THE CONDITIONS OF MARRIAGE
In my volume introductory to Eugenics I have dealt at length with marriage from that point of view. Here our concern is with the individual woman, and though neither in theory nor in practice can we entirely dissociate the question of the future from that of the individual's needs, it is necessary here to discuss the present conditions of marriage in the civilized world, from the woman's point of view. We have to ask ourselves how these conditions act in selecting women from the ranks of the unmarried; whether the transition proceeds from random chance, or whether there is a selection in certain definite directions, and if so, what directions? We have to ask whether different women would pass into the ranks of the married if the conditions of marriage were other than they are; and we shall assuredly arrive at the principle that whatever changes are necessary in the conditions of marriage, so that the best women shall become the mothers of the future, must be and will be effected.
One has elsewhere argued at length that monogamy is the marriage form which has prevailed and will be maintained because of its superior survival-value—in other words, because it best serves the interests of the future. But what of the individual in a country where there are thirteen hundred thousand adult women in excess of men, which is the case of Great Britain? Plainly, there is need for very serious criticism of such an institution in such circumstances. Let the reader briefly be reminded, then, that, as I have previously argued, Nature makes no arrangement for such a disproportion between the sexes. More boys than girls are indeed born, but from our infantile mortality, which is largely a male infanticide, onwards, morbid influences are at work which result in the disproportion already named.
Two excellent reasons may be adduced why any disproportion in the numbers of the sexes should be the opposite of that which now obtains. The ideal condition, no doubt, is that of numerical equality. Failing that, the evils of a male preponderance, though very real, are comparatively small. For one thing, celibacy affects a woman more than a man: men, on the whole, suffer less from being unmarried. It is a more serious deprivation for the woman than for the man, in general, to be debarred from parenthood. This is a proposition which we need not labour here, for no reader will dispute its importance and its relevance.
No less important is the economic question. Specially consecrated as she is to the future, woman as distinctive woman is necessarily handicapped in relation to the present. She is at an economic disadvantage. One's blood boils at the cruel effrontery of men who protest against women's efforts to gain an honest living, but who have never a word or a deed against prostitution or against the causes which produce the numerical preponderance of women. But here again our proposition, though unfamiliar, and indeed so far as I know never yet stated, needs no labouring—that owing to the economic opportunities of the sexes, it is, at any rate, on that ground, of no significance that men shall be in excess in a community, but it is of very grave significance that women shall be in excess. It is pitiable, and indeed revolting, in this country where the excess of women is so marked, to hear from year to year the comments of men upon the supposed degeneration of women, upon their unnatural selfishness, their desire to invade spheres which do not belong to them, and so forth and so forth ad nauseam; whilst these commentators are themselves hand in hand with drink, with war and with Mammon, destroying male children of all ages in disproportionate excess, sending our manhood to be slain in war, and sending it also in the cause of industry—that is to say, in the cause of gold—to our colonies, as if the culture of the racial life were not the vital industry of any people.
A third very important reason why a numerical preponderance of women is more injurious to a country than a numerical preponderance of men is that, though the duty and responsibility of selection for parenthood devolves upon both sexes, it is normally discharged with greater efficiency by women than by men; and a numerical preponderance of women gravely interferes with their performance of this great function. It may obviously be argued that such a preponderance leaves a greater choice to the men. But I believe that men do not exercise their choice so well. In a word, women are more fastidious; the racial instinct is weaker in them, less rampant and less roving. In the exercise of this function women are therefore, on the whole, naturally more capable, more responsible, less liable to be turned aside by the demands of the moment. In his "Pure Sociology," Professor Lester Ward has very clearly and forcibly discussed the comparative behaviour of the two sexes in this matter, and he shows how the great feminine sentiment, not confined merely to the human species, is to choose the best. The principle is also a factor in masculine action, but much less markedly so. What we call, then, the greater fastidiousness of the female sex is a definite sex character, and has a definite racial value, raising the standard of fatherhood where it is allowed free play. But in a nation which contains a great excess of women, under economic conditions which are greatly to their disadvantage, the value of this natural fastidiousness is practically lost. Such are the conditions in Great Britain at present that practically any man, of however low a type, however diseased, however unworthy for parenthood, may become a father, if he pleases.
