Accepting it as a fact that in the families of our higher classes the

average number is distinctly smaller than in the families of our lower

classes, let us look for a moment at some of the causes creating this

difference. First, in the higher classes men may have mistresses whose

children are unacknowledged; and frequently they form the marriage tie

with heiresses whose hereditary tendency is necessarily—as expounded by

Francis Galton—towards sterility. Second, women of the higher classes

are often delicate. They cannot support the strain of frequent

maternity. Is this a condition that, in an advancing civilization, will

persist? By no means. The ideal of womanhood, as of manhood, points to

strength, not weakness—“a combination of brain power and skill with

bodily health and vigour. Many intellectual men are physically robust

and capable in a polygamous state of patriarchal propagation.”

(_Over-population_, John M. Robertson.) And it is impossible to doubt

that a rational education, embracing free play to activities hitherto

denied to the sex, and promoting physical development, will lift women

to a superior level of health and of physiological capacity. Third, the

higher classes avail themselves to some extent of neo-Malthusian

preventive checks, whereas the mass of the people are either ignorant of

them or opposed to their use. Fourth, enforced celibacy in the case of a

large proportion of women of the cultured classes is a cause of

relatively fewer numbers. Obviously it is from the “warrens of the poor”

that prolific life persistently springs. There we have the highest rate

of genesis; and as the refined restrain propagation and limit their

numbers, the poor enter the breach and fill up the ranks from their own

inferior stock. Now, mark the result. The individuating process is

checked, and ultimately fails, through the crowding out of the

individuated. What occurs, naturally, inevitably, by the action of the

process is a gradual subsidence, finally a limiting of the individuating

factor, the very social force to which Herbert Spencer directs

attention! Surely it suffices to point out “that no theory of the

ultimate effects of mere refinement on rate of increase can give us help

while nine-tenths of the human race are not refined, and not visibly in

the way of becoming so.” (_Over-population_, John M. Robertson.)

We are compelled to dismiss Herbert Spencer’s “law of population” as

irrelevant to the situation, and to declare that he has no more solved

the riddle of the Sphinx than have Malthus, Darwin and Huxley.

The population problem, as it faces us to-day, is serious beyond all

comparison. It is impossible to over-estimate the importance of finding

its true solution. But while thousands of men and women are ready now to

admit the seriousness, nowhere as yet has a movement appeared of united

action applicable and adequate to the exigency.

CHAPTER II

THE PROBLEM OF SEX

How glorious will be the awakening when man’s desires will be

honoured, his passions utilized, his labour exalted, whilst life is

loved, and ever and ever creates love afresh.—ZOLA.

The Law of Population derives its force from an innate, powerful

instinct or passion in man, the unguarded exercise of which brings about

reproduction of the species. The thing therefore of greatest importance

to general well-being is the discovery of means whereby to prevent this

imperious instinct dominating and controlling the reproductive

conditions—which imperatively need to be governed by reason and moral

sense.

The sexual instinct, irresponsibly exercised, keeps population up to the

margin of the means of subsistence—whatever that may be at the

time—perpetuates disease, constitutional weakness and inherited taint,

and frustrates the community’s best efforts to make life easier and

happier to all.

My immediate purpose is to show that the prevention of all this evil is

possible, for rational man may slowly and surely guide the above vital

instinct into a new course—a course that will lead to the redemption of

his physical nature, the purifying and elevating of his intellectual and

emotional nature, and the direct creation of social virtue and

happiness.

I must first point out the obstacles standing in the way of this

fundamental far-reaching readjustment. There is a fatal ignorance of the

true nature of the instinct in question, there is an obstinate prejudice

that prevents frank discussion of the subject, there is Puritan or

ascetic feeling that shuns pleasure as evil, and there is an optimistic

fatalism which, basing itself on Darwinian law—already superseded by

man’s interference—persists in the _laissez-faire_ policy, however

suicidal.

Sexual relations form the background of human life and are the primary

sources of our finest emotions. Therefore the instinct that prompts to

sex-union ought to hold a supremely honourable place in public

estimation, and be carefully guarded from reproach and every hurtful or

degrading condition. This great factor in physical and emotional life

stands, at present, in disgrace. It is ignominiously repressed, it

produces heart-rending misery and unmitigated evil. Publicly and in

current literature, either it is ignored (hypocritically) or misjudged

and condemned; and all the time privately it is intensely felt; and in

every direction throughout society its licentious, furtive indulgence

swirls into the vicious circles of destruction, the broken hearts and

lives of women, the fallen dignity and besmirched consciences of men.

If we look at the matter of sexual intercourse calmly and in the light

of pure reason alone, we must perceive that its intrinsic qualities are

good, not evil. It creates happiness in the giving and receiving of

pleasure, and the physiological exaltation connected with pleasure

promotes individual health and buoyancy. To quote Herbert Spencer:

“Pleasure increases vitality and raises the tide of life.” If man “eats

and drinks immoderately,” said W. R. Greg, “nature punishes him with

dyspepsia and disease; but nature never forbids him to eat when he is

hungry and to drink when he is thirsty, provided he does so with

discretion. Indeed, she punishes him equally if he abstains, as if he

exceeds.” Mr. Greg further showed that the action of nature is precisely

similar in respect of the sexual function. If man indulges to excess, he

is punished by premature exhaustion, with appropriate maladies, not

otherwise however. On the contrary, enforced and total abstinence is

punished often, if not habitually, by “nervous disturbance and suffering

and by functional disorder.” (_Enigmas of Life_, Chapter II.) Observe

also the sexual desire “is the especial one of all our animal wants

which is redeemed from animalism by being blended with our strongest and

least selfish affections; which is ennobled by its associations in a way

in which the appetites of eating and drinking and sleeping can never be

ennobled in a degree to which the pleasures of the eye and ear can be

ennobled only by assiduous and lofty culture.” (_Enigmas of Life._ W. R.

