A Vision of the Future, Based on the Application of Ethical Principles

by Jane Hume Clapperton

Contents

CHAP.		PAGE
	Initial Chapter—Happiness	[1]
Part I—Economics in Modern Life
I	The Industrial Revolution	[23]
II	Organized Industry	[51]
Part II—The Physiological Aspects of the Subject
I	The Law of Population	[79]
II	The Problem of Sex	[97]
III	Eugenics or Stirpiculture	[114]
IV	Marriage	[131]
V	Parentage	[149]
Part III—Abnormal Humanity
	The Elimination of Crime	[163]
Part IV—Evolution of the Emotions
I	The Sentiments of Individual Rights and Social Justice	[185]
II	Rapacity, Pride, Love of Property	[202]
III	Personal Jealousy, National Patriotism	[218]
	Part V—Education, or Direct Training of Childhood to the Civilized Habit of Mind	[237]
Part VI—Conditions in Aid of Happy Life in a Developing Civilization
I	The Needs of Adolescence	[257]
II	Domestic Reform	[268]
Part VII—Religion and Religious Life
	Primal Elements in Humanity’s Evolution	[287]
	Summary	[319]
	Synopsis	[325]

INITIAL CHAPTER
HAPPINESS

The ultimate value of all effort is the production of happiness, and objects excite our interest in so far as we believe them to be conducive to that great and ultimate consummation of existence—Happiness.—J. C. Chatterji.

The age in which we live is one of great activity and general movement. We are passing out of the mindless, genetic, into the rational, conscious epochs of evolution; and while, at every stage of human history, right conduct depends objectively on relatively true thinking, and subjectively, on good impulses, a transitional period such as the present demands special efforts to attain to an adequate and clear conception of the problems of life.

If no correct philosophy of life comes to birth in the thinking centres of our social organism, general conduct will continue harmful to many and inimical to progress.

How may the truth of a philosophy be tested? No better answer, I think, can be given than that of Buddha, of whom it is chronicled that he said in reference to a projected philosophy—“After observation and analysis if it agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.” Our theory of life must appeal to the developed reason of civilized man and carry a conviction of its truth. Moreover, it must be all-embracing. Sectional aims and aspirations will never suffice. The aim must be universal, i.e., directed to the well-being of all mankind.

In view of the question: “What is the primary object of human life?” two significant facts are apparent. First, the perpetual aim, conscious or instinctive, of man, as of all physical beings, is to compass the satisfaction of his desires, viz., contentment. Second, however diverse and conflicting may seem the opinions held by popular teachers on the subject, there is nevertheless an essential unity. For all point to some kind of happiness, in the present or future, for oneself, or others, for individuals, or for the race, as the ultimate end of existence.

A close observation of actual life—apart from theories of duty—reveals incontestably that the instinct to seek pleasure and avoid pain is universal and paramount. It is the general force ruling individual conduct. A child shrinks from lessons and seeks play because the one causes painful effort, the other gives pleasurable sensations, unless there are the beginnings of an intellectual sense and the child is what we call studious; in that case the sense of effort is overcome by the pleasure of learning, and there is no unwillingness. Or when the representative faculty is strong, the thought of a parent’s or teacher’s approval may be so clear in the young mind as to make the future happiness counterbalance the present effort. But it is always pleasure at the moment, or pleasure in anticipation, or fear of punishment, viz., avoidance of pain, that gives the stimulus to work. The human nature of a tender mother is much the same. She hates to hear her offspring cry, she loves to see them smile. She seems to sacrifice herself to them, but in reality it is not so; for her greatest pains and pleasures reach her through them. Her personal desires, her dearest hopes, are centred in her children. She is proud of their acquirements, ambitious for their future, happy in their success. When she strives to check and discipline them, it is because she dreads, for them and for herself, some baneful consequences should she refrain. She does not act for a selfish end. Her nature is more complex, far wider and deeper than the child’s; but her action is essentially the same. She is avoiding painful and seeking pleasurable sensations, present and future, for herself and her children.

Nor with the poor man is the position different. The pain of hunger or the dread of hunger, for himself or those beings whom he loves, stimulates to a life of continuous and wearing toil. If he submit to present pain, it is that he may avoid remote pain, and secure the satisfaction of his most pressing wants.

The leisured classes are differently situated. With conditions of life that place them above the struggle for subsistence, they seek enjoyment according to individual character and tastes. Whatever interests the mind and stirs the emotions pleasurably will be pursued. We speak of this and that career as guided by genius, ambition, benevolence, and so forth, but in every case these qualities of mind have pushed choice in the direction which will gratify the individual.

If we say goodness, not happiness, is the proper aim of life, we must allow that goodness means the aiding to bring happiness to mankind. Religions signifying less than this are unworthy the name of religion. Now it is emphatically the good who keenly suffer in the midst of an evil social state where poverty, misery and crime abound. It has been truly said—“The contrast between the ideal and the actual of humanity lies as a heavy weight upon all tender and reflective minds.” These perceive that goodness, in their own case, has depended largely on the conditions of their lives, while thousands of their fellow-creatures have had little scope for goodness, because born and brought up in degraded, vile conditions they had no power to escape from. It is no consolation to the good to point to a future happy state and to immortality for themselves. The actual is what concerns them. Their feelings get no rest, their intellects surge with perpetual efforts to conceive some means of radical reform, some method to secure more goodness and more happiness for all, i.e. for every woman, man and child, alive in the present day.

Turning now to published opinions concerning the object of life, Carlyle taught that conscientious work was the main business of civilized man. “Be indifferent,” he cried, “alike to pleasure and pain; care only to do work, honest, successful work (no futilities) in this hurly-burly world.” He directed attention from abstract ideals of the future to the actual life of the present, pointing out the miseries and shams of the evil social state and powerfully inveighing against its corruptions. To maintain an outward existence of active usefulness and an inward state of quietism and stoicism was Carlyle’s conception of an individual’s duty, but while there was to be no seeking for personal reward he believed this course would result in blessedness, and blessedness meant something purer, nobler, more desirable than happiness. If we take his own history set forth in the Reminiscences as carrying out this theory, we find that in his case it broke down. He toiled and plodded, doing successful work to the end of what appeared a noble, victorious career, but the blessedness never came, or if it did, it was not nobler and purer than happiness. It was a gloomy state, bankrupt of hope and full of querulous, dissatisfied egotism.

George Eliot gave us no theory of life in any of her works of genius. The action of her influence is, however, unmistakeable. It was to develop social and sympathetic feeling, to make individuals tolerant and tender towards their fellows, judging none without due regard to his or her surroundings. She has accustomed her thoughtful readers to the scientific aspect of human nature and social life, to watch the manifold relations between the two, the action and interaction of forces without and within, and to see the continuity of causation along with the reforming effect of ceaseless changes. The evolutional conception of life underlies all her work. The pictures are realistic, there is no false colouring and vain delusions, no perfection of character—but aspiration, effort, broad humanity—and no perfect happiness attained. She indicated, however, that the social state wants altering, and readjustments there would conduce to nobler life and greater happiness. She hoped for progress by gradual changes in the outward social system and in inward human nature. “What I look to,” she once said, in conversation with a friend, “is a time when the impulse to help our fellows shall be as immediate and irresistible as that which I feel to grasp” (and as she spoke she grasped the mantelpiece) “something firm if I am falling.” Although George Eliot formulated no theory I conceive she held the belief that happiness for all at all times is the object of life, and to be arrived at, chiefly, through the development of the altruistic or sympathetic side of human nature.

Some writers teach that culture is most to be desired. The rapid growth of wealth in this country has forced upwards in the social scale a class of people destitute of culture and refinement. This class dominates society and takes the lead in fashion. Luxury and ostentation are everywhere prominent; extravagant modes of living prevail without the comfort of the former simpler and more genial modes, and this is side by side with poverty and destitution that do not decrease. Patronage, with its demoralizing influence on both classes, is the most conspicuous bond between the wealthy and the poor, and vulgarity of mind characterizes the age. There is little to surprise us in the fact that gentle, refined natures withdraw from public life into a narrow sphere, not necessarily a selfish one, but a sphere bounded and circumscribed by their own personal tastes and temperaments. Finding solace in intellectual pursuits and a pure elevated enjoyment in the study of art and literature, they adopt the theory that culture is the proper business of man. Sweetness and light have been held up as the panacea for all the ills of life and the “elevation of the masses” as the true social progress.

Other teachers, thinking less of intelligence than of moral sentiment, point to perfection of character as the aim of life. They recognize the marked diversity in human nature. Some intellects are slow and dull, incapable of being kindled into fervour or brightened into swift reflection, and culture for such is hopeless. But in God’s sight, surely, all men are equal. Birds without song have brilliant plumage to compensate the defect, and so with man. The “law of compensation” holds throughout humanity they have said, and, for the most part, hearts are deep and tender even when heads are dull. Our finest works of literature and art may fail to give one pleasurable sensation for lack of the special faculty to apprehend their beauty, but kindness makes the whole world kin. When the noble, generous, sympathetic side of human nature is appealed to there comes a quick response. Happiness is the aim of life, but happiness implies excellence of character, the emotional and moral elevation of all mankind.

That Ruskin’s views were similar to the above we learn from his Crown of Wild Olive. “Education,” he says there, “does not mean teaching people to know what they do not know—it means teaching them to behave as they do not behave. It is not teaching the youth of England the shape of letters and the tricks of numbers, and then leaving them to turn their arithmetic to roguery and their literature to lust. It is, on the contrary, training them into the perfect exercise and kingly continence of their body and souls by kindness, by watching, by warning, by precept and by praise—but, above all, by example.”

From the field of modern science there has come as yet no direct teaching on the subject of life’s duties and purpose, but two of our eminent scientists have thrown out hints that are important and significant. The late Professor Huxley says of his own career: “The objects I have had in view are briefly these—To promote the increase of natural knowledge and forward the application of scientific method to all problems of life—in the conviction that there is no alleviation for the sufferings of mankind except veracity of thought and action and the resolute facing of the world as it is when the garment of make-believe by which pious hands have hidden its uglier features is stripped off.” (Methods and Results, Essays by Thomas M. Huxley.)

Professor Sir Oliver Lodge has stated that new paths of investigation are opening up to science. Telepathy, clairvoyance and some other allied psychic states have been tested and found in the range of actual fact. They reveal qualities in man which although special to a few individuals only, are latent it may be in all, and point to an unknown province of nature to which man seems related independently of his five senses. It becomes evident that by the “resolute facing of the world as it is,” science is altering our conception of man’s existence and nature, and extending our vista of his future.

Positivist thinkers, who base their teaching on materialistic philosophy, have bright anticipations for the human race, although ages may elapse before the realization of their hopes; and the existence of poverty and misery in our midst is fully recognized, graphically described, and feelingly deplored. The exponents of Positivism are eloquent, cultured, refined. We want a new religion, they say, and without that, no rapid progress can be made. The public mind is all at sea, floating in a chaos of unfixed beliefs, and to reach settled convictions and formulate a creed is the crying need of our times. Religion is a scheme of thought and life whereby the whole effort of individual men and societies of men is concentrated in common and reciprocal activity with reference to a Superior Being which men and societies alike may serve. The Superior Being is collective humanity, and men’s true business is to understand and seek to perfect human nature and the social state.

A marked feature of present-day French literature, we are told, is a reaction of religious sentiment against the rule of scientific naturalism, and religious sentiment dominates in the strangely pathetic and fascinating journal of the Swiss author, Amiel, which has been widely read. “To win true peace,” says Amiel, “a man needs to feel himself in the right road, i.e., in order with God and the Universe. This faith gives strength and calm. I have not got it. Sybarite and dreamer,” so he addresses himself, “will you go on like this to the end for ever, tossed backwards and forwards between duty and happiness, incapable of choice and action? Is not life the test of our moral force? Are not inward waverings temptations of the soul?” To the question—Will all religions be suppressed by science? he replies: “All those that start from a false conception of nature, certainly,” and adds reflectively: “If the scientific conception of nature prove incapable of bringing harmony to man, what will happen?” To which he answers: “We shall have to build a moral city without God, without an immortality of the soul.” Then, protesting against Emil de Laveleyes’ notion that civilization could not last without belief in God and a future life, he exclaims: “A belief is not true because it is useful; and it is truth alone—scientific, established, proved and rational truth—which is capable of satisfying now-a-days the awakened minds of all classes.”

I have here presented what is only a meagre reflection of portions of our mental atmosphere, but I know of no clearer, more definite thoughts emanating from influential teachers calculated to throw light on the great enigma of life. It may seem to my readers that on these mental heights unanimity exists as little as on the lower planes of man’s discordant impulses, his confused and conflicting actions. Clearly we have no philosophy of life as groundwork to orderly personal and social action, no religion of vital power to bind the nations in one, no moral code adapted to the complexities of our social relations, and, above all, no steady belief in a universal love to sweeten society from end to end and create the requisite medium in which alone the nobler qualities of human nature will bud and blossom.

Nevertheless the diverse opinions held by the above thinkers are not irreconcilable. Carlyle’s “blessedness” is the feeling of harmony with the divine order of development in humanity and the universe, therefore it is identical with Amiel’s “true peace.” The Positivists’ “Supreme Being” is the perfected man whose endowments of sympathetic fellowship, emotional sweetness, intellectual light, moral strength, kingly continence of body and soul, and knowledge of truth are specialized and pointed to by George Eliot, Ruskin, Huxley and others. All have simply given expression to aspiration from the subjective side of their human nature conformably to the evolutionary process within themselves, and the attitude of mind produced thereby in each. Partial, but not contradictory views, characterise those thinkings. Beneath superficial differences there lurks a unanimous belief that harmony of life with conditions—viz., happiness, is the legitimate aim of life. A Humanity steadily moving in a given direction may be infinitely varied in detail, and since the correct philosophy of life must be a wide generalization embracing all, we need not wonder at its slowness to appear. Modern nationalities are only now emerging from the individualistic to pass into the socialistic stage of industrial development. Our popular writers and teachers, springing from a specialized class—not the main body of the people—instinctively show their limitations by individualistic or sectional modes of thought. Mark, for instance, the insufficiency, nay, the pathetic absurdity of the thought—Culture will cure the ills of life, in face of the fact that thousands in our midst to-day possess no intellectual desires whatever, while the appetites belonging to their physical nature which forms the very basis of life have never been properly met and satisfied.

In setting forth a definition of happiness we have to recognize the marvellous complexity of human nature. We have to take into account not only variations distinctive in, and native to, separate individuals, but the gradations and variations within each individual arising from progress, or the reverse, in his or her outward condition and inward development. Contentment means the satisfaction of desire. But desire may be directed to the physical plane, the emotional plane, the mental plane, the spiritual plane. The harmony of all life is happiness, and brings blessedness or peace.

Having shown that practically infants, children, young men and women, adults and old people of every social class are similarly engaged in seeking happiness, each according to his tastes and tendencies controlled by his personal, social and spiritual development; having shown also that thinkers and writers offer no condemnation, I proceed to point out that this universal habit is in harmony with evolution. It tends to personal evolution, i.e., to expansion and elevation of character and capacities. Moreover, it tells favourably on general life. It tends to social evolution, i.e., to expansion and elevation of the social organism or collective society so long as the method pursued by each individual is unhurtful to the other organic units incorporated in that society.

To seek to attain happiness at the expense of other human beings whose happiness is thereby sacrificed, is of course evil. It is anti-social, or vicious, i.e., it is wholly adverse to personal evolution and social evolution, in other words, to general progress. But given a society that has carefully surrounded its units by conditions of personal freedom (harmonious with general well-being) in which to seek innocent happiness, the normal man or woman on a level with the average of his race is not in any danger of preferring the vicious course.

That we confuse a wholesome love of pleasure with selfishness arises from the fact that individual selfishness unhappily is developed by our present evil system of life. Notwithstanding, it is easy to show the real value of pleasure by its ready alliance with unselfishness. A significant feature is this—people take pleasure in uniting for pleasure. Sensuous pleasures are taken as a rule, socially, it being recognized that to civilized man the presence of the enjoyment of others enhances his personal enjoyment. The physiological effect of pleasure is to promote health and activity. “Every pleasure raises the tide of life; every pain lowers the tide of life,” says Herbert Spencer. The pleasures of love are essentially and pre-eminently invigorating and social. It is only when they are selfishly pursued that evil creeps in, and what should produce the purest happiness becomes degraded into a source of misery.

It seems hardly necessary to point out further that asceticism and purism are immoral because directed against an element in happiness. Whenever science finds out means to alleviate suffering or free the condition of pleasure from accidental accompaniments that are evil, it is clearly the duty of man to hail the discovery and apply it that he may add to the sum of human happiness.

Before touching on environment, i.e., the social condition under which alone general happiness becomes possible, I may classify desires into primary and secondary in order to make the subject clearer. Primary desires are those common to all physical beings, the satisfaction of which (in man) is necessary to healthful ordinary social life. Secondary desires are those whose satisfaction is necessary to some individuals, but not to all.

Desires for food, clothing, shelter, also for work alternating with rest, and for love, belong to the first class. They are primary and fundamental. But desires that imply a development of cultured intellect, of delicate sensibilities, of high moral and emotional attainments, of aesthetic tastes, and of spiritual life are secondary desires, i.e., they are not common to all at the present stage of the evolution of man. That they may become so is devoutly to be desired; but if we expect to reach a high standard of life in the social organism without first securing for its individual units the satisfaction of primary needs, we indulge a vain delusion. Does a tree throw out fruitful branches before it is rooted in the soil at its base? Development depends on the satisfaction of primary needs, and proportionally to these being made secure will the satisfaction of the higher desires become necessary to happiness.

Now in relation to primary needs, the conditions which it is the duty of society as a whole to secure for the individual are, first: Freedom to act for the end of securing satisfaction of desire; second, opportunity for acquiring the means of satisfaction; third, ability to adopt the means; fourth, protection of life and action. And these conditions have a wide implication. The first implies some control of individual conduct as regards propagation, that each social unit may possess a sound constitution and the comfort of physical health. The second implies access to nature. The third implies education to give knowledge and skill. The fourth implies an organized society with an appropriate, scientifically arranged system of industry.

That our present confused industrial and social system—the survival of an archaic state—is inimical to happiness, few thinkers will deny. Discontent is not confined to the poor. Where wealth abounds there is little, if any, real happiness. “The towers of Westminster,” says Edward Carpenter, “stand up by the river, and within, the supposed rulers contend and argue.... The long lines of princely mansions stretch through Belgravia and Kensington; lines of carriages crowd the park; there are clubs and literary cliques and entertainments, but of the voice of human joy there is scarcely a note.... And I saw the many menacing, evil faces, creeping, insincere worm-faces, faces with noses ever on the trail, hunting blankly and always for gain; faces of stolid conceit, of puckered propriety, of slobbering vanity, of damned assurance.

“O faces, whither, whither are you going?

“No God, no truth, no justice, and under it all no love.

“O the deep, deep hunger!

“The mean life all around, the wolfish eyes, the mere struggle for existence, as of man starving on a raft at sea—no room for anything more.

“O the deep, deep hunger of love.”

This picture of the degradation and misery of rich and poor alike is essentially true to fact. Our collective life does not supply the necessary conditions for real happiness in any section of the community; and nothing less than a reconstruction of society and regeneration of its life will suffice to meet the wants of humanity. Immense efforts are put forth in philanthropy and benevolence. Enormous energy is expended in partial or sectional reforms; for quite correctly has it been said that “Reform tends to run on a single rail, the majority of people refusing to study society as an organism of organisms resting on biological law.” (John M. Robertson.) We make no attempt as yet, to prevent waste of energy, to focus the factors of meliorism, to mass them, to direct them straight to the causes of evil and apply them effectively there—and that, because we have no carefully constructed scheme of thought and life whereby the whole effort of individual men and societies of men is concentrated in common and reciprocal activity to the end of creating happiness for all.

Social regeneration is necessarily of a two-fold character, embracing action without and action within. The first—which I call objective, signifies collective action on the physical plane adapted to promote and sustain the healthful, happy vitality of a race expected to grow steadily and uniformly in physical, mental, moral and spiritual elevation. The second, which I call subjective, signifies collective action directed to the repression of all the unsocial desires of man—those selfish emotions and narrow affections that alloy the mental and moral structure of human beings and render it impossible to develop the spiritual side of Humanity. The Darwinian laws—supposed by many to be still applicable to man—had relation, not to happiness, but to the preservation of life and the continuance of the race in the genetic, unconscious period of evolution. It is in the conscious period or stage of evolution that happiness evolves. Our present system of social life, if system it can be called, is a chaos of conflicting interests, duties, thoughts, feelings, actions—a prison-house in which the finer qualities and attributes of man can scarcely exist.

