Studies in the Psychology of Sex Volume Vi Part 35

Jealousy among lower races may be disguised or modified by tribal customs. Thus Rasmussen (People of the Polar North, p. 65) says in reference to the Eskimo custom of wife-exchange: "A man once told me that he only beat his wife when she would not receive other men. She would have nothing to do with anyone but him-and that was her only failing!" Rasmussen elsewhere shows that the Eskimo are capable of extreme jealousy.

[414]

See, e.g., Moll, s.e.xualleben des Kindes, p. 158; cf., Gesell's "Study of Jealousy."

[415]

Jealousy is notoriously common among drunkards. As K. Birnbaum points out ("Das s.e.xualleben der Alkokolisten," s.e.xual-Probleme, Jan., 1909), this jealousy is, in most cases, more or less well-founded, for the wife, disgusted with her husband, naturally seeks sympathy and companionship elsewhere. Alcoholic jealousy, however, goes far beyond its basis of support in fact, and is entangled with delusions and hallucinations. (See e.g., G. Dumas, "La Logique d'un Dement," Revue Philosophique, Feb., 1908; also Stefanowski, "Morbid Jealousy," Alienist and Neurologist, July, 1893.)

[416]

Ellen Key, Ueber Liebe und Ehe, p. 335.

[417]

Schrempf points out ("Von Stella zu Klarchen," Mutterschutz, 1906, Heft 7, p. 264) that Goethe strove to show in Egmont that a woman is repelled by the love of a man who knows nothing beyond his love to her, and that it is easy for her to devote herself to the man whose aims lie in the larger world beyond herself. There is profound truth in this view.

[418]

A discussion on "Platonic friendship" of this kind by several writers, mostly women, whose opinions were nearly equally divided, may be found, for instance, in the Lady's Realm, March, 1900.

[419]

There are no doubt important exceptions. Thus Merimee's famous friendship with Mlle. Jenny Dacquin, enshrined in the Lettres a une Inconnue, was perhaps Platonic throughout on Merimee's side, Mlle. Dacquin adapting herself to his att.i.tude. Cf. A. Lefebvre, La Celebre Inconnue de Merimee, 1908.

[420]

The love-letters of all these distinguished persons have been published. Rosa Mayreder (Zur Kritik der Weiblichkeit, pp. 229 et seq.) discusses the question of the humble and absolute manner in which even men of the most masculine and impetuous genius abandon themselves to the inspiration of the beloved woman. The case of the Brownings, who have been termed "the hero and heroine of the most wonderful love-story that the world knows of," is specially notable; (Ellen Key has written of the Brownings from this point of view in Menschen, and reference may be made to an article on the Brownings' love-letters in the Edinburgh Review, April, 1899). It is scarcely necessary to add that an erotic relationship may mean very much to persons of high intellectual ability, even when its issue is not happy; of Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the most intellectually distinguished of women, it may be said that the letters which enshrine her love to the worthless Imlay are among the most pa.s.sionate and pathetic love-letters in English.

CHAPTER XII.

THE SCIENCE OF PROCREATION.

The Relationship of the Science of Procreation to the Art of Love-s.e.xual Desire and s.e.xual Pleasure as the Conditions of Conception-Reproduction Formerly Left to Caprice and l.u.s.t-The Question of Procreation as a Religious Question-The Creed of Eugenics-Ellen Key and Sir Francis Galton-Our Debt to Posterity-The Problem of Replacing Natural Selection-The Origin and Development of Eugenics-The General Acceptance of Eugenical Principles To-day-The Two Channels by Which Eugenical Principles are Becoming Embodied in Practice-The Sense of s.e.xual Responsibility in Women-The Rejection of Compulsory Motherhood-The Privilege of Voluntary Motherhood-Causes of the Degradation of Motherhood-The Control of Conception-Now Practiced by the Majority of the Population in Civilized Countries-The Fallacy of "Racial Suicide"-Are Large Families a Stigma of Degeneration?-Procreative Control the Outcome of Natural and Civilized Progress-The Growth of Neo-Malthusian Beliefs and Practices-Facultative Sterility as Distinct from Neo-Malthusianism-The Medical and Hygienic Necessity of Control of Conception-Preventive Methods-Abortion-The New Doctrine of the Duty to Practice Abortion-How Far is this Justifiable?-Castration as a Method of Controlling Procreation-Negative Eugenics and Positive Eugenics-The Question of Certificates for Marriage-The Inadequacy of Eugenics by Act of Parliament-The Quickening of the Social Conscience in Regard to Heredity-Limitations to the Endowment of Motherhood-The Conditions Favorable to Procreation-Sterility-The Question of Artificial Fecundation-The Best Age of Procreation-The Question of Early Motherhood-The Best Time for Procreation-The Completion of the Divine Cycle of Life.

We have seen that the art of love has an independent and amply justifiable right to existence apart, altogether, from procreation. Even if we still believed-as all men must once have believed and some Central Australians yet believe[421]-that s.e.xual intercourse has no essential connection with the propagation of the race it would have full right to existence. In its finer manifestations as an art it is required in civilization for the full development of the individual, and it is equally required for that stability of relationships which is nearly everywhere regarded as a demand of social morality.

When we now turn to the second great const.i.tutional factor of marriage, procreation, the first point we encounter is that the art of love here also has its place. In ancient times the s.e.xual congruence of any man with any woman was supposed to be so much a matter of course that all questions of love and of the art of love could be left out of consideration. The propagative act might, it was thought, be performed as impersonally, as perfunctorily, as the early Christian Fathers imagined it had been performed in Paradise. That view is no longer acceptable. It fails to commend itself to men, and still less to women. We know that in civilization at all events-and it is often indeed the same among savages-erethism is not always easy between two persons selected at random, nor even when they are more specially selected. And we also know, on the authority of very distinguished gynaecologists, that it is not in very many cases sufficient even to effect coitus, it is also necessary to excite o.r.g.a.s.m, if conception is to be achieved.

Many primitive peoples, as well as the theologians of the Middle Ages, have believed that s.e.xual excitement on the woman's part is necessary to conception, though they have sometimes mixed up that belief with false science and mere superst.i.tion. The belief itself is supported by some of the most cautious and experienced modern gynaecologists. Thus, Matthews Duncan (in his lectures on Sterility in Women) argued that the absence of s.e.xual desire in women, and the absence of pleasure in the s.e.xual act, are powerful influences making for sterility. He brought forward a table based on his case-books, showing that of nearly four hundred sterile women, only about one-fourth experienced s.e.xual desire, while less than half experienced pleasure in the s.e.xual act. In the absence, however, of a corresponding table concerning fertile women, nothing is hereby absolutely proved, and, at most, only a probability established.

Kisch, more recently (in his s.e.xual Life of Woman), has dealt fully with this question, and reaches the conclusion that it is "extremely probable" that the active erotic partic.i.p.ation of the woman in coitus is an important link in the chain of conditions producing conception. It acts, he remarks, in either or both of two ways, by causing reflex changes in the cervical secretions, and so facilitating the pa.s.sage of the spermatozoa, and by causing reflex erectile changes in the cervix itself, with slight descent of the uterus, so rendering the entrance of the s.e.m.e.n easier. Kisch refers to the a.n.a.logous fact that the first occurrence of menstruation is favored by s.e.xual excitement.

Some authorities go so far as to a.s.sert that, until voluptuous excitement occurs in women, no impregnation is possible. This statement seems too extreme. It is true that the occurrence of impregnation during sleep, or in anaesthesia, cannot be opposed to it, for we know that the unconsciousness of these states by no means prevents the occurrence of complete s.e.xual excitement. We cannot fail, however, to connect the fact that impregnation frequently fails to occur for months and even years after marriage, with the fact that s.e.xual pleasure in coitus on the wife's part also frequently fails to occur for a similar period.

"Of all human instincts," Pinard has said,[422] "that of reproduction is the only one which remains in the primitive condition and has received no education. We procreate to-day as they procreated in the Stone Age. The most important act in the life of man, the sublimest of all acts since it is that of his reproduction, man accomplishes to-day with as much carelessness as in the age of the cave-man." And though Pinard himself, as the founder of puericulture, has greatly contributed to call attention to the vast destinies that hang on the act of procreation, there still remains a lamentable amount of truth in this statement. "Future generations," writes Westermarck in his great history of moral ideas,[423] "will probably with a kind of horror look back at a period when the most important, and in its consequences the most far-reaching, function which has fallen to the lot of man was entirely left to individual caprice and l.u.s.t."

We are told in his Table Talk, that the great Luther was accustomed to say that G.o.d's way of making man was very foolish ("sehr narrisch"), and that if G.o.d had deigned to take him into His counsel he would have strongly advised Him to make the whole human race, as He made Adam, "out of earth." And certainly if applied to the careless and reckless manner in which procreation in Luther's day, as still for the most part in our own, was usually carried out there was sound common sense in the Reformer's remarks. If that is the way procreation is to be carried on, it would be better to create and mould every human being afresh out of the earth; in that way we could at all events eliminate evil heredity. It was, however, unjust to place the responsibility on G.o.d. It is men and women who breed the people that make the world good or bad. They seek to put the evils of society on to something outside themselves. They see how large a proportion of human beings are defective, ill-conditioned, anti-social, incapable of leading a whole and beautiful human life. In old theological language it was often said that such were "children of the Devil," and Luther himself was often ready enough to attribute the evil of the world to the direct interposition of the Devil. Yet these ill-conditioned people who clog the wheels of society are, after all, in reality the children of Man. The only Devil whom we can justly invoke in this matter is Man.

