We contemplate our marriage system with satisfaction. We remember the many unquestionable evidences in favour of it, and we marvel that it so often proves a failure. For while we remember the evidence in favour of it, we forget the evidence against it, and we overlook the important fact that our favourable evidence is largely based on the vision of an abstract or idealised monogamy which fails to correspond to the detailed and ever varying system which in practice we cherish. We point to the fact that monogamic marriage has probably flourished throughout the history of the world, that it exists among savages, even among animals, but we fail to observe how far that monogamy differs from ours, even assuming that our monogamy is a real monogamy and not a disguised polygamy, especially in the fact that it is a free union and only subject to the inherent penalties that follow its infraction, not to external penalties. Ours is not free; our faith in its natural virtues is not quite so firm as we assert; we are always meddling with it and worrying over its health and anxiously trying to bolster it up. We are not by any means willing to let it rest on the sanction of its own natural or divine laws. Our feeling is, as James Hinton used ironically to express it: "Poor God with no one to help Him!"
The fact is that when we compare our civilised marriage system with marriage as it exists in Nature, we fail to realise a fundamental distinction. Our marriage system is made up of two absolutely different elements which cannot blend. On the one hand, it is the manifestation of our deepest and most volcanic impulses. On the other hand, it is an elaborate web of regulations—legal, ecclesiastical, economic—which is to-day quite out of relation to our impulses. On the one hand, it is a force which springs from within; on the other hand, it is a force which presses on us from without.[1] One says broadly that these two elements of marriage, as we understand it, are out of relation to each other. But there is an important saving qualification to be made. The inner impulse is not without law, and the external pressure is not without an ultimate basis of nature. That is to say, that under free and natural conditions the inner impulse tends to develop itself, not licentiously but with its own order and restraints, while, on the other hand, our inherited regulations are largely the tradition of ancient attempts to fix and register that natural order and restraint. The disharmony comes in with the fact that our regulations are traditional and ancient, not our own attempts to fix and register the natural order but inextricably mixed up with elements that are entirely alien to our civilised habits of life. Whatever our attitude towards mediaeval Canon Law may be—whether reverence or indifference or disgust—it yet holds us and is ingrained into our marriage system to-day. Canon Law was a good and vital thing under the conditions which produced it. The survival of Canon Law to-day, with the antiquated and ascetic conception of the subordination of women associated with it, is the chief reason why we in the twentieth century have not yet progressed so far towards a reasonable system of marriage as the Romans had reached on the basis of their law, nearly two thousand years ago.[2] Marriage is conditioned both by inner impulse and outward pressure. But a healthy impulse bears within it an order and restraint of its own, while a truly moral outward pressure is based, not on the demands of mediaeval days, but on the demands of our own day.
How far this is from being the case yet we find well illustrated by our divorce methods. All our modern culture favour a sense of the sacredness of the sexual relations; we cherish a delicate reserve concerning all the intimacies of personal relationship. But when the magic word "Divorce" is uttered we fling all our civilisation to the winds, and in the desecrated name of Law we proceed to an inquisition which scarcely differs at all from those public tests of mediaeval law-courts which now we dare not venture even to put into words.
It is true that we are not bound to be consistent when it is an advantage to be inconsistent. And if there were a method in our madness it would be justified. But there is no method. From first to last the history of divorce (read it, for instance, in Howard'sMatrimonial Institutions) is an ever shifting record of cruel blunders and ridiculous absurdities. Divorce began in modern times in flagrant injustice to one of the two partners, the wife, and it has ended—if we may hope that the end is approaching—in imbecilities that to future ages will be incredible. For no legal jargon has ever been invented that will express the sympathies and the antipathies of human relationship; they even escape the subtlest expression. Law-makers have tortured their brains to devise formulas which will cover the legitimate grounds for divorce. How vain their efforts are is sufficiently shown by the fact that by no chance can they ever agree on their formulas, and that they are changing them constantly with feverish haste, dimly realising that they are but the antiquated representatives of mediaevalism, and that soon their occupation will be gone for ever.
The reasons for the making or the breaking of human relationships can never be formulated. The only result of such legal formulas is that they bring law into contempt because they have to be ingeniously and methodically cheated in order to adapt them in any degree to civilised human needs. Thus such laws not only degrade the name of Law, but they degrade the whole community which tolerates them. There is only one ultimate reason for either marriage or divorce, and that is that the two persons concerned consent to the marriage or consent to the divorce. Why they consent is no concern of any third party, and, maybe, they cannot even put it into words.
At the same time, let us not forget, marriage and divorce are a very real concern of the State, and law cannot ignore either. It is the business of the State to see to it that no interests are injured. The contract of marriage and the contract of divorce are private matters, but it is necessary to guard that no injury is thereby done to either of the contracting persons, or to third parties, or to the community as a whole. The State may have a right to say what persons are unfit for marriage, or at all events for procreation; the State must take care that the weaker party is not injured; the State is especially bound to watch over the interests of children, and this involves, in the best issue, that each child shall have two effective parents, whether or not those parents are living together. A large scope—we are beginning to recognise—must be left alike to freedom of marriage and freedom of divorce, but the State must mark out the limits within which that freedom is exercised.
The loosening hold of the State on marriage is by no means connected with any growing sense of the value of divorce. At the best, it is probable that divorce is merely a necessary evil. One of the chief reasons why we should seek to promote education in relation to sexual relationships and to inculcate the responsibilities of such relationships, so making the approach to marriage more circumspect, is in order to obviate the need for divorce. For divorce is always a confession of failure. Very often, indeed, it involves not only a confession of failure in one particular marriage but of failure for marriage generally. One notes how often the people who fail in a first marriage fail even more hopelessly in the second. They have chosen the wrong partners; but one suspects that for them all partners will prove the wrong partners. One sometimes hears nowadays that a succession of marriage relationships is desirable in order to develop character. But that depends on many things. It very much depends on what character there is to develop. A man may have relationships with a hundred women and develop much less character out of his experience, and even acquire a much less intimate knowledge of women, than the man who has spent his life in an endless series of adventures with one woman. It depends a good deal on the man and not a little on the woman.