The natural condition suitable to monogamy being a numerical equality of the sexes, the suggestion may obviously be made that where there is a great excess of women, monogamy should yield to polygamy; and indeed where there is such excess monogamy is more apparent than real—an ideal rather than a practice. Thus we have one or two modern authors who have installed themselves in sociology by the royal road of romance—though even to this branch of learning, as to mathematics, there is no short cut whatsoever, even for those whose pens are naturally skilful—authors who tell us that, given this numerical preponderance of women, some kind of polygamous modification of the present marriage system should certainly be adopted. To one aspect of this contention we shall later return. Meanwhile, the answer is that, rather than abolish monogamy, we should strive to alter the conditions which produce such an excess of women. If such an aim were necessarily impracticable, we might well feel inclined to vote for polygamy rather than the present state of things. It is a very decent alternative to prostitution. But in point of fact our aim of equalizing the numbers of the sexes, which I assert as a canon of fundamental politics, is eminently practicable; and here we may briefly outline, as very relevant to the problems of womanhood, the methods by which that aim is to be realized for the good of both sexes in the present and the future.
Nature gives us more than a fair start, almost as if she knew that the wastage of male life is apt to be higher at all ages even under the best conditions. She sends more male children into the world, as if to secure, on the whole, an equality of the sexes in adult life. That ideal is realizable, even allowing for a considerable excess of male deaths. One of our duties, then, is to control that part of the male death-rate, if any, which is controllable. To begin at the beginning, we find that infant mortality claims our attention at once. For years past in the campaign against infant mortality I have urged this as an apparently somewhat remote, yet very real and important issue. Infant mortality bears heaviest upon male babies. It is largely, as I have so often said, a male infanticide, notably contrasting with the practice of deliberate female infanticide which is known in so many times and places. In lowering the infant mortality we shall reduce this disproportion of male deaths, and shall make for the survival of a larger number of men. Bring down the infant mortality to proper limits and we shall have in adult life possible male partners for a large number of women who are now without such because of the male infanticide of twenty and thirty years ago.
It is characteristic of the fashion in which the surface gains our attention while the substance evades it, that the question of the disproportion of the sexes should have been brought to the public notice in regard to a subject which, though not unimportant, is quite secondary compared with those which we are now discussing. Only three or four years ago people were startled and incredulous when one told them by the pen or in lectures that there was a very great excess of women in these islands. Nowadays everybody knows it. This is not because people have suddenly come to realize the fundamental importance for the State of such matters, but simply because the fact provides an argument regarding Woman Suffrage. This immensely important fact of female preponderance, with its gigantic consequences, which affect every aspect of the national life, was totally ignored by the public until, forsooth, it became an argument against Woman Suffrage; and then the foolish people whose voices are allowed to be heard on these complicated matters, but who would be laughed out of court if they expressed their opinions on other subjects equally outside their competence, told us that woman's suffrage would mean government by women, they being in the majority. For all other consequences of this gigantic fact they have no concern; not even the mental capacity to grasp that it must have consequences. But this, which happens not to be a consequence of it, they are loud to insist upon. At any rate, they have done this service until the public at last is acquainted with the demographic fact; and one of the suffragist leaders some time ago publicly expressed an old argument of the present writer's that in point of fact this grave supposed consequence of woman's suffrage need not be feared if only for the reason that Woman Suffrage would certainly mean increased attention to infant mortality, and therefore increased control of the morbid causes which at present account for female preponderance.
It might indeed be added also that, in so far as Woman Suffrage operated against war, it would contribute in another way to the correction of this numerical disparity. Not the least of the many evils which have flowed from the last hideous war in which Great Britain engaged—evils which glass-eyed politicians have since been exploiting in the interests of their own charlatanry—is the loss to scores of thousands of women in this country of the complemental manhood which was destroyed by wounds and more especially by disease in South Africa. The wickedness with which that war was entered upon, and the criminal ignorance with which it was mismanaged, and the elementary principles of hygiene defied, have their consequences to-day in much of the unmated and handicapped womanhood of Great Britain. It may be noted that polygamy as a historical phenomenon has commonly and necessarily been associated with militarism. Large destruction of manhood by war leads to a numerical excess of women, and polygamy is a consequence. If the consequences in our modern civilization are less decent than polygamy, which would affront the beautiful minds that are unconcerned for Regent Street, surely our duty is more strenuously than ever to combat the causes which, as we see, are quite definitely traceable and controllable.
The increased attention paid to the conditions of child life is of direct service to the nation, and to womanhood in especial, by tending to interfere with the excessive and unnecessary mortality of boys. As we have elsewhere observed, the male organism has less vitality than the female organism. When both sexes at any age are subjected to the same injurious influences, more males than females die. Thus all our work with such a measure as the Children Act, keeping children out of public-houses, and so forth, directly serves the womanhood of the not distant future by preserving a certain amount of manhood to keep it company. Accepting the truth of the dictum that it is not good for man to be alone, we have to learn the still more general and profound truth that it is not good for woman to be alone, and, as we now learn, the modern movement for the care of childhood has this notable consequence, which I have been pointing out for many years and now insist upon once again, that it makes for the greater numerical equality of the sexes in adult life, and therefore for the relief of the many evils near and remote which flow from the numerical excess of women. Answering the question, "Whither are we tending?" in Christmas, 1909, Mr. G. K. Chesterton referred to our liability to "float feebly towards every sociological fad or novelty until we believe in some plain, cold, crude insanity, such as keeping children out of public-houses."[16] Considering the authority, I think this is fairly good testimony toward the wisdom of the achievement to which some of us devoted the greater part of three strenuous years; and if the question is to be asked "whither are we tending," part of the answer will be that by such measures as this for the care of child life, which means in practice especially for the keeping alive of boys, we are tending toward the correction of one of the gravest, though least recognized, evils of the present day.
