The Tyranny of Shams

by Joseph McCabe

But one needs no lengthy reflection to discover that at the root of all this clamour for maintaining or increasing the birth-rate we have only military requirements. Some, indeed, urge that a nation needs as many soldiers as possible for her industrial army as well as for her military forces; but, seeing that each nation already has more than she can employ, we are not impressed by this phrase. It is not volume of production, or gross largeness of revenue, which makes a nation great. It is the proportion of her revenue to her population, and in that respect some of the smallest States are the most happily situated. The need of a large army alone justifies complaints about a falling birth-rate, and it is monstrous that we should lay this strain on parents merely in order to produce “fodder for cannon.” The actual need of each country, as long as the military system lasts, must, of course, be met, but—apart from the hope that we will soon cast off the greater part of this military burden—two circumstances show that we have not here a sound and permanent social need. The birth-rate is falling in all civilised countries, and will eventually reach a common low level; and the war has shown us that a nation with a reduced population may, like any nation with a small population, find compensation for its weakness in alliances.

The truth is that the premature advance of France in restricting its birth-rate has led to a general fallacy. France exposed itself to a particular danger in face of Germany, and this special weakness of France was converted into the general statement that any nation which reduces its birth-rate is in danger. Not only is the general statement untrue, but the particular case of France is very carelessly conceived. After 1871 the German Empire had such an advantage in population over France, and (until 1895) so much less need of maintaining a fleet, that even a full birth-rate would not have equipped France confidently for a combat. In any case, we come back always to military needs, and we may trust that these will not long impose their terrible strain on civilisation. There is, apart from them, no reason why the birth-rate should not sink in every country to the level of the death-rate, and in many countries even lower.

On the other hand, the superficial folk who cry for heavy maternity and full cradles overlook a very important social fact. I am thinking chiefly of the men and women who denounce in principle the practice of restricting births. Not only do they ignore the overcrowding of our trades and professions,—and they are usually amongst the most reluctant to organise them,—but they fail to notice that the increasing application of science and humane sentiment to our modes of living threatens the earth, as a whole, with enormous over-population, unless the birth-rate be checked. The population of England has increased nearly fourfold in the past hundred years, whereas it had little more than doubled in the previous two hundred years. The factors which are responsible for this vast modern increase are becoming more active every decade, and are spreading over the world. How will the population of Europe and Asia stand when they are fully applied in Russia, China, and India? Within twenty years the United States, according to its agricultural experts, will have as large a population as it can support, and we have already seen Germany very largely thrust into war because of its superabundant population. The future is full of peril and misery if we continue to allow this military demand for men to masquerade as a sound and permanent human need. The birth-rate must be checked.

We must therefore refuse to allow the path of reform to be obstructed by either the priest or the drill-sergeant. If ever a time comes when some real interest of the race is endangered by too low a birth-rate, we may trust the race to see to it. Conservatives often imagine that those who would reform life on common-sense lines are devoid of sentiment. They confuse sentiment and sentimentality, which is sentiment out of accord with reason. The man of the future will be, in my judgment, not less, but more emotional than the man of to-day; but he will not allow ancient prejudices and mere phrases to have the unchecked support of his feelings. It will not be enough to tell him that divorce is increasing, or the birth-rate falling, or respect for the clergy deteriorating. He will ask the precise value in social terms of your bogy. At present we have, on broad social grounds, much to gain and nothing to lose by a fall of the birth-rate. Indeed, the prospect of a fall is, as far as this economic development alone is concerned, much exaggerated. Millions of employed women have, and will continue to have, children. Under our present system of industry this has undoubtedly certain risks and burdens; under the organised system of employment for which I plead it will be possible to adjust employment to maternal functions.

And this brings me to the cardinal issue of the whole controversy: the economic position of the married woman or the mother. Let us face this graver position quite candidly. The industrial disorganisation will right itself in the course of time. The middle-class father of our time whose daughter does a certain amount of work, not in order to relieve his pocket, but in order to buy additional luxuries for herself, has assuredly a grievance. She takes part of a man’s work and pay, yet leaves on him the old burden of maintenance. She makes matters worse by accepting a low wage, because she is not self-maintaining. I am assuming that women will become independent economic units, and that the rate of payment will be—equal wage for equal service.