Thus the work of marriage in the world must depend entirely on the nature of that world. A fine marriage system can only be produced by a fine civilisation of which it is the exquisite flower. Laws cannot better marriage; even education, by itself, is powerless, necessary as it is in conjunction with other influences. The love-relationships of men and women must develop freely, and with due allowance for the variations which the complexities of civilisation demand. But these relationships touch the whole of life at so infinite a number of points that they cannot even develop at all save in a society that is itself developing graciously and harmoniously. Do not expect to pluck figs from thistles. As a society is, so will its marriages be.
[1] It is this artificial and external pressure which often produces a revolt against marriage. The author of a remarkable paper entitled, "Our Incestuous Marriage," in theForum(Dec., 1915), advocates a reform of social marriage customs "in conformance with the freedom-loving modern nature," and the introduction of "a fresh atmosphere for married life in which personality can be made to appear so sacred and free that marriage will be undertaken and borne as lightly and gracefully as a secret sin."
[2] See Sir James Donaldson,Woman: Her Position and Influence in Ancient Greece and Rome, 1907; also S.B. Kitchin's excellentHistory of Divorce, 1912; this author believes that the tendency in modern civilisation is to return to the simple principles of Roman law involving divorce by consent. See also Havelock Ellis,Sex in Relation to Society, Ch. X.
The history of educated opinion concerning the birth-rate and its interpretation during the past seventy years is full of interest. The actual operative factors—natural, pathological, economic, social, and educational—in raising or lowering the birth-rate, are numerous and complicated, and it is difficult to determine exactly how large a part each factor plays. But without determining that at all, it is still very instructive to observe the evolution of popular intelligent opinion concerning the significance of a high and a low birth-rate.
Popular opinion on this matter may be said to have passed through three stages. I am referring to Western Europe and more particularly to England and Germany, for it must be remembered that, in this matter, England and Germany are running a parallel course. England happens to be, on the whole, a little ahead, having reached its period of full expansion at a somewhat earlier period than Germany, but each people is pursuing the same course.
In the first stage—let us say about the middle of the last century and the succeeding thirty years—the popular attitude was one of jubilant satisfaction in a high and rising birth-rate. There had been an immense expansion of industry. The whole world seemed nothing but a great field for the energetic and industrial nations to exploit. Workers were needed to keep up with the expansion and to keep down wages to a rate which would make industrial expansion easy; soldiers and armaments were needed to protect the movements of expansion. It seemed to the more exuberant spirits that a vast British Empire, or a mighty Pan-Germany, might be expected to cover the whole world. France, with its low and falling birth-rate, was looked down at with contempt as a decadent country inhabited by a degenerate population. No attempts to analyse the birth-rate, to ascertain what are really the biological, social, and economic accompaniments of a high birth-rate, made any impression on the popular mind. They were drowned in the general shout of exultation.
That era of optimism was followed by a swift reaction. Towards 1880 the upward movement of the birth-rate began to be arrested; it soon began steadily to fall, as it is continuing to do to-day. In France it is falling slowly, in Italy more rapidly, in England and Prussia still more rapidly. As, however, the fall began earliest in France, the birth-rate is lower there than in the other countries named; for the same reason it is lower in England than in Prussia, although England stands in this respect at almost exactly the same distance from Prussia to-day as thirty years ago, the fall having occurred at the same rate in both countries. It is quite possible that in the future it may become more rapid in Prussia than in England, for the birth-rate of Berlin is lower than the birth-rate of London, and urbanisation is proceeding at a more rapid rate in Germany than in England.
The realisation of such facts as these produced a period of pessimism which marks the second stage in this evolution. The great movement of expansion, which seemed to promise so much to ambitious nations anxious for world-power, was being arrested. Moreover, it began to be realised that the rapid growth of a community was accompanied by phenomena which had not been foreseen by the enthusiasts of the first period of optimism. They had argued—not indeed verbally but in effect—that the higher the birth-rate the cheaper labour and lives would become, and the cheaper labour and lives were, the easier it would be for a nation with its industrial armies and its military armies to get ahead of other rival nations. But they had not realised that, with the growth of popular education in modern democratic states, cheap labour is no longer willing to play without protest this humble and suffering part in national progress. The workers of the nations began to declare, clearly or obscurely, as they were able, that they no longer intended to sell their labour and their lives so cheaply. The rising birth-rate of the middle of the nineteenth century coincided with, and to a large extent doubtless produced, the organisation of labour, trades unions, the political activity of the working classes, Socialism, as well as the extreme forms of Anarchism and Syndicalism. It was when these movements began to attain a high degree of organisation and power that the birth-rate began to decline. Thus the pessimists of the second period were faced by horrors on both sides. On the one hand, they saw that the ever-increasing rate of human production which seemed to them the essential condition of national, social, even moral progress, had not only stopped but was steadily diminishing. On the other hand, they saw that, even in so far as it was maintained, it involved, under modern conditions, nothing but social commotion and economic disturbance.
There are still many pessimists of this second period alive among us, and actively proclaiming their gospel of despair, alike in England and in Germany. But a new generation is growing up, and this question is now entering a third period. The new generation rejects alike the passive optimism of the first period and the passive pessimism of the second period. Its attitude is hopeful but it realises that mere hope is vain unless there is clear intellectual vision and unless there is individual and social action in accordance with that vision.
It is to-day beginning to be seen that the old notion of progress by means of reckless multiplication is vain. It can only be effected at a ruinous cost of death, disease, poverty, and misery. We see this in the past history of Western Europe, as we still see it in the history of Russia. Any progress effected along that line—if "progress" it can be called—is now barred, for it is absolutely opposed to those democratic conceptions which are ever gaining greater influence among us.