Our business in the present volume is not with childhood. It is not possible to go fully into the statistical details of the comparative death-rate of the sexes, but the data can readily be obtained by any interested reader.[17]
It may be argued that the questions now under consideration are foreign to a chapter entitled "The Conditions of Marriage," but the excess of women in a community is one of the most fundamental conditions of marriage therein, and the question is not the less necessary to be dealt with because, so far as one can ascertain, its consequences have escaped the notice of previous students.
Having dealt with the waste of male life in infancy, in childhood and in war, we must pass on to a totally different factor of our problem, and that is the emigration to our colonies and elsewhere of a greatly disproportionate number of men. One does not assert for a moment that the men should not go, but merely that if they do, so should women also. As everyone knows they go for many reasons and purposes. These are largely industrial and imperial. The Civil Service claims a large number. These bachelors go in the cause of Empire, whether as actual servants of the State or in the interests of commerce. They are largely picked men, capable of discipline and initiative and of withstanding hardships; and also in large degree intellectually able. It is certainly not good for them to be alone, and it is worse for the women whom they leave behind. All this may seem right and the only practicable thing for the day, but it is fundamentally wrong because it is wrong for the morrow.
If other needs were not so pressing, one might well devote an entire volume, not inappropriately in these days of fiscal controversy, to the question of vital imports and exports. Year after year passes, and politicians in Great Britain grow more and more voracious and, if possible, less and less veracious on the subject of what they misunderstand by imports and exports. The subject is really one for knowledge, not for politicians. With great ceremony at intervals, they go through the highly superfluous performance of calling each other liars, as who should say that Queen Anne is dead: and while this tragical farce continues the question of vital imports and exports is ignored. Within it there lies the key to the Irish question, for instance, since no nation can be saved which persistently exports the best of its life. And in this question also lies the key to a great part of the woman question and to a great part of the colonial question. Politicians who have not even discovered yet that trade is a process of exchange, and who assume that in every bargain someone is being worsted, pay no heed to the questions what sort of people leave our shores, and what sort of people enter them. Or rather, as if in order to emphasize their blindness to fundamentals, they make a point about passing an act against alien immigration, which merely serves to throw into prominence our national neglect of this great issue. This is not the time and the place in which I can deal with it in its entirety, but it must be referred to in so far as it bears on the proportion of the sexes. Toward the end of 1909 there was a long correspondence in the Times on the subject of "Unmarried Daughters." One may print in the text the admirable letter in which a finger is put upon the heart of the question. We are told about the incompetence of women to deal with national affairs, but here we find a woman writing to the Times on a fundamental matter for the Imperialist, though no member of our Houses of Parliament has yet given any attention to it.
Sir: Only two of your numerous correspondents on this subject have really reached the root of the matter.
For more than thirty years the young men of the British Isles have found it increasingly difficult to make a living in their native land. Therefore there has been—and still is—a steady exodus of our male population to our Colonies, where they are unhampered by the many disadvantages prevailing here. Unfortunately they are obliged to leave the corresponding proportion of women behind. The result is a surplus of 1,000,000 women in Great Britain; but let me hasten to add (lest the mistake be laid upon Nature when it is not hers) that there is a proportionate shortage of 1,000,000 women in our colonies. I have recently been on a tour throughout Canada and the States, and was most struck by the scarcity of women in Western Canada—there are about eight men to one woman. And in America the saddest sight of all is the appalling number of half-castes, a blot on the civilization of the States, but a blot for which Europeans are responsible. The absence of white women is answerable for the worst type of population, so that in reality this is a very pressing Imperial question; and all those interested in the growth and future of Canada should turn their attention to it. For, unless we can induce the right sort of British women to emigrate we shall not have the Colonies peopled with our own race or speaking our own mother tongue.
Canada wants unmarried women, her cry is for our marriageable daughters, and each one would find her vocation out there.
Canadian men are one of the finest types of manhood possible, but they are too hard working to be able to return here in search of a wife. How gladly they would welcome the possibility of sharing their homes with a sister or a wife can only be guessed by those who have been there.
