sex appears. The lower forms of animal and plant life often reproduce
themselves without the aid of sex, and it has even been argued that
reproduction and sex are directly antagonistic, that active propagation
is always checked when sexual differentiation is established. "The
impression one gains of sexuality," remarks Professor Coulter, foremost
of American botanists, "is that it represents reproduction under
peculiar difficulties."[1] Bacteria among primitive plants and protozoa
among primitive animals are patterns of rapid and prolific reproduction,
though sex begins to appear in a rudimentary form in very lowly forms of
life, even among the protozoa, and is at first compatible with a high
degree of reproduction. A single infusorian becomes in a week the
ancestor of millions, that is to say, of far more individuals than could
proceed under the most favourable conditions from a pair of elephants in
five centuries, while Huxley calculated that the progeny of a single
parthenogenetic aphis, under favouring circumstances, would in a few
months outweigh the whole population of China.[2] That proviso--"under
favouring conditions"--is of great importance, for it reveals the weak
point in this early method of Nature's for conducting evolution by
enormously rapid multiplication. Creatures so easily produced could be,
and were, easily destroyed; no time had been spent on imparting to them
the qualities that would enable them to lead, what we should call in our
own case, long and useful lives.
Yet the method of rapid multiplication was not readily or speedily
abandoned by Nature. Still speaking in our human way, we may say that
she tried to give it every chance. Among insects that have advanced so
far as the white ants, we find that the queen lays eggs at an enormous
rate during the whole of her active life, according to some estimates
at the rate of 80,000 a day. Even in the more primitive members of the
great vertebrate group, to which we ourselves belong, reproduction is
sometimes still on almost as vast a scale as among lower organisms.
Thus, among herrings, nearly 70,000 eggs have been found in a single
female; but the herring, nevertheless, does not tend to increase in the
seas, for it is everywhere preyed upon by whales and seals and sharks
and birds, and, not least, by man. Thus early we see the connection
between a high death-rate and a high birth-rate.
The evidence against reckless reproduction at last, however, proved
overwhelming. With whatever hesitation, Nature finally decided, once
and for all, that it was better, from every point of view, to produce a
few superior beings than a vast number of inferior beings. For while
the primary end of Nature may be said to be reproduction, there is a
secondary end of scarcely less equal urgency, and that is evolution. In
other words, while Nature seems to our human eyes to be seeking after
quantity, she is also seeking, and with ever greater eagerness, after
quality. Now the method of rapid and easy reproduction, it had become
clear, not only failed of its own end, for the inferior creatures thus
produced were unable to maintain their position in life, but it was
distinctly unfavourable to any advance in quality. The method of sexual
reproduction, which had existed in a germinal form more or less from
the beginning, asserted itself ever more emphatically, and a method
like that of parthenogenesis, or reproduction by the female unaided by
the male (illustrated by the aphis), which had lingered on even beside
sexual reproduction, absolutely died out in higher evolution. Now the
fertilisation involved by the existence of two sexes is, as Weismann
insisted, simply an arrangement which renders possible the
intermingling of two different hereditary tendencies. The object of
sex, that is to say, is by no means to aid reproduction, but rather to
subordinate and check reproduction in order to evolve higher and more
complex beings. Here we come to the great principle, which Herbert
Spencer developed at length in his _Principles of Biology_, that, as he
put it, Individuation and Genesis vary inversely, whence it followed
that advancing evolution must be accompanied by declining fertility.
Individuation, which means complexity of structure, has advanced, as
Genesis, the unrestricted tendency to mere multiplication, has receded.
This involves a diminished number of offspring, but an increased amount
of time and care in the creation and breeding of each; it involves also
that the reproductive life of the organism is shortened and more or
less confined to special periods; it begins much later, it usually ends
earlier, and even in its period of activity it tends to fall into
cycles. Nature, we see, who, at the outset, had endowed her children so
lavishly with the aptitude for multiplication, grown wiser now, expends
her fertile imagination in devising preventive checks on reproduction
for her children's use.
