As for marriage, invaluable though at its best it be for the completion and ennoblement of the individual life, its great function for society and for the race is in relation to childhood. Thus considered, the dictum of Professor Westermarck may be understood, that children are not the result of marriage but marriage the result of children. This, in other words, is to say that marriage has become evolved and established as a social institution because of its services to race-culture. It is, in short, the supreme eugenic institution. This great subject must next occupy our attention.
[CHAPTER X]
MARRIAGE AND MATERNALISM
Our present concern is the relation of marriage to race-culture, and for this purpose we must investigate an epoch ages before the institution of human marriage, ages before mankind itself. We must first remind ourselves of what may be called the trend of progress from the first in respect of that reproduction upon which all species depend, all living individuals being mortal.
At first, in the effort for survival and increase, life tried the quantitative method. If we take the present day bacteria as representatives of the primitive method, we see that not quality nor individuality but quantity and numbers are the means by which, in their case, life seeks to establish itself more abundantly. We express our own birth-rate in its proportion per year to one thousand living: but twenty thousand bacteria injected into a rabbit have been found to multiply into twelve thousand million in one day. “One bacterium has been actually observed to rear a small family of eighty thousand within a period of twenty-four hours.” “The cholera bacillus can duplicate every twenty minutes, and might thus in one day become 5,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, with the weight, according to the calculations of Cohn, of about 7,366 tons. In a few days, at this rate, there would be a mass of bacteria as big as the moon, huge enough to fill the whole ocean.”
If now we trace the history of life up to man, we find in him—as we have seen—the lowest birth-rate of any animal and the longest ante-natal period in proportion to his body weight, the longest period of maternal feeding, and by far the lowest infant mortality and general death-rate. A chief fact of progress has been, in a word, the supersession of the quantitative by the qualitative criterion of survival-value. Immeasurably vast vital economy and efficiency have thus been effected. The tendency of progress, in short—a tendency coincident with the evolution of ever higher and higher species—is to pass from the horrible Gargantuan wastefulness of the older methods towards the evident but yet lamentably unrealised ideal—that every child born shall reach maturity. This great historical tendency, which will ultimately involve the restriction of parenthood to the fit, fine and relatively few, has occurred under the impartial rule of natural selection simply and solely because it has endowed with survival-value the successive species in which it has been demonstrated.
The rise of parenthood.—Consistently with this fact and with the argument of the previous chapter is the tendency towards the lengthening of infancy, a very characteristic condition of the evolution of the higher forms of life. This lengthening and accentuation of infancy makes for variety of development, and, as we have seen, is supremely instanced in man, where it depends upon, and makes possible, the transmutation of fixed instincts into the plastic thing we call intelligence. Thus, to quote the words of Dr. Parsons,[44] “we find that as infancy is prolonged in the progress of species, the care given to offspring by parents is increased. It extends over a longer period and it is directed more and more towards the total welfare of offspring. The need of a potentially many-sided and enduring kind of parental care is filled through the social group we call the family.”
Apart from those immensely significant creatures, the social insects, we find well-marked though primitive signs of motherhood amongst the fishes, and in a few cases, such as the stickleback, the beginnings of fatherhood. But it is not until we reach the mammals, and especially the monkeys and apes, that we find a great development of motherhood, far more prolonged and far more important than the more frequently extolled parental care found amongst the birds.