One feels guilty of sentiment here (after reading Nietzsche!), and hurries back to the sober features of those crowded volumes. Here, in cold scientific statement, is our social problem: here are volumes biological on heredity, eugenics, dietetics, and disease; volumes sociological on marriage, prostitution, the family, the position of woman, contraception and the control of population; volumes psychological on education, criminology, and the replacement of supernatural by social religion; volumes economic on private property, poverty, child labor, industrial methods, arbitration, minimum wage, trusts, free trade, immigration, prohibition, war; volumes political on individualism and communism, anarchism and socialism, single tax, Darwinism and politics, democracy and aristocracy, patriotism, imperialism, electoral and administrative methods; methodological volumes on trade-unions and craft-unions, “direct action” and “political action,” violence and non-resistance, revolution and reform. It is a discouraging maze; we plunge into it almost hopelessly. Several of these authors have schemes for taking the social machine apart, and a few even have schemes for putting it together again; hardly one of them remembers the old warning that this machine must be kept going while it is being repaired. And each of these solutions, as its author never suspects, is but an added problem.
Let us listen to these men for a while, let us follow them for a space, and see where they bring us out. They may not bring us out at all; but perhaps that is just what we need to see.
II
“Solutions”
1
Feminism
And first, with due propriety, let us listen to the case of woman vs. the status quo. We imagine the argument as put by a studious and apparently harmless young lady. She begins gently and proceeds crescendo.
“The case for woman is quite simple; as simple as the case for democracy. We are human beings, we are governed, we are taxed; and we believe that just government implies the consent of the governed.
“We might have been content with the old life, had you masters of the world been content to leave us the old life. But you would not. Your system of industry has made the position of most young men so hopeless and insecure that they are year by year putting back the age of marriage. You have forced us out of our homes into your factories; and you have used us as a means of making still harder the competition for employment among the men. Your advocates speak of the sacredness of the home; and meanwhile you have dragged 5,000,000 English women out of their homes to be the slaves of your deadening machines.[291] You exalt marriage; and in this country one woman out of every ten is unmarried, and one out of every twenty married women works in your unclean shops. The vile cities born of your factory-system have made life so hard for us, temptations so frequent, vice so attractive and convenient, that we cannot grow up among you without suffering some indelible taint.
“Some of us go into your factories because we dread marriage, and some of us marry because we dread your factories. But there is not much to choose between them. If we marry we become machines for supplying another generation of workers and soldiers; and if we talk of birth-control you arrest us. As if we had no right to all that science has discovered! And the horror of it is that while you forbid us to learn how to protect ourselves and our children from the evils of large families, you yourselves buy this knowledge from your physicians and use it; and one of your societies for the prevention of birth-control has been shown to consist of members with an average of 1.5 children per family.[292] Your physicians meet in learned assemblies and vote in favor of maintaining the law which forbids the spread of this information; and then we find that physicians have the smallest average family in the community.[293] One must be a liar and a thief to fit comfortably into this civilization which you ask us to defend.
“But we are resolved to get this information; and all your laws to prevent us will only lessen our respect for law. We will not any longer bring children into the world unless we have some reasonable hope of giving them a decent life. And not only that. We shall end, too, the hypocrisies of marriage. If you will have monogamy you may have it; but if you continue merely to pretend monogamy we shall find a way of regaining our independence. We shall not rest until we have freed ourselves from the sting of your generosity; until our bread comes not from your hand in kindness but from the state or our employers in recognition of our work. Then we shall be free to leave you, and you free to leave us, as we were free to take one another at the beginning,—so far, alas! as the categorical imperative of love left us free. And our children will not suffer; better for them that they see us part than that they live with us in the midst of hypocrisy and secret war.
“Because we want this freedom—to stay or to go—this freedom to know and control the vital factors of our lives, therefore we demand equal suffrage. It is but a little thing, a mere beginning; and beware how you betray your secrets in your efforts to bar us from this beginning. Are you afraid to share with us the power of the ballot? Do you confess so openly that you wish to command us without our consent, that you wish to use us for your secret ends? You dare not fight fair and in the open? Is the ballot a weapon which you use on us and will not let us use on you? It is so you conceive citizenship! Or will you ask us to believe that you are thinking not of your own interests but of posterity?