Moreover, we are now better able to analyse demographic phenomena and we are no longer satisfied with any crude statements regarding the birth-rate. We realise that they need interpretation. They have to be considered in relation to the sex-constitution and the age-constitution of the population, and, above all, they must be viewed in relation to the infant mortality-rate. The bad aspect of the French birth-rate is not so much its lowness as that it is accompanied by a high infantile mortality. The fact that the German birth-rate is higher than the English ceases to be a matter of satisfaction when it is realised that German infantile mortality is vastly greater than English. A high birth-rate is no sign of a high civilisation. But we are beginning to feel that a high infantile death-rate is a sign of a very inferior civilisation. A low birth-rate with a low infant death-rate not only produces the same increase in the population as a high birth-rate with the high death-rate, which always accompanies it (for there are no examples of, a high birth-rate with a low death-rate), but it produces it in a way which is far more worthy of our admiration in this matter than the way of Russia and China where opposite conditions prevail.[1]
It used to be thought that small families were immoral. We now begin to see that it was the large families of old which were immoral. The excessive birth-rate of the early industrial period was directly stimulated by selfishness. There were no laws against child-labour; children were produced that they might be sent out, when little more than babies, to the factories and the mines to increase their parents' incomes. The diminished birth-rate has accompanied higher moral transformation. It has introduced a finer economy into life, diminished death, disease, and misery. It is indirectly, and even directly, improving the quality of the race. The very fact that children are born at longer intervals is not only beneficial to the mother's health, and therefore to the children's general welfare, but it has been proved to have a marked and prolonged influence on the physical development of children.
Social progress, and a higher civilisation, we thus see, involve a reduced birth-rate and a reduced death-rate; the fewer the children born, the fewer the risks of death, disease, and misery to the children that are born. The fact that civilisation involves small families is clearly shown by the tendency of the educated and upper social classes to have small families. As the proletariat class becomes educated and elevated, disciplined to refinement and to foresight—as it were aristocratised—it also has small families. Civilisational progress is here in a line with biological progress. The lower organisms spawn their progeny in thousands, the higher mammals produce but one or two at a time. The higher the race the fewer the offspring.
Thus diminution in quantity is throughout associated with augmentation in quality. Quality rather than quantity is the racial ideal now set before us, and it is an ideal which, as we are beginning to learn, it is possible to cultivate, both individually and socially. The day is coming, as Engel remarks in his useful book onThe Elements of Child Protection, when fatherhood and motherhood will only be permitted to the strong. That is why the new science of eugenics or racial hygiene is acquiring so immense an importance. In the past racial selection has been carried out crudely by the destructive, wasteful, and expensive method of elimination, through death. In the future it will be carried out far more effectively by conscious and deliberate selection, exercised not merely before birth, but before conception and even before mating. It is idle to suppose that such a change can be exerted by mere legislation, for which, besides, our scientific knowledge is still inadequate. We cannot, indeed, desire any compulsory elimination of the unfit or any regulated breeding of the fit. Such notions are idle. Man can only be bred from within, through the medium of his intelligence and will, working together under the control of a high sense of responsibility. Galton, who recognised the futility of mere legislation to elevate the race, believed that the hope of the future lay in eugenics becoming a part of religion. The good of the race lies, not in the production of a super-man, but of a super-humanity. This can only be attained through personal individual development, the increase of knowledge, the sense of responsibility towards the race, enabling men to act in accordance with responsibility. The leadership in civilisation belongs not to the nation with the highest birth-rate but to the nation which has thus learnt to produce the finest men and women.
[1] For a more detailed discussion of these points see the author'sTask of Social Hygiene.
It was inevitable that the Great War of to-day should lead to an outcry, in all the countries engaged, for more children and larger families. In Germany and in Austria, in France and in England, panic-stricken fanatics are found who preach to the people that the birth-rate is falling and the nation is decaying. No scheme is too wild for the supposed benefit of the country in a fierce coming fight for commercial supremacy, as well as with due regard to the requirements in cannon fodder of another Great War twenty years hence.
It may be well, however, to pause before we listen to these Quixotic plans.[1] We may then find reason to think, not only that any attempt to arrest the falling birth-rate is scarcely likely to be effective in view of the fact that it affects not one country only but all the countries that count, but that even if it could be successful it would be mischievous. Whatever the results of the War may be, one result is fairly certain and that is that, under the most favourable circumstances, every country will emerge laden with misery and debt; whatever prosperity may follow, living will be expensive for a long time to come and the incomes of all classes heavily burdened. A Bounty on Babies would hardly make up for these difficulties. The happy family, under the conditions that seem to be immediately ahead of us, is likely to be the small family. The large family—as indeed has been the case in the past—is likely to be visited by disease and death.
But there is more to be said than this. We must dismiss altogether the statement so often made that a falling birth-rate means "an old and dying community." The Germans have for years been making this remark contemptuously regarding the French. But to-day they have to recognise a vitality in the French which they had not expected, while in recent years, also, their own birth-rate has been falling more rapidly than that of France. Nor is it true that a falling birth-rate means a falling population; the French birth-rate has long been steadily falling, yet the French population has been steadily increasing all the time, though less rapidly than it would had not the death-rate been abnormally high. It is not the number of babies born that counts, but the net result in surviving children. An enormous number of babies are born in China; but an enormous number die while still babies. So that it is better to have a few babies of good quality than a large number of indifferent quality, for the falling birth-rate is more than compensated by the falling death-rate. That is what we are attaining in England, and, as we know, our steadily falling birth-rate results in a steadily growing population.
There is still more to be said. Small families and a falling birth-rate are not merely no evil, they are a positive good. They are a gain for humanity. They represent an evolutionary rise in Nature and a higher stage in civilisation. We are here in the presence of great fundamental principles of progress which have been working through life from the beginning.