But the position of the married woman, or of the independent woman who undertakes maternal functions, forms a special and difficult problem, which is pressing upon us more heavily every decade. There is spreading rapidly through the civilised world a feeling of rebellion against the economic dependence of wife or husband. No Conservative argumentation, no censure of new ideas, no religious preaching of self-sacrifice for a doubtful reward in heaven, will relieve us of this difficulty. Educated women—statistics of college-taught women are available—are increasingly rebelling against the subjection or inferiority which this economic dependence seems to entail. It is the chief motive of the general demand for economic independence (or an independent place in the industrial world) and has much to do with the revolt against marriage itself. Whether or no we adopt new ideals of social life, this revolt will spread.

One very quickly sees that it is not so much marriage as the traditional practice of husbands which is chiefly responsible for the revolt. The practice varies considerably, but, apart from a small class in which the wife brings with her or earns an independent income, it is still generally true to say that the wife receives what the husband chooses to give. Now it is plain that this difficulty may be met in a very large proportion of cases by an equitable voluntary agreement. Various domestic experiments of the kind are being tried, and a comparison of experiences would be useful. Many people are agreed in the just view that, since the wife works at home while the husband works abroad, all income is joint income. A common fund, accessible to both, is assigned for household and saving, and an equal and fixed personal share is taken by each from the income or wage. Such an arrangement is quite easily practised by middle-class people, and it seems to me to remove every legitimate suspicion of ignominy from the wife’s position.

When unmarried women have secured economic independence they will be able to demand some such arrangement before marrying. The kind of “modesty” which would prevent a woman from having an understanding before marriage in regard to income and children is a very costly and foolish luxury. Let them insist that the ritual words, “With all my worldly goods I thee endow,” must mean something more than that they shall have chocolates and pretty dresses if they humour the moods of a husband. Our law, which secures for a wife full maintenance when she has ceased to do any work for it (after a separation), but has no interest in her when she is working dutifully for twelve or fourteen hours a day, is infinitely more dangerous to marriage than are the puritan assaults of Mr. G. B. Shaw. In any case, a voluntary agreement that a wife has access to the bank and cash-box, and a right to take for personal use the same sum as her husband, removes all need of asking money from a husband (which is justly odious to many women), and makes a wife economically independent in any important sense of the word.

But it would be futile to hope either that the majority of men will thus surrender their privileged position, or that all women will recognise even such an arrangement as economic independence. A grave conflict undoubtedly lies before us, and there will be an increasing demand for the State-endowment of wifehood, or at least of motherhood. The suffrage movement has naturally inflamed the difficulty by educating women in a sense of grievance. Indeed, it seems to many of us that Feminist writers have at times gone far beyond legitimate grievances and set up fictitious and mischievous standards. This is a very common development of propagandist movements which meet with a prolonged resistance. The first generation of agitators says the obvious and just things in regard to the reform: the next generation must revive the jaded sentiment with stimulating novelties and exaggerations. It seems to me one of these morbid exaggerations to speak of marriage as “legalised prostitution”; to imagine that one is “selling one’s body” to a man, or receiving payment for ministering to his “lust.” One Feminist writer of some influence, and some pretension to knowledge of science, has actually compared the human male very unfavourably with all other male animals in the world, on the ground that the latter are content with a restricted period of “rut”!

This mixture of ancient Puritanism and advanced sociology is as incongruous as it is mischievous. A woman who sincerely regards sex-pleasure in the way generally implied by the use of the word “lust”—a woman who has not the same healthy desire of it as her partner—has no right to marry: except, of course, to marry a man with similarly antique views. A wife of such a kind may very well consider that she is being “paid” to surrender her body. The normal wife is not paid for that at all. She is paid—if there is any paying—to care for the home and her children: which is as well earned a payment as the fee of a lawyer. And from the sentimental point of view it does not make a particle of difference whether she is paid out of her husband’s income or out of the coffers of the State. She would still “sell her body,” if there is any selling of body. But there is not. Maternity and sex-pleasure are entirely different matters.