I am so greatly impressed with the advisability of encouraging English women to go out there that I strongly urge every suitable, healthy, and useful woman between the age of twenty-five and thirty-five to depart (if she has nothing to prevent her), and, through the British Emigration Society, Imperial Institute, I shall hope to do all that I can to assist them financially.
I am, sir,
Yours faithfully,
Sophie K. Bevan.
(Times, Dec. 24, 1909.)
It was of interest for the student of opinion and practice to compare this letter with another which appeared in the Times within a few days of it. This was an official letter from another Emigration Society and advocated the object, worthy in itself, of sending boys to Australasia. The letter ended with the following assertion regarding such boys: "They are the pioneers of Empire, they will be the founders of nations to come."
But the point exactly is that at present the nations to come in our Colonies are not coming: much more likely as nations to come in Australasia, as things go at present, are the Chinese and Japanese. Before nations can be founded, the co-operation of women is indispensable. We complain of the birth-rate in our Colonies, or at least those few persons do who know that parenthood is the key to national destiny. But we should complain of our own folly in so interfering with the natural balance of the sexes as to create pressing problems, wholly insoluble, alike at home and in our Colonies. At all times "England wants men," but wherever it wants men it wants women,—even in war we are now beginning to realize the importance of the trained nurse. There can be no future for our Colonies if they are to be inhabited by a bachelor generation, and the excess of women at home prejudices the stability of the heart of empire. Either we must cease exporting our boys and young manhood—which I certainly do not advocate—or our girlhood must go also—which I certainly do advocate. This is only one aspect of the question of vital imports and exports, upon which a book of vital importance for any nation, and above all, for England, might well be written.
Once again let us remind ourselves how cogently this question concerns the conditions of marriage. It means that the conditions are now such that in our Colonies a woman can exercise her rightful function of choosing the best man to be her husband and a father of the future, while at home this is possible only for the very few, and for vast numbers marriage is wholly impossible. I return, then, to the original proposition: are we to follow the advice of our gay, irresponsible sociologists so-called, who advise us to abolish monogamy in the circumstances, or are we to alter the alterable conditions which so disastrously prejudice and complicate that great institution in the heart of our empire to-day? Surely there can be but one answer to this question when we realize that all the causes of the present disproportion between the sexes at home—causes such as infant mortality, child mortality, war, and the exportation of one sex in great excess to the Colonies—are evil in themselves quite apart from their influence upon the practice of monogamy. Unfortunately, it is a modern custom in this age of transition for clever people to criticize on abstract, patriotic, sociological, quasi-ethical, and such like grounds, institutions and practices which irk them personally. Unfortunately, also, sociology is in the position, at present and yet for a little while inevitable, of shall we say medicine in its earliest stages, when anyone may be accepted as qualified who simply asserts that he is. Lastly, sociology is the most complicated of all the sciences because the chain of causation is longer; and very few of those who write or read about it have the patience to go back through psychology to biology and the laws of life in their analyses. An institution like marriage is criticized by those who think that it is an ecclesiastical invention of yesterday, and that what hands have made, hands can destroy, though marriage is æons older even than the mammalian order. They take transient, artificial conditions, lasting not for a second in the history of mankind seen as a whole, and simply accepting these conditions as part of the order of nature, they ask us to overthrow an institution which is immeasurable ages older than man himself. The odds are somewhat against them, one may surmise, but they may do considerable injury to their own age notwithstanding.
After having dealt with this fundamental biological condition of marriage, we must next turn to a psychological question which is scarcely less important. The human being is immensely complex both in composition and in needs, and the institution of monogamy does not become easier of maintenance as human complexity increases. Amongst the lower animals or even amongst the lower races of mankind, the relations between the sexes are mostly confined to one sphere, but amongst ourselves the problem is to mate for life complex individuals whose needs are many, ranging from the purely physical to the purely psychical. Thus it is a matter of common experience that whilst one woman meets one part of a man's needs, another meets another, and this of course with grave prejudice to monogamy. Some of the modern writers to whom allusion has been made suggest that these different needs want sorting out; that one woman is to be the intellectual companion of a man, and another the mother of his children. But though men and women are multiple and complex, they are in the last resort unities. These absolute distinctions between one need and another do not work out in practice. Anything which tends toward splitting up the human personality must be a disservice to it. Nor do we desire that women of the higher type, best fitted to be the intellectual companions of men, shall be those who do not contribute to the future of the race. From the eugenic point of view the mother is every whit as important as the father. I do not believe for a moment that these more or less definite proposals of Mr. Shaw and Mr. Wells are soundly based, and perhaps indeed it is not necessary to argue against them at greater length. Of more value is it to ask ourselves whether feminine nature may not prove itself quite equal to the task of meeting all the needs of masculine nature.
