I assume that you have followed my argument, and are prepared to

consider seriously whether it may be possible to establish love in

marriage as the sex institution of civilized society. If you really wish

to bring such an institution into existence, the first thing you have to

do is to accomplish the social revolution; that is, you must wipe out

class control of society, and prestige based upon money exploitation.

But that is a vast change, and will take time, and meanwhile we have to

live, and wish to live with as little misery as possible. So the

practical question becomes this: Suppose that you, as an individual,

wish to find as much happiness in love as may now be possible, what

counsel have I to offer? If you are young, you wish this advice for

yourself; while if you are mature, you wish it for your children. I will

put my advice under four heads: First, marriage for love; second, birth

control; third, early marriage; fourth, education for marriage.

The first of these we have considered at some length. A part of the

process of social revolution is personal conversion; the giving up by

every individual of the worldly ideal, the surrender of luxury and

self-indulgence, the consecrating of one's life to self education and

the cause of social justice. And do not think that that is an easy

thing, or an unimportant thing, a thing to be taken for granted. On the

contrary, it is something that most of us have to struggle with at every

hour of our lives, because respect for property and worldly conventions

has become one of our deepest instincts; our whole society is poisoned

with it, and I can count on the fingers of one hand the people I have

known in my life who have completely escaped from it. It is not merely a

question of refusing to marry except for love, it is a question of

refusing to love except for honest and worthy qualities. It is a

question of saving our children from the damnable forces of snobbery,

which lay siege to their young minds and destroy the best impulses of

their hearts, while we in our blindness are still thinking of them as

babies.

Of the other three topics that I have suggested, I begin with birth

control, because it is the most fundamental and most important. Without

birth control there can be no freedom, no happiness, no permanence in

love, and there can be no mastery of life. Birth control is one of the

great fundamental achievements of the human reason, as important to the

life of mankind as the discovery of fire or the invention of printing.

Birth control is the deliverance of womankind, and therefore of mankind

also, from the blind and insane fecundity of nature, which created us

animals, and would keep us animals forever if we did not rebel.

Ever since the dawn of history, and probably for long ages before that,

our race has been struggling against this blind insanity of nature.

Poor, bewildered Theodore Roosevelt stormed at what he called "race

suicide," thinking it was some brand new and terrible modern corruption;

but nowhere do we find a primitive tribe, nowhere in history do we find

a race which did not seek to save itself from overgrowth and consequent

starvation. They did not know enough to prevent conception, but they did

the best they could by means of abortion and infanticide. And because

today superstition keeps the priceless knowledge of contraception from

the vast majority of women, these crude, savage methods still prevail,

and we have our million abortions a year in the United States. Assuming

that something near one-fourth our population consists of women capable

of bearing children, we have one woman in twenty-five going through this

agonizing and health-wrecking experience every year. They go through

with it, you understand, regardless of everything--all the moralists and

preachers and priests with their hell fire and brimstone. They go

through with it because we have both marriage without love, and love

without marriage; also because we permit some ten or twenty per cent of

our total population to suffer the pangs of perpetual starvation,

because more than half our farms are mortgaged or occupied by tenants,

and some ten or twenty per cent of our workers are out of jobs all the

time.

Some of our women know about birth control. They are the rich women, who

get what they want in this world. They object to the humiliations and

inconveniences of child bearing, and some of them raise one or two

children, and others of them raise poodle dogs. Also, our middle classes

have found out; our doctors and lawyers and college professors, and

people of that sort. But we deliberately keep the knowledge from our

foreign populations, by the terrors which the church has at its command.

And what is the practical consequence of this procedure? It is that

while all our Anglo-Saxon stock, those who founded our country and

established its institutions, are gradually removing themselves from the

face of the earth, our ignorant and helpless populations, whether in

city slums or on tenant farms, are multiplying like rabbits. Read Jack

London's "The Valley of the Moon" and see what is happening in

California. You will find the same thing happening in any portion of the

United States where you take the trouble to use your own eyes.

Now, I try to repress such impulses toward race prejudice as I find in

myself. I am willing to admit for the sake of this argument that in the

course of time all the races that are now swarming in America,

Portuguese and Japanese and Mexican and French-Canadian and Polish and

Hungarian and Slovakian, are capable of just as high intellectual

development as our ancestors who wrote the Declaration of Independence.

But no one who sees the conditions under which they now live can deny

that it will take a good deal of labor, teaching them and training them,

as well as scrubbing them, to accomplish that result. And what a waste

of energy, what a farce it makes of culture, to take the people who have

already been scrubbed and taught and trained for self-government, and

exterminate them, and raise up others in their place! It seems time that

we gave thought to the fundamental question, whether or not there is

something self-destroying in the very process of culture. Unless we can

answer this we might as well give up our visions and our efforts to lift

the race.

Theodore Roosevelt stormed at birth control for something like ten

years, and it would be interesting if we could know how many Anglo-Saxon

babies he succeeded in bringing into the world by his preachments. If

what he wanted was to correct the balance between native and foreign

births, how much more sensible to have taught birth control to those

poor, pathetic, half-starved and overworked foreign mothers of our slums

and tenant farms! I can wager that for every Anglo-Saxon baby that

Theodore Roosevelt brought into the world by his preachings, he could

have kept out ten thousand foreign slum babies, if only he had lent his

aid to Margaret Sanger!

Ah, but he wanted all the babies to be born, you say! I see before me

the face of a certain devout old Christian lady, known to me, who

settles the question by the Bible quotation, "Be fruitful and multiply."

But what avails it to follow this biblical advice, if we allow one out

of five of the new-born infants to perish from lack of scientific care

before they are two years old? What avails it if we send them to school

hungry, as we do twenty-two per cent of the public school children of

New York City? What avails it if we allow venereal disease to spread, so

that a large percentage of the babies are deformed and miserable? What

avails it if, when they are fully grown, we can think of nothing better

to do with them than to take them by millions at a time and dress them

up in uniforms and send them out to be destroyed by poison gases? Would

it not be the part of common sense to establish universal birth control

for at least a year or two--until we have learned to take care of our

newly born babies, and to feed our school children, and to protect our

youths from vice, and to abolish poverty and war from the earth?

These are the social aspects of birth control. There are also to be

considered what I might call the personal aspects of it. Because young

people do not know about it, and have no way to find out about it, they

dare not marry, and so the amount of vice in the world is increased.

Because married women do not know about it, love is turned to terror,

and marital happiness is wrecked. Because the harmless and proper

methods are not sensibly taught, people use harmful methods, which cause

nervous disorders, and wreck marital happiness, and break up homes.

Thorough and sound knowledge about birth control is just as essential to

happiness in marriage as knowledge of diet is necessary to health, or as

knowledge of economics is necessary to intelligent action as a voter and

citizen. The suppression by law of knowledge of birth control is just as

grave a crime against human life as ever was committed by religious

bigotry in the blackest days of the Spanish Inquisition.

Now this law stands on the statute books of our country, and if I should

so much as hint to you in this book what you need to know, or even where

you can find out about it, I should be liable to five years in jail and

a fine of $5,000, and every person who mailed a copy of this book, or

any advertisement of this book, would be in the same plight. But there

is not yet a law to prohibit agitation against the law, so the first

thing I say to every reader of this book is that they should obtain a

copy of the _Birth Control Review_, published at 104 Fifth Avenue, New

York, and also should join the Voluntary Parenthood League, 206

Broadway, New York. Get the literature of these organizations and

circulate them and help spread the light!

As to the knowledge which you need, the only advice I am allowed to give

is that you should seek it. Seek it, and persist in seeking, until you

find it. Ask everyone you know; and ask particularly among enlightened

people, those who are willing to face the facts of human life and trust

in reason and common sense. I do not know if I am violating the law in

thus telling you how to find out about birth control. One of the

charming features of this law, and others against the spreading of

knowledge, is that they will never tell you in advance what you may say,

but leave you to say it and take your chances! I believe that I am not

violating any law when I tell you that there are half a dozen simple,

inexpensive, and entirely harmless methods of preventing undesired

parenthood without the destruction of the marital relationship.

I am one of those who for many years believed that the destruction of

the marital relationship was the only proper and moral method. I was

brought up to take the monkish view of love. I thought it was an animal

thing which required some outside justification. I had been taught

nothing else; but now I have had personal experience of other

justifications of love, and I believe that love is a beautiful and

joyful relationship, which not merely requires no other justification,

but confers justification upon many other things in life.

I used to believe in that old ideal of celibacy, thinking it a fine

spiritual exercise. But since then I have looked out on life, and have

found so many interesting things to do, so much important work calling

for attention, that I do not have to invent any artificial exercises for

my spirit. I have looked at humanity, and brought myself to recognize

the plain common sense fact--that whatever superfluous energy I may have

to waste upon artificial spirituality, the great mass of the people have

no such energy to spare. They need all their energies to get a living

for themselves and for their wives and little ones. They have their sex

impulses, and will follow them, and the only question is, shall they

follow them wisely or unwisely? The religious people decide that sexual

indulgence is wrong, and they impose a penalty--and what is that

penalty? A poor, unwanted little waif of a soul, which never sinned, and

had nothing to do with the matter, is brought into a hostile world, to

suffer neglect, and perhaps starvation--in order to punish parents who

did not happen to be sufficiently strong willed to practice continence

in marriage!

I used to believe that there was benefit to health and increase of

power, whether physical or mental, in the celibate life. I have tried

both ways of life, and as a result I know that that old idea is

nonsense. I know now that love is a natural function. Of course, like

any other function it can be abused; just as hunger may become gluttony,

sleeping may become sluggishness, getting the money to pay one's way

through life may become ferocious avarice. But we do not on this account

refuse ever to eat or sleep or get money to pay our debts. I do not say

that I believe, I say I know, that free and happy love, guided by wisdom

and sound knowledge, is not merely conducive to health, but is in the

long run necessary to health.

People who condemn birth control always argue as if one wished to teach

this knowledge indiscriminately to the young. Perhaps it is natural that

those who oppose the use of reason should assume that others are as

irrational as themselves. All I can say is that I no more believe in

teaching birth control to the young than I believe in feeding beefsteak

to nursing infants. There is a period in life for beefsteaks--or, if my

vegetarian friends prefer, for lentil hash and peanut butter sandwiches;

in exactly the same way there is a time for teaching the fundamentals of

sex, and another time for teaching the art of happiness in marriage,

which includes birth control. That brings me, by a very pleasant

transition, to the other two subjects which I have promised to discuss:

early marriage and education for marriage.

CHAPTER XL

EARLY MARRIAGE

(Discusses love marriages, how they can be made, and the duty of

parents in respect to them.)

I have shown how economic forces in our society make for later and later

marriage; and at the present time economic forces are so overwhelming

that all other forces are hardly worth mentioning in comparison. You

are, let us say, the mother of a boy of eighteen, and you have what you

call "common sense"--meaning thereby a grasp of the money facts of life.

If your darling boy of eighteen should come to you with a grave face and

announce, "Mother dear, I have met the girl I love, and we have decided

that we want to get married"--you would consider that the most absurd

thing you had ever heard in all your born days, and you would tell the

lad that he was a baby, and to run along and play. If he persisted in

his crazy notion, you and your husband and all the brothers and sisters

and relatives and friends both of the boy and the girl would set to

work, by scolding and ridiculing, to make life a misery for them, and

ninety-nine times out of a hundred you would break down the young

couple's marital intention.

But now, let us try another supposition. Let us suppose that your

darling boy of eighteen should come to you again and say, "Mother dear,

some of the boys are going to spend this evening in a brothel, and I

have decided to go along." Would you think that was the most absurd

thing you had ever heard in all your born days? Or would you answer,

"Yes, of course, my boy; that is what I had in mind when I made you give

up the girl you loved"? No, you would not answer that. But here is the

vital fact--it doesn't matter what you would answer, for you would never

have a chance to answer. When a mother's darling wants to get married,

he comes and asks his mother's blessing; but never does a mother's

darling ask a blessing before he goes with the other boys to a brothel.

He just goes. Maybe he borrows the money from some other fellow, and

next day tells you he went to a theater. Or maybe he picks up some poor

man's daughter on the street, and takes her into the park, or up on the

roof of a tenement. Some such thing he does, to find satisfaction for an

instinct which you in your worldly wisdom or your heavenly piety spurn

and ridicule.