Let us put forth all our strength to create out of this chaos “the garden in which we may walk.” Let us break down the walls of our prison-house till it “opens at length on the sunlit world and the winds of heaven.” (Edward Carpenter.)

PART I
ECONOMICS IN MODERN LIFE

The only safety of nations lies in removing the unearned increments of income from the possessing classes and adding them to the wage-income of the working classes or to the public income in order that they may be spent in raising the standard of consumption.—J. A. Hobson, Contemporary Review, August, 1902.

CHAPTER I
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

It is a leading thought in modern philosophy that in its process of development, each institution tends to cancel itself. The special function is born out of social necessities; its progress is determined by attractions or repulsions which arise in society, producing a certain effect which tends to negate the original function.—William Clarke.

If we view the physical aspects of existence in relation to happiness, it is obvious that the satisfaction of desires for food, clothing and shelter stands first in order of urgency in the life of nations.

That modern nationalities are very far from the attainment of this satisfaction of primary wants is lamentably evident to the eye of observers who examine the conditions in which the great majority of their members live. Food to the mass of the people is excessively dear. In order to buy it for his family, a workman has often to spend two-thirds of his weekly wage, leaving one-third only to meet the cost of shelter and clothing, and nothing at all for recreation and instruction.

If we add to this difficulty of satisfying the primary needs of a family on average wages, the frequent lack of employment with the consequent lack of any weekly income at all, and the prevalence of low wages, rightly termed starvation-wages, we have before us a picture of the utter inadequacy of our present industrial system to subserve general well-being.

It is necessary to understand something of our present industrial system, its foundations and evolution in the past, if we are to forecast the changes that will occur in the immediate future, when the fast-growing recognition of its manifold failings must inevitably bring about a different order of industry. Private property in land and in other essentials for the production of food, shelter, clothing, etc., lies at the basis of the present system; and since the direct object of private proprietors is not to satisfy the primary needs of the people, but to create individual profits, we cannot wonder that a system thus motived by selfishness works out in a miserable and wholly imperfect manner.

The industrial class may be broadly divided into two sections, employers and employed, while a few highly skilled workers, members of the professions of law, medicine, arts, letters, and science stand in a measure outside this category. Landlords and shareholders as such are an idle section of the community. They absorb the labour of a multitude of workers, while giving no personal service in return. Quite truly has it been said: “The modern form of private property is simply a legal claim to take year by year a share of the produce of the national industry without working for it.” (Fabian Essays, page 26).

In comparing past forms with the present forms of industry, a distinguishing feature of the latter is the number of great factories where workers toil long hours, usually in the tending of machines, to turn out for the private profit of their employers, vast quantities of goods destined for retail distribution all over the world. The large organizations of industry, so familiar to us, are of quite recent growth, and already show signs of a coming change as sweeping in its scope as any changes that have occurred in the past. Yet to listen to the expression of opinions that prevail in literary and upper class circles, one would suppose we had reached finality in our social system, and that the conventional tributes paid to proprietors of land and capital in the shape of rent and interest would, as a matter of course, remain legal to the end of time.

Now let us glance at the history of the past. For two centuries after the Norman conquest, intestine war and feudal oppressions embittered the life of the British labourer. He might be called from the plough at any moment to take up arms in his master’s quarrel, and if he sowed seed and saw his fields ripen, the harvest of his hopes might still be cut down by the sword of the forager, or trodden by the hoof of the war-horse. He was bondsman and slave, defenceless in the hands of the lords of the soil, who at best, protected him only in the barest necessities of a scanty livelihood—a hut without a chimney, its furniture a great brass pot and a bed valued at a few shillings. (Wade’s History of the Working Classes.) A change for the better came after the plague of 1348, and, when by perpetual warfare with France, men had become more valuable through diminution of their number.

King Edward the Third freed the bondsmen to recruit his armies, and enforced villeinry service was exchanged for service paid by wages—these, however, were ordinarily fixed by statute. In the middle of the eighteenth century wages stood at the ratio of about a bushel and a half of wheat for one week’s labour; by the middle of the nineteenth century they had fallen to what could only purchase one bushel of wheat. (Threading my Way, R. D. Owen, p. 220.) The cause of this change was that meanwhile, two clever men—Arkwright and Watt—had made discoveries which gave an impetus to industry beyond all previous experience. Mechanical aids to production were invented, and the consequent cheapening of products created more and more demand. Machinery and human labour side by side were under stress and strain to meet the call of new desires. Cotton and wool and flax were woven into fabrics and poured out of Great Britain to every quarter of the globe; capital was amassed, and wealthy capitalists bid against each other for more labour still. Agriculturists flocked into towns, factories sprang up in all directions, population rapidly increased, and children were sucked into the industrial maelstrom, for health and happiness were in no way considered when remunerative work was offered.

Outwardly the British world had altered. Internal warfare had passed away, and the war-horse was no longer visible in harvest-fields. The scene now presents a resemblance to a huge hive of bees industriously secreting and amassing honey for future use. Great Britain has assumed beyond her own shores a foremost place among civilized nations. The resources of her newly-created wealth seem boundless, and everywhere her power is felt. She can thin the ranks of her population, and swell her army to conquer and suppress the tyrant Napoleon, while keeping at work the enormous leviathan of her own trade and commerce by the deft fingers of her little children. Summer and winter find her tiny bees—infants of seven or eight—at labour in the factories from six a.m. to noon. One hour for dinner is allowed, and they toil on once more till eight o’clock at night.

Were these, then, the “good old times” of which we are proud? At all events they were the times in which England’s greatness was established and vast fortunes were built up, founded upon the industry of young children sweating in factories for thirteen hours a day.

“It was not in exceptional cases,” wrote Robert Dale Owen, when on a tour of inspection of factories with his father in 1815, “but as a rule, that we found children of ten years old worked regularly fourteen hours a day, with but half an hour’s interval for the midday meal, eaten in the factory.” In the fine yarn cotton mills, the “temperature usually exceeded 75 degrees,” and in all factories the atmosphere was more or less injurious to the lungs. In some cases “greed of gain had impelled mill-owners to still greater extremes of inhumanity, utterly disgraceful to a civilized nation.” Their mills were run fifteen, sometimes sixteen, hours a day, and children were employed even under the age of eight. “In some large factories, from one-fourth to one-fifth of the children were cripples or otherwise deformed. Most of the overseers openly carried stout leather thongs, and frequently we saw even the youngest children severely beaten.” (Threading my Way, p. 102.) At that period Robert Owen the elder expressed himself thus to the Earl of Liverpool: “It would be clearly unjust to blame manufacturers for practices with which they have been familiar from childhood, or to suppose that they have less humanity than any other class of men.” The system was what Robert Owen condemned, and he strained every nerve to bring about some alterations in the system. He wrote and spoke and agitated for the protection of children by law, and for their compulsory education, and he publicly exposed the ghastly evils that spring from competition unchecked by law, while left free to regulate itself at any amount of cost to life, health, and happiness.

After the lapse of about four years, the first point aimed at by Robert Owen was gained, and infants became protected by statute from gross oppression. His second point was gained in 1870, when the Government Bill for National Education was passed. And ever since the period of that noble, unselfish life, minds have everywhere been awakening to the truth of his third point, viz., that frightful evils inalienably belong to free industrial competition.

Owen proved that in the year 1816, the machine-saved labour in producing English fabrics—cotton, woollen, flax, and silk—exceeded the work which two hundred million of operatives could have turned out previous to the year 1760. (Threading my Way, p. 218.) The world was richer then to the extent of all this enormous producing power—a power, he thought, surely sent down from Heaven to set man free from the ancient curse that in the sweat of his brow should he eat bread. But what were the actual facts? There was no respite from toil for the workers, no freedom from the curse! Throughout the old and new world, senseless machinery competed with the living sons of toil, or, as Robert Owen expressed it, “a contest goes on between wood and iron on the one hand, human thews and sinews on the other—a dreadful contest, at which humanity shudders, and reason turns astonished away.” (Threading my Way, p. 218.) The problem presented was this: A recent rapid growth of wealth had enriched the few and left many in misery; nay more, it had lowered and pressed down the many to depths of degradation previously unknown. Were there no means by which mankind could unitedly work for the benefit of all, and all be made happy as the world grew richer? Political Economy suggested none, and Robert Owen turned from its futile study to that of the facts themselves. He was a manufacturer, in sympathy with employers as well as with employed. He had every opportunity for a practical understanding of the interests involved, and he gave years to the study of this question in a spirit of keen inquiry and ardent devotion to the cause. His ultimate conclusion was that in some form of socialism alone could a remedy for the existent evils of industrial life be found.

Henceforth he laboured to give to the world an object lesson in socialism. He embarked his fortune in bold experiments, which proved—as in the case of New Harmony—financial failures. Into the details of these failures I cannot now enter, nor have we to deal just yet with socialism as a remedy. My present purpose is to show the origin and reality of the evils inherent in the individualistic system of industry—evils on which the argument for socialism is based. And I must reiterate the statement made by John Stuart Mill in 1869, that the fundamental questions relating to property, and to the best methods of production and distribution—questions involved in socialism—require to be thoroughly investigated. Mr. Mill’s opinion regarding socialism was that in some future time communistic production might prove well-adapted to the wants and the nature of man, but a high standard of moral and intellectual education would first be necessary, and the passage to that state could only be slow.

Meanwhile the sufferings of the proletariat are as intense as in the days of Robert Owen. The problem which absorbed his energies and wrecked his fortunes remains as yet unsolved, and we, who live when a twentieth century has been entered upon, are daily surrounded by a mass of workers tied hand and foot by poverty and often weighed down by despair. And this is the case, notwithstanding the lapse of a long intermediate period of national prosperity; in spite, also, of the powers of science to enlighten manual labour, the intellectual efforts to advance education, and a boundless benevolence and sympathy ready to embrace all mankind, and give happiness to all, were only the right means devised wherewith to accomplish that end.[^[1]]

[1]. In the Scotsman of March 16, 1897, this paragraph occurs: “At the meeting of Edinburgh Parish Council yesterday, it was stated that pauperism is increasing, and pointed out that for the month ending 15th ult. there was an increase of 114 applications for individuals for relief, compared with the corresponding period last year!”

It was stated by Mr. Rowntree (whose investigations of this subject are widely known and respected) that one-fourth of the population of Great Britain lives in poverty, either primary or secondary; while 52 per cent. of the cases of primary poverty are due to the principal wage-earner receiving too low a wage to maintain his family in physical efficiency. (Evening News Report, March 22, 1903.)

Individual benevolence has failed, and that as completely as Robert Owen’s socialism, to cope with general poverty, and the method of Poor Laws has accomplished almost nothing.

In Robert Owen’s day the evils described in factory life belonged specially to Great Britain. That is not the limit, however, now. I need only refer my reader to Henry George’s picture of poverty dogging the footsteps of progress in America and to Professor Goldwin Smith’s corroborative words: “It is a melancholy fact, that everywhere in America we are looking forward to the necessity of a public provision for the poor.” And again: “There will in time be an educated proletariat of a very miserable and perhaps dangerous kind, for nothing can be more wretched and explosive than destitution with the social humiliation which attends it, in men whose sensibilities have been quickened and whose ambition has been aroused.”

The problem respecting appalling poverty in the midst of wealth (it is a poverty marring the happiness of the rich as well as the poor) cries out for solution. It forces itself upon public attention in the old world as in the new. There is no escape from it. The problem must be grappled with by educated reason, and solved by means of the patient exercise of a cold calculation of natural forces. Happily it is recognized in its evolutional aspects by many thinkers all over the world. Twenty years ago Charles Letourneau in his Sociology wrote: “In every country which enjoys the European system of civilization, the right of property has ever been in a state of evolution, always tending to give a greater degree of independence to the individual owner; in other words, the evolution is always worked in favour of individual egotism. Who can say that the evolution is now complete, or that we have yet realized the highest ideal system in the disposition of our property? A progressive evolution is, for every society, one of the conditions of existence. The right of proprietorship cannot, therefore, remain stationary.” The period that has elapsed since that passage was written has witnessed a widespread and strong growth of opinion upon these lines.

In the Contemporary Review of February, 1902, Mr. J. A. Hobson thus writes: “... The idea of natural individual rights as the basis of democracy disappears. A clear grasp of society as an economic organism completely explodes the notion of property as an inherent individual right, for it shows that no individual can make or appropriate anything of value without the direct continuous assistance of society.”

The right of proprietorship in land is the first principle to examine. The relation between land and life in its simpler aspects is clear and definite. All classes of land animals—man included—are immediately dependent for subsistence upon the produce of land, and when man emerges from slavery, another element, namely, labour, enters into the conditions of his life and becomes, with land, essential to his existence. Of food, fitted for the nourishment of man, uncultivated land produces little save some wild fruits and edible roots, and many wild animals, which he may eat if in hunting them down they do not eat him. But land placed under the additional forces of man’s physical and intellectual energies produces an immense variety of objects—a perfect wealth of raw material, vegetable, animal, mineral—which, yielding to further elaboration through his efforts and genius, all help to create for him a civilized life. This raw material, in short, supplied man with food, shelter, clothing, with the comforts and luxuries his developing nature demands, and with all necessaries to the existence of literature, science, and art.

Passing over the primitive forms of associated life—the nomad and pastoral—we come to the agricultural stage, when labourers on the land are manifestly the all-important social units. They sow, till, and reap the fields. They tend domestic animals, whose skins and wool are made into garments by other members of the group. But the latter depend for food and the raw materials of their industry on the cultivators, who are, if I may so express it, the foundation stones of the simple social structure. To whom does the land belong? To the whole group, and an annual division amongst the families for purposes of cultivation takes place, whilst weapons, fishing-boats, tools and other movables are the property of individuals.

Now observe, a change gradually occurs, a change from the communal possession of land to a system of the individual possession of land, and force is the sole cause of this change. External aggression has initiated militant activity, while, in the process of frequent resistance to invasion, and frequent aggression upon others, there is produced the class inequalities which distinguish a militant type of society and a system allowing of individual land-ownership. Land becomes private property in the hands of the bold and crafty, who compel the cultivation of the soil by the landless men of the group, and by prisoners of war spared on condition that they perform hard labour. The institution of slavery thus becomes established, and it is a leading factor in the promotion of civilization. Lords of the soil spend their energies in warlike activities, whilst protecting their slaves and serfs at labour. The produce of that labour is appropriated by the dominant class, and used for its own particular benefit. Its requirements extend much beyond the mere necessaries of existence that it yields to the workers, and slowly there uprises a new form of labour and a large class of labourers, producing a variety of commodities to gratify the desires of pomp-loving, barbaric chiefs.

Now this class, the labour of which is wholly absorbed by the chiefs, must be fed from the produce of the land. How is this accomplished? The chiefs, while exacting hard labour from the slaves and serfs, yield them only a bare living. But the proceeds of their labour, over and above the bare living of the producers, is very considerable. There is therefore a large surplus, which, appropriated by the chiefs as rent, is the source of their power. With it they support a large class of landless men engaged in ministering to their own specific wants. Moreover, this class groups itself around the castle of the chiefs, which are filled with military retainers, and here we have the beginnings of towns.

The town population increases steadily with the increase of the surplus produce from land under better conditions of cultivation. Markets and stores are instituted, and a commercial system is introduced. Barter gives way to the use of money, and the entire social organism expands and becomes more complex.

Anon, slavery disappears. But workers on the land—always the most necessary social units—remain poor as before. Competitors for work, in danger of starving, drive no hard bargain with masters who are in full possession of the soil, and able to forbid their growing even the simple fruits and grain required for a meagre living. For food enough to live, they readily pledge the labour of their whole lives, and since nature’s recompense for labour is liberal, there is an abundant surplus produce for landowners to grasp and employ as they choose. Into the towns it is sent, and there it stimulates progress—mental and material—and creates new departures in social life.

Class inequalities among town workers increase, and labour becomes organized. The mentally stronger dominate the weaker in the new fields of industry. They direct and control the production of commodities for the use of the dominant class, and succeed in acquiring a greater reward for their work than a meagre living. Out of the surplus produce of the land they become able to secure from their lords a portion which forms the foundation of wealth in a new social class—a class of landless capitalists who, possessing brain power and later money-power, become the supreme factors in altering social conditions. These men promote manufacture and commerce by action similar to the landholders’ methods of promoting agriculture. They press down their workers to a bare living, and take as profits all that competition permits of the results of the joint labour. These profits they apply to the satisfaction of their personal desires and the carrying out of their schemes of manufacturing and commercial enterprise. Finally, they indulge in luxurious living and emulate landholders in the purchase of valuable commodities, thus stimulating certain trades.

Meanwhile, through the intercourse of urban life, mental activity rapidly augments. Education is initiated, aptitude and skill are more and more prized and rewarded. Invention profoundly modifies the primitive modes of production, and genius aspires to understand and govern the forces of nature. One direction taken by mental activity eventuates in an important social force, viz., the Church, or religious organization. Many of the best minds in early ages were allied with the priesthood, and the Church’s desire for stately temples, gorgeous shrines, and decorative worship have enormously aided the outward development of architecture, sculpture, painting, and music, and the inward growth of aesthetic capacity. But priests and all whose labour is absorbed by the requirements of religious worship and the constructing of temples, must be fed on the produce of the land. The priesthood is maintained in leisure by rents, tithes, or the voluntary offerings of the people. It is freed from the necessity of industrial labour and military activity, and members within this large class have devoted their leisure to literature, history, philosophy, and art, thereby greatly advancing civilization.

Under increased stability of governments the organization becomes of a mainly industrial type. Nations now possess enormous wealth in the form of material commodities, wealth in the form of intellectual literature and the educational institutions that promote knowledge; wealth in the form of ornament—all that embellishes and makes beautiful the surroundings of human life; and all this wealth has come into existence through the natural action of evolutionary forces—an action creative, step by step, of a system of social interdependence and regulation. The prominent features of the system are: First, private property in land; second, great social inequality; third, poverty of manual labourers; fourth, a large town population, and a small or minimum peasant population. Its less prominent but no less decisive feature is the complete social subjugation of the poor by the rich.

The supports of the system through the whole process of its growth have been labourers on the land, and these labourers have scarcely at all partaken of the national wealth. The food they reaped formed the motor force vitalizing and energizing the evolving social organism. Food was the ruling power deciding the growth and extent of economic life, as well as the form of its development. But food-producers have never determined the destination of the surplus food, and in this fact lies the key to a great social problem which students of social science are bound to comprehend. The landholders—and these as a rule have not been workers on the land—have decided the destination of the surplus produce. Up to the present-day landlords—including the proprietors of coal, iron and other mines, capitalist employers of labour, the churches of the nation, and hereditary rulers—are at the fountainhead of modern civilization. It is through their action—caused mainly by selfishness, tyranny, pride, greed—that cultivators and operatives have been kept at maximum toil and been limited in number, while at the same time the land’s resources have developed and improved until land and labour united serve to support an enormous mass of population—individuals of entirely distinctive character, activities, social position and social worth, all alike in this one particular—they are daily and hourly consumers of the produce of the land.

A good harvest that is general over the world sends activity like an electric current through the economic system. A bad harvest, if universal, would cause universal depression; not agriculture alone must suffer, but manufacture, commerce, science, art, literature, education, recreation—for on the production of food depends the buying power of the whole trading world. It is true that modern countries are not maintained from their own food resources alone. Also, it is true that the machinery of exchange—money and our vast credit system—enter into the phenomena and confuse the student’s mind. Nevertheless, an all-important fact discloses itself on close investigation, viz., this—the relation of landlordism to modern civilization is not accidental, it is essential and causal.

As already shown, the general drift of the produce of the land has been into the towns; and thither also have migrated the labourers. Machinery and science applied to land cultivation lowered the amount of peasant labour required, but it did not lower the birth-rate. Surplus peasants have been driven by necessity from their homes to the centres of manufacturing industry, and, competing for work there with the operative class, have kept wages low and facilitated the enriching of capitalist employers. These men, actuated by personal desires, selfish ambition, and a tendency to mercantile speculation, use their wealth in extending the production of objects that minister to a life of luxury and refinement.

