“The dregs of the human species—the blind, the deaf mute, the degenerate, the imbecile, the epileptic—are better protected than pregnant women.”—Bouchacourt.“I hold that the two crowning and most accursed sins of the society of this present day are the carelessness with which it regards the betrayal of women, and the brutality with which it suffers the neglect of children.”—Ruskin.
“The dregs of the human species—the blind, the deaf mute, the degenerate, the imbecile, the epileptic—are better protected than pregnant women.”—Bouchacourt.
“I hold that the two crowning and most accursed sins of the society of this present day are the carelessness with which it regards the betrayal of women, and the brutality with which it suffers the neglect of children.”—Ruskin.
A chapter must be included here concerning a question which can never safely be ignored in any consideration of race-culture, but the importance of which, as I think I see it, is recognised by no one who has concerned himself at all with this subject, from Mr. Francis Galton himself downwards. We must all be agreed, Mr. Galton declares, as to the propriety of breeding, if it be possible, for health, energy and ability, whatever else may be doubtful. To this I would add that, whether we are agreed or not, we must breed for motherhood, and that, even if we do not, we shall have to reckon with it. The general eugenic position, I fancy, is that the requirements which we should make of both sexes, the mothers of the future as well as the fathers, are essentially identical: but it seems to me that we have not yet reckoned with the vast importance of motherhood as a factor in the evolution of all the higher species of animals, and its absolute supremacy, inevitable and persistent whether recognised or ignored, in the case of man. Any system of eugenics or race-culture, any system of government, any proposal for social reform—as, for instance, the reduction of infantmortality—which fails to reckon with motherhood or falls short of adequately appraising it, is foredoomed to failure and will continue to fail so long as the basal facts of human nature and the development of the human individual retain even approximately their present character. Whatever proposals for eugenics or race-culture be made or carried out, the fact will remain that the race is made up of mortal individuals; that every one of these begins its visible life as a helpless baby, and that the system which does not permit the babies to survive,theywill not permit to survive.
This is a general and universal proposition, admitting of no exceptions, past, present or to come. It applies equally to conscious systems of race-culture, to forms of marriage, to forms of government, to any other social institution or practice or character that can be named or conceived. Upon every one of these the babies pronounce a judgment from which there is no appeal. The baby may be a potential Newton, Shakespeare, Beethoven or Buddha, but it is at its birth the most helpless thing alive, the potentialities of which avail it not one whit. It is in more need of care, immediate and continuous, than a baby microbe or a baby cat, whatever the unpublished glories of which its brain contains the promise; and in the total absence of any apparatus, mechanical, legal, or scientific, which can provide the mother's breast and the mother's love, individual motherhood, in its exquisitely complementary aspects, physical and psychical, will remain the dominant factor of history so long as the final judgments upon every present and the final determinations for every future lie in the hands of helpless babyhood—which will be the case so long as man is mortal. When, if ever, science, having previously conquered disease, identifies the causes of natural death and removes them, thenmotherhood and babyhood may be thrown upon the rubbish heap; but until that hour they are enthroned by decree of Nature, and can be dethroned only at the cost of Her certain and annihilative vengeance.
It is the master paradox that at his first appearance the lord of the earth should be the most helpless of living things. Consider a new-born baby. “Unable to stand, much less to wander in search of food; very nearly deaf; all but blind; well-nigh indiscriminating as to the nature of what is presented to its mouth; utterly unable to keep itself clean, yet highly susceptible to the effects of dirt; able to indicate its needs only by alternately turning its head, open-mouthed, from side to side and then crying; possessed of an almost ludicrously hypersensitive interior; unable to fast for more than two or three hours, yet having the most precise and complicated dietetic requirements; needing the most carefully maintained warmth; easily injured by draughts; the prey of bacteria (which take up a permanent abode in its alimentary canal by the eleventh day)—where is to be found a more complete picture of helpless dependence?”[42]How comes it that this creature is to be lord of the earth, and a member of the only species which succeeds in continually multiplying itself?
Motherhood and intelligence.—We have maintained that the vital character which is of supreme survival-value for man is his intelligence, and this, as we know, is his unique possession. It is very largely for intelligence, therefore, that race-culture or eugenics proposes, if possible, to work. But if there be certain conditions which must be complied with before intelligence can possibly be evolved, eugenics will come to disaster should it ignore them. These conditions do exist, and have hitherto been entirely ignored by all students of this question. Let certain great facts be observed.
Why is the human baby the most helpless of all creatures? Since it is to become the most capable, should it not, even in its infant state, show signs of its coming superiority? What is the meaning of this paradox?
The answer is that, so far as physical weapons of offence and defence are concerned, these have disappeared because intelligence makes them superfluous or even burdensome. But the peculiar helplessness of the human infant depends not upon its nakedness in the physical sense but upon its lack of very nearly all instinctive capacities. It is this absence of effective instincts which distinguishes the baby from the young of all other creatures. Why should its endowment in this respect be so inferior?