I do not wish to exaggerate. If you are an exceptionally wise and

tactful mother, you may keep the confidence of your boy, and guide him

day by day through his temptations and miseries, and keep him chaste.

But the more you try that, the more apt you will be to come to my

conclusion, that late marriage is a crime against the race; the more

aware you will be of the danger, either that his boy friends may break

him down, or that some lewd woman may come to his bedroom in the

night-time. Never will you be able to be quite sure that he is not lying

to you, because of his shame, and the pain he cannot bear to inflict

upon you. Never will you be quite sure that he is not hiding some cruel

disease, sneaking off to some quack who takes his money and leaves him

worse than before--until finally he shoots off his head, as happened to

a nephew of an old and dear friend of mine.

Such is the problem of the mother of a son; and now, what about the

mother of a daughter? This seems much simpler; because your daughter is

not generally troubled with sex cravings, and if you teach her the

proprieties, and see that she is carefully chaperoned, you may

reasonably hope that she will be chaste. But some day you expect that

she will marry; and then comes your problem. If you are the usual

mother, you are looking for some one who can maintain her in the state

of life to which she is accustomed. If a fairy prince would come along,

or a plaster saint, you would be pleased; but failing that, you will

take a successful business man, one who has made his way in the world

and secured himself a position. But turn back to the figures I gave you

a while ago. If this man is thirty years of age, there is at least a

fifty-fifty chance that he has had some venereal disease; and while the

doctors claim to cure these diseases absolutely, we must bear in mind

that doctors are human, and sometimes claim more than they perform.

Every doctor will admit, if you pin him down, that these diseases burrow

deeply into the tissues, and many times are supposed to be cured when

they are only hidden.

Here is, in a nutshell, the problem of the mother of a daughter. If you

marry your daughter at seventeen to a lad of her own age, you have a

very good chance of marrying her to a person who is chaste. If you marry

her to a man of twenty-five, you have perhaps one chance in a hundred.

If you marry her to a man of thirty-five, you have perhaps one chance in

ten thousand. You may not like these facts; I do not like them myself;

but I have learned that facts are none the less facts on that account.

You know the average society bud of eighteen, and her attitude to a boy

of the same age. She regards him as a child; and you think, perhaps,

that it is natural for a girl to be interested in men of thirty-five and

even forty-five. But I tell you that it is not natural, it is simply one

of the perversions of pecuniary sex. The girl is interested in such men,

because all her young life she has been carefully coached for the

marriage market; because she is dressed for it, and solemnly brought

out, and introduced to other players of this exciting game of marriage

for money, with its incredible prizes of automobiles and jewels and

palaces full of servants, and magic check-books that never grow empty.

But suppose that, instead of regarding her as a prize in a lottery, you

let her grow up naturally, and taught her the truth about herself, both

body and mind; suppose that, instead of dressing her in ways

deliberately contrived to emphasize her sex, you put her in a simple

uniform, and taught her to be honest and straightforward, instead of

mincing and coy; suppose she played athletic games with boys of her own

age, and invited them to her home, not for "jazz" dancing and stuffing

cake and candy, but for the sharing of good music and literature and

art--don't you think that maybe this girl might become interested in a

lad of her own age, and choose him with some understanding of his real

self?

You take it for granted that young people should not marry until they

can "afford it." But stop and consider, is not this a relic of old days?

Always it takes time, and deliberate effort of the reason, to adjust our

conventions to new facts; so face this fact--marriage today does not

necessarily mean children, it may just mean love. It involves little

more expense, because the young people need cost no more together than

they cost in the separate homes of their parents. If they are children

of the poor, they are already taking care of themselves. If they are

children of the moderately well off, their parents expect to support

them while they are getting an education; and why can they not just as

well live together, and the parents of each contribute their share? Let

the parents of the boy give him, not merely what it costs to keep him at

home, but also the sums which otherwise the boy would pay to the

brothels. By this argument I do not mean that I favor keeping young

people financially dependent upon their parents. My own son is working

his own way through college, and I should be glad to see every young man

doing the same. All that I am saying is that if parents are going to

support their children while they are getting an education, they might

just as well support them married as single, instead of penalizing

matrimony by making all allowances cease at that point.

I know a certain ardent feminist, who is all for late marriage for

women, and abhors my ideas on this subject. She wants women to get a

chance to develop their personalities; whereas I want to sacrifice them

to the frantic exigencies of the male animal! Young things of seventeen

and eighteen have no idea what they are, or what they want from life;

the mating impulse is a blind frenzy in them, and they must be taught to

control it, just as they are taught not to kill when they are angry!

In the first place, I point out that young ladies in colleges and in

ballrooms give a lot of time and thought to sex, even though they do not

call it by that inelegant term. I very much question whether, if we

should apply our wisdom to the task of getting our young people happily

mated before we sent them off to college, we should not get a lot more

serious study out of them than we now do, with all their "fussing" and

flirting and dancing.

Second, I am willing to make heroic moral efforts, where I see any

chance of adequate results, but I have examined the facts, and

definitely made up my mind that it is not worth while, in our present

stage of culture, to preach to the mass of men the doctrine that they

should abstain from sex experience until they are twenty-five or thirty

years of age. You may storm at them, but they only laugh at you; you may

pass laws, and try to put them in jail, but you only provide a harvest

for blackmailers and grafters. As to sacrificing the girl, my answer is

simply that I believe in love; and in this I think the girl will agree

with me, if you will let her! I have never heard any qualified person

maintain that it hurts a girl to respond to love at the age of seventeen

or eighteen; nor do I think that it hurts a boy, provided that he is

taught the virtues of moderation and self-restraint. Without these, it

will hurt him to eat; but that is no argument for starving him. As for

the question of his maturity and power to judge, we are able at present

to keep him from marrying anybody, so I think we might reasonably hope

to keep him from marrying a wanton or a slut. Certainly we might find

somebody better than the peroxide blonde he now picks up in front of the

moving picture palace.

The question, at what ages we shall advise our young couple to have

children, is a separate one, depending upon many circumstances. First,

of course, they should not have any until they are able financially to

maintain them. As to the age at which it is physically advisable, that

is a question to be settled by physicians and physiologists. I myself

had the idea that the proper age would be when the woman had attained

her full stature; but my friend Dr. William J. Robinson sends me some

statistics from the Johns Hopkins Hospital _Bulletin_, which startle me.

This publication for January, 1922, gives the results in five hundred

childbirths, in which the mother's age was from twelve to sixteen years

inclusive. It appears that pregnancy and labor at these ages are no more

dangerous than in older women; but on the other hand, the duration of

the labor is actually shorter, and the size of the children is not

inferior. These facts are so contrary to the general impression that I

content myself with calling attention to them, and leave the commenting

to be done by feminists and others who oppose themselves to the idea of

early marriage.

CHAPTER XLI

THE MARRIAGE CLUB

(Discusses how parents and elders may help the young to avoid

unhappy marriages.)

I will make the assumption that you would like to have a trial of my

cure for prostitution. You would like to do something right here and

now, without waiting for the social revolution. Very well: I propose

that you shall find a few other parents of boys and girls who are in

revolt against our system of hidden vice, and that you will meet and

form a modern marriage club. Only you won't call it that, of course; you

will tactfully describe it as a literary society, or a social circle, or

an Epworth League. The parents who run it will know what it is for, just

as they do today; the only difference being that it will exist to

promote love matches instead of money matches. It happens that I am

myself a tactless sort of a person, not skillful at avoiding saying what

I mean. So, in this chapter, I shall content myself with setting forth

exactly what this marriage club will do, and leaving it to more clever

people to supply the necessary camouflage.

This club will begin by correcting the most stupid of all our

educational blunders, the assumption of the necessary immaturity of the

young. Our young people nowadays have ten times as much chance to learn

and ten times as much stimulus to learn as we had; and it is a generally

safe assumption that they know much more than we think they do, and are

ready to learn every sensible and interesting thing. I am carrying on an

epistolary acquaintance with a little miss of twelve, who has read half

a dozen of my books--among the "worst" of them--and writes me letters of

grave appreciation. I have talked on Socialism to a thousand school

children, and had them question me for an hour, and heard just as worth

while questions as I have heard from an audience of bankers. Never in my

life have I talked about real things with children that I did not find

them proud to be treated seriously, and eager to show that they were

worthy of that honor. A great part of our foolishness with children is

due to the emptiness of our own heads.

These parents will delegate one man and one woman to make a thorough

study of the sex education of the young. Of course, there is knowledge

about sex which has to be given to the very youngest child, and more and

more must be given as they grow older and ask more questions. But what I

have in mind here is that detailed and precise knowledge which must be

given to the young when they approach the period of puberty. At this age

of fourteen or fifteen the man will take each of the boys apart, and the

woman will take each of the girls, and will explain to them what they

need to know. This duty will not be trusted to parents, for parents have

an imbecile fear of talking straight to their children, and try to get

by with rubbish about bees and flowers. Let every child know that the

days of the hole-and-corner sex business is forever past, and that here

is an instructed person, who talks real American, and knows what he is

talking about, and will deal with facts, instead of with evasions.

This club will help to educate the youngsters, and also to give them a

good time, developing both their minds and bodies, and learning to know

them thoroughly. When they are sixteen each one will have another talk,

this time about marriage and what it means; learning that it is not

merely flirtations and delicious thrills, but a business partnership,

and the deepest and best of all friendships. So when John finds that he

likes Mary best of all the girls he knows, this won't be a subject for

"kidding" and sly innuendo, and blushes and simpering on Mary's part,

but an occasion for decent and sensible talk about what each of them

really is, and what each thinks the other to be. If they think they are

in love, then there will be a council of the elder statesmen, to

consider that case, and what are the chances of happiness in that love.

This may sound forbidding, but it is exactly what is done at

present--only it is not done honestly and frankly, and therefore does

not carry proper weight with the young people.

I am an opponent of long engagements, but I am also an opponent of no

engagements at all; I know no truer proverb than "Marry in haste and

repent at leisure." It would be my idea that a very young couple should

announce their engagement, and then wait six months, and be consulted

again about the matter, and have a chance to withdraw with no hard

feelings, if either party thought best. If they wished to go on, they

might be asked to wait another six months, if their elders felt very

certain there were reasons to doubt the wisdom of the match.

There are, of course, people who, because of disease or physical defect,

should never be allowed to marry; and others who might marry, but should

not be allowed to have children. There should be laws providing for such

cases, requiring physical examination before marriage, and in extreme

cases providing for a simple and harmless surgical operation to prevent

the hopelessly unfit from passing on their defects to the future. But

dealing for the moment with normal young persons, members of our modern

marriage club, I should say that if, after they have listened to the

warning of their elders, and have waited for a decent interval to think

things over, they still remain of the opinion that they can make a

successful marriage, then it is up to the elders to wish them luck. I

have known of young couples who have refused to heed warnings, and

regretted it; but I have known of others who went ahead and had their

own way and proved they were right. There is a form of wisdom called

experience and there is another form called love.

I hear the worldly and cynical rail at the blindness of "young love,"

and I can see the truth in what they say; but also I can see the deeper

truth in the magic dreams of the young soul. Here is a youth who adores

a girl, and you know the girl, and it is comical to you, because you

know she is not any of the things the youth imagines. But who are you

that claim to know the last thing about a human soul? Look into your

own, and see how many different things you are! Look back, if you can,

to the time when you were young, and remember the visions and the hopes.

They have lost all reality to you now; but who can say how many of them

you might have made real if there had been one other person who believed

in them, and loved them, and would not give them up?

I write this; and then I think of the other side--the fools that I have

known in love! The trusting women, marrying rotten men to reform them!

The pitiful people who think that fine phrases and sentimentality can

take the place of facts! I implore my young couples to sit down and

face the realities of their own natures, to decide what they are, and

what they want to be--and if there is going to be any change, let it be

made and tried out before marriage! I implore them to begin now to

control their desires by their reason and judgment; to begin, each of

them at the very outset, to carry their share of the burdens and do

their share of the hard work. I implore them to value independence and

self-reliance in the other, and never above all things to marry from

pity, which is a worthy emotion in its place, but has nothing to do with

sex, which should be an affair between equals, a matter of partnership

and not of parasitism. I think that, on the whole, the most dreadful

thing in love is the use of it for preying, for the securing of favors

and advantages of any sort, whether by men or by women.