The older political economists mistakenly taught that “all capital, with a trifling exception, was originally the result of saving.” (J. S. Mill’s Political Economy, book 1, chap. 5.) Attention to the history of social evolution, however, proves the fact to be otherwise. Not individual saving, but social seizure, created capital. Its origin, as we have shown, was the surplus produce taken from producers and disposed of by a dominant class. It originated through the selfish quality of rapacity and not through the respectable virtue of prudence, as some capitalists would have us believe. The growth of capital has been enormous since the beginning of the industrial revolution; and at the present moment the riches of a comparatively small number of the owners of our land and capital are colossal and increasing. At the same time, there is no diminution of poverty among workers. Thirty per cent. of the five million inhabitants of London are inadequately supplied with the bare necessaries of life, and about a fourth of the entire community become paupers at sixty-five. I refer my reader to Sidney Webb’s pamphlet, The Difficulties of Individualism.

The supersession of the small by the great industry has given the main fruits of invention and the new power over nature to a small proprietary class, upon whom the mass of the people are dependent for leave to earn their living. The rent and interest claimed by that class absorbs, on an average, one-third of the product of labour. The remaining 8d. of the 1s. is then shared between the various classes co-operating in the production, but in such a way that at least 4d. goes to a set of educated workers numbering less than one-fifth of the whole, leaving four-fifths to divide less than 4d. out of the 1s. between them. “The consequence is the social condition we see around us.” (Ibid.)

Thus four out of five of the whole population—the weekly wage-earners—toil perpetually for less than a third of the aggregate product of labour, at an annual wage averaging at most £40 per adult, and are hurried into early graves by the severity of their lives, dying, as regards at least one-third of them, destitute, or actually in receipt of poor law relief.

In town and country, the operatives and peasants, who, united, form one large class engaged in manual labour, resemble Sinbad the Sailor, on whose shoulders rides the Old Man of the Sea. It is they who maintain our leisured classes. The proletariat carries on its back all the rich and their innumerable dependents, more than 300,000 soldiers, an immense navy, a million of paupers, a number of State pensioners, a multitude of criminals, His Majesty and the Royal Family, all Government officials and ecclesiastics—a vast host of unproductive consumers throughout society.

Slavery of the many for the comfort and enjoyment of the few! That is all man has attained to, so far, in the evolution of society. And no one who studies the facts of life can deny this impeachment of civilization: “All over the world the beauty, glory, and grace of civilization rests on human lives crushed into misery and distortion.” (Henry George.)

The extremity of contrast between rich and poor has no ethical justification. Under purely ethical conditions, every child born into a nation should have equal chances of life, comforts, and luxuries, with every other child. But, as we know, one British babe may be born to an income of £100,000 a year, and another to no income, but to a constant struggle for bare subsistence and a pauper’s grave at last. The system permitting this is ethically odious. Nevertheless, we have to recognize that, under non-ethical conditions, development has taken place, and we must accept the process as the natural, inevitable result of all prior conditions.

Man’s ethical nature itself is the product of a slow evolution, not yet so advanced as to require and create purely ethical social conditions. Changes in the future will proceed on lines of natural growth, as in the past, but with this supreme difference—the issues will be favourable to general happiness, the advance infinitely more rapid, because aided by conscious human effort.

All schemes of social reform that are revolutionary are widely chimerical to the thoughtful evolutionist, for were we suddenly to deprive our richer classes of property, privilege, and power, we should simply create a general abasement of our national civilization. Our upper classes, rendered effeminate by ill-spent leisure and all the artificial pleasures of a voluptuous and inane life, are incapable of directing civilization to the highest and noblest ends. Yet it is out of their midst that springs the demand for commodities ministering to all the amenities and refinements of a civilized life. It is refinement alone that demands refinement, culture that demands culture; and were the control of human labour to pass suddenly from the hands of the upper into those of the lower classes, which are still, in the mass, degraded and unenlightened, there would be no effective demand for these commodities, and the science and art implicated in their production would inevitably, though gradually, disappear.

Progressive evolution culminates in social justice, and the principle of private property in land, which implies an injurious monopoly in what is essential to human life (and is therefore socially unjust), is certain to be consciously relinquished at a given stage of the nation’s intellectual and moral advance.

Having traced the evolution of the individualistic system of industry, and seen that the inherent evils of the system have their source in the private ownership of land and capital, which “necessarily involves the complete exclusion of the mere worker, as such, from most of the economic advantages of the soil on which he is born, and the buildings, machinery, and railways he finds around him” (Sidney Webb), let me now sum up and state the paramount evils that have to be overcome. For the workers these are—low wages, long hours of toil, difficulty of obtaining work, and, when it is obtained, uncertainty of being permitted to retain it. For the community generally there are further evils, viz., first, the mal-production of commodities made manifest in food adulteration and in a perpetual output of objects that, instead of promoting and conserving civilization, debase and corrupt public taste and morals; and, second, the mal-production of human life, for poverty is a social force that directly tends to racial degeneration. A population born and bred in our city slums becomes physically, mentally, and morally unfit.

The facts of poverty and the unemployed are impossible to deny. Frederick Harrison’s picture is accurate; ninety per cent. of the actual producers of wealth have no home they can call their own beyond the end of the week, have no bit of soil or so much as a room that belongs to them, have nothing of any kind except so much of old furniture as will go in a cart; have the precarious chance of weekly wages, which barely suffice to keep them in health; are separated by so narrow a margin from destitution that a month of bad trade, sickness or unexpected loss brings them face to face with hunger and pauperism. This is the normal state of the average workman in town or country. (Report of Ind. Ref. Congress, 1886.)

As regards the children of these workmen, fifty per cent. die before they reach five years of age, while eighteen per cent. only of upper class children die at the same age. The industrial evolution of the last 150 years, with its labour-saving machinery and highly organized masses of wage-workers, has done nothing at all to lessen poverty. Poverty has steadily kept pace with the increase of population.

But observe in the present day there is one significant feature that forces itself upon public attention—a feature revealing to the social student our approach to that stage of evolution spoken of by William Clarke in the passage I quote as motto to this chapter: “Each institution tends to cancel itself.... Its special function and progress produce effects tending to negate the original function.”

If we look minutely into the latest developments of large businesses, we find that the diminution in the number of competitors does not as a rule lead to an easing of the competitive struggle. As Mr. J. A. Hobson observes and demonstrates: “It is precisely in those trades which are most highly organized, provided with the most advanced machinery, and composed of the largest units of capital, that the fiercest and most unscrupulous competition has shown itself.” (Evolution of Capital, p. 120.) There is an increase, in short, of the elements destined to destroy competition. The anxiety, arduousness, and wastefulness of strife among the rival competitors, becomes so intolerable that a mutual truce and amalgamation is sought after as a release. When fully realized, the amalgamation becomes a monopoly, and competition, that much vaunted check to counteract the natural rapacity of private capitalists, ceases altogether. Let industrial monopoly be fairly established, and behold! competition, with all its merits, real or assumed, is abrogated.

But industrial monopoly in private hands becomes intolerable to the public, so that invariably, in the long run, the community either puts a forcible stop to the monopoly, or assumes it, and administers it as a State function.

We may confidently assert that as large industries approach to the stage of absorption into monopolies of federated groups of wealthy capitalists, the more general and widespread grows dissatisfaction and resentment on the part of the dispossessed smaller capitalists who have been beaten out of the field.

Now, the trend of movement to-day, through the whole fields of production and distribution, is from business on a small scale to business on a large scale, and the formation of limited companies, rings, trusts, etc. By purchasing raw material in greater quantities an immense saving is effected, and the same occurs in the advertising of goods and in organizing numerous workers instead of a few. These savings make it possible to lower the price of the finished commodity to the public. Hence the change from smaller to larger commercial enterprises is favourable to public interests up to a certain point. But the moment monopoly point is reached, the position straightway becomes reversed. Henceforward the public have no protection from a sudden raising of prices, for, the competitive check having been withdrawn, monopolists dominate their respective fields of production and distribution, and the individually selfish forces alone hold sway.

This tendency, then, to larger and larger industrial organization, with its wasteful warfare and other attendant evils, implies a certain advance. It indicates competition working out to its last expression and final breakdown. It points to the supersession of the individualistic industrial system by a collectivist industrial system requiring democratic state-ownership of land and the means of production and distribution of all commodities.

In process of civilizing man has made himself acquainted with many laws of nature, and has learnt so to handle matter as to direct its forces into channels carrying benefit to himself. He has thus become the controller of natural forces in as far as they lie within reach of his mental comprehension and physical activities. It is by this method, and no other, that our advance along the line of material civilization has been accomplished, and all further extension of the comforts and amenities of economic and social life is certain to be obtained through persistence in this available and satisfactory course.

Now, throughout the domain of non-material civilization, man has never constituted himself controller of natural forces, although, in orders of life inferior to his own, he has guided many vital forces. For instance, there are vegetable and animal forces—all subject to natural law—that he has enlisted in his service and made submissive to his dominion. The forms of vegetable life around us to-day—cereals, fruit-trees, plants, and flowers of infinitely varied tint—bear witness to the art and skill of man; and the animal kingdom, ruled by mysterious biological laws, has provided him with faithful servants obedient to his will, in a life which to dogs and horses is largely artificial.

In the order of his own social life man’s position is wholly different. What we behold, if we take an objective view of a so-called civilized society, is a marvellous variety of complicated movements. These are the outcome of forces pursuing an unbridled course; and that course is always the path of least resistance. As yet there is no intervening force of a collective, mental nature to adapt that course to an ultimate definite aim and purpose, or to harmonize broadly those lines of least resistance with the line of permanent and universal advantage to mankind. As Professor Lester F. Ward expresses it, “Man has made the winds, the waters, fire, steam and electricity do his bidding. All nature, both animate and inanimate, has been reduced to his service.... One class of natural forces still remains the play of chance, and from it, instead of aid, he is constantly receiving the most serious checks. This field is that of society itself, these unreclaimed forces are the social forces of whose nature man seems to possess no knowledge, whose very existence he persistently ignores, and which he consequently is powerless to control.” (Dynamic Sociology, vol. I. p. 35.) These unreclaimed social forces—selfishness, rapacity, pride—give activity to the competitive system, and run riot on the basis of private property in land and the means of production. But the present condition of things cannot much longer persist, and a new industrial system, the outcome of far more elevated social forces, is shaping itself rapidly in many minds throughout Europe, America, and the whole civilized world; that system of co-operative industry we have now to consider.

CHAPTER II
ORGANIZED INDUSTRY

The true organic formula of political as of economic justice is—

“From each according to his powers,

To each according to his needs.”

J. A. Hobson.

Whilst bearing in mind that the present economic system—a system unconsciously produced through the play of selfish forces—was a necessary stage of evolution, and tended to progress so long as savage proclivities in the mass of the people made a closer social union impossible, we have also to recognize the changes, outward and inward, occurring under that system. First, a rise of co-operation, both voluntary and involuntary—in factories and throughout business generally—has taken place, causing evolution to proceed on wider lines. Second, a slow, silent, unstudied, half-unconscious movement has advanced, and in these days eventuated in the conception of a new system which purports to be the form that industrial evolution must assume in the near future. And inasmuch as this new system is less egoistic and more social than any system of competition, it will move on ethical lines of progress.

The present system, as we have seen, is based on private property in land and the instruments of production and distribution. In opposition to this, socialism implies that the State or people collectively should own the land and instruments of production and distribution. Further, that the State should organize routine labour and direct the distribution of produce upon this basis, and that throughout society social equality should be established and maintained.

The sentiment of justice and the feelings of sympathy and solidarity, without which no socialized society could exist, are prominent everywhere to-day. They manifest in philanthropic action all over the country, in constant efforts to adjust political and economic forces to lines of social equality and in the revolt of wage-workers, throughout the civilized world, from conditions they are finding intolerable and will not much longer endure.

A wholly unselfish order of life is impossible still, but under any intelligent collectivist system, individual selfishness becomes modified and controlled. Hence we may confidently expect that the strong anti-social feelings fostered by the private property and competitive system of industry will largely subside in the greater fraternity of an organized socialism.

It is significant that ignorant opponents, in their wildly erroneous interpretation of the theory of socialism as an equal division of money to all, recognize the gross injustice of the present distribution of wealth. The wrong and misery accruing from the individualistic system of industry are widely felt and freely admitted, while the underlying causes of the evil and the true remedies are not yet understood.

As regards the connexion of socialism with the theories of political economy, I must shortly explain: Political economy is the science of wealth—its production and distribution. But as the science relates exclusively to the present competitive system, the socialist finds in it a full exposure of the evils involved in that system, and ample grounds for striving to bring about its supersession by a system of co-operation on a socialized property basis. There is not and there cannot be any conflict between a true political economy and a scientific socialism. The one describes what is, the other what may be and ought to be. Both recognize that wealth is produced (and it is the only possible way) by the application of labour to land, and its products. In the present system, the individual possession of land and the instruments of production forms the ruling factor, producing inequality in the distribution of wealth and gives the basis on which commercial competition rests. In referring to laws of political economy, it is not unusual to speak as if they were laws of nature, no more to be banished than the law of gravitation. On this assumption there is raised the argument that society is forever bound to the present system, with its payments of rent, interest and profits out of the surplus proceeds of labour. Nevertheless, it is easy to see that the so-called laws of economics are only rules of social living springing from motives of human self-seeking exercised within the generally accepted conditions of private property in the essentials of life. It is not necessary for the socialist to contend against any single generalization of political economy; each may be true on its own basis, but, with that basis socialism is at war. Let society relinquish the property basis, and political economy remains applicable only to the past, while in the future the motives of human self-seeking enter upon a fresh career in a more altruistic system.

We must grasp the true nature of the various tributes imposed upon labour—rent, interest, profits and rent of ability—to comprehend their economic bearing. A farm is the private property of a landlord, while it is cultivated by a farmer and his labourers. The proceeds of the industry of the two latter is divided into three portions—the labourers’ wages, the landlord’s rent and the farmer’s profits. The first, dependent on demand and supply in the labour market, is kept down to what will cover the expense of a bare subsistence; and the second is always the highest amount the landlord can extract above the portion the farmer consents to live upon after paying the subsistence wage to his labourers. A landlord’s rapacity, however, is no longer the only factor in determining rent, since State interference has been found necessary for protection of farmers in the public interests. The economic bearing of rent is this: it gives effect to the demands of the landlord class for the results of an immense amount of labour applied to the production of varied commodities. As already explained, the produce sold in towns by farmers to pay rent goes, in large measure, to the support of workers who are manufacturing luxuries, objets de luxe, and many meretricious wares that minister to the depraved taste of men and women whose happiness is destroyed by a life of idleness and ennui.

It is not land only, but capital in the shape of railways, factories, workshops, machinery, etc., that are held as private property. For the use of these, therefore, workers pay a tribute called interest on capital. This interest gives effective demand to the wants of a large class of comparatively idle shareholders, who further absorb the services and produce of another great army of workers. The next tribute, namely profits, is a claim connected with the organizing of labour. It represents a prodigious tax levied upon workers, a tax that enables employers and managers—more or less wealthy—to enjoy comforts and luxuries their employés can never command. The fourth tribute has been called the rent of ability. It rests on the non-ethical principle that some people deserve from society a great reward for work they have pleasure in doing, while the toilers engaged in irksome, dangerous, dirty, distasteful work—however necessary to the whole community—are only entitled to a pittance wage.

Let us look at the proportional value of rent, interest, profits and rent of ability in their relation to the reward of manual labour. Out of the yearly income of the nation, recently computed at £1,450,000,000, £510,000,000 goes in rent and interest and £410,000,000 in profits and salaries to the ruling classes, while £530,000,000 only is available for payment of wages to manual workers. But when we consider that the latter compose the great mass of the population, and the former a small section or fraction of it only, the enormities involved in the working of our property institutions exhibit their true colours, and the growing sense of justice within civilized humanity revolts wholly from the system. The facts, roughly speaking, are that one-third of the total income of the nation goes to four-fifths of the population, while the remaining one-fifth pockets two-thirds of the income. (See Sidney Webb in Fabian Tract No. 69.)

In the Census of 1891 there were 543,038 adult men who entered themselves as not working for a living. We may assume these belonged chiefly to the wealthy classes, and if we reckon their average incomes at £500 per annum, there emerges a sum of £271,519,000 as approximately the value of the labour they exact each year from workers to whom they render no services in return. Again, if we add to the number of these idle men the women and children now living on rent and interest, the above computation falls far short of the reality. And, need it be said, the more there is taken from workers by non-workers, the less must remain for the workers themselves.

To people ignorant of economic principles, the man who spends a good income on personal gratifications appears—in his relations to society—either passive, or active beneficially, inasmuch as he “gives employment,” and his “giving” on these lines is lavish. Moreover, it is considered that the difference between rich and poor is one of natural inequality, of which, if workers complain, they are considered as unreasonable as the invalid who complains that other people are healthy. But the facts admit of no such analogy. The rich owe everything to the poor. They are simply a parasitic class, and the money they spend represents a power (socially permitted) to command and absorb the labour of their fellows. They exact life-long services, for which they bestow no personal service in return. Were we to place a rich man with all his money on an uninhabited island, however fertile, he would at once be reduced to his natural stature. No money would cause his daily comforts to spring up around him, and still less the many luxuries without which he feels his existence has no charm. In order to live he himself must work, for he is the sole representative of the scores of fellow-men on whose labour he has hitherto wholly depended for necessaries and all the amenities of a civilized life. The absorption by one of the labour of many is a social arrangement of genetic origin, and is immoral or non-ethical in character.

Socialism is the philosophy of a pure, wholesome, progressive industrial life, to be initiated and maintained by human effort—nay more, it is a veritable Gospel of Peace. And I use the word Gospel advisedly, for the finest religious quality of human nature is not in those beings who calmly pursue a course of spiritual development for themselves, unmindful that the physical part of their fellows craves the food and rest without which the latent soul within cannot manifest itself.

We have seen that in the domain of feeling the stirrings of socialism have for years been agitating the bosom of society, and although the outcome in philanthropic action issues usually in failure, none the less does it spring from the highest and holiest motives of man. But while philanthropy chiefly represents love’s labour lost, there are other and more virile forces in action that are indicative of a coming organic democracy. Observe, for instance, the constant efforts of the people to alter the political and economic strain by State interference. This agitation is a very significant fact. It betrays a hunger for social justice which will certainly increase with the growth of knowledge, public spirit and sensitiveness to personal rights. This hunger can never be fully appeased under any system that permits wealth to flow to the lucky, the clever, the cunning, the greedy, and be handed down by inheritance and bequest from generation to generation. No modification of individualism and not even socialism will banish all popular agitation. Communism is the far-distant goal to which it points, for communism alone sets forth as attainable a satisfying equality in all the comforts of life, and since evolution must eventuate in social justice, whatever falls short of this will inevitably contain some conditions of discontent.

But whilst a craving for justice among the masses cries out for State interference, from whence comes the modern view of what justice means? Among the classes it has been considered that the man who is clever, i.e. mentally strong, has a right to a greater reward for labour than the man who is stupid. The origin of this notion is simply the fact that in a competitive system he is able to obtain that superior reward. Power, and not any ethical idea, is the foundation of the notion. The notions of justice prevailing throughout society have all arisen naturally in the past amid the strong and privileged few, and readily have they been accepted by the docile and oppressed many. The clever, not the stupid, have formed public opinion, and that under a purely egoistic impulse. Nevertheless, as evolution passes from the unconscious to the self-conscious stage, reason unites with altruistic feeling to give birth to new conceptions that are moulding public opinion to a higher and truer form, and working out on the plane of practical action. The conception of justice involved in socialism is naturally unpalatable to the privileged few, but it goes far to prove the truth of socialism, that the conception is the fruit of the most advanced study of our social organism as a whole, while it coincides precisely with the blindly instinctive pulsations of the central mass of the people.

Turning now from the moral and emotional to the economic and practical side of the question, we are bound to inquire by what methods transition from the present competitive commercial system of industry to the socialism of the future will take effect. For, be it observed, supporters of the latter system not only assert its ethical superiority, but further assert that it is both practicable and economically inevitable.

There are two, and only two, general directions of popular reform: first, the revolutionary—the driving straight at established institutions with the intention of overthrowing them; second, the legislative—the aiming to improve the existing system by co-operative methods and the modification and gradual destruction of its worst features, i.e. its extremes of injustice and inequality. I have to point out how retrograde and futile for the promotion of happiness is sudden revolution. It is the spontaneous method of human passion where intellect is unenlightened on natural evolution and causation. It seeks to overturn what, for the time being, is the highest product of evolution, and it would blindly substitute that, which although ethically superior, the society of the time is unable to support. The method of legislative reform, national and municipal, is the rational one; and no other, we may confidently hope, will be tried in the civilized countries of Europe so long as socialists are not harassed and persecuted for their opinion beyond the point of endurance.