At the beginning of life on the earth reproduction ran riot. Of one minute organism it is estimated that, if its reproduction were not checked by death or destruction, in thirty days it would form a mass a million times larger than the sun. The conger-eel lays fifteen million eggs, and if they all grew up, and reproduced themselves on the same scale, in two years the whole sea would become a wriggling mass of fish. As we approach the higher forms of life reproduction gradually dies down. The animals nearest to man produce few offspring, but they surround them with parental care, until they are able to lead independent lives with a fair chance of surviving. The whole process may be regarded as a mechanism for slowly subordinating quantity to quality, and so promoting the evolution of life to ever higher stages.
This process, which is plain to see on the largest scale throughout living nature, may be more minutely studied, as it acts within a narrower range, in the human species. Here we statistically formulate it in the terms of birth-rate and death-rate; by the mutual relationship of the two courses of the birth-rate and the death-rate we are able to estimate the evolutionary rank of a nation, and the degree in which it has succeeded in subordinating the primitive standard of quantity to the higher and later standard of quality.
It is especially in Europe that we can investigate this relationship by the help of statistics which in some cases extend for nearly a century back. We can trace the various phases through which each nation passes, the effects of prosperity, the influence of education and sanitary improvement, the general complex development of civilisation, in each case moving forward, though not regularly and steadily, to higher stages by means of a falling birth-rate, which is to some extent compensated by a falling death-rate, the two rates nearly always running parallel, so that a temporary rise in the birth-rate is usually accompanied by a rise in the death-rate, by a return, that is to say, towards the conditions which we find at the beginning of animal life, and a steady fall in the birth-rate is always accompanied by a fall in the death-rate.
The modern phase of this movement, soon after which our precise knowledge begins, may be said to date from the industrial expansion, due to the introduction of machinery, which Professor Marshall places in England about the year 1760. That represents the beginning of an era in which all civilised and semi-civilised countries are still living. For the earlier centuries we lack precise data, but we are able to form certain probable conclusions. The population of a country in those ages seems to have grown very slowly and sometimes even to have retrograded. At the end of the sixteenth century the population of England and Wales is estimated at five millions and at the end of the seventeenth at six millions—only 20 per cent. increase during the century—although during the nineteenth century the population nearly quadrupled. This very gradual increase of the population seems to have been by no means due to a very low birth-rate, but to a very high death-rate. Throughout the Middle Ages a succession of virulent plagues and pestilences devastated Europe. Small-pox, which may be considered the latest of these, used to sweep off large masses of the youthful population in the eighteenth century. The result was a certain stability and a certain well-being in the population as a whole, these conditions being, however, maintained in a manner that was terribly wasteful and distressing.
The industrial revolution introduced a new era which began to show its features clearly in the early nineteenth century. On the one hand, a new motive had arisen to favour a more rapid increase of population. Small children could tend machinery and thereby earn wages to increase the family takings. This led to an immediate result in increased population and increased prosperity. But, on the other hand, the rapid increase of population always tended to outrun the rapid increase of prosperity, and the more so since the rise of sanitary science began to drive back the invasions of the grosser and more destructive infectious diseases which had hitherto kept the population down. The result was that new forms of disease, distress, and destitution arose; the old stability was lost, and the new prosperity produced unrest in place of well-being. The social consciousness was still too immature to deal collectively with the difficulties and frictions which the industrial era introduced, and the individualism which under former conditions had operated wholesomely now acted perniciously to crush the souls and bodies of the workers, whether men, women, or children.
As we know, the increase of knowledge and the growth of the social consciousness have slowly acted wholesomely during the past century to remedy the first evil results of the industrial revolution. The artificial and abnormal increase of the population has been checked because it is no longer permissible in most countries to stunt the minds and bodies of small children by placing them in factories. An elaborate system of factory legislation was devised, and is still ever drawing fresh groups of workers within its protective meshes. Sanitary science began to develop and to exert an enormous influence on the health of nations. At the same time the supreme importance of popular education was realised. The total result was that the nature of "prosperity" began to be transformed; instead of being, as it had been at the beginning of the industrial era, a direct appeal to the gratification of gross appetites and reckless lusts, it became an indirect stimulus to higher gratifications and more remote aspirations. Foresight became a dominating motive even in the general population, and a man's anxiety for the welfare of his family was no longer forgotten in the pleasure of the moment. The social state again became more stable, and mere "prosperity" was transformed into civilisation. This is the state of things now in progress in all industrial countries, though it has reached varying levels of development among different peoples.
It is thus clear that the birth-rate combined with the death-rate constitutes a delicate instrument for the measurement of civilisation, and that the record of their combined curves registers the upward or downward course of every nation. The curves, as we know, tend to be parallel, and when they are not parallel we are in the presence of a rare and abnormal state of things which is usually temporary or transitional.
It is instructive from this point of view to study the various nations of Europe, for here we find a large number of small nations, each with its own statistical system, confined within a small space and living under fairly uniform conditions. Let us take the latest official figures (which are usually for 1913) and attempt to measure the civilisation of European countries on this basis. Beginning with the lowest birth-rate, and therefore in gradually descending rank of superiority, we find that the European countries stand in the following order: France, Belgium, Ireland, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Norway, Scotland, Denmark, Holland, the German Empire, Prussia, Finland, Spain, Austria, Italy, Hungary, Serbia, Bulgaria, Roumania, Russia. If we take the death-rate similarly, beginning with the lowest rate and gradually proceeding to the highest, we find the following order: Holland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Scotland, Prussia, the German Empire, Finland, Ireland, France, Italy, Austria, Serbia, Spain, Bulgaria, Hungary, Roumania, Russia.