Greg, p. 71.) We have no fastidious recoil from eating and drinking

because these are merely animal functions. We take pains to improve our

methods of preparing food, and we embellish our repasts with

super-sensual surroundings in order to elevate the nutritive functions

and free them from grossness or brutality. The fundamentally animal

nature of sexual passion does not imply brutality, it is sociable to a

far greater degree than eating or drinking, and this element of

sociality purifies and ennobles, causing the function to become the

basis of tender unselfish love. In its physiological aspect we may rest

assured that the average normal human being has as little inherent

tendency to sexual excess as to gluttony or drunkenness.

But apart from the question of excess, an attitude of mind towards the

whole subject is common which must be condemned. This attitude consists

of an element of shame, misnamed delicacy, and a sense of moral

superiority. Women chiefly cherish the feeling, but men pay homage to

it, with the result that in no friendly communion of men and women does

it seem compatible with good taste to discuss questions of sex.

All vulgar allusions to love, all flippant talk on the subject of sex

are distinctly contrary to good taste, they dishonour human nature, but

I submit that it is an outrage on common sense, and an immoral action,

when students of the Population—or any other grave social question—allow

this spurious delicacy to interfere with their facing the whole facts of

life, or to bias judgment in reasoning from the facts.

On the publication of my previous volume, _Scientific Meliorism and the

Evolution of Happiness_, in 1885, a woman of superior intellect and

attainments reviewed the book. One passage in her criticism stands thus:

“A certain instinct that in such matters the instinct of reprobation is

as healthy as it is superficially unreasonable, may make one sicken at

the suggestions of neo-Malthusianism.” (_The Academy_ of May 15th,

1886.) Such squeamishness is no indication of health or good taste. Its

unreasonableness condemns it, and the source from which it springs is

prejudice induced through specific conditions. The reviewer appears to

suspect as much, for, later she remarks: “One cannot put down the book

without a greatly increased sense of the supreme necessity of

criticizing all established theories and institutions and of the supreme

duty of refraining from precipitate action.” This is a sentiment one can

endorse, and I appeal to all my readers, especially to women, to refrain

from forming any judgment on any part of this difficult, all-important

problem, until they have mastered the subject in all its aspects. To

pursue the opposite course is to act irrationally and immorally. It

causes to spring up in other minds the prejudice which distorts and

disguises truth.

In nutritive functions, all repulsive animalism becomes overborne, as

human nature refines and civilizes, and in a profounder sense the

brutality of sex-passion vanishes through the growth of a higher love,

which has for its dominant quality—not eagerness for possession—but

unselfish tenderness. This tenderness, permeating the individual and

extending its benign influence into society, issues in the gentle

manners and virtuous actions that seem to spring directly from a

universal principle of sympathy and love.

The scientific exposition of the phenomena has long been before the

public. G. H. Lewes, in his _Problems of Life and Mind_, demonstrated

that whilst the individual functions of man (alimentation being one of

these) arise in relation to the cosmos, his general functions, including

sex-appetite, arise in relation to the social medium, and “animal

impulses become blended with human emotions,” until “in process of

evolution, starting from the merely animal appetite of sexuality, we

arrive at the purest and most far-reaching tenderness.” The social

instincts, which he calls analogues of the individual instincts, tend

more and more to make “sociality dominate animality and thus subordinate

personality to humanity.” (_Problems of Life and Mind_, vol. 1, p. 159.)

It is only recently that the full significance of these facts has begun

to influence general thought and to create a revolt against the

unscientific attitude of mind that covers the sexual instinct with

contumely and hypocritical disdain. There dawns in consequence a new

light upon the afflicting problem of our social impurity. It is seen

that the horrible struggle for existence which makes grief and pain,

exhausting mental effort and physical restraint, enter so largely into

the lot of unhappy man, is the paramount evil to cast out. “The

wonderful cycles of normal life are for ever clean and pure.” (_The New

Spirit_, Havelock Ellis.) And with far more of sex-union—especially for

the young—and all the tender social joys that emanate from that union,

and far more of ease and happiness in life, there becomes possible a

great increase of goodness.[2]

Footnote 2:

It is well to know moments of material happiness, since they teach us

where to look for loftier joys.—_Wisdom and Destiny_, by Maurice

Maeterlinck.

The late James Hinton spoke truly of the matter when he said: “Sensuous

pleasure will be to the moral life of the future as sense-impressions

are to the knowledge of the present, and with the same history. It will

not be a thing put aside as evil or degrading or misleading, but

recognized as the very basis and means of the life, and used with

enhancements and multiplied powers undreamt of by us.” And again, “This

is what sets the soul on fire—the union of goodness and pleasure. It is

a new possibility, a hope we never saw before, a means whereby all may

be brought into goodness.” (_The Law Breaker_, pp. 275, 236.) The key to

the position, he points out, is the taking of pleasure unselfishly and

with complete regard to the happiness of others.

The region of sex is indeed to this day unreclaimed, but, as Mr. Ellis

asks: “Why should the sweetening breath of science be guarded from this

spot? Our attitude towards this part of life affects profoundly our

attitude towards life altogether.” (_The New Spirit_, pp. 127, 125).

Which of us has not felt the truth of that deep saying of Thoreau’s that

“for him to whom sex is impure there are no flowers in nature.”