It is because of the fact that, if instinct is to give rise to intelligence, it must be plastic. A purely instinctive creature reacts to certain sets of circumstances in certain effortless, perfect and fixed ways. The reactions are the whole of its psychical life. They need no education, being as perfectly performed on the first occasion as on the last, and in many instances being performed only once in the whole history of the creature in question. But, on the other hand, they are almost incapable of education, and even in the cases where they lack absolute perfection at first, they only require the merest modicum of opportunity in order to acquire it. Perfect within their limits, they are yet most definitely limited. They never achieve the new, they are utterly at fault in novel circumstances, and they are wholly incapable of creating circumstances.
A creature cannot be at once purely instinctive and intelligent. An instinctive action is simply a compound reflex action, a highly adapted automatism: now automatism and intelligence are necessarily inversely proportional. It is possible for an intelligent creature to acquire automatisms, which are popularly described as instinctive. They are not instincts, however, but the acquired equivalentsof instincts: “secondary automatisms.” If they are used to replace intelligence, the individual, in so far, sinks from the human to the sub-human level. Their proper function is to leave the intelligence free for higher purposes more worthy of it than, say, the act of dressing oneself.
In order that an intelligent creature should be evolved it was necessary that instinct should become plastic. Intelligence could not be superposed upon a complete and final instinctive equipment. You cannot determine your own acts if they are already determined for you by your nervous organisation. The incomparable superiority of intelligence depends upon its limitless and creative character, in virtue of which, as Disraeli puts it, “men are not the creatures of circumstances: circumstances are the creatures of men.” But whilst intelligence can learn everything, it has everything to learn, and the most nearly intelligent creature whom the earth affords thus begins his independent life almost wholly bereft of all the instruments which have served the lower creatures so well, whilst, on the other hand, he is provided with an utterly undeveloped, and indeed, at that time non-existent, weapon which, even if it did exist, he could not use. Hence the unique helplessness of the human baby: one of the most wonderful and little appreciated facts in the whole of nature—effectively hidden from the glass eyes of the kind of man who calls a baby a “brat,” but, to eyes that can see, not only the master paradox from the philosophical point of view but also a fact of the utmost moment from the practical point of view.
The evolution of motherhood.—It directly follows that motherhood is supremely important in the case of man. It is the historical fact that its importance in the history of the animal world has been steadily increasing throughout æonian time. The most successful and ancientsocieties we know, those of the social insects, which antedate by incalculable ages even the first vertebrates, could not survive for a single generation without the motherhood or foster-motherhood to which the worker females sacrifice their lives and their own chances of physical maternity.
The development of maternal care may be steadily traced throughout the vertebrate series—pari passuwith the evolution of sexual relations towards the ideal of monogamy, which is ideal just because of its incomparable services to motherhood. But whilst motherhood is of the utmost service for lower creatures, tending always to lessen infant mortality—if it may be so called—and to increase the proportion of life to death and birth, it is of supreme service in the case of man because of the absolute dependence upon it of intelligence, the solitary but unexampled weapon with which he has won the earth. Hence in breeding for intelligence we cannot afford to ignore that upon which intelligence depends. Even if we could produce genius at will, we should find our young geniuses just as dependent upon motherhood as the common run of mankind. Newton himself was a seven months' baby, and the potentialities of gravitation and the calculus and the laws of motion in his brain could not save him: motherhood could and did.
Even our least biological reformers must admit that purely physical motherhood, up to the point of birth, can scarcely be omitted in any schemes for social reform or race-culture. Some of them will even admit that purely physical motherhood, so far as the mother's breasts are concerned, cannot wisely be dispensed with. The psychical aspects of motherhood, however, many of these writers—I do not call them thinkers—ignore. In relation to infant mortality—which is the most obvious symptom of causes productive of vast and widespread physical deteriorationamongst the survivors, and which must be abolished before any really effective race-culture is possible—it is worth noting that motherhood cannot safely be superseded. I do not believe in thecrècheor the municipal milk depôt except as stop-gaps, or as object-lessons for those who imagine that the slaughtered babies are not slaughtered but die of inherent defect, and that therefore infant mortality is a beneficent process. In working for the reduction of this evil we must work through and by motherhood. In some future age, boasting the elements of sanity, our girls will be instructed in these matters. At present the most important profession in the world is almost entirely carried on by unskilled labour, and until this state of things is put an end to, it is almost idle to talk of race-culture at all. But under our present system of education, false and rotten as it is in principles and details alike, it is necessary for us to send visitors to the homes of the classes which, in effect, supply almost the whole of the future population of the country, and to establish schools for mothers on every hand.