It seems to me that the right answer, in many cases at any rate, to the wife's question, how is she to retain the whole of her husband's interest, is hinted at in Mr. Somerset Maugham's recent play "Penelope"—she must be many women to him herself. And this the wise and happy woman is, though I do not think the phrase "many women" at all covers the variety of feeling to which the ideal woman can appeal.
The ideal love is that in which the whole nature is joined, in all its parts, upon one object which appeals alike to every fundamental instinct in our composition. The ideal woman does not require to be "many women" to a man of the right kind in the sense suggested in Mr. Maugham's play. She requires rather to be in herself at one and the same time or at different times, mother, wife and daughter. This condition satisfied, behold the ideal marriage.
It is probably fair to say that the three strongest and most important needs of a man's nature are those which are satisfied by mother, wife, and daughter. Primarily, perhaps, his wife must be to him his wife, his contemporary and partner, and there must be a physical bond between them. (Doubtless there are many happy marriages where this primary condition is not satisfied, this primitive form of affection being substantially absent, and its presence being proved non-essential: but such must be a state of unstable equilibrium at best, though the concession must be made.) Now the problem for the wife is to unite in her person and in her personality those other feelings which are part of normal human nature. Every man likes to be mothered at times, and it is for his wife to see that she performs that function better than any other; better even than his own mother. Where he finds merely physical satisfaction, he also finds, happy man, sympathy and comfort, protection and solace, balm for wounded self-esteem—everything that the hurt or slighted child knows he will find in his mother's arms.
Yet again, a man likes not only to be mothered but he likes to play the father. Let his wife be a daughter to him; let her be capable of shrinking, so to say, into small space, becoming little and confident and appealing and calling forth every protective impulse of her husband's nature.
To one who knew nothing of human nature it might sound as if we were asking more of womanhood than is within its capacity. But many a man and many a woman will know better. The right kind of woman can be and is mother, wife and daughter to her husband; and in every one of these capacities she strengthens her hold in the other two. Let the happily married examine their happiness, and they will discover that the Preacher was right when he said: "and a threefold cord is not quickly broken."
What has here been said is perhaps far more fundamental, just because it is based upon the primary instincts of humanity, than much of the ordinary talk about intellectual companionship and the like. What a man wants is sympathy, not intellectual companionship as such; what a man wants from another man, indeed, is sympathy, and not merely intellectual parity as such. The man who annoys us is not he who is incapable of appreciating our arguments, or he who does not share our knowledge, but he who is out of sympathy with us, and we find far more happiness with the rawest youth who, though entirely ignorant, is at least on our side—caring for the things for which we care. Capacity to share the same intellectual work may be a very pleasant addition to marriage, but it is no essential. What a man wants is that his wife shall be on his side in his pursuits. A boy does not require that his mother shall be able to play football with him, but he does require that she shall care whether his side wins or loses. The wife who is a true mother to her husband, in this sense, need not be concerned because she cannot, let us say, follow his working out of a geometrical proposition. Let her be on his side whether he fails or succeeds, thus playing the mother; and for the rest, if she asks him what those funny marks mean, she can play the daughter too, and hold his heart with both hands at once.
It is to be hoped that such arguments as these will persuade the reader to assent to our rejection of the psychological grounds on which it is proposed to abolish monogamy. We extend all the sympathy in the world to those whose fortune has been unfortunate, and we admit that the ideal does not always coincide with the real, but we deny that the supposed argument against monogamy is based upon a sound understanding of human nature, its needs and its unity in multiplicity.
If we are to stand by monogamy it behoves us to examine very carefully certain of its present conditions which militate against the full realization of its value for the individual and for the race. The disproportion of the sexes we have already discussed, and it may here be assumed that that grave obstacle to the success of monogamy is removed. There remains the fact, probably on the whole a quite new fact of our day, that under modern conditions a large proportion of women, whose quality we must consider, are declining monogamy as at present constituted.
Let it be granted that a certain number of these women are cranks, aberrant in various directions, unfitted for any kind of marriage, undesirable from the eugenic standpoint, and perhaps less often declining to be married than failing of the opportunity. There remains the fact that a large and probably increasing number of women are nowadays being educated up to such a standard of ideals that, even though their decision involves the sacrifice of motherhood, they cannot consent to marriage under present conditions. It is not that they are without opportunity, for many of them during ten or fifteen years of their lives may refuse one proposal after another, and spend the intervals in avoiding the onset of such attentions. It is not necessarily that the men who propose are of an inferior type. Such women may refuse many men who come well up to or far surpass the modern male standard. It is not that they are by any means without capacity for affection; nor can one be at all certain that in many cases they would not do better to marry, after all, heavy though the price may be.
