Their action in man.—Within the human species the laws of multiplication hold. It is still worth while, after half a century, to quote Spencer's remark as to infertility in women due to mental labour carried to excess—“most of the flat-chested girls who survive their high-pressure education are incompetent to bear a well-developed infant and to supply it with the natural food for the natural period.” On all hands people with opened eyes are rightly urging this truth upon us to-day. In the United States the so-called higher education of girls has been proved in effect to sterilise them—and these the flower of the nation's girlhood, and therefore, rightly, the very elect for motherhood. Here is simply an instance of the Spencerian principle in its most unfortunate misdirection by man.
Before leaving Spencer, we must refer briefly to the predictions, based upon the foregoing principles, with which he concluded his great work. The further evolution of man, he declares, must take mainly the direction of a higher intellectual and emotional development. Hitherto, and even to-day, pressure of population is the original cause of human competition, application, discipline, expenditure of energy—and one may add, the possibility of continued selection. Excess of fertility, then, says Spencer, is the cause of man's evolution, but “man's further evolution itself necessitates a decline in his fertility.” The future progress of civilisation will be accompanied by increased development of individuality, emotional and intellectual. As Spencer observes, this does not necessarily mean a mentally laborious life, for as mental activity “gradually becomes organic, it will become spontaneous and pleasurable.”
Finally, the necessary antagonism between individuality and parenthood ensures the ultimate attainment of the highest form of the maintenance of the race—“... a form in which the amount of life shall be the greatest possible, and the births and deaths the fewest possible.”
If now we look back at the law of Malthus we shall realise the enormous significance of the law of Spencer. In this respect we have the advantage over Malthus that we are aware, as he was not, of the great fact of organic evolution. We discover, then, that an actual consequence of the pressure of population, leading as it does to the struggle for existence, and, in the main, the survival of higher types, is that the rate of fertility falls. This conception of the fall in the birth-rate—which, it is maintained, has been a great factor in all organic progress—was entirely absent from the mind of Malthus. In a word, the unlimited multiplication which Malthus observed leads to its own correction. It provides abundance of material for natural selection to work upon, and then the survival-value of individuation, wherever it appears, asserts itself, with the consequence that the rate of multiplication declines. This is actually to be observed to-day. Malthus desired that we should postpone marriage to later ages so as to lower the birth-rate. The increasing necessity and demand for individuation is effecting that which Malthus desired. The average age at marriage has been rising in our own country in both sexes during the last thirty years: and the evidence shows that as civilisation advances the age of marriage becomes later and later. Professor Metchnikoff has discussed some aspects of this question in his book The Nature of Man.
The intensive culture of life.—For every student of progress, and not least for the eugenist, Spencer's law is a warrant of hope and a promise of better things to come. It teaches that in the development of higher—that is to say, more specialised—that is to say, more individualised—organic types, Nature is working already, and has been working for ages, towards the elimination of the brutal elements in the struggle for existence. This is, of course, what every worker for progress, and every eugenist in especial, desires. Spencer's discovery teaches also that individuality compensates a species for loss of high fertility. The survival-value of individuation is greater than the survival-value of rapid multiplication. The very fact of progress is the replacement of lower by higher life, the supersession of the quantitative by the qualitative criterion of survival-value, the increasing dominance of mind over matter, the substitution of the intensive for the merely extensive cultivation of life. These various phrases express, I believe, various aspects of one and the same great fact, and I only wish it were possible to include here an exhaustive study of the conception which may be expressed by the phrase “the intensity of life”—as distinguished from its mere extension. There is, I believe, a real and significant analogy between the introduction of what is called intensive cultivation in agriculture, and the eugenic principle which seeks to replace the extensive by the intensive cultivation of human life.
The eugenic difficulty.—But it will be already evident to the reader that, though Spencer's law offers hope and warrant to the eugenist, it also poses him with a permanent and ineradicable difficulty which is inherent in natural necessity—viz., the difficulty that, in consequence of the operation of this law, those very classes or members of a society whose parenthood he most desires must be, in general, the least fertile. Throughout the animal world the lesser fertility of higher species is no real handicap to them, as we know; but where the conditions of selection are so profoundly modified as in human society, the case is very different. Furthermore, amongst mankind individuality has often grown, and does grow, to such an extent that parenthood disappears altogether. Indeed, Spencer's law expresses itself—and the eugenist must qualify his hopes by the fact—in the practical infertility of many[25] of the most highly individualised and even unique personalities, that is to say, in the ranks of what we call genius. To this subject we must return.
A notable section in Mr. Galton's great work, Inquiries into Human Faculty, states very plainly the difficulty for the eugenist involved in Spencer's law, under its more statistical aspect. What are the relative effects of early and late marriages? Mr. Galton proves, mathematically, that in a very few generations a group of persons who marry late will be simply bred down and more than supplanted by those who marry early. Now no one will dispute that the less individualised, the lower types, the more nearly animal, do in general marry earlier, and are more fertile. Here, then, is an anti-eugenic tendency in human society, depending really upon Spencer's law and requiring us to recognise and counteract it by throwing all the weight we can upon the side of progress, which means increasing to our utmost the survival-value and the effective fertility of the higher types.
Much more space might be spent upon this gravest of problems for the eugenist—the fact that the very persons from whom he desires to recruit the future on account of their greater individuality are also on that very account the persons who, by natural necessity, tend to be less fertile. The difficulty shows itself in the male sex, but it shows itself still more conspicuously in the female sex, where the proportion of the individual energy devoted to the race, as compared with that devoted to individuation, is necessarily far higher, and must so remain if the race is to persist. Primarily, the body of woman is the temple of life to come—and therefore, as we shall some day teach our girls, the holy of holies. Without going further into this matter now, it may be suggested that a cardinal principle of practical importance is involved. It is that the individual development of women, their higher education, their self-expression in works of art and thought and practice, cannot safely be carried to the point at which motherhood is compromised; else the race in question will necessarily disappear and be replaced by any race whatsoever, the women of which continue to be mothers. There are women of the worker bee type whom this argument annoys intensely. No one wants them to be mothers.