CHAPTER XLII

EDUCATION FOR MARRIAGE

(Maintains that the art of love can be taught, and that we have the

right and the duty to teach it.)

I assume now that our young couple have definitely made up their minds,

and that the wedding day is near. They are therefore, both the man and

the woman, in position to receive information as to the physical aspects

of their future experience. This information is now for the most part

possessed only by pathologists--who impart it too late, after people

have blundered and wrecked their lives. The opponents of birth control

ask in horror if you would teach it to the young; I am now able to

answer just when I would teach it; I would teach it to these young

couples about to marry. I would make it by law compulsory for every

young couple to attend a school of marriage, and to learn, not merely

the regulation of conception, but the whole art of health and happiness

in sex.

Perhaps the words, "a school of marriage," strike you as funny. When I

was young I remember that Pulitzer founded a school of journalism, and

all newspaper editors made merry--they knew that journalism could only

be learned in practice. But nowadays every city editor gives preference

to an applicant who has taken a college course in reporting; they have

learned that journalism can be taught, just like engineering and

accounting. In the same way I assert that marriage can be taught, and

the art of love, physical, mental, moral, and even financial; I think

that the day will come when enlightened parents would no more dream of

trusting their tender young daughter to a man who had not taken a course

in sex, than they would go up in an aeroplane with a pilot who knew

nothing about an engine.

The knowledge which I possess upon the art of love I would be glad to

give you in this book; but unfortunately, if I were to do so, my book

would be suppressed, and I should be sent to jail.

Some ten or twelve years ago I received a pitiful letter from a man who

was in state's prison in Delaware, charged with having imparted

information as to birth control. Under our amiable legal system, a

perfectly innocent man may be thrown into jail, and kept there for a

year or two before he is tried, and if he is without money or friends,

he might as well be buried alive. I went to Wilmington to call on the

United States attorney who had caused the indictment in this case, and

had an illuminating conversation with him. The official was anxious to

justify what he had done. He assured me that he was no bigot, but on the

contrary an extremely liberal man, a Unitarian, a Progressive, etc. "But

Mr. Sinclair," he said, "I assure you this prisoner is not a reformer or

humanitarian or anything like that. He is a depraved person. Look, here

is something we found in his trunk when we arrested him; a pamphlet,

explaining about sex relations. See this paragraph--it says that the

pleasure of intercourse is increased if it is prolonged."

I looked at the pamphlet, and then I looked at the attorney. "Do you

think you have stated the matter quite fairly?" I asked. "Apparently the

purpose is to explain that the emotions of women are more slow to be

aroused than those of men, and that husbands failing to realize this,

often do not gratify their wives."

"Well," said the other, "do you consider that a subject to be

discussed?"

"Pardon me if I discuss it just a moment," I replied. "Do you happen to

know whether the statement is a fact?"

"No, I don't. It may be, I suppose."

"You have never investigated the matter?"

The legal representative of our government was evidently annoyed by my

persistence. "I have not," he answered.

"But then, suppose I were to tell you that thousands of homes have been

broken up for lack of just that bit of knowledge; that tens of thousands

of marriages are miserable for lack of it."

"Surely, Mr. Sinclair, you exaggerate!"

"Not at all. I could prove to you by one medical authority after

another, that if the desire of a woman in marriage is roused, and then

left ungratified, the result is nervous strain, and in the long run it

may be nervous breakdown."

The above covers only one detail of the pamphlet in question. I read

some pages of it, and argued them out with the attorney. It was a

perfectly simple, straightforward exposition of facts about the

physiology of sex; and one of the reasons a man was to be sent to jail

for several years was--not that he had circulated such a pamphlet, not

that he had showed it to young people, but merely that he had it in his

trunk!

There is an honest and very useful book, written by an English

physician, Dr. Marie C. Stopes, entitled "Married Love," published by

Dr. Wm. J. Robinson of New York, a specialist of authority and

integrity. The book deals with just such vital facts in a perfectly

dignified and straightforward manner; yet Dr. Robinson has been hounded

by the postoffice department because of it; he was convicted and forced

to pay a fine of $250, and the book was barred from the mails!

I have so much else of importance to say in this Book of Love that it

would not be sensible to jeopardize it by causing a controversy with our

official censors of knowledge. Therefore I will merely say in general

terms that men and women differ, not merely as a sex, but as

individuals, and every marriage is a separate problem. Every couple has

to solve it in the intimacy of their love life, and for this there are

needed, first of all, gentleness on the part of the man, especially in

the first days of the honeymoon; and on the part of both at all times

consideration for the other's welfare and enjoyment, and above all,

frankness and honesty in talking out the subject. Reticence and shyness

may be virtues elsewhere, but they have no place in the intimacies of

the sex life; if men and women will only ask and answer frankly, they

can find out by experience what makes the other happy, and what causes

pain.

We are dealing here with the most sacred intimacy of life, and one of

the most vital of life's problems. It is here, in the marriage bed, that

the divorce problem is to be settled, and likewise the problem of

prostitution; for it is when men and women fail to understand each

other, and to gratify each other, that one or the other turns cold and

indifferent, perhaps angry and hateful--and then we have passions

unsatisfied, and ranging the world, breaking up other homes and

spreading disease. So I would say to every young couple, seek knowledge

on this subject. Seek it without shame from others who have had a chance

to acquire it. Seek it also from nature, our wise old mother, who knows

so much about her children!

Be natural; be simple and straightforward; and beware of fool notions

about sex. If you will look in the code of Hammurabi, which is over four

thousand years old, you will see the provision that a man who has

intercourse with a menstruating woman shall be killed. In Leviticus you

will read that both the man and the woman are to be cast out from their

people. You will find that most people still have some such notion,

which is without any basis whatever in health. And this is only one

illustration of many I might give of ignorance and superstition in the

sex life. I would give this as one very good rule to bear in mind; your

love life exists for the happiness and health of yourself and your

partner, and not for Hammurabi, nor Moses, nor Jehovah, nor your

mother-in-law, nor anybody else on the earth or above it.

Great numbers of people believe that women are naturally less passionate

than men, and that marital happiness depends upon men's recognizing

this. Of course, there are defective individuals, both men and women;

but the normal woman is every bit as passionate as a man, if once she

has been taught; and if love is given its proper place in life, and

monkish notions not allowed to interfere, she will remain so all through

life, in spite of child-bearing or anything else. I say to married

couples that they should devote themselves to making and preserving

passionate gratification in love; because this is the bright jewel in

the crown of marriage, and if lovers solve this problem, they will find

other problems comparatively simple.

CHAPTER XLIII

THE MONEY SIDE OF MARRIAGE

(Deals with the practical side of the life partnership of

matrimony.)

So far we have discussed marriage as if it consisted only of love. But

it is manifest that this is not the case. Marriage is every-day

companionship, and also it is partnership in a complicated business. In

our school of marriage therefore we shall teach the rights and duties of

both partners to the contract, and shall face frankly the money side of

the enterprise.

One of the first facts we must get clear is that the economics of

marriage are in most parts of the world still based upon the subjection

of woman, and are therefore incompatible with the claims of woman as a

partner and comrade. They will never be right until the social

revolution has abolished privilege, and the state has granted to every

woman a maternity endowment, with a mother's pension for every child

during the entire period of the rearing and education of that child.

Until this is done, the average woman must look to some man for the

support of her child, and that, by the automatic operation of economic

force, makes her subject to the whims of the man. What women have to do

is to agitate for a revision of the property laws of marriage; and

meantime to see that in every marriage there is an extra-legal

understanding, which grants to the woman the equality which laws and

conventions deny her.

When I was a boy my mother had a woman friend who, if she wanted to go

downtown, would borrow a quarter from my mother. This woman's husband

was earning a generous salary, enough to enable him to buy the best

cigars by the box, and to keep a supply of liquors always on hand; but

he gave his wife no allowance, and if she wanted pocket money she had to

ask him for it, each time a separate favor. Yet this woman was keeping a

home, she was doing just as hard work and just as necessary work as the

man. Manifestly, this was a preposterous arrangement. If a woman is

going to be a home-maker for a husband, it is a simple, common-sense

proposition that the salary of the husband shall be divided into three

parts--first, the part which goes to the home, the benefit of which is

shared in common; second, the part which the husband has for his own

use; and third, the part which the wife has for hers. The second and

third parts should be equal, and the wife should have hers, not as a

favor, but as a right. If the two are making a homestead, or running a

farm, or building up a business, then half the proceeds should be the

woman's; and it should be legally in her name, and this as a matter of

course, as any other business contract. If the woman does not make a

home, but merely displays fine clothes at tea parties, that is of course

another matter. Just what she is to do is something that had better be

determined before marriage; and if a man wants a life-partner, to take

an interest in his work, or to have a useful work of her own, he had

better choose that kind of woman, and not merely one that has a pretty

face and a trim ankle.

The business side of marriage is something that has to be talked out

from time to time; there have to be meetings of the board of directors,

and at these meetings there ought to be courtesy and kindness, but also

plain facts and common sense, and no shirking of issues. Love is such a

very precious thing that any man or woman ought to be willing to make

money sacrifices to preserve it. But on the other hand, it is a fact

that there are some people with whom you cannot be generous; the more

you give them, the more they take, and with such people the only safe

rule is exact justice. Let married couples decide exactly what

contribution each makes to the family life, and what share of money and

authority each is entitled to.

I might spend several chapters discussing the various rocks on which I

have seen marriages go to wreck. For example, extravagance and worldly

show; clothes for women. In Paris is a "demi-monde," a world of brutal

lust combined with riotous luxury. The women of this "half-world" are in

touch with the world of art and fashion, and when the rich costumers and

woman-decorators want what they call ideas, it is to these lust-women

they go. The fashions they design are always depraved, of course; always

for the flaunting of sex, never for the suggestion of dignity and grave

intelligence. At several seasons of the year these lust-women are

decked out and paraded at the race-courses and other gathering places

of the rich, and their pictures are published in the papers and spread

over all the world. So forthwith it becomes necessary for your wife in

Oshkosh or Kalamazoo to throw away all the perfectly good clothes she

owns, and get a complete new outfit--because "they" are wearing

something different. Of course the costume-makers have seen that it is

extremely different, so as to make it impossible for your wife and

children to be happy in their last season's clothes. I have a winter

overcoat which I bought fourteen years ago, and as it is still as good

as new I expect to use it another fourteen years, which will mean that

it has cost me a dollar and a half per year. But think what it would

have cost me if I had considered it necessary each year to have an

overcoat cut as the keepers of French mistresses were cutting theirs!

But then, suppose you put it up to your wife and daughters to wear

sensible clothes, and they do so, and then they observe that on the

street your eyes turn to follow the ladies in the latest disappearing

skirt? The point is, you perceive, that you yourself are partly to blame

for the fashions. They appeal to a dirty little imp you have in your own

heart, and when the decent women discover that, it makes them blazing

hot, and that is one of the ways you may wreck your domestic happiness

if you want to. Unless I am greatly mistaken, when the class war is all

over we are going to see in our world a sex war; but it is not going to

be between the men and the women, it is going to be between the mother

women and the mistress women, and the mistress women are going to have

their hides stripped off.

Men wreck marriage because they are promiscuous; and women wreck it

because they are parasites. Woman has been for long centuries an

economic inferior, and she has the vices of the subject peoples and

tribes. Now there are some who want to keep these vices, while at the

same time claiming the new privileges which go with equality. Such a

woman picks out a man who is sensitive and chivalrous; who knows that

women suffer handicaps, pains of childbirth, physical weakness, and who

therefore feels impelled to bear more than his share of the burdens. She

makes him her slave; and by and by she gets a child, and then she has

him, because he is bowed down with awe and worship, he thinks that such

a miracle has never happened in the world before, and he spends the rest

of his life waiting on her whims and nursing her vanities. I note that

at the recent convention of the Woman's Party they demanded their rights

and agreed to surrender their privileges. There you have the final test

by which you may know that women really want to be free, and are

prepared to take the responsibilities of freedom.

