With Trotwood
Mr. Thos. J. Moore, of Moore’s, S. C., writes: “Have you your family genealogy? You seem to be up on horse pedigree. I’d like to have it, if not too much trouble.”
Alas and alack! but that is the trouble with most of us. We pedigree our horses and dogs, but we throw off terribly on our sons and daughters. Any old pedigree seems good enough for them. In the language of the Bible, “Is thy servant a dog, that he should do this thing?” What a Book it is! “For I, the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquities of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generations of them that hate me, and shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me and keep my commandments.” There is authority for a pedigreed man. And the Book itself—chapters are given to the pedigree of one man. The Bible loves a good pedigree. It is a great registration Book of the Jews. Did you ever see Moses’ pedigree tabulated—Moses, the greatest man in the Bible except One? It tells a wonderful story. He was the most inbred man that ever lived. And so was the mother of the Christ. These things will do to study and think about.
As for me, I am constrained to say that the quiet study of the pedigree of horses has taught me much. I have picked up a few of the great lessons of cause and effect in studying the lower animal that should apply to the higher one. That is the only way. Darwin reached the laws of his evolution by beginning with the lowest form of life.
I hold it to be a crime for any human being to bring into the world an offspring which he knows will be inferior to himself. He owes it to posterity to breed up. The mother is what breeds up. The white man who brands his unborn child a mongrel deserves death at the hands of the rest of his race. Death, because, like the murderer, he is pulling down society. The murderer takes what he cannot restore. But this man does worse—he chains his own child for life to a dead body.
It is a crime because it is the duty of all to breed up—to produce something by well chosen marriage better than themselves. It should be a criminal offense—as it already is a moral one—to bring into the world peoples with maimed heads, maimed souls and yellow bodies. The Greeks were right—it is only through a pure breed that man may reach the stars. The Bible is right—it always is: pedigree counts most.
What a pity all the world does not go into the horse business and study the effects of heredity long enough to learn a little common sense about the breeding of that highest of animals—man! What a pity they cannot get off their little bicycles long enough to get the hump out of their backs and the wheels out of their heads, and learn that like, in man or horse, poet or donkey, produceslike or the likeness of an ancestor! Will people never learn that falling in love is often nothing in the world but an accident, and often more fatal than falling down an elevator shaft? Will they never stop to think that they haven’t any more right to afflict their unborn children with the crotches, cranks, whims, crookedness and conceit of their own souls than they have to murder them after they are born? Ye gods, and is it from this that immortality is made?
Some day, for the benefit of humanity, I propose to open a Registration Book. I want to do this because I want to see people take as much interest in their own children as they do in their horses, and as much interest in their own pedigree as they do in their dog’s. Many a man “falls in love” with, and marries, a woman whose qualities, character and pedigree, if wrapped up in a horse’s hide, he wouldn’t be caught trading an old blind mule for; and many a woman, under the same silly pressure, marries some vicious brute “to reform him,” who if turned into a buggy horse, with half the meanness that he had inherited, she wouldn’t risk her poodle dog behind.
And here is the way I would go to registering my people. In all registration there must first be a foundation stock. I would let truthfulness, honesty and work count as “foundation stock.” This would change the present standard radically, and let into life a foundation of good blood that at present is entirely neglected and not allowed to come in at all unless it happens to come in under a dress suit. I would then let accomplishments—the ability to do—from the ability to do poetry to the ability to make two blades of grass grow where one grew before—count as my classes, and it wouldn’t take me long to straighten out old humanity and proceed to breed a race of people fit to live.
