Perhaps we may now attempt to sum up the suggestion of this chapter. It is based upon a belief in the principle of monogamy—without, as some would assert, a credulous acceptance of all the present conditions of that institution. The principle underlying it may be right and impossible of improvement, but our practice may be hampered by any number of superstitions, traditions, injustices, economic and other difficulties, which nevertheless do not invalidate our ideal.
Therefore, instead of proposing to abolish monogamy or that great principle of common parental care of children, the support of motherhood by fatherhood, which is perfectly expressed in monogamy alone, let us seek rather, in the interests of the future—which will mean proximately in the interests of woman, the great organ of the future—to make the conditions of marriage such that it best serves the highest interests. We need not cavil at those who look upon marriage as a symbol of the union between Christ and His Church, but we must look upon it also as a human institution which exists to serve mankind and must be treated accordingly. We are quite prepared to accept in its place any other institution which will serve mankind better, and we adhere to monogamy only because such an alternative cannot be named.
We are to regard any disproportion in the number of the sexes as inimical to monogamy. We know that in the past, when there has been a great excess of women, as owing to chronic militarism, polygamy has been the natural consequence; and we must recognize that such an excess of women at the present day is a predisposing cause, if not of polygamy, of something immeasurably worse. The causes of that excess of women have therefore been examined in some degree, and our duty of opposing them is laid down as a fundamental political proposition.
We then discussed and criticized a second argument for polygamy, based upon the assumption that a man requires more from women than one woman can afford him. The answer to that argument is that many women exist who meet all their husbands' needs and satisfy all their instincts, and that for this end the intensive education of woman's intellect is not a necessary condition. It may be added that if the race is to rise, the highest type of women as well as the highest type of men must be its parents, the mothers being exactly as important as the fathers on the score of heredity. Any attempt, therefore, to split up womanhood, so that the lower types shall become the mothers, and the higher the companions of men, is a directly dysgenic proposal, opposing the great eugenic principle that the best of both sexes must be the parents of the future.
When we find, therefore, that marriage under present conditions does not satisfy many of the highest kinds of women, we must ask whether their dissatisfaction is warranted, and if, as we do, we find it based upon the fact that the present conditions are grossly unjust to women, we must modify those conditions so that, at the very least, the wife and mother shall not have the worst of them.
Finally, whatever we may fail to achieve because, for instance, of some fundamental facts of human nature against which it is vain to legislate, at least we have economic conditions under our control, and control them we must, so that, whoever shall be in a position of economic insecurity, at least it shall not be the mothers of the future. Our first concern must be to safeguard them, whosoever else is inconvenienced. In deciding how this is effected we are to be guided by that great fact of increasing paternal responsibility which is demonstrated by the history of animal evolution since the appearance of the earliest vertebrates, and of which marriage, in all its forms, is at bottom the human and social expression. We are to recognize that if sub-human fathers are in any degree held by nature responsible with their mates for the care of their offspring, much more should this be true of man, "made with such large discourse, looking before and after," who is to be held responsible for all his acts, and most of all for those most charged with consequence. The man who brings children into the world is responsible to their mother and through her to society at large, which must see to it that that responsibility is not evaded. At present in England the working man spends on the average not less than one-sixth of his entire income on alcoholic drinks, whilst society yearly pays for the feeding of more of his children. But it is not good enough that the father shall swallow the interests of the future in this fashion. As the State in Germany takes a percentage of his earnings in order to protect him against the risks of the future, so we must see to it that the necessary proportion of his earnings is devoted towards discharging the responsibilities which he has incurred.
A notable consequence must follow from many such reforms as this chapter suggests. The marriage rate must fall, and the birth-rate, already falling, must fall much further; and so assuredly in any case they will; nor need anyone be alarmed at such a prospect. Even from the point of view of quantity, the future supply of "food for powder," and so forth, the question is not how many babies are born, as people persist in thinking, but how many babies survive. For seven years past I have been preaching, in season and out of season, that our Bishops and popular vaticinators in general are utterly wrong in bewailing the falling birth-rate, whilst the unnecessary slaughter of babies and children stares them in the face. How dare they ask for more babies to be similarly slain! It may be permitted to quote a passage written several years ago. "My own opinion regarding the birth-rate is that so long as we continue to slay, during the first year of life alone, one in six or seven of all children born (the unspeakably beneficent law of the non-transmission of acquired characters permitting these children to be born amazingly fit and well, city life notwithstanding), the fall in the birth-rate should be a matter of humanitarian satisfaction. Let us learn how to take care of the fine babies that are born, and when we have shown that we can succeed in this, as we have hitherto most horribly failed, we may begin to suggest that perhaps, if the number were increased, we might reasonably expect to take care of that number also. Babies are the national wealth, and in reality the only national wealth; and just as a sensible father will satisfy himself that his son can take care of his pocket-money, before he listens to a demand for its augmentation, so, as a people, we are surely responsible to the Higher Powers, or our own ideals, for the production of proof that we can take care of the young helpless lives which are daily entrusted to us, before we cry for more. It would be easy to quote episcopal denouncements regarding the birth-rate, but I am at a loss for references to similarly influential opinions about the slaughter of the babies that are born—a matter which surely should take precedence. May I, in all deference, commend for consideration a parable which always comes to my mind when I read clerical comments on the birth-rate, without reference to the infant-mortality? It was figured by the Supreme Lover of Children that a wicked servant, entrusted with a portion of his master's wealth to turn to good account, went and hid it in the earth. He was not rewarded by the charge of more such wealth. We, as a people, are entrusted with living wealth, and, whilst we demand more, we go and bury much of it in the earth—whence, alas! it cannot be recovered. Not an increase of opportunity, thus wasted, was the reward of the unprofitable servant, but to be cast into outer darkness. Is there no moral here?"
Very distinguished recent authority may be quoted in favour of this principle. At the Annual Public Meeting of the Academy of Sciences, held in Paris in December, 1909, Professor Bouchard discussed the question of the population of France, and came to the conclusion that the birth-rate "depended upon social conditions which it was difficult if not altogether impossible to modify, and in these circumstances the alternative remedy was to reduce the number of deaths."
It must surely be plain that those reforms in the conditions of marriage which have been advocated in this chapter will meet this need, and are not necessarily to be feared even by those who, in this matter, devote their solicitude entirely to the question of numbers, quality apart. For the eugenist who is primarily concerned with quality these reforms are surely unchallengeable.