Now we cannot accept the birth-rates and death-rates of the various countries exactly at their face value. Temporary conditions, as well as the special composition of a population, not to mention peculiarities of registration, exert a disturbing effect. Roughly and on the whole, however, the figures are acceptable. It is instructive to find how closely the two rates agree. The agreement is, indeed, greater at the bottom than at the top; the eight countries which constitute the lowest group as regards birth-rate are the identical eight countries which furnish the heaviest death-rates. That was to be expected; a very high birth-rate seems fatally to involve a very high death-rate. But a very low birth-rate (as we see in the cases of France and Ireland) is not invariably associated with a very low death-rate, though it is never associated with a high death-rate. This seems to indicate that those qualities in a highly civilised nation which restrain the production of offspring do not always or at once produce the eugenic racial qualities possessed by hardier peoples living under simpler conditions. But with these reservations it is not difficult to combine the two lists in a fairly concordant order of descending rank. Most readers will agree, that taking the European populations in bulk, without regard to the production of genius (for men of genius are always a very minute fraction of a nation), the European populations which they are accustomed to regard as standing at the head in the general diffusion of character, intelligence, education, and well-being, are all included in the first twelve or thirteen nations, which are the same in both lists though they do not follow the same order. These peoples, as peoples—that is, without regard to their size, their political importance, or their production of genius—represent the highest level of democratic civilisation in Europe.
It is scarcely necessary to add that various countries outside Europe equal or excel them; the death-rate of the United States, so far as statistics show, is the same as that of Sweden; that of Ontario, still better, is the same as Denmark; while the death-rate of the Australian Commonwealth, with a medium birth-rate, is lower than that of any European country, and New Zealand holds the world's championship in this field with the lowest death-rate of all. On the other hand, some extra-European countries compare less favourably with Europe; Japan, with a rather high birth-rate, has the same high death-rate as Spain, and Chile, with a still higher birth-rate, has a higher death-rate than Russia. So it is that among human peoples we find the same laws prevailing as among animals, and the higher nations of the world differ from those which are less highly evolved precisely as the elephant differs from the herring, though within a narrower range, that is to say, by producing fewer offspring and taking better care of them.
The whole of this evolutionary process, we have to remember, is a natural process. It has been going on from the beginning of the living world. But at a certain stage in the higher development of man, without ceasing to be natural, it becomes conscious and deliberate. It is then that we have what may properly be termedBirth Control. That is to say, that a process which had before been working slowly through the ages, attaining every new forward step with waste and pain, is henceforth carried out voluntarily, in the light of the high human qualities of reason and foresight and self-restraint. The rise of birth control may be said to correspond with the rise of social and sanitary science in the first half of the nineteenth century, and to be indeed an essential part of that movement. It is firmly established in all the most progressive and enlightened countries of Europe, notably in France and in England; in Germany, where formerly the birth-rate was very high, birth control has developed with extraordinary rapidity during the present century. In Holland its principle and practice are freely taught by physicians and nurses to the mothers of the people, with the result that there is in Holland no longer any necessity for unwanted babies, and this small country possesses the proud privilege of the lowest death-rate in Europe. In the free and enlightened democratic communities on the other side of the globe, in Australia and New Zealand, the same principles and practice are generally accepted, with the same beneficent results. On the other hand, in the more backward and ignorant countries of Europe, birth control is still little known, and death and disease flourish. This is the case in those eight countries which come at the bottom of both our lists.
Even in the more progressive countries, however, birth control has not been established without a struggle, which has frequently ended in a hypocritical compromise, its principles being publicly ignored or denied and its practice privately accepted. For, at the great and vitally important point in human progress which birth control represents, we really see the conflict of two moralities. The morality of the ancient world is here confronted by the morality of the new world. The old morality, knowing nothing of science and the process of Nature as worked out in the evolution of life, based itself on the early chapters of Genesis, in which the children of Noah are represented as entering an empty earth which it is their business to populate diligently. So it came about that for this morality, still innocent of eugenics, recklessness was almost a virtue. Children were given by God; if they died or were afflicted by congenital disease, it was the dispensation of God, and, whatever imprudence the parents might commit, the pathetic faith still ruled that "God will provide." But in the new morality it is realised that in these matters Divine action can only be made manifest in human action, that is to say through the operation of our own enlightened reason and resolved will. Prudence, foresight, self-restraint—virtues which the old morality looked down on with benevolent contempt—assume a position of the first importance. In the eyes of the new morality the ideal woman is no longer the meek drudge condemned to endless and often ineffectual child-bearing, but the free and instructed woman, able to look before and after, trained in a sense of responsibility alike to herself and to the race, and determined to have no children but the best. Such were the two moralities which came into conflict during the nineteenth century. They were irreconcilable and each firmly rooted, one in ancient religion and tradition, the other in progressive science and reason. Nothing was possible in such a clash of opposing ideas but a feeble and confused compromise such as we still find prevailing in various countries of Old Europe. It was not a satisfactory solution, however inevitable, and especially unsatisfactory by the consequent obscurantism which placed difficulties in the way of spreading a knowledge of the methods of birth control among the masses of the population. For the result has been that while the more enlightened and educated have exercised a control over the size of their families, the poorer and more ignorant—who should have been offered every facility and encouragement to follow in the same path—have been left, through a conspiracy of secrecy, to carry on helplessly the bad customs of their forefathers. This social neglect has had the result that the superior family stocks have been hampered by the recklessness of the inferior stocks.
We may see these two moralities in conflict to-day in America. Up till recently America had meekly accepted at Old Europe's hands the traditional prescription of our Mediterranean book of Genesis, with its fascinating old-world fragrance of Mount Ararat. On the surface, the ancient morality had been complacently, almost unquestionably, accepted in America, even to the extent of permitting a vast extension of abortion—a criminal practice which ever flourishes where birth-control is neglected. But to-day we suddenly see a new movement in the United States. In a flash, America has awakened to the true significance of the issue. With that direct vision of hers, that swift practicality of action, and, above all, that sense of the democratic nature of all social progress, we see her resolutely beginning to face this great problem. In her own vigorous native tongue we hear her demanding: "What in the thunder is all the secrecy about, anyhow?" And we cannot doubt that America's own answer to that demand will be of immense significance to the whole world.