CHAPTER XLIV

THE DEFENSE OF MONOGAMY

(Discusses the permanence of love, and why we should endeavor to

preserve it.)

So far in this discussion we have assumed that love means monogamous

love. We did so, for the reason that we could not consider every

question at once. But we have promised to deal with all the problems of

sex in the light of reason; and so we have now to take up the question,

what are the sanctions of monogamy, and why do we refuse sanction to

other kinds of love?

First, let us set aside several reasons with which we have nothing to

do. For example, the reason of tradition. It is a fact that Anglo-Saxon

civilization has always refused legal recognition to non-monogamous

marriage. But then, Anglo-Saxon civilization has recognized war, and

slavery, and speculation, and private property in land, and many other

things which we presume to describe as crimes. If tradition cannot

justify itself to our reason, we shall choose martyrdom.

Second, the religious reason. This is the one that most people give. It

is convenient, because it saves the need of thinking. Suffice it here to

say that we prefer to think. If we cannot justify monogamy by the facts

of life, we shall declare ourselves for polygamy.

What are the scientific and rational reasons for monogamy? First among

them is venereal disease. This may seem like a vulgar reason, but no one

can deny that it is real. There was a time, apparently, when mankind did

not suffer from these plagues, and we hope there may be such a time

again. I shall not attempt to prescribe the marital customs for the

people of that happy age; I suspect that they will be able to take care

of themselves. Confining myself to my lifetime and yours, I say that the

aim of every sensible man and woman must be to confine sex relations to

the smallest possible limits. I know, of course, that there are

prophylactics, and the army and navy present statistics to show that

they succeed in a great proportion of cases. But if you are one of

those persons in whose case they don't succeed, you will find the

statistics a cold source of comfort to you.

John and Mary go to the altar, or to the justice of the peace, and John

says: "With all my worldly goods I thee endow." But the formula is

incomplete; it ought to read: "And likewise with the fruits of my wild

oats." Marriage is a contract wherein each of the contracting parties

agrees to share whatever pathogenic bacteria the other party may have or

acquire; surely, therefore, the contract involves a right of each party

to have a say as to how many chances of infection the other shall incur.

John goes off on a business trip, and is lonesome, and meets an

agreeable widow, and figures to himself that there is very little chance

that so charming a person can be dangerous. But maybe Mary wouldn't

agree with his calculations; maybe Mary would not consider it a part of

the marriage bargain that she should take the diseases of the agreeable

widow. What commonly happens is that Mary is not consulted; John revises

the contract in secret, making it read that Mary shall take a chance at

the diseases of the widow. How can any thinking person deny that John

has thus committed an act of treason to Mary?

I know that there are people who don't mind running such chances; that

is one reason why there are venereal diseases. All I can say is that the

sex-code set forth in this book is based upon the idea that to deliver

mankind from the venereal plague, we wish to confine the sex

relationship within the narrowest limits consistent with health,

happiness and spiritual development; and that to this end we take the

young and teach them chastity, and we marry them early while they are

clean, and then we call upon them to make the utmost effort to make a

success of that union, and to make it a matter of honor to keep the

marital faith. We do this with some hope of effectiveness, because we

have made our program consistent with the requirements of nature, the

genuine needs of love both physical and spiritual.

The second argument for monogamy is the economic one. We have dreamed a

social order where every child will be guaranteed maintenance by the

state, and where women will be free from dependence on men. What will be

the love arrangements of men and women under this new order is another

problem which we leave for them to decide, in the certainty that they

will know more about it than we do. Meantime, we are for the present

under the private property regime, and have to love and marry and raise

our children accordingly. The children must have homes, and if they are

to be normal children, they must have both the male and female influence

in their lives; which means that their parents must be friends and

partners, not quarreling in secret. This argument, I know, is one of

expediency. I have adopted it, after watching a great number of people

try other than monogamous sex arrangements, and seeing their chances of

happiness and success wrecked by the pressure of economic forces. To

rebel against social compulsion may be heroism, and again it may be

merely bad judgment. For my part, the world's greatest evil is poverty,

the cause of crime, prostitution and war. I concentrate my energies upon

the abolishing of that evil, and I let other problems wait.

The third reason is that monogamy is economical of human time and

thought. The business of finding and wooing a mate takes a lot of

energy, and adjustment after marriage takes more. To throw away the

results of this labor and do it all over again is certainly not common

sense. Of course, if you bake a cake and burn it, you have to get more

material and make another try; but that is a different matter from

baking a cake with the deliberate intention of throwing it away after a

bite or two.

The advocates of varietism in love will here declare that we are begging

the question. We are assuming that love and the love chase are not

worthy in themselves, but merely means to some other end. Can it be that

love delights are the keenest and most intense that humans can

experience, and that all other purposes of life are contributory to

them? Certainly a great deal of art lends support to this idea, and many

poets have backed up their words by their deeds. As Coleridge phrased

it:

"All thoughts, all passions, all delights,

Whatever stirs this mortal frame,

All are but ministers of Love

And feed his sacred flame."

This is a question not to be played with. Experimenting in love is

costly, and millions have wrecked their lives by it. The sex urge in us

is imperious and cruel; it wants nothing less than the whole of us,

body, mind and spirit, and ofttimes it behaves like the genii in the

bottle--it gets out, and not all the powers in the universe can get it

back. I have talked with many men about sex and heard them say that it

presents itself to them as an unmitigated torment, something they would

give everything they own to be free of. And these, mind you, not men

living in monasteries, trying to repress their natural impulses, but men

of the world, who have lived freely, seeking pleasure and taking it as

it came. The primrose path of dalliance did not lead them to peace, and

the pursuit of variety in love brought them only monotony.

I stop and think of one after another of these sex-ridden people, and I

cannot think of one whom I would envy. I know one who in a frenzy of

unhappiness seized a razor and castrated himself. I think of another, a

certain classmate in college whom I once stopped in a conversation,

remarking: "Did you ever realize what a state you have got your mind

into? Everything means sex to you. Every phrase you hear, every idea

that is suggested--you try to make some sort of pun, to connect it

somehow or other with sex." The man thought and said, "I guess that's

true." The idea had never occurred to him before; he had just gone on

letting his instincts have their way with him, without ever putting his

reason upon the matter.

That was a crude kind of sex; but I think of another man, an idealist

and champion of human liberty. One of the forms of liberty he maintained

was the right to love as many women as he pleased, and although he was a

married man, one hardly ever saw him that he was not courting some young

girl. As a result, his mental powers declined, and he did little but

talk about ideas. I do not know anyone today who respects him--except a

few people who live the same sort of life. The thought of him brings to

my mind a sentence of Nietzsche--a man who surely stood for freedom of

personality: "I pity the lovers who have nothing higher than their

love."

A question like this can be decided only by the experience of the race.

Some will make love the end and aim of life, and others will make it the

means to other ends, and we shall see which kind of people achieve the

best results, which kind are the most useful, the most dignified, the

most original and vital. I have seen a great many young people try the

experiment of "free love," and I have seen some get enough of it and

quit; I could name among these half a dozen of our younger novelists. I

know others who are still in it--and I watch their lives and find them

to be restless, jealous, egotistical and idle. My defense of monogamy is

based upon the fact that I have never known any happy or successful

"free lovers." Of course, I know some noble and sincere people who do

not believe in the marriage contract, and refuse to be bound by law; but

these people are as monogamous as I am, even more tightly bound by honor

than if they were duly married.

It seems to be in the very nature of true and sincere love to imagine

permanence, to desire it and to pledge it. If you aren't that much in

love, you aren't really in love at all, and you had better content

yourself with strolling together and chatting together and dining

together and playing music together. So many pleasant ways there are in

which men and women can enjoy each other's company without entering upon

the sacred intimacy of sex! You can learn to take sex lightly, of

course, but if you do so, you reduce by so much the chances that true

and deep love will ever come to you; for true and deep love requires

some patience, some reverence, some tending at a shrine. The animals

mate quickly and get it over with; but the great discoveries about love,

and the possibilities of the human soul in love, have come because men

and women have been willing to make sacrifices for it, to take it

seriously--and more especially to take seriously the beloved person, the

rights and needs and virtues of that person. From the lives of such we

learn that love is nature's device for taking us out of ourselves, and

making us truly social creatures.

Early in my life as a writer I undertook to answer Gertrude Atherton, in

her glorification of the sex-corruptions of capitalist society. She

indicted American literature for its "bourgeois" qualities--among these

the fact that American authors had a prejudice in favor of living with

their own wives. Mrs. Atherton set forth the joys of sex promiscuity as

they are understood by European artists, and I ventured in replying to

remark that "one woman can be more to a man than a dozen can possibly

be." That sounds like a paradox, but it is really a profound truth, and

the person who does not understand it has missed the best there is in

the sex relation. There is a limit to the things of the body, but to

those of the mind and spirit there is no limit, and so there is no

reason why true love should ever fall prey to boredom and satiety.

CHAPTER XLV

THE PROBLEM OF JEALOUSY

(Discusses the question, to what extent one person may hold another

to the pledge of love.)

Once upon a time I knew an Anarchist shoemaker, the same who had me sent

to jail for playing tennis on Sunday, as I have narrated in "The Brass

Check." I remember arguing with him concerning his ideas of sex, which

were of the freest. I can hear the very tones of his voice as he put the

great unanswerable question: "What are you going to do about the problem

of jealousy?" And I had no response at hand; for jealousy is truly a

most cruel and devastating and unlovely emotion; and yet, how can you

escape it, if you are going to preserve monogamy?

The Anarchist shoemaker's solution was to break down all the prejudices

against sexual promiscuity. Free and unlimited license was every

person's right, and for any other person to interfere was enslavement,

for any other person to criticize was superstition. But the power of

superstition is strong in the world, and the shoemaker found men

resentful of his teachings, and disposed to confiscate the rights of

their wives and daughters. Hence the shoemaker's disapproval of

jealousy.

Other men, less purely physiological in their attitude to sex, have

wrestled with this same problem of jealousy. H. G. Wells has a novel,

"In the Days of the Comet," in which he portrays two men, both nobly and

truly in love with the same woman. One in a passion of jealousy is about

to murder the other, when a great social transformation is magically

brought about, and the would-be murderer wakes up to universal love, and

the two men nobly and lovingly share the same woman. Shelley also

dreamed this dream, inviting two women to share him. I have known others

who tried it, but never permanently. I do not say that it never has

succeeded, or that it never can succeed. In this book I am renouncing

the future--I am trying to give practical advice to people, for the

conduct of their lives here and now, and my advice on this point is

that polygamous and polyandrous experiments in modern capitalist society

cost more than they are worth.

I once knew a certain high school teacher, who believed religiously in

every kind of freedom. When she married, she and her husband, an artist,

made a vow against jealousy; but as it worked out, this vow meant that

the wife had a steady job and took care of the husband, while he loafed

and loved other women. When finally she grew tired of it, he accused her

of being jealous; also, she had brought it down to the matter of money!

I know another woman, an Anarchist, widely known as a lecturer on sex

freedom. She laid down the general principle of unlimited personal

freedom for all, and she tried to live up to her faith. She entered into

a "free union" with a certain man, and when she discovered that he was

making love to another woman, in the presence of a friend of mine she

threw a vase of flowers at his head. You see, her general principles had

clashed with another general principle, to the effect that a person who

feels deep and strong love inevitably desires that love to endure, and

cannot but suffer to see it preyed upon and destroyed.

Let us first consider the question, just what are the true and proper

implications of monogamous love? The Roman Catholic church advocates

"monogamy," and understands thereby that a man and woman pledge

themselves "till death do us part," and if either of them cancels this

arrangement it is adultery and mortal sin. I hope that none of my

readers understands by "monogamy" any such system of spiritual

strangulation. My own idea is rather what some churchman has

sarcastically described by the term "progressive polygamy." I believe

that a man and woman should pledge their faith in love, and should keep

that faith, and endeavor with all their best energies to make a success

of it; they should strive each to understand the other's needs, and

unselfishly to fulfill them, within the limits of fair play. But if,

after such an effort has been truly made, it becomes clear that the

union does not mean health and happiness for one of the parties, that

party has a right to withdraw from it, and for any government or church

or other power to deny that right is both folly and cruelty.