Psychical motherhood.—I confess myself opposed to the principle of bribing a woman to become a mother, whether overtly or covertly, whether in the guise of State-aid or in the form of eugenic premiums for maternity. It may sound very well to offer a bonus for the production of babies by mothers whom the State or any eugenic power considers fit and worthy. But though the bonus may help motherhood in its physical aspects, the importance of which no one questions, I do not see what service it renders to motherhood in its psychical aspects—which are at least equally important. What is the outlook for the baby when the bonus is spent? In fact, with all deference to Mr. Galton, and with such deference as may be due to the literary triflers who have discussed this matter, I am inclined to think that acardinal requisite for a mother is love of children. Ignorant this may be, and indeed at first always is, but if it is there it can be instructed. The woman who does not think the possession of a baby a sufficient prize is no fit object, I should say, for any other kind of bribe or lure. The woman who “would rather have a spare bedroom than a baby” is the woman whom I do not want to have a baby. Thus I look with suspicion on any proposals which assume that the psychical elements of motherhood are of little moment in eugenics. I see no sign or prospect that they can be dispensed with, and I think eugenics is going to work on wrong lines if it proposes to ignore them. Even if you turn out Nature with a fork she will yet return—tamen usque recurret.
In this question we should be able to derive great assistance from biography. Real guidance, I believe, is obtained from this source, but only a pitiable fraction of that which should be obtained. Scientific biography is yet to seek, and it is the ironical fact that when Herbert Spencer, in hisAutobiography, devoted a large amount of space to the discussion ofbothhis parents and their relatives, the literary critics were bored to death. Nevertheless, we cannot know too much about the ancestry, on both sides, and the early environment, of great men. At present it is always tacitly assumed that a great man is the son of his father alone. The biographer would probably admit, if pressed, that doubtless some woman or other was involved in the matter, and that her name was so and so—if any one thinks it worth mentioning. On the score of heredity alone, however, we derive, men and women alike, with absolute equality from both parents; and we cannot know too much about the mothers of men of genius. Such knowledge would often avail us materially in cases where the paternal ancestry offers little explanation of the child's destiny.
We do owe, however, to great men themselves many warm and unqualified tributes to their mothers, not on the score of heredity, but on the score of the psychical aspects of motherhood. This, indeed, is one of the great lessons of biography which some eugenists have forgotten. It is all very well to breed for intelligence, but intelligence needs nurture and guidance, and that need is the more urgent, the more powerful and original the intelligence in question. The physical functions of motherhood from the moment of birth onwards can be effected, no doubt, though at very great cost, by means of incubators and milk laboratories, and so forth. But there is no counterfeiting or replacing the psychical component of complete maternity, and a generation of the highest intelligence borne by unmaternal women would probably succeed only in writing the blackest and maddest page in history.
The eugenic demand for love.—Mr. Galton desires that we breed for physique, ability, and energy. But we also need more love, and we must breed for that. Nothing is easier or more inevitable once we make human parenthood conscious and deliberate. When children are born only to those who love children, and who will tend to transmit their high measure of that parental instinct from which all love is derived, we shall bring to earth a heaven compared with which the theologian's is but a fool's paradise.
The first requisite, then, for the mothers of the future, the elements of physical health being assumed, is that they should be motherly. They may or may not, in addition, be worthy of such exquisite titles as “the female Shakespeare of America,” but they must have motherliness to begin with. For this indispensable thing there is no substitute. It must certainly be granted, and the fact should not be ignored, that the hidden spring of motherliness in a girl may be revealed only by actual maternity,and the frivolous damsel who used to think babies “silly squalling things” may be mightily transformed when the silly squalling thing is her own—and the Fifth Symphony sound and fury signifying nothing compared with its slightest whimper. I will grant even that the maternal instinct is so deeply rooted and universal that its absence must be regarded as either a rare abnormality or else as the product of the grossest mal-education in the wide sense. But the reader will not blame me for insisting at such length upon what, as he would think, no one could deny, when he discovers that these salient truths are denied, and that in what should be the sacred name of eugenics, they are openly flouted and defied.
Before we go on to consider these perversions of a great idea, it may briefly be observed that, though fatherhood is historically a mushroom growth compared with motherhood, and though its importance is vastly less, yet as a complementary principle, aiding and abetting motherhood, and making for its most perfect expression, fatherhood played a great part in animal evolution, in the right line of progress, ages before man appeared upon the earth at all, and that its work is not yet done. To this subject we must return. Meanwhile it is well to note the dangers with which eugenics is at present threatened in the form of certain proposals which, if for a time they became popular—and they have elements making for popularity—would inevitably throw the gravest discredit upon the whole subject.