Already, as regards legislation in this country, the power of the Demos—the mass of the people—is acutely felt. Step by step our rulers have been compelled to lower the political franchise in order to quell revolutionary tendency and maintain their position. Fear-forces within the social organism have changed direction unnoted at the surface. The classes are secretly more afraid of the people than the people are of the classes; yet the actual burdens borne by the people are in no way lightened. And why is this so? Because the people generally are ignorant of their political power, and still more ignorant of how to wield it favourably to their own interests. As has truly been said: “The difficulty in England is not to secure more political power for the people, but to persuade them to make any sensible use of the power they already have.”

But social forces of persuasion and enlightenment are ready prepared for their guidance. In the upper and lower sections of the middle class, men and women whose culture is scientific and whose moral sentiment is advanced, are ranging themselves in the van of the world’s progress, and chiefly through their efforts there is pouring into and penetrating the darkness of the masses a flood of intellectual enlightenment. This process begun has its definite bearings. A growing intelligence in the people will cause the displacement of all authority that is irresponsible. A better selection of legislators will be made, and these, constrained by judicious criticism, will study the principles of social science and learn how best to attain the clear ends of government.

As our masses rise to the full exercise of their political power and the democratic trend of the nation goes forward, no higher motive force than that of self-seeking is required to secure better social conditions. Not only does the ignorant self-seeking of the masses carry weight commanding attention, but the intelligent self-seeking of rulers is a force set in similar direction. To please the majority of constituents is their highest policy; and since food and leisure and education are the essential needs of that majority, such available intellect as the legislative body possesses will be honestly applied to promoting the increase and better distribution of these various necessaries of a civilized life; in short, to promoting the general well-being in so far as the exigencies of the times permit.

I do not deny that self-seeking in rulers has hitherto mainly led to the clever hoodwinking of ignorant constituents. I merely assert that we have rounded the point of Cape Danger in that regard. Every step we take on democratic lines, every advance we make in educating the people, removes us further from that danger point. Moreover, I assert that extending the Parliamentary franchise to women of every social class will equally work for good. The new altruistic or philanthropic spirit of the age has laid firm hold of the so-called educated women of to-day. When public responsibility presses these women to self-education in politics, the myriad injustices revealed will cause them to turn from futile individualist charities and concentrate their energies on works of real and lasting social reform. We may confidently anticipate that the British Parliament will become an excellent instrument of Democratic Government when certain reforms—that are already widely agitated—have been carried out. These reforms are that: “The House of Commons should be freed from the veto of the House of Lords, and should be thrown open to candidates from all classes by a system of payment of representatives and a more rational method of election.” (See Fabian Tract No. 70.)

There are two lines of action certain to be pursued by a Parliament growing yearly more democratic. One is the line of protection of labour, the other is that of an active service of the people. Now State interference with trade—in the interests of workers—is condemned by the laissez-faire school of economists. Such action is scoffingly termed “grandmotherly legislation.” It is deprecated as injurious to society as a whole, as an outrage on the liberty of the British subject, and an impious desecration of the capitalistic fetish, “Freedom of Contract.” But when the knowledge of facts proves that on one side this so-called freedom signifies freedom of choice between dire starvation and the distasteful terms of an absolute master, surprise is not felt that intelligent men prefer what the ignorant may regard as a species of State bondage. This preference is a feature of the times clearly visible. No doubt, where social equality reigns, individual liberty is a noble attainment; but with inequality in the means of life and the fundamental conditions of social happiness, a State that is honestly striving to restore the balance is a very fount of justice. The quest of the workers is not that of individual liberty, but of a collective liberty, embracing every man, woman and child within the ranks of their own order.

There is no moral principle that condemns State interference, although we may admit that occasionally it has wrought evil instead of good. Failures have been caused by ignorance alike in the rulers and the ruled. But as knowledge of the real problem advances, errors in governing will become less frequent, and the action of the State be marked by a wise adaptation to human needs in view of the greatest happiness possible.

State regulation is simply a matter of power and expediency. At the present low stage of civilization, for just so long as the ruling power is exercised by a propertied minority, it will prove injurious to the majority; but when the power passes over to the people the evils from which the majority suffer—in so far as they are remediable by society—will be slowly and surely redressed. Our County, District and Parish Councils are important instalments of democracy. These elected bodies, with their increasing powers, are potent to make of the community an ever larger and larger employer of labour, until, at the will of the people, all industries become absorbed, and the collectivist system of labour organization is gradually established. It is evident that the instruments of a thoroughly democratic administration are rapidly perfecting in Great Britain; and when the ideal of socialism dominates the national mind, these will present a ready means of realizing the ideal in practice. Ignorance of the ideal leads many minds into the false assumption that the raising of wages, and to do this the impoverishing of capitalists, is the socialistic sine quâ non in State action. But as Mrs. Bosanquet explains: “In our nineteenth century cry for higher wages we are apt to lose sight of the fact that many things are more important to the working-man than a few shillings added to his weekly income. A good supply of water, well-paved and lighted streets, a market in which he can always obtain wholesome food, and properly guarded sanitary conditions, will do more to raise his standard of living above that of his ancestors than any increase of mere money income. With those he can lead a healthy, orderly life on comparatively small wages; without them no rise in wages, however desirable in itself, will enable him to escape danger and disease.” (Rich and Poor, by Mrs. Bernard Bosanquet.)

This puts the case for municipal socialism in a nutshell. No amount of philanthropy, no amount of individual action is likely to provide a parish with a good water supply, properly paved and lighted streets, sanitary dwellings and a well-managed market. (Fabian News.) Yet these are fundamental requisites of general well-being, and another requisite for well-being and progress, dependent upon State action, is education of the people. If the power of the masses and their independence of arbitrary authority grow out of accord with their real knowledge of things, disastrous and bloody revolutions become possible. That in some sort the State must educate the masses is a principle already acknowledged and acted upon. We know, too, with how little success! But as Government loses its evil characteristics and grows enlightened, our State education will be directed to new ends. Its aim will be to impress such knowledge on the rising generations as will prepare them for social life, and instruct them in the means of averting misery and increasing happiness. It will educate them in the science of society and true meliorism, in the best methods for repressing anti-social feelings, in the formation of noble ideals of conduct, and in that religion which unites mankind in the region of the heart and makes of their union a living and growing social organism.

But while this is the aim of State education, the exact means adopted may vary. Where parents are superior much may be left in their hands, but inferior parents can never be permitted to train up children in inferior ways at the risk of lowering social purity and health.

I believe the time will arrive when Government, acting on its right of force and expediency, will take up and sequestrate the small class of social units who, defective by nature and evil conditions, are unable to control the injurious tendency to propagate their kind. This degraded minority will be kindly dealt with and allowed all liberty not inconsistent with the careful guarding of public safety. The object to attain would be simply the putting an end to their evil stock.

In the matter of State education, as well as in that of State interference with trade, objections are made on the ground of injustice. “Why,” it is asked, “should a man without children be taxed to educate the children of others? Is it not unjust that the earnings of the prudent should be taken to save the imprudent from the consequences of their own folly?” My answer is that besides being expedient, it is not socially unjust and the argument rests on the fact that the rewards of life depend upon the economic conditions of society much more than upon individual effort or merit. The amount of a man’s income is determined by forces not created by justice, and over which he has no personal control. A clever physician may command the fee of a guinea a visit. Let another competent man appear in the neighbourhood and charge half a guinea, the first has to lower his fee or lose his patients, and if he lowers his fee, the sum of the incomes of the two physicians sharing the patients between them will be less than the amount of the single income originally derived from that source. A man’s gains are what the competitive system ordained by society permits him to seize, whether he be working hard or not at all. Within these non-moral conditions an appeal to justice is irrelevant. Outside the non-moral conditions, what justice requires is that all men should be socially equal in respect of two things, viz. liberty and the ordinary comforts of life.

If employers do not deem it unjust to lower wages, neither should they deem it unjust were the State to lower their incomes to the precise amount their employés receive. Society has in the past arbitrarily arranged conditions that favour the few; why should it not now arbitrarily rearrange these conditions favourably to the many? If we take the average amount of all incomes to represent the sum each worker might justly receive, we find that a number of people have far more than this sum. The surplus represents then an “unearned increment” obtained by force of circumstance. A still larger number of people, on the other hand, are wholly unable to win, by any effort they may make, the above average amount, even if they work hard and well all their lives. Is it not just and reasonable that the more fortunate are required to give up a portion of their “unearned increment” in order that in the interests of society the children of the less fortunate should be educated? And, again, the improvident and immoral are nature’s defective children. Does not the highest religion demand that they should be tenderly dealt with and spared—if that be possible—all the tortures that nature unaided would bring upon them.

I believe that, under conscious evolution, the State will become in its action more and more philanthropic, simply for this reason—its members will become more and more humane and public-spirited.

Voluntary and State agency, however, will continue to co-exist. Each has its peculiar merits and demerits, and each individual case to be dealt with has its peculiar conditions. Science and experience must in each case therefore decide which agency applies best. There is no foregone conclusion that under State Socialism all private industries will collapse. The principle of the system is that no method of industry, hurtful to society as a whole, may exist, and the power of the State shall be rigorously used to protect the interests of the whole, as against conflicting individual interests. Even now it is felt, through the growing democratic spirit, that for our public bodies to take advantage of the struggle for employment of starving, hard-pressed men and women, is a national disgrace. It will soon be a point of honour with the nation to fix a minimum wage for public employés much above the competitive rate. Some County Councils have already been moved to direct that workers employed by them, or under their contracts, should be paid trade-union wages. Parliament has in some cases acted similarly, and when we remember that Government at this moment is the largest employer of labour in the kingdom, we realize that its example in giving wages determined more by equity than by competition will have a raising effect upon wages in private employment.

There is not any danger, however, that the movement of taking over the industries of the country by the State will stop short of the most favourable point. As I write this chapter, the following paragraph has appeared in a socialist journal of to-day: “It is proposed to establish a gigantic trust to control the entire iron-producing interests of the United States. This, of course, is eminently proper from an economic view, as it is a clearly demonstrated fact that production on a large scale is cheaper than production on a small scale. Carnegie, Rockefeller and Morgan, proposers of the iron trust, are, from a certain standpoint, benefactors of the race, inasmuch as they will demonstrate the practicability of the co-operative idea on a national scale in production. In due time the people will recognize the folly of allowing these men to reap the whole profits, and the system will be readjusted.”

Another important public event was the introduction into the British Parliament of an Employer’s Liability Bill. “This Bill proceeds,” said its introducer, “on the principle that when a person for his own profit sets in motion agencies which create risks for others, he ought to be civilly responsible.” (The Scotsman Report, May 4, 1897.) Now it goes without saying that the iron trust, and all trusts and commercial rings and monopolies, create the risk of a disastrous rise of prices to the general public, and a consequent greater inequality of wealth possession than even that from which we are suffering acutely to-day. A logical executive, holding the above principle, will inevitably annex to the State these huge outgrowths of the competitive system, will keep down prices to the level required by the general interests, and apply profits to the good of all.

That the time is not far distant when nationalization of the land will take place, appears from the fact that many others besides socialists advocate the measure. But we must not suppose that rent will be abrogated. The State will impose a charge on the fertile and well situated lands to create conditions that are fair not only to consumers but to cultivators, whose labour in view of a given result must vary according to the superiority or inferiority of soils and situations. District Councils will in all probability organize agricultural labour, the State only drawing a rent; while to present owners of the land compensation will be made, and, if accustomed to work on the land, salaried positions in the new order offered.

The rent exacted by the State may become the single form of taxation necessary for purposes of administration and for organized labour engaged on such service of the people as does not bring in any profit. But when routine industries bearing on universal needs belong to the State, profits will flow into the national exchequer. It will be possible to gradually increase the State’s payment for labour as the workers become more capable of elevating their standard of life and consuming wisely; while the surplus profits will be available for the organizing of new services to be rendered free.

The carriage and distribution of letters is a comparatively long established State industry. The carriage of human beings should equally become so. The State’s taking over of railways and the municipalities’ taking over of tramways cannot be much longer delayed.

Bread baking and distributing by Government employés is pre-eminently desirable, to put an end to adulteration in a primary necessary of life and to prevent the waste of energy which takes place in the present disorganized system. Already there is such a general complaint of the quality of bakers’ bread, that an approved method of baking from pure flour under State control would be welcomed by all who perceive how the racial blood is more or less poisoned and its vitality lowered by what is called “the staff of life.” (A prolonged process of baking breaks up the starch granules, and renders bread more digestible. The extra expense and trouble precludes the adoption of this method by private bakers.)

Again, the health of the nation suffers cruelly from poison germs carried in the medium of milk. But when district councils have organized agricultural labour, dairy produce will be distributed under strict Government control. Emulation will spring up among local authorities all over the country to excel one another in the arts of rapidly acquiring and skilfully managing all industries that affect general health, and thus raising the tide of life within the bounds of their jurisdiction. With this aim broadly accomplished, the minor industries might safely be left for some time in private hands and under a competition modified in a greater degree than now by State inspection for the benefit of workers and consumers.

Among services to be made free to the public, those of transit bulk largely and should probably come first—free railway and steamship service, free tramway and cable-car service, to be followed in time by a more or less complete service of free entertainments calculated to develop art and promote a happy, joyous life.

If we cast our thoughts forward and try to realize the action and interaction of these altered social conditions upon society, we can hardly mistake the nature of the changes humanity itself will undergo. With the destruction of the frightful incubus of poverty, human hearts will no longer be wrung by anguish, bitterness, despair. With opportunity freely afforded for regular employment and its ample reward, for decent and wholesome living, and a civic life brightened by many pure pleasures, the degrading and false excitements will cease to allure. Drunkenness, vice, crime will greatly diminish. Instead of the desperate struggle for bread and all that appertains to an animal life pure and simple, a new struggle will arise—a benign, inspiring emulation to attain to and acquire the noble qualities of humanity, the distinctive characteristics of, not the lower animal, but the higher spiritual man.

Respecting the form of government in a Socialistic State, I cannot do better than quote Mr. J. A. Hobson: “A developed organic democracy will have evolved a specialized ‘head,’ an expert official class, which shall draft laws upon information that comes to them from innumerable sources through class and local representation, and shall administer the government, subject to protests similarly conveyed.” “The conditions of a really effective expert officialism are two: such real equality of educational opportunities as shall draw competent officials from the whole people; and such a growth of public intelligence and conscience as shall establish the real final control of government for society in its full organic structure.” (Contemporary Review, February, 1902.)

PART II
THE PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF THE SUBJECT

The laws of heredity constitute the most important agency whereby the vital forces, the vigour and soundness of the physical system, are changed for better or worse.—Nathan Allen, M.D., LL.D.

CHAPTER I
THE LAW OF POPULATION

The population question is the real riddle of the Sphinx, to which no political Oedipus has as yet found the answer. In view of the ravages of the terrible monster over-multiplication all other riddles sink into insignificance.—Huxley.

No human life can be maintained without food, and no healthy individual life can be maintained without good food in sufficient quantity; therefore, the relation of numbers to the actual food supply—in other words, the Population Question—stands at the threshold of our social inquiries and at the base of all social reform.

At the beginning of last century, Malthus, who knew nothing of evolution, expounded the doctrine that man tends to increase more rapidly than the means of subsistence; that population and food, like two runners of unequal swiftness chained together, advance side by side, but the pace or natural rate of increase of the former is so immensely superior to that of the latter that it is necessarily greatly checked. And the checks are of two kinds. They are either positive—that is, deaths occur from famine, accident, war or disease, and keep down the population so that the means of subsistence are just sufficient to enable the poorer classes barely to exist; or they are preventive—that is, fewer births take place than man is capable of causing.

This doctrine was a fertile germ of thought in the mind of Charles Darwin. He, while conscious to some extent of the process of evolution, was grappling with the great problems of differentiation and genesis of species. How came it that the life which is assumed to develop from low and simple to the highest and most complex forms everywhere exhibited breaks, or sudden changes, in the apparently natural order? Darwin perceived that a key to the enigma lay in the marvellous fecundity of organisms. Each group reproduced its kind in overflowing numbers, and accidental conditions destroyed individuals and groups that failed to secure sufficient food or to protect themselves from enemies. Here were factors of progress, but factors by no means admirable—a murderous slaughter of the weak, a frantic struggle for existence, culminating in violent death or slow starvation, ultimately in extinction. Nevertheless, the medal had two sides, for the race is to the swift, the battle to the strong; bread is the portion of the wise, favour the reward of skill. Should we feel surprise that in a semi-theological and metaphysical era, rather than a scientific one, Darwin formulated his great discovery in terms suggesting not a cruel, but a beneficent Nature? His law of natural selection, or survival of the fittest, established itself in many minds as a sacred principle that man could neither deny nor seek to counteract.

Now this conception, carried into the field of economics, confused the minds of men engaged in the study of facts and problems of human life and progress. Political economists had to contemplate a social strife and struggle for existence among men as fierce and relentless as that holding sway in the brute kingdom. And in this struggle society as a whole stood on the side of external nature as opposed to the mass of striving individuals. A genetic, spontaneously developed system of industry favoured a high birth-rate that kept wages low, an unscrupulous exploitation of labour in the interests of capital, a wholesale slaughter of infants, a crushing out or trampling down of the weak, and a perpetual grinding of the face of the poor, while, simultaneously, wealth was multiplying and capital becoming concentrated and easy of control by the so-called princes of industry. Conditions of life to the great mass of the people were fraught with constant misery; yet, since Darwin had demonstrated—in his Origin of Species, published in 1858—that a struggle for existence eventuates in the survival of the fittest, enlightened thinkers, with a few rare exceptions, accepted the cruel facts of industrial life without any conscious moral revolt from the system.

“Laissez-faire” was the logical outcome of Darwinian law applied to human affairs, and Darwin’s authority dominated the public mind of the period. Christianity was teaching the principle that the poor would be with us always; a poet cheerfully sang “God’s in His Heaven; All’s right with the world; All’s love and all’s law,” and political economists expounded the laws of demand and supply, of rent, of wages, of profits, of interest, etc., without one hint or surmise that man himself was bound to interfere with the action of derivative laws, to modify or even annul them.

Meanwhile an instinct of sympathy, rudimentary in primitive man, was steadily growing and strengthening during all the transitions of tribal, village-communal, feudal and national life, in the stormy militant epoch, till the moment arrived when it compelled man’s interference. Spontaneously, impulsively, individual philanthropy interposed between a suffering humanity on the one hand, and on the other external nature and a social system that were alike relentless. It supported the weak and helped the unfit to survive. It deliberately selected the half-starved, the diseased, the criminals, and enabled them to exist and propagate. Finally it forced society to make laws subversive of the policy of “laissez-faire,” thereby introducing a new order of things, irrespective of all doctrinaire principles or authoritative teaching. That new order of things is socialism, and the genesis of socialism is distinctly to be traced to the vital element in human nature—unselfish sympathy.

The rise and progress of philanthropic action carries momentous issues in various directions, both unfavourable and favourable to human welfare. It has made the law of natural selection and survival of the fittest obsolete for us as applied to man. It tends to a lowering of the level of average health and a gradual degenerating of the race through selection of the unfit, and through the power of hereditary transmission. It counteracts the positive or destructive checks to the increase of population, and thereby extends the area of general misery. Nevertheless, at the same time, it increases the strength and the solidarity of human society, and becomes a new law of life. That law may be called “Sympathetic Selection” and “Survival of the Gentle.” Darwin in 1878 acknowledged its existence. He recognized it as a law in human society superseding that of Natural Selection and Survival of the Fittest.

In 1801 the population of England and Wales was 8,892,536, or let us say about nine millions. Eighty years later it had risen to about twenty-six millions! The increase showed an accelerated rate according to the census returns. Whereas in the ten years between 1841 and 1851 the percentage of increase was 12·65, in those from 1861 to 1871 it was 13·19, and between 1871 and 1881 it was 14·34. In the United Kingdom in 1900 there has been an increase of 18 per cent. since 1880.

Now Malthus had pointed out that with conditions of life comparatively favourable, and an increase of food supply comparatively easy, population was found to double itself in twenty-five years or less. Our numbers during these eighty years had been, roughly speaking, trebled! and the increase took place under conditions not favourable but unfavourable to the bulk of the nation. Manufacturing industries had enabled us to purchase food from abroad, and consequently a larger number of children survived. Food, however, cannot always be forthcoming in greater and greater abundance from countries that need more and more of their own food supply, and which, by manufacturing for themselves, are gradually reducing their demand for our manufactured commodities.