The command "Be fruitful and multiply," which the ancient Hebrews put into the mouth of their tribal G.o.d, was, as Crackanthorpe points out,[424] a command supposed to have been uttered when there were only eight persons in the world. If the time should ever again occur when the inhabitants of the world could be counted on one's fingers, such an injunction, as Crackanthorpe truly observes, would again be reasonable. But we have to remember that to-day humanity has sp.a.w.ned itself over the world in hundreds and even thousands of millions of creatures, a large proportion of whom, as is but too obvious, ought never to have been born at all, and the voice of Jehovah is now making itself heard through the leaders of mankind in a very different sense.

It is not surprising that as this fact tends to become generally recognized, the question of the procreation of the race should gain a new significance, and even tend to take on the character of a new religious movement. Mere morality can never lead us to concern ourselves with the future of the race, and in the days of old, men used to protest against the tendency to subordinate the interests of religion to the claims of "mere morality." There was a sound natural instinct underlying that protest, so often and so vigorously made by Christianity, and again revived to-day in a more intelligent form. The claim of the race is the claim of religion. We have to beware lest we subordinate that claim to our moralities. Moralities are, indeed, an inevitable part of our social order from which we cannot escape; every community must have its mores. But we are not ent.i.tled to make a fetich of our morality, sacrificing to it the highest interests entrusted to us. The nations which have done so have already signed their own death-warrant.[425] From this point of view, the whole of Christianity, rightly considered, with its profound conviction of the necessity for forethought and preparation for the life hereafter, has been a preparation for eugenics, a schoolmaster to discipline within us a higher ideal than itself taught, and we cannot therefore be surprised at the solidity of the basis on which eugenical conceptions of life are developing.

The most distinguished pioneers of the new movement of devotion to the creation of the race seem independently to have realized its religious character. This att.i.tude is equally marked in Ellen Key and Francis Galton. In her Century of the Child (English translation, 1909), Ellen Key entirely identifies herself with the eugenic movement. "It is only a question of time," she elsewhere writes (Ueber Liebe und Ehe, p. 445), "when the att.i.tude of society towards a s.e.xual union will depend not on the form of the union, but on the value of the children created. Men and women will then devote the same religious earnestness to the psychic and physical perfectioning of this s.e.xual task as Christians have devoted to the salvation of their souls."

Sir Francis Galton, writing a few years later, but without doubt independently, in 1905, on "Restrictions in Marriage," and "Eugenics as a Factor in Religion" (Sociological Papers of the Sociological Society, vol. ii, pp. 13, 53), remarks: "Religious precepts, founded on the ethics and practice of older days, require to be reinterpreted, to make them conform to the needs of progressive nations. Ours are already so far behind modern requirements that much of our practice and our profession cannot be reconciled without illegitimate casuistry. It seems to me that few things are more needed by us in England than a revision of our religion, to adapt it to the intelligence and needs of this present time.... Evolution is a grand phantasmagoria, but it a.s.sumes an infinitely more interesting aspect under the knowledge that the intelligent action of the human will is, in some small measure, capable of guiding its course. Man has the power of doing this largely, so far as the evolution of humanity is concerned; he has already affected the quality and distribution of organic life so widely that the changes on the surface of the earth, merely through his disforestings and agriculture, would be recognizable from a distance as great as that of the moon. Eugenics is a virile creed, full of hopefulness, and appealing to many of the n.o.blest feelings of our nature."

As will always happen in every great movement, a few fanatics have carried into absurdity the belief in the supreme religious importance of procreation. Love, apart from procreation, writes one of these fanatics, Vacher de Lapouge, in the spirit of some of the early Christian Fathers (see ante p. 509), is an aberration comparable to sadism and sodomy. Procreation is the only thing that matters, and it must become "a legally prescribed social duty" only to be exercised by carefully selected persons, and forbidden to others, who must, by necessity, be deprived of the power of procreation, while abortion and infanticide must, under some circ.u.mstances, become compulsory. Romantic love will disappear by a process of selection, as also will all religion except a new form of phallic worship (G. Vacher de Lapouge, "Die Crisis der s.e.xuellen Moral," Politisch Anthropologische Revue, No. 8, 1908). It is sufficient to point out that love is, and always must be, the natural portal to generation. Such excesses of procreative fanaticism cannot fail to occur, and they render the more necessary the emphasis which has here been placed on the art of love.

