In England, France, Scandinavia, and Germany, information regarding birth control is also freely disseminated, but the establishment of clinics in these countries is not so well organized as it is in Holland, with the consequence that the upper and middle classes, as in this country, have ready access to this knowledge, while the poor continue to multiply because of their lack of it. This leads, especially in France, to a high infant mortality, which, rather than a low birth-rate, is the real cause of her decreasing population.
We in America should learn a lesson from this, and I would urge immediate group action to form clinics at once. We have in this country a splendid foundation in our hospital system and settlement work. The American trained nurse is the best equipped and most capable in the world, which enables us, if we begin work at once, to accomplish as much in ten years’ time as the European countries have done in thirty years.
The clinic I established in the Brownsville district of Brooklyn accomplished at least this: it showed the need and usefulness of such an agency.
The free clinic is the solution for our problem. It will enable women to help themselves, and will have much to do with disposing of this soul-crushing charity which is at best a mere temporary relief.
Woman must be protected from incessant childbearing before she can actively participate in the social life. She must triumph over Nature’s and Man’s laws which have kept her in bondage. Just as man has triumphed over Nature by the use of electricity, shipbuilding, bridges, etc., so must woman triumph over the laws which have made her a childbearing machine.
RACE REGENERATION. HAVELOCK ELLIS. New Tracts for the Times. Cassell & Co., Ltd., London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne. 1911.
Henry Havelock Ellis: L.S.A. Hon. Member Medico-legal Society of New York. Hon. Fellow of the Chicago Academy of Medicine; Foreign Associate of the Societe Medico-Historique of Paris, etc.; General Editor of the Contemporary Science Series (1889); born Croydon, Surrey, 2nd Feb., 1859; belonging on both sides to families connected with the sea; spent much of childhood on sea, (Pacific, etc.); educated, private schools; St. Thomas’s Hospital; engaged in teaching in various parts of New South Wales, 1875–79. Returned to England and qualified as medical man, but only practiced for a short time, having become absorbed in scientific and literary work. Edited the Mermaid Series of Old Dramatists, 1887–89. Publications: The New Spirit, 1890; The Criminal, 1890 (4th edition revised and enlarged 1910); Man and Woman, a Study of Human Secondary Sexual Characters, 1894 (5th edition revised and enlarged 1914); Sexual Inversion, being Vol. II of Studies in the Psychology of Sex, 1897 (3rd edition revised and enlarged 1915); Affirmations, 1897; The Evolution of Modesty, etc., being vol. I of the studies in Psychology of Sex, 1899 (3rd edition revised and enlarged, 1910); The 19th Century; A Dialogue in Utopia, 1900; A Study of British Genius, 1904; Analysis of the Sexual Impulse, 1903, (2nd edition revised and enlarged 1913); Sexual Selection in Man, 1905; Erotic Symbolism, 1906; Sex in Relation to Society, being vols. 3, 4, 5 and 6 of studies in psychology of sex; The Soul of Spain, 1908; The World of Dreams, 1911; The Task of Social Hygiene, 1912; Impressions and Comments, 1914; Essays In War Time, 1916.
When we survey the movement of social reform which has been carried on during the past one hundred years, we thus see that it is proceeding in four stages. 1—The effort to clear away the gross filth of our cities, to improve the dwellings, to introduce sanitation, and to combat disease. 2—The attempt to attack the problem more thoroughly by regulating conditions of work, and introducing the elaborate system of factory legislation. 3—The still more fundamental step of taking in hand the children who have not yet reached the age of work, nationalizing education, and ultimately pushing back the care and over-sight of infants to the moment of birth. 4—Finally, most fundamental step of all, the effort, which is still only beginning to provide the conditions of healthy life even before birth. It must be remembered that this movement in all its four stages is still in active progress among us. It is not mere ancient history. On the contrary, it is a movement that is constantly spreading and at every point becoming more thorough, more harmoniously organized. Before long it will involve a national medical service, which will impose on doctors as their primary duty, not the care of disease, but the preservation of health. We have to realize at the same time that this movement has been exclusively concerned, not with the improvement of the quality of human life, but exclusively with the betterment of the conditions under which life is lived. It tacitly assumed that we have no control over human life and no responsibility for its production. It accepted human life—however numerous it might be in quantity, however defective in quality—as a God given fact, which it would be impious to question. It heroically set itself to the endless task of cleansing the channels down which this muddy torrent swept. It never went to the source. Only take care of the soil, these workers at social reform said in effect, and the seed is no matter. That, as we can now see, was a silly enough position to take up. P. 26.
