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of violated law, better go and hang yourself than make some trusting girl the mother of your syphilitic offspring. Should you do so, after reading this book, although I am opposed to the infliction of the death penalty under any circumstances, still I would say that you deserved hanging a thousand times more than Vasquez, the notorious California robber and murderer. True, there is a hope that you may be thoroughly cured, but the chances are greatly against you, for among the hundreds of remedies laid down by the different Medical Schools, I have never found but one that is infallible, and this is known to but very few physicians. If you can apply to me, either personally or by letter, I will put you in a way to be perfectly cured; but if not, then I warn you, that if you would escape a terrible remorse and torture of conscience, to die sooner than become the father of a syphilitic child.

The same remarks concerning syphilis, will apply to woman, but it is so rare that a young woman becomes thus diseased, and so much more common for a young man than is generally supposed, that I have pointed to him especially, and must particularly caution the young ladies to be careful how they permit any man to become the father of their children.

Coming directly to the point, supposing that the conditions for both male and female are all right, I will give definite instructions as to how offspring should be begotten.

1. Both the expectant parents should desire offspring and feel that they can afford it pecuniarily.

2.

Both should live perfectly chaste for at least thirty days, and ninety days would be better, or even a whole year if possible.

3. Both should be in love, each with the other, and both earnestly desire the procreative act.

A few details, as to the modus operandi, seem appropriate, in order that there may be no misunderstanding. If it was to be only a crop of wheat, it would be thought worth while

to state all the particulars, and yet if a whole harvest should be lost, that loss would scarcely be felt five years later, whereas a badly begotten child would be a source of misery through life.

If the woman has previously been a mother, then at least two years should intervene between the last birth and next conception. This time is fixed upon the hypothesis that the woman has been fortunate and successful with her last child, and that her constitution is good. If otherwise, then a much longer time. Much depends upon circumstances, as to the time that should elapse, but two years is the very shortest period, even when these circumstances have been the most favorable.

UNIVERSITY

OF

Nature's Secrets.

35

CHAPTER IV.

WHO SHOULD NOT BECOME PARENTS; THE HORRORS OF MASTURBATION.

I have already indicated that the victim of syphilis should not assume the great responsibility of parentage until assured, beyond even the shadow of a doubt, of perfect soundness. But there are many other classes of persons who are under equally imperative moral obligations not to become parents. I shall therefore devote a Chapter especially to such, hoping that parents may be admonished thereby to put forth more care in training their children, and that they may not form any of these disgusting habits, so at varience with good breeding, so destructive of morals, and utterly incapacitating them from becoming the parents of robust, intellectual children. Reader, if you have any pride of family, if you would see your name honored in your third generation, give heed to my counsel. Carefully train the children you now have, and some day your grandchildren may rise up and call you blessed; neglect your children, permit them to form these vile habits, which will make them objects of loathing to all their acquaintances, and then you may expect your grandchildren to be fit candidates for the almshouse, insane asylum, reform school, house of correction, prison, penitentiary and gallows.

I deem it unnecessary to make any additional comments upon the enormity of the crime of parentage by either man or woman whose system still retains even a shadow of the deadly virus of syphilis. It is a crime too horrible for con

templation, and too unnatural to be suspected but for the ghastly evidences which we meet at every turn in every rank of life, from the king in his royal purple to the beggar in his rags. It is the awful penalty which the God of Nature has imposed for the violation of his law, and he is no respecter of persons. It is the penalty not only of unfaithfulness to a bosom companion, but it is the terrible penalty of prostitution and licentiousness. God has ordained one man for one woman, and whatsoever is more than this, on the part of either, is sin. And not only has God ordained these horrible diseases as a present punishment, but that the sin shall be visited upon his children to the third and fourth generations. Aye, and so it is even to the fiftieth generation, taking the various names of "scrofula," "king's evil," "humor in the blood, etc.," when the system has been once poisoned with the deadly virus.

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On the subject of masterbation a few more words seem necessary. In spite of our boasted civilization, our “intelligent masses, our free schools, our gorgeous churches, maintained at an annual expense of more than fifty millions of dollars, in the United States, our fifty thousand clergymen, with an equal number of doctors and lawyers, to say nothing of eleven millions of Spiritualists, every one of whom claims to be a reformer, in spite of all these things, the loathsome practice of masturbation is steadily upon the increase. Its victims are crowding the asylums for the insane and idiotic. A vast army of them are annually swept into their graves. And still there are millions of cases, of a milder type, swarming every walk of life. We meet them in every rank of society, their pale and pinched faces giving notice of their disgusting practices, just as certainly as a striped pole gives notice of a barber-shop. These of the milder type are doing far more injury to society than the poor wretches first named, for they are denied parentage on the score that monsters cannot propagate their species.

Were you to look at the statistics of those who die annually, victims of this revolting crime against Nature, you might fancy that they would soon all die off. Yet only a small proportion of these imbeciles die until middle age; they drag on a miserable existence, marrying and intermarrying, reproducing their kind, filling the earth with male and female masturbators, male and female prostitutes, male and female consumptives, and so on to the end of the chapters of vice, crime and disease. Millions of dollars are annually expended in passing laws to punish these loathsome unfortunates; other millions to prosecute and bring them to justice [?]; other millions in the erection and support of almshouses, prisons and gallowses whereby the public may give expression to its utter abhorrence of these monsters, making them atone by vicarious suffering for the sins of their parents, and not only of the parents, but the sins of the public itself. If only one dollar in a hundred, expended as above enumerated, were set aside and appropriated in the employment of teachers, both men and women, to instruct the masses, as I am trying to instruct them in this little work, it would not be many years before it would be found that less than one-half as many of these unfortunates would be born. Then what results might not be expected if one half of these millions, instead of one per cent, should be so expended?

But we need never expect any such policy on the part of Government, so long as doctors, lawyers and preachers are a controlling influence in the land, for this would be aiming a death-blow at the three learned professions, which now actually control the Government.

In order that I might be able to furnish facts and statistics upon this sickening subject, I have been in the habit of gathering them for years, and now, instead of being at a loss to furnish them, I am at a loss what to select and what to omit, for I might fill a large volume upon this subject alone. Many years ago, in England, the land of my nativity, my attention

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