"What has posterity done for me that I should do anything for posterity?" a cynic is said to have asked. The answer is very simple. The human race has done everything for him. All that he is, and can be, is its creation; all that he can do is the result of its laboriously acc.u.mulated traditions. It is only by working towards the creation of a still better posterity, that he can repay the good gifts which the human race has brought him.[426] Just as, within the limits of this present life, many who have received benefits and kindnesses they can never repay to the actual givers, find a pleasure in vicariously repaying the like to others, so the heritage we have received from our ascendents we can never repay, save by handing it on in a better form to our descendants.

It is undoubtedly true that the growth of eugenical ideals has not been, for the most part, due to religious feeling. It has been chiefly the outcome of a very gradual, but very comprehensive, movement towards social amelioration, which has been going on for more than a century, and which has involved a progressive effort towards the betterment of all the conditions of life. The ideals of this movement were proclaimed in the eighteenth century, they began to find expression early in the nineteenth century, in the initiation of the modern system of sanitation, in the growth of factory legislation, in all the movements which have been borne onwards by socialism hand in hand with individualism. The inevitable tendency has been slowly towards the root of the matter; it began to be seen that comparatively little can be effected by improving the conditions of life of adults; attention began to be concentrated on the child, on the infant, on the embryo in its mother's womb, and this resulted in the fruitful movement of puericulture inspired by Pinard, and finally the problem is brought to its source at the point of procreation, and the regulation of s.e.xual selection between stocks and between individuals as the prime condition of life. Here we have the science of eugenics which Sir Francis Galton has done so much to make a definite, vital, and practical study, and which in its wider bearings he defines as "the science which deals with those social eugenics that influence, mentally or physically, the racial qualities of future generations." In its largest aspect, eugenics is, as Galton has elsewhere said, man's attempt "to replace Natural Selection by other processes that are more merciful and not less effective."

In the last chapter of his Memories of My Life (1908), on "Race Improvement," Sir Francis Galton sets forth the origin and development of his conception of the science of eugenics. The term, "eugenics," he first used in 1884, in his Human Faculty, but the conception dates from 1865, and even earlier. Galton has more recently discussed the problems of eugenics in papers read before the Sociological Society (Sociological Papers, vols. i and ii, 1905), in the Herbert Spencer Lecture on "Probability the Foundation of Eugenics," (1907), and elsewhere. Galton's numerous memoirs on this subject have now been published in a collected form by the Eugenics Education Society, which was established in 1907, to further and to popularize the eugenical att.i.tude towards social questions; The Eugenics Review is published by this Society. On the more strictly scientific side, eugenic studies are carried on in the Eugenics Laboratory of the University of London, established by Sir Francis Galton, and now working in connection with Professor Karl Pearson's biometric laboratory, in University College. Much of Professor Pearson's statistical work in this and allied directions, is the elaboration of ideas and suggestions thrown out by Galton. See, e.g., Karl Pearson's Robert Boyle Lecture, "The Scope and Importance to the State of the Science of National Eugenics" (1907). Biometrika, edited by Karl Pearson in a.s.sociation with other workers, contains numerous statistical memoirs on eugenics. In Germany, the Archiv fur Ra.s.sen und Gesellschafts-biologie, and the Politisch-Anthropologische Revue, are largely occupied with various aspects of such subjects, and in America, The Popular Science Monthly from time to time, publishes articles which have a bearing on eugenics.

At one time there was a tendency to scoff, or to laugh, at the eugenic movement. It was regarded as an attempt to breed men as men breed animals, and it was thought a sufficiently easy task to sweep away this new movement with the remark that love laughs at bolts and bars. It is now beginning to be better understood. None but fanatics dream of abolishing love in order to effect pairing by rule. It is merely a question of limiting the possible number of mates from whom each may select a partner, and that, we must remember, has always been done even by savages, for, as it has been said, "eugenics is the oldest of the sciences." The question has merely been transformed. Instead of being limited mechanically by caste, we begin to see that the choice of s.e.xual mates must be limited intelligently by actual fitness. Promiscuous marriages have never been the rule; the possibility of choice has always been narrow, and the most primitive peoples have exerted the most marked self-restraint. It is not so merely among remote races but among our own European ancestors. Throughout the whole period of Catholic supremacy the Canon law multiplied the impediments to matrimony, as by ordaining that consanguinity to the fourth degree (third cousins), as well as spiritual relationship, is an impediment, and by such arbitrary prohibitions limited the range of possible mates at least as much as it would be limited by the more reasonable dictates of eugenic considerations.