Notwithstanding this patent fact, there are social reformers to-day who persist in ignoring the population difficulty, and there are thinkers who, basing their views on Herbert Spencer’s dictum that “man’s fertility will be checked by his individuation,” pass it over lightly. Generally speaking, however, the public conscience is now aroused, and enlightened men and women are tolerably well alive to the fundamental nature and the grave importance of the population question.

“In some parts of the United States of America,” says an able writer, “population has actually doubled itself, apart from immigration, in twenty-five years; and this in the face of the ordinary retarding influences. If such a rate of increase upon the present population of the whole globe were to prevail for only 250 years, there would be left but one square yard of standing room for each individual.”

Again: “If we grant that a scientific treatment of crops would enable food supplies to keep pace with population, and for this purpose supposing that all the land in the planet Jupiter were available for a market garden, it would not ultimately be want of food but want of room that would put a stop to the increase of the multitude.” But further, the above author—a mathematician—examines what the potentiality of increase represents on the supposition that each individual merely died the natural death of old age. “Under such favourable conditions as the absence of war, famine and disease, the race might treble its numbers in thirty years. To show the significance of the numerical law, let us imagine it to operate undisturbed 3,000 years upon the progeny of a single pair. The number of human beings finally existing would be expressed by twice the 100th power of 3. An easy computation will show that if these people were packed together, allowing six cubic feet of space for each person, they would fill up the whole solar system in every direction, and extend beyond it to a distance 430 times that of the planet Neptune. In fact, a solid sphere of human beings would be formed having a diameter of 2,400,000,000,000 miles. Such considerations lead us to realize the absolute inevitableness of Nature’s checks upon reproduction.” (Social Evolution and the Evolution of Socialism, by George Shoobridge Carr, M.A., Cantab.)

Turning now from scientific speculation to recognized authority in practical politics, let me quote from a paper read at the Registrar-General’s office on March 18, 1890, by Dr. William Ogle, Superintendent of Statistics: “The population of England and Wales is, as we all know, growing in a most formidable manner, and though persons may differ in their estimates of the time when that growth will have reached its permissible limits, no one can doubt that, if the present rate of increase be maintained, the date of that event cannot possibly be very remote.”

Premising that the rate of increase is not due to the birth-rate only, but also to a fall in the death-rate, and that voluntary philanthropy and State interference influence the latter, we pass to the consideration of conditions that affect the marriage-rate—consequently the birth-rate—in the artisan and labouring classes, composing the bulk of the nation. The Registrar-General, in his report for the year 1876, wrote as follows: “The state of trade and national industry is strikingly exhibited in the fluctuations of the marriage-rate of the last nine years.... The period of commercial distress, which began about the middle of 1866 and continued during five years ... influenced the marriage-rates of these years, which were 17·5, 16·5, 16·1, 15·9, 16·1 and 16·7 (in the 1,000) respectively. In 1872 and 1873 the working classes became excited under the rapid advance of wages and the diminution of the hours of labour, and the marriage-rates rose to 17·5 and 17·6 respectively.” In his report for 1881 the Registrar-General again accentuated this important point: “The marriage-rate reflects with much accuracy the condition of public welfare.” And further on: “The birth-rate was at its maximum in 1876, and fell uninterruptedly from that date year by year in natural accordance with the corresponding decline in the marriage-rate.” These years represented another period of commercial depression. We have here then incontrovertible proof of the national tendency. The mass of our people increase their numbers so soon as they are more comfortable, and the marriage-rate for each year may be called the pulse or indicator of the nation’s economic well-being. Its fluctuations coincide with the upward and downward movements of commercial activity.

In this connexion we have also to note that the most rapid growth of our population is taking place in the great industrial centres, the mining, manufacturing and trading districts; and the type that there prevails is necessarily affecting the British race.

By the Parliamentary return of marriages, births and deaths registered in England and Wales in the year 1881, it appeared that in different districts the percentages of marriages varied considerably. It was greater in the mining, manufacturing and trading districts than in the farming districts, and much higher in London than in the provinces. In the district comprising Hertford, Buckingham, Oxford, Bedford, Cambridge, the rate equalled twelve persons per annum for each thousand of the population. In London it was eighteen persons for each thousand, and in the divisions which comprise Yorkshire and Lancashire the rate was sixteen and seventeen persons to each thousand. As regards births, the proportions stated were somewhat similar. In London there were thirty-five births to one thousand of the population, whilst in the southeastern division there were only thirty-one; but the rate rose again to thirty-five and thirty-six in the great manufacturing districts of the Midlands and the North.

Dr. Ogle’s examination of statistics on the subject shows that this state of things has continued, in its main features, up to the present day. “Men marry,” he says, “in greater numbers when trade is brisk. The fluctuations in the marriage-rate follow the fluctuations in the amount of industrial employment.” “The rates vary very greatly in the different registration counties.” “In London the rate is invariably high. Almost all the counties in which the marriage-rate is high are counties in which the population is also high of women engaged in industrial occupations, and therefore presumably in receipt of independent wages, while all the counties in which the marriage-rate is very low are also counties in which but a very small population of the women are industrially occupied.” The general drift of the figures leads to the conclusion that early marriage is most common where there is the largest amount of employment for women.

The age at which marriage takes place is examined by Dr. Ogle as “a subject of scarcely less importance than the rate in its bearing upon the growth of the population.” And the point is of special interest in view of the fact that delayed marriage was valued by Malthus as a desirable preventive check. Dr. Ogle finds that the lowest average age at marriage for both bachelors and spinsters, viz., 25·6 and 24·2 respectively, was in 1873, the year in which the marriage-rate was highest; and from that date to the present time the ages have gone up gradually but progressively in harmony with the general decline in the marriage-rate. In 1888 the average age of bachelors at marriage was 26·3 years, and of spinsters was 24·7.

Observe of late years there has been a slight decline of the marriage-rate and a certain retardation of marriage, consequently the birth-rate has fallen, but says Dr. Ogle, “so also has the death-rate, and almost in equal amount; so that the balance between the two, or natural increment of the population, has practically scarcely changed. We may,” he observes, “dismiss altogether the notion that any adequate check to the increase of population is hereafter to be found in retardation of marriage. Such retardation may defer the day when a stationary population will be necessary, but, when that day has come, will be insufficient to prevent further growth. If a stationary population is to be obtained by simple diminution of the marriage-rate, that rate would have to be reduced 45 per cent. below the lowest point it has ever yet reached. In short, almost one-half of those who marry would have to remain permanently celibate. This seems as hopeless a remedy as the retardation.” He makes clearer still this important matter: “If one-quarter of the women who now marry were to remain permanently celibate, and the remaining three-quarters were to retard their marriages for five years, the birth-rate would be reduced to the level of the present death-rate. It is manifest that if the growth of population is hereafter to be arrested ... by increase of permanent celibacy, or by retardation of marriage, these remedies will have to be applied on a scale so enormously in excess of any experience as to amount to a social revolution.”

What, then, is the present position?

Population tends to increase faster than actual subsistence. Obviously it cannot outrun the supply of food because people cannot live upon nothing. There ensues therefore a state of chronic starvation among the most helpless, and premature deaths keep population reduced to the means of subsistence.

Let us glance at facts concerning London alone. London now contains over 4,300,000 persons. Three hundred thousand of these earn less than 18s. per week per family, and live in a chronic state of want. One person in every five will die in the workhouse, hospital, or lunatic asylum. Moreover, the percentage is increasing. Considering that comparatively few of the deaths are those of children, it is probable that one of every four London adults will be driven into these refuges to die.

One in every eleven of the whole population is a pauper. One in every five of persons over 65 is a pauper. The appalling statistics of the pauperism of the aged are carefully concealed in all official returns. In 1885 Canon Blackley found that 42·7 per cent. of deaths of persons over 60 in twenty-five rural parishes were those of paupers. Very many children in the Board Schools go to school without sufficient food unless supplied gratuitously. Over 30,000 persons in London have no home but the fourpenny “doss-house” or the causal ward. (Fabian Tracts, Nos. 10 and 17.)

The death-rate of children in the poorest districts of the East End of London is three times as great as among the rich at the West End. In barbarous ages the death-rate was, as far as we can learn, far higher than now, and even now the death-rate of children in Russia is extremely high.

We have little cause to rejoice in the absence of famine, pestilence and war so long as the lowering of the death-rate—by sanitation, the hospital system and the outcome generally of sympathetic feeling—increases the proportion of human beings in a state of chronic want, and produces a gradual enfeeblement and deterioration of the human race. Yet it is inconceivable that rationalized man could withhold his efforts to reduce the death-rate in the future because of the fatal effects of his philanthropic action in the past.

Darwin acknowledged this dilemma. In the year 1878 he somewhat sadly wrote: “The evils that would follow by checking benevolence and sympathy in not fostering the weak and diseased would be greater than by allowing them to survive and procreate.” Ten years later Professor Huxley wrote: “So long as unlimited multiplication goes on, no social organization which has ever been devised, no fiddle-faddling with the distribution of wealth, will deliver society from the tendency to be destroyed by the reproduction within itself in its intensest form of that struggle for existence, the limitation of which is the object of society.” (Nineteenth Century, February, 1888.)

Further than this he did not go; Huxley, like Darwin, brings us up to the dilemma and leaves us there. Not such, however, is the position of all scientific men in the present day. “We stand on the threshold of a new departure in social evolution,” says the author already quoted, “a new and potent factor in the process is about to make itself felt. This factor is man’s intellect.... The intelligence of man will act intelligently; population will not be subjected to mere haphazard restriction; it will be regulated with a wise adaptation of means to an end.” (Social Evolution and the Evolution of Socialism, G. S. Carr, pp. 65, 66.) Man’s intelligence already perceives the right policy to pursue. It is to lower the birth-rate, to limit births to a proportion conformable with the food supply; in other words, to create a painless, instead of a painful, equalization of births and deaths.

Is there any other means of escape from the existent dilemma? I answer, there is none. Emigration has sometimes been regarded as an efficient check to over-population, and Dr. Ogle allows that “hitherto some of the excess of births over deaths has been met by emigration, or rather by excess of emigration over immigration; but never on such a scale as to free the country from more than one-twentieth part of its redundant growth.” Moreover, this minimum of good is counterbalanced by evil, for emigration “carries off the more vigorous and enterprising of our working men to the necessary deterioration of the residue left at home.” And further: “The facilities for successful emigration are yearly diminishing; the time must inevitably come—sooner or later—when this means of reducing our population will altogether fail us.”

In view of the obvious tendency of better conditions—when brought about—to create a reduction of the death-rate and an acceleration of the birth-rate, eventuating in an increase of general misery, neither Malthus, Darwin, Huxley, nor any other great teacher of the past, has given us applicable and available counsel. There only remains for us now to consider Herbert Spencer’s opinion regarding this all-important matter. He is credited with the demonstration of a law of population wider than the laws discerned by Malthus and Darwin. The law is this: “Other things equal, multiplication and individuation vary inversely, i.e. the rate of reproduction of all living things becomes lowered as the development is raised, and conversely.” (Lecture on “Claims of Labour,” Edin., 1886, Patrick Geddes.)

We have to do with this so-called law in respect only of its bearing on practical action. The corollary deduced from it is: Individuate, educate and refine your masses, for the rate of increase will fall as organisms rise in the scale of culture.

Now what are our prospects of any rapid advance in individuation (development and culture) among the seething masses of a people who are helpless and frightfully overcrowded by the action of the very law which individuation is to counteract? In how long a period will the process be likely to take effect? It is on the answer to these questions that the worth of the principle as a law of practical guidance for humanity must depend.

Accepting it as a fact that in the families of our higher classes the average number is distinctly smaller than in the families of our lower classes, let us look for a moment at some of the causes creating this difference. First, in the higher classes men may have mistresses whose children are unacknowledged; and frequently they form the marriage tie with heiresses whose hereditary tendency is necessarily—as expounded by Francis Galton—towards sterility. Second, women of the higher classes are often delicate. They cannot support the strain of frequent maternity. Is this a condition that, in an advancing civilization, will persist? By no means. The ideal of womanhood, as of manhood, points to strength, not weakness—“a combination of brain power and skill with bodily health and vigour. Many intellectual men are physically robust and capable in a polygamous state of patriarchal propagation.” (Over-population, John M. Robertson.) And it is impossible to doubt that a rational education, embracing free play to activities hitherto denied to the sex, and promoting physical development, will lift women to a superior level of health and of physiological capacity. Third, the higher classes avail themselves to some extent of neo-Malthusian preventive checks, whereas the mass of the people are either ignorant of them or opposed to their use. Fourth, enforced celibacy in the case of a large proportion of women of the cultured classes is a cause of relatively fewer numbers. Obviously it is from the “warrens of the poor” that prolific life persistently springs. There we have the highest rate of genesis; and as the refined restrain propagation and limit their numbers, the poor enter the breach and fill up the ranks from their own inferior stock. Now, mark the result. The individuating process is checked, and ultimately fails, through the crowding out of the individuated. What occurs, naturally, inevitably, by the action of the process is a gradual subsidence, finally a limiting of the individuating factor, the very social force to which Herbert Spencer directs attention! Surely it suffices to point out “that no theory of the ultimate effects of mere refinement on rate of increase can give us help while nine-tenths of the human race are not refined, and not visibly in the way of becoming so.” (Over-population, John M. Robertson.)

We are compelled to dismiss Herbert Spencer’s “law of population” as irrelevant to the situation, and to declare that he has no more solved the riddle of the Sphinx than have Malthus, Darwin and Huxley.

The population problem, as it faces us to-day, is serious beyond all comparison. It is impossible to over-estimate the importance of finding its true solution. But while thousands of men and women are ready now to admit the seriousness, nowhere as yet has a movement appeared of united action applicable and adequate to the exigency.

CHAPTER II
THE PROBLEM OF SEX

How glorious will be the awakening when man’s desires will be honoured, his passions utilized, his labour exalted, whilst life is loved, and ever and ever creates love afresh.—Zola.

The Law of Population derives its force from an innate, powerful instinct or passion in man, the unguarded exercise of which brings about reproduction of the species. The thing therefore of greatest importance to general well-being is the discovery of means whereby to prevent this imperious instinct dominating and controlling the reproductive conditions—which imperatively need to be governed by reason and moral sense.

The sexual instinct, irresponsibly exercised, keeps population up to the margin of the means of subsistence—whatever that may be at the time—perpetuates disease, constitutional weakness and inherited taint, and frustrates the community’s best efforts to make life easier and happier to all.

My immediate purpose is to show that the prevention of all this evil is possible, for rational man may slowly and surely guide the above vital instinct into a new course—a course that will lead to the redemption of his physical nature, the purifying and elevating of his intellectual and emotional nature, and the direct creation of social virtue and happiness.

I must first point out the obstacles standing in the way of this fundamental far-reaching readjustment. There is a fatal ignorance of the true nature of the instinct in question, there is an obstinate prejudice that prevents frank discussion of the subject, there is Puritan or ascetic feeling that shuns pleasure as evil, and there is an optimistic fatalism which, basing itself on Darwinian law—already superseded by man’s interference—persists in the laissez-faire policy, however suicidal.

Sexual relations form the background of human life and are the primary sources of our finest emotions. Therefore the instinct that prompts to sex-union ought to hold a supremely honourable place in public estimation, and be carefully guarded from reproach and every hurtful or degrading condition. This great factor in physical and emotional life stands, at present, in disgrace. It is ignominiously repressed, it produces heart-rending misery and unmitigated evil. Publicly and in current literature, either it is ignored (hypocritically) or misjudged and condemned; and all the time privately it is intensely felt; and in every direction throughout society its licentious, furtive indulgence swirls into the vicious circles of destruction, the broken hearts and lives of women, the fallen dignity and besmirched consciences of men.

If we look at the matter of sexual intercourse calmly and in the light of pure reason alone, we must perceive that its intrinsic qualities are good, not evil. It creates happiness in the giving and receiving of pleasure, and the physiological exaltation connected with pleasure promotes individual health and buoyancy. To quote Herbert Spencer: “Pleasure increases vitality and raises the tide of life.” If man “eats and drinks immoderately,” said W. R. Greg, “nature punishes him with dyspepsia and disease; but nature never forbids him to eat when he is hungry and to drink when he is thirsty, provided he does so with discretion. Indeed, she punishes him equally if he abstains, as if he exceeds.” Mr. Greg further showed that the action of nature is precisely similar in respect of the sexual function. If man indulges to excess, he is punished by premature exhaustion, with appropriate maladies, not otherwise however. On the contrary, enforced and total abstinence is punished often, if not habitually, by “nervous disturbance and suffering and by functional disorder.” (Enigmas of Life, Chapter II.) Observe also the sexual desire “is the especial one of all our animal wants which is redeemed from animalism by being blended with our strongest and least selfish affections; which is ennobled by its associations in a way in which the appetites of eating and drinking and sleeping can never be ennobled in a degree to which the pleasures of the eye and ear can be ennobled only by assiduous and lofty culture.” (Enigmas of Life. W. R. Greg, p. 71.) We have no fastidious recoil from eating and drinking because these are merely animal functions. We take pains to improve our methods of preparing food, and we embellish our repasts with super-sensual surroundings in order to elevate the nutritive functions and free them from grossness or brutality. The fundamentally animal nature of sexual passion does not imply brutality, it is sociable to a far greater degree than eating or drinking, and this element of sociality purifies and ennobles, causing the function to become the basis of tender unselfish love. In its physiological aspect we may rest assured that the average normal human being has as little inherent tendency to sexual excess as to gluttony or drunkenness.

But apart from the question of excess, an attitude of mind towards the whole subject is common which must be condemned. This attitude consists of an element of shame, misnamed delicacy, and a sense of moral superiority. Women chiefly cherish the feeling, but men pay homage to it, with the result that in no friendly communion of men and women does it seem compatible with good taste to discuss questions of sex.

All vulgar allusions to love, all flippant talk on the subject of sex are distinctly contrary to good taste, they dishonour human nature, but I submit that it is an outrage on common sense, and an immoral action, when students of the Population—or any other grave social question—allow this spurious delicacy to interfere with their facing the whole facts of life, or to bias judgment in reasoning from the facts.

On the publication of my previous volume, Scientific Meliorism and the Evolution of Happiness, in 1885, a woman of superior intellect and attainments reviewed the book. One passage in her criticism stands thus: “A certain instinct that in such matters the instinct of reprobation is as healthy as it is superficially unreasonable, may make one sicken at the suggestions of neo-Malthusianism.” (The Academy of May 15th, 1886.) Such squeamishness is no indication of health or good taste. Its unreasonableness condemns it, and the source from which it springs is prejudice induced through specific conditions. The reviewer appears to suspect as much, for, later she remarks: “One cannot put down the book without a greatly increased sense of the supreme necessity of criticizing all established theories and institutions and of the supreme duty of refraining from precipitate action.” This is a sentiment one can endorse, and I appeal to all my readers, especially to women, to refrain from forming any judgment on any part of this difficult, all-important problem, until they have mastered the subject in all its aspects. To pursue the opposite course is to act irrationally and immorally. It causes to spring up in other minds the prejudice which distorts and disguises truth.

In nutritive functions, all repulsive animalism becomes overborne, as human nature refines and civilizes, and in a profounder sense the brutality of sex-passion vanishes through the growth of a higher love, which has for its dominant quality—not eagerness for possession—but unselfish tenderness. This tenderness, permeating the individual and extending its benign influence into society, issues in the gentle manners and virtuous actions that seem to spring directly from a universal principle of sympathy and love.

The scientific exposition of the phenomena has long been before the public. G. H. Lewes, in his Problems of Life and Mind, demonstrated that whilst the individual functions of man (alimentation being one of these) arise in relation to the cosmos, his general functions, including sex-appetite, arise in relation to the social medium, and “animal impulses become blended with human emotions,” until “in process of evolution, starting from the merely animal appetite of sexuality, we arrive at the purest and most far-reaching tenderness.” The social instincts, which he calls analogues of the individual instincts, tend more and more to make “sociality dominate animality and thus subordinate personality to humanity.” (Problems of Life and Mind, vol. 1, p. 159.)

It is only recently that the full significance of these facts has begun to influence general thought and to create a revolt against the unscientific attitude of mind that covers the sexual instinct with contumely and hypocritical disdain. There dawns in consequence a new light upon the afflicting problem of our social impurity. It is seen that the horrible struggle for existence which makes grief and pain, exhausting mental effort and physical restraint, enter so largely into the lot of unhappy man, is the paramount evil to cast out. “The wonderful cycles of normal life are for ever clean and pure.” (The New Spirit, Havelock Ellis.) And with far more of sex-union—especially for the young—and all the tender social joys that emanate from that union, and far more of ease and happiness in life, there becomes possible a great increase of goodness.[^[2]]

[2]. It is well to know moments of material happiness, since they teach us where to look for loftier joys.—Wisdom and Destiny, by Maurice Maeterlinck.

