ON PREVENTIVE CHECKS TO POPULATION.
This is no doubt a complex and difficult subject. Nature from far back time has provided in the most determined and obstinate way for the perpetuation of organic life, and has endowed animals, and even plants, with a strong sexual instinct. By natural selection this instinct tends, it would seem, to be accentuated; and in the higher animals and man it sometimes attains a pitch almost of ferocity. In civilized man this effect is further increased by the intensity of consciousness, which reflects desire on itself, as well as by collateral conditions of life and luxury.
In the animal and plant world generally, and up to the realm of Man, Nature appears to be perfectly lavish in the matter, and careless of the waste of seed and of life that may ensue, provided her object of race-propagation is attained; and naturally when the time arrives that Man, objecting to this waste, faces up to the problem, he finds it no easy one to solve.
And not only Man (the male) objects to lower Nature’s method of producing superfluous individuals only to kill them off again in the struggle for existence;but Woman objects to being a mere machine for perpetual reproduction.
There are only two ways commonly proposed of meeting the difficulty: either (1) the adoption of some kind of artificial preventatives to conception, or (2) the exercise of very considerable continence and self-control in the face of the powerful instinct of procreation. Of course, also, the two methods may be used in conjunction with each other.
(1) It must be acknowledged that artificial checks to population are for the most part very unsatisfactory: their uncertainty, their desperate matter-of-factness, so fatal to real feeling, the probability that they are in one way or another dangerous or harmful, and then their one-sideness, since here—as so often in matters of sex—the man’s satisfaction is largely at the cost of the woman: all these things are against them. One method however—that which consists in selecting, for sexual congress, a certain part of the woman’s monthly cycle, can hardly be called artificial, and is altogether the least open to the objections cited. Its success truly is not absolutely certain, but is perhaps sufficiently nearly so for the general purpose of regulating the family; and if the method involves some self-control, it does not at any rate make an impracticable demand in that direction.
(2) To adopt the method of self-control alone without regard to (1) would practically mean, in thoseinstances where children were thought undesirable, an entire abstinence from actual intercourse, and would in most cases be making too great a demand on human nature, as well as, in some, running a possible risk of prejudice to health. No doubt the danger of prejudice to health has been greatly exaggerated; for as a rule a strong effort towards voluntary continence is one of the best safeguards of health; but it does not follow from this that complete abstinence is generally either practicable or desirable. It may, however, be said that it is in the direction of self-control rather than in the direction of unlimited “checks” that we should look for the future; and that if some effort were made towards a wise choice of the periods of congress, the general object in view would be attained without putting an inordinate strain upon the average human nature, and without necessitating recourse to doubtful and artificial devices. The effort itself, too, would lead to that Transmutation of sex-force into the higher emotional elements, of which we have spoken already, and which is such an important factor in Evolution.
I do not much doubt that, as society evolves, the sex-difficulty generally—which has been such a serious one during the civilization-period—will to a great extent subside again. As to excessive breeding (which of course does not necessarily mean excessive sex-congress) it is probably a phenomenon which marks different races during a certain period of their growthand maturity, and which passes away again. And as to excessive sex-desire, since the animals certainly do not show the inordinateness of man in this respect, there is hope for man too when he comes to his senses! A cleaner life, a cleaner diet, the habit of the open air, the growth of the mind to wider interests, the growth of Love itself—all will help. The two last-mentioned elements indeed necessarily evoke a certain effort of control over the more animal instinct—and a kind of conflict, until the two portions of the nature are brought into harmony.