The result is that, though reproduction is greatly slackened, evolution
is greatly accelerated. The significance of sex, as Coulter puts it,
"lies in the fact that it makes organic evolution more rapid and far
more varied." It is scarcely necessary to emphasise that a highly
important, and, indeed, essential aspect of this greater individuation
is a higher survival value. The more complex and better equipped
creature can meet and subdue difficulties and dangers to which the more
lowly organised creature that came before--produced wholesale in a way
which Nature seems now to look back on as cheap and nasty--succumbed
helplessly without an effort. The idea of economy begins to assert
itself in the world. It became clear in the course of evolution that it
is better to produce really good and highly efficient organisms, at
whatever cost, than to be content with cheap production on a wholesale
scale. They allowed greater developmental progress to be made, and they
lasted better. Even before man began it was proved in the animal world
that the death-rate falls as the birth-rate falls.
If we wish to realise the vast progress in method which has been made,
even within the limits of the vertebrates to which we ourselves belong,
we have but to compare with the lowly herring, already cited, the
highly evolved elephant. The herring multiplies with enormous rapidity
and on a vast scale, and it possesses a very small brain, and is almost
totally unequipped to grapple with the special difficulties of its
life, to which it succumbs on a wholesale scale. A single elephant is
carried for about two years in his mother's womb, and is carefully
guarded by her for many years after birth; he possesses a large brain;
his muscular system is as remarkable for its delicacy as for its power
and is guided by the most sensitive perceptions. He is fully equipped
for all the dangers of his life, save for those which have been
introduced by the subtle devilry of modern man, and though a single
pair of elephants produces so few offspring, yet their high cost is
justified, for each of them has a reasonable chance of surviving to old
age. The contrast from the point of view of reproduction of the herring
and the elephant, the low vertebrate and the high vertebrate, well
illustrates the tendency of evolution. It clearly brings before us the
difference between Nature's earlier and later methods, the ever growing
preference for quality of offspring over quantity.
It has been necessary to touch on the wider aspects of reproduction in
Nature, even when our main concern is with particular aspects of
reproduction in man, for unless we understand the progressive tendency
of reproduction in Nature, we shall probably fail to understand it in
man. With these preliminary observations, we may now take up the
question as it affects man.
It is not easy to ascertain the exact tendencies of reproduction in our
own historical past or among the lower races of to-day. On the whole,
it seems fairly clear that, under ordinary savage and barbarous
conditions, rather more children are produced and rather more children
die than among ourselves; there is, in other words, a higher birth-rate
and a higher infantile death-rate.[3] A high birth-rate with a low
death-rate seems to have been even more exceptional than among
ourselves, for under inelastic social conditions the community cannot
adjust itself to the rapid expansion that would thus be rendered
necessary. The community contracts, as it were, on this expanding
portion and largely crushes it out of life by the forces of neglect,
poverty, and disease.[4] The only part of Europe in which we can to-day
see how this works out on a large scale is Russia, for here we find in
an exaggerated form conditions, which once tended to rule all over
Europe, side by side with the beginnings of better things, with
scientific progress and statistical observation. Yet in Russia, up till
recently, if not even still, there has only been about one doctor to
every twelve thousand inhabitants, and the witch-doctor has flourished.
Small-pox, scarlet fever, diphtheria, typhoid, and syphilis also
flourish, and not only flourish, but show an enormously higher
mortality than in other European countries. More significant still,
famine and typhus, the special disease of filth and overcrowding and
misery--both of them banished, save in the most abnormal times, from
the rest of Europe--have in modern times ravaged Russia on a vast
scale. Ignorance, superstition, insanitation, filth, bad food, impure
water, lead to a vast mortality among children which has sometimes
destroyed more than half of them before they reach the age of five; so
that, enormously high as the Russian birth-rate is, the death-rate has
sometimes exceeded it.[5] Nor is it found, as some would-be sagacious
persons confidently assert, that the high birth-rate is justified by
the better quality of the survivors. On the contrary, there is a very
large proportion of chronic and incurable diseases among the survivors;
blindness and other defects abound; and though there are many very
large and fine people in Russia, the average stature of the Russians is
lower than that of most European peoples.[6]
Russia is in the era of expanding industrialism--a fateful period for
any people, as we shall see directly--and the results resemble those
which followed, and to some extent exist still, further west. The
workers, whose hours often extended to twelve or fourteen, frequently
had no homes but slept in the factory itself, in the midst of the
machinery, or in a sort of dormitory above it, with a minimum of space
and fresh air, men and women promiscuously, on wooden shelves, one
above the other, under the eye of Government inspectors whose protests
were powerless to effect any change. This is, always and everywhere,
even among so humane a people as the Russians, the natural and
inevitable result of a high birth-rate in an era of expanding
industrialism. Here is the goal of unrestricted reproduction, the same
among men as among herrings. This is the ideal of those persons,
whether they know it or not, who in their criminal rashness would dare
to arrest that fall in the birth-rate which is now beginning to spread
its beneficent influence in every civilised land.