It is precisely here that development in the sense of purity gives a

sure hope of moral regeneration. And very remarkable is it that as in

the old days when prophetic poetry took the lead in all religious

reforms so now we have art in the van of social reform boldly

confronting the great enemies of progress—ignorance, pride, prejudice

and malicious insinuation. When Ibsen’s “Ghosts” was first put upon the

stage of a London theatre, a dramatic critic delivered himself thus: “It

is a dream of revolt—the revolt of the ‘joy of life’ against the gloom

of hidebound, conventional morality, the revolt of the natural man and

woman, the revolt of the individual against the oppression of social

prejudice. The joy of life, the joy of life—it rings like a clarion

through the play.” (_Star_ of March 14th, 1891.) The fine women of

Ibsen’s creation speak out upon questions of sex with a pure, earnest

candour that breathes a new morality, and this moral element is one of

the central features in Whitman’s attitude towards sex. For the lover,

there is nothing in the loved one impure or unclean; a breath of passion

has passed over, and all things are sweet. For most of us this influence

spreads no farther, for the man of strong moral instinct it covers all

human things in infinitely widening circles; his heart goes out to every

creature that shares the loved one’s delicious humanity, henceforth

there is nothing human that he cannot touch with reverence and love.

_Leaves of Grass_ is penetrated by this moral element. (_The New

Spirit_, Havelock Ellis, p. 123.)

Walt Whitman himself says: “Difficult as it will be, it has become, in

my opinion, imperative to achieve a shifted attitude from superior men

and women towards the thought and fact of sexuality as an element in

character, personality, the emotions, and a theme in literature.” (_How

I made a Book._ An Essay by Walt Whitman.)

The principles underlying the new morality may be thus stated: Goodness

does not consist in starving or denying any normal animal appetite,

therefore chastity in the sense of total abstinence is essentially

immoral. Life is not so prodigal of joys that man can wisely forego any

source of innocent happiness, hence asceticism has no place in a

rational theory and code of morals. The course for rational man to adopt

in reference to sexual appetite is duly to satisfy and regulate it; and

by removing every loathsome condition that superinduces degradation, to

compel it to raise the tide of life in promoting individual comfort and

general virtue.

To the reader who grasps the population problem it may seem that this

moral code would place society on the horns of a painful dilemma, for

while morality is said to require a closer union between the sexes than

has hitherto prevailed, propagation—which is the actual result of that

union—must be limited to an extent hitherto unknown, and by many people

deemed impossible of attainment. By its patient investigations of

nature, however, science here comes to the rescue of those whose

standpoint in viewing the sexual problem is one of ardent sympathy with

the essential needs and the moral aspirations of man in a social

position truly pathetic.

Physiology has revealed that sexual organs are naturally divided into

amative and reproductive organs, each class functionally distinct from

the other. Amative organs relate primarily to sexual union, while

reproductive organs relate primarily to impregnation and gestation. The

process of reproduction may take place without use of the amative organs

by simply bringing spermatozoa to ova (this has been done), and on the

other hand the amative organs can be exercised without effecting

reproduction. Sexual intercourse and procreation are not vitally

related, as they are ordinarily assumed to be.

Moreover, the instincts connected with sexual union and with offspring

are separate and distinct. In popular, confused thought, a reproductive

instinct is attributed to animals and man. In reality, no direct

instinct to reproduce the species exists. Animals unite sexually from an

instinct directed to a pleasurable exercise of function; and although,

in man, the relation has been made complex by his knowledge of the facts

of reproduction and of social life, the sexual instinct is connected

solely with pleasure and social feeling—not with reproduction. On the

other hand, instincts associated with the presence and nurture of the

young are not sexual or related to sexual passion. Therefore any

doctrine requiring man’s exercise of the sexual function to be

restricted to the end of reproduction is without justification in nature

and directly conflicts with the facts of life.

The sexual act, in the natural order of things, is only occasionally in

accidental relation to the reproductive process, for with married people

in a thousand acts only a dozen may be reproductive. If social morality

then requires the satisfaction of normal sexual feeling—and I think I

have shown this to be the case—the desideratum is to prevent at will

instead of leaving to accident the above occasional relation, and make

the separation between amative and reproductive conditions as complete

as their functional separation.

An American writer has well said: “If there is one social phenomenon

which human ingenuity ought to bring completely under the control of the

will, it is the phenomenon of procreation.” “Just as everyone is his own

judge of how much he shall eat and drink, of what commodities he wants

to render life enjoyable, so everyone should be his own judge of how

large a family he desires, and should have power in the same degree to

leave off when the requisite number is reached.” (Lester F. Ward.

_Dynamic Sociology_, vol. 2, p. 465.) The Bible Communists of Oneida

Creek practised voluntary control over the propagative function during

thirty years with marked success. The number of births was regulated in

accordance with the wishes of the community, and such careful attention

was paid to the laws of heredity that no children of defective organisms

or unsound constitutions were born. Were man universally intelligent and

morally self-controlled, the knowledge of physiological facts and of

invention applied to those facts would suffice to create general

spontaneous limitation of the birth-rate and hygienic propagation of

species. But one has only to think of the battered humanity in the back

slums of every great city—the physical, mental and moral weaklings of

our degraded populace—to realize that it is fantastic folly to expect

individual intelligence under vicious and utterly depressing conditions,

to counteract habit and save society from a rising tide of overwhelming

numbers, the product of random pregnancy and sportive chance.

It cannot be a solution nor even a relief to the population difficulty

that the intelligent—comparatively few—should limit their families so

long as the masses refuse or fail to limit theirs. When society,

becoming fully alive to the imminent danger of a too rapid birth-rate

solves the population and social problems combined—in the only way

possible—it will facilitate and promote the use of scientific checks to

conception, and, if necessary, exact their adoption by some legislative

device. (See _Social Control of the Birth-rate_, by G. A. Gaskell.)

By the aid of these personal means of avoiding or preventing conception

the desired complete separation of amative and reproductive conditions

is effected. Love is set free to rule in its own domain, and reason

controls procreation to the infinite benefit of all future generations.