What we have to recognize is that this is a phenomenon in every way evil. There must be something wrong with any institution which does not appeal to many members of the highest types of womanhood. Perhaps in certain of its details this institution must be an anachronism, a survival from times to which it may have been well suited when the development of womanhood was habitually stunted, but inadequate to satisfy the demands of fully developed womanhood in our own days. Now from the eugenic point of view it is of course the finest kind of women that we desire to be the mothers of the future—the more and not the less fastidious, those who are capable of the highest development, those who hold themselves in the highest honour, those who are least willing to renounce their possession of themselves.
Men are to be heard who say that this is all nonsense; that it is natural for women to surrender themselves, that motherhood is a splendid reward, and that they are handsomely paid as well in material things. But how many men would be willing to marry on the conditions with which marriage is offered to a woman? How many men would be willing to surrender their possession of themselves to an owner for life, so that at no future hour can they have the right to privacy? Of course if the conditions for marriage were for a man what they are for a woman, scarcely any men would marry, and men would very soon see to it that these conditions were utterly altered. They are conditions imposed in a past age by the stronger sex upon the weaker, and no moral defence of them is possible. It may be argued, and might long have been argued, that a practical defence of them is possible, but that is undermined in our own time when we find that under these conditions marriage is declined by a large number of the best women. The practical argument is now the other way. In the interests of elementary justice, of marriage, of the individual and of the race, the conditions of marriage must be so modified that they shall be equal for both sexes, and that the best members of both sexes shall find them acceptable. This last is of course the fundamental eugenic requirement.
The initial criticism of some will be, no doubt, that many men who now marry will decline the bargain. But surely we need not care at all—if the right kind of men accept it. As for the others, in the coming time, when we take more care of our womanhood, and when they are deprived of the economic weapon, they may go whither they will, their non-representation in the future of the race being precisely what we desire.
Women, then, are entitled to demand that the conditions of marriage be so modified as, above all things, to allow them the possession of themselves as the married man has possession of himself. The imposition of motherhood upon a married woman in absolute despite of her health and of the interests of the children is none the less an iniquity because it has at present the approval of Church and State. It is woman who bears the great burden of parenthood, and with her the decision must rest. It is idle to reply that this is impossible, for it is possible, as there are not a few happy wives throughout the civilized world to bear testimony. Every new life that comes into being is to be regarded as sacred from the first. The accident of birth at a particular stage in its development does not in the slightest degree affect this ethical principle, as even the law, for a wonder, recognizes. The full acceptance of the principle that woman must decide is, I am convinced, the only right and effective way in which to abolish altogether the dangers at present run by the life which is at once unborn and unwanted. The decision must be made once and for all before the new life is called into initial being, and the last word must lie with her who is to bear it. I am strengthened in the enunciation of this principle by the reflection that it would be ridiculed and condemned by the vote of every public-house and music-hall throughout the civilized world.
Let it be observed that in thus allowing the wife the possession of her own person, we are giving her only what her husband possesses, and that her possession of herself is of vastly more moment to her than his own liberty to him. Nothing more than sheer equality is being claimed for her, and the claim in her case has a double strength, since it is made valid not only by her own interests but by those of the future. The future must be protected, and therefore she who is its vessel must be protected. This is no more than the sub-human mother everywhere has as her birthright, and however much this teaching may offend the common male assumption that a wife is a form of property, the future certainly holds within itself the establishment of this principle.
The question of divorce is so important that we must defer it to the next chapter.
We have briefly alluded to the question of the wife's possession of herself. We must now refer to the question, scarcely less important, of her possession of her own property and her claims upon her husband's. It is difficult for the present generation to realize that very few decades have passed since the time when everything which a woman possessed became, when she married, the property of her husband. That is now a question which there is no need to discuss, but there remains a very great issue, lately become prominent, and suggested by the popular phrase, the endowment of motherhood.
We should obviously be false to our first principles if we did not assent with all our hearts to the fundamental principle expressed by this phrase. If it is necessary that the wife be protected as a wife, it is even more necessary that she be protected as a mother. There are twelve hundred thousand widows in this country at the present time, and of these a large number stand in unaided parental relation to a great multitude of children. I showed some years ago that, as we shall see in more detail in a later chapter, alcohol makes not less than forty-five thousand widows and orphans every year in England and Wales. Nothing can be more certain than that, in the interests of all except the worthless type of man, the economic protection of motherhood is an urgent need, less open to criticism perhaps than any other economic reconstruction proposed by the reformer. Some will argue, of course, that the State is to look after children directly, but I, for one, as a biologist, have no choice but to believe that the way to save children is to safeguard parenthood, and I cannot question that our duty is to provide the mother with the necessary means for performing her supreme function, whether she has a living husband or is a widow or is unmarried.
The question remains, how is this to be done, and whence is the money to be obtained?
