results from it — these, and nothing else, are the best roads to the East's
deliverance from the woes of fanaticism.
Your salvation is in your own hands, O sons of the East. Your disease lies in your religious fanaticism, and the foreigner knows this disease, and is at work to exploit it.
Either you consent to this exploitation, or you rise up to shake off its yoke. And there is no way to that save by drawing near to one another, creeds and sects alike, by way of mutual intermarriage. Do your religious chiefs forbid you? Cast them off. Do your religions and their laws stand in your way? Set them aside. And know that if religion does not yield good — all good — there is no profit in it. Keep of the religions their sound teachings, which command kindness and love and forbid what is evil, and leave aside those of their laws that lead to division and dispersion. If you remain clinging to the agents of disintegration and the commandments of separation, you place in the hands of your enemies a weapon with which they will fight you, and you will remain enslaved.
There is no salvation for the East but in its casting off fanaticism; and fanaticism will not be cast off until the female element enters into the apparatus of salvation; and there is no way to that save by intermarriage between the various sects and creeds. Will the East awake, then, and work for its own salvation?
The second danger of the marriage of near kin is that which touches the soundness of offspring and progeny. Marriage between relatives preserves the traits of the ancestors, be they good or bad. Such is the law of heredity. The children are bound over to their fathers and forefathers: it may pass close at hand, from fathers to sons, and it may at times pass from afar, from grandsires to grandchildren.
And once we know that some undesirable traits must exist even in the best and soundest
of families, it becomes clear to us how these are transmitted by continual intermarriage among relatives, and grow more firmly rooted, generation after generation, in their offspring. Thus we see that families which keep to intermarriage within the family, and do not mingle with others by way of procreation, show particular traits and habits by which they are known and which set them apart from all others. And if one family is found distinguished by good traits and habits through its adherence to family intermarriage, there are ten families in which unwholesome habits and traits, and hereditary diseases and infirmities, come to the fore.
Conversely, when a man marries a woman not of his family, or not of his people, a blending takes place between the traits inherited from the two stocks. And with the continuance of this kind of marriage, change and transformation come about.
Thus do the traits of peoples change — their habits, their morals, and the health of their children.
The betterment of offspring comes by way of the choice of the two spouses. This is directed selective choice, carried over from Darwin's law of natural selection. In the wisdom of the farmers we have a proof of the soundness of this rule: for the farmers graft the tree whose fruit is weak or bad with a graft from a tree whose fruit is good.
And if we say that marriage between kinsfolk is undesirable, this does not mean that marriage between a sound element and an unsound one is any better.
The two elements must be chosen, so that the sound marries the sound. As for the unsound — hand it over to the Hitlerite system! Let it be done away with by being kept from breeding; for it is better for humanity that numbers should lessen and the stock improve, than that the stock should worsen and the peoples multiply, thereby multiplying men's afflictions, their greeds, their rivalries, and their wars.
Many housewives have no opportunity to take athletic exercise outside the home, and this may lead to their being afflicted with stoutness, flabbiness, and sluggishness — and perhaps to some of the ailments that go with these conditions.
It is a duty, however, to point to housework as a welcome form of exercise, whether or not the lady of the house finds ample time to engage in athletic exercises.
If the lady has no inclination to attend to the work of the house as a duty... and her circumstances are so comfortable that she thinks herself under no compulsion to see to her tasks herself... then let her know that doing her own work is both a duty and a pleasure. As for exercise, it is what a lady must think of and keep before her eyes, for it is one of the necessities of the refined lady in the modern home.
In the Bedroom
Exercise in the morning is abundantly beneficial, and if it is not easy for you to take exercise of that kind, then making your bed and your husband's bed in the morning is the first of the useful movements of exercise. Note the resemblance between the outright exercise movement and the bending movement for making the bed. Try making your bed, and think of it as exercise, and you will find pleasure, enjoyment, and vigor in it.
In the Dining Room
Then make your way to the dining room, and note the resemblance between the exercise position and the position of a lady arranging the china cupboard — squatting, then rising, then squatting again — three or four times over. In that is a pleasure not to be denied.