XV RACE SUICIDE
I was visiting the north of England in connection with an Industrial Congress, and I called upon a woman whose husband worked in a mine. Her small house was scrupulously clean, she was young, vigorous, swift in thought and movement, and gave me the impression that nothing came into her life in the form of obstacle and surprise without finding her ready to deal with it effectively. She showed me with a certain pride the small collection of books on social subjects bought in second-hand shops by her and her husband. I remember seeing John Stuart Mill, Ruskin, William Morris, Rowntree, Henry George, and many another familiar name. "We have read them together," she told me, "we have educated one another since the time we first met at evening classes." I remarked that her married life seemed to lack one thing only, and that was a family, and I quoted the Eastern aphorism that a house without children is a garden without flowers. She smiled a little sadly, and then I noted how some faint lines about her mouth tightened and hardened, robbing her of a certain charm. "Lady Warwick," she said, "we earn between us by hard work from day to day between four and five pounds a week. It has taken many years to reach that figure, and there is no chance of passing beyond it. What we have endured on the road to this comparative comfort we alone know, and we don't talk about it. But we both believe that the game is not worth the candle. The conditions of life in England are not worth perpetuating, and neither of us would willingly bring children into the world to take their chance and run their horrible risks as we did." She stopped for a moment in order to be sure of her self-control, and then she told me that in her view, though all her heart cried out for little children, sterility was the only protest that could be made against the cruel conditions of modern life under capitalism. "I know that my husband and I are desirables from the employer's standpoint. We earn far more than we receive, we are temperate, hard-working, punctual, reliable. But when we have settled our rent and rates, clubs, and insurances, dressed ourselves, paid tram fares and bought a few books, there is nothing left but a slender margin that a few months' illness would sweep away. For a week or ten days a year we may learn that England is not all as hideous as this corner of it, but we shall die without a glimpse of the world beyond and of its treasures that our books tell us about. If we stop to think, our life is full of unsatisfied longings, and though we don't give them free play we can't ignore them altogether. So we will not produce any more slaves for the capitalist, and I can tell you that there is not one decently educated, young married woman of my acquaintance who is not of the same mind. You could go into a score of houses known to me in this town alone and find strong, vigorous women whose childlessness is their one possible protest against the existing wage slavery."
Years have passed since, in that gloomy little northern town with its congeries of mean streets looking meaner than ever under the rain, I met the speaker whose name has passed from me. She may well be approaching the time when Nature will confirm her resolve irrevocably, but the memory of that conversation has haunted me with the vision of thousands of lost souls and unhappy lives.
I know now, if I did not know it then, that the music of little voices and the patter of little feet would have brought into that poor worker's life many of the joys for which she sighed in vain. She did not know, nor at that time did I, that obedience to natural law ensures a happiness that is independent of external circumstances, while disobedience brings in its train an ever-growing mental discord and sows the seeds of disease and decay. Statistics can be fascinating friends even though they be formidable acquaintances; they have a rough eloquence of their own that is more effective than honeyed speech.
The birth-rate of England, France, and the United States, associated as it is in all these countries with the death-rate of the newly born, is to me one of the most depressing signs of the times. I cannot help realising that in many cases sterility is not the deliberate protest of the wage slave, it is the selfish protest of the pleasure seeker, and in a small minority of cases the genuine, yet narrow, fear of the eugenist and his following whose enthusiasms have outrun both knowledge and faith. Tolstoy went so far as to say that the man who enjoys association with his wife for any purpose save procreation is guilty of a crime. While many childless women live celibate lives, particularly in America, the great majority do not. In Milton's stately words they "of love and love's delight take freely," as though the power that rules and guides the world could in the long run be outwitted by what it has created.
To-day the civilised world is at the parting of the ways. War has riven asunder the ranks of the best and bravest, and has left in the hearts of the survivors so vivid a sense of the horrors of life that many a man will hesitate to become a father lest his sons have to take their place in time to come on the fields of war and his daughters chance to be among the dwellers in a conquered city. All classes have been gathered to battle, one and all will feel the responsibility attending the failure of our civilisation. While many will believe they are responding to a high instinct when they elect to follow the line of least resistance and leave the world a little poorer, the cumulative effect of such a decision is positively terrible to contemplate.
There are some lines in Coriolanus that might have been addressed not to those who banished him from Rome, but to the women of the world's most highly civilised countries:—
"Have the power still
To banish your defenders; till at length