Here we join issue with those Socialist writers who advocate the endowment of motherhood and give it their own meaning; and that is why in a preceding paragraph the word fundamental has been emphasized, since in the endowment of motherhood as understood by socialists there are two principles, one which I call fundamental, and a second—that the endowment shall be by the State—which now falls to be considered. I do not see how any one can challenge the following sentences from Mr. H. G. Wells:
"So the monstrous injustice of the present time which makes a mother dependent upon the economic accidents of her man, which plunges the best of wives and the most admirable of children into abject poverty if he happens to die, which visits his sins of waste and carelessness upon them far more than upon himself, will disappear. So too the still more 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, will disappear."[18]
But the remarkable circumstance is that Mr. Wells proposes to remedy these consequences of, for instance, "sins of waste and carelessness," not by dealing with those sins but by the simple method that "a woman with healthy and successful offspring will draw a wage for each one of them from the State so long as they go on well. It will be her wage. Under the State she will control her child's upbringing. How far her husband will share in the power of direction is a matter of detail upon which opinion may vary—and does vary widely amongst Socialists." How far a father is to share in directing his children's upbringing is "a matter of detail," we are told. The phrase suffices to show that whatever we are dealing with here is either sheer fantasy or else thinking of so crude a kind as to be unworthy of the name. Since early in the history of the fishes paternal responsibility has been a factor of ascending evolution. It has ever been a more and more responsible thing to be a father. It is now proposed to reduce fatherhood to the purely physiological act—as amongst, shall we say, the simpler worms; and the proposal is only "a matter of detail."
Probably we had better go our own way, and waste no more time upon this kind of thing. There remains to answer our question, how is motherhood to be endowed; and the answer I propose is by fatherhood. Motherhood is already so endowed in many a happy case. There are quite a number of men to be found who take such a remarkable pride and interest in their own children that their "share in the power of direction" is a real one, and would never occur to them to be "a matter of detail." They regard their earnings, these unprogressive fathers, as in large measure a trust for their wives and children, and expend them accordingly. They are not guilty of "sins and waste and carelessness"; and some of them are even inclined to question whether they should pay for the results of such sins on the part of other men: and since those who believe in the "fetish of parental responsibility," to quote the favourite Socialist cliché, can show that this is not a fetish but a tutelary deity of Society, whose power has been increasing since backbones were invented, they may be well assured that the last word will be with them.
What we require is the application of the principle of insurance; we must compel a husband and father to do his duty, as many husbands and fathers do their duty now without compulsion. We must regard him as responsible in this supremely important sphere, as we do in every other. Doubtless, this will often mean some interference with his "sins of waste and carelessness"; and so much the better for everybody. Those who prefer to be wasteful and careless had best remain in the ranks of bachelorhood. We have no desire for any representation of their moral characteristics in future generations, but if they do marry they must be controlled. Meanwhile our champions of paternal irresponsibility are having things all their own way. Every year more children are being fed at the expense of the State, and there is no one to challenge the father who smokes and drinks away any proportion of his income that he pleases.
Perhaps we may now attempt to sum up the suggestion of this chapter. It is based upon a belief in the principle of monogamy—without, as some would assert, a credulous acceptance of all the present conditions of that institution. The principle underlying it may be right and impossible of improvement, but our practice may be hampered by any number of superstitions, traditions, injustices, economic and other difficulties, which nevertheless do not invalidate our ideal.
Therefore, instead of proposing to abolish monogamy or that great principle of common parental care of children, the support of motherhood by fatherhood, which is perfectly expressed in monogamy alone, let us seek rather, in the interests of the future—which will mean proximately in the interests of woman, the great organ of the future—to make the conditions of marriage such that it best serves the highest interests. We need not cavil at those who look upon marriage as a symbol of the union between Christ and His Church, but we must look upon it also as a human institution which exists to serve mankind and must be treated accordingly. We are quite prepared to accept in its place any other institution which will serve mankind better, and we adhere to monogamy only because such an alternative cannot be named.
We are to regard any disproportion in the number of the sexes as inimical to monogamy. We know that in the past, when there has been a great excess of women, as owing to chronic militarism, polygamy has been the natural consequence; and we must recognize that such an excess of women at the present day is a predisposing cause, if not of polygamy, of something immeasurably worse. The causes of that excess of women have therefore been examined in some degree, and our duty of opposing them is laid down as a fundamental political proposition.
We then discussed and criticized a second argument for polygamy, based upon the assumption that a man requires more from women than one woman can afford him. The answer to that argument is that many women exist who meet all their husbands' needs and satisfy all their instincts, and that for this end the intensive education of woman's intellect is not a necessary condition. It may be added that if the race is to rise, the highest type of women as well as the highest type of men must be its parents, the mothers being exactly as important as the fathers on the score of heredity. Any attempt, therefore, to split up womanhood, so that the lower types shall become the mothers, and the higher the companions of men, is a directly dysgenic proposal, opposing the great eugenic principle that the best of both sexes must be the parents of the future.