Now, on the basis of this definition of monogamy--or, if you prefer, of

progressive polygamy--we are in position to say what we think about

jealousy. If two people pledge their faith, and one breaks it, and the

other complains, we do not call that jealousy, but just common decency.

Neither do we call it jealousy if one expects the other to avoid the

appearance of guilt; for love is a serious thing, not to be played with,

and I think that a person who truly loves will do everything possible to

make clear to the beloved that he is keeping and means to keep the

plighted faith.

You may say that I am using words arbitrarily, in endeavoring thus to

distinguish between justifiable and unjustifiable jealousy, and calling

the former by some other name. It does not make much difference about

words, provided I make clear my meaning. I could point out a whole

string of words which have good meanings and bad meanings, and cannot be

discussed without preliminary explanations and distinctions; religion,

for example, and morality, and aristocracy, and justice, to name only a

few. Most people's thinking about marriage and love has been made like

soup in a cheap restaurant, by dumping in all kinds of scraps and

notions from such opposite poles of human thought as Christian monkery

and Renaissance license, absurdly called "romance." So before you can do

any thinking about a problem like jealousy, you have to agree to use the

word to mean something definite, whether good or bad.

We shall take jealousy as a "bad" word, and use it to mean the setting

up, by a man or woman, of some claim to the love of another person,

which claim cannot be justified in the court of reason and fair play.

This includes, in the first place, all claims based upon a courtship,

not ratified by marriage. It is to the interest of society and the race

that men and women should be free to investigate persons of the other

sex, and to experiment with the affections before pledges of marriage

are made. If sensible customs of love and just laws of marriage were

made, there would be no excuse for a woman's giving herself to a man

before marriage; she should be taught not to do it, and then if she does

it, the risk is her own, and the disgusting perversion of venality and

greed known as the "breach of promise suit" should be unknown in our

law. The young should be taught that it is the other person's right to

change his mind and withdraw at any time before marriage; whatever pains

and pangs this may cause must be borne in silence.

The second kind of jealousy is that which seeks to keep in the marriage

bond a person who is not happy in it and has asked to be released. The

law sanctions this kind of cowardly selfishness, which manifests itself

every day on the front pages of our newspapers--a spectacle of monstrous

and loathsome passions unleashed and even glorified. Husbands set the

bloodhounds of the law after wives who have fled with some other man,

and send the man to a cell, and drag the woman back to a loveless home.

Wives engage private detectives, and trail their husbands to some "love

nest," and then ensue long public wrangles, with washing of filthy

linen, and the matter is settled by a "separation." The virtuous wife,

who may have driven the man away by neglect or vanity or stupidity, is

granted a share of his earnings for the balance of her life; and two

more people are added to the millions who are denied sexual happiness

under the law, and are thereby impelled to live as law violators.

For this there is only one remedy conceivable. We have banned

cannibalism and slavery and piracy and duelling, and we must ban one

more ancient and cruel form of human oppression, the effort to hold

people in the bonds of sex by any other power save that of love. I am

aware that the reactionaries who read this book will take this sentence

out of its context and quote it to prove that I am a "free lover." I

shall be sorry to have that done, but even so, I was not willing to live

in slavery myself, and I am not willing to advocate it for others. I am

aware that there are degenerate and defective individuals, and that we

have to make special provision for them, as I shall presently set forth;

but the average, normal human being must be free to decide what is love

for him, and what is happiness for him. Every person in the world will

have to deny himself the right to demand love where love is not freely

given, and all lovers in the world will have to hold themselves ready to

let the loved one go if and when the loved one demands it. I am aware

that this is a hard saying, and a hard duty, but it is one that life

lays upon us, and one that there is no escaping.

CHAPTER XLVI

THE PROBLEM OF DIVORCE

(Defends divorce as a protection to monogamous love, and one of the

means of preventing infidelity and prostitution.)

You will hear sermons and read newspaper editorials about the "divorce

evil," and you will find that to the preacher or editor this "evil"

consists of the fact that more and more people are refusing to stay

unhappily married. It does not interest these moralizers if the

statistics show that it is women who are getting most of the divorces,

and that the meaning of the phenomenon is that women are refusing to

continue living with drunken and dissolute men. To the clergy, the

breaking of a marriage is an evil _per se_, and regardless of

circumstances. They know this because God has told them so, and in the

name of God they seek to keep people tied in sex unions which have come

to mean loathing instead of love.

Now, I will assert it as a mathematical certainty that a considerable

percentage of marriages must fail. It is essential to progress that

human beings should grow, both mentally and spiritually, and manifestly

they cannot all grow in the same way. If they grow differently, must

they not sometimes lose the power to make each other happy in the

marital bonds? Who does not know the man who masters life and becomes a

vital force, while his wife remains dull and empty? If such a man

changes wives, the world in general denounces him as a selfish beast;

but the world does not know nor does it care about those thousands of

men who, not caring to be branded as selfish beasts, fulfill the needs

of their lives by keeping mistresses in secret.

I knew a certain country school teacher, one of the most narrowly

conventional young women imaginable, who was engaged to a middle-aged

business man. He went to New York on a business trip, and stayed a

couple of months, and wrote her that he had met some Anarchists, and had

discovered that all he had read about them in the newspapers was false,

and that they were the true and pure idealists to whom the rest of his

life must be devoted. The young lady was horrified; nor was she any

happier when she came to New York and met her fiance's new friends. She

ought in common sense to have broken the engagement; but she was in

love, and she married, as many another fool woman does, with the idea of

"reforming" the man. She failed, and was utterly and unspeakably

wretched.

I know another man, a conservative capitalist of narrow and aggressive

temper, whose wife turned into an ardent Bolshevik. The man thinks that

all Bolsheviks should be shut up in jail for life, while the wife is

equally certain that all jails should be razed to the ground and all

Bolsheviks placed in control of the government. These two people have

got to a point where they cannot sit down to the breakfast table without

flying into a quarrel. I know another case of a modern scientist, an

agnostic, whose wife, a half-educated, sentimental woman, took to

dabbling in mysticism, and drove him wild by setting up an image of

Buddha in her bedroom, and consorting with "swamis" in long yellow

robes. I know another whose wife turned into an ultra-pious Catholic,

and turned over the care of his domestic life to a priest. Is it not

obvious that the only possible solution of such problems lies in

divorce? Unless, indeed, we are all of us going to turn over the care of

our domestic lives to the priests!

Our grandfathers and grandmothers believed one thing, and believed the

same thing when they were seventy as when they were twenty; so it was

possible for them to dwell in domestic security and permanence till

death did them part. But we are learning to change our minds; and

whether what we believe is better or worse than what our ancestors

believed, at least it is different. Also we are coming to take what we

believe with more seriousness; the intellectual life means more and more

to us, and it becomes harder and harder for us to find sexual and

domestic happiness with a partner who does not share our convictions,

but, on the contrary, may be contributing to the campaign funds of the

opposition party.

I do not mean by this that people should get a divorce as soon as they

find they differ about some intellectual idea; on the contrary, I have

advocated that they should do everything possible to understand and to

tolerate each other. But it is a fact that intellectual convictions are

the raw material out of which characters and lives are made, and it is

inevitable that some characters and lives that fit quite well at twenty

should fit very badly at thirty or forty. When we refuse divorce under

such circumstances we are not fostering marriage, as we fondly imagine;

we are really fostering adultery. It is a fact that not one person in

ten who is held by legal or social force in an unhappy sex union will

refrain from seeking satisfaction outside; and because these outside

satisfactions are disgraceful, and in some cases criminal, they seldom

have any permanence. Therefore it follows that "strict" divorce laws,

such as the clerical propaganda urges upon us, are in reality laws for

the promotion of fornication and prostitution.

There is a short story by Edith Wharton, in which the "divorce evil" is

exhibited to us in its naked horror; the story called "The Other Two,"

in the volume "The Descent of Man." A society woman has been divorced

twice and married three times, and by an ingenious set of circumstances

the woman and all three of the men are brought into the same

drawing-room at the same time. Just imagine, if you can, such an

excruciating situation: a woman, her husband, and two men who used to be

her husbands, all compelled to meet together and think of something to

say! I cite this story because it is a perfect illustration of the

extent to which the "divorce problem" is a problem of our lack of sense.

Mrs. Wharton will, I fear, consider me a very vulgar person if I assert

that there is absolutely no reason whatever why any of those four people

in her story should have had a moment's discomfort of mind, except that

they thought there was. There is absolutely nothing to prevent a man and

woman who used to be married from meeting socially and being decent to

each other, or to prevent two men from being decent to each other under

such circumstances. I would not say that they should choose to be

intimate friends--though even that may be possible occasionally.

I know, because I have seen it happen. In Holland I met a certain

eminent novelist and poet, a great and lovable man. I visited his home,

and met his wife and two little children, and saw a man and woman living

in domestic happiness. The man had also two grown sons, and after a few

days he remarked that he would like me to meet the mother of these young

men. We went for a walk of a mile or so, and met a lady who lived in a

small house by herself, and who received us with a friendly welcome and

talked with us for a couple of hours about music and books and art. This

lady had been the writer's wife for ten years or so, and there had been

a terrible uproar when they voluntarily parted. But they had refused to

pay attention to this uproar; they understood why they did not wish to

remain husband and wife any longer, but they did not consider it

necessary to quarrel about it, nor even to break off the friendship

which their common interests made possible. The two women in the case

were not intimate, I gathered, but they frequently met at the homes of

others, and found no difficulty in being friendly. I suggest to Mrs.

Wharton that this story is at least as interesting as the one she has

told; but I fear she will not care to write it, because apparently she

considers it necessary that people who are well bred and refined should

be the helpless victims of destructive manias.

CHAPTER XLVII

THE RESTRICTION OF DIVORCE

(Discusses the circumstances under which society has the right to

forbid divorce, or to impose limitations upon it.)

We have quoted the old maxim, "Marry in haste and repent at leisure,"

and we suggested that parents and guardians should have the right to ask

the young to wait before marriage, and make certain of the state of

their hearts. We have now the same advice to give concerning divorce;

the same claim to enter on behalf of society--that it has and should

assert the right to ask people to delay and think carefully before

breaking up a marriage.

What interest has society in the restriction of divorce? What affair is

it of any other person if I choose to get a divorce and marry a new wife

once a month? There are many reasons, not in any way based upon

religious superstition or conventional prejudice. In the first place,

there are or may be children, and society should try to preserve for

every child a home with a father and a mother in it. Second, there are

property rights, of which every marriage is a tangle, and the settlement

of which the law should always oversee. Third, there is the question of

venereal disease, which society has an unquestionable right to keep

down, by every reasonable restriction upon sexual promiscuity. And

finally, there is the respect which all men and women owe to love. It

seems to me that society has the same right to protect love against

extreme outrage, as it has to forbid indecent exposure of the person on

the street.

There is in successful operation in Switzerland a wise and sane divorce

law, based upon common sense and not upon superstition. A couple wish to

break their marriage, and they go before a judge, and in private

session, as to a friendly adviser, they tell their troubles. He gives

them advice about their disagreement, and sends them away for three

months to think it over. At the end of three months, if they still

desire a divorce, they meet with him again. If he still thinks there is

a chance of reconciliation, he has the right to require them to wait

another three months. But if at the end of this second period they are

still convinced that the case is hopeless, and that they should part,

the judge is required to grant the divorce. You may note that this is

exactly what I have suggested concerning young couples who become

engaged. In both cases, the parties directly interested have the right

to decide their own fate, but the rest of the world requires them to

think carefully about it, and to listen to counsel. Except for grave

offenses, such as adultery, insanity, crime or venereal disease, I do

not think that anyone should receive a divorce in less than six months,

nor do I think that any personal right is contravened by the imposing of

such a delay.

Next, what are we going to say to the right, or the claim to the right,

on the part of a man or woman, to be married once a year throughout a

lifetime? In order to illustrate this problem, I will tell you about a

certain man known to me. In his early life he spent a couple of years in

a lunatic asylum. He lays claim to extraordinary spiritual gifts, and

uses the language of the highest idealism known. He is a man of culture

and good family, and thus exerts a peculiar charm upon young women of

refinement and sensitiveness. To my knowledge he was three times married

in six years, and each time he deserted the woman, and forced her to

divorce him, and to take care of herself, and in one case of a child. In

addition, he had begotten one child out of marriage, and left the mother

and child to starve. For ten years or so I used to see him about once in

six months, and invariably he had a new woman, a young girl of fine

character, who had been ensnared by him, and was in the agonizing

process of discovering his moral and mental derangement. Yet there was

absolutely nothing in the law to place restraint upon this man; he could

wander from state to state, or to the other side of the world, preying

upon lovely young girls wherever he went.