At the present day it may be said that the principle of the voluntary control of procreation, not for the selfish ends of the individual, but in order to extinguish disease, to limit human misery, and to raise the general level of humanity by subst.i.tuting the ideal of quality for the vulgar ideal of mere quant.i.ty, is now generally accepted, alike by medical pathologists, embryologists and neurologists, and by sociologists and moralists.

It would be easy to multiply quotations from distinguished authorities on this point. Thus, Metchnikoff points out (Essais Optimistes, p. 419) that orthobiosis seems to involve the limitation of offspring in the fight against disease. Ballantyne concludes his great treatise on Antena.n.a.l Pathology with the statement that "Eugenics" or well-begetting, is one of the world's most pressing problems. Dr. Louise Robinovitch, the editor of the Journal of Mental Pathology, in a brilliant and thoughtful paper, read before the Rome Congress of Psychology in 1905, well spoke in the same sense: "Nations have not yet elevated the energy of genesic function to the dignity of an energy. Other energies known to us, even of the meanest grade, have long since been wisely utilized, and their activities based on the principle of the strictest possible economy. This economic utilization has been brought about, not through any enforcement of legislative restrictions, but through steadily progressive human intelligence. Economic handling of genesic function will, like the economic function of other energies, come about through a steady and progressive intellectual development of nations." "There are circ.u.mstances," says C. H. Hughes, ("Restricted Procreation," Alienist and Neurologist, May, 1908), "under which the propagation of a human life may be as gravely criminal as the taking of a life already begun."

From the general biological, as well as from the sociological side, the acceptance of the same standpoint is constantly becoming more general, for it is recognized as the inevitable outcome of movements which have long been in progress.

"Already," wrote Haycraft (Darwinism and Race Progress, p. 160), referring to the law for the prevention of cruelty to children, "public opinion has expressed itself in the public rule that a man and woman, in begetting a child, must take upon themselves the obligation and responsibility of seeing that that child is not subjected to cruelty and hardship. It is but one step more to say that a man and a woman shall be under obligation not to produce children, when it is certain that, from their want of physique, they will have to undergo suffering, and will keep up but an unequal struggle with their fellows." Professor J. Arthur Thomson, in his volume on Heredity (1908), vigorously and temperately pleads (p. 528) for rational methods of eugenics, as specially demanded in an age like our own, when the unfit have been given a better chance of reproduction than they have ever been given in any other age. Bateson, again, referring to the growing knowledge of heredity, remarks (Mendel's Principles of Heredity, 1909, p. 305): "Genetic knowledge must certainly lead to new conceptions of justice, and it is by no means impossible that, in the light of such knowledge, public opinion will welcome measures likely to do more for the extinction of the criminal and the degenerate than has been accomplished by ages of penal enactment." Adolescent youths and girls, said Anton von Menger, in his last book, the pregnant Neue Sittenlehre (1905), must be taught that the production of children, under certain circ.u.mstances, is a crime; they must also be taught the voluntary restraint of conception, even in health; such teaching, Menger rightly added, is a necessary preliminary to any legislation in this direction.

Of recent years, many books and articles have been devoted to the advocacy of eugenic methods. Mention may be made, for instance, of Population and Progress (1907), by Montague Crackanthorpe, President of the Eugenics Education Society. See also, Havelock Ellis, "Eugenics and St. Valentine," Nineteenth Century and After, May, 1906. It may be mentioned that nearly thirty years ago, Miss J. H. Clapperton, in her Scientific Meliorism (1885, Ch. XVII), pointed out that the voluntary restraint of procreation by Neo-Malthusian methods, apart from merely prudential motives, there clearly recognized, is "a new key to the social position," and a necessary condition for "national regeneration." Professor Karl Pearson's Groundwork of Eugenics, (1909) is, perhaps, the best brief introduction to the subject. Mention may also be made of Dr. Saleeby's Parenthood and Race Culture (1909), written in a popular and enthusiastic manner.

How widely the general principles of eugenics are now accepted as the sound method of raising the level of the human race, was well shown at a meeting of the Sociological Society, in 1905, when, after Sir Francis Galton had read papers on the question, the meeting heard the opinions of numerous sociologists, economists, biologists, and well-known thinkers in various lands, who were present, or who had sent communications. Some twenty-one expressed more or less unqualified approval, and only three or four had objections to offer, mostly on matters of detail (Sociological Papers, published by the Sociological Society, vol. ii, 1905).

