The Journal comments on "this mass of physical inefficiency, with all its concomitant human misery, and direct loss to the country."
Sir Auckland Geddes, addressing the Federation of British Industries, stated that "appalling facts about the health of the nation have been disclosed in reports of medical examinations carried out by recruiting authorities." One of the most startling and disquieting of these disclosures was that of hundreds of thousands of our men, between the ages of 18 and 43, dying of tuberculosis.
Despite all this, however, because our authorities fear to face the truth and the drastic economic upheaval involved in the prohibition of all young wives and mothers from the stress of breadwinning, attempt is being made to shelve the whole blame of this appalling state of national health upon faulty industrial and hygienic conditions; too long hours of work, imperfect ventilation, bad housing, inferior cooking, poor wages, and so forth. All factors, of course, but only contributory to the great vital one. And in order to placate the public conscience, reforms in these directions are promised. Excellent and sadly needed reforms, it is true—in so far as they go; but bound to failure because they will not go to the root of things. They will be tried, no doubt, in our promised Reconstruction-scheme. But being palliative merely, further holocausts of human life and faculty and happiness will be sacrificed in the experiment.
Sooner or later—and Heaven send it be sooner lest it come too late!—the truth must be confronted, and the crisis met. The further the Feminism now threatening our downfall secures footing, however, and more and more diverts the nation's life-resources into merely economic channels, more and more squanders them in abnormal ambitions and output, the more deeply-rooted and more desperate will have become the cancer of our national decadence. And incalculably the more difficult and dangerous will be the task of its eradication.
The reform should have come while man still held the reins securely in his grasp—ere Feminism had entrenched itself and its deforming aims and powers behind an enfranchised woman-sex; to intimidate and out-number his own. Because women in general, misled by these false standards, and, moreover, deteriorated by de-sexing training, become every year less and less disposed toward home and family-life; less and less willing to burden themselves with the duties and sacrifices indispensable to the proper fulfilment of wife and motherhood. And now, more than ever, when they are still further to be pitted against men in the industrial struggle, woman-instincts and aptitudes will become ever more warped and enfeebled in them.
The Danger menacing us is the graver because, while Disease is the expression of a healthy vital conscience protesting, in terms of pain and disability, against conditions, environmental or personal, adverse to normal states of health and development (and to which the healthy living organism declines therefore to conform), Degeneracy is characterised by a vital conscience of so low an order that it conforms and adapts the type, without pain or protest, to conditions perversive of healthy normality and of further evolutionary advance.
There comes a stage, accordingly, in Racial decline, when the Racial vital conscience no longer rebels, in terms of Disease, but conforms, in terms of Degeneracy, to artificial, abnormal and evil conditions of living, environmental and personal. And then as happened to those mighty civilisations snuffed out before us—the major portion of the community having lapsed from health and normality into decadent states of mind and body, vice and corruption become its Normal both of mind and body. Evil and chaos run riot. Till Nature, defied and transgressed at every turn, opens the vials of her wrath, and pours forth her microbic myriads to sow death and destruction wholesale.
Thus she sweeps from the board of Life another great Race—that had failed.
VI
Already, there are disquieting signs that the physical disease and abnormality among us have engendered such degrees of mental and of moral aberration as may lead at any hour to grave disruption. Below the quiet order of our British constitution are heard, from time to time, the rumble of chaotic and disintegrating forces. With growing frequency, the shriek of anarchy shrills. Red flags break. We shall be truly fortunate if we succeed in bridging over, without more or less serious upheaval, the critical gap between War and Peace.