This particular man happens to call himself a "radical"; but I could

tell you of similar men in the highest social circles, or in the

political world, the theatrical world, the "sporting" world; they are in

every rank of life, and are just as definitely and certainly menaces to

human welfare and progress as pirates on the high seas or highwaymen on

the road. Nor are they confined to the males; the world is full of women

who use their sex charms for predatory purposes, and some of them are

far too clever for any law that you or I can contrive at present. But I

think we might begin by refusing to let any man or woman have more than

two divorces in one lifetime, in any state or part of the world. If any

man or woman tries three times to find happiness in love, and fails each

time, we have a right to assume that the fault must lie with that

person, and not with the three partners.

I think we may go further yet; having made wise laws of love and

marriage, taking into consideration all human needs, we have a right to

require that men and women shall obey the laws. At present the great

mass of the public has sympathy for the law-breaker; just as, in old

days, the peasants could not help admiring the outlaw who resisted

unjust land laws and robbed the rich, or as today, under the capitalist

regime, we can not withhold our sympathy from political prisoners, even

though they have committed acts of violence which we deplore. But when

we have made sex laws that we know are just and sensible--then we shall

consider that we have the right to restrain sex criminals, and in

extreme cases we shall avail ourselves of the skill of science to

perform a surgical operation which will render him unable in future to

prey upon the love needs of people who are placed at his mercy by their

best qualities, their unselfishness and lack of suspicion.

We clear out foul-smelling weeds from our garden, because we wish to

raise beautiful flowers and useful herbs therein. There lives in

California a student of plant life, who has shown us what we can do, not

by magic or by superhuman efforts, but simply by loving plants, by

watching them ceaselessly, understanding their ways, and guiding their

sex-life to our own purposes. We can perform what to our ignorant

ancestors would have seemed to be miracles; we can actually make all

sorts of new plants, which will continue to breed their own kind, and

survive forever if we give them proper care. In other words, Luther

Burbank has shown us that we can "change plant nature."

There flash back upon my memory all those dull, weary, sick human

creatures, who have repeated to me that dull, weary, sick old formula,

"You cannot change human nature." I do not think I am indulging either

in religious superstition or in blind optimism, but am speaking

precisely, in saying that whenever human beings get ready to apply

experimental science to themselves, they can change human nature just as

they now change plant nature. By putting human bodies together in love,

we make new bodies of children more beautiful than any who have yet

romped on the earth; and in the same way, by putting minds and souls

together, we can make new kinds of minds and souls, different from those

we have previously known, and greater than either the man-soul or the

woman-soul alone.

Also, by that magic which is the law of mind and soul life, each new

creation can be multiplied to infinity, and shared by all other minds

and souls that live in the present or may live in the future. We have

shown elsewhere how genius multiplies to infinity the joy and power of

life by means of the arts; and one of the greatest of the arts is the

art of love. Consider the great lovers, the true lovers, of history--how

they have enriched the lives of us all. It does not make any difference

whether these men and women lived in the flesh, or in the brain of a

poet--we learn alike from Dante and Beatrice, from Abelard and Heloise,

from Robert and Elizabeth Browning, from Tristan and Isolde, from Romeo

and Juliet, what is the depth and the splendor of this passion which

lies hidden within us, and how it may enrich and vivify and glorify all

life.

PART FOUR

THE BOOK OF SOCIETY

CHAPTER XLVIII

THE EGO AND THE WORLD

(Discusses the beginning of consciousness, in the infant and in

primitive man, and the problem of its adjustment to life.)

We have now to consider the relationship of man to his fellows, with

whom he lives in social groups. Upon this problem floods of light have

been thrown by the new science of psycho-analysis. I will try to give,

briefly and in simple language, an idea of these discoveries.

One of the laws of biology is that every individual, in his development,

reproduces the history of the race; so that impulses and mental states

of a child reveal to us what our far-off ancestors loved and feared. The

same thing is discovered to be true of neurotics, people who have failed

in adjusting themselves to civilized life, and have gone back, in some

or all of their mental traits, to infantile states. If we analyze the

unconscious minds of "nervous patients," and compare them with what we

find in the minds of infants, and in savages, we discover the same

dreams, the same longings and the same fears.

The mental life of man begins in the womb. We cannot observe that life

directly, but we know that it is there, because there cannot be organic

life without mind to direct it, and just as there is an unconscious mind

that regulates the bodily processes in adults, so in the embryo there

must be an unconscious mind to direct the flow of blood, the building of

bones, muscle, eyes and brain. The mental life of that unborn creature

is of course purely egotistical; it knows nothing outside itself, and it

finds this universe an agreeable place--everything being supplied to it,

promptly and perfectly, without effort of its own.

But suddenly it gets its first shock; pain begins, and severe

discomfort, and the creature is shoved out into a cold world, yelling in

protest against the unsought change. And from that moment on, the

new-born infant labors to adjust itself to an entirely new set of

conditions. Discomforts trouble it, and it cries. Quickly it learns that

these cries are answered, and satisfaction of its needs is furnished.

Somehow, magically, things appear; warm and dry covering, a trickle of

delicious hot milk into its mouth. At first the infant mind has no idea

how all this happens; but gradually it comes to realize objects outside

itself, and it forms the idea that these objects exist to serve its

wants. Later on it learns that there are particular sounds which attach

to particular objects, and cause them to function. The sound "Mama," for

example, produces a goddess clothed in beauty and power, performing

miracles. So the infant mind arrives at the "period of magic gestures"

and the "period of magic words"; corresponding to a certain type of myth

and belief which we find in every race and tribe of human being that now

exists or ever has existed on earth. All these stories about magic

wishes and magic rings and magic spells of a thousand sorts; and nowhere

on earth a child which does not listen greedily to such fancies! The

reason is simply that the child has passed through this stage of mental

life, and so recently that the feelings are close to the surface of his

consciousness.

But gradually the infant makes the painful discovery that not everything

in existence can be got to serve him; there are forces which are proof

against his magic spells; there are some which are hostile, and these

the infant learns to regard with hatred and fear. Sometimes hatred and

fear are strangely mixed with admiration and love. For example, there is

a powerful being known as "father," who is sometimes good and useful,

but at other times takes the attention of the supremely useful "mother,"

the source of food and warmth and life. So "father" is hated, and in

fancy he is wished out of the way--which to the infant is the same thing

as killing. Out of this grows a whole universe of fascinating mental

life, which Freud calls by the name "the [OE]dipus complex"--after the

legend of the Greek hero who murdered his father and committed incest

with his mother, and then, when he discovered what he had done, put out

his own eyes. There is a mass of legends, old as human thought,

repeating this story; we cannot be sure whether they have grown out of

the greeds and jealousies of this early wish-life of the infant, or

whether they had their base in the fact that there was a stage in human

progress in which the father really was killed off by the sons.

This latter idea is discussed by Freud, in his book, "Totem and Taboo."

It appears that primitive man lived in hordes, which were dominated by

one old male, who kept all the women to himself, and either killed the

young males, or drove them out to shift for themselves; so the young men

would combine and murder their father. The forming of human society, of

marriage and the family, depended upon one factor, the decision of the

young victors to live and let live. The only way they could do this was

to agree not to quarrel over the women of their own group, but to seek

other women from other groups. This may account for what is known as

"exogamy," an almost universal marriage custom of primitive man, whereby

a man named Jones is barred by frightful taboos from the women named

Jones, but is permitted relations with all the women named Smith.

To return to our infant: he is in the midst of a painful process of

adjusting himself to the outside world; discovering that sometimes all

his magic words and gestures fail, his wishes no longer come true. There

are beings outside him, with wills of their own, and power to enforce

them; he has to learn to get along with these beings, and give up his

pleasures to theirs. These processes which go on in the infant soul, the

hopes and the terrors, the griefs and the angers, are of the profoundest

significance for the later adult life. For nothing gets out of the mind

that has once got into it; the infantile cravings which are repressed

and forgotten stay in the unconscious, and work there, and strive still

for expression. The conscious mind will not tolerate them, but they

escape in the form of fairy-tales and stories, of dreams and delusions,

slips of the tongue, and many other mental events which it is

fascinating to examine. Also, if we are weakened by ill health or

nervous strain, these infantile wishes may take the form of "neuroses,"

and fully grown people may take to stammering, or become impotent, or

hysterical, or even insane, because of failures of adjustment to life

that happened when they were a year or two old. These things are known,

not merely as a matter of theory, but because, as soon as by analysis

these infant secrets are brought into consciousness and adjusted there,

the trouble instantly ceases.

So it appears that the whole process of human life, from the very hour

of birth, consists of the correct adjustment of men and women in

relation to their fellows. Not merely is man a social being, but all the

prehuman ancestors of men, for ages upon geologic ages, have been

social beings; they have lived in groups, and their survival has

depended upon their success in fitting themselves snugly into group

relationships. Failure to make correct adjustments means punishment by

the group, or by enemies outside the group; if the failure is serious

enough, it means death. We may assert that the task of understanding

one's fellow men, and making one's self understood by them, is the most

important task that confronts every individual.

And if we look about the world at present, the most superficial of us

cannot fail to realize that the task is far from being correctly

performed. So many people unhappy, so many striving for what they cannot

get! So many having to be locked behind bars, like savage beasts,

because they demand something which the world is resolved not to let

them have! So many having to be killed, by rifles and machine-guns, by

high explosive shells and poison gas--because they misunderstood the

social facts about them, and thought they could fulfill some wishes

which the rest of mankind wanted them to repress! As I read the

psycho-analyst's picture of the newly born infant with its primitive

ego, its magic cries and magic gestures, I cannot be sure how much of it

is sober science and how much is mordant irony--a sketch of the mental

states of the men and women I see about me--whole classes of men and

women, yes, even whole nations!

The effort of the following chapters will be to interpret to men and

women the world which they have made, and to which they are trying to

adjust themselves. More especially we shall try to show how, by better

adjustments, men may change both themselves and the world, and make both

into something less cruel and less painful, more serene and more certain

and more free.

CHAPTER XLVIX

COMPETITION AND CO-OPERATION

(Discusses the relation of the adult to society, and the part which

selfishness and unselfishness play in the development of social

life.)

Pondering the subject of this chapter, I went for a stroll in the

country, and seating myself in a lonely place, became lost in thought;

when suddenly my eye was caught by something moving. On the bare, hot,

gray sand lay a creature that I could see when it moved and could not

see when it was still, for it was exactly the color of the ground, and

fitted the ground tightly, being flat, and having its edges scalloped so

that they mingled with the dust. It was a lizard, covered with heavy

scales, and with sharp horns to make it unattractive eating. At the

slightest motion from me it vanished into a heap of stones, so quickly

that my eye could scarcely follow it.

This creature, you perceive, is in its actions and its very form an

expression of terror; terror of devouring enemies, of jackals that

pounce and hawks that swoop, and also of the hot desert air that seeks

to dry out its few precious drops of moisture. Practically all the

energies of this creature are concentrated upon the securing of its own

individual survival. To be sure, it will mate, but the process will be

quick, and the eggs will be left for the sun to hatch out, and the baby

lizards will shift for themselves--that is to say, they will be

incarnations of terror from the moment they open their eyes to the

light.

The jackal seeks to pounce upon the lizard, and so inspires terror in

the lizard; but when you watch the jackal you find that it exhibits

terror toward more powerful foes. You find that the hawk, which swoops

upon the lizard, is equally quick to swoop away when it comes upon a man

with a gun. This preying and being preyed upon, this mixture of cruelty

and terror, is a conspicuous fact of nature; if you go into any orthodox

school or college in America today, you will be taught that it is

nature's most fundamental law, and governs all living things. If you

should take a course in political economy under a respectable

professor, you would find him explaining that such cruelty-terror

applies equally in human affairs; it is the basis of all economic

science, and the effort to escape from it is like the effort to lift

yourself by your boot-straps.

