Essays in War-Time Part 10

Only such parents are fit to father and to mother a future race worthy to rule the world.

It is sometimes said that the control of conception, since it is frequently carried out immediately on marriage, will tend to delay parenthood until an unduly late age. Birth control has, however, no necessary result of this kind, and might even act in the reverse direction. A chief cause of delay in marriage is the prospect of the burden and expense of an unrestricted flow of children into the family, and in Great Britain, since 1911, with the extension of the use of contraceptives, there has been a slight but regular increase not only in the general marriage rate but in the proportion of early marriages, although the _general_ mean age at marriage has increased. The ability to control the number of children not only enables marriage to take place at an early age but also makes it possible for the couple to have at least one child soon after marriage. The total number of children are thus s.p.a.ced out, instead of following in rapid succession.

It is only of recent years that the eugenic importance of a considerable interval between births has been fully recognised, as regards not only the mother--this has long been realised--but also the children. The very high mortality of large families has long been known, and their a.s.sociation with degenerate conditions and with criminality. The children of small families in Toronto, Canada, are taller than those of larger families, as is also the case in Oakland, California, where the average size of the family is smaller than in Toronto.[12] Of recent years, moreover, evidence has been obtained that families in which the children are separated from each other by intervals of more than two years are both mentally and physically superior to those in which the interval is shorter. Thus Ewart found in a northern English manufacturing town that children born at an interval of less than two years after the birth of the previous child remain notably defective, even at the age of six, both as regards intelligence and physical development. When compared with children born at a longer interval and with first-born children, they are, on the average, three inches shorter and three pounds lighter than first-born children.[13]

Such observations need to be repeated in various countries, but if confirmed it is obvious that they represent a fact of the most vital significance.

Thus when we calmly survey, in however summary a manner, the great field of life affected by the establishment of voluntary human control over the production of the race, we can see no cause for anything but hope. It is satisfactory that it should be so, for there can be no doubt that we are here facing a great and permanent fact in civilised life. With every rise in civilisation, indeed with all evolutionary progress whatever, there is what seems to be an automatic fall in the birth-rate. That fall is always normally accompanied by a fall in the death-rate, so that a low birth-rate frequently means a high rate of natural increase, since most of the children born survive.[14] Thus in the civilised world of to-day, notwithstanding the low birth-rate which prevails as compared with earlier times, the rate of increase in the population is still, as Leroy-Beaulieu points out, appalling, nearly half a million a year in Great Britain, over half a million in Austro-Hungary, and three-quarters of a million in Germany. When we examine this excess of births in detail we find among them a large proportion of undesired and undesirable children. There are two opposed alternative methods working to diminish this proportion: the method of preventing conception, with which we have here been concerned, and the method of preventing live birth by producing abortion. There can be no doubt about the enormous extension of this latter practice in all civilised countries, even although some of the estimates of its frequency in the United States, where it seems especially to flourish, may be extravagant. The burden of excessive children on the overworked underfed mothers of the working cla.s.ses becomes at last so intolerable that anything seems better than another child. "I'd rather swallow the druggist's shop and the man in it than have another kid," as, Miss Elderton reports, a woman in Yorkshire said.[15]

Now there has of late years arisen a movement, especially among German women, for bringing abortion into honour and repute, so that it may be carried out openly and with the aid of the best physicians. This movement has been supported by lawyers and social reformers of high position. It may be admitted that women have an abstract right to abortion and that in exceptional cases that right should be exerted.

Yet there can be very little doubt to most people that abortion is a wasteful, injurious, and almost degrading method of dealing with the birth-rate, a feeble apology for recklessness and improvidence. A society in which abortion flourishes cannot be regarded as a healthy society. Therefore, a community which takes upon itself to encourage abortion is incurring a heavy responsibility. I am referring more especially to the United States, where this condition of things is most marked. For, there cannot be any doubt about it, just as all those who work for birth control are diminishing the frequency of abortion, so _every attempt to discourage birth control promotes abortion_. We have to approach this problem calmly, in the light of Nature and reason. We have each of us to decide on which side we shall range ourselves. For it is a vital social problem concerning which we cannot afford to be indifferent.

There is here no desire to exaggerate the importance of birth control.

It is not a royal road to the millennium, and, as I have already pointed out, like all other measures which the course of progress forces us to adopt, it has its disadvantages. Yet at the present moment its real and vital significance is acutely brought home to us.

