systematic scale. They are no longer of a merely speculative character.
We no longer regard children as the "gifts of God," flung into our
helpless hands; we are beginning to realise that the responsibility is
ours to see that they come into the world under the best conditions,
and at the moments when their parents are best fitted to produce them.
Vaerting proposes that it should be the business of all school
authorities to register the ages of the pupils' parents. This is
scarcely a provision to which even the most susceptible parent could
reasonably object, though there is no cause to make the declaration
compulsory where a "conscientious" objection existed, and in any case
the declaration would not be public. It would be an advantage--though
this might be more difficult to obtain--to have the date of the
parents' marriage, and of the birth of previous children, as well as
some record of the father's standing in his occupation. But even the
ages of the parents alone would teach us much when correlated with the
school position of the pupil in intelligence and in conduct. It is
quite true that there are unavoidable fallacies. We are not, as in the
case of genius, dealing with people whose life-work is complete and
open to the whole world's examination. The good and clever child is not
necessarily the forerunner of the first-class man or woman; and many
capable and successful men have been careless in attendance at lectures
and rebellious to discipline. Moreover, the prejudice and limitations
of the teachers have also to be recognised. Yet when we are dealing
with millions most of these fallacies would be smoothed out. We should
be, once for all, in a position to determine authoritatively the exact
bearing of one of the simplest and most vital factors of the betterment
of the race. We should be in possession of a new clue to guide us in
the creation of the man of the coming world. Why not begin to-day?
[1] He has further discussed the subject in _Die Neue Generation_,
Aug.-Nov., 1914, and in a more recent (1916) pamphlet which I have not
seen.
[2] The reference is to _The Century of the Child_, by Ellen Key, who
writes (English translation, p. 2): "My conviction is that the
transformation of human nature will take place, not when the whole of
humanity becomes Christian, but when the whole of humanity awakens to
the consciousness of the 'holiness of generation.' This consciousness
will make the central work of Society the new race, its origin, its
management, and its education; about these all morals, all laws, all
social arrangements will be grouped."
[3] It is not only ability, but idiocy, criminality and many other
abnormalities which specially tend to appear in the first-born. The
eldest-born represents the point of greatest variation in the family,
and the variation thus yielded may be in either direction, useful or
useless, good or bad. See, _e.g._, Havelock Ellis, _A Study of British
Genius_, pp. 117-120. Sören Hansen, "The Inferior Quality of the
First-born Children," _Eugenics Review_, Oct., 1913.
[4] Marro, _La Pubertà_ (French translation _La Puberté_), Ch. XI.
XV
MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE
We contemplate our marriage system with satisfaction. We remember the
many unquestionable evidences in favour of it, and we marvel that it so
often proves a failure. For while we remember the evidence in favour of
it, we forget the evidence against it, and we overlook the important
fact that our favourable evidence is largely based on the vision of an
abstract or idealised monogamy which fails to correspond to the
detailed and ever varying system which in practice we cherish. We point
to the fact that monogamic marriage has probably flourished throughout
the history of the world, that it exists among savages, even among
animals, but we fail to observe how far that monogamy differs from
ours, even assuming that our monogamy is a real monogamy and not a
disguised polygamy, especially in the fact that it is a free union and
only subject to the inherent penalties that follow its infraction, not
to external penalties. Ours is not free; our faith in its natural
virtues is not quite so firm as we assert; we are always meddling with
it and worrying over its health and anxiously trying to bolster it up.
We are not by any means willing to let it rest on the sanction of its
own natural or divine laws. Our feeling is, as James Hinton used
ironically to express it: "Poor God with no one to help Him!"
The fact is that when we compare our civilised marriage system with
marriage as it exists in Nature, we fail to realise a fundamental
distinction. Our marriage system is made up of two absolutely different
elements which cannot blend. On the one hand, it is the manifestation
of our deepest and most volcanic impulses. On the other hand, it is an
elaborate web of regulations--legal, ecclesiastical, economic--which is
to-day quite out of relation to our impulses. On the one hand, it is a
force which springs from within; on the other hand, it is a force which
presses on us from without.[1] One says broadly that these two elements
of marriage, as we understand it, are out of relation to each other.
