Applied Eugenics Part 23

4. Deficiency in normal s.e.xual feeling, or perversion.

5. Deficiency of one kind or another, physical or mental, causing difficulty in getting an acceptable mate.

The persons in groups 4 and 5 certainly and in groups 1, 2, and 3 probably to a less extent, are inferior, and their celibacy is an advantage to the race, rather than a disadvantage, from a eugenic point of view. Their inferiority is in part the result of bad environment. But since innate inferiority is so frequently a large factor, the bad environment often being experienced only because the nature was inferior to start with, the average of the group as a whole must be considered innately inferior.

Then there are among celibate men two other cla.s.ses, largely superior by nature:

6. Those who seek some other end so ardently that they will not make the necessary sacrifice in money and freedom, in order to marry.

7. Those whose likelihood of early marriage is reduced by a prolonged education and apprenticeship. Prolongation of the celibate period often results in life-long celibacy.

Some of the most important means of remedying the above conditions, in so far as they are dysgenic, can be grouped under three general heads:

1. Try to lead all young men to avoid a loose s.e.xual life and venereal disease. A general effort will be heeded more by the superior than by the inferior.

2. Hold up the role of husband and father as particularly honorable, and proclaim its shirking, without adequate cause, as dishonorable. Depict it as a happier and healthier state than celibacy or pseudo-celibacy.

For a man to say he has never met a girl he can love simply means he has not diligently sought one, or else he has a deficient emotional equipment; for there are many, surprisingly many, estimable, attractive, unmarried women.

3. Cease prolonging the educational period past the early twenties. It is time to call a halt on the schools and universities, whose constant lengthening of the educational period will result in a serious loss to the race. External circ.u.mstances of an educational nature should not be allowed to force a young man to postpone his marriage past the age of 25. This means that students must be allowed to specialize earlier. If there is need of limiting the number of candidates, compet.i.tive entrance examinations may be arranged on some rational basis. Superior young men should marry, even at some cost to their early efficiency. The high efficiency of any profession can be more safely kept up by demanding a minimum amount of continuation work in afternoon, evening, or seasonal cla.s.ses, laboratories, or clinics. No more graduate fellowships should be established until those now existing carry a stipend adequate for marriage. Those which already carry larger stipends should not be limited to bachelors, as are the most valuable awards at Princeton, the ten yearly Proctor fellowships of $1,000 each.

The causes of the remarkable failure of college women to marry can not be exhaustively investigated here, but for the purposes of eugenics they may be roughly cla.s.sified as unavoidable and avoidable. Under the first heading must be placed those girls who are inherently unmarriageable, either because of physical defect or, more frequently, mental defect,--most often an over-development of intellect at the expense of the emotions, which makes a girl either unattractive to men, or inclines her toward a celibate career and away from marriage and motherhood.

Opinions differ as to the proportion of college girls who are inherently unmarriageable. Anyone who has been much among them will testify that a large proportion of them are not inherently unmarriageable, however, and their celibacy for the most part must be cla.s.sified as avoidable. Their failure to marry may be because

(1) They desire not to marry, due to a preference for a career, or development of a cynical att.i.tude toward men and matrimony, due to a faulty education, or

(2) They desire to marry, but do not, for a variety of reasons such as:

(a) They are educated for careers, such as school-teaching, where they have little opportunity to meet men.

(b) Their education makes them less desirable mates than girls who have had some training along the lines of home-making and mothercraft.

(c) They have remained in partial segregation until past the age when they are physically most attractive, and when the other girls of their age are marrying.

(d) Due to their own education, they demand on the part of suitors a higher degree of education than the young men of their acquaintance possess. A girl of this type wants to marry but desires a man who is educationally her equal or superior. As men of such type are relatively rare, her chances of marriage are reduced.

(e) Their experience in college makes them desire a standard of living higher than that of their own families or of the men among whom they were brought up. They become resistant to the suit of men who are of ordinary economic status. While waiting for the appearance of a suitor who is above the average in both intelligence and wealth, they pa.s.s the marriageable age.

(f) They are better educated than the young men of their acquaintance, and the latter are afraid of them. Some young men dislike to marry girls who know more than they do, except in the distinctively feminine fields.

These and various similar causes help to lower the marriage-rate of college women and to account for the large number of alumnae who desire to marry but are unable to do so. In the interest of eugenics, the various difficulties must be met in appropriate ways.

Marriage is not desirable for those who are eugenically inferior, from weak const.i.tutions, defective s.e.xuality, or inherent mental deficiency.

