As long as land was abundant or rather as long as people were scarce, there was enough of the necessaries of life to give a competence and comfort to all. When the country is filled up there is no longer the profusion that nature set out for us at first. The land that we ought to have reserved for our children, educated in our ways and inheriting our ideas is given to foreigners, and our own are disinherited. The miraculous insanity of this, is that we view this prospect with more than complacency and are anxious to help it along. We not only crowd the country with immigrants, many of whom we are obliged to class as objectionable, but we encourage a double rate of increase by the Apotheosis of the parents of large families, as if fecundity were a merit or there were any danger of “race suicide”. The danger is greater that nature out of patience with our colossal stupidity will visit homicide on the whole race, just as she has so often done on parts of it.
The danger the Professor sees ahead is no dream. Neither is the final remedy he so confidently proposes. Even now, are some of these vital questions being solved, and along the Professor’s lines. We shall learn to begin our study of sociology with the Bees and the Ants; older races than we are, and in practical hard sense far ahead.
Many people do not know that we have gone to sleep directly over a weak spot in the Earth’s crust, that although it gives many warnings by growlings and grumblings, it fails to wake us up. We turn over and half awake, we mutter—it isn’t going to be much of a quake I guess. If some crank does not succeed in sounding the alarm loud enough and none but a crank will be likely to sound it at all, the citizen peers out—“’tis nothing but that crank,” he says, and he rolls over as if he thought it better to be overwhelmed by a quake than saved by a crank. So much the worse if even the crank cannot save us.
The questions that we seem desirous to push aside are the most persistent in pressing for solution. What is the aim of the aimless multitudes that swarm to our shores? What do any of us live for? To live? Is living worth it, if it cannot be done in comfort? The old theological query shows up—“What is the chief end of man”? As they answered; it was nothing at all to man and of paltry insignificance to anybody else.
Worker Sex. See [page 182].
I inferred from a remark the Professor dropped that he regarded the present human race as gradually developing a third or worker sex from those present, especially the female; and this without any artificial effort. It is evident to the most superficial observation that the women are pushing ahead into occupations that a few years ago were monopolized by the men. The men, are being dispossessed of their employments, and the women usurp their places. Women thus employed and self supporting, cannot reasonably be expected to see anything very alluring in a marriage that presents a prospect to the woman of being obliged to support a husband and children as well as herself. This condition of things will certainly cause a decline in matrimony, has already done it in fact; amongst the women of the greatest enterprise.
See [page 199], Abolition of the Stomach.
The Professor’s plan of the abortion or extinction of the digestive apparatus is in direct continuance of evolution. There are many cases in nature in which a process or system is abandoned or superseded by a different one, and new organs and new functions may totally displace others. For example the Amphibians are supplied with gills, and are able to live continuously under water, but they begin to live part of the time in the air, and lungs are developed which at first begin to do part of the office of aerating the blood of the animal, and gradually assume the whole of the function, the gills becoming atrophied and abolished.
The prognostication of the Professor in regard to the metamorphosis of the digestive apparatus is neither wild nor extravagant. The unborn infant lives on food digested by its mother and introduced into its system. After its birth the food is digested and supplied by its own internal laboratory, instead of that of the mother. It might just as well be supplied by a chemical laboratory. The only essential condition is that the food be perfectly assimilable by the tissues and without any surplus of substances not required. The transfer of the food supply from the circulation of the mother to its production by the chemist is reached by several stages or changes. First it is from the mothers circulation supported by exterior supplies of food. Next it is furnished by the circulation of the infant supported by exterior supplies; commonly beginning with the natural lacteal secretion, then after a time the demand changes from this to stronger food; also to acquired habits in taste the use of stimulants, narcotics etc. Thus nature changes the organism in the most radical way to keep it in conformity with conditions that are necessary for its support, and likewise changes its environment to furnish the conditions with which conformity is essential. If we consider how great the changes are, in the structure and functions of one body during the living of one life; we cannot feel surprised at the changes in human anatomy that we know to have occurred in the long ages up which we have so laboriously toiled, nor at the further changes which the foresight of the Professor points out to us, and for which he helps himself to such a prodigal allowance of time. The changes we have met and passed are far greater than those assumed for the future. As to our evolution we are certainly not yet half through.