But there is an important saving qualification to be made. The inner
impulse is not without law, and the external pressure is not without an
ultimate basis of nature. That is to say, that under free and natural
conditions the inner impulse tends to develop itself, not licentiously
but with its own order and restraints, while, on the other hand, our
inherited regulations are largely the tradition of ancient attempts to
fix and register that natural order and restraint. The disharmony comes
in with the fact that our regulations are traditional and ancient, not
our own attempts to fix and register the natural order but inextricably
mixed up with elements that are entirely alien to our civilised habits
of life. Whatever our attitude towards mediaeval Canon Law may
be--whether reverence or indifference or disgust--it yet holds us and
is ingrained into our marriage system to-day. Canon Law was a good and
vital thing under the conditions which produced it. The survival of
Canon Law to-day, with the antiquated and ascetic conception of the
subordination of women associated with it, is the chief reason why we
in the twentieth century have not yet progressed so far towards a
reasonable system of marriage as the Romans had reached on the basis of
their law, nearly two thousand years ago.[2] Marriage is conditioned
both by inner impulse and outward pressure. But a healthy impulse
bears within it an order and restraint of its own, while a truly moral
outward pressure is based, not on the demands of mediaeval days, but on
the demands of our own day.
How far this is from being the case yet we find well illustrated by our
divorce methods. All our modern culture favour a sense of the
sacredness of the sexual relations; we cherish a delicate reserve
concerning all the intimacies of personal relationship. But when the
magic word "Divorce" is uttered we fling all our civilisation to the
winds, and in the desecrated name of Law we proceed to an inquisition
which scarcely differs at all from those public tests of mediaeval
law-courts which now we dare not venture even to put into words.
It is true that we are not bound to be consistent when it is an
advantage to be inconsistent. And if there were a method in our madness
it would be justified. But there is no method. From first to last the
history of divorce (read it, for instance, in Howard's _Matrimonial
Institutions_) is an ever shifting record of cruel blunders and
ridiculous absurdities. Divorce began in modern times in flagrant
injustice to one of the two partners, the wife, and it has ended--if we
may hope that the end is approaching--in imbecilities that to future
ages will be incredible. For no legal jargon has ever been invented
that will express the sympathies and the antipathies of human
relationship; they even escape the subtlest expression. Law-makers have
tortured their brains to devise formulas which will cover the
legitimate grounds for divorce. How vain their efforts are is
sufficiently shown by the fact that by no chance can they ever agree on
their formulas, and that they are changing them constantly with
feverish haste, dimly realising that they are but the antiquated
representatives of mediaevalism, and that soon their occupation will be
gone for ever.
The reasons for the making or the breaking of human relationships can
never be formulated. The only result of such legal formulas is that
they bring law into contempt because they have to be ingeniously and
methodically cheated in order to adapt them in any degree to civilised
human needs. Thus such laws not only degrade the name of Law, but they
degrade the whole community which tolerates them. There is only one
ultimate reason for either marriage or divorce, and that is that the
two persons concerned consent to the marriage or consent to the
divorce. Why they consent is no concern of any third party, and, maybe,
they cannot even put it into words.
At the same time, let us not forget, marriage and divorce are a very
real concern of the State, and law cannot ignore either. It is the
business of the State to see to it that no interests are injured. The
contract of marriage and the contract of divorce are private matters,
but it is necessary to guard that no injury is thereby done to either
of the contracting persons, or to third parties, or to the community as
a whole. The State may have a right to say what persons are unfit for
marriage, or at all events for procreation; the State must take care
that the weaker party is not injured; the State is especially bound to
watch over the interests of children, and this involves, in the best
issue, that each child shall have two effective parents, whether or not
those parents are living together. A large scope--we are beginning to
recognise--must be left alike to freedom of marriage and freedom of
divorce, but the State must mark out the limits within which that
freedom is exercised.