But beyond these groups of women are the much larger groups of celibates who are distinctly superior, and whose chances of marriage have been reduced for one of the reasons mentioned above or through living in cities with an undue proportion of female residents. Then there are, besides these, superior women who, because they are brought up in families without brothers or brothers' friends, are so unnaturally shy that they are unable to become friendly with men, however much they may care to. It is evident that life in a separate college for women often intensifies this defect. There are still other women who repel men by a manner of extreme self-repression and coldness, sometimes the result of parents' or teachers' over-zealous efforts to inculcate modesty and reserve, traits valuable in due degree but harmful in excess.

When will educators learn that the education of the emotions is as important as that of the intellect? When will the schools awake to the fact that a large part of life consists in relations with other human beings, and that much of their educational effort is absolutely valueless, or detrimental, to success in the fundamentally necessary practice of dealing with other individuals which is imposed on every one? Many a college girl of the finest innate qualities, who sincerely desires to enter matrimony, is unable to find a husband of her own cla.s.s, simply because she has been rendered so cold and unattractive, so over-stuffed intellectually and starved emotionally, that a typical man does not desire to spend the rest of his life in her company. The same indictment applies in a less degree to men. It is generally believed that an only child is frequently to be found in this cla.s.s.

On the other hand, it is equally true--perhaps more important--that many innately superior young men are rejected, because of their manner of life. Superior young men should be induced to keep their physical records clean, in order that they may not suffer the severe depreciation which they would otherwise sustain in the eyes of superior women.

But in efforts to teach chast.i.ty, s.e.x itself must not be made to appear an evil thing. This is a grave mistake and all too common since the rise of the s.e.x-hygiene movement. Undoubtedly a considerable amount of the celibacy in sensitive women may be traced to ill-balanced mothers and teachers who, in word and att.i.tude, build up an impression that s.e.x is indecent and b.e.s.t.i.a.l, and engender in general a damaging suspicion of men.[115]

Level heads are necessary in the s.e.x ethics campaign. Whereas the venereal diseases will probably, with a continuation of present progress in treatment and prophylaxis, be brought under control in the course of a century, the problem of differential mating will exist as long as the race does, which can hardly be less than tens of millions of years.

Lurid presentation, by drama, novel, or magazine-story, of dramatic and highly-colored individual s.e.x histories, is to be avoided. These often impress an abnormal situation on sensitive girls so strongly that aversion to marriage, or s.e.x antagonism, is aroused. Every effort should be made to permeate art--dramatic, plastic, or literary--with the highest ideals of s.e.x and parenthood. A glorification of motherhood and fatherhood in these ways would have a portentous influence on public opinion.

"The true, intimate chronicle of an everyday married life has not been written. Here is a theme for genius; for only genius can divine and reveal the beauty, the pathos, and the wonder of the normal or the commonplace. A felicitous marriage has its comedy, its complexities, its element, too, of tragedy and grief, as well as its serenity and fealty.

Matrimony, whether the pair fare well or ill, is always a great adventure, a play of deep instincts and powerful emotions, a drama of two psyches. Every marriage provides a theme for the literary artist. No lives are free from enigmas."[116]

More "temperance" in work would probably promote marriage of able and ambitious young people. Walter Gallichan complains that "we do not even recognize love as a finer pa.s.sion than money greed. It is a kind of luxury, or pleasant pastime, for the sentimentally minded. Love is so undervalued as a source of happiness, a means of grace, and a completion of being, that many men would sooner work to keep a motor car than to marry."

Men should be taught greater respect for the individuality of women, so that no high-minded girl will shrink from marriage with the idea that it means a surrender of her personality and a state of domestic servitude.

A more discriminating idea of s.e.x-equality is desirable, and a recognition by men that women are not necessarily creatures of inferior mentality. It would be an advantage if men's education included some instruction along these lines. It would be a great gain, also if intelligent women had more knowledge of domestic economy and mothercraft, because one of the reasons why the well-educated girl is handicapped in seeking a mate is the belief all too frequently well founded of many young men that she is a luxury which he can not afford.

Higher education in general needs to be reoriented. It has too much glorified individualism, and put a premium on "white collar" work. The trend toward industrial education will help to correct this situation.

Professor Sprague[117] points out another very important fault, when he says: "More strong men are needed on the staffs of public schools and women's colleges, and in all of these inst.i.tutions more married instructors of both s.e.xes are desirable. The catalogue of one of the [women's] colleges referred to above shows 114 professors and instructors, of whom 100 are women, of whom only two have ever married.