Thus it is that as we get to the root of the matter the whole question becomes clear. We see that there is really no standing ground in any country for the panic-monger who bemoans the fall of the birth-rate and storms against small families. The falling birth-rate is a world-wide phenomenon in all countries that are striving toward a higher civilisation along lines which Nature laid down from the beginning. We cannot stop it if we would, and if we could we should merely be impeding civilisation. It is a movement that rights itself and tends to reach a just balance. It has not yet reached that balance with us in this country. That may be seen by anyone who has read the letters from mothers lately published under the title ofMaternityby the Women's Co-operative Guild; there is still far more misery caused by having too many babies than by having too few; a bonus on babies would be a misfortune, alike for the parents and the State—whether bestowed at birth as proposed in New Zealand, or at the age of twelve months as proposed in France, or fourteen years as proposed in England—unless it were confined to children who were not merely alive at the appointed age, but able to pass examination as having reached a definitely high standard. The falling birth-rate, which, it must be remembered, is affecting all civilised countries, should be a matter for joy rather than for grief.
But we need not therefore fold our hands and do nothing. There is still much to be effected for the protection of Motherhood and the better care of children. We cannot, and should not, attempt to increase the number of children. But we may well attempt to work for their better quality. There we shall be on very safe ground. More knowledge is necessary so that all would-be parents may know how they may best become parents and how they may, if necessary, best avoid it. Procreation by the unfit should be, if not prohibited by law, at all events so discouraged by public opinion that to attempt it would be counted disgraceful. Much greater public provision is necessary for the care of mothers during the months before, as well as during the period after, the child's birth. The system of Schools for Mothers needs to be universalised and systematically carried out. Along such lines as these we may hope to increase the happiness of the people and the strength of the State. We need not worry over the falling birth-rate.
[1] Those who wish to study the latest restatements of opinions in England may be recommended to read the Report of the Commission of Inquiry into Great Britain's falling birth-rate, appointed in 1913 by the National Council of Public Morals, under the title ofThe Declining Birth-rate: Its Causes and Effects, 1916.
The study of the questions relating to sex, so actively carried on during recent years, has become more and more concentrated on to the practical problems of marriage and the family. That was inevitable. It is only reasonable that, with our growing scientific knowledge of the mysteries of sex, we should seek to apply that knowledge to those questions of life which we must ever regard as central. How can we add to the stability or to the flexibility of marriage? How can we most judiciously regulate the size of our families?
At the outset, however, we cannot too deeply impress upon our minds the fact that these questions are not new in the world. If we try to find an answer to them by confining our attention to the phenomena presented by our own species, at our own particular moment of civilisation, it is very likely indeed that we may fall into crude, superficial, even mischievous conclusions.
The fact is that these questions, which are agitating us to-day, have agitated the world ever since it has been a world of life at all. The difference is that whereas we seek to deal with them consciously, voluntarily, and deliberately, throughout by far the greater part of the world's life they have been dealt with unconsciously, by methods of trial and error, of perpetual experiment, which has often proved costly, but has all the more clearly brought out the real course of natural progress. We cannot solve problems so ancient and deeply rooted as those of sex by merely rational methods which are only of yesterday. To be of value our rational methods must be the revelation in deliberate consciousness of unconscious methods which go far back into the remote past. Our conscious, deliberate, and purposive methods, carried out on the plane of reason, will not be sound unless they are a continuation of those methods which have already, in the slow evolution of life, been found sound and progressive on the plane of instinct. This must be borne in mind by those people—always to be found among us, though not always on the side of social advance—who desire their own line of conduct in matters of sex to be so closely in accord with natural and Divine law that to question it would be impious.
A medical friend of my own, when once in the dentist's chair under the influence of nitrous oxide anaesthesia (a condition, as William James showed, which frequently leads us to believe we are solving the problems of the universe), imagined himself facing the Almighty and insistently demanding the real object of the existence of the world. And the Almighty's answer came in one word: "Reproduction." My friend is a man of philosophic mind, and the solution of the mystery of the world's purpose thus presented to him in vision may perhaps serve as a simple and ultimate statement of the object of life. From the very outset the great object of Nature to our human eyes seems to be primarily reproduction, in the long run, indeed, an effort after economy of method in the attainment of an ever greater perfection, but primarily reproduction. This tendency to reproduction is indeed so fundamental, it is impressed on vital organisation with so great a violence of emphasis, that we may regard the course of evolution as much more an effort to slow down reproduction than to furnish it with any new facilities.
We must remember that reproduction appears in the history of life before sex appears. The lower forms of animal and plant life often reproduce themselves without the aid of sex, and it has even been argued that reproduction and sex are directly antagonistic, that active propagation is always checked when sexual differentiation is established. "The impression one gains of sexuality," remarks Professor Coulter, foremost of American botanists, "is that it represents reproduction under peculiar difficulties."[1] Bacteria among primitive plants and protozoa among primitive animals are patterns of rapid and prolific reproduction, though sex begins to appear in a rudimentary form in very lowly forms of life, even among the protozoa, and is at first compatible with a high degree of reproduction. A single infusorian becomes in a week the ancestor of millions, that is to say, of far more individuals than could proceed under the most favourable conditions from a pair of elephants in five centuries, while Huxley calculated that the progeny of a single parthenogenetic aphis, under favouring circumstances, would in a few months outweigh the whole population of China.[2] That proviso—"under favouring conditions"—is of great importance, for it reveals the weak point in this early method of Nature's for conducting evolution by enormously rapid multiplication. Creatures so easily produced could be, and were, easily destroyed; no time had been spent on imparting to them the qualities that would enable them to lead, what we should call in our own case, long and useful lives.
