principle that we would apply if boys and girls were just simply as intelligent as they might be and allowing their simple affections to get started. If they would only allow themselves to be interested in people of certain grades of character and physical and moral perfection, you would immediately have the foundation laid for doing the very thing that was done with those rats.

Now let’s see, in this lower chart we have musical talent. We had a wonderful boy here this winter. I haven’t followed that. I don’t know the story of his ancestry. In all probability it shows something like this. You see here the history of Johann Sebastian Bach, and in that family were some very great musicians. The dark circles in the four generations were great musicians that were world famous.

Let us suppose that you want your boy or girl who is musically inclined to make a great contribution of that energy factor which you have given them and help them to realize that, if that is one of the factors they want dominant in coming generations, to just keep in mind that it will be worth their while to get someone of the opposite sex who will be the parent of their children who will develop that great quality, Whether it is music or art or dramatic ability. Whenever you have had great dramatists, they have been able to transmit that factor to be great dramatists.

In the next we have another phase of it. We find here a physical development, and these physical developments will be carried over into increasing proportions in the coming generation.

In the next slide we see one of the things I want to particularly emphasize–mental instability. You see here these people that were slightly mentally unable developed into people that were very unstable. Immediately the boy or girl gets the idea that there is going to be an increase in the qualities that are undesirable in them if they blend them with a deficient factor in their mate. Their off-spring are doomed. See what a terrible thing that is one, two, three, four it is too pathetic a thing to count, a horrible picture.

Take this one. The chart shows heredity of feeblemindedness. This woman married three husbands, and by each of those husbands produced feeble-minded children, and she was not feeble-minded in the sense that you think of when she ought to be in an institution. She was just an easy prey for some man that was looking for privileges. That is feeble-mindedness. Let’s see a little farther how easily that gets into society.

Here we have, for example, pedigrees of a family with a high proportion of feeble-mindedness. You note here how a sex pervert here in the father joining with this woman that all of their off-spring are sex perverts. What girl is going to look at that picture then find herself out in an automobile with some young man, and he tells her a nice story, and perhaps they have decided they are going to get married, maybe they elope because papa and mama doesn’t approve of the young man. She thinks she knows better than pa and ma, but she didn’t see this, that if she marries that fellow that her children will be sex perverts in the next generation, and because that man is dressed up in fine clothes doesn’t make any difference at all in this law. It doesn’t matter how he is dressed or whether he has an automobile or buggy or going on foot.

Let’s take this terrible picture of the Jukes family. There is only one phase of that and it is so horrible I don’t want to repeat it to you. Here we have a family of sixteen hundred individuals that were studied in the first place in 1875, and it was found in that group all sorts of criminality and baseness. Poorness of those chromosomes was present to this terrible extent that fifty-two per cent of the women born in that family twelve hundred individuals were prostitutes, and it is estimated that something over ninety-five to ninety-eight per cent of the men were sex perverts. But they weren’t necessarily poor people. They just had that kind of determiner. Some years later, after they got distributed through different committees and after the law had put so many in prison that it had cost millions of dollars to the states in which they lived to keep them in institutions, and the institutions had tried to make decent, better people of those people, then Estabrooke made another study forty years after the first study to see how much they had improved by the disciplinary methods of our institutions. And how much improvement do you suppose there was? When, I tell you that in the second survey the number of prostitutes was fifty-one per cent of the people your heart will break. Oh, how hard it is, for by law and by restriction we can’t eliminate them, to make character.

We just don’t change the chromosomes. We are not working at the right place. The only way we can do that is to make those people stop producing. That is the largest part of our population and is larger than any other single group of individuals. Will any boy or any girl see that chart and deliberately go into marriage with a sex pervert? I don’t think she will.

If we as a church could make everyone of our boys and girls as much safer as they would be if they knew the facts that are on that chart, don’t you think that would be a great Christian service to them? Helping to bring God’s Kingdom on earth and into their lives for the next generation?

That is too terrible to dwell on, and here is another family just as horrible. We will pass that, it is impossible. It can’t be done that way, you can’t do it by restriction.

Now some girl says, “Well, he doesn’t drink very much. Why, yes, he carries a hip pocket bottle. In fact, I don’t mind taking a little myself. I don’t get drunk at all.” What might happen if the thing that happens in animals happens in humans? In the first generation after guinea pigs have been put into cages and before mating the male is allowed to inhale alcoholic vapor, and mating occurs while he is in that stage with alcohol in his circulation, in approximately the same percentage as it is in the blood of the boy and girl who has taken alcohol into the system at a wild party, the off-spring may not show the physical defects but in the animals in the third and fourth generation develops these serious physical defects. That is because the chromosomes are being passed on and on and part that we have have been part of our ancestors way back, and some ancestor could easily blight one of those characteristics of our determiners.

Will a boy or girl see that kind of power and look lightly upon the hip pocket flask? Boys and girls are just about as sensible as we are.

Let us take another problem. This hasn’t anything to do with liquor or the sex instinct. Here is a perfectly normal boy and girl and their minds are clean and habits good, and they come and do their family right here, perhaps they are two young people right here in this audience, and they have the problem. Now is it wise for our families to blend chromosomes? Now let’s see what might happen. Let us suppose in this family the genealogy shows a kidney disturbance, and let’s see whether or not we are going to have these kidney disturbances develop in these different ones. If we have right eyes we will get some information by an analysis of this. In this particular family, by going back to the ancestors, one side of the ancestors had neuritis or Bright’s Disease. In the three generations, following out twenty-eight individuals, sixteen developed neuritis. Now that is by Hurst, the English authority and has tremendous significance.

If we have in our bodies an organ that does not have a normally defensive mechanism, and we blend that normally defensive mechanism in a mate, and our off-spring carry forward two weak determiners instead of one, then we magnify that problem to that extent.

Let’s have the next, please. I think I have in my chart something like two thousand families that I have studied with regard to this question of the diseases that would be likely to develop in their bodies if they carried local infections, because I am concerned that they shall not have dental infection and lesions that tend to develop if they have sores and decay which cause weakness in their bodies. This is the individual’s own life history. In the two brothers and three sisters, and the father and father’s father, and mother and mother’s mother, and his brothers and sisters, and we found that both the brothers and sisters and this individual have both heart trouble and rheumatism, and we find that in that family there were eight or nine cases of heart trouble.

Let us suppose that is your boy or my boy. What more helpful thing could we do than to at least be careful that the affections of our boy don’t take us over where they should.

(Dr. Price’s lecture was interrupted because of Baccalaureate Services for the Case School Graduates)

 

Editor’s note: Since the era in which this article was written, society’s understanding of respectful terminology when referring to ethnic and cultural groups has evolved, and some readers may be offended by references to “negro” people and other out-of-date terminology. However, this article has been archived as a historical document, and so we have chosen to use Price’s exact words in the interest of authenticity.  No disrespect to any cultural or ethnic group is intended.