The late James Hinton spoke truly of the matter when he said: “Sensuous pleasure will be to the moral life of the future as sense-impressions are to the knowledge of the present, and with the same history. It will not be a thing put aside as evil or degrading or misleading, but recognized as the very basis and means of the life, and used with enhancements and multiplied powers undreamt of by us.” And again, “This is what sets the soul on fire—the union of goodness and pleasure. It is a new possibility, a hope we never saw before, a means whereby all may be brought into goodness.” (The Law Breaker, pp. 275, 236.) The key to the position, he points out, is the taking of pleasure unselfishly and with complete regard to the happiness of others.

The region of sex is indeed to this day unreclaimed, but, as Mr. Ellis asks: “Why should the sweetening breath of science be guarded from this spot? Our attitude towards this part of life affects profoundly our attitude towards life altogether.” (The New Spirit, pp. 127, 125). Which of us has not felt the truth of that deep saying of Thoreau’s that “for him to whom sex is impure there are no flowers in nature.”

It is precisely here that development in the sense of purity gives a sure hope of moral regeneration. And very remarkable is it that as in the old days when prophetic poetry took the lead in all religious reforms so now we have art in the van of social reform boldly confronting the great enemies of progress—ignorance, pride, prejudice and malicious insinuation. When Ibsen’s “Ghosts” was first put upon the stage of a London theatre, a dramatic critic delivered himself thus: “It is a dream of revolt—the revolt of the ‘joy of life’ against the gloom of hidebound, conventional morality, the revolt of the natural man and woman, the revolt of the individual against the oppression of social prejudice. The joy of life, the joy of life—it rings like a clarion through the play.” (Star of March 14th, 1891.) The fine women of Ibsen’s creation speak out upon questions of sex with a pure, earnest candour that breathes a new morality, and this moral element is one of the central features in Whitman’s attitude towards sex. For the lover, there is nothing in the loved one impure or unclean; a breath of passion has passed over, and all things are sweet. For most of us this influence spreads no farther, for the man of strong moral instinct it covers all human things in infinitely widening circles; his heart goes out to every creature that shares the loved one’s delicious humanity, henceforth there is nothing human that he cannot touch with reverence and love. Leaves of Grass is penetrated by this moral element. (The New Spirit, Havelock Ellis, p. 123.)

Walt Whitman himself says: “Difficult as it will be, it has become, in my opinion, imperative to achieve a shifted attitude from superior men and women towards the thought and fact of sexuality as an element in character, personality, the emotions, and a theme in literature.” (How I made a Book. An Essay by Walt Whitman.)

The principles underlying the new morality may be thus stated: Goodness does not consist in starving or denying any normal animal appetite, therefore chastity in the sense of total abstinence is essentially immoral. Life is not so prodigal of joys that man can wisely forego any source of innocent happiness, hence asceticism has no place in a rational theory and code of morals. The course for rational man to adopt in reference to sexual appetite is duly to satisfy and regulate it; and by removing every loathsome condition that superinduces degradation, to compel it to raise the tide of life in promoting individual comfort and general virtue.

To the reader who grasps the population problem it may seem that this moral code would place society on the horns of a painful dilemma, for while morality is said to require a closer union between the sexes than has hitherto prevailed, propagation—which is the actual result of that union—must be limited to an extent hitherto unknown, and by many people deemed impossible of attainment. By its patient investigations of nature, however, science here comes to the rescue of those whose standpoint in viewing the sexual problem is one of ardent sympathy with the essential needs and the moral aspirations of man in a social position truly pathetic.

Physiology has revealed that sexual organs are naturally divided into amative and reproductive organs, each class functionally distinct from the other. Amative organs relate primarily to sexual union, while reproductive organs relate primarily to impregnation and gestation. The process of reproduction may take place without use of the amative organs by simply bringing spermatozoa to ova (this has been done), and on the other hand the amative organs can be exercised without effecting reproduction. Sexual intercourse and procreation are not vitally related, as they are ordinarily assumed to be.

Moreover, the instincts connected with sexual union and with offspring are separate and distinct. In popular, confused thought, a reproductive instinct is attributed to animals and man. In reality, no direct instinct to reproduce the species exists. Animals unite sexually from an instinct directed to a pleasurable exercise of function; and although, in man, the relation has been made complex by his knowledge of the facts of reproduction and of social life, the sexual instinct is connected solely with pleasure and social feeling—not with reproduction. On the other hand, instincts associated with the presence and nurture of the young are not sexual or related to sexual passion. Therefore any doctrine requiring man’s exercise of the sexual function to be restricted to the end of reproduction is without justification in nature and directly conflicts with the facts of life.

The sexual act, in the natural order of things, is only occasionally in accidental relation to the reproductive process, for with married people in a thousand acts only a dozen may be reproductive. If social morality then requires the satisfaction of normal sexual feeling—and I think I have shown this to be the case—the desideratum is to prevent at will instead of leaving to accident the above occasional relation, and make the separation between amative and reproductive conditions as complete as their functional separation.

An American writer has well said: “If there is one social phenomenon which human ingenuity ought to bring completely under the control of the will, it is the phenomenon of procreation.” “Just as everyone is his own judge of how much he shall eat and drink, of what commodities he wants to render life enjoyable, so everyone should be his own judge of how large a family he desires, and should have power in the same degree to leave off when the requisite number is reached.” (Lester F. Ward. Dynamic Sociology, vol. 2, p. 465.) The Bible Communists of Oneida Creek practised voluntary control over the propagative function during thirty years with marked success. The number of births was regulated in accordance with the wishes of the community, and such careful attention was paid to the laws of heredity that no children of defective organisms or unsound constitutions were born. Were man universally intelligent and morally self-controlled, the knowledge of physiological facts and of invention applied to those facts would suffice to create general spontaneous limitation of the birth-rate and hygienic propagation of species. But one has only to think of the battered humanity in the back slums of every great city—the physical, mental and moral weaklings of our degraded populace—to realize that it is fantastic folly to expect individual intelligence under vicious and utterly depressing conditions, to counteract habit and save society from a rising tide of overwhelming numbers, the product of random pregnancy and sportive chance.

It cannot be a solution nor even a relief to the population difficulty that the intelligent—comparatively few—should limit their families so long as the masses refuse or fail to limit theirs. When society, becoming fully alive to the imminent danger of a too rapid birth-rate solves the population and social problems combined—in the only way possible—it will facilitate and promote the use of scientific checks to conception, and, if necessary, exact their adoption by some legislative device. (See Social Control of the Birth-rate, by G. A. Gaskell.)

By the aid of these personal means of avoiding or preventing conception the desired complete separation of amative and reproductive conditions is effected. Love is set free to rule in its own domain, and reason controls procreation to the infinite benefit of all future generations. In an article by Mr. J. Holt Schooling in the Contemporary Review for February, 1902, entitled “The Natural Increase of Three Populations,” it is shown how widely in the United Kingdom the use of preventive checks has spread within the last twenty years. The writer says in comparing the birth-rates of Germany, England and France since 1880: “There has been a fall in the birth-rate during each period in each country. But England’s fall has been larger than all; larger than the fall in the French birth-rate. During 1880–1884 there were 323 births per year per 10,000 of our population; during 1895–1899 there were only 291 births per year per 10,000 of population—a yearly fall of 32 births per 10,000 of population. France’s fall was 28 births and Germany’s fall was only 10 births, although Germany’s birth-rate was higher throughout than that of England or of France.” This is very satisfactory, and in regard to the strength of a nation that depends upon the adults, and there are more adults in a population where the children are fewer. The death-rate in England during the last twenty years has been always the lowest of the three countries.

At the present moment, society has no scientific sex-philosophy whatever. It affects to be governed by Puritanism—a vague doctrine belonging to the past history of the race and not in connexion with any ethical code directed to the development of goodness through a careful regard to the happiness of man and the satisfaction of his normal human nature. Puritanism, whether affected or real, spreads abroad hypocrisy, deceit, lying; it tends to licentiousness in men and the utter defilement of women, to social disorder and decay. Above all, it frustrates the development of that higher love, which, having animalism allied, but subordinate, fills the mind with exquisite emotion and creates unselfish delights.

Many years ago Miss Martineau wrote: “A thing to be carefully remembered is that asceticism and licentiousness universally co-exist. All experience proves this, and every principle of human nature might prophesy the proof. Passions and emotions cannot be extinguished by general rules.” (How to observe Morals and Manners, p. 169.) Puritanism ignores the sexual needs of the young. In a scientific age man is bound to recognize physiological reasons for early satisfaction of the sexual appetite and physiological reasons for delayed parentage.

Of the former, I have here to say that an early moderate stimulation of the female sexual organs (after puberty is reached) tends, by the law of exercise promoting development of structure, to make parturition in mature life easy and safe; and that the healthy functional and emotional life of love and gratified passion is the best preventive of hysteria, chlorosis, love melancholy, and other unhappy ailments to which our young women are cruelly and barbarously exposed, and which, I do not hesitate to say, make them in many cases feel their youth to be an almost insufferable martyrdom.

There are no less serious sexual evils which overtake masculine youth, if continent, namely, persistent and miserable cravings, abnormally directed instinct, spermatorrhoea, self-abuse; and these are usually hidden from sight and knowledge in consequence of a feeling that, in sexual matters, adults have no sympathy with the young.

In Lecky’s History of European Morals, vol. 2, p. 301, prostitution is thus referred to:—“However persistently society may ignore this form of vice, it exists, nevertheless, and on the most gigantic scale, and an evil rarely assumes such inveterate and perverting forms as when it is shrouded in obscurity and veiled by a hypocritical appearance of unconsciousness. The existence in England of unhappy women, sunk in the very lowest depths of vice and misery ... shows what an appalling amount of moral evil is festering uncontrolled, undiscussed and unalleviated under the fair surface of decorous society.” The number of London prostitutes was estimated at 80,000 in the year 1870. Since then, it has probably increased. In Paris, according to Von Dettingen, the actual number at that period was upwards of 60,000; in Berlin, 25,000 to 30,000. In Hamburg, in 1860, every ninth woman above the age of 15 was a prostitute, and in Leipzig the women depending principally or exclusively on prostitution was estimated at 2,000. This field of prostitution encloses whole armies of women finding there their only means of earning a miserable livelihood and a corresponding number of victims claimed by death and disease. (Woman in the Past, Present and Future. August Bebel, pp. 100–101.)

The prostitute, in her thousands; the married drudge, weary of child-bearing; the desolate old maid; these are all alike victims to social oppression. They are compelled to abstain from, or compelled to engage in, a specific function which is only natural, pleasurable, healthful and virtuous in the absence of all tyranny. Love to be real must be prompted by personal desire, and free to express itself in unhurtful conditions: I mean conditions that involve individual liberty, social respect and human dignity. The facts of prostitution alone would amply suffice to put Puritanism out of court in social reform. As a result of conduct, it has no control over vicious propensities, whilst it restrains tormentingly impulses that are normal and virtuous, that need only fitting conditions of healthful freedom.

Discarding asceticism and conventional purism as alike immoral, the social reforms that are based on a knowledge of human nature and a knowledge of the possibilities allied with conscious evolution, will bring all the institutions of our social life into accordance with the needs of the individual; and one essential condition of happy life is sexual love, with such union of the sexes as conforms to the general or collective interests.

In view of the law of population, and the fact that science has made plain how practically to separate the amative from the reproductive conditions of physical union, the love of the sexes can harmonize with the highest interests of our collective social life, and eugenics, not sexual love, may become paramount in generation.

What social morality requires is that the forces of philoprogenitiveness and a public conscience combined should dominate the function of reproduction, while love is left free from coercive control in the sphere of individual life.

CHAPTER III
EUGENICS OR STIRPICULTURE

The first step towards the reduction of disease is beginning at the beginning to provide for the health of the unborn.—Dr. Richardson.

The whole theory concerning heredity and its marvellous influence for good or evil is a nauseous draught for mankind to swallow. No wonder we revolt instinctively from a doctrine that charges tender parents with transmitting an evil heritage to the offspring they passionately love. “Although many important books draw attention to the facts, as far as they are ascertained, these momentous facts have as yet made no impression on the general mind.” (Scientific Meliorism and the Evolution of Happiness, p. 329.) This statement is no longer true. It was written in 1884, and since then immense strides have been made in the realization of the action of heredity. The subject is frequently and persistently brought forward now, and urged upon the attention of the public. Zola’s mère idée is not found only in French fiction, the new Russian school of fiction is permeated by it; and even in England some novelists, following in the footsteps of George Eliot, are assuming a scientific attitude towards life, and the facts of heredity are not ignored.

Moreover, in science and in all high-class criticism of life the doctrine of heredity is directly taught.

Apart from purely literary work, the examination of criminal statistics as a whole, and the practical observations of physicians, doctors, dentists, schoolmasters, poor-guardians, systematized and made public at congresses and stored in scientific handbooks so inexpensive as to be well within reach of all students—these, I say, combine to impress upon the general mind the conviction that racial degeneracy is a palpable fact; and that inheritance is prime factor in the degenerating process. And recently indeed a suspicion of danger in over-estimating this factor has been publicly expressed. Whereas formerly, it is said, a child was supposed to be born with a mind like a clean sheet of paper, on whose fair surface we might write what we chose, opinion points in the present day to an opposite extreme, viz., this, that the hereditary tendencies born with the child determine its future career, and that education cannot modify this destiny in any essential respect. Now, to disallow the importance of education as also a prime factor in progress is an error of judgment; but so long as the human race continues scourged by sickness, martyred by pain, demoralized by disease and innate debility, and decimated by premature death, it is not possible for thinkers to over-estimate the profound significance for weal or woe of this question of heredity.

Where individual life is not menaced by poverty or destitution, disease is the bane of existence, the barrier to physical comfort and to both mental and moral advance. Alas! how few of us have any permanent possession of sound health. In spite of medical science, sanitary protection, progress made during the last hundred years in knowledge of pathological conditions, and vast resources now at our command for subduing and mitigating every form of physical evil, disease dogs our footsteps from infancy to maturity and onwards to the grave. We have the young attacked by consumption, the middle-aged suffering from failing health, the aged struck by paralysis or bowed down by rheumatism; and everywhere we meet husbands and wives permanently saddened by the loss of the chosen companion of their life, and mothers whose light-hearted buoyancy died out for ever when the babe, prized beyond all treasure, was snatched from their arms to be laid in our appallingly numerous children’s graves.

In order to form an approximately correct conception of disease, we must glance for a moment at the conditions of health. Life in all its forms, physical or mental, morbid or healthy, is in close relation to the individual organism and external forces. Health, as the consequence and evidence of a successful adaptation to the conditions of existence, implies the preservation, well-being and development of the organism; while disease marks a failure in organic adaptation to external conditions, and leads to disorder, decay and death.

If we could perceive all the conditions, outward and inward, and take them into account, a distinct line of causation would become apparent. We should find disease no more an accident than the storm that breaks upon the seaboard or the volcanic flames that burst from the mountain top. The extreme complexity and delicacy of biological phenomena precludes a wide grasp of conditions in individual cases, but scientific investigation has established the point that of the antecedents to disease the largest proportion is some heritage of weakness transmitted from parents—some disabilities for healthy life resulting from a bad descent.

When, for instance, mental anxiety produced by adverse circumstances is said to have made a man mad, there is implied some inherent infirmity of nervous element which has co-operated. “Were the nervous system in a state of perfect soundness and in possession of that reserve power which it then has of adapting itself, within certain limits, to the varying external conditions, it is probable,” says Maudsley, “that the most unfavourable circumstances would not disturb permanently the relation and initiate mental disease. But when unfavourable action from without conspires with an infirmity of nature within, then the conditions of disorder are established and a discord or madness is produced.” (The Physiology and Pathology of the Mind, p. 199.)

Thus although outward circumstances often decide the character of a disease, inherited infirmity is its primary cause. A being liable to madness, if subjected to anxiety, may, under different conditions, acquire not madness but consumption. A child may fall a victim to the special ailment from which one or both parents suffered; but equally it is possible that disease in him may assume a totally different form. All that can be affirmed with certainty is this: of diseased parents the offspring invariably inherit a constitution liable to “some kind of morbid degeneration, or a constitution destitute of that reserve power necessary to meet the trying occasions of life!”

The trying occasions of life have multiplied with every new complexity in social structure; and there has been no corresponding increase of constitutional strength; but, on the contrary, a growing feebleness of physique and instability of nerve-function. “Our children in these times,” remarks Dr. Richardson, “are our reproach. Where is there a healthy child? You may put before me a child showing to the unskilled mind no trace of disease.... It is sure to have some inherited failure. We are as yet unacquainted with all the phenomena of disease that pass in the hereditary line.... We admit, as proved, scrofula or struma, cancer, consumption, epilepsy, rheumatism, gout. It would be wrong to limit the hereditary proclivities of disease to this list. The further my own observations extend, the stronger is the impression made on my mind that the majority of the phenomena of disease have hereditariness of character.” (Diseases of Modern Life, p. 38.) Sir James Paget and Sir William Jenner gave evidence of a similar kind before a Committee of the House of Lords in 1882. From the former eminent physician’s speech I may quote one passage: “We now know that certain diseases of the lungs, liver and spleen are all of syphilitic origin, and the mortality from syphilis in its later forms is every year found to be larger and larger, by its being found to be the source of a number of diseases which previously were referred to other origins.” (The Times Report, August 11th, 1882.)

In August Bebel’s work on Woman, her Position in the Past, Present and Future, this passage occurs: “With regard to the decimating effects of venereal disease, we will only mention that in England between 1857 and 1865 the authenticated cases which ended fatally amounted to over 12,000, among which no fewer than 69 per cent. were children under twelve months, the victims of parental infection.” (p. 101.)

Of the original source from which syphilis sprang, of its implication in the sex problem, and of the ultimate eradication of its virus—to be attained only by the true solution of the sex problem—we cannot here speak; the point under immediate consideration is the fact that the civilized races of mankind persist in propagating and perpetuating disease. They unscrupulously bring into the world individual organisms that are pre-destined to failure because not endowed with the potential qualities indispensable to complete and successful life.

In America the same conditions are noted and publicly referred to. Mr. Nathan Allen, M.D., before a medical society at Massachusetts, reported: “A gradual change is taking place in the organization of our New England people—a change which has occurred principally within the last two or three generations. The nervous temperament with all its advantages and disadvantages is becoming too predominant for other parts of the body. The frame-work of the body generally is not so large ... the countenance is paler, the features are more pointed and not so expressive of health. We have a larger class of diseases arising from general debility ... we have more disease of the brain and nervous system, more sudden deaths from apoplexy, paralysis, and also diseases of the heart. In sound healthy stock we have in a far higher degree the recuperative powers of nature; while the original constitution is feeble, diseases of almost every kind become complicated, and their treatment more difficult as well as doubtful in result.”

Laws of inheritance affect the moral as well as the physical and mental health of the nation. Their action is fatally legible in the public records of crime. Not that many criminals inherit the actual attributes of crime—brutality, cruelty, malignity, propensity to abnormal sexual practices—these develop through the interaction of external with internal forces—but the ordinary criminal is born deficient in the elemental qualities necessary to the establishment of the average moral nature.

From observations carried on in English prisons, it appears that in these days of careful school-board education 25 per cent. of prisoners can neither read nor write, and a certain number are quite incapable of receiving and benefiting by school instruction. “The memory and reasoning powers are so utterly feeble that attempts to school them is a waste of time.” (Crime and its Causes, William Douglas Morrison, of H.M. Prison, Wandsworth, p. 195.) Intellectually, criminals are “unquestionably less gifted than the rest of the community”; emotionally they “have the family sentiment only feebly developed,” and morally the will is “morbidly variable.” A prisoner may be animated by good resolutions, anxious to do what is right, often possessing a sense of moral responsibility, yet may plunge again and again into crime from the absence of a sustained power of volition. “Persons afflicted in this way are generally convicted for crimes of violence, such as assault, manslaughter, murder. They experience real sentiments of remorse, but neither remorse nor penitence enables them to grapple with their evil star. The will is stricken with disease, and the man is dashed hither and thither a helpless wreck on the sea of life.”