Eugenics and the family.—Certain remarkable tendencies invoking the name of eugenics are now to be observed in Germany. These have considerable funds, much enthusiasm, journalistic support, and even a large measure of assistance in academic circles. In pursuance of the idea of eugenics there is a movement the nature ofwhich is indicated by the following quotation from a private letter:—
“I wonder if your attention was drawn to the German projects of the reform of the Family. They all aim at improving the German race and rendering decisive its superiority over all others. The means seem to be too revolutionary. The more modern wish the establishment of the matriarchal family (ein nach Mutterrecht), the more logical require universal polygamy and polyandry, an individualisation of Society. Others hope to increase the production of German geniuses by the ‘hellenic friendship.’[!] The three movements are strongly organised, command large pecuniary means, a phalanx of original and prolific writers, and enthusiastic devotion to their cause. More even than the support of Courts and aristocracy is, in my eyes, that of the Universities. It is there that the destinies of Germany have always been shaped, and if they are determined to reform the Family in that way, it will be done.... The Herren Professoren are terribly in earnest, yet they say things which even to the least prejudiced minds appear ridiculous and even vulgar. Still, their projects have some relation to Eugenics, and to Sociology in general.”
“I wonder if your attention was drawn to the German projects of the reform of the Family. They all aim at improving the German race and rendering decisive its superiority over all others. The means seem to be too revolutionary. The more modern wish the establishment of the matriarchal family (ein nach Mutterrecht), the more logical require universal polygamy and polyandry, an individualisation of Society. Others hope to increase the production of German geniuses by the ‘hellenic friendship.’[!] The three movements are strongly organised, command large pecuniary means, a phalanx of original and prolific writers, and enthusiastic devotion to their cause. More even than the support of Courts and aristocracy is, in my eyes, that of the Universities. It is there that the destinies of Germany have always been shaped, and if they are determined to reform the Family in that way, it will be done.... The Herren Professoren are terribly in earnest, yet they say things which even to the least prejudiced minds appear ridiculous and even vulgar. Still, their projects have some relation to Eugenics, and to Sociology in general.”
This sufficiently indicates the dangers run by the eugenic principle at the hands of those who see in it an instrument of protest and rebellion against established things. We dare not repudiate the sacred principles of protest and rebellion, which have been the conditions of all progress, but believing in motherhood as we must, believing it to be authorised by nature herself and not by any human conventions, we must deplore any tendencies such as the two last cited. For us in this country, however, a more immediate interest attaches to the views of a much admired and discussed writer who claims to be a social philosopher of the first order, and whose claims must now be examined.
The opinions of Mr. Bernard Shaw on the question of eugenics may be quoted from his contribution to the subject published inSociological Papers1904, pp. 74, 75, in discussion of Mr. Galton's great paper. Mr. Shaw begins by saying:“I agree with the paper and go so far as to say that there is now no reasonable excuse for refusing to face the fact that nothing but a eugenic religion can save our civilisation from the fate that has overtaken all previous civilisations.” And further:—
“I am afraid we must make up our minds either to face a considerable shock to vulgar opinion in this matter or to let eugenics alone.... What we must fight for is freedom to breed the race without being hampered by the mass of irrelevant conditions implied in the institution of marriage. If our morality is attacked, we can carry the war into the enemy's country by reminding the public that the real objection to breeding by marriage is that marriage places no restraint on debauchery, so long as it is monogamic.... What we need is freedom for people who have never seen each other before and never intend to see one another again, to produce children under certain definite public conditions, without loss of honour.”
“I am afraid we must make up our minds either to face a considerable shock to vulgar opinion in this matter or to let eugenics alone.... What we must fight for is freedom to breed the race without being hampered by the mass of irrelevant conditions implied in the institution of marriage. If our morality is attacked, we can carry the war into the enemy's country by reminding the public that the real objection to breeding by marriage is that marriage places no restraint on debauchery, so long as it is monogamic.... What we need is freedom for people who have never seen each other before and never intend to see one another again, to produce children under certain definite public conditions, without loss of honour.”
The conception of individual fatherhood here stated involves a deliberate reversion to the order of the beast: it excludes individual fatherhood from any function in aiding motherhood or in serving the future. It involves, of course, the total abolition of the family. It denies and flouts the very best elements in human nature. It assumes that the best women will find motherhood worth while without the interest and sympathy and help and protection of the father. It does not, however, condemn or exclude the psychical functions of motherhood, since so far as this quotation goes it might be assumed that the mother would be permitted to live with her own child. On this point, however, Mr. Shaw offered us further guidance in his controversy with myself in thePall Mall Gazette, in December, 1907. One or two of hisdictamust here be quoted—they followed upon my remark, “Anything less like a mother than the State I find it hard to imagine”:—
“When the State left the children to the mothers, they got no schooling; they were sent out to work under inhuman conditions, under-ground and over-ground for atrociously long hours, as soon as they were able to walk; they died of typhus fever in heaps; they grew up to be as wicked to their own children as their parents had been to them. State socialism rescued them from the worst of that, and means to rescue them from all of it. I now publicly challenge Dr. Saleeby to propose, if he dares, to withdraw the hand of the State and abandon the children to their mothers as they fall.... All I need say is that before Dr. Saleeby can persuade me to sacrifice the future of human society to his maternalism, he will have to tackle me with harder weapons than the indignant enthusiasm of a young man's mother worship.”