Is it to be expected that the curriculum created by such a staff would idealize and prepare for family and home life as the greatest work of the world and the highest goal of woman, and teach race survival as a patriotic duty? Or, would it be expected that these bachelor staffs would glorify the independent vocation and life for women and create employment bureaus to enable their graduates to get into the offices, schools and other lucrative jobs? The latter seems to be what occurs."

Increase of opportunity for superior young people to meet each other, as discussed in our chapter on s.e.xual selection, will play a very large part in raising the marriage rate. And finally, the delayed or avoided marriage of the intellectual cla.s.ses is in large part a reflection of public opinion, which has wrongly represented other things as being more worth while than marriage.

"The promotion of marriage in early adult life, as a part of social hygiene, must begin with a new canonization of marriage," Mr. Gallichan declares. "This is equally the task of the fervent poet and the scientific thinker, whose respective labors for humanity are never at variance in essentials.... The sentiment for marriage can be deepened by a rational understanding of the pa.s.sion that attracts and unites the s.e.xes. We need an apotheosis of conjugal love as a basis for a new appreciation of marriage. Reverence for love should be fostered from the outset of the adolescent period by parents and pedagogues."

If, in addition to this "diffusion of healthier views of the conjugal relation," some of the economic changes suggested in later chapters are put in effect, it seems probable that the present racially disastrous tendency of the most superior young men and women to postpone or avoid marriage would be checked.

CHAPTER XIII

INCREASE OF THE BIRTH-RATE OF THE SUPERIOR

Imagine 200 babies born to parents of native stock in the United States.

On the average, 103 of them will be boys and 97 girls. By the time the girls reach a marriageable age (say 20 years), at least 19 will have died, leaving 78 possible wives, on whom the duty of perpetuating that section of the race depends.

We said "Possible" wives, not probable; for not all will marry. It is difficult to say just how many will become wives, but Robert J. Sprague has reported on several investigations that illuminate the point.

In a selected New England village in 1890, he says, "there were forty marriageable girls between the ages of 20 and 35. To-day thirty-two of these are married, 20 per cent. are spinsters.

"An investigation of 260 families of the Ma.s.sachusetts Agricultural College students shows that out of 832 women over 40 years of age 755 or 91 per cent. have married, leaving only 9 per cent. spinsters. This and other observations indicate that the daughters of farmers marry more generally than those of some other cla.s.ses.

"In sixty-nine (reporting) families represented by the freshman cla.s.s of Amherst College (1914) there are 229 mothers and aunts over 40 years of age, of whom 186 or 81 per cent. have already married.

"It would seem safe to conclude that about 15 per cent. of native women in general American society do not marry during the child-bearing period." Deducting 15 per cent. from the 78 possible wives leaves sixty-six probable wives. Now among the native wives of Ma.s.sachusetts 20 per cent. do not produce children, and deducting these thirteen childless ones from the sixty-six probable wives leaves fifty-three probable, married, child-bearing women, who must be depended on to reproduce the original 200 individuals with whom we began this chapter.

That means that each woman who demonstrates ability to bear offspring must bear 3.7 children. This it must be noted, is a minimum number, for no account has been taken of those who, through some defect or disease developed late in life, become unmarriageable. In general, unless every married woman brings three children to maturity, the race will not even hold its own in numbers. And this means that each woman must bear four children, since not all the children born will live. If the married women of the country bear fewer than nearly four children each, the race is in danger of losing ground.

Such a statement ought to strike the reader as one of grave importance; but we labor under no delusion that it will do so. For we are painfully aware that the bugaboo of the declining birth-rate of superior people has been raised so often in late years, that it has become stale by repet.i.tion. It no longer causes any alarm. The country is filled with sincere but mentally short-sighted individuals, who are constantly ready to vociferate that numbers are no very desirable thing in a birth-rate; that quality is wanted, not quant.i.ty; that a few children given ideal care are of much more value to the state and the race than are many children, who can not receive this attention.

And this att.i.tude toward the subject, we venture to a.s.sert, is a graver peril to the race than is the declining birth-rate itself. For there is enough truth in it to make it plausible, and to separate the truth from the dangerous untruth it contains, and to make the bulk of the population see the distinction, is a task which will tax every energy of the eugenist.

Unfortunately, this is not a case of mere difference of opinion between men; it is a case of antagonism between men and nature. If a race hypnotize itself into thinking that its views about race suicide are superior to nature's views, it may make its own end a little less painful; but it will not postpone that end for a single minute. The contest is to the strong, and although numbers are not the most important element in strength, it is very certain that a race made up of families containing one child each will not be the survivor in the struggle for existence.