The harmony of the social organism depends upon congruity of thought and feeling in its members and upon action made promptly conformable through exercise of the power of control centred in the inner part or spiritual nature of man.

A criminal is an unsocial man, an undeveloped being, one, generally speaking, whose pregenital stock was below par, and failed in the conservation, development and transmission of a physical, mental and moral capacity equalling that of the average of his race. The physical debility or inherited tendency to nerve weakness—so universal in the present day—has clearly a causal relation with the increase of crime deplored by the principal authorities on the subject in Europe and America.

In the United States we are told by Mr. D. A. Wells and by Mr. Howard Wines, an eminent specialist in criminal matters, that crime is steadily increasing at a faster rate than in due proportion to the increase of population. Nearly all the chief statisticians abroad tell the same tale. Dr. Mischler, of Vienna, and Professor Von Liszt, of Marburg, draw a deplorable picture of the increase of crime in Germany. In France, the criminal problem is as formidable and perplexing as in Germany. M. Henri Joli estimates that crime has increased 133 per cent. within the last half century, and is steadily rising. Taking Victoria as a typical Australasian colony, we find that even in the antipodes, which are not vexed to the same extent as Europe with social and economic difficulties, crime is persistently raising its head ... it is a more menacing danger among the Victorian Colonists than it is at home. (Crime and its Causes, W. D. Morrison. Published in 1891, pp. 12 and 13.)

While physical degeneracy creates crime, a non-moral life on the other hand causes further physical deterioration. The pursuit of wealth for purely personal ends is pre-eminently anti-social. Breadth of thought and social feeling grow impossible to the man whose life is devoted to the business of amassing riches; and Dr. Henry Maudsley gives it as his conviction, based upon wide observation of family life, that such men are extremely unlikely to beget healthy children. In cases where the father has toiled upwards from poverty to vast wealth, “I have witnessed the results,” he says, “in a degeneracy mental and physical of his offspring which has sometimes gone as far as extinction of the family in the third or fourth generation. I cannot but think after what I have seen that the extreme passion for getting rich does predispose to mental degeneration in the offspring, either to moral defect or to moral and intellectual deficiency, or to outbreaks of positive insanity under the conditions of life.” (The Physiology and Pathology of the Mind, p. 206.)

This fact alone is amply sufficient to condemn an industrial system that creates monopolies, concentrates wealth, stimulates greed, degrades the upper classes by superfluous luxury, the lower by envy, poverty, despair, and tends generally to physical, mental and moral decay. But were the entire economic system judiciously reconstructed, fatal elements would remain so long as man fails to grapple with the biological problem and fails to bring the great life forces of reproduction under conscientious direction and control.

Gravitation and all well studied mechanical and chemical forces have been adapted by man to special purposes in relation with his civilized life; even so must the sexual forces that belong to his basic existence be in their turn dominated and made conformable with his higher moral and spiritual needs. In this regard his primary need is that there shall be no transmission of disease or constitutional debility from one generation to another; but that the entire strength of the laws of heredity shall create an improvement of stock and thereby lift humanity to a higher level of physical health and efficiency.

In seeking the true method of attaining this end, it is our duty to look first to the teaching of the great founders of social philosophy. Without their invaluable services in discovering and setting forth the one unbroken process of law which “connects all phenomena from the motion of molecules and the courses of the suns to the phenomena of human thought and the destinies of nations” (J. M. Robertson), no intellects could to-day grasp the causes of misery and, conceiving the possibility of circumventing these causes, devise a scheme of scientific action to reverse the trend of general movement and evolve conditions of genuine and universal happiness.

In this sphere, however—the sphere of eugenics, or improvement of the human stock, as also in regard to the population and sex problems—Darwin and Herbert Spencer have failed us. The mind of the former, habituated to dwell on the favourable aspects of the struggle for existence during the early epochs of man’s history, was blind to the consequences of the genesis and growth of the broadly social element in man. Barbarous man could let cosmic forces prevail to exterminate the weak. Sympathetic man is compelled by virtue of his enlarged subjective nature to institute a new struggle, viz., a struggle against the struggle for existence (a phrase used by Lange), and already his triumph is everywhere visible in the survival of the unfit to struggle.

Darwin opposed the proposal to restrain population on the score that this would minimize the struggle which had created civilization in the past and which must needs, he thought, carry it on in the future, and both Darwin and Herbert Spencer “assumed that a generalization which sums up the progressive forces of a collectively unconscious society, i.e. a society without the conception of evolution and of a universal sociology, must equally sum up the progressive principles of a collectively conscious society, a society which has realized evolution and is constructing a universal sociology. Though they themselves are our greatest helpers towards such consciousness, they failed to realize that our attainment of it must revolutionize human history.” (Modern Humanists, J. M. Robertson, p. 234).

Turning then to less illustrious men, Mr. Francis Galton is our most advanced teacher in the field of eugenics. He faces the problem of race regeneration and has put forth a scheme or policy of action, resting on Dr. Matthews Duncan’s alleged facts regarding the relative fertility in early and late marriages. He shows that a group of a hundred mothers whose marriages and those of their daughters should take place at the age of twenty, would, in the course of a few generations, breed down a group of a hundred mothers whose marriages and those of their daughters were delayed until the age of twenty-nine. Let us then, he reasons, promote by every means in our power the early marriage of human beings of superior quality, whilst we discountenance early marriage in those social members who are less favourably endowed. And “few,” he says, “would deserve better of their country than those who determine to live celibate lives through a reasonable conviction that their issue would probably be less fitted than the generality to play their part as citizens.” (Inquiries into Human Faculty, p. 336.)

In examination for official appointments he would have attention paid to a candidate’s ancestral qualifications as well as his personal ability. The man of inherited sound constitution and average ability should be preferred to the man of superior ability who belongs to a delicate and short-lived family. The former will in all probability become the more valuable servant of the two. Some scheme should be devised by which to bestow marks for family merit, to put, as it were, a guinea stamp to the sterling guinea’s worth of natural nobility; and this, he conceives, might set a great social avalanche in motion. It would open the eyes of every family, and of society at large, to the importance of marriage alliance with a good stock; it would introduce the subject of race as a permanent topic of consideration, and lead to a careful collecting of family histories and noting of those facts which are absolutely necessary for guidance in right conduct. Late marriage, as advised by Malthus, Mr. Galton utterly condemns. The prudent alone are influenced by that doctrine, and it is, he says, a most pernicious rule of conduct in its bearing upon race. His policy, then, is early and fruitful marriage for the best specimens of our race, and widespread celibacy in the case of those less highly favoured, whilst everywhere the sentiment should prevail that eugenics, or the improvement of the human stock, is the primary consideration in marriage and the guiding principle in sex relations.

This theory I hold to be one-sided, and the policy misleading and to some extent false. Mr. Galton ignores the fundamental principle of social life, viz., that the happiness of all, at all times, should be the aim and object of rational man, and he mistakes the quality of human nature in highly civilized man. To demand celibacy of men and women whose defective organisms it is not desirable to perpetuate, would be in hundreds and thousands of instances to sacrifice unnecessarily present happiness to future gain—to build up the comfort and enjoyment of coming generations at the expense of the comfort and enjoyment of our own generation. The sentiment of justice repudiates this action as well as condemns the reverse position of a reckless self-indulgent procreating to the deterioration of the human stock, whilst reason distinctly shows that individual liberty, in respect of marriage, is a social necessity perfectly compatible with the well-being of all. Physical regeneration of race will not be achieved by an overstrained morality that does violence to the emotional human nature of the normal and average man.

Mr. Galton’s system of social reform accords in some respects with that which it is the purpose of this work to set forth. Both systems premise teaching that it is man’s duty and within his power to improve the physical, intellectual and moral structure of his race. He may, in part, achieve this by intelligent forethought and careful action in exercising the function of propagating his kind. Population must not be kept up by consumptives or persons whose pedigree is tainted by any disease known to be hereditary, and public opinion must enforce the necessary restraints. (Temporary illness ought also to be considered. It is when parents are in their best state of health only that they are morally justified in bringing children into the world.)

Of these, celibacy is a restraint commended and advised by Mr. Galton, whilst scientific meliorism deliberately rejects it, for celibacy is a vital evil, destroying individual happiness and tending obviously to social disorder. Wherever love in its highest form exists between two individuals, union is eminently desirable; but if either or both be afflicted by disease or hereditary taint, the sacrifice demanded of them is to carefully abstain from giving birth to children. Whether the means adopted be those of natural self-control or of artificial aids to self-control will depend on the views of the individuals immediately concerned, and in this matter society has no right of interference.

It is the business, however, of society to sweep away ignorance and make it possible for the poor as well as the rich to enter on the right path voluntarily, and where, from physical or moral degeneracy, self-regulation is impossible, society must exercise authority and coercively restrain the vital social force of propagation. It will not be by means of the lonely lives celibacy entails that civilized men and women will refrain from having children disqualified for useful citizenship. We shall, to quote the late poet laureate’s words, “move upward, working out the beast, and let the ape and tiger die,” by other means more worthy of humanity, i.e. by socialized freedom and sex equality; by intelligent self-control voluntarily practised (with or without artificial appliance), and by control, enforced wherever necessary by the State in fulfilment of its responsible duty—the careful guardianship of the congenital blood of future generations.

In the savage epoch of our history, the force of natural selection produced survival of the fittest. From that epoch we have long since passed into a semi-civilized epoch in which the force of sympathetic selection produces a miserable state of indiscriminate survival; we have now to pass forward to the epoch in which the rational force of a wise, intelligent selection will systematically secure the birth of the physically fit.

CHAPTER IV
MARRIAGE

Marriage is that union of the sexes which is most in accordance with the moral and physical necessities of human beings and which harmonizes best with their other relations of life.—Richard Harte.

It is of vast importance to bear clearly in mind that all the great social institutions that confront us to-day are of genetic origin and evolution. They have not been devised by man to bring about the true end of all intelligent effort—namely, happiness. They are simply the undesigned, unforeseen results of various natural and social forces of the past. They survive through their tendency to maintain the existence of the race. They subserve life, not happiness. It is not my intention to treat marriage historically and trace back the various forms of it to their social origins. It is sufficient to bear in mind the fact of the natural, undevised origin of every form, including that form of monogamy which prevails in the most civilized countries of to-day. A priori, we should have expected that monogamy, being the ideal sex-union of the civilized races of Western Europe, would have been everywhere the last form to appear; that, in short, its fitness to survive all other forms would be shown by lateness of development as well as by superior qualifications for satisfying the needs of a highly developed humanity. This is not so, however. Mr. Herbert Spencer gives reasons for believing that monogamy dates as far back as any other marital relation. “Indeed, certain modes of life necessitating wide dispersion such as are pursued by the lowest forest tribes in Brazil and the interior of Borneo—modes of life which in earlier stages of human evolution must have been commoner than now—hinder other relations of the sexes.” (Sociology, vol. i. p. 698.) Two of the lowest tribes of savages existing, the Wood-Veddahs of Ceylon and the Bushmen of South Africa, are customarily monogamous. It is plain, therefore, that if monogamy is to be reckoned the final form of sexual relations, no argument can be based on any theory of its recent date in evolution. The opinion must seek to rest upon different ground—upon the quality of the institution, its fitness and adequateness, not only to human needs in the present system of society, but in the reformed system of the future.

While a number of primitive tribes are monogamous, as also are certain monkeys and birds, many civilized peoples have adopted polygamy, sometimes openly, at other times in a masked form. Polyandry is also a form of marriage not uncommon among semi-civilized peoples, as the Nairs of Malabar, the Kandyans of Ceylon and the Tibetans.

The Nairs are especially interesting because there is among them a regulated system of complex marriage which will compare in its results very favourably with the monogamous marriage of Western nations. The rule of the Matriarchate prevails, “inheritance is from mother to daughter and from the uncle to the children of the eldest sister; the household is directed by the mother or the eldest girl; polyandry and polygamy exist side by side or are inextricably mixed. Thus each woman is the wife of several men, each of whom has in turn several wives.” (Elisee Reclus, Primitive Folk, p. 162.) The men are under well-understood obligations to assist in the support of the domestic establishments, while the children look up to their mothers and uncles as their special protectors. The result of these customs on the status of women is most remarkable. It is said that “in no country are women more influential and respected than in Malabar.” (Ibid. p. 156.) The Nair lady may possess property, choose her own husbands and rule her own children. Marriage is not, as elsewhere, the taking possession of a woman by the man, but is really her emancipation from male thraldom. It puts her as nearly on a footing of social equality with the man as is possible in a semi-militant community. What is it that has decided the selection or unconscious choice—if we may call it so—of matrimonial usage among the various races of mankind, since no special form is necessarily connected with the degree of general civilization? The conditions and exigencies of social life; and as those conditions and exigencies change in the future, matrimonial usages will also change. As a matter of fact, every possible method, speaking generally, has been adopted. Sometimes a regulated promiscuity—for each man claimed his rights—sometimes the mixed polyandric and polygamic household; occasionally simple polyandry or polygamy; at other times monogamy; marriage experimental also, as with the Redskins of Canada, who pair and unite for a few days, then quit each other if the trial has not proved satisfactory to both parties; or temporary marriage as in the case of the Jews in Morocco, who unite for three or six months according to agreement; or free marriages as those of the Hottentots and Abyssinians, who marry, part, and remarry at will; or partial, as the marriages of the Assanyeh Arabs, which only bind the parties for certain days of the week. Every possible general method, I repeat, has been tried, and when the practice hit upon has served human needs and also promoted the solidarity and increase of the group, it has tended to persist.

In tracing the evolution of the modern European form of monogamous marriage, we become aware that at a very early period, and for a long time subsequently, the wife was regarded as the absolute property of the husband. The wife was a bought or a captured article, and like other articles of property was at the entire disposal of the owner to use, sell, lend or abuse as he thought fit. The Roman law makes no essential difference between the marital law and the law of property, and modern marriage laws in the different States of Europe and America treat the wife as if she were in a very large degree a personal possession of her husband.

The history of modern marriage, in short, is the history of man’s domination of woman and the measures he has taken to assume, assert and establish his rights of possession. Amid changing outward conditions of life, he has made good his claim to control her destiny in accordance with his own varying desires.

In appraising the value of our much-vaunted monogamy, we must clearly understand that its legal basis is not, and never was, a strong personal adhesion of sympathy and affection, but a compact respecting personal property, involving in the cases where the “contracting parties are possessed of wealth, both property in person and in things.” It is quite legal, and indeed quite respectable, for marriages to be formed on a pecuniary and social foundation, into which love does not enter. The woman who sells herself in marriage to a man for the sake of money and position is not regarded as a prostitute, but as a respectable, “honest” woman who has made a “fortunate” marriage.

To understand how thoroughly marriage is based upon property and not upon love, it should suffice to contemplate the grounds on which legal divorce is granted. Divorce is not granted, in this country at least, on proofs of incompatibility of nature and absence of affection, but on proof of adultery, in which co-respondents may be compelled to pecuniarily compensate the husband on account of having made use of his wife without his permission as her owner. Connivance by the husband precludes the granting of a divorce. Man’s supremacy and woman’s subjection become evident in the fact that no amount of simple adultery in a husband can be made the ground of a divorce, nor is a wife able to claim any pecuniary compensation from the paramours of a husband. Matrimony, at this epoch, is for the most part a “commercial transaction,” but in the words of Herbert Spencer, “already increased facilities for obtaining divorce point to the probability that whereas in those early stages during which permanent monogamy was being evolved, the union by law (originally the act of purchase) was regarded as the essential part of marriage and the union by affection non-essential; and whereas at present the union by law is thought the more important and the union by affection the less important, there will come a time when the union by affection will be held of primary moment, and the union by law as of secondary moment; and hence reprobation of marital relations in which the union by affection has dissolved. That this conclusion will seem unacceptable to most is probable, I may say certain.” (Principles of Sociology, vol. i. p. 788.)

Herbert Spencer strikes here at the very foundation of modern marriage. Moreover, in making affection rule sexual relations, he opens up all the possibilities of other forms of marriage than the monogamous, for affection may not only be transitory, but unrestricted to one. In face of the barbarous origin of marriage, there exists no reason why people of liberal thought should make a dogged, pious stand at monogamy while lightly dismissing promiscuity, polygamy, polyandry as disreputable forms of sex-union. Mr. Spencer holds that “the monogamic form of the sexual relation is manifestly the ultimate form,” but he gives no reasons to prove his case that are not sufficiently disproved by the form of marriage existing among the Nairs. Again, the fact of the numerical equality of the sexes does not make monogamy the only suitable form, although it supplies a reasonable objection to pure polygamy and pure polyandry. Mr. Spencer says that “monogamy is a pre-requisite to a high position of women.” Here he plainly overlooks the facts of the respected and comparatively independent position of women among peoples practising mixed polygamy and polyandry under fixed rules and regulations.

With the actual facts of life before us, we are forced to admit that under the régime of man’s dominancy and woman’s subjection, monogamy has been gross throughout all history, while with polyandry it has not been so. Note, in this regard, one fact alone—jealousy, that mean, selfish emotion which destroys the happiness of so many lives, is not in evidence among the simple polyandric Nairs. The associated husbands live on a good understanding with one another, there is a complete absence of jealousy. Which of us can say, in view of the monogamy that surrounds us: Tolstoi’s graphic picture, “the wild beast of jealousy began to roar in its den,” applies only to a marriage in fiction? It is to monogamy that we owe the typical domestic tyrant and many tyrannous attributes that survive in modern masculine human nature. Monogamy, too, has always been accompanied by other sexual relations in which both sexes are degraded and one sex is socially and physically ruined. As Mr. W. E. H. Lecky has pointed out, monogamy on one side of the shield implies prostitution on the other.

In its normal form, monogamy signifies the attachment of one man to one woman, involving—first, permanent and exclusive sexual union; second, conjoint domestic life; third, the generating and rearing of a family; fourth, social intercourse in the class of society to which the parties belong. Beyond these features of marriage, the economic and social forces of the age bring about in the vast majority of marriages a constant subjection of the wife to the husband, by reason of her being dependent on him for her living, and a general freedom to the husband but not to the wife to commit adultery. There is usually compelled also lateness of marriage, which implies unhealthful, painful conditions of life in the celibate youth of both sexes. I will ask here: Ought we to look upon permanency and exclusiveness as essential elements in the form of sex-union best suited to humanity at the present stage of its evolving civilization? Permanency is necessarily essential to our ideal of the final form of marriage, for the strongest, most valuable bond of affection implies it, and loss of love from whatever cause is a real calamity. But where that calamity has already befallen, for society to enforce a mere outward permanency of the matrimonial bond is irrational—the counterfeit union is productive only of private misery and public disorder. And further, under our present wretched economic conditions, the struggle for bread and absence of leisure and freedom in the case of the workers, and, amid the upper classes, frequent financial difficulties, false notions and customs of propriety and etiquette—all these combine to make it rare indeed that a man or woman chances to meet and unite with his or her counterpart or true life companion.

Commercialism is no safe guide in the quest for a vital, permanent sex-union, and until commercialism wholly disappears, the exigencies of life demand freedom of divorce to rectify unavoidable errors of judgment in matrimony, and make more possible the forming of ties that are truly and naturally permanent.

As human beings become more moral inwardly and create the outward conditions in which they can live a truly moral existence, Mr. Emerson’s principle that the great essentials in human conduct are to escape from all false ties and to reveal ourselves as we are, will be more and more acknowledged and acted upon. Great thinkers like Milton in the past and Herbert Spencer in the present, condemn as contrary to religion and reason a permanency that involves falsity or absence of love. “It is a less breach of wedlock,” says Milton, “to part with wise and quiet consent betimes, than still to foil and profane that mystery of joy and union with a polluting sadness and perpetual distemper; for it is not the outward continuing of marriage that keeps whole that covenant, but whatsoever does most according to peace and love, whether in marriage or in divorce, he it is that breaks marriage least, it being so often written that ‘Love only is the fulfilment of every commandment.’” (John Milton, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, chap. v.) Divorce made attainable to all men and women, rich and poor, without any disgraceful accompaniment, is a necessary condition of progress. And in effect, each nation of Western Europe accepts and facilitates divorce concurrently with its advance in civilization.

Not long ago, in my hearing, a Roman Catholic barrister, whose practice makes him familiar with all that occurs in the Divorce Court, delivered himself to this effect: “My church anathematises divorce, and to my mind she is right. But I am not the fool to think that the divorce law passed in our Statute Books in the year 1858 will ever be annulled or departed from. In the interests of morality, the pressing desideratum is that the basis of divorce be made the same for man and woman. It is a crying iniquity that whereas a husband by avoiding physical force, may legally be as unfaithful to his marriage vows as he chooses, and may tyrannize over and trample under his feet the feelings of his wife, one single slip in an unguarded moment on her part, one act of adultery committed, it may be in a fit of despair, entitles him by law to repudiate her summarily as barbarian husbands dismissed their wives.”