“When the State left the children to the mothers, they got no schooling; they were sent out to work under inhuman conditions, under-ground and over-ground for atrociously long hours, as soon as they were able to walk; they died of typhus fever in heaps; they grew up to be as wicked to their own children as their parents had been to them. State socialism rescued them from the worst of that, and means to rescue them from all of it. I now publicly challenge Dr. Saleeby to propose, if he dares, to withdraw the hand of the State and abandon the children to their mothers as they fall.... All I need say is that before Dr. Saleeby can persuade me to sacrifice the future of human society to his maternalism, he will have to tackle me with harder weapons than the indignant enthusiasm of a young man's mother worship.”
Mr. Shaw's teaching constitutes a brutal and deliberate libel upon the highest aspects of womanhood. For his own purposes he attributes to the mothers all the abominations which, as every one knows, have lain and in some measure still lie, at the door of the State. The man who has this opinion of motherhood is complacently ignorant of the elements of the subject. His charge is denied by every one who has worked as doctor or nurse or visitor or missionary amongst the poorer classes, and knows that the mothers there met are of the very salt of the earth.
It is well to state plainly here that these utterly irresponsibledictahave absolutely no relation or resemblance whatever to the opinions or proposals of Mr. Francis Galton himself, who desires to effect race-culture through marriage, and whose whole propaganda is based upon this assumption. This we shall afterwards see. Meanwhile we may note Mr. Galton's own words: “The aim of eugenics is to bring as many influences as can be reasonably employed, to cause the useful classes in the community to contribute more than their proportion to the next generation.” Mr. Galton would be the first to assert that influences designed to supersede motherhood and to abolish everything but the physical aspect of fatherhood, would not be reasonable, but insane in the highest degree.
The ideal of race-culture without fatherhood or motherhood, except in the mere physiological sense, constitutesa denial of the greatest facts in evolution, as we have seen. It ignores everything that is known and daily witnessed regarding the development of the individual, and the formation of character, without which intelligence is a curse. There is not the slightest fear that any such reversion to the order of the beast is possible, absolutely forbidden as it is by the laws of human nature. There is, however, reasonable ground for apprehension, especially when the recent developments in Germany are remembered, that the public may obtain its notions of eugenics in a highly-garbled form.[43]
It must be asserted as fervently and plainly as possible that, if the idea of race-culture is even in the smallest degree to be realised, it must work through motherhood and fatherhood not less in their psychical than in their physical aspects. It is time to have done with the gross delusions of Nietzsche regarding the nature and course of organic evolution. Morality is not an invention of man but man the child of morality, and it is not by the abolition of motherhood, in which morality originated, nor of fatherhood, its first ally, that the super-man is to be evolved: but by the attainment of those lofty conceptions of the function, the responsibility and the privilege of parenthood which it is the first business of eugenics to inculcate.
As for marriage, invaluable though at its best it be for the completion and ennoblement of the individual life, its great function for society and for the race is in relation to childhood. Thus considered, the dictum of Professor Westermarck may be understood, that children are notthe result of marriage but marriage the result of children. This, in other words, is to say that marriage has become evolved and established as a social institution because of its services to race-culture. It is, in short, the supreme eugenic institution. This great subject must next occupy our attention.
Our present concern is the relation of marriage to race-culture, and for this purpose we must investigate an epoch ages before the institution of human marriage, ages before mankind itself. We must first remind ourselves of what may be called the trend of progress from the first in respect of that reproduction upon which all species depend, all living individuals being mortal.
At first, in the effort for survival and increase, life tried the quantitative method. If we take the present day bacteria as representatives of the primitive method, we see that not quality nor individuality but quantity and numbers are the means by which, in their case, life seeks to establish itself more abundantly. We express our own birth-rate in its proportion per year to one thousand living: but twenty thousand bacteria injected into a rabbit have been found to multiply into twelve thousand million in one day. “One bacterium has been actually observed to rear a small family of eighty thousand within a period of twenty-four hours.” “The cholera bacillus can duplicate every twenty minutes, and might thus in one day become 5,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, with the weight, according to the calculations of Cohn, of about 7,366 tons. In a few days, at this rate, there would be a mass of bacteria as big as the moon, huge enough to fill the whole ocean.”
If now we trace the history of life up to man, we find in him—as we have seen—the lowest birth-rate of anyanimal and the longest ante-natal period in proportion to his body weight, the longest period of maternal feeding, and by far the lowest infant mortality and general death-rate. A chief fact of progress has been, in a word, the supersession of the quantitative by the qualitative criterion of survival-value. Immeasurably vast vital economy and efficiency have thus been effected. The tendency of progress, in short—a tendency coincident with the evolution of ever higher and higher species—is to pass from the horrible Gargantuan wastefulness of the older methods towards the evident but yet lamentably unrealised ideal—that every child born shall reach maturity. This great historical tendency, which will ultimately involve the restriction of parenthood to the fit, fine and relatively few, has occurred under the impartial rule of natural selection simply and solely because it has endowed with survival-value the successive species in which it has been demonstrated.