Yet the method of rapid multiplication was not readily or speedily abandoned by Nature. Still speaking in our human way, we may say that she tried to give it every chance. Among insects that have advanced so far as the white ants, we find that the queen lays eggs at an enormous rate during the whole of her active life, according to some estimates at the rate of 80,000 a day. Even in the more primitive members of the great vertebrate group, to which we ourselves belong, reproduction is sometimes still on almost as vast a scale as among lower organisms. Thus, among herrings, nearly 70,000 eggs have been found in a single female; but the herring, nevertheless, does not tend to increase in the seas, for it is everywhere preyed upon by whales and seals and sharks and birds, and, not least, by man. Thus early we see the connection between a high death-rate and a high birth-rate.
The evidence against reckless reproduction at last, however, proved overwhelming. With whatever hesitation, Nature finally decided, once and for all, that it was better, from every point of view, to produce a few superior beings than a vast number of inferior beings. For while the primary end of Nature may be said to be reproduction, there is a secondary end of scarcely less equal urgency, and that is evolution. In other words, while Nature seems to our human eyes to be seeking after quantity, she is also seeking, and with ever greater eagerness, after quality. Now the method of rapid and easy reproduction, it had become clear, not only failed of its own end, for the inferior creatures thus produced were unable to maintain their position in life, but it was distinctly unfavourable to any advance in quality. The method of sexual reproduction, which had existed in a germinal form more or less from the beginning, asserted itself ever more emphatically, and a method like that of parthenogenesis, or reproduction by the female unaided by the male (illustrated by the aphis), which had lingered on even beside sexual reproduction, absolutely died out in higher evolution. Now the fertilisation involved by the existence of two sexes is, as Weismann insisted, simply an arrangement which renders possible the intermingling of two different hereditary tendencies. The object of sex, that is to say, is by no means to aid reproduction, but rather to subordinate and check reproduction in order to evolve higher and more complex beings. Here we come to the great principle, which Herbert Spencer developed at length in hisPrinciples of Biology, that, as he put it, Individuation and Genesis vary inversely, whence it followed that advancing evolution must be accompanied by declining fertility. Individuation, which means complexity of structure, has advanced, as Genesis, the unrestricted tendency to mere multiplication, has receded. This involves a diminished number of offspring, but an increased amount of time and care in the creation and breeding of each; it involves also that the reproductive life of the organism is shortened and more or less confined to special periods; it begins much later, it usually ends earlier, and even in its period of activity it tends to fall into cycles. Nature, we see, who, at the outset, had endowed her children so lavishly with the aptitude for multiplication, grown wiser now, expends her fertile imagination in devising preventive checks on reproduction for her children's use.
The result is that, though reproduction is greatly slackened, evolution is greatly accelerated. The significance of sex, as Coulter puts it, "lies in the fact that it makes organic evolution more rapid and far more varied." It is scarcely necessary to emphasise that a highly important, and, indeed, essential aspect of this greater individuation is a higher survival value. The more complex and better equipped creature can meet and subdue difficulties and dangers to which the more lowly organised creature that came before—produced wholesale in a way which Nature seems now to look back on as cheap and nasty—succumbed helplessly without an effort. The idea of economy begins to assert itself in the world. It became clear in the course of evolution that it is better to produce really good and highly efficient organisms, at whatever cost, than to be content with cheap production on a wholesale scale. They allowed greater developmental progress to be made, and they lasted better. Even before man began it was proved in the animal world that the death-rate falls as the birth-rate falls.
If we wish to realise the vast progress in method which has been made, even within the limits of the vertebrates to which we ourselves belong, we have but to compare with the lowly herring, already cited, the highly evolved elephant. The herring multiplies with enormous rapidity and on a vast scale, and it possesses a very small brain, and is almost totally unequipped to grapple with the special difficulties of its life, to which it succumbs on a wholesale scale. A single elephant is carried for about two years in his mother's womb, and is carefully guarded by her for many years after birth; he possesses a large brain; his muscular system is as remarkable for its delicacy as for its power and is guided by the most sensitive perceptions. He is fully equipped for all the dangers of his life, save for those which have been introduced by the subtle devilry of modern man, and though a single pair of elephants produces so few offspring, yet their high cost is justified, for each of them has a reasonable chance of surviving to old age. The contrast from the point of view of reproduction of the herring and the elephant, the low vertebrate and the high vertebrate, well illustrates the tendency of evolution. It clearly brings before us the difference between Nature's earlier and later methods, the ever growing preference for quality of offspring over quantity.
It has been necessary to touch on the wider aspects of reproduction in Nature, even when our main concern is with particular aspects of reproduction in man, for unless we understand the progressive tendency of reproduction in Nature, we shall probably fail to understand it in man. With these preliminary observations, we may now take up the question as it affects man.
It is not easy to ascertain the exact tendencies of reproduction in our own historical past or among the lower races of to-day. On the whole, it seems fairly clear that, under ordinary savage and barbarous conditions, rather more children are produced and rather more children die than among ourselves; there is, in other words, a higher birth-rate and a higher infantile death-rate.[3] A high birth-rate with a low death-rate seems to have been even more exceptional than among ourselves, for under inelastic social conditions the community cannot adjust itself to the rapid expansion that would thus be rendered necessary. The community contracts, as it were, on this expanding portion and largely crushes it out of life by the forces of neglect, poverty, and disease.[4] The only part of Europe in which we can to-day see how this works out on a large scale is Russia, for here we find in an exaggerated form conditions, which once tended to rule all over Europe, side by side with the beginnings of better things, with scientific progress and statistical observation. Yet in Russia, up till recently, if not even still, there has only been about one doctor to every twelve thousand inhabitants, and the witch-doctor has flourished. Small-pox, scarlet fever, diphtheria, typhoid, and syphilis also flourish, and not only flourish, but show an enormously higher mortality than in other European countries. More significant still, famine and typhus, the special disease of filth and overcrowding and misery—both of them banished, save in the most abnormal times, from the rest of Europe—have in modern times ravaged Russia on a vast scale. Ignorance, superstition, insanitation, filth, bad food, impure water, lead to a vast mortality among children which has sometimes destroyed more than half of them before they reach the age of five; so that, enormously high as the Russian birth-rate is, the death-rate has sometimes exceeded it.[5] Nor is it found, as some would-be sagacious persons confidently assert, that the high birth-rate is justified by the better quality of the survivors. On the contrary, there is a very large proportion of chronic and incurable diseases among the survivors; blindness and other defects abound; and though there are many very large and fine people in Russia, the average stature of the Russians is lower than that of most European peoples.[6]
Russia is in the era of expanding industrialism—a fateful period for any people, as we shall see directly—and the results resemble those which followed, and to some extent exist still, further west. The workers, whose hours often extended to twelve or fourteen, frequently had no homes but slept in the factory itself, in the midst of the machinery, or in a sort of dormitory above it, with a minimum of space and fresh air, men and women promiscuously, on wooden shelves, one above the other, under the eye of Government inspectors whose protests were powerless to effect any change. This is, always and everywhere, even among so humane a people as the Russians, the natural and inevitable result of a high birth-rate in an era of expanding industrialism. Here is the goal of unrestricted reproduction, the same among men as among herrings. This is the ideal of those persons, whether they know it or not, who in their criminal rashness would dare to arrest that fall in the birth-rate which is now beginning to spread its beneficent influence in every civilised land.
