“But we shall get this from you, just as we get other things from you,—by repetition. And then we shall go on to make the world more fit for women to live in: we shall force open all the avenues of life that have been closed to us before, making us narrow and petty and dull. We shall compel your universities to admit us to their classes; we shall enter your professions, we shall compete with you for office, we shall win the experiences and dare the adventures which we need to make us your rivals in literature and philosophy and art. You say we cannot be your comrades, your friends; that we can be only tyrants or slaves; but what else can we be, with all the instructive wealth of life kept from us? You hide from us the great books that are being written to-day, and then you are surprised at our gossip, our silly scandal-mongering, our inability to converse with you on business and politics, on science and religion and philosophy; you will not let us grow, and then you complain because we are so small. But we want to grow now, we want to grow! We cannot longer be mothers only. The world does not need so many children; and even to bring up better children we must have a wider and healthier life. We must have our intellects stimulated more and our feelings less. We have burst the bonds of our old narrow world; we must explore everything now. It is too late to stop us; and if you try you will only make life a mess of hatred and conflict for us both. And after all, do you know why we want to grow? It is because we long for the day when we shall be no longer merely your mistresses, but also your friends.”
2
Socialism
Another complainant: a young Socialist: such a man as works far into almost every night in the dingy office of his party branch, and devotes his Sundays to Das Kapital; bright-eyed, untouched by disillusionment; fired by the vision of a land of happy comrades.
“I agree with the young lady,” he says; “the source of all our ills is the capitalist system. It was born of steam-driven machinery and conceived in laissez-faire. It saw the light in Adam Smith’s England, ruined the health of the men of that country, and then came to America, where it grew fat on ‘liberty’ and ‘the right to do as one pleases with one’s own.’ It believed in competition—that is to say war—as its God, in whom all things lived and moved and sweated dividends; it made the acquisition of money, by no matter what means, the test of virtue and success, so that honest men became ashamed of themselves if they did not fail; it made all life a matter of ‘push’ and ‘pull,’ like the two sides of a door in one of those business palaces which make its cities great mazes of brick and stone rising like new Babels in the face of heaven. Its motto was, Beware of small profits; its aim was the greatest possible happiness of the smallest possible number. Out of competition it begot the trust, the rebate, and the ‘gentleman’s agreement’; out of ‘freedom of contract’ it begot wage-slavery; out of ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ it begot an industrial feudalism worse than the old feudalism, based on the inheritance not of land, but of the living bodies and souls of thousands of men, women and children. When it came (in 1770) the annual income of England was $600,000,000; in 1901 the annual income of England was $8,000,000,000; the system has made a thousand millionaires, but it has left the people starving as before.[294] It has increased wages, and has increased prices a trifle more. It has improved the condition of the upper tenth of the workers, and has thrown the great remaining mass of the workers into a hell of torpor and despair. It has crowned all by inventing the myopic science of scientific management, whereby men are made to work at such speed, and with such rigid uniformity, that the mind is crazed, and the body is worn out twenty years before its time. It has made the world reek with poverty, and ugliness, and meanness, and the vulgarity of conspicuous wealth. It has made life intolerable and disgraceful to all but sheep and pigs.
“There is only one way of saving our civilization—such as there is of it—from wasting away through the parasitic degeneration of a few of its parts and the malnutrition of the rest; and that is by frankly abandoning this laissez-faire madness, and changing the state into a mechanism for the management of the nation’s business. We workers must get hold of the offices, and turn government into administration. Without that our strikes and boycotts, our ‘direct action’ and economic organization, arrive at little result; every strike we ‘win’ means that prices will go up, and our time and energy—and dues—have gone to nothing but self-discipline in solidarity. We can control prices only by controlling monopolies; and we can control monopolies only by controlling government. That means politics, and it’s a scheme that won’t work until the proletariat get brains enough to elect honest and sensible men to office; but if they haven’t the brains to do that they won’t have the brains to do anything effective on the economic or any other field. We know how hard it is to get people to think; but we flatter ourselves that our propaganda is an educative force that grows stronger every year, and has already achieved such power as to decide the most important election held in this country since the Civil War.
“Already a large number of people have been educated—chiefly by our propaganda—to understand, for example, the economic greed that lies behind all wars. They perceive that so long as capital finds its highest rate of profit in the home market, capitalists see to it that peace remains secure; but that when capital has expanded to the point at which the rate of interest begins to fall, or when labor has ceased to be docile, because it has ceased to be unorganized and uninformed, capitalists then seek foreign markets and foreign investments, and soon require the help of war—that is, the lives of the workers at home—to help them enforce their terms on foreign governments and peoples. Only the national ownership of capital can change that. We thought once that we were too civilized ever to go to war again; we begin to see that our industrial feudalism leads inevitably to war and armaments, and the intellectual stagnation that comes from a militaristic mode of national life. We begin to see all history as a Dark Age (with fitful intervals of light),—a long series of wars in which men have killed and died for delusions, fighting to protect the property of their exploiters. And it becomes a little clearer to us than before that this awful succession of killings and robberies is no civilization at all, and that we shall never have a civilization worthy of the name until we transform our industrial war into the coöperative commonwealth, and all ‘foreigners’ into friends.”
3
Eugenics
“My dear young man,” says the Eugenist at this point, “you must study biology. Your plan for the improvement of mankind is all shot through with childish ignorance of nature’s way of doing things. Come into my laboratory for a few years; and you will learn how little you can do by merely changing the environment. It’s nature that counts, not nurture. Improvement depends on the elimination of the inferior, not on their reformation by Socialist leaflets or settlement work. What you have to do is to find some substitute for that natural selection—the automatic and ruthless killing off of the unfit—which we are more and more frustrating with our short-sighted charity. Humanitarianism must get informed. Our squeamishness about interfering with the holy ‘liberty of the individual’ will have to be moderated by some sense of the right of society to protect itself from interference by the individual. Here are the feeble-minded, for example; they breed more rapidly than healthy people do, and they almost always transmit their defect. If you don’t interfere with these people, if you don’t teach them or force them to be childless, you will have an increase in insanity along with the development of humanity. Think of making a woman suffer to deliver into the world a cripple or an idiot. And further, consider that the lowest eighth of the people produce one-half of the next generation. The better people, the more vigorous and healthy people, are refusing to have children; every year the situation is becoming more critical. City-life and factory-life make things still worse; young men coming from the country plunge into the maelstrom of the city, then into its femalestrom; they emerge with broken health, marry deformities dressed up in the latest fashion, and produce children inferior in vigor and ability to themselves. Given a hundred years more of this, and western Europe and America will be in a condition to be overcome easily by the fertile and vigorous races of the East. That is what you have to think of. The problem is larger than that of making poor people less poor; it is the problem of preserving our civilization. Your socialism will help, but it will be the merest beginning; it will be but an introduction to the socialization of selection,—which is eugenics. We will prevent procreation by people who have a transmissible defect or disease; we will require certificates of health and clean ancestry before permitting marriage; we will encourage the mating, with or without love, of men and women possessed of energy and good physique. We will teach people, in Mr. Marett’s phrase, to marry less with their eyes and more with their heads. It will take us a long while to put all this into effect; but we will put it. Time is on our side; every year will make our case stronger. Within half a century the educated world will come and beg us to guide them in a eugenic revolution.”
4
Anarchism
A gentle anarchist: