Detaching the element of theory, we have a plain proposal to eradicate tainted stocks from the human garden and promote the growth of the sounder. As I have said, the positive proposal to breed has not yet been put before us in a practicable or discussable form. This is largely because Eugenists fear to alarm the public by pointing out how it affects the position of marriage. There are, however, many other difficulties. The extraordinary diversity among children of the same parents warns us that we cannot count on the result of mating human beings, with their infinitely more complex nervous systems, as we can count on the issue of mating sheep or dogs. The mediocrity of the living children of our ablest men of the last generation, even when the mother was an excellent mate, is another circumstance to be considered. We do not yet know the points to breed for, and there is no constancy of result. Eugenists sometimes refer to the physical or mental superiority of one class of children over another, but in this they do not attempt to distinguish between the effect of environment and the natural endowment. Positive Eugenics is not yet beyond the stage of research. Such research, if conducted without academic prejudice (which is too apparent in many Eugenic papers), is of very great service; and, if ever a firm proposal lies before us, we may trust that rhetorical phrases and clerical prejudices will not be allowed to bar the way.
In the case of negative Eugenics we are nearer agreement. Here again, however, research is not always candid. Inquiries have been made into the lineage of American criminals, and the large percentage of criminals in one family is held to indicate a tainted stock: it is not sufficiently noticed that they all lived in the same crime-breeding environment. Other Eugenists try to intimidate us with the cry that lunacy and crime are increasing rapidly: whereas (as I showed in the Hibbert Journal, April 1912) there is no proved increase of lunacy and no increase of crime, in proportion to the growth of population. These methods bring discredit on the Eugenic proposals. It is, however, now agreed that certain diseases, including certain forms of mental disease, are transmissible, and common-sense suggests that we should prevent their transmission. It is well to bear in mind, however, that these things affect only a fraction of the community. As is the case with every new social proposal, Eugenics is being pressed as a panacea; and it appeals to many as a fascinating method of healing our social maladies without touching the present distribution of wealth. It is one subsidiary remedy among the hundred which modern civilisation needs to apply. By all means let us discover what “tainted stocks,” if any, there are amongst us; and let us have the elementary courage and intelligence to extinguish them, by the isolation, painless destruction, or sterilisation of their representatives.
The future of the family seems not obscure. Malthusian and Eugenic proposals will alter much of the crudeness and stupidity of the old family ideal, and ease of divorce will remove the blight it has put on many a home. Hundreds of thousands bless marriage with gratitude and sincerity: tens of thousands curse it with equal sincerity. Let there be liberty and life for all. For a modern legislature to ignore a vast amount of vice and misery, and be guided by the ancient formula of a celibate priesthood, is one of the most lamentable features of our civilisation. And the unbiased social student may look without concern on the growth of extra-matrimonial love. There is no interest of the State which forbids it, nor any sound principle of morals. The woman of the future will be her own mistress, responsible neither to priest nor moralist in this respect. If she chooses, she will marry; but she will not sacrifice half the joy of life because she cannot, or does not choose to, venture upon the experiment of domestic intimacy.
CHAPTER VII.
THE FUTURE OF WOMAN
The old tradition of the family is intimately connected with the old ideal of womanhood, and this in turn is summoned to the bar of modern criticism. A substantial change in the position of woman seems so revolutionary a disturbance, since it directly affects half the race and must very seriously affect the home and the State, that our Conservatives employ against the proposal the whole arsenal of controversial rhetoric. We hear of the wisdom of the race—as if the race did not grow wiser as it grows older—and the thin end of the wedge. We are reminded that the ancient civilisations always came to an end when their women rebelled against their natural position. We have private appeals to our sensuous feelings and our instincts of proprietorship, and open appeals to the ascetic doctrine of the Pauline Epistles. We have history put before us, as usual, in chosen fragments, and on the strength of these detached bits of learning we hear impressive sermons on the “laws” of history and of nature.
