These are two closely related and essential factors to advance, and have been so felt from man’s earliest infancy. The complicated systems of marriage and relationship in vogue among the Australian and other rude tribes arose from the effort to adjust the birth-rate to the available amount of food. Many of the forms of marriage arose from the same consideration. In polygamous countries most men are monogamous because they cannot keep large families. Legal infanticide, exposure of the new-born, as in China, is another effort in the same direction. Where such measures are not legalised they reappear in other guises. Artificial abortion and intentional limitation of families are frequent in France and the United States. They are outcrops of a sentiment of self-protection which has been familiar to the species from its beginning.
Sex feeling belongs distinctly to the animal and emotional side of human nature. Where it is the dominating motive, neither individual nor group can attain the highest development. This is noticeably the case in the African. Coloured children in our public schools are equal to their white associates up to the age of puberty. But that change is more profound in the African than in the European constitution. After it has occurred, the difference in favour of the white children becomes very apparent. Their mental world is not so invaded by thoughts of sex, and they are more inclined to study.
In a less degree, as I have before remarked, the same contrast exists between the Teutonic and Latin peoples of Europe, and has been acknowledged to have resulted in decided advantages for the former.
Virility—that is, the reproductive potency in the male—bears no relation to the strength of the erotic passion.
In some the passion of sexual love is little more than an appetite. Satisfied, it is indefinitely quiescent, not entering into the general life; or, if it at times fires the emotions, they are easily restrained or banished by the exercise of other mental powers. This has been the case with many eminent men of notoriously ardent temperaments but never subdued by them (Byron, Goethe).
It is also an ethnic trait, a characteristic of the Teutonic blood, in sharp contrast to the so-called Latin peoples. With the latter, as is obvious from the literature, the erotic feeling is an enduring and overmastering passion, colouring the intelligence and often absorbing into itself the activities of the life.
As virility in man, so fecundity in woman has no relation to sex feeling; or, if any, in a reverse degree.
The famous calculations of Malthus, which cannot be disproved, and which have been confirmed by the latest statistics, show that this fear of population transcending the food-supply is real and ever present. Where it is not immediate, as in modern life, it is nevertheless near and visible in the division of the parental property among a large family of children; in the increased difficulties of properly educating such a family and giving each a proper position and start in life; and in providing for such as are feeble or incompetent. This effort, extended throughout a community, means more intense competition, a more bitter struggle for property, a more constant occupation with sordid details, to the neglect of reflection, study, and abstract thought.
Reproduction, therefore, to its utmost limits, would be of no advantage to a community, but decidedly deleterious. Its effect on the collective mind would be lowering, as it would centre the general attention on material aims and personal interests.
Nor is the individual who would direct his activities by the highest motives at all compelled to increase his kind. The accessory demands upon his time and powers which such an action usually entails, would probably hinder him in his efforts. Darwin forcibly stated this in his Descent of Man. He imagines a man who, not compelled by any deep feeling, yet sacrifices his life for the good of others through the love of glory. “His example would excite the same wish for glory in other men and would strengthen by exercise the noble feeling of admiration. He might thus do far more good to his tribe than by begetting offspring with a tendency to inherit his own high character.”