We have no means of ascertaining precisely the birth-rate in Western
Europe before the nineteenth century, but the estimates of the
population which have been made by the help of various data indicate
that the increase during a century was very moderate. In England, for
instance, families scarcely seem to have been very large, and, even
apart from wars, many plagues and pestilences, during the eighteenth
century more especially small-pox, constantly devastated the
population, so that, with these checks on the results of reproduction,
the population was able to adjust itself to its very gradual expansion.
The mortality fell heavily on young children, as we observe in old
family records, where we frequently find two or even three children of
the same Christian name, the first child having died and its name been
given to a successor.
During the last quarter of the eighteenth century, a new phase of
social life, profoundly affecting the reproductive habits of the
community, made its appearance in Western Europe, at first in England.
This was the new industrial era, due to the introduction of machinery.
All the social methods of gradual though awkward adaptation to a slow
expansion were dislocated. Easy expansion of population became a
possibility, for factories were constantly springing up, and "hands"
were always in demand. Moreover, these "hands" could be children for it
was possible to tend machinery at a very early age. The richest family
was the family with most children. The population began to expand
rapidly.
It was an era of prosperity. But when it began to be realised what this
meant it was seen that such "prosperity" was far from an enviable
condition. A community cannot suddenly adjust itself to a sudden
expansion, still less can it adjust itself to a continuous rapid
expansion. Disease, misery, and poverty flourished in this prosperous
new industrial era. Filth and insanitation, immorality and crime, were
fostered by overcrowding in ill-built urban areas. Ignorance and
stupidity abounded, for the child, placed in the monotonous routine of
the factory when little more than an infant, was deprived alike of the
education of the school and of the world. Higher wages brought no
higher refinement and were squandered on food and drink, on the lowest
vulgar tastes. Such "prosperity" was merely a brutalising influence; it
meant nothing for the growth of civilisation and humanity.
Then a wholesome movement of reaction set in. The betterment of the
environment--that was the great task that social pioneers and reformers
saw before them. They courageously set about the herculean task of
cleansing this Augean stable of "Prosperity." The era of sanitation
began. The endless and highly beneficent course of factory legislature
was inaugurated.[7]
That is the era which, in every progressive country of the world, we
are living in still. The final tendency of it, however, was not
foreseen by its great pioneers, or even its humble day-labourers of the
present time. For they were not attacking reproduction; they were
fighting against bad conditions, and may even have thought that they
were enabling reproduction to expand more freely. They had not realised
that to improve the environment is to check reproduction, being indeed
the one and only way in which undue reproduction can be checked. That
may be said to be an aspect of the opposition between Genesis and
Individuation, on which Herbert Spencer insisted, for by improving the
environment we necessarily improve the individual who is rooted in that
environment. It is not, we must remember, a matter of conscious and
voluntary action. That is clearly manifest by the fact that it occurs
even among the most primitive micro-organisms; when placed under
unfavourable conditions as to food and environment they tend to pass
into a reproductive phase and by sporulation or otherwise begin to
produce new individuals rapidly. It is the same in Man. Improve the
environment and reproduction is checked.[8] That is, as Professor
Benjamin Moore has said, "the simple biological reply to good economic
conditions." It is only among the poor, the ignorant, and the wretched
that reproduction flourishes. "The tendency of civilisation," as
Leroy-Beaulieu concludes, "is to reduce the birth-rate." Those who
desire a high birth-rate are desiring, whether they know it or not, the
increase of poverty, ignorance, and wretchedness.
So far we have been dealing with fundamental laws and tendencies, which
were established long before Man appeared on the earth, although Man
has often illustrated, and still illustrates, their inevitable
character. We have not been brought in contact with the influence of
conscious design and deliberate intention. At this point we reach a
totally new aspect of reproduction.
II.
THE ORIGIN AND RESULTS OF BIRTH CONTROL
In tracing the course of reproduction we have so far been concerned
with what are commonly considered the blind operations of Nature in the
absence of conscious and deliberate volition. We have seen that while
at the outset Nature seems to have impressed an immense reproductive
impetus on her creatures, all her energy since has been directed to the
imposition of preventive checks on that reproductive impetus. The end
attained by these checks has been an extreme diminution in the number
of offspring, a prolongation of the time devoted to the breeding and
care of each new member of the family, in harmony with its greatly
prolonged life, a spacing out of the intervals between the offspring,
and, as a result, a vastly greater development of each individual and
an ever better equipment for the task of living. All this was slowly
attained automatically, without any conscious volition on the part of
the individuals, even when they were human beings, who were the agents.
