MARRIAGE
Forty years ago it would have been possible to say that all encouragements to marriage necessarily meant increasing the birth rate. Economic and other causes contribute to the decline of both marriage and birth-rates. In this chapter I am not concerned with the discouragements to race increase. I remark elsewhere on the absence of national inspiration to race improvement. I am at present concerned only with marriage as the medium for procreation, no other aspect of marriage is the concern of Eugenists. To encourage those marriages which will tend to produce a noble race might well befit the consideration of a great people. The views uttered here, while I think they would be largely shared by Eugenists as a whole, are more or less personal to the writer who alone is responsible for their statement. The legitimatisation in some way of the illegitimate seems to me a necessary, urgent duty of the State. The stigma, implying moral blame and sometimes meeting with actual ill-treatment on that account, is as unjust and undeserved as anything that can be imagined. To overcome the difficulty by making the marriage of the parents the sole method of removing the reproach seems to me as unjust as it is illogical. There is no sense in making a child suffer unnecessarily. The absence of a home with a pair of loving parents is often the natural sufferings inflicted on a "natural" child. We ought not to encourage any discrimination between the adopted and the unadopted illegitimate child. Public opinion must learn to regard all children from the moment of their birth as having an inherent right to the best possible welcome and the treatment best fitted to make them desirable citizens. Eugenics studies the parents and on occasion challenges their right to produce seed, and one of its basic reasons for doing so must inevitably be that there can be no post-natal challenge to the child's right to exist.
Illegitimacy however greatly deprecated morally has justified itself historically. It has produced some of earth's chosen heroes. It can be condemned ethically because it so often inflicts hardship, privation and misery on the unhappy mother and the innocent child. That subsequent marriage of the parents should bring into the family records the acknowledged previous offspring is obvious common sense, but the child whose father refuses to do its mother the sometimes doubtful "honour" of marriage should be regarded in this respect as a child whose father is dead. As our records demand a name for the father, "Anon" should serve where paternity is doubtful and the real father's name should be acknowledged in every official document in every case where paternity orders are obtained. In other words illegitimacy should be abolished and, marriage or no marriage, every child should be duly entitled to every right of inheritance, etc., which the laws at present confine to the fruit of wedlock. It is not the form of marriage or its absence but the racial result with which Eugenics is concerned. Morality, religion, or the law which holds society together may have its reproach, its deprecatory warnings, and even its punishments for parents who transgress its conventions, but humanity demands that no stone shall be thrown at the child.
Eugenics is so seriously concerned with the race that it cannot accept the pretentious puerilities which so often masquerade under the title of marriage-law reforms. The mere refusal of a marriage certificate to couples who cannot pass certain medical shibboleths, while their offspring is unconsidered (except in so far as it demands immediate public assistance) seems to be a mockery of a serious subject. The marriage of the unfit is the concern of the Eugenists primarily because deception on either side may lead to terrible evil. Physical examinations and medical certificates before marriage are an urgent necessity—not as a bar to marriage but as a hindrance to deceit. Wives must know the man they are marrying. Men must be informed what kind of wife is hidden beneath the attractive dress. A danger of marriage is that a perfectly capable healthy person may unsuspectingly marry an impotent, barren or deformed consort. Love capable of conquering a wholesome physical repulsion is one thing; love, blinded by custom, delivered bound into the hands of disease is a vile thing incapable of defence. Partners for life can even now demand a certificate on the portal of marriage, but public opinion and legislation must make such certificates an essential preliminary to the marriage contract. All legal barriers to breaking an engagement on grounds of physical and mental ill-health must be swept away, and the enlightened public must be led to learn that some promises are better broken than kept. If these ante-matrimonial conditions are observed Eugenists will look with a charitable if discouraging glance at marriages of the unfit. Marriage between two "unfit" persons can be defended on very many grounds so long as children are not born. It is, generally speaking, improbable that the unfit at their worst will either be drawn to each other or that they will wish to enter on any career which may tend to deprive them of what vitality they still possess. Most often such unions would be inevitably fruitless whatever vain attempts were made to make the dry bones live. Such unions would in nearly every instance simply mean that to prevent scandal a form of marriage is gone through and thereafter two weaklings give each other the comfort of communion; their common diet is suited to their needs, they live (as far as they can afford it) in an atmosphere adapted to their complaint. I do not envy the state of soul of their critics who would mar the placid satisfaction of mutual comfort which would solace their declining childless days.
The union of the fit and the unfit is a calamity or a catastrophe in cases of knowledge, it is a crime where the victim is deceived into ignorance. The union of two unfit persons entered into in complete knowledge will be an infinitely smaller evil.
To make marriage attractive we must very greatly increase the facilities for unmaking it, and we must lay down some general principles for its healthy continuance. The absolute right of a woman to her own person, and her prerogative to refuse to bear children, seem elementary conditions of civilised wedlock. Woman must be protected from outrage, be she wife or not. A married woman must have the same right over her own person and her own children that an unmarried woman has over hers. It is an unmistakable slight on marriage to compel a woman to relinquish any of the legal or social rights she would enjoy if unmarried. We cannot afford to throw these obstacles in the way of marriage, we want the best women to marry and not to abstain on account of the altogether unnecessary and unnatural disabilities which laws and men have made.
Eugenists are willing to concede that divorce should be cheap, easy and free from shameful scandal. This can only be done however without grave injustice to women and the race if, apart from religious and moral considerations, the family is made the first consideration. The problem is largely an economic one. It is not likely that the State willingly intends to take upon itself the burden of maintaining thousands of wives unable to maintain themselves discarded by husbands wealthy enough to incur new responsibilities and expense. Whether marriage should be regarded as giving a claim to equal shares in the property and income of either partner is worthy of discussion. It is likely enough that the thinking woman of the present day and her successors will insist on wages for wives, wages for motherhood, and wages for housekeeping, and that these stipulations will receive the sanction of State law wherever they are reasonably scheduled and definitely approved. The children of divorced parents occupy an onerous position. Mr. Henry James, in "What Maisie Knew," has touched convincingly on this point. It cannot be dismissed as unimportant for there is hardly a single good environment in children's lives so potent as that of a happy home in which the two parents' love for each other is only rivalled by their united love for the young lives their love has so miraculously created. But there is no worse condition for children than the home of hate. Divorce may be horrid, but the atmosphere of love turned to indifference and hate is hell for all who breathe there.
While marriage does not exhaust all the possibilities of increasing the race it may be said to be not only the best but the only socially desirable way. Preventing divorce, or railing marriage round with difficulties not only encourages illicit relations outside marriage, it inevitably tends to prevent marriages being as fecund as the interests of the race demands. There is no need to sigh for a uniform marriage-law. If the ideal rule could be discovered it would be a pity not to make it universal. States which have experimented under present conditions become valuable examples or warnings, and the only need is that the least enlightened (or the least speculative) State should come into line with the most advanced without undue delay. Fortunately already there has been a number of very interesting enterprises by individual States, and the time is ripe for the more general adoption of those marriage laws which have given general satisfaction where tried.