The rise of parenthood.—Consistently with this fact and with the argument of the previous chapter is the tendency towards the lengthening of infancy, a very characteristic condition of the evolution of the higher forms of life. This lengthening and accentuation of infancy makes for variety of development, and, as we have seen, is supremely instanced in man, where it depends upon, and makes possible, the transmutation of fixed instincts into the plastic thing we call intelligence. Thus, to quote the words of Dr. Parsons,[44]“we find that as infancy is prolonged in the progress of species, the care given to offspring by parents is increased. It extends over a longer period and it is directed more and more towards the total welfare of offspring. The need of a potentially many-sided and enduring kind of parental care is filled through the social group we call the family.”
Apart from those immensely significant creatures, the social insects, we find well-marked though primitive signs of motherhood amongst the fishes, and in a few cases, such as the stickleback, the beginnings of fatherhood. But it is not until we reach the mammals, and especially the monkeys and apes, that we find a great development of motherhood, far more prolonged and far more important than the more frequently extolled parental care found amongst the birds.
Very interesting, however, in the case of the fishes is the fact observed by Sutherland that “as soon as the slightest trace of parental care is discovered the chance of survival is increased and the birth-rate is lowered.” As a general summary these words of Dr. Parsons will serve:—“Diminution of offspring is a threefold gain to a species. (1) It lessens the vital drain upon the parent. (2) It enables the size and capacity of the limited number of offspring to be increased. (3) In the case of the higher developments of parental care after birth, it concentrates the advantage of that care upon a few instead of scattering it, and thereby weakening its influence, upon many.”
Now how are these facts connected with that relation between the parents which we call marriage, temporary or permanent, foreshadowed or perfected?
It may be submitted that the racial function or survival-value of marriage in all its forms, low or high, animal or human, consists in its services to the principle of motherhood, these services depending upon the help and strength which are afforded to motherhood by fatherhood.
Animal marriage.—Let us now look very briefly at the facts of animal marriage from this point of view. The phrase, animal marriage, may possibly offend the reader, but is there any reason to be offended at the suggestion that the principle of marriage actually has a warrant older even than mankind? It has lately been pointedout by a distinguished naturalist, Mr. Ernest Thompson Seton, that animals, like men, have long been groping, so to say, for an ideal form of marriage. We now know, as will be shown, that, contrary to popular opinion, promiscuity does not prevail amongst the lowest races of men. Equally false is the popular notion that promiscuity prevails amongst most of the lower animals. Promiscuity, it is true, does occur, but so also does strict monogamy, “and promiscuous animals, such as rabbits and voles, while high in the scale of fecundity, are low in the scale of general development.” Says Mr. Seton: “It is commonly remarked that while the Mosaic law did not expressly forbid polygamy, it surrounded marriage with so many restrictions that by living up to the spirit of them the Hebrew ultimately was forced into pure monogamy. It is extremely interesting to note that the animals, in their blind groping for an ideal form of union, have gone through the same stages, and have arrived at exactly the same conclusion. Monogamy is their best solution of the marriage question, and is the rule among all the higher and most successful animals.”
The moose, Mr. Seton tells us, has several wives in one season but only one at a time. The hawks practise monogamy lasting for one season, “the male staying with the family, and sharing the care of the young till they are well-grown.” The wolves consort for life, but the death of one leaves the other free to mate again. There is a fourth method “in which they pair for life, and, in case of death, the survivor remains disconsolate and alone to the end. This seems absurd. It is the way of the geese.” The point especially to be insisted upon as regards animal marriage is its evident service to their race-culture, in accordance with the principle here laid down thatmarriage is of value because it supports motherhood by fatherhood, and that its different forms are of value in proportion as they doso more or less effectively. We may note also, as a corollary to this, that marriage must be more important in proportion as the young of a species are helpless and in proportion as their helplessness is long continued. The importance of marriage for man, therefore, must necessarily be higher than for any of the lower animals.
Human marriage.—We must turn now to human marriage, and the principle which we must remember is that of survival-value. We are discussing a natural phenomenon exhibited by living creatures. This is what so few people realise when they speak of marriage. They cannot disabuse themselves of the idea that it is a human invention, and especially an ecclesiastical invention. Thus, on the one hand, it is supported by persons who base its claims on mystical or dogmatic grounds; whilst, on the other hand, it is attacked by those who are opposed to ecclesiasticism or religion of any kind, and attacked in the name of science—in which, if the fact could only be recognised, is found every possible warrant and sanction, and indeed imperative demand, for this most precious of all institutions. Here we must endeavour to look upon it as an exceedingly ancient fact of life, vastly more ancient than mankind; and in judging it and explaining it we must apply Nature's universal criterion, which is that of its survival-value or service to race-culture. Let us then glance very briefly at the actual facts of human marriage—conceived as an institution by which the survival-value of fatherhood is added to that of motherhood.