Flinders Petrie, discussing those great migrations due to the unrestricted expansion of barbarous races which have devastated Europe from the dawn of history, remarks: "We deal lightly and coldly with the abstract facts, but they represent the most terrible tragedies of all humanity--the wreck of the whole system of civilisation, protracted starvation, wholesale ma.s.sacre. Can it be avoided? That is the question, before all others, to the statesman who looks beyond the present time."[16] Since Petrie wrote, only ten years ago, we have had occasion to realise that the vast expansions which he described are not confined to the remote past, but are at work and producing the same awful results, even at the very present hour. The great and only legitimate apology which has been put forward for the aggressive att.i.tude of Germany in the present war has been that it was the inevitable expansive outcome of the abnormally high birth-rate of Germany in recent times; as Dr. Dernburg, not long ago, put it: "The expansion of the German nation has been so extraordinary during the last twenty-five years that the conditions existing before the war had become insupportable." In other words, there was no outlet but a devastating war. So we are called upon to repeat, with fresh emphasis, Petrie's question: _Can it be avoided_? All humanity, all civilisation, call upon us to take up our stand on this vital question of birth control. In so doing we shall each of us be contributing, however humbly, to

"one far-off divine event, To which the whole creation moves."

[1] J.M. Coulter, _The Evolution of s.e.x in Plants_, 1915; Geoffrey Smith, "The Biology of s.e.x," _Eugenics Review_, April, 1914.

[2] See, _e.g._, Geddes and Thomson, _The Evolution of s.e.x_, Ch. XX.; and T.H. Morgan, _Heredity and s.e.x_, Ch. I.

[3] To quote one of the most careful investigators of this point, Northcote Thomas, among the Edo-speaking people of Nigeria, found that the average number of living children per husband was 2.7; including all children, alive and dead, the average number was per husband 4.5, and per wife 2.7. "Infant mortality is heavy" (Northcote Thomas, _Anthropological Report of Edo-speaking People of Nigeria_, 1910, Part I., pp. 15, 63).

[4] The same end has been rather more mercifully achieved in earlier periods by infanticide (see Westermarck, _Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas_, Vol. I., Ch. 17). It must not be supposed that infanticide was opposed to tenderness to children. Thus the Australian Dieyerie, who practised infanticide, were kind to children, and a mother found beating her child was herself beaten by her husband.

[5] See Havelock Ellis, _The Nationalisation of Health_.

[6] Similar results appear to follow in China where also the birth-rate is very high and the mortality very great. It is stated that physical development is much inferior and pathological defects more numerous among Chinese as compared with American students. (_New York Medical Journal_, Nov. 14th, 1914, p. 978.) The bad conditions which produce death in the weakest produce deterioration in the survivors.

[7] The law is thus laid down by P. Leroy-Beaulieu (_La Question de la Population_, 1913, p. 233): "The first degree of prosperity in a rude population with few needs develops prolificness; a later degree of prosperity, accompanied by all the feelings and ideas stimulated by the development of education and a democratic environment, leads to a gradual reduction of prolificness."

[8] This is too often forgotten. Birth control is a natural process, and though in civilised men, endowed with high intelligence, it necessarily works in some measure voluntarily and deliberately, it is probable that it still also works, as in the evolution of the lower animals, to some extent automatically. Sir Shirley Murphy (_Lancet_, Aug. 10th, 1912), while admitting that intentional restriction has been operative, remarks: "It does not appear to me that there is any more reason for ignoring the likelihood that Nature has been largely concerned in the reduction of births than for ignoring the effects of Nature in reducing the death-rate. The decline in both has points of resemblance. Both have been widely manifest over Europe, both have in the main declined in the period of 1871-1880, and indeed both appear to be behaving in like manner."

[9] I do not overlook the fact that the artificial clothing of primitive man is in its origin mainly ornament, having myself insisted on that fact in discussing this point in "The Evolution of Modesty" (_Studies in the Psychology of s.e.x_, Vol. I.). It is to be remembered that, in animals--and very conspicuously, for instance, in birds--natural clothing is also largely ornament of secondary s.e.xual significance.

[10] At the end of the eighteenth century there were in France four children on the average to a family; a movement of rapid increase in the population reached its climax in 1846; by 1860 the average number of children to a family had slowly fallen to but little over three. Broca, writing in 1867 ("Sur la Pretendue Degenerescence de la Population Francaise"), mentioned that the slow fall in the birth-rate was only slightly due to prudent calculation and mainly to more general causes such as delay in marriage.

[11] Havelock Ellis, _Studies in the Psychology of s.e.x_, Vol. VI., "s.e.x in Relation to Society," Ch. XI., The Art of Love.

[12] The exact results are presented by F. Boas (abstract of Report on _Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants_, Washington, 1911, p. 57), who concludes that "the physical development of children, as measured by stature, is the better the smaller the family."

[13] R.J. Ewart, "The Influence of Parental Age on Offspring," _Eugenics Review_, Oct., 1911.

[14] In New Zealand the birth-rate is very low; but the death-rate of children in the first year is only 58 per thousand as against 130 in England.

[15] E.M. Elderton, _Report on the English Birth-rate_, Part I., 1914. See also the collection of narratives of their experiences by working-cla.s.s mothers, published under the t.i.tle of _Maternity_ (Women's Co-operative Guild, 1915).

[16] Flinders Petrie, _Journal of the Anthropological Inst.i.tute_, 1906, p. 220.