The loosening hold of the State on marriage is by no means connected
with any growing sense of the value of divorce. At the best, it is
probable that divorce is merely a necessary evil. One of the chief
reasons why we should seek to promote education in relation to sexual
relationships and to inculcate the responsibilities of such
relationships, so making the approach to marriage more circumspect, is
in order to obviate the need for divorce. For divorce is always a
confession of failure. Very often, indeed, it involves not only a
confession of failure in one particular marriage but of failure for
marriage generally. One notes how often the people who fail in a first
marriage fail even more hopelessly in the second. They have chosen the
wrong partners; but one suspects that for them all partners will prove
the wrong partners. One sometimes hears nowadays that a succession of
marriage relationships is desirable in order to develop character. But
that depends on many things. It very much depends on what character
there is to develop. A man may have relationships with a hundred women
and develop much less character out of his experience, and even acquire
a much less intimate knowledge of women, than the man who has spent his
life in an endless series of adventures with one woman. It depends a
good deal on the man and not a little on the woman.
Thus the work of marriage in the world must depend entirely on the
nature of that world. A fine marriage system can only be produced by a
fine civilisation of which it is the exquisite flower. Laws cannot
better marriage; even education, by itself, is powerless, necessary as
it is in conjunction with other influences. The love-relationships of
men and women must develop freely, and with due allowance for the
variations which the complexities of civilisation demand. But these
relationships touch the whole of life at so infinite a number of points
that they cannot even develop at all save in a society that is itself
developing graciously and harmoniously. Do not expect to pluck figs
from thistles. As a society is, so will its marriages be.
[1] It is this artificial and external pressure which often produces a
revolt against marriage. The author of a remarkable paper entitled,
"Our Incestuous Marriage," in the _Forum_ (Dec., 1915), advocates a
reform of social marriage customs "in conformance with the
freedom-loving modern nature," and the introduction of "a fresh
atmosphere for married life in which personality can be made to appear
so sacred and free that marriage will be undertaken and borne as
lightly and gracefully as a secret sin."
[2] See Sir James Donaldson, _Woman: Her Position and Influence in
Ancient Greece and Rome, 1907_; also S.B. Kitchin's excellent _History
of Divorce_, 1912; this author believes that the tendency in modern
civilisation is to return to the simple principles of Roman law
involving divorce by consent. See also Havelock Ellis, _Sex in Relation
to Society_, Ch. X.
XVI
THE MEANING OF THE BIRTH-RATE
The history of educated opinion concerning the birth-rate and its
interpretation during the past seventy years is full of interest. The
actual operative factors--natural, pathological, economic, social, and
educational--in raising or lowering the birth-rate, are numerous and
complicated, and it is difficult to determine exactly how large a part
each factor plays. But without determining that at all, it is still
very instructive to observe the evolution of popular intelligent
opinion concerning the significance of a high and a low birth-rate.
Popular opinion on this matter may be said to have passed through three
stages. I am referring to Western Europe and more particularly to
England and Germany, for it must be remembered that, in this matter,
England and Germany are running a parallel course. England happens to
be, on the whole, a little ahead, having reached its period of full
expansion at a somewhat earlier period than Germany, but each people is
pursuing the same course.
In the first stage--let us say about the middle of the last century and
the succeeding thirty years--the popular attitude was one of jubilant
satisfaction in a high and rising birth-rate. There had been an immense
expansion of industry. The whole world seemed nothing but a great field
for the energetic and industrial nations to exploit. Workers were
needed to keep up with the expansion and to keep down wages to a rate
which would make industrial expansion easy; soldiers and armaments were
needed to protect the movements of expansion. It seemed to the more
exuberant spirits that a vast British Empire, or a mighty Pan-Germany,
might be expected to cover the whole world. France, with its low and
falling birth-rate, was looked down at with contempt as a decadent
country inhabited by a degenerate population. No attempts to analyse
the birth-rate, to ascertain what are really the biological, social,
and economic accompaniments of a high birth-rate, made any impression
on the popular mind. They were drowned in the general shout of
exultation.