The professor calls this cruelty-terror by the name "competition"; and

he creates for his own purposes an abstract being whom he names "the

economic man," a creature who acts according to this law, and exists

under these conditions. One of the professor's formulas is the so-called

"Malthusian law," that population presses always upon the limits of

subsistence. Another is "the law of diminishing returns of agriculture,"

that you can get only so much product out of a certain piece of land, no

matter how much labor and capital you put into it. Another is Ricardo's

"iron law of wages," that wages cannot rise above the cost of living.

Another is embodied in the formula of Adam Smith, that "Competition is

the life of trade." The professor enunciates these "laws," coldly and

impersonally, as becomes the scientist; but if you go into the world of

business, you find them set forth cynically, in scores of maxims and

witticisms: "Dog eat dog," "the devil take the hindmost," "business is

business," "do others or they will do you."

Evidently, however, there is something in man which rebels against these

"natural" laws. In our present society man has set aside six days in the

week in which to live under them, and one day in the week in which to

preach an entirely different and contradictory code--that of Christian

ethics, which bids you "love your neighbor," and "do unto others as you

would they should do unto you." Between these Sunday teachings and the

week-day teachings there is eternal conflict, and one who takes pleasure

in ridiculing his fellow men can find endless opportunity here. The

Sunday preachers are forbidden to interfere with the affairs of the

other six days; that is called "dragging politics into the pulpit." On

the other hand, incredible as it may seem, there are professors of the

week-day doctrine who call themselves Christians, and believe in the

Sunday doctrine, too. They manage this by putting the Sunday doctrine

off into a future world; that is, we are to pounce upon one another and

devour one another under the "iron laws" of economics so long as we live

on earth, but in the next world we shall play on golden harps and have

nothing to do but love one another. If anybody is so foolish as to apply

the Sermon on the Mount to present-day affairs, we regard him as a

harmless crank; if he persists, and sets out to teach others, we call

him a Communist or a Pacifist, and put him in jail for ten or twenty

years.

In the Book of the Mind, I have referred to Kropotkin's "Mutual Aid as a

Factor in Evolution," which I regard as one of the epoch-making books of

our time. Kropotkin clearly proves that competition is not the only law

of nature, it is everywhere modified by co-operation, and in the great

majority of cases co-operation plays a larger part in the relations of

living creatures than competition. There is no creature in existence

which is entirely selfish; in the nature of the case such a creature

could not exist--save in the imaginations of teachers of special

privilege. If a species is to survive, some portion of the energies of

the individual must go into reproduction; and steadily, as life

advances, we find the amount of this sacrifice increasing. The higher

the type of the creature, the longer is the period of infancy, and the

greater the sacrifice of the parent for the young. Likewise, most

creatures make the discovery that by staying together in herds or

groups, and learning to co-operate instead of competing among

themselves, they increase their chances of survival. You find birds that

live in flocks, and other birds, like hawks and owls and eagles, that

are solitary; and you find the co-operating birds a thousand times as

numerous--that is to say, a thousand times as successful in the struggle

for survival. You find that all man's brain power has been a social

product; the supremacy he has won over nature has depended upon one

thing and one alone--the fact that he has managed to become different

from the "economic man," that product of the imagination of the

defenders of privilege.

It is evident that both competition and co-operation are necessary to

every individual, and the health of the individual and of the race lies

in the proper combination of the two. If a creature were wholly

unselfish--if it made no effort to look after its own individual

welfare--it would be exterminated before it had a chance to reproduce.

If, on the other hand, it cannot learn to co-operate, its progeny stand

less chance of survival against creatures which have learned this

important lesson. We have a nation of a 110,000,000 people, who have

learned to co-operate to a certain limited extent. Some of us realize

how vastly the happiness of these millions might be increased by a

further extension of co-operation; but we find ourselves opposed by the

professors of privilege--and we wish that these gentlemen would go out

and join the lizards of the desert sands or the sharks of the sea,

creatures which really practice the system of "laissez faire" which the

professors teach.

The plain truth is that we cannot make a formula out of either

competition or co-operation. We cannot settle any problem of economics,

of business or legislation, by proclaiming, for example, that

"Competition is the life of trade." Competition may just as well turn

out to be the death of trade; it depends entirely upon the kind of

competition, and the stage of trade development to which it is applied.

In the early eighteenth century, when that formula of Adam Smith was

written, competition was observed to keep down prices and provide

stimulus to enterprise, and so to further abundant production. But the

time came when the machinery for producing goods was in excess, not

merely of the needs of the country, but of the available foreign

markets, and then suddenly the large-scale manufacturers made the

discovery that competition was the death of trade to them. They

proceeded, as a matter of practical common sense, and without consulting

their college professors, to abolish competition by forming trusts. We

passed laws forbidding them to do this, but they simply refused to obey

the laws. In the United States they have made good their refusal for

thirty-five years, and in the end have secured the blessing of the

Supreme Court upon their course.

So now we have co-operation in large-scale production and marketing. It

is known by various names, "pools," "syndicates," "price-fixing,"

"gentlemen's agreements." It is a blessing for those who co-operate, but

it proves to be the death of those who labor, and also of those who

consume, and we see these also compelled to combine, forming labor

unions and consumers' societies. Each side to the quarrel insists that

the other side is committing a crime in refusing to compete, and our

whole social life is rent with dissensions over this issue. Manifestly,

we need to clear our minds of dead doctrines; to think out clearly just

what we mean by competition, and what by co-operation, and what is the

proper balance between the two.

I have been at pains in this book to provide a basis for the deciding of

such questions. It is a practical problem, the fostering of human life

and the furthering of its development. We cannot lay down any fixed

rule; we have to study the facts of each case separately. We shall say,

this kind of competition is right, because it helps to protect human

life and to develop its powers. We shall say, this other kind of

competition is wrong because it has the opposite effect. We shall say,

perhaps, that some kind was right fifty years ago, or even ten years

ago, because it then had certain effects; but meantime some factor has

changed, and it is now having a different effect, and therefore ought to

be abolished.

There has never been any kind of human competition which men did not

judge and modify in that way; there is no field of human activity in

which ethical codes do not condemn certain practices as unfair. The

average Englishman considers it proper that two men who get into a

dispute shall pull off their coats, and settle the question at issue by

pummeling each other's noses. But let one of these men strike his

opponent in the groin, or let him kick his shins, and instantly there

will be a howl of execration. Likewise, an Anglo-Saxon man who fights

with the fists has a loathing for a Sicilian or Greek or other

Mediterranean man who will pull a knife. That kind of competition is

barred among our breeds; and also the kind which consists of using

poisons, or of starting slanders against your opponent.

If you look back through history, you find many forms of competition

which were once eminently respectable, but now have been outlawed. There

was a time, for example, when the distinction we draw between piracy and

sea-war was wholly unknown. The ships of the Vikings would go out and

raid the ships and seaports of other peoples, and carry off booty and

captives, and the men who did that were sung as heroes of the nation.

The British sea-captains of the time of Queen Elizabeth--Drake,

Frobisher, and the rest of them--are portrayed in our school books as

valiant and hardy men, and the British colonies were built on the basis

of their activities; yet, according to the sea laws in force today, they

were pirates. We regard a cannibal race with abhorrence; yet there was a

time when all the vigorous races of men were cannibals, and the habit of

eating your enemies in battle may well have given an advantage to the

races which practiced it.

On the other hand, you find sentimental people who reject all

competition on principle, and would like to abolish every trace of it

from society, and especially from education. But stop and consider for a

moment what that would mean. Would you abolish, for example, the

competition of love, the right of a man to win the girl he wants? You

could not do it, of course; but if you could, you would abolish one of

the principal methods by which our race has been improved. Of course,

what you really want is, not to abolish competition in love, but to

raise it to a higher form. There is an old saying, "All's fair in love

and war," but no one ever meant that. You would not admit that a man

might compete in love by threatening to kill the girl if she preferred a

rival. You would not admit that he might compete by poisoning the other

man. You would not admit that he might compete by telling falsehoods

about the other man. On the other hand, if you are sensible, you admit

that he has a right to compete by making his character known to the

girl, and if the other man is a rascal, by telling the girl that.

Would you abolish the competition of art, the effort of men to produce

work more beautiful and inspiring than has ever been known before? Would

you abolish the effort of scientists to overthrow theories which have

hitherto been accepted? Obviously not. You make these forms of

competition seem better by calling them "emulation," but you do not in

the least modify the fact that they involve the right of one person to

outdo other persons, to supplant them and take away something from them,

whether it be property or position or love or fame or power. In that

sense, competition is indeed the law of life, and you might as well

reconcile yourself to it, and learn to play your part with spirit and

good humor.

Also, you might as well train your children to it. You will find you

cannot develop their powers to the fullest without competition; in fact,

you will be forced to go back and utilize forms of competition which are

now out of date among adults. I have told in the Book of the Body how I

myself tried for ten years or more to live without physical competition,

and discovered that I could not; I have had to take up some form of

sport, and hundreds of thousands of other men have had the same

experience. What is sport? It is a deliberate going back, under

carefully devised rules, to the savage struggles of our ancestors. The

very essence of real sport is that the contestants shall, within the

rules laid down, compete with each other to the limit of their powers.

With what contempt would a player of tennis or baseball or whist regard

the proposition that his opponent should be merciful to him, and let him

win now and then! Obviously, these things have no place in the game, and

to be a "good sport" is to conform to the rules, and take with enjoyment

whatever issue of the struggle may come.

But then again, suppose you are competing with a child; obviously, the

conditions are different. You no longer play the best you can, you let

the child win a part of the time; but you do not let the child know

this, or it would spoil the fun for the child. You pretend to try as

hard as you know how, and you cry out in grief when you are beaten, and

the child crows with delight. And yet, that does not keep you from

loving the child, or the child from loving you.

The purpose of this elaborate exposition is to make clear the very vital

point that a certain set of social acts may be right under some

conditions, and desperately wrong under other conditions. They may be

right in play, and not in serious things; they may be right in youth,

and not in maturity; they may be right at one period of the world's

development, while at another period they are destructive of social

existence. If, therefore, we wish to know what are right and wrong

actions in the affairs of men, if we wish to judge any particular law or

political platform or program of business readjustment, the first thing

we have to do is to acquire a mass of facts concerning the society to

which the law or platform or program, is to be applied. We need to ask

ourselves, exactly what will be the effect of that change, applied in

that particular way at that particular time. In order to decide

accurately, we need to know the previous stages through which that

society has passed, the forces which have been operating in it, and the

ways in which they have worked.

But also we must realize that the lessons of history cannot ever be

accepted blindly. The "principles of the founders" apply to us only in

modified form; for the world in which we live today is different from

any world which has ever been before, and the world tomorrow will be

different yet. We are the makers of it, and the masters of it, and what

it will be depends to some extent upon our choice. In fact, that is the

most important lesson of all for us to learn; the final purpose of all

our thought about the world is to enable us to make it a happier and a

better world for ourselves and our posterity to live in.

CHAPTER L

ARISTOCRACY AND DEMOCRACY

(Discusses the idea of superior classes and races, and whether

there is a natural basis for such a doctrine.)

In the letters of Thomas Jefferson is found the following passage:

"All eyes are open or opening to the rights of man. The general spread

of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable

truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their

backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them

legitimately, by the grace of God."

This, which Jefferson, over a hundred years ago, described as a

"palpable truth," is still a long way from prevailing in the world. We

are trying in this book not to take anything for granted, so we do not

assume this truth, but investigate it; and we begin by admitting that

there are many facts which seem to contradict it, and which make it more

difficult of proof than Jefferson realized. It is not enough to point

out the lack of saddles on the backs, and of boots and spurs on the feet

of newly born infants; for the fact is that men are not exploited

because of saddles, nor is the exploiting accomplished by means of boots

and spurs. It is done by means of gold and steel, banks and credit

systems, railroads, machine-guns and battleships. And while it is not

true that certain races and classes are born with these things on them,

they are born to the possession of them, and the vast majority of

mankind are without them all their lives, and without the ability to use

them even if they had them.

