In addition, a thorough change in social pretensions and habits of life is necessary, above all in the large towns, where building societies for the erection of small flats with common kitchen, offices for providing domestic help, paid by the hour, and co-operative societies for the cheaper supply of the necessaries of life, might considerably assist young people in establishing their homes. It is, however, not only this, but also communal employment that must be promoted, if men of about twenty-five are to be ready to enter upon their various occupations and—after thirty-five years in the service of the State—to be entitled to their pensions, but at the same time under the obligation to retire, except in the rare cases where special talent renders a person indispensable in some leading position. The experience a man has gained, and the strength that is left to him, would find full employment in other social affairs or in personal interests.
It is not against immoral literature, but against the Treasury, the Budget Committee and against private employers of labour that moral reformers should draw up their resolutions. So long as a business man is able to make two or three millions a year net profit while of those employed in his office scarcely two or three are so paid that they can think of marriage before the age of thirty; so long as the head of a government department can reply, to the application of a class of officials for an increase of salary in order to facilitate marriage, by a gracious promise of more frequent leave to go to town; or an employer refuse a female employee’s demand for a raise of salary with a gallant reference to the ease with which— with her advantages of appearance—she might increase her income; so long will the marriage question remain unsolved.
All preaching of morality to youth which does not at the same time condemn the state of society that favours immorality, but makes the realisation of youthful love an impossibility, is more than stupidity, it is a crime.
So long as the present low rates of pay and uncertain conditions of employment continue, the blood of men will continue more and more to be corrupted, and that of women to be impoverished, while waiting for the marriage which might have given to society excellent children born of healthy and happy parents. So long as societies thus fatuously sacrifice their highest values will every other kind of social reform be nothing but a work of Penelope, of which the night will undo what the day has done.
CHAPTER IV
LOVE’S SELECTION
In the foregoing chapter it was insisted that love’s freedom in the procreation of new life must have a downward limit, in that this freedom can only be allowed to those who have attained the age of sexual maturity. But it ought also to have an upward limit, since a great difference in age between father and mother—like the advanced age of one of them—offers unfavourable conditions for the health, strength, and upbringing of the children. And as, for reasons given in the last chapter, the lawful age of marriage for both sexes must be put at twenty-one, a difference in age of twenty-five years should be the highest the law ought to allow in one or the other case.
No one who sees the meaning of life in its advance towards higher forms would dispute nowadays the obvious duty of not transmitting serious diseases the hereditariness of which is already ascertained by science. But as this has only been ascertained in a few cases, legal hindrances as regards the many doubtful cases would be not only a—perhaps meaningless—interference with the life of the individual, but also an unfavourable circumstance for continued research in the most important branch of biology.
What ought to be insisted upon even now is that each party before marriage should possess full knowledge of its possible dangers, but that the choice should thereupon be left to their own sense of responsibility. No one—at least not yet—can ask the individual to sacrifice his happiness for contested possibilities; but in the interests of the individual, as of that of the race, we can, on the other hand, demand that no one shall make his choice in love in ignorance. And the more the sense of racial community approaches its renaissance under the influence of evolutionism, the more natural will all safeguards appear with which that choice may be surrounded to the advantage of posterity. Even now it is considered quite natural that a medical examination should precede life insurance. In the future it may be equally obvious that before marriage the woman should ascertain from a female doctor and the man from a male doctor whether they are capable of fulfilling their duty to the race. And it is not only a question of insuring the new lives, but also of assuring the couple themselves that they have no organic defects which in some instances might make marriage impossible, which in others are easily avoidable, but ignorance regarding which would in each case entail unnecessary suffering.