In an article by Mr. J. Holt Schooling in the _Contemporary Review_ for

February, 1902, entitled “The Natural Increase of Three Populations,” it

is shown how widely in the United Kingdom the use of preventive checks

has spread within the last twenty years. The writer says in comparing

the birth-rates of Germany, England and France since 1880: “There has

been a fall in the birth-rate during each period in each country. But

England’s fall has been larger than all; larger than the fall in the

French birth-rate. During 1880–1884 there were 323 births per year per

10,000 of our population; during 1895–1899 there were only 291 births

per year per 10,000 of population—a yearly fall of 32 births per 10,000

of population. France’s fall was 28 births and Germany’s fall was only

10 births, although Germany’s birth-rate was higher throughout than that

of England or of France.” This is very satisfactory, and in regard to

the strength of a nation that depends upon the adults, and there are

more adults in a population where the children are fewer. The death-rate

in England during the last twenty years has been always the lowest of

the three countries.

At the present moment, society has no scientific sex-philosophy

whatever. It affects to be governed by Puritanism—a vague doctrine

belonging to the past history of the race and not in connexion with any

ethical code directed to the development of goodness through a careful

regard to the happiness of man and the satisfaction of his normal human

nature. Puritanism, whether affected or real, spreads abroad hypocrisy,

deceit, lying; it tends to licentiousness in men and the utter

defilement of women, to social disorder and decay. Above all, it

frustrates the development of that higher love, which, having animalism

allied, but subordinate, fills the mind with exquisite emotion and

creates unselfish delights.

Many years ago Miss Martineau wrote: “A thing to be carefully remembered

is that asceticism and licentiousness universally co-exist. All

experience proves this, and every principle of human nature might

prophesy the proof. Passions and emotions cannot be extinguished by

general rules.” (_How to observe Morals and Manners_, p. 169.)

Puritanism ignores the sexual needs of the young. In a scientific age

man is bound to recognize physiological reasons for early satisfaction

of the sexual appetite and physiological reasons for delayed parentage.

Of the former, I have here to say that an early moderate stimulation of

the female sexual organs (after puberty is reached) tends, by the law of

exercise promoting development of structure, to make parturition in

mature life easy and safe; and that the healthy functional and emotional

life of love and gratified passion is the best preventive of hysteria,

chlorosis, love melancholy, and other unhappy ailments to which our

young women are cruelly and barbarously exposed, and which, I do not

hesitate to say, make them in many cases feel their youth to be an

almost insufferable martyrdom.

There are no less serious sexual evils which overtake masculine youth,

if continent, namely, persistent and miserable cravings, abnormally

directed instinct, spermatorrhoea, self-abuse; and these are usually

hidden from sight and knowledge in consequence of a feeling that, in

sexual matters, adults have no sympathy with the young.

In _Lecky’s History of European Morals_, vol. 2, p. 301, prostitution is

thus referred to:—“However persistently society may ignore this form of

vice, it exists, nevertheless, and on the most gigantic scale, and an

evil rarely assumes such inveterate and perverting forms as when it is

shrouded in obscurity and veiled by a hypocritical appearance of

unconsciousness. The existence in England of unhappy women, sunk in the

very lowest depths of vice and misery ... shows what an appalling amount

of moral evil is festering uncontrolled, undiscussed and unalleviated

under the fair surface of decorous society.” The number of London

prostitutes was estimated at 80,000 in the year 1870. Since then, it has

probably increased. In Paris, according to Von Dettingen, the actual

number at that period was upwards of 60,000; in Berlin, 25,000 to

30,000. In Hamburg, in 1860, every ninth woman above the age of 15 was a

prostitute, and in Leipzig the women depending principally or

exclusively on prostitution was estimated at 2,000. This field of

prostitution encloses whole armies of women finding there their only

means of earning a miserable livelihood and a corresponding number of

victims claimed by death and disease. (_Woman in the Past, Present and

Future._ August Bebel, pp. 100–101.)

The prostitute, in her thousands; the married drudge, weary of

child-bearing; the desolate old maid; these are all alike victims to

social oppression. They are compelled to abstain from, or compelled to

engage in, a specific function which is only natural, pleasurable,

healthful and virtuous in the absence of all tyranny. Love to be real

must be prompted by personal desire, and free to express itself in

unhurtful conditions: I mean conditions that involve individual liberty,

social respect and human dignity. The facts of prostitution alone would

amply suffice to put Puritanism out of court in social reform. As a

result of conduct, it has no control over vicious propensities, whilst

it restrains tormentingly impulses that are normal and virtuous, that

need only fitting conditions of healthful freedom.

Discarding asceticism and conventional purism as alike immoral, the

social reforms that are based on a knowledge of human nature and a

knowledge of the possibilities allied with conscious evolution, will

bring all the institutions of our social life into accordance with the

needs of the individual; and one essential condition of happy life is

sexual love, with such union of the sexes as conforms to the general or

collective interests.

In view of the law of population, and the fact that science has made

plain how practically to separate the amative from the reproductive

conditions of physical union, the love of the sexes can harmonize with

the highest interests of our collective social life, and eugenics, _not

sexual love_, may become paramount in generation.

What social morality requires is that the forces of philoprogenitiveness

and a public conscience combined should dominate the function of

reproduction, while love is left free from coercive control in the

sphere of individual life.

CHAPTER III

EUGENICS OR STIRPICULTURE

The first step towards the reduction of disease is beginning at the

beginning to provide for the health of the unborn.—Dr. RICHARDSON.

The whole theory concerning heredity and its marvellous influence for

good or evil is a nauseous draught for mankind to swallow. No wonder we

revolt instinctively from a doctrine that charges tender parents with

transmitting an evil heritage to the offspring they passionately love.