While permanency is eminently valuable in sexual relations, can we venture to say the same as regards exclusiveness? This distinctive quality of exclusiveness is not an extension of love, but a narrowing of it down—a restraint upon personal feeling. When woman wins her freedom and is no longer under any circumstances man’s dependent and slave, but his friend and comrade in the battle of life, will she restrain the physical expression of sex-love, yet fearlessly respond to all the tender ties certain to unite her with the opposite sex? To give at present a dogmatic reply is impossible. Personally, my instincts—so far as I know them—accord with Herbert Spencer’s dictum: the ultimate form of sexual relation will be monogamic; but I recognize my own limitations. Since the women of my generation are children of bond-slaves, hampered within and without by survivals from an epoch of sex subjection wherein man’s dominancy superimposed upon woman a chastity he repudiated for himself, the standpoint from which the freed being of the future will decide her sex-morality is not in the grasp of my apprehension.

Nevertheless, the immediate path of progress is distinctly marked out. I agree with the author who holds the opinion that: “Better indeed were a Saturnalia of free men and women than the spectacle which, as it is, our great cities present at night.” (Edward Carpenter.) But set women free “from the mere cash-nexus to a husband, from the money slavery of the streets, from the nameless terrors of social opinion, and from the threats of the choice of perpetual virginity or perpetual bondage,” and we need not fear for sex-morality. “Sex in man is an organized passion, an individual need or impetus; but in woman it may more properly be termed a constructive instinct, with the larger signification that that involves.... Nor does she often experience that divorce between the sentiment of love and the physical passion which is so common with men. Sex with her is a deep and sacred instinct, carrying with it a sense of natural purity.” (Woman, Edward Carpenter, p. 9.) And from woman herself let me quote a passage occurring in a women’s journal: “Love is an emotion separate from sex-impulse, it may or may not exist in co-relation to it. The testimony easily taken from the lives of many women is to the effect that love enters not into the impulse which, active and unrestrained on the part of those to whom they are yoked for life, has created for them a life which can be called by no name save slavery.” (Shafts, October, 1895.) Again, turning to the opposite sex, Havelock Ellis states (in his study of Man and Woman, Contemporary Science Series) that: “In women men find beings who have not wandered so far as men from the typical life of earth’s creatures; women are for men the human embodiments of the restful responsiveness of Nature.”

I am convinced that however polygamous the male-sex—under a system of industrial commercialism may appear—the great mass of our women are not licentious and not polyandrous in tendency. While a Saturnalia of free men and women would, as compared with present sexual conditions, be a preferable evil, we need not in our forecast of the future dread such a Saturnalia, or face its possibility. It is a libel on humanity to assume that no self-restraints are inherent to withhold mankind from sexual excesses when freed from control by Church and State. And although it might be said that “the growing complexity of man’s nature would be likely to lead him into more rather than fewer sex relations, on the other hand it is obvious that as the depth and subtlety of any attachment that really holds him increases, so does such attachment become more permanent and durable and less likely to be realized in a number of persons.... In man and woman we find a distinct tendency towards the formation of this double unit of wedded life ... and while we do not want to stamp such natural unions with any false irrevocability or dogmatic exclusiveness, what we do want is a recognition to-day of the tendency to their formation as a natural fact independent of any artificial laws.” (Marriage, Edward Carpenter, p. 31.)

The natural restraints or checks upon undue indulgence in sex-intercourse extend from the physical or material plane to the spiritual plane. These are—considerations of health; feelings of unselfishness and social duty; and a spiritual, i.e. an ideal, conception of humanity and of all the manifold relations of life.

Unselfishness is pre-eminently the natural check and regulator of sex relations, and not until love is emancipated from selfishness will it reach an ideal form. If we love unselfishly we desire the happiness and freedom of the being loved even to the extent of self-abnegation; tyranny and jealousy become impossible. All natural checks will necessarily strengthen and grow as humanity rises higher in the scale of being; moreover, education is bound—under racial progress—to become to each succeeding generation a much more adequate guide than hitherto. Even in the present day, it would not be difficult to get youths and girls at the age of romance to understand that “though they may have to contend with some superfluity of passion in early years, the most permanent and deeply-rooted desire within them will, in all probability, lead them at last to find their complete happiness and self-fulfilment only in a close union with a life-mate”; to understand also that “towards this end they must be prepared to use self-control, to prevent the aimless straying of their passions, and patience and tenderness towards the realization of the union when its time comes.” (Edward Carpenter.) This teaching would bring to the young a far truer conception of the sacredness of marriage than our marriage laws and customs give.

It must never be forgotten, however, that this question of marriage and every other social question must be viewed in relation to kindred topics. A sectional treatment of society will surely mislead if we fail to recall the changes going forward in every department of life, and the close connexion that exists between the forces of social and individual evolution. Scientific meliorism implies a reconstruction of domestic life; and, within the new environment, the instructing of youth and its guidance in sex-conduct will become comparatively easy. Nor is it only by the training and guidance of youth that marriage will be favourably affected in a new domestic system. The tendency to tyranny within the home—an abhorrent feature of past monogamy—will have no opportunity to appear; and two undesirable female types—the idle fine lady and the household drudge—will become as extinct as the dodo.

Outside the precincts of home, large social and industrial changes will promote the disappearance of the prostitute, and finally there will emerge the truly emancipated woman, fearless and enlightened—a capable guide to man in the task of consciously subordinating passions that are selfish and transitory to those deeper attachments and higher emotions that give birth to spiritual love. “Is marriage a failure?” has been boldly asked and widely discussed in comparatively recent years; and that the audible answer—sadly re-echoed in thousands of hearts—was in the affirmative, shows a wholesome awakening to facts—an awakening that inevitably precedes all real reforms in an epoch of conscious evolution.

So permeated with selfishness is the mental atmosphere surrounding all questions of sex that the rule of life I here indicate will be utterly distasteful to those who accept the régime of custom. Yet as regards morality or an ethical code, there are two, and two only, logical attitudes of mind. Either we must think of the stamping out of all sexual feeling on the ground of its purely animal nature, and limiting physical union to the utmost that is compatible with perpetuation of species; or we must think of a gradual elevating of sexual instinct and action to a dignified position in human life with due consideration for the desires and needs of every one after puberty is reached. The first is practically impossible to the vast majority of the race at its present stage of development. They would simply refuse submission to the intolerable restraints necessitated. In effect, the ascetic answer to problems of sex is no actual solution, but a shelving of the fundamental question, with a tacit acceptance of the prodigious evils around us in respect both of sex-union and the advent of children. The only rational course is that of elevating and regulating these relations in view of human happiness. This implies a steady repression of anti-social emotions and persistent cultivation of unselfishness. Our marital habits of selfish appropriation and jealous control are in direct opposition to the moral elevation of sexual instinct. Selfishness degrades where it penetrates, and the problem is to rescue our sexual forces from selfishness, and utilize these forces, i.e. make them subserve the interests of social virtue. Hitherto, they have been ignored and neglected—a result of false thinking and ascetic teaching, while in actual life they have run riot, creating incalculable evils.

The British race publicly professes monogamy and preaches to the young a Puritan doctrine. Privately the drama enacted would disgrace a civilization of the Middle Ages. In the lower classes wife-beating and murder, in the upper classes the hideous revelations of the Divorce Court, witness to the impurity and the misery of our boasted monogamy. We tolerate licence, we condemn and conceal vicious propensities; we harbour a social evil of gigantic magnitude, we permit hypocrisy to prevail, we instigate the young to form self-interested mercantile marriages. We are corrupt in our social life and mentally debased, for we refuse to think out a rational code of sex morals, and without that we shall never attain to a lofty conception, a true ideal of what life ought to be. Our modern monogamy in its inwardness is not falsely pictured in this indictment: “The commercialism which buys and sells all human things; the narrow physical passion of jealousy; the petty sense of private property in another person; social opinions and legal enactments, have all converged to choke and suffocate wedded love in egoism, lust and meanness.” (Edward Carpenter’s Marriage, p. 38.)

In view of general happiness and virtue, we must seek the abrogation of all laws based on or involving sex-inequality. And, further, that marriage may become transformed into a sacred, sympathetic and permanent bond—a deeper and truer relation of life—we must seek facilities for divorce or the abrogation of the specific law that binds beings together for life in ill-assorted or artificial unions.

CHAPTER V
PARENTAGE

The simple fact that the birth of a human being, the image of God, as religious people say, is in so many cases regarded as of very much less importance than that of a domestic animal, proves the degraded condition in which we live.—August Bebel.

The reproduction of species yields to no other special function of life in respect of importance and the wide scope of its vital issues. Notwithstanding that vast numbers of illegitimate children are born in every civilized country where monogamy reigns, this function of reproduction is popularly regarded as allied with marriage in the order of a natural and necessary consequence—a result irrespective of human will. Now scientific meliorism makes a clear distinction between marriage and parentage on the ground that, while the former comparatively is of insignificant importance to the interests of humanity in general, parentage is of vital moment to these interests; moreover, between the two there exists no integral or essential relation. On the one hand, progeny spring from unions not legalized by marriage; on the other, many married people, swayed by motives chiefly egoistic, but sometimes altruistic, are consciously exercising a voluntary restraint over propagation.

The late Matthew Arnold tells us that when gazing on one occasion in company with a benevolent man upon a multitude of slum children eaten up with disease, half-sized, half-fed, half-clothed, neglected by their parents, without health, without home, without hope, the good man said: “The one thing really needful is to teach these little ones to succour one another, if only with a cup of cold water.” Mr. Arnold promptly rejected that theory. “So long as the multitude of these poor children is perpetually swelling,” said he, “they must be charged with misery to themselves and us, whether they help one another with a cup of cold water or no, and the knowledge how to prevent them accumulating is what we want.” That knowledge is no longer inaccessible to man. There are known rational methods by which to keep the populating tendency within due limits, and at the same time to promote individual prudence, foresight and self-dependence.

Neo-Malthusianism, with its power of subjugating the law of population and deferring parentage, is a new key to the social position, and neo-Malthusian practice has already taken root in British society. The discovery is of vast significance, so great are its latent possibilities of promoting universal happiness. But as long as reproduction of human physical life is left to haphazard, and the rule of private, personal interests alone, without any honourable recognition, intelligent guidance, or moral and economic support, the immediate effect on national life is, and will continue to be, the very reverse of beneficial.

Matthew Arnold’s exhortation in respect of the slum children was: “We must let conscience play freely and simply upon the facts of the case; we must listen to what it tells us of the intelligible law of things as concerns these children, and what it tells us is that a man’s children are not really sent any more than the pictures upon his walls or the horses in his stable are sent, and that to bring people into the world when one cannot afford to keep them and oneself decently, or to bring more of them into the world than one can afford to keep thus, is by no means an accomplishment of the Divine Will or a fulfilment of nature’s simplest laws, but is contrary to reason and the will of God.” (Culture and Anarchy, p. 246.)

This remonstrance addressed to the rich (these alone have pictures on their walls and horses in their stables) may have had some effect, for certain it is that in the upper classes artificial checks to conception are now widely used, while slum children show no tendency to proportionately diminish in number. Individuals whose standard of living is high, and whose pecuniary means are small, or who are thoughtful, intelligent, prudent, either refrain from marriage, or, marrying, check propagation. The natural result is that children of the comparatively superior types are becoming numerically weaker than children of the thoughtless, reckless members of society who exercise their reproductive powers to the utmost. It is supremely important that we should recognize how parentage bears upon human life and happiness in far wider relations than either sexual union alone or marriage alone.

Maintenance of species has hitherto been accomplished at an enormous sacrifice of individual life. The requirement that there shall arise a full number of adults in successive generations is fulfilled by means which subordinate the existing and next succeeding members of the species in various degrees. (See Herbert Spencer’s Principles of Sociology, vol. i. p. 621.)

Among low forms—inferior to the human organism—the germs of new individuals are produced in immense numbers, the larger part of the parental substance being sometimes transformed into these germs. Birth here may be immediately followed by the death of the parent organism, and an immense mortality of the young may take place—consequent on defenceless exposure, insufficient food and other untoward conditions. “Of a million minute ova left uncared for, the majority are destroyed before they are hatched, so that very few have considerable amounts of individual life.” (Ibid. p. 622.)

Throughout the course of evolution the natural order in moving from higher to higher types is a gradual decrease of this condition, viz. the sacrifice of individual life to the life of the species, and at the same time an increase of compensating pleasures allied with the reproductive function. When illustrating this natural order, Herbert Spencer points to the methods among fishes and amphibians contrasted with those among birds and mammals. The spawn of the former when safely deposited is generally left to its fate.[^[3]] There is physical cost to adults with apparently no accompanying gratifications. Birds and mammals, however, carefully rear and tend their offspring. “The activities of parenthood are sources of agreeable emotions, just as are the activities which achieve self-sustentation.”

[3]. There are exceptions to the rule, as in the case of the male stickleback.

Passing from the less intelligent vertebrates which produce many young at short intervals and abandon them at an early age, to the more intelligent higher vertebrates which produce few young at longer intervals and aid them for longer periods, this principle clearly emerges—“While the rate of juvenile mortality is diminished, there results both a lessened physical cost of maintaining the species and an augmented satisfaction of the affections.” (Principles of Sociology, vol. i. p. 628.)

There is no reversal of this genetic order of nature in the epoch of conscious evolution. The processes are different, because man possesses developed intellect, aided by scientific knowledge and invention as a new and skilled ally in the struggle to maintain his species at less and less cost of individual life and happiness; but the general forward movement takes precisely the same course. With the highest evolved type of man this sacrifice of individual life to the species is reduced to a minimum, while the interests of species are conserved in a painless, a wholly superior manner. And, further, the entire range of domestic feelings—parental, filial, fraternal and intimately social, become extended and increasingly capable of bestowing enduring pleasure. The ultimate goal is easy maintenance of species, without—to any unpleasurable extent—subordinating single members of species to that end.

Love of offspring, as already explained, has no reproductive instinct at its base. It is a feeling—superimposed on organic nature—dependent on family life or arrangements that involve parental care and more or less of adult activity directed to the well-being of the young. This sentiment of love of offspring or philoprogenitiveness, is well established in the British race; but with rampant poverty in our midst, can we wonder that in hundreds of thousands of individual cases the paternal relation—so capable of filling the heart with tender emotions and joy—creates an actual disgust, or a feeling of despair, malignancy, even injustice, as is shown in the touching little satire, Ginx’s Baby. Ginx frankly gave his wife notice that, as his utmost efforts could scarcely maintain their existing family, if she ventured to present him with any more, either single or twins ... “he would most assuredly drown him.” Later, when the arrival of number thirteen is imminent—the wife being unable longer to hide the impending event—Ginx fixed his determination by much thought and a little extra drinking. He argued thus: “He wouldn’t go on the parish. He couldn’t keep another youngster to save his life. He had never taken charity and never would. There was nothink to do with it but drown it.”

Nor is even the maternal relation proof against bitterness in untoward conditions, although the feelings will be differently expressed, and may possibly assume a pious garb. “I’ve ’ad my fifteen or my twenty on ’em, but, thank ’eaven, the churchyard ’as stood my friend.” These or similar words have often been heard in an English factory town. The women speaking thus were not otherwise callous or incapable of mother-love. They were gentle, patient, toiling drudges, who had had the philoprogenitiveness of average human nature and the tender joys of maternity perverted into secret care and open hypocritical cant by the physical strain of a too-frequent child-bearing, combined with the miseries of ceaseless labour, pinched means, and comfortless, crowded homes.

The frequent advent of children who are unwelcome to their own parents in a society no longer ignorant of the scientific means by which its weakest members may avoid parentage, without any destruction of life or any injury to sexual function, is marvellously irrational, and it indicates divergence from the well-marked path of evolutional progress.

Opposition to neo-Malthusian practice arises from primitive conceptions of life (conceptions antecedent to evolutional theory), while all the various undefined scruples painfully experienced by individuals are survivals of the sentiment allied with these false conceptions. Prejudice dies slowly, as ignorance is dispelled by the growing light of new knowledge.

I have shown that asceticism is an immoral principle, the action of which tends to fill individual life with gloom and depression, and to thwart or counteract general happiness. I have also shown the absolute necessity for retarding the multiplication of human beings to suit the limits of available subsistence. And now, after pointing out that philoprogenitiveness—which is the groundwork of domestic and social virtue, and ought to be the mainspring of reproduction of species—is continually liable to be strained, depressed or perverted into anti-social bitterness in parental bosoms among the lower classes, I must ask the question: How otherwise than by the easiest method known to science could the difficulties of the position be met and overcome?

Messrs. Patrick Geddes and J. A. Thomson, in their treatise on the Evolution of Sex, urge the necessity of what they call “an ethical rather than a mechanical prudence after marriage, of a temperance recognized to be as binding on husband and wife as chastity on the unmarried.” (The Evolution of Sex, p. 297.) But what do these gentlemen mean by the temperance here recommended? It is surely well known that the birth of a large family is perfectly consistent with a sparing, most temperate exercise of the procreative function; and surely also it would be folly on our part to look for parental conduct controlled by ethical motive in the warrens of the poor of our large cities, from whence springs an important section of the national life. (Social Control of the Birth Rate, Pamphlet by G. A. Gaskell.)

In the homes of the upper classes, adorned with all the amenities and refinements of civilization, parental prudence results mainly from egoistic motive. Practical reformers will hesitate to assume that those—the less favoured social units—are likely to surpass these in moral elevation, and demean themselves generally in a superior manner! But further, a parental prudence, dispensing with mechanical methods of checking propagation, may even prove the converse of ethical conduct. Advanced sexual morality requires a free and healthful exercise of sexual function. That such freedom is not possible under present social conditions is irrelevant to the question at issue; the point is that conduct unnecessarily traversing this advanced sexual morality is not in accordance with rationalized social ethics; it has no scientific basis.

Parental morals must conform to the principle indicated by Herbert Spencer—reduce to a minimum the sacrifice of individual life and happiness to the life of the species; augment to the maximum the joys of affection involved in parental relations. This is possible to a race among which are beings of low intelligence and unrestrained passion only by bringing into play the laws of heredity through rational breeding. But rational breeding depends on an appeal to ordinary egoistic motive and practical resort to the painless mechanical means of checking conception.

There is no general unwillingness to limit their families among the poor; what is lacking consists simply in power of control over the physical conditions of fertility. To see children half-starved and wives sickly and miserable is no more pleasant to parents of the Ginx order than to those of us who view it from a safe distance; and there is ample intelligence to perceive the connexion between, on the one hand, discomfort and poverty attendant on a family of ten or twelve, on the other, comparative comfort allied with a family of only three or four.

A code of ethics covering the interests of the entire nation commands strenuous effort on the part of all thoughtful, intelligent people to make the artificial checks known to the thoughtless and unintelligent. It is not by proudly rejecting scientific invention in this matter that we shall attain to development of higher and higher types of man, but by skilfully using it as a powerful ally in our struggle to maintain and regenerate species at less and less cost to individual happiness.

Apart altogether from man’s partial practice of neo-Malthusian art, under egoistic motives, civilization has created an interference with the original order of race preservation under generous or altruistic motive. Social feeling slowly developing revolts—in detail—from the cruel method of the law of natural selection. It spontaneously supersedes that law by one of sympathetic selection. But whereas the former law issued in survival of the fittest, the latter issues day by day in indiscriminate survival, and consequent race deterioration. A controlled rate of increase is not therefore the only position to which reason and science must guide us; we have further to escape from the disastrous consequences of the above law and pass to conditions of life evolved under the benign influence of a rational and moral law—a law of social selection, resulting in appropriate birth, or the birth of the socially fit.

There are thousands of our present day population with whom family life is no whit superior to that of birds, whose pairing is immediately followed by rapid breeding and a complete scattering of the brood when the young are barely fledged. A wise philanthropy in line with the march of progressive evolution may lift these thousands to the level of the higher vertebrates, “which produce few young at longer intervals and give them aid for longer periods.” The recalcitrant minority refusing to practice parental prudence must be treated by society as abnormal individuals, incapable of rising to the standard of average civilized human nature, and these must be subjected to social restraint.

PART III
ABNORMAL HUMANITY

Men may rise on stepping-stones

Of their dead selves to higher things.

—From In Memoriam.