That era of optimism was followed by a swift reaction. Towards 1880 the
upward movement of the birth-rate began to be arrested; it soon began
steadily to fall, as it is continuing to do to-day. In France it is
falling slowly, in Italy more rapidly, in England and Prussia still
more rapidly. As, however, the fall began earliest in France, the
birth-rate is lower there than in the other countries named; for the
same reason it is lower in England than in Prussia, although England
stands in this respect at almost exactly the same distance from Prussia
to-day as thirty years ago, the fall having occurred at the same rate
in both countries. It is quite possible that in the future it may
become more rapid in Prussia than in England, for the birth-rate of
Berlin is lower than the birth-rate of London, and urbanisation is
proceeding at a more rapid rate in Germany than in England.
The realisation of such facts as these produced a period of pessimism
which marks the second stage in this evolution. The great movement of
expansion, which seemed to promise so much to ambitious nations anxious
for world-power, was being arrested. Moreover, it began to be realised
that the rapid growth of a community was accompanied by phenomena which
had not been foreseen by the enthusiasts of the first period of
optimism. They had argued--not indeed verbally but in effect--that the
higher the birth-rate the cheaper labour and lives would become, and
the cheaper labour and lives were, the easier it would be for a nation
with its industrial armies and its military armies to get ahead of
other rival nations. But they had not realised that, with the growth of
popular education in modern democratic states, cheap labour is no
longer willing to play without protest this humble and suffering part
in national progress. The workers of the nations began to declare,
clearly or obscurely, as they were able, that they no longer intended
to sell their labour and their lives so cheaply. The rising birth-rate
of the middle of the nineteenth century coincided with, and to a large
extent doubtless produced, the organisation of labour, trades unions,
the political activity of the working classes, Socialism, as well as
the extreme forms of Anarchism and Syndicalism. It was when these
movements began to attain a high degree of organisation and power that
the birth-rate began to decline. Thus the pessimists of the second
period were faced by horrors on both sides. On the one hand, they saw
that the ever-increasing rate of human production which seemed to them
the essential condition of national, social, even moral progress, had
not only stopped but was steadily diminishing. On the other hand, they
saw that, even in so far as it was maintained, it involved, under
modern conditions, nothing but social commotion and economic
disturbance.
There are still many pessimists of this second period alive among us,
and actively proclaiming their gospel of despair, alike in England and
in Germany. But a new generation is growing up, and this question is
now entering a third period. The new generation rejects alike the
passive optimism of the first period and the passive pessimism of the
second period. Its attitude is hopeful but it realises that mere hope
is vain unless there is clear intellectual vision and unless there is
individual and social action in accordance with that vision.
It is to-day beginning to be seen that the old notion of progress by
means of reckless multiplication is vain. It can only be effected at a
ruinous cost of death, disease, poverty, and misery. We see this in the
past history of Western Europe, as we still see it in the history of
Russia. Any progress effected along that line--if "progress" it can be
called--is now barred, for it is absolutely opposed to those democratic
conceptions which are ever gaining greater influence among us.
Moreover, we are now better able to analyse demographic phenomena and
we are no longer satisfied with any crude statements regarding the
birth-rate. We realise that they need interpretation. They have to be
considered in relation to the sex-constitution and the age-constitution
of the population, and, above all, they must be viewed in relation to
the infant mortality-rate. The bad aspect of the French birth-rate is
not so much its lowness as that it is accompanied by a high infantile
mortality. The fact that the German birth-rate is higher than the
English ceases to be a matter of satisfaction when it is realised that
German infantile mortality is vastly greater than English. A high
birth-rate is no sign of a high civilisation. But we are beginning to
feel that a high infantile death-rate is a sign of a very inferior
civilisation. A low birth-rate with a low infant death-rate not only
produces the same increase in the population as a high birth-rate with
the high death-rate, which always accompanies it (for there are no
examples of, a high birth-rate with a low death-rate), but it produces
it in a way which is far more worthy of our admiration in this matter
than the way of Russia and China where opposite conditions prevail.[1]
It used to be thought that small families were immoral. We now begin to
see that it was the large families of old which were immoral. The
excessive birth-rate of the early industrial period was directly
stimulated by selfishness. There were no laws against child-labour;
children were produced that they might be sent out, when little more
than babies, to the factories and the mines to increase their parents'
incomes. The diminished birth-rate has accompanied higher moral
transformation. It has introduced a finer economy into life, diminished
death, disease, and misery. It is indirectly, and even directly,
improving the quality of the race. The very fact that children are born
at longer intervals is not only beneficial to the mother's health, and
therefore to the children's general welfare, but it has been proved to
have a marked and prolonged influence on the physical development of
children.