Now occurred a change which we may regard as, in some respects, the
most momentous sudden advance in the whole history of reproduction: the
process of reproductive progress became conscious and deliberately
volitional.
We often fancy that when natural progress becomes manifested in the
mind and will of man it is somehow unnatural. It is one of the wisest
of Shakespeare's utterances in one of the most mature of his plays that
"Nature is made better by no mean
But Nature makes that mean ...
This is an art
Which does mend Nature, change it rather, but
The art itself is Nature."
Birth control, when it ceases to be automatic and becomes conscious, is
an art. But it is an art directed precisely to the attainment of ends
which Nature has been struggling after for millions of years, and,
being consciously and deliberately an art, it is enabled to avoid many
of the pitfalls which the unconscious method falls into. It is an art,
but
"The art itself is Nature."
It is always possible for the narrow-eyed fanatic to object to the
employment of birth control, precisely as he might object to the use of
clothes, as "unnatural." But, if we look more deeply into the matter,
we see that even clothes are not truly unnatural. A vast number of
creatures may be said to be born in clothes, clothes so naturally such
that, when stripped from the animals they belong to, we are proud to
wear them ourselves. Even our own ancestors were born in clothes, which
they lost by the combined or separate action of natural selection,
sexual selection, and the environment, which action, however, has not
sufficed to abolish the desirability of clothes.[9] So that the impulse
by which we make for ourselves clothes is merely a conscious and
volitional form of an impulse which, in the absence of consciousness
and will, had acted automatically. It is just the same with the control
and limitation of reproductive activity. It is an attempt by open-eyed
intelligence and foresight to attain those ends which Nature through
untold generations has been painfully yet tirelessly struggling for.
The deliberate co-operation of Man in the natural task of birth-control
represents an identification of the human will with what we may, if we
choose, regard as the divinely appointed law of the world. We can well
believe that the great pioneers who, a century ago, acted in the spirit
of this faith may have echoed the thought of Kepler when, on discovering
his great planetary law, he exclaimed in rapture: "O God! I think Thy
thoughts after Thee."
As a matter of fact, however, it was in no such spirit of ecstasy that
the pioneers of the movement for birth control acted. The Divine
command is less likely to be heard in the whirlwind than in the still
small voice. These great pioneers were thoughtful, cautious,
hard-headed men, who spoke scarcely above a whisper, and were far too
modest to realise that a great forward movement in natural evolution
had in them begun to be manifested. Early man could not have taken this
step because it is even doubtful whether he knew that the conjunction
of the sexes had anything to do with the production of offspring, which
he was inclined to attribute to magical causes. Later, although
intelligence grew, the uncontrolled rule of the sexual impulse obtained
so firm a grip on men that they laughed at the idea that it was
possible to exercise forethought and prudence in this sphere; at the
same time religion and superstition came into action to preserve the
established tradition and to persuade people that it would be wicked
to do anything different from what they had always done. But a saner
feeling was awakening here and there, in various parts of the world. At
last, under the stress of the devastation and misery caused by the
reproductive relapse of the industrial era, this feeling, voiced by a
few distinguished men, began to take shape in action.
The pioneers were English. Among them Malthus occupies the first place.
That distinguished man, in his great and influential work, _The
Principle of Population_, in 1798, emphasised the immense importance of
foresight and self-control in procreation, and the profound
significance of birth limitation for human welfare. Malthus relied,
however, on ascetic self-restraint, a method which could only appeal to
the few; he had nothing to say for the prevention of conception in
intercourse. That was suggested, twenty years later, very cautiously by
James Mill, the father of John Stuart Mill, in the _Encyclopedia
Britannica_. Four years afterwards, Mill's friend, the Radical
reformer, Francis Place, advocated this method more clearly. Finally,
in 1831, Robert Dale Owen, the son of the great Robert Owen, published
his _Moral Physiology_, in which he set forth the ways of preventing
conception; while a little later the Drysdale brothers, ardent and
unwearying philanthropists, devoted their energies to a propaganda
which has been spreading ever since and has now conquered the whole
civilised world.