First, the limiting of population by the will of human individuals. In
the beginning men stole fire from the gods; but life they allowed the
Almighty to continue to dispense at his own inscrutable pleasure, while
they remained his pleased but puzzled agents in its transmission. It
was only in the eighties of the last century, after a hundred thousand
years, that man hit upon the idea and the practice of controlling life
as he had controlled fire. From the beginning, he had planted the
fire-seed according to his own purpose and social need. And now at last
he has come to look upon the life-seed as not simply in his keeping as
a trust for another, but as his own property to control in the interest
of his own future. Can human audacity reach higher? Can the assumption
of divine and creative responsibility by man out-strip this latest act
of self-government? From beast to citizen, did we say? But have we not
found the process during the last four hundred years to be from
citizenship to godship, from creature to creator? It was one of your
American reformers who entitled a book _Man as Social Creator_. From
beast to citizen seemed dull enough; but from citizen to God--what
intoxication of zest does this thought engender! Can the creature dare
it? Is this the great venture? Is this the meaning of the travail of
the ages? Or is it only a process from citizen to man, from tamed beast
to free spirit feeling the Soul of All at the inmost centre of himself,
and finding the means at last of incarnating that soul in the
community, in politics, trade, and domestic life? Howsoever the new
facts and the newer outlook are to be interpreted, it becomes quite
clear that if civilization was the taming of beasts, something that is
not civilization has begun to assert itself. The liberating of
citizens, as it moves to triumphant attainment, must scrap many an
institution, many a habit, and set up the reverse of many a rule of
conduct. We have indeed reached a new era, one which is not that of
taming animals, when young women can--and know that they can--as
war-brides strike against the labor of maternity and against the
foreseen horror of a fate for one's offspring such as they would never
choose for the fruit of their love.
But, secondly, close upon the invention of means for controlling the
transmission of life has followed the idea that this control shall not
rest with the individuals most intimately concerned, but with the will
of the community--of the nation--of federated humanity. If a man has no
exclusive right to do as he pleases with his power of labor, to
withhold it or direct it irrespective of the general welfare and the
will of the commonweal, how much less, say the advocates of eugenic
marriage, shall men and women be permitted to follow their own whim and
their selfish pleasure as regards the use or waste of the power to
communicate life? This new doctrine that men are only trustees for the
nation and posterity in their central power to control the future
quantity and quality of human beings whom they may bring into
existence, recognizes no division of society into the tamed and the
tamers. There is no class suggested of monopolists of social power who
will regulate the rest of the community, as the owner of cattle
controls the breeding of them. The general will of the community,
administered under diffused public opinion and through the educated
judgment of the individual himself, will decide. Only in cases of what
are agreed to be downright crimes will the law step in to condemn and
prevent, and then only through agents who are directly accountable to
an enlightened and alert public opinion. The retaining of this new
mastery of man over the quantity and quality of human life, by the
communal conscience against all monopolists, is the transcendent
feature of the new order. But if this be so, then trade, our system of
producing and distributing wealth, ceases to be merely a question of
the control of labor and becomes a question of the control of the
transmission of human life. Such control might have been accounted a
possible privilege among Virginian breeders of slaves. But so to regard
it seems monstrous, now that chattel slavery has been universally
condemned, thanks to the triumphant levellers of the last hundred
years. What is more, all trade is beginning to be regarded as a
question ultimately, not of the manufacture of machines and their
products, nor of the propagation of plants and animals, but of the
begetting of spiritual agents, who in their turn are to become the
makers and masters of the universe in which they are to live.
The third characteristic event of our century which is to help us to
slough off civilization, as our ancestors ten thousand years ago rid
themselves of the wild-beast features of barbarism and savagery, is the
awakening of women. Their claim to social initiative and responsibility
is the extremest possible reach of democratic self-assertion. The
remarkable peculiarity of their entrance into trade is not, however,
that they are women, but that they are the one half of mankind who have
never worked for hire, but always from love, and who have desired the
wage less than the approval of those they served. The morals of trade,
as it has existed under the relation of master to wage-earner, even the
ethics of trades-unionism, cannot survive the censure of women, who on
other principles demand for themselves the right of maintenance by the
state to protect them in the bearing and rearing of children and the
making of homes, and the nursing of the wounded and the sick. Now that
women no longer allow themselves as social agents to be ignored, they
will insist that not only the morals of marriage and of democratic
relations must become humane, but that all trade, as well as all
legislation, must be guided by the eugenic motive.