[3]. There are exceptions to the rule, as in the case of the male stickleback.
Passing from the less intelligent vertebrates which produce many young at short intervals and abandon them at an early age, to the more intelligent higher vertebrates which produce few young at longer intervals and aid them for longer periods, this principle clearly emerges—“While the rate of juvenile mortality is diminished, there results both a lessened physical cost of maintaining the species and an augmented satisfaction of the affections.” (Principles of Sociology, vol. i. p. 628.)
There is no reversal of this genetic order of nature in the epoch of conscious evolution. The processes are different, because man possesses developed intellect, aided by scientific knowledge and invention as a new and skilled ally in the struggle to maintain his species at less and less cost of individual life and happiness; but the general forward movement takes precisely the same course. With the highest evolved type of man this sacrifice of individual life to the species is reduced to a minimum, while the interests of species are conserved in a painless, a wholly superior manner. And, further, the entire range of domestic feelings—parental, filial, fraternal and intimately social, become extended and increasingly capable of bestowing enduring pleasure. The ultimate goal is easy maintenance of species, without—to any unpleasurable extent—subordinating single members of species to that end.
Love of offspring, as already explained, has no reproductive instinct at its base. It is a feeling—superimposed on organic nature—dependent on family life or arrangements that involve parental care and more or less of adult activity directed to the well-being of the young. This sentiment of love of offspring or philoprogenitiveness, is well established in the British race; but with rampant poverty in our midst, can we wonder that in hundreds of thousands of individual cases the paternal relation—so capable of filling the heart with tender emotions and joy—creates an actual disgust, or a feeling of despair, malignancy, even injustice, as is shown in the touching little satire, Ginx’s Baby. Ginx frankly gave his wife notice that, as his utmost efforts could scarcely maintain their existing family, if she ventured to present him with any more, either single or twins ... “he would most assuredly drown him.” Later, when the arrival of number thirteen is imminent—the wife being unable longer to hide the impending event—Ginx fixed his determination by much thought and a little extra drinking. He argued thus: “He wouldn’t go on the parish. He couldn’t keep another youngster to save his life. He had never taken charity and never would. There was nothink to do with it but drown it.”
Nor is even the maternal relation proof against bitterness in untoward conditions, although the feelings will be differently expressed, and may possibly assume a pious garb. “I’ve ’ad my fifteen or my twenty on ’em, but, thank ’eaven, the churchyard ’as stood my friend.” These or similar words have often been heard in an English factory town. The women speaking thus were not otherwise callous or incapable of mother-love. They were gentle, patient, toiling drudges, who had had the philoprogenitiveness of average human nature and the tender joys of maternity perverted into secret care and open hypocritical cant by the physical strain of a too-frequent child-bearing, combined with the miseries of ceaseless labour, pinched means, and comfortless, crowded homes.
The frequent advent of children who are unwelcome to their own parents in a society no longer ignorant of the scientific means by which its weakest members may avoid parentage, without any destruction of life or any injury to sexual function, is marvellously irrational, and it indicates divergence from the well-marked path of evolutional progress.
Opposition to neo-Malthusian practice arises from primitive conceptions of life (conceptions antecedent to evolutional theory), while all the various undefined scruples painfully experienced by individuals are survivals of the sentiment allied with these false conceptions. Prejudice dies slowly, as ignorance is dispelled by the growing light of new knowledge.
I have shown that asceticism is an immoral principle, the action of which tends to fill individual life with gloom and depression, and to thwart or counteract general happiness. I have also shown the absolute necessity for retarding the multiplication of human beings to suit the limits of available subsistence. And now, after pointing out that philoprogenitiveness—which is the groundwork of domestic and social virtue, and ought to be the mainspring of reproduction of species—is continually liable to be strained, depressed or perverted into anti-social bitterness in parental bosoms among the lower classes, I must ask the question: How otherwise than by the easiest method known to science could the difficulties of the position be met and overcome?
Messrs. Patrick Geddes and J. A. Thomson, in their treatise on the Evolution of Sex, urge the necessity of what they call “an ethical rather than a mechanical prudence after marriage, of a temperance recognized to be as binding on husband and wife as chastity on the unmarried.” (The Evolution of Sex, p. 297.) But what do these gentlemen mean by the temperance here recommended? It is surely well known that the birth of a large family is perfectly consistent with a sparing, most temperate exercise of the procreative function; and surely also it would be folly on our part to look for parental conduct controlled by ethical motive in the warrens of the poor of our large cities, from whence springs an important section of the national life. (Social Control of the Birth Rate, Pamphlet by G. A. Gaskell.)
In the homes of the upper classes, adorned with all the amenities and refinements of civilization, parental prudence results mainly from egoistic motive. Practical reformers will hesitate to assume that those—the less favoured social units—are likely to surpass these in moral elevation, and demean themselves generally in a superior manner! But further, a parental prudence, dispensing with mechanical methods of checking propagation, may even prove the converse of ethical conduct. Advanced sexual morality requires a free and healthful exercise of sexual function. That such freedom is not possible under present social conditions is irrelevant to the question at issue; the point is that conduct unnecessarily traversing this advanced sexual morality is not in accordance with rationalized social ethics; it has no scientific basis.