Here we have been spending enormous enthusiasm, labor and money in improving the conditions of life, with the notion in our heads that we should thereby be improving life itself, and after 70 years we find no convincing proof that the quality of our people is one whit better than it was when for a large part they lived in filth, were ravaged by disease, bred at random, soaked themselves in alcohol, and took no thought for the morrow. Our boasted social reform has been a matter of bricks and mortar—a piling up of hospitals, asylums, prisons and workhouses—while our comparatively sober habits may be merely a sign of the quietly valetudinarian way of life imposed on a race no longer possessing the stamina to withstand excess.
One of the most obvious tests of our degree of success in social reform directed to the betterment of social conditions is to be found in the amount of our pauperism, and the condition of our paupers. If the amelioration of the conditions of life can effect even a fraction of what has been expected of it, the results ought to be seen in the diminution of our pauperism, and the improvement of the condition of our paupers. Yet so far as numbers are concerned, the vast army of our paupers has remained fairly constant during the whole period of social reform, if indeed it has not increased. As to the ineffectiveness of our methods the Royal Commissioners, especially perhaps in their Minority Report, have shed much light. It was to be expected that these muddled methods should be most marked in all that concerns the beginnings of life, for that is precisely where our whole treatment of social reform has been most at fault. Children under 16 form nearly one-third of the paupers relieved. In the United Kingdom the Poor Law authorities have on their books as outdoor paupers, 50,000 infants under four years of age. As regards the annual number of births in the Poor Law institutions of the United Kingdom, there are not even definite statistics available, but it is estimated in the Minority Report that the number is probably over 15,000, 30% of these being legitimate children, and 70% illegitimate. There is no system in the treatment of mothers; and often not the most elementary care in the treatment of the infants. It is scarcely surprising that though the general infant mortality is excessively high, the infant mortality of the workhouse babies is two or three times as high as that among the general population. And the Royal Commissioners pathetically ask, “To what is this retrogression due? It cannot be due to lack of expenditure, or to lack of costly and elaborate machinery.” No, it certainly is not. It is in large part due, as we are now just beginning to recognize, to the concentration of our activities on the mere conditions of life, to our neglect of the betterment of life itself. We have failed to realize that the whitening of our sepulchres will not limit the number of corpses placed in those sepulchres. It is the renewal of the spirit within that is needed, not alone the improvement of material conditions, but the regeneration of life. If we wish to realize more in detail the slight extent to which our efforts to better the conditions of life have raised the quality of life itself, we have but to turn to the problem of the feebleminded, which during recent years has attracted so much attention. It is necessary to remember that this feeblemindedness is largely handed on by heredity. Exact investigation has now shown that feeblemindedness is inherited to an enormous extent. Some years ago, Dr. Ashby, speaking from a large experience, estimated that at least 75% of feebleminded children are born with an inherited tendency to mental defect. More precise investigation has shown since that this estimate was under the mark. Dr. Tredgold, who in England has most carefully studied the heredity of the feebleminded, found that in over 82% there is a bad nervous inheritance. Heredity is the chief cause of feeblemindedness, and Tredgold has never seen a normal child born of two feebleminded parents. The very thorough investigation of the heredity of the feebleminded which is now being carried on at the institution for their care at Vineland, N. J., shows even more decisive results. By making careful pedigrees of the families to which the inmates at Vineland belong it is seen that in a large proportion of cases feeblemindedness is handed on from generation to generation, and is transmissible through three generations, though it sometimes skips a generation. Not only is feeblemindedness inherited, and in a much greater degree than has been hitherto suspected, but the feebleminded tend to have a much larger number of children than normal people. The average number of children of feebleminded people seems to be usually about one-third more than in normal families, and is sometimes very much greater. Page 26–36.