Here it is:
Trotwood’s Human Standard.When white men and women meet the following requirements and are duly registered, they shall be accepted as standard bred and shall be permitted to marry:1. Any white man who has earned and saved one thousand dollars, provided he is honest, industrious and truthful, and is sound in wind, limb, and mind.2. Any white woman who can cook a square meal, make her own clothes, keep a house clean and play on some musical instrument, provided always that she is pure, lives under some moral standard and will agree to raise her children under it.3. Every man who is the father of a great man or woman.4. Every woman who is the mother of a great man or woman.5. Geniuses, however cranky.6. The father and mother of a genius.Non-Standard.The following shall be non-standard, and neither they nor their children shall be registered:1. Old bachelors from choice.2. Cranks.3. Liars.4. The impure.5. Diseased persons and the children of consumptives, the cancerous and the insane.6. The children of impure married women.7. Society people wherever found and their one child.8. Married men who lead germans.9. Women who eat onions, drink beer or whiskey, or chew gum.10. The children of women who play cards for money or for prizes. They keep up the supply of gamblers.11. Evangelists who preach slang and dirty sermons from the pulpit.12. Dialect poets.13. Praying lawyers.14. Bank cashiers who run Sunday-schools.15. Doctors who give much medicine and cut people open.16. The last three ought really to be damned.17. People who have reached middle age and still say: “I taken,” “You hadn’t ought to,” “I seen him,” and “It is me.”Given under the hand and seal, stamped and delivered byTROTWOOD.
Trotwood’s Human Standard.
When white men and women meet the following requirements and are duly registered, they shall be accepted as standard bred and shall be permitted to marry:
1. Any white man who has earned and saved one thousand dollars, provided he is honest, industrious and truthful, and is sound in wind, limb, and mind.
2. Any white woman who can cook a square meal, make her own clothes, keep a house clean and play on some musical instrument, provided always that she is pure, lives under some moral standard and will agree to raise her children under it.
3. Every man who is the father of a great man or woman.
4. Every woman who is the mother of a great man or woman.
5. Geniuses, however cranky.
6. The father and mother of a genius.
Non-Standard.
The following shall be non-standard, and neither they nor their children shall be registered:
1. Old bachelors from choice.
2. Cranks.
3. Liars.
4. The impure.
5. Diseased persons and the children of consumptives, the cancerous and the insane.
6. The children of impure married women.
7. Society people wherever found and their one child.
8. Married men who lead germans.
9. Women who eat onions, drink beer or whiskey, or chew gum.
10. The children of women who play cards for money or for prizes. They keep up the supply of gamblers.
11. Evangelists who preach slang and dirty sermons from the pulpit.
12. Dialect poets.
13. Praying lawyers.
14. Bank cashiers who run Sunday-schools.
15. Doctors who give much medicine and cut people open.
16. The last three ought really to be damned.
17. People who have reached middle age and still say: “I taken,” “You hadn’t ought to,” “I seen him,” and “It is me.”
Given under the hand and seal, stamped and delivered by
TROTWOOD.
Editor Trotwood’s:
Your writings as they appeared in the Horse Review always appealed to me, especially the “Old Wash” stories, and I remember some years ago that some one was impertinent enough to ask the age of Old Wash. Of course, that fellow wasn’t entitled to an answer, but as I have run across a clipping of an old negro woman whom I am sure must be old Wash’s mother (I hope you can verify it), I want him to look her up. The fact that he felt young enough to marry (the unlucky thirteenth) it might interest him to be able to tell his troubles to his ma.
Your magazine is a welcome monthly visitor, and may it always come up to the standard you have planned for it is my earnest wish. Here is the story:
Barnum, the great showman, hearing of an old negro woman down in Tennessee who claimed to be 125 years old, called to see her with a view to securing her for a side show. He found that the old woman was really very ancient, and commenced to question to find out just how old she really was. He said to her:
“Auntie, do you remember George Washington?”
“I reckon I duz, sah; I’se played wid him many a day.”
“Do you remember anything about the Revolutionary War?” asked Barnum.
“Well, I should say I duz,” replied the old lady. “I ’members when de bullets wuz a flyin’ and a zoonin’ round here laik bumblebees, sah.”
“What do you remember about the fall of the Roman empire?” said Barnum.
The old woman was “stumped” for a moment, but, recovering herself, replied:
“I wuz a mighty leetle gal den’ but I ’members hearin’ de ole folk say dat dey heerd sumpin’ drap.”
E. J. FERGUSON.
Washington, Pa.
Photo by Julie Royster, Raleigh, N. C.
Photo by Julie Royster, Raleigh, N. C.
Photo by Julie Royster, Raleigh, N. C.