When we find, therefore, that marriage under present conditions does not satisfy many of the highest kinds of women, we must ask whether their dissatisfaction is warranted, and if, as we do, we find it based upon the fact that the present conditions are grossly unjust to women, we must modify those conditions so that, at the very least, the wife and mother shall not have the worst of them.
Finally, whatever we may fail to achieve because, for instance, of some fundamental facts of human nature against which it is vain to legislate, at least we have economic conditions under our control, and control them we must, so that, whoever shall be in a position of economic insecurity, at least it shall not be the mothers of the future. Our first concern must be to safeguard them, whosoever else is inconvenienced. In deciding how this is effected we are to be guided by that great fact of increasing paternal responsibility which is demonstrated by the history of animal evolution since the appearance of the earliest vertebrates, and of which marriage, in all its forms, is at bottom the human and social expression. We are to recognize that if sub-human fathers are in any degree held by nature responsible with their mates for the care of their offspring, much more should this be true of man, "made with such large discourse, looking before and after," who is to be held responsible for all his acts, and most of all for those most charged with consequence. The man who brings children into the world is responsible to their mother and through her to society at large, which must see to it that that responsibility is not evaded. At present in England the working man spends on the average not less than one-sixth of his entire income on alcoholic drinks, whilst society yearly pays for the feeding of more of his children. But it is not good enough that the father shall swallow the interests of the future in this fashion. As the State in Germany takes a percentage of his earnings in order to protect him against the risks of the future, so we must see to it that the necessary proportion of his earnings is devoted towards discharging the responsibilities which he has incurred.
A notable consequence must follow from many such reforms as this chapter suggests. The marriage rate must fall, and the birth-rate, already falling, must fall much further; and so assuredly in any case they will; nor need anyone be alarmed at such a prospect. Even from the point of view of quantity, the future supply of "food for powder," and so forth, the question is not how many babies are born, as people persist in thinking, but how many babies survive. For seven years past I have been preaching, in season and out of season, that our Bishops and popular vaticinators in general are utterly wrong in bewailing the falling birth-rate, whilst the unnecessary slaughter of babies and children stares them in the face. How dare they ask for more babies to be similarly slain! It may be permitted to quote a passage written several years ago. "My own opinion regarding the birth-rate is that so long as we continue to slay, during the first year of life alone, one in six or seven of all children born (the unspeakably beneficent law of the non-transmission of acquired characters permitting these children to be born amazingly fit and well, city life notwithstanding), the fall in the birth-rate should be a matter of humanitarian satisfaction. Let us learn how to take care of the fine babies that are born, and when we have shown that we can succeed in this, as we have hitherto most horribly failed, we may begin to suggest that perhaps, if the number were increased, we might reasonably expect to take care of that number also. Babies are the national wealth, and in reality the only national wealth; and just as a sensible father will satisfy himself that his son can take care of his pocket-money, before he listens to a demand for its augmentation, so, as a people, we are surely responsible to the Higher Powers, or our own ideals, for the production of proof that we can take care of the young helpless lives which are daily entrusted to us, before we cry for more. It would be easy to quote episcopal denouncements regarding the birth-rate, but I am at a loss for references to similarly influential opinions about the slaughter of the babies that are born—a matter which surely should take precedence. May I, in all deference, commend for consideration a parable which always comes to my mind when I read clerical comments on the birth-rate, without reference to the infant-mortality? It was figured by the Supreme Lover of Children that a wicked servant, entrusted with a portion of his master's wealth to turn to good account, went and hid it in the earth. He was not rewarded by the charge of more such wealth. We, as a people, are entrusted with living wealth, and, whilst we demand more, we go and bury much of it in the earth—whence, alas! it cannot be recovered. Not an increase of opportunity, thus wasted, was the reward of the unprofitable servant, but to be cast into outer darkness. Is there no moral here?"
Very distinguished recent authority may be quoted in favour of this principle. At the Annual Public Meeting of the Academy of Sciences, held in Paris in December, 1909, Professor Bouchard discussed the question of the population of France, and came to the conclusion that the birth-rate "depended upon social conditions which it was difficult if not altogether impossible to modify, and in these circumstances the alternative remedy was to reduce the number of deaths."
It must surely be plain that those reforms in the conditions of marriage which have been advocated in this chapter will meet this need, and are not necessarily to be feared even by those who, in this matter, devote their solicitude entirely to the question of numbers, quality apart. For the eugenist who is primarily concerned with quality these reforms are surely unchallengeable.