The doctrine that "all men are created equal," or that they ought to be

equal, we shall describe for convenience as the democratic doctrine. It

first came to general attention through Christianity, which proclaimed

the brotherhood of all mankind in a common fatherhood of God. But even

as taught by the Christians, the doctrine had startling limitations. It

was several centuries before a church council summoned the courage to

decide that women were human beings, and had souls; and today many

devout Christians are still uncertain whether Japanese and Chinese and

Filipinos and Negroes are human beings, and have souls. I have heard old

gentlemen in the South gravely maintain that the Negro is not a human

being at all, but a different species of animal. I have heard learned

men in the South set forth that the sutures in the Negro skull close at

some very early age, and thus make moral responsibility impossible for

the black race. And you will find the same ideas maintained, not merely

as to differences of race and color, but as to differences of economic

condition. You will find the average aristocratic Englishman quite

convinced that the "lower orders" are permanently inferior to himself,

and this though they are of the same Anglo-Saxon stock.

For convenience I will refer to the doctrine that there is some natural

and irremovable inferiority of certain races or classes, as the

aristocratic doctrine. I will probably startle some of my readers by

making the admission that if there is any such natural or irremovable

inferiority, then a belief in political or economic equality is a

blunder. If there are certain classes or races which cannot think, or

cannot learn to think as well as other classes and races, those mentally

inferior classes and races will obey, and they will be made to obey, and

neither you nor I, nor all the preachers and agitators in the world,

will ever be able to arrange it otherwise. Suppose we could do it, we

should be committing a crime against life; we should be holding down the

race and aborting its best development.

Is there any such natural and irremovable inferiority in human beings?

When we come to study the question we find it complicated by a different

phenomenon, that of racial immaturity, which we have to face frankly and

get clear in our minds. One of the most obvious facts of nature is that

of infancy and childhood. We have just pointed out that if you are

competing with a child, you do it in an entirely different way and under

an entirely different set of rules, and if you fail to do this, you are

unfair and even cruel to the child. And it is a fact of our world that

there are some races more backward in the scale of development than

other races. You may not like this fact, but it is silly to try to evade

it. People who live in savage huts and beat on tom-toms and fight with

bows and arrows and cannot count beyond a dozen--such people are not

the mental or moral equals of our highly civilized races, and to treat

them as equals, and compete with them on that basis, means simply to

exterminate them. And we should either exterminate them at once and be

done with it, or else make up our minds that they are in a childhood

stage of our race, and that we have to guide them and teach them as we

do our children.

There is no more useful person than the wise and kind teacher. But

suppose we saw some one pretending to be a teacher to our children,

while in reality enslaving and exploiting them, or secretly robbing and

corrupting them--what would we say about that kind of teacher? The name

of that teacher is capitalist commercialism, and his profession is known

as "the white man's burden"; his abuse of power is the cause of our

present racial wars and revolts of subject peoples. A fair-minded man,

desirous of facing all the facts of life, hardly knows what stand to

take in such a controversy; that is, hardly knows from which cause the

colored races suffer more--the white man's exploitation, or their own

native immaturity.

To say that certain races are in a childhood stage, and need instruction

and discipline, is an entirely different thing from saying they are

permanently inferior and incapable of self-government. Whether they are

permanently inferior is a problem for the man of science, to be

determined by psychological tests, continued possibly over more than one

generation. We have not as yet made a beginning; in fact, we have not

even acquired the scientific impartiality necessary to such an inquiry.

In the meantime, all that we can do is to look about us and pick up

hints where we can. In places like Massachusetts, where Negroes are

allowed to go to college and are given a chance to show what they can

do, they have not ousted the white man, but many of them have certainly

won his respect, and one finds charming and cultured men among them, who

show no signs of prematurely closed up skulls. And one after another we

see the races which have been held down as being inferior, developing

leadership and organization and power of moral resistance. The Irish are

showing themselves today one of the most vigorous and high-spirited of

all races. The Hindus are developing a movement which in the long run

may prove more powerful than the white man's gold and steel. The

Egyptians, the Persians, the Filipinos, the Koreans, are all devising

ways to break the power of capitalist newspaper censorship. How sad that

the subject races of the world have to get their education through

hatred of their teachers, instead of through love!

Of course, these rebel leaders are men who have absorbed the white man's

culture, at least in part; practically always they are of the younger

generation, which has been to the white man's schools. But this is the

very answer we have been seeking--as to whether the race is permanently

inferior, or merely immature and in need of training. It is not only

among the brown and black and yellow races that progress depends upon

the young generations; that is a universal fact of life.

In the course of this argument we shall assume that the Christian or

democratic theory has the weight of probability on its side, and that

nature has not created any permanently and necessarily inferior race or

class. We shall assume that the heritage of culture is a common

heritage, open to all our species. We shall not go so far as the

statement which Jefferson wrote into the Declaration of Independence,

that "all men are created free and equal"; but we shall assert that they

are created "with certain inalienable rights," and that among these is

the right to maintain their lives and to strive for liberty and

happiness. Also, we shall say that there will never be peace or order in

the world until they have found liberty, and recognition of their right

to happiness.

CHAPTER LI

RULING CLASSES

(Deals with authority in human society, how it is obtained, and

what sanction it can claim.)

It is possible to conceive an order of nature in which all individuals

were born and developed exactly alike and with exactly equal powers.

Such is apparently the case with lower animals, for example the ants and

the bees. But among human beings there are great differences; some are

born idiots and some are born geniuses. Even supposing that we are able

to do away with blindness and idiocy, it is not likely that we can ever

make a race of uniform genius. There will always be some more capable

minds, who will discover new powers of life, and will compel the others

to learn from them. It is to the interest of the race that this learning

should be done as quickly as possible. In other words, the great problem

of society is how to recognize superior minds and put them in authority.

We look back over history, and discover a few wise men, and many rulers;

but very, very rarely does it happen that the ruler is a wise man, or a

friend of wise men. Far more often we find the ruler occupied in

suppressing the wise man and his wisdom. There was a ruler who allowed

the mob to crucify Jesus, and another who ordered Socrates to drink the

hemlock, and another who tortured Galileo, and another who chopped off

the head of Sir Walter Raleigh--and so on through a long and tragic

chronicle. And even when the accident of a wise ruler occurs he is apt

to be surrounded by a class of parasites and corrupt officials who are

busy to thwart his will.

The general run of history is this: some group seizes power by force,

and holds it by the same means, and seeks to augment and perpetuate it.

Those who win the power are frequently men of energy and practical

sense, and do fairly well as governors; but they are never able to hand

on their virtues, and their line becomes corrupted by sensuality and

self-indulgence, and the subject classes are plundered and driven to

revolt. Often the revolt fails, but in the course of time it succeeds,

and there is a new dynasty, or a new ruling class, sometimes a little

better than the old, sometimes worse.

How shall one judge whether the new regime is better or worse?

Obviously, this is a most important question; it has to do, not merely

with history, but with our daily affairs, our voting. As one who has

read some tens of thousands of pages of history, and has pondered its

lessons with heart-sickness and despair, I lay down this general law by

which revolts and changes of power may be judged: If the change results

in the holding of power by a smaller number of people, it is a reaction;

but if the change results in distributing the power among a larger group

of the community, then that community has made a step in advance.

I have seen a sketch of the history of some Central American

country--Guatemala, I think--which showed 130 revolutions in less than a

hundred years. Some rascal gets together a gang, and seizes the

government and plunders its revenue. When he has plundered too much,

some other rascal stirs up the people, and gets together another gang.

Such "revolutions" we regard as subjects for comic opera, and for the

Richard Harding Davis type of fiction; but we do not consider them as

having any relationship to progress. We describe them as "palace"

revolutions.

But compare with this the various English revolutions. We write learned

histories about them, and describe England as "the Mother of

Parliaments." The reason for this is that when there was political

discontent in England, the protesting persons proceeded to organize

themselves, and to understand their trouble and to remedy it. They had

the brain power to do this; they maintained their right to do it, and

when by violence or threats of violence they forced the ruling class to

give way, they brought about a wider extension of liberty, a wider

distribution of power. Tennyson has pictured England as a state "where

freedom slowly broadens down from precedent to precedent." We today,

reading its history, are inclined to put a sarcastic emphasis on the

word "slowly"; but Tennyson would answer that it is better for a

community to move forward slowly than to move forward rapidly and then

move backward nearly as far.

We have pointed out several times the important fact of biology that

change does not necessarily mean progress from any rational or moral

point of view. Degeneration is just as real a fact as progress, and it

does not at all follow that because things change they are changing for

the better. It is worth while to repeat this in discussing human

society, for it is just as true of governments and morals as of living

species. A nation may pile up wealth, and multiply a hundredfold the

machinery of wealth production, and only be increasing luxury and

wantonness and graft. A nation may change its governmental forms, its

laws and social conventions, and boast noisily of these changes in the

name of progress, while as a matter of fact it is following swiftly the

road to ruin which all the empires of history have traced. So far as I

can discover, there is one test, and only one, by which you can judge,

and that is the test already indicated: Is the actual, effective power

of the state wielded by a larger or a smaller percentage of the

population than before the change took place?

You will note the words "actual, effective power." Nothing is more

familiar in human life than for forms to survive after the spirit which

created them is dead; and nothing is more familiar than the use of these

forms as masks to deceive the populace. There have been many times in

history when people have gone on voting, long after their votes ceased

to count for anything; there have been many times when people have gone

through the motions of freedom long after they have been slaves. Mexico

under Diaz had one of the most perfect of constitutions, and was in

reality one of the most perfect of despotisms; and we Americans are

sadly familiar with political democracies which do not work.

Shall we, therefore, join the pessimists and say that history is a blind

struggle for useless power, and that the notion of progress is a

delusion? I do not think so; on the contrary, I think it is easily to be

demonstrated that there has been a steady increase in the amount of

knowledge possessed by the race, and in the spread of this knowledge

among the whole population. I think that through most of the period of

written history we can trace a real development in human society. I

think we can analyze the laws of this development, and explain its

methods; and I think this knowledge is precious to us, because it

enables us to accelerate the process and to make the end more certain.

This task, the analysis of social evolution, is the task we have next to

undertake.

CHAPTER LII

THE PROCESS OF SOCIAL EVOLUTION

(Discusses the series of changes through which human society has

passed.)

We have now to consider, briefly, the history of man as a social being,

the groups he has formed, and the changes in his group systems.

Everything in life grows, and human societies are no exception to the

rule. They have undergone a long process of evolution, which we can

trace in detail, and which we find conforms exactly to the law laid down

by Herbert Spencer; a process whereby a number of single and similar

things become different parts of one complex thing. In the case of human

societies the units are men and women, and social evolution is a process

whereby a small and simple group, in which the individuals are

practically alike, grows into a large and complex group, in which the

individuals are widely different, and their relations one to another are

complicated and subtle.

There are two powerful forces pressing upon human beings, and compelling

them to struggle and grow. The first of these forces is fear, the need

of protection against enemies; the second is hunger, the need of food

and the means of producing and storing food. The first causes the

individual to combine with his fellows and establish some form of

government, and this is the origin of political evolution. The second

causes him to accumulate wealth, and to combine industrially, and this

is the origin of economic evolution. Because the first force is a little

more urgent, we observe in the history of human society that evolution

in government precedes evolution in industry.

I made this statement some twenty years ago, in an article in "Collier's

Weekly." I wrote to the effect that man's first care was to secure

himself against his enemies, and that when he had done this he set out

to secure his food supply. "Collier's" called upon the late Professor

Sumner of Yale University, a prize reactionary and Tory of the old

school, to answer me; and Professor Sumner made merry over my statement,

declaring that man sought for food long before he was safe from his

enemies. Some years later, when Sumner died, one of his admirers wrote

in the New York "Evening Post" that he had completely overwhelmed me,

and I had acknowledged my defeat by failing to reply--something which

struck me as very funny. It was, of course, possible that Sumner had

overwhelmed me, but to say that I had considered myself overwhelmed was

to attribute to me a degree of modesty of which I was wholly incapable.

As a matter of fact, I had had my usual experience with capitalist

magazines; "Collier's Weekly" had promised to publish my rejoinder to

Sumner, but failed to keep the promise, and finally, when I worried

them, they tucked the answer away in the back part of the paper, among

the advertisements of cigars and toilet soaps.