The pioneer student of marriage from the standpoint of science was Herbert Spencer, who with great labour supported the conclusion that monogamy is the highest, best and latest form of marriage. But in the absence of the great mass of evidence which is now before us, Spencer too readily assumed the truth of the popular notion that promiscuity was the primitive state, and taught thathuman marriage has developed from this through polygamy towards the ideal of monogamy. The work of Professor Westermarck, however—Spencer's chief follower in this path—has shown, and later writers have abundantly confirmed it, that this primitive promiscuity never existed. There is no nation or race or clan of man now extant, however primitive or barbaric, that has not definite marriage laws; there is no society on earth, however rude, that does not punish the unfaithful wife. Furthermore, polygamy, the only historical rival of monogamy, is now known to have played a quite trivial part in history, not merely compared with monogamy, but as compared with that which it was supposed to have played. Even in countries which we call polygamous to-day, polygamy is the relatively rare exception and monogamy the rule. On this most important question it is well, however, to quote the words of Professor Westermarck himself:—
“The great majority of peoples are, as a rule, monogamous, and the other forms of marriage are usually modified in a monogamous direction.” “As to the history of the forms of human marriage, two inferences regarding monogamy and polygyny may be made with absolute certainty; monogamy, always the predominant form of marriage, has been more prevalent at the lowest stages of civilisation than at somewhat higher stages; whilst, at a still higher stage, polygyny has again, to a great extent, yielded to monogamy.” “We may thus take it for granted that civilisation, up to a certain point, is favourable to polygyny; but it is equally certain that in its highest forms it leads to monogamy.” “But, though civilisation up to a certain point is favourable to polygyny,its higher forms invariably and necessarily lead to monogamy.”
“The great majority of peoples are, as a rule, monogamous, and the other forms of marriage are usually modified in a monogamous direction.” “As to the history of the forms of human marriage, two inferences regarding monogamy and polygyny may be made with absolute certainty; monogamy, always the predominant form of marriage, has been more prevalent at the lowest stages of civilisation than at somewhat higher stages; whilst, at a still higher stage, polygyny has again, to a great extent, yielded to monogamy.” “We may thus take it for granted that civilisation, up to a certain point, is favourable to polygyny; but it is equally certain that in its highest forms it leads to monogamy.” “But, though civilisation up to a certain point is favourable to polygyny,its higher forms invariably and necessarily lead to monogamy.”
It is the principle of survival-value that explains the dominance of monogamy at all stages of human society—with the single exception of continuously and wholly militant societies, in which polygamy obtained in consequence of the great numerical excess of women. It isthe fate of the children, in which everything is involved, that has determined the history of human marriage. Furthermore, we may see here one more illustration of the truth that quality is ousting quantity in the course of progress, and that a low birth-rate represents a more advanced stage than a high birth-rate. The birth-rate under polygamy is undoubtedly high, but polygamy does not make for the survival and health of the children, and the infant mortality is gigantic. As I have said elsewhere, “the form of marriage which does not permit the babies to survive,theydo not permit to survive. There is the beginning and the end of the whole matter in a nutshell. It is not a question of the father's taste and fancy, but of what he leaves above ground when the worms are eating him below.... No system yet conceived can compare for a moment with monogamy in respect of the one criterion which time and death recognise, the fate of the children.”
In a word, the wholly adequate and only possible explanation of the historical fact of the dominance of monogamy is its supreme survival-value. It has competed with every other kind of sex relation and has been selected by natural selection because of its supreme service for race-culture—the most perfect conceivable addition of fatherhood to motherhood.
Plato and motherhood.—Thus eugenics must repudiate not only the ideas of Mr. Shaw on this subject, but the teaching of Plato, from whom Mr. Shaw's ideas on this particular subject are apparently derived. It is in the fifth book of hisRepublicthat the pioneer eugenist lays down his ideas for race-culture. He realised, indeed, the importance, after birth, of the nurture of children—“it is of considerable, nay, of the utmost importance to the State, when this is rightly performed or otherwise;” and he refers also to their nurture while veryyoung, “in the period between their generation and their education, which seems to be the most troublesome of all.” His method involved a complete community of wives and children amongst the guardians of the State, and on no account were the parents to know their own children nor the children their parents. The best were to be chosen for parents, on the analogy of animal race-culture by man. The children of inferior parents were to be killed. The others were to be conveyed to the common nursery of the city, but every precaution was to be taken thatno mother should know her own child. This practice was to be the cardinal point of the Republic and “the cause of the greatest good to the city.”