If we ask by what channels this impulse towards the control of procreation for the elevation of the race is expressing itself in practical life, we shall scarcely fail to find that there are at least two such channels: (1) the growing sense of s.e.xual responsibility among women as well as men, and (2) the conquest of procreative control which has been achieved in recent years, by the general adoption of methods for the prevention of conception.

It has already been necessary in a previous chapter to discuss the far-reaching significance of woman's personal responsibility as an element in the modification of the s.e.xual life of modern communities. Here it need only be pointed out that the autonomous authority of a woman over her own person, in the s.e.xual sphere, involves on her part a consent to the act of procreation which must be deliberate. We are apt to think that this is a new and almost revolutionary demand; it is, however, undoubtedly a natural, ancient, and recognized privilege of women that they should not be mothers without their own consent. Even in the Islamic world of the Arabian Nights, we find that high praise is accorded to the "virtue and courage" of the woman who, having been ravished in her sleep, exposed, and abandoned on the highway, the infant that was the fruit of this involuntary union, "not wishing," she said, "to take the responsibility before Allah of a child that had been born without my consent."[427] The approval with which this story is narrated clearly shows that to the public of Islam it seemed entirely just and humane that a woman should not have a child, except by her own deliberate will. We have been accustomed to say in later days that the State needs children, and that it is the business and the duty of women to supply them. But the State has no more right than the individual to ravish a woman against her will. We are beginning to realize that if the State wants children it must make it agreeable to women to produce them, as under natural and equitable conditions it cannot fail to be. "The women will solve the question of mankind," said Ibsen in one of his rare and pregnant private utterances, "and they will do it as mothers." But it is unthinkable that any question should ever be solved by a helpless, unwilling, and involuntary act which has not even attained to the dignity of animal joy.

It is sometimes supposed, and even a.s.sumed, that the demand of women that motherhood must never be compulsory, means that they are unwilling to be mothers on any terms. In a few cases that may be so, but it is certainly not the case as regards the majority of sane and healthy women in any country. On the contrary, this demand is usually a.s.sociated with the desire to glorify motherhood, if not, indeed, even with the thought of extending motherhood to many who are to-day shut out from it. "It seems to me," wrote Lady Henry Somerset, some years ago ("The Welcome Child," Arena, April, 1895), "that life will be dearer and n.o.bler the more we recognize that there is no indelicacy in the climax and crown of creative power, but, rather, that it is the highest glory of the race. But if voluntary motherhood is the crown of the race, involuntary compulsory motherhood is the very opposite.... Only when both man and woman have learned that the most sacred of all functions given to women must be exercised by the free will alone, can children be born into the world who have in them the joyous desire to live, who claim that sweetest privilege of childhood, the certainty that they can expand in the sunshine of the love which is their due." Ellen Key, similarly, while pointing out (Ueber Liebe und Ehe, pp. 14, 265) that the tyranny of the old Protestant religious spirit which enjoined on women unlimited submission to joyless motherhood within "the whited sepulchre of marriage" is now being broken, exalts the privileges of voluntary motherhood, while admitting that there may be a few exceptional cases in which women may withdraw themselves from motherhood for the sake of the other demands of their personality, though, "as a general rule, the woman who refuses motherhood in order to serve humanity, is like a soldier who prepares himself on the eve of battle for the forthcoming struggle by opening his veins." Helene Stocker, likewise, reckons motherhood as one of the demands, one of the growing demands indeed, which women now make. "If, to-day," she says (in the Preface to Liebe und die Frauen, 1906), "all the good things of life are claimed even for women-intellectual training, pecuniary independence, a happy vocation in life, a respected social position-and at the same time, as equally matter-of-course, and equally necessary, marriage and child, that demand no longer sounds, as it sounded a few years ago, the voice of a preacher in the wilderness."

The degradation to which motherhood has, in the eyes of many, fallen, is due partly to the tendency to deprive women of any voice in the question, and partly to what H. G. Wells calls (Socialism and the Family, 1906) "the monstrous absurdity of women discharging their supreme social function, bearing and rearing children, in their spare time, as it were, while they 'earn their living' by contributing some half mechanical element to some trivial industrial product." It would be impracticable, and even undesirable, to insist that married women should not be allowed to work, for a work in the world is good for all. It is estimated that over thirty per cent. of the women workers in England are married or widows (James Haslam, Englishwoman, June, 1909), and in Lancashire factories alone, in 1901, there were 120,000 married women employed. But it would be easily possible for the State to arrange, in its own interests, that a woman's work at a trade should always give way to her work as a mother. It is the more undesirable that married women should be prohibited from working at a profession, since there are some professions for which a married woman, or, rather, a mother, is better equipped than an unmarried woman. This is notably the case as regards teaching, and it would be a good policy to allow married women teachers special privileges in the shape of increased free time and leave of absence. While in many fields of knowledge an unmarried woman may be a most excellent teacher, it is highly undesirable that children, and especially girls, should be brought exclusively under the educational influence of unmarried teachers.