The appeal to history, which men like Dr. Emil Reich have so gravely abused, is in this case singularly unfortunate. In most cases the candid student of history finds some ancient abuse or irrational tradition making its way from one civilisation to another, and finds it natural that our more critical and independent generation should at length seek to dethrone it. But in the case of woman the Conservative has not even “the wisdom of the race” to appeal to. Her position in the past has varied greatly, but it is very far from true that she had always occupied that state of subjection in which our Victorian reformers found her. I have elsewhere (Woman in Political Evolution) surveyed the full story of woman’s development, and will here be content with a summary view which makes the Feminist movement of our time intelligible.
During the greater part of the history of civilisation, in the Egyptian and Mesopotamian empires, woman had a considerable measure of freedom and respect. When the Greeks and Romans entered the stage, they brought with them a different tradition in regard to woman, but as soon as they reached the height of their cultural development, their women (and many of their men) rebelled against this tradition. The civilisation of Greece was extinguished so speedily that the women of Athens, aided by so eminent a thinker as Plato, had not time to win their emancipation; but the Roman women did succeed in lifting themselves from their position of subjection. In the meantime, however, the political and religious development of Europe led to the reappearance of the barbaric tradition in a new form. The Christian leaders had in their sacred documents the social code of a rude Semitic tribe, the Jews, which was sternly emphasised by St. Paul, and they brooded darkly over the position of woman. Tertullian fiercely reminded Christians that, but for woman, the race would never have been damned. Ambrose ingeniously reflected that Eve was made out of a mere rib, not out of the brain, of Adam. Augustine regarded woman as an unpleasant institution created by Providence for the relief of weak-willed males and for the maintenance of the race. Jerome frowned heavily on the Roman woman’s claim of emancipation. This quaint mixture of Jewish contempt and ascetic dread was imposed on Europe by the triumphant priesthood, educated mainly in the opinions of “the Fathers,” and woman sank again to a position of inferiority and subjection.
Women writers of many countries have written this story of the degradation of their sex in Christian Europe, and one can only admire the splendid audacity with which Bishop Welldon assures women that Jesus Christ (who never uttered a protest against the Jewish conception or a warning against the coming abuse of it) was “the first to respect them,” or the Bishop of London describes Christianity as “woman’s best friend,” or Bishop Diggle represents the Christian as an advance on the Roman attitude. Our clergy are distinguished for the facility with which they make historical statements without giving us any serious evidence of a command of history; they have the advantage of being able to assure their followers that it is a “sin” to read more accurate and less orthodox experts.
The historical truth is that the nineteenth century found woman in a position far lower than that she had occupied at Rome seventeen centuries before—far lower, indeed, than she had occupied during (except for two brief periods) the many thousands of years of the history of civilisation. It was quite inevitable that a movement for her emancipation and uplifting should find a place among the great reforms initiated in the last century. To conceive this movement as a semi-hysterical rebellion against the settled usage of the race is merely to betray a gross ignorance of history. Recent experience has taught us that there is a great deal in the settled usage of the race to rebel against; but it is false that in this case we are doing so. The undisputed historical truth is that woman had been comparatively free and respected during the greater part of the civilised period: that, when the early civilisations of Greece and Rome had placed her in subjection for a few centuries, she, at the beginning of the Christian era, rebelled and won her emancipation: and that the later period of subjection was merely due to the incorporation in the Christian religion of the primitive and crude ideal of a polygamous Arab tribe. Against this intolerable superstition modern civilisation has rebelled, and we are in the midst of a far deeper discussion of woman’s nature and position than ever occurred before.
The discussion is passing through the three phases which are customary in these controversies. At first the clergy and the Conservative quoted the Bible and the Fathers. Then, when women began to show that they were disposed to examine a little more closely the authority of documents which taught so obvious an injustice, it was pleaded that in this case the religious view coincided with “sound” science and sociology. In that phase we are to-day, discussing claims that “nature” and our social interest are on the side of the old ideal. In a few more decades, when the battle is won, the Bishop of London of the time will be demonstrating that the reform was anticipated by the Fathers sixteen hundred years ago and was contained, in germ, in the New Testament.