“Although many important books draw attention to the facts, as far as

they are ascertained, these momentous facts have as yet made no

impression on the general mind.” (_Scientific Meliorism and the

Evolution of Happiness_, p. 329.) This statement is no longer true. It

was written in 1884, and since then immense strides have been made in

the realization of the action of heredity. The subject is frequently and

persistently brought forward now, and urged upon the attention of the

public. Zola’s _mère idée_ is not found only in French fiction, the new

Russian school of fiction is permeated by it; and even in England some

novelists, following in the footsteps of George Eliot, are assuming a

scientific attitude towards life, and the facts of heredity are not

ignored.

Moreover, in science and in all high-class criticism of life the

doctrine of heredity is directly taught.

Apart from purely literary work, the examination of criminal statistics

as a whole, and the practical observations of physicians, doctors,

dentists, schoolmasters, poor-guardians, systematized and made public at

congresses and stored in scientific handbooks so inexpensive as to be

well within reach of all students—these, I say, combine to impress upon

the general mind the conviction that racial degeneracy is a palpable

fact; and that inheritance is prime factor in the degenerating process.

And recently indeed a suspicion of danger in over-estimating this factor

has been publicly expressed. Whereas formerly, it is said, a child was

supposed to be born with a mind like a clean sheet of paper, on whose

fair surface we might write what we chose, opinion points in the present

day to an opposite extreme, viz., this, that the hereditary tendencies

born with the child determine its future career, and that education

cannot modify this destiny in any essential respect. Now, to disallow

the importance of education as also a prime factor in progress is an

error of judgment; but so long as the human race continues scourged by

sickness, martyred by pain, demoralized by disease and innate debility,

and decimated by premature death, it is not possible for thinkers to

over-estimate the profound significance for weal or woe of this question

of heredity.

Where individual life is not menaced by poverty or destitution, disease

is the bane of existence, the barrier to physical comfort and to both

mental and moral advance. Alas! how few of us have any permanent

possession of sound health. In spite of medical science, sanitary

protection, progress made during the last hundred years in knowledge of

pathological conditions, and vast resources now at our command for

subduing and mitigating every form of physical evil, disease dogs our

footsteps from infancy to maturity and onwards to the grave. We have the

young attacked by consumption, the middle-aged suffering from failing

health, the aged struck by paralysis or bowed down by rheumatism; and

everywhere we meet husbands and wives permanently saddened by the loss

of the chosen companion of their life, and mothers whose light-hearted

buoyancy died out for ever when the babe, prized beyond all treasure,

was snatched from their arms to be laid in our appallingly numerous

children’s graves.

In order to form an approximately correct conception of disease, we must

glance for a moment at the conditions of health. Life in all its forms,

physical or mental, morbid or healthy, is in close relation to the

individual organism and external forces. Health, as the consequence and

evidence of a successful adaptation to the conditions of existence,

implies the preservation, well-being and development of the organism;

while disease marks a failure in organic adaptation to external

conditions, and leads to disorder, decay and death.

If we could perceive all the conditions, outward and inward, and take

them into account, a distinct line of causation would become apparent.

We should find disease no more an accident than the storm that breaks

upon the seaboard or the volcanic flames that burst from the mountain

top. The extreme complexity and delicacy of biological phenomena

precludes a wide grasp of conditions in individual cases, but scientific

investigation has established the point that of the antecedents to

disease the largest proportion is some heritage of weakness transmitted

from parents—some disabilities for healthy life resulting from a bad

descent.

When, for instance, mental anxiety produced by adverse circumstances is

said to have made a man mad, there is implied some inherent infirmity of

nervous element which has co-operated. “Were the nervous system in a

state of perfect soundness and in possession of that reserve power which

it then has of adapting itself, within certain limits, to the varying

external conditions, it is probable,” says Maudsley, “that the most

unfavourable circumstances would not disturb permanently the relation

and initiate mental disease. But when unfavourable action from without

conspires with an infirmity of nature within, then the conditions of

disorder are established and a discord or madness is produced.” (_The

Physiology and Pathology of the Mind_, p. 199.)

Thus although outward circumstances often decide the character of a

disease, inherited infirmity is its primary cause. A being liable to

madness, if subjected to anxiety, may, under different conditions,

acquire not madness but consumption. A child may fall a victim to the

special ailment from which one or both parents suffered; but equally it

is possible that disease in him may assume a totally different form. All

that can be affirmed with certainty is this: of diseased parents the

offspring invariably inherit a constitution liable to “some kind of

morbid degeneration, or a constitution destitute of that reserve power

necessary to meet the trying occasions of life!”

The trying occasions of life have multiplied with every new complexity

in social structure; and there has been no corresponding increase of

constitutional strength; but, on the contrary, a growing feebleness of

physique and instability of nerve-function. “Our children in these

times,” remarks Dr. Richardson, “are our reproach. Where is there a

healthy child? You may put before me a child showing to the unskilled

mind no trace of disease.... It is sure to have some inherited failure.

We are as yet unacquainted with all the phenomena of disease that pass

in the hereditary line.... We admit, as proved, scrofula or struma,

cancer, consumption, epilepsy, rheumatism, gout. It would be wrong to

limit the hereditary proclivities of disease to this list. The further

my own observations extend, the stronger is the impression made on my

mind that the majority of the phenomena of disease have hereditariness

of character.” (_Diseases of Modern Life_, p. 38.) Sir James Paget and

Sir William Jenner gave evidence of a similar kind before a Committee of

the House of Lords in 1882. From the former eminent physician’s speech I

may quote one passage: “We now know that certain diseases of the lungs,

liver and spleen are all of syphilitic origin, and the mortality from

syphilis in its later forms is every year found to be larger and larger,

by its being found to be the source of a number of diseases which

previously were referred to other origins.” (_The Times_ Report, August

11th, 1882.)

In August Bebel’s work on _Woman, her Position in the Past, Present and

Future_, this passage occurs: “With regard to the decimating effects of

venereal disease, we will only mention that in England between 1857 and

1865 the authenticated cases which ended fatally amounted to over

12,000, among which no fewer than 69 per cent. were children under

twelve months, the victims of parental infection.” (p. 101.)