We have no means of ascertaining precisely the birth-rate in Western Europe before the nineteenth century, but the estimates of the population which have been made by the help of various data indicate that the increase during a century was very moderate. In England, for instance, families scarcely seem to have been very large, and, even apart from wars, many plagues and pestilences, during the eighteenth century more especially small-pox, constantly devastated the population, so that, with these checks on the results of reproduction, the population was able to adjust itself to its very gradual expansion. The mortality fell heavily on young children, as we observe in old family records, where we frequently find two or even three children of the same Christian name, the first child having died and its name been given to a successor.
During the last quarter of the eighteenth century, a new phase of social life, profoundly affecting the reproductive habits of the community, made its appearance in Western Europe, at first in England. This was the new industrial era, due to the introduction of machinery. All the social methods of gradual though awkward adaptation to a slow expansion were dislocated. Easy expansion of population became a possibility, for factories were constantly springing up, and "hands" were always in demand. Moreover, these "hands" could be children for it was possible to tend machinery at a very early age. The richest family was the family with most children. The population began to expand rapidly.
It was an era of prosperity. But when it began to be realised what this meant it was seen that such "prosperity" was far from an enviable condition. A community cannot suddenly adjust itself to a sudden expansion, still less can it adjust itself to a continuous rapid expansion. Disease, misery, and poverty flourished in this prosperous new industrial era. Filth and insanitation, immorality and crime, were fostered by overcrowding in ill-built urban areas. Ignorance and stupidity abounded, for the child, placed in the monotonous routine of the factory when little more than an infant, was deprived alike of the education of the school and of the world. Higher wages brought no higher refinement and were squandered on food and drink, on the lowest vulgar tastes. Such "prosperity" was merely a brutalising influence; it meant nothing for the growth of civilisation and humanity.
Then a wholesome movement of reaction set in. The betterment of the environment—that was the great task that social pioneers and reformers saw before them. They courageously set about the herculean task of cleansing this Augean stable of "Prosperity." The era of sanitation began. The endless and highly beneficent course of factory legislature was inaugurated.[7]
That is the era which, in every progressive country of the world, we are living in still. The final tendency of it, however, was not foreseen by its great pioneers, or even its humble day-labourers of the present time. For they were not attacking reproduction; they were fighting against bad conditions, and may even have thought that they were enabling reproduction to expand more freely. They had not realised that to improve the environment is to check reproduction, being indeed the one and only way in which undue reproduction can be checked. That may be said to be an aspect of the opposition between Genesis and Individuation, on which Herbert Spencer insisted, for by improving the environment we necessarily improve the individual who is rooted in that environment. It is not, we must remember, a matter of conscious and voluntary action. That is clearly manifest by the fact that it occurs even among the most primitive micro-organisms; when placed under unfavourable conditions as to food and environment they tend to pass into a reproductive phase and by sporulation or otherwise begin to produce new individuals rapidly. It is the same in Man. Improve the environment and reproduction is checked.[8] That is, as Professor Benjamin Moore has said, "the simple biological reply to good economic conditions." It is only among the poor, the ignorant, and the wretched that reproduction flourishes. "The tendency of civilisation," as Leroy-Beaulieu concludes, "is to reduce the birth-rate." Those who desire a high birth-rate are desiring, whether they know it or not, the increase of poverty, ignorance, and wretchedness.
So far we have been dealing with fundamental laws and tendencies, which were established long before Man appeared on the earth, although Man has often illustrated, and still illustrates, their inevitable character. We have not been brought in contact with the influence of conscious design and deliberate intention. At this point we reach a totally new aspect of reproduction.
In tracing the course of reproduction we have so far been concerned with what are commonly considered the blind operations of Nature in the absence of conscious and deliberate volition. We have seen that while at the outset Nature seems to have impressed an immense reproductive impetus on her creatures, all her energy since has been directed to the imposition of preventive checks on that reproductive impetus. The end attained by these checks has been an extreme diminution in the number of offspring, a prolongation of the time devoted to the breeding and care of each new member of the family, in harmony with its greatly prolonged life, a spacing out of the intervals between the offspring, and, as a result, a vastly greater development of each individual and an ever better equipment for the task of living. All this was slowly attained automatically, without any conscious volition on the part of the individuals, even when they were human beings, who were the agents. Now occurred a change which we may regard as, in some respects, the most momentous sudden advance in the whole history of reproduction: the process of reproductive progress became conscious and deliberately volitional.
We often fancy that when natural progress becomes manifested in the mind and will of man it is somehow unnatural. It is one of the wisest of Shakespeare's utterances in one of the most mature of his plays that