The second great channel through which the impulse towards the control of procreation for the elevation of the race is entering into practical life is by the general adoption, by the educated cla.s.ses of all countries-and it must be remembered that, in this matter at all events, all cla.s.ses are gradually beginning to become educated-of methods for the prevention of conception except when conception is deliberately desired. It is no longer permissible to discuss the validity of this control, for it is an accomplished fact and has become a part of our modern morality. "If a course of conduct is habitually and deliberately pursued by vast mult.i.tudes of otherwise well-conducted people, forming probably a majority of the whole educated cla.s.s of the nation," as Sidney Webb rightly puts it, "we must a.s.sume that it does not conflict with their actual code of morality."[428]

There cannot be any doubt that, so far as England is concerned, the prevention of conception is practiced, from prudential or other motives, by the vast majority of the educated cla.s.ses. This fact is well within the knowledge of all who are intimately acquainted with the facts of English family life. Thus, Dr. A. W. Thomas writes (British Medical Journal, Oct. 20, 1906, p. 1066): "From my experience as a general pract.i.tioner, I have no hesitation in saying that ninety per cent. of young married couples of the comfortably-off cla.s.ses use preventives." As a matter of fact, this rough estimate appears to be rather under than over the mark. In the very able paper already quoted, in which Sidney Webb shows that "the decline in the birthrate appears to be much greater in those sections of the population which give proofs of thrift and foresight," that this decline is "princ.i.p.ally, if not entirely, the result of deliberate volition," and that "a volitional regulation of the marriage state is now ubiquitous throughout England and Wales, among, apparently, a large majority of the population," the results are brought forward of a detailed inquiry carried out by the Fabian Society. This inquiry covered 316 families, selected at random from all parts of Great Britain, and belonging to all sections of the middle cla.s.s. The results are carefully a.n.a.lyzed, and it is found that seventy-four families were unlimited, and two hundred and forty-two voluntarily limited. When, however, the decade 1890-99 is taken by itself as the typical period, it is found that of 120 marriages, 107 were limited, and only thirteen unlimited, while of these thirteen, five were childless at the date of the return. In this decade, therefore, only seven unlimited fertile marriages are reported, out of a total of 120.

What is true of Great Britain is true of all other civilized countries, in the highest degree true of the most civilized countries, and it finds expression in the well-known phenomenon of the decline of the birthrate. In modern times, this movement of decline began in France, producing a slow but steady diminution in the annual number of births, and in France the movement seems now to be almost, or quite, arrested. But it has since taken place in all other progressive countries, notably in the United States, in Canada, in Australia, and in New Zealand, as well as in Germany, Austro-Hungary, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. In England, it has been continuous since 1877. Of the great countries, Russia is the only one in which it has not yet taken place, and among the ma.s.ses of the Russian population we find less education, more poverty, a higher deathrate, and a greater amount of disease, than in any other great, or even small, civilized country.

It is sometimes said, indeed, that the decline of the birthrate is not entirely due to the voluntary control of procreation. It is undoubtedly true that certain other elements, common under civilized conditions, such as the postponement of marriage in women to a comparatively late age, tend to diminish the size of the family. But when all such allowances have been made, the decline is still found to be real and large. This has been shown, for instance, by the statistical a.n.a.lyses made by Arthur Newsholme and T. H. C. Stevenson, and by G. Yule, both published in Journal Royal Statistical Society, April, 1906.