Of the original source from which syphilis sprang, of its implication in

the sex problem, and of the ultimate eradication of its virus—to be

attained only by the true solution of the sex problem—we cannot here

speak; the point under immediate consideration is the fact that the

civilized races of mankind persist in propagating and perpetuating

disease. They unscrupulously bring into the world individual organisms

that are pre-destined to failure because not endowed with the potential

qualities indispensable to complete and successful life.

In America the same conditions are noted and publicly referred to. Mr.

Nathan Allen, M.D., before a medical society at Massachusetts, reported:

“A gradual change is taking place in the organization of our New England

people—a change which has occurred principally within the last two or

three generations. The nervous temperament with all its advantages and

disadvantages is becoming too predominant for other parts of the body.

The frame-work of the body generally is not so large ... the countenance

is paler, the features are more pointed and not so expressive of health.

We have a larger class of diseases arising from general debility ... we

have more disease of the brain and nervous system, more sudden deaths

from apoplexy, paralysis, and also diseases of the heart. In sound

healthy stock we have in a far higher degree the recuperative powers of

nature; while the original constitution is feeble, diseases of almost

every kind become complicated, and their treatment more difficult as

well as doubtful in result.”

Laws of inheritance affect the moral as well as the physical and mental

health of the nation. Their action is fatally legible in the public

records of crime. Not that many criminals inherit the actual attributes

of crime—brutality, cruelty, malignity, propensity to abnormal sexual

practices—these develop through the interaction of external with

internal forces—but the ordinary criminal is born deficient in the

elemental qualities necessary to the establishment of the average moral

nature.

From observations carried on in English prisons, it appears that in

these days of careful school-board education 25 per cent. of prisoners

can neither read nor write, and a certain number are quite incapable of

receiving and benefiting by school instruction. “The memory and

reasoning powers are so utterly feeble that attempts to school them is a

waste of time.” (_Crime and its Causes_, William Douglas Morrison, of

H.M. Prison, Wandsworth, p. 195.) Intellectually, criminals are

“unquestionably less gifted than the rest of the community”; emotionally

they “have the family sentiment only feebly developed,” and morally the

will is “morbidly variable.” A prisoner may be animated by good

resolutions, anxious to do what is right, often possessing a sense of

moral responsibility, yet may plunge again and again into crime from the

absence of a sustained power of volition. “Persons afflicted in this way

are generally convicted for crimes of violence, such as assault,

manslaughter, murder. They experience real sentiments of remorse, but

neither remorse nor penitence enables them to grapple with their evil

star. The will is stricken with disease, and the man is dashed hither

and thither a helpless wreck on the sea of life.”

The harmony of the social organism depends upon congruity of thought and

feeling in its members and upon action made promptly conformable through

exercise of the power of control centred in the inner part or spiritual

nature of man.

A criminal is an unsocial man, an undeveloped being, one, generally

speaking, whose pregenital stock was below par, and failed in the

conservation, development and transmission of a physical, mental and

moral capacity equalling that of the average of his race. The physical

debility or inherited tendency to nerve weakness—so universal in the

present day—has clearly a causal relation with the increase of crime

deplored by the principal authorities on the subject in Europe and

America.

In the United States we are told by Mr. D. A. Wells and by Mr. Howard

Wines, an eminent specialist in criminal matters, that crime is steadily

increasing at a faster rate than in due proportion to the increase of

population. Nearly all the chief statisticians abroad tell the same

tale. Dr. Mischler, of Vienna, and Professor Von Liszt, of Marburg, draw

a deplorable picture of the increase of crime in Germany. In France, the

criminal problem is as formidable and perplexing as in Germany. M. Henri

Joli estimates that crime has increased 133 per cent. within the last

half century, and is steadily rising. Taking Victoria as a typical

Australasian colony, we find that even in the antipodes, which are not

vexed to the same extent as Europe with social and economic

difficulties, crime is persistently raising its head ... it is a more

menacing danger among the Victorian Colonists than it is at home.

(_Crime and its Causes_, W. D. Morrison. Published in 1891, pp. 12 and

13.)

While physical degeneracy creates crime, a non-moral life on the other

hand causes further physical deterioration. The pursuit of wealth for

purely personal ends is pre-eminently anti-social. Breadth of thought

and social feeling grow impossible to the man whose life is devoted to

the business of amassing riches; and Dr. Henry Maudsley gives it as his

conviction, based upon wide observation of family life, that such men

are extremely unlikely to beget healthy children. In cases where the

father has toiled upwards from poverty to vast wealth, “I have witnessed

the results,” he says, “in a degeneracy mental and physical of his

offspring which has sometimes gone as far as extinction of the family in

the third or fourth generation. I cannot but think after what I have

seen that the extreme passion for getting rich does predispose to mental

degeneration in the offspring, either to moral defect or to moral and

intellectual deficiency, or to outbreaks of positive insanity under the

conditions of life.” (_The Physiology and Pathology of the Mind_, p.

206.)

This fact alone is amply sufficient to condemn an industrial system that

creates monopolies, concentrates wealth, stimulates greed, degrades the

upper classes by superfluous luxury, the lower by envy, poverty,

despair, and tends generally to physical, mental and moral decay. But

were the entire economic system judiciously reconstructed, fatal

elements would remain so long as man fails to grapple with the

biological problem and fails to bring the great life forces of

reproduction under conscientious direction and control.

Gravitation and all well studied mechanical and chemical forces have

been adapted by man to special purposes in relation with his civilized

life; even so must the sexual forces that belong to his basic existence

be in their turn dominated and made conformable with his higher moral

and spiritual needs. In this regard his primary need is that there shall

be no transmission of disease or constitutional debility from one

generation to another; but that the entire strength of the laws of

heredity shall create an improvement of stock and thereby lift humanity

to a higher level of physical health and efficiency.