We see here, then, that the very first proposals for race-culture involved the destruction of marriage and the family, and a total denial of the value of the psychical aspects of motherhood and fatherhood alike. Plato's first critic, however, his own great pupil Aristotle, devoted the best part of his work, thePolitics, to showing that the suggestions of Plato were not only wrong in themselves, but would not secure his end. Aristotle showed, in the words of Mr. Barker, that “the destruction of the family, and the substitution in its place of one vast clan, would lead but to the destruction of warm feelings, and the substitution of a sentiment which is to them as water is to wine.... So with the system of common marriage, as opposed to monogamy. The one encourages at best a poor and shadowy sentiment, while it denies to man the satisfaction of natural instinct and the education of family life; the other is natural and right, both because it is based on those instincts, and because it satisfies the moral nature of man, in giving him objects of permanent yet vivid interest above and beyond himself.” The truth of this matter is that the rest may reason and welcome—but we fathers know.
Marriage a eugenic instrument.—It has definitely to be stated, then, that the abolition of marriage and the family is in no degree whatever a part of the eugenic proposal. We desire to achieve race-culture by and through marriage, on the lines which indeed many lower races of men successfully practise at the present day. We must make parenthood more responsible, not less so. It will afterwards be shown that the suggested incompatibility between marriage and the family, on the one hand, and race-culture or eugenics on the other, does not exist. It will be shown that we have in marriage not only the greatest instrument of race-culture that has yet been employed—half-consciously—by man, but also an instrument supremely fitted, and indeed without a rival, for the conscious, deliberate, and scientific intentions of modern eugenists. The applicability of marriage for this purpose will be shown by reference to actual facts. Mr. Galton himself has shown how effectively an educated public opinion can employ marriage for the purposes of race-culture, its services to which have indeed led to its evolution. It has furthermore to be added that only the formation of public opinion can ever lead to the ideal which we desire. This opinion already exists in some degree as regards one or two transmissible diseases, and, though without adequate scientific warrant, as regards the marriage of first cousins. In these respects it is not without some measure of effectiveness, and the fact is of the utmost promise.
“Marriage,” said Goethe, “is the origin and the summit of all civilisation.” Perhaps it would be more accurate to saythe familyrather thanmarriage. The childless marriage may be and often is a thing of the utmost beauty and value to the individuals concerned, but it is certainly not the origin of civilisation, and if it be its summit it is also its grave. The eugenicsupport of marriage, therefore, depends upon a belief in the family, and that form of marriage will commend itself which provides the best form of family. From the point of view of certain eugenists, polygamy would be desirable in many cases, as extending the parental opportunities of the man of fine physique or intellectual distinction. The problem remains, however, as to the nurture of the children so obtained, and historical study returns us a very clear answer as to the relative merits of the polygamous family and the monogamous family. It is this last that pre-eminently justifies itself on the score of its services to childhood and therefore to the race. Its survival is a matter of absolute certainty, because of its survival-value. Neither Plato nor Mr. Shaw, nor any kind of collectivist legislation will permanently abolish it.
The principle of maternalism.—The merits of monogamy can be defined in terms of the principle which I would venture to call maternalism—the principle of the permanent and radical importance of motherhood and whatever institutions afford it the greatest aid.
Maternalism would point, I think, to the supreme paradox that the dominant creature of the earth is born of woman, and born the most absolutely helpless of all living creatures whatsoever, animal or vegetable; it would note that this utter dependence upon others, mother or foster-mother, is not only the most unqualified known, but the longest maintained; it would observe that of all the human beings now alive, all that have lived, all that are to be, not one could survive its birth for twenty-four hours but for motherhood; it would note that only motherhood has rendered possible the development of instinct into that intelligence which, itself dependent upon motherhood for the possibility of its development, has dependent upon it the fact that the earth is now man's and the fulness thereof; and tothe advocates of all the political -isms that can be named, and the small proportion of them that can be defined, it would apply its specific criterion: Do you regard the safeguarding and the ennoblement of motherhood as the proximate end of all political action, the end through which the ultimate ends, the production and recognition of human worth, can alone be attained; do you realise that marriage is invaluablebecauseit makes for the enthronement of motherhood as nothing else ever did or can; do you realise that, metaphors about State maternity notwithstanding, the State has neither womb nor breasts, these most reverend and divine of all vital organs being the appanage of the individual mother alone?
The maternalist principle being assumed, and the value of monogamy on the ground that it supports motherhood by fatherhood, the forthcoming discussion as to the possibilities of race-culture will assume the persistence of monogamy and will centre upon the possibility of selecting or rejecting, for the purposes of race-culture, those who are available for entrance into the marriage state. The reader who has not studied social anthropology—and this is true of nearly all the critics of eugenics, very few of whom have studied anything—will be astounded, I believe, to discover the practically unlimited extent to which public opinion, whether or not formulated as law, has always been capable of controlling marriage, and therefore, race-culture.
Proposed definition of marriage.—Recognising the existence of subhuman marriage, we may be at a loss to define marriage as distinguished from sex-relations in general. It is that form of sex-relation which involves or is adapted tocommon parental careof the offspring—the support of motherhood by fatherhood.