Some have supposed that, since the Catholic Church forbids incomplete s.e.xual intercourse, this movement for the control of procreation will involve a relatively much greater increase among Catholic than among non-Catholic populations. This, however, is only correct under certain conditions. It is quite true that in Ireland there has been no fall in the birthrate, and that the fall is but little marked in those Lancashire towns which possess a large Irish element. But in Belgium, Italy, Spain, and other mainly Catholic countries, the decline in the birthrate is duly taking place. What has happened is that the Church-always alive to s.e.xual questions-has realized the importance of the modern movement, and has adapted herself to it, by proclaiming to her more ignorant and uneducated children that incomplete intercourse is a deadly sin, while at the same time refraining from making inquiries into this matter among her more educated members. The question was definitely brought up for Papal judgment, in 1842, by Bishop Bouvier of Le Mans, who stated the matter very clearly, representing to the Pope (Gregory XVI) that the prevention of conception was becoming very common, and that to treat it as a deadly sin merely resulted in driving the penitent away from confession. After mature consideration, the Curia Sacra Poenitentiaria replied by pointing out, as regards the common method of withdrawal before emission, that since it was due to the wrong act of the man, the woman who has been forced by her husband to consent to it, has committed no sin. Further, the Bishop was reminded of the wise dictum of Liguori, "the most learned and experienced man in these matters," that the confessor is not usually called upon to make inquiry upon so delicate a matter as the debitum conjugale, and, if his opinion is not asked, he should be silent (Bouvier, Dissertatio in s.e.xtum Decalogi praeceptum; supplementum ad Tractatum de Matrimonio. 1849, pp. 179-182; quoted by Hans Ferdy, s.e.xual-Probleme, Aug., 1908, p. 498). We see, therefore, that, among Catholic as well as among non-Catholic populations, the adoption of preventive methods of conception follows progress and civilization, and that the general practice of such methods by Catholics (with the tacit consent of the Church) is merely a matter of time.

From time to time many energetic persons have noisily demanded that a stop should be put to the decline of the birthrate, for, they argue, it means "race suicide." It is now beginning to be realized, however, that this outcry was a foolish and mischievous mistake. It is impossible to walk through the streets of any great city, full of vast numbers of persons who, obviously, ought never to have been born, without recognizing that the birthrate is as yet very far above its normal and healthy limit. The greatest States have often been the smallest so far as mere number of citizens is concerned, for it is quality not quant.i.ty that counts. And while it is true that the increase of the best types of citizens can only enrich a State, it is now becoming intolerable that a nation should increase by the mere dumping down of procreative refuse in its midst. It is beginning to be realized that this process not only depreciates the quality of a people but imposes on a State an inordinate financial burden.

It is now well recognized that large families are a.s.sociated with degeneracy, and, in the widest sense, with abnormality of every kind. Thus, it is undoubtedly true that men of genius tend to belong to very large families, though it may be pointed out to those who fear an alarming decrease of genius from the tendency to the limitation of the family, that the position in the family most often occupied by the child of genius is the firstborn. (See Havelock Ellis, A Study of British Genius, pp. 115-120). The insane, the idiotic, imbecile, and weak-minded, the criminal, the epileptic, the hysterical, the neurasthenic, the tubercular, all, it would appear, tend to belong to large families (see e.g., Havelock Ellis, op. cit., p. 110; Toulouse, Les Causes de la Folie, p. 91; Harriet Alexander, "Malthusianism and Degeneracy," Alienist and Neurologist, Jan., 1901). It has, indeed, been shown by Heron, Pearson, and Goring, that not only the eldest-born, but also the second-born, are specially liable to suffer from pathological defect (insanity, criminality, tuberculosis). There is, however, it would seem, a fallacy in the common interpretation of this fact. According to Van den Velden (as quoted in s.e.xual-Probleme, May, 1909, p. 381), this tendency is fully counterbalanced by the rising mortality of children from the firstborn onward. The greater pathological tendency of the earlier children is thus simply the result of a less stringent selection by death. So far as they show any really greater pathological tendency, apart from this fallacy, it is perhaps due to premature marriage. There is another fallacy in the frequent statement that the children in small families are more feeble than those in large families. We have to distinguish between a naturally small family, and an artificially small family. A family which is small merely as the result of the feeble procreative energy of the parents, is likely to be a feeble family; a family which is small as the result of the deliberate control of the parents, shows, of course, no such tendency.

These considerations, it will be seen, do not modify the tendency of the large family to be degenerate. We may connect this phenomenon with the disposition, often shown by nervously unsound and abnormal persons, to believe that they have a special apt.i.tude to procreate fine children. "I believe that everyone has a special vocation," said a man to Marro (La p.u.b.erta, p. 459); "I find that it is my vocation to beget superior children." He begat four,-an epileptic, a lunatic, a dipsomaniac, and a valetudinarian,-and himself died insane. Most people have come across somewhat similar, though perhaps less marked, cases of this delusion. In a matter of such fateful gravity to other human beings, no one can safely rely on his own unsupported impressions.

The demand of national efficiency thus corresponds with the demand of developing humanitarianism, which, having begun by attempting to ameliorate the conditions of life, has gradually begun to realize that it is necessary to go deeper and to ameliorate life itself. For while it is undoubtedly true that much may be done by acting systematically on the conditions of life, the more searching a.n.a.lysis of evil environmental conditions only serves to show that in large parts they are based in the human organism itself and were not only pre-natal, but pre-conceptional, being involved in the quality of the parental or ancestral organisms.