We need not fear that the number of unmarried mothers will be alarming. The first aid to true morality is honesty. Monogamy is the ideal relationship between men and women. But enforced relationships are neither ideal nor true. Ideal conditions can be established only between free human beings. Compulsion is death. Selection and choice mean life and health.
The man or the woman who is free, and particularly free from self-condemnation, is instinctively monogamous. Life in all its phases tends upward toward conscious and specific selection. Conscious selection must include love, and we may safely trust love. Love is inseparable from truth and fidelity. Without love, all the efforts of all the Eugenic Societies on earth will accomplish little, however well-meant their efforts. Eugenists confine their work to the physical aspect of the subject and as a matter of expediency deal with the effects of marriage and race-propagation in their relation to disease and degeneracy, ignoring the esoteric phase of the subject. Thus no real good can come of the Eugenic movement per se. Its contribution to Progress consists in its value as an "announcer" of a higher ideal, rather than a higher order. The higher order can come only by getting back to primal laws.
The fact should not be overlooked that the ancient Greeks were competent Eugenists. They effected wonderful results, too, in two important points of the well-balanced individual. They worked for beauty and intellect, both desirable adjuncts to a perfect race, but both also as cold as the marble statues which Greece gave to the world. Greek and Roman civilization toppled and fell because it was a civilization without foundation; it was built from the outside; it was like an old ruined house encased in a thin wall of beautiful marble, and set upon a high hill. It deceives the eye from a distance, but freezes the blood and congeals the soul when intimately known.
Greek and Roman civilization, based upon physical Eugenics, was unbalanced and could not endure, because it was a civilization of force; of dominance rather than of unity. There was no ideal of sex-equality, and therefore Love was regarded as the least important requisite in Eugenic marriage. It should be obvious that without the element of love, as the basis of selection, human reproduction must take on the same status as stock-breeding, which may for a time give the finest physical specimens of animal life, but which, if persisted in, finally results in decadence.
We have an example of the tendency to decadence from in-breeding of those types of humans which have the best advantages at least of education and refinement, whether or not those advantages are embraced. We refer to Royalty. We need only mention the illustrious example of Cleopatra to prove this. Cleopatra was the offspring of a marriage between a brother and sister—a custom which prevailed among ancient rulers to insure none but royal blood. Cleopatra we may well believe was both beautiful and intellectual, but it is also certain that she was abnormally lacking in conscience, in tenderness, in love. Her passions were those of the animal, and not of the soul.
In modern life, Spain and Austria both furnish discouraging data to exponents of "select" breeding. In fact it is thoroughly established that degeneracy is not the result of imperfect physical conditions only. The greatest villians are not infrequently both handsome and intellectual.
Bulwer Lytton well illustrates this fact in his character of "Margrave" in "A Strange Story." Margrave was a perfect and beautiful physical specimen. He possessed rare intelligence, but he had no soul and was utterly incapable of the finer sensibilities, which we instinctively classify as spiritual attributes.
Returning to a consideration of what has been termed the "unusual behavior" of the feminine half of mankind, we find that the chief end and aim of many women centers upon the problem of how to avoid maternity, quite upsetting traditional ideas regarding woman's rightful sphere, which began and ended in rearing a large family.
Women in all walks of life, rich and poor, wise and frivolous, selfish and unselfish—are refusing to bear children. The superficial observer rails against this, because he sees only the effect. He sees women living in fashionable hotels, if they are rich enough to afford it; if they are poor they establish a cheap imitation of this phase of semi-communal life in what is paradoxically known as "light" housekeeping, usually represented by one small dark room where the nearest delicatessen serves as a convenience, the public laundry minimizes domestic labor, and the department store supplies ready made, the family clothing, from undergarments to top coats. Under these conditions, whether of fashionable hotel suites or dark "light housekeeping," it is plain that children are not welcome.
Even those of the class found between these extremes are discouraged from rearing children, since city life tends more and more to apartments as a substitute for the home; and no well regulated apartment house is open to children. The average observer, as we say, notes these conditions, but fails to realize that there must be a cosmic cause for a condition so wide-spread. There must be "something back of it," as we say of many things which we note in our every day life. Looked at from the surface only, these conditions seem deplorable and ultimately race-suicidal. But the cosmic law is always upward in tendency. We may safely trust it, if we will.