Social progress, and a higher civilisation, we thus see, involve a
reduced birth-rate and a reduced death-rate; the fewer the children
born, the fewer the risks of death, disease, and misery to the children
that are born. The fact that civilisation involves small families is
clearly shown by the tendency of the educated and upper social classes
to have small families. As the proletariat class becomes educated and
elevated, disciplined to refinement and to foresight--as it were
aristocratised--it also has small families. Civilisational progress is
here in a line with biological progress. The lower organisms spawn
their progeny in thousands, the higher mammals produce but one or two
at a time. The higher the race the fewer the offspring.
Thus diminution in quantity is throughout associated with augmentation
in quality. Quality rather than quantity is the racial ideal now set
before us, and it is an ideal which, as we are beginning to learn, it
is possible to cultivate, both individually and socially. The day is
coming, as Engel remarks in his useful book on _The Elements of Child
Protection_, when fatherhood and motherhood will only be permitted to
the strong. That is why the new science of eugenics or racial hygiene
is acquiring so immense an importance. In the past racial selection has
been carried out crudely by the destructive, wasteful, and expensive
method of elimination, through death. In the future it will be carried
out far more effectively by conscious and deliberate selection,
exercised not merely before birth, but before conception and even
before mating. It is idle to suppose that such a change can be exerted
by mere legislation, for which, besides, our scientific knowledge is
still inadequate. We cannot, indeed, desire any compulsory elimination
of the unfit or any regulated breeding of the fit. Such notions are
idle. Man can only be bred from within, through the medium of his
intelligence and will, working together under the control of a high
sense of responsibility. Galton, who recognised the futility of mere
legislation to elevate the race, believed that the hope of the future
lay in eugenics becoming a part of religion. The good of the race lies,
not in the production of a super-man, but of a super-humanity. This can
only be attained through personal individual development, the increase
of knowledge, the sense of responsibility towards the race, enabling
men to act in accordance with responsibility. The leadership in
civilisation belongs not to the nation with the highest birth-rate but
to the nation which has thus learnt to produce the finest men and
women.
[1] For a more detailed discussion of these points see the author's
_Task of Social Hygiene_.
XVII
CIVILISATION AND THE BIRTH-RATE
It was inevitable that the Great War of to-day should lead to an
outcry, in all the countries engaged, for more children and larger
families. In Germany and in Austria, in France and in England,
panic-stricken fanatics are found who preach to the people that the
birth-rate is falling and the nation is decaying. No scheme is too wild
for the supposed benefit of the country in a fierce coming fight for
commercial supremacy, as well as with due regard to the requirements in
cannon fodder of another Great War twenty years hence.
It may be well, however, to pause before we listen to these Quixotic
plans.[1] We may then find reason to think, not only that any attempt
to arrest the falling birth-rate is scarcely likely to be effective in
view of the fact that it affects not one country only but all the
countries that count, but that even if it could be successful it would
be mischievous. Whatever the results of the War may be, one result
is fairly certain and that is that, under the most favourable
circumstances, every country will emerge laden with misery and debt;
whatever prosperity may follow, living will be expensive for a long
time to come and the incomes of all classes heavily burdened. A Bounty
on Babies would hardly make up for these difficulties. The happy
family, under the conditions that seem to be immediately ahead of us,
is likely to be the small family. The large family--as indeed has been
the case in the past--is likely to be visited by disease and death.