In seeking the true method of attaining this end, it is our duty to look

first to the teaching of the great founders of social philosophy.

Without their invaluable services in discovering and setting forth the

one unbroken process of law which “connects all phenomena from the

motion of molecules and the courses of the suns to the phenomena of

human thought and the destinies of nations” (J. M. Robertson), no

intellects could to-day grasp the causes of misery and, conceiving the

possibility of circumventing these causes, devise a scheme of scientific

action to reverse the trend of general movement and evolve conditions of

genuine and universal happiness.

In _this_ sphere, however—the sphere of _eugenics_, or improvement of

the human stock, as also in regard to the population and sex

problems—Darwin and Herbert Spencer have failed us. The mind of the

former, habituated to dwell on the favourable aspects of the struggle

for existence during the early epochs of man’s history, was blind to the

consequences of the genesis and growth of the broadly social element in

man. Barbarous man could let cosmic forces prevail to exterminate the

weak. Sympathetic man is compelled by virtue of his enlarged subjective

nature to institute a new struggle, viz., a struggle against the

struggle for existence (a phrase used by Lange), and already his triumph

is everywhere visible in the survival of the unfit to struggle.

Darwin opposed the proposal to restrain population on the score that

this would minimize the struggle which had created civilization in the

past and which must needs, he thought, carry it on in the future, and

both Darwin and Herbert Spencer “assumed that a generalization which

sums up the progressive forces of a collectively unconscious society,

i.e. a society without the conception of evolution and of a universal

sociology, must equally sum up the progressive principles of a

collectively _conscious_ society, a society which has realized evolution

and is constructing a universal sociology. Though they themselves are

our greatest helpers towards such consciousness, they failed to realize

that our attainment of it must revolutionize human history.” (_Modern

Humanists_, J. M. Robertson, p. 234).

Turning then to less illustrious men, Mr. Francis Galton is our most

advanced teacher in the field of eugenics. He faces the problem of race

regeneration and has put forth a scheme or policy of action, resting on

Dr. Matthews Duncan’s alleged facts regarding the relative fertility in

early and late marriages. He shows that a group of a hundred mothers

whose marriages and those of their daughters should take place at the

age of twenty, would, in the course of a few generations, breed down a

group of a hundred mothers whose marriages and those of their daughters

were delayed until the age of twenty-nine. Let us then, he reasons,

promote by every means in our power the early marriage of human beings

of superior quality, whilst we discountenance early marriage in those

social members who are less favourably endowed. And “few,” he says,

“would deserve better of their country than those who determine to live

celibate lives through a reasonable conviction that their issue would

probably be less fitted than the generality to play their part as

citizens.” (_Inquiries into Human Faculty_, p. 336.)

In examination for official appointments he would have attention paid to

a candidate’s ancestral qualifications as well as his personal ability.

The man of inherited sound constitution and average ability should be

preferred to the man of superior ability who belongs to a delicate and

short-lived family. The former will in all probability become the more

valuable servant of the two. Some scheme should be devised by which to

bestow marks for family merit, to put, as it were, a guinea stamp to the

sterling guinea’s worth of natural nobility; and this, he conceives,

might set a great social avalanche in motion. It would open the eyes of

every family, and of society at large, to the importance of marriage

alliance with a good stock; it would introduce the subject of race as a

permanent topic of consideration, and lead to a careful collecting of

family histories and noting of those facts which are absolutely

necessary for guidance in right conduct. Late marriage, as advised by

Malthus, Mr. Galton utterly condemns. The prudent alone are influenced

by that doctrine, and it is, he says, a most pernicious rule of conduct

in its bearing upon race. His policy, then, is early and fruitful

marriage for the best specimens of our race, and widespread celibacy in

the case of those less highly favoured, whilst everywhere the sentiment

should prevail that _eugenics_, or the improvement of the human stock,

is the primary consideration in marriage and the guiding principle in

sex relations.

This theory I hold to be one-sided, and the policy misleading and to

some extent false. Mr. Galton ignores the fundamental principle of

social life, viz., that the happiness of all, at all times, should be

the aim and object of rational man, and he mistakes the quality of human

nature in highly civilized man. To demand celibacy of men and women

whose defective organisms it is not desirable to perpetuate, would be in

hundreds and thousands of instances to sacrifice unnecessarily present

happiness to future gain—to build up the comfort and enjoyment of coming

generations at the expense of the comfort and enjoyment of our own

generation. The sentiment of justice repudiates this action as well as

condemns the reverse position of a reckless self-indulgent procreating

to the deterioration of the human stock, whilst reason distinctly shows

that individual liberty, in respect of marriage, is a social necessity

perfectly compatible with the well-being of all. Physical regeneration

of race will not be achieved by an overstrained morality that does

violence to the emotional human nature of the normal and average man.

Mr. Galton’s system of social reform accords in some respects with that

which it is the purpose of this work to set forth. Both systems premise

teaching that it is man’s duty and within his power to improve the

physical, intellectual and moral structure of his race. He may, in part,

achieve this by intelligent forethought and careful action in exercising

the function of propagating his kind. Population must not be kept up by

consumptives or persons whose pedigree is tainted by any disease known

to be hereditary, and public opinion must enforce the necessary

restraints. (Temporary illness ought also to be considered. It is when

parents are in their best state of health only that they are morally

justified in bringing children into the world.)

Of these, celibacy is a restraint commended and advised by Mr. Galton,

whilst scientific meliorism deliberately rejects it, for celibacy is a

vital evil, destroying individual happiness and tending obviously to

social disorder. Wherever love in its highest form exists between two

individuals, union is eminently desirable; but if either or both be

afflicted by disease or hereditary taint, the sacrifice demanded of them

is to carefully abstain from giving birth to children. Whether the means

adopted be those of natural self-control or of artificial aids to

self-control will depend on the views of the individuals immediately

concerned, and in this matter society has no right of interference.

It is the business, however, of society to sweep away ignorance and make

it possible for the poor as well as the rich to enter on the right path

voluntarily, and where, from physical or moral degeneracy,

self-regulation is impossible, society must exercise authority and

coercively restrain the vital social force of propagation. It will not

be by means of the lonely lives celibacy entails that civilized men and

women will refrain from having children disqualified for useful

citizenship. We shall, to quote the late poet laureate’s words, “move

upward, working out the beast, and let the ape and tiger die,” by other

means more worthy of humanity, i.e. by socialized freedom and sex

equality; by intelligent self-control voluntarily practised (with or

without artificial appliance), and by control, enforced wherever

necessary by the State in fulfilment of its responsible duty—the careful

guardianship of the congenital blood of future generations.

In the savage epoch of our history, the force of natural selection

produced survival of the fittest. From that epoch we have long since

passed into a semi-civilized epoch in which the force of sympathetic

selection produces a miserable state of indiscriminate survival; we have

now to pass forward to the epoch in which the rational force of a wise,

intelligent selection will systematically secure the birth of the

physically fit.

CHAPTER IV

MARRIAGE

Marriage is that union of the sexes which is most in accordance with

the moral and physical necessities of human beings and which

harmonizes best with their other relations of life.—RICHARD HARTE.

It is of vast importance to bear clearly in mind that all the great

social institutions that confront us to-day are of genetic origin and

evolution. They have not been devised by man to bring about the true end

of all intelligent effort—namely, happiness. They are simply the

undesigned, unforeseen results of various natural and social forces of

the past. They survive through their tendency to maintain the existence

of the race. They subserve life, not happiness. It is not my intention

to treat marriage historically and trace back the various forms of it to

their social origins. It is sufficient to bear in mind the fact of the

natural, undevised origin of every form, including that form of monogamy

which prevails in the most civilized countries of to-day. _A priori_, we

should have expected that monogamy, being the ideal sex-union of the

civilized races of Western Europe, would have been everywhere the last

form to appear; that, in short, its fitness to survive all other forms

would be shown by lateness of development as well as by superior

qualifications for satisfying the needs of a highly developed humanity.

This is not so, however. Mr. Herbert Spencer gives reasons for believing

that monogamy dates as far back as any other marital relation. “Indeed,

certain modes of life necessitating wide dispersion such as are pursued

by the lowest forest tribes in Brazil and the interior of Borneo—modes

of life which in earlier stages of human evolution must have been

commoner than now—hinder other relations of the sexes.” (_Sociology_,

vol. i. p. 698.) Two of the lowest tribes of savages existing, the

Wood-Veddahs of Ceylon and the Bushmen of South Africa, are customarily

monogamous. It is plain, therefore, that if monogamy is to be reckoned

the final form of sexual relations, no argument can be based on any

theory of its recent date in evolution. The opinion must seek to rest

upon different ground—upon the quality of the institution, its fitness

and adequateness, not only to human needs in the present system of

society, but in the reformed system of the future.

While a number of primitive tribes are monogamous, as also are certain

monkeys and birds, many civilized peoples have adopted polygamy,

sometimes openly, at other times in a masked form. Polyandry is also a

form of marriage not uncommon among semi-civilized peoples, as the Nairs

of Malabar, the Kandyans of Ceylon and the Tibetans.

The Nairs are especially interesting because there is among them a

regulated system of complex marriage which will compare in its results

very favourably with the monogamous marriage of Western nations. The

rule of the Matriarchate prevails, “inheritance is from mother to

daughter and from the uncle to the children of the eldest sister; the

household is directed by the mother or the eldest girl; polyandry and

polygamy exist side by side or are inextricably mixed. Thus each woman

is the wife of several men, each of whom has in turn several wives.”

(Elisee Reclus, _Primitive Folk_, p. 162.) The men are under

well-understood obligations to assist in the support of the domestic

establishments, while the children look up to their mothers and uncles

as their special protectors. The result of these customs on the status

of women is most remarkable. It is said that “in no country are women

more influential and respected than in Malabar.” (Ibid. p. 156.) The

Nair lady may possess property, choose her own husbands and rule her own

children. Marriage is not, as elsewhere, the taking possession of a

woman by the man, but is really her emancipation from male thraldom. It

puts her as nearly on a footing of social equality with the man as is

possible in a semi-militant community. What is it that has decided the

selection or unconscious choice—if we may call it so—of matrimonial

usage among the various races of mankind, since no special form is

necessarily connected with the degree of general civilization? The

conditions and exigencies of social life; and as those conditions and

exigencies change in the future, matrimonial usages will also change. As

a matter of fact, every possible method, speaking generally, has been

adopted. Sometimes a regulated promiscuity—for each man claimed his

rights—sometimes the mixed polyandric and polygamic household;

occasionally simple polyandry or polygamy; at other times monogamy;

marriage experimental also, as with the Redskins of Canada, who pair and

unite for a few days, then quit each other if the trial has not proved

satisfactory to both parties; or temporary marriage as in the case of

the Jews in Morocco, who unite for three or six months according to

agreement; or free marriages as those of the Hottentots and Abyssinians,

who marry, part, and remarry at will; or partial, as the marriages of

the Assanyeh Arabs, which only bind the parties for certain days of the

week. Every possible general method, I repeat, has been tried, and when

the practice hit upon has served human needs and also promoted the

solidarity and increase of the group, it has tended to persist.

In tracing the evolution of the modern European form of monogamous

marriage, we become aware that at a very early period, and for a long

time subsequently, the wife was regarded as the absolute property of the

husband. The wife was a bought or a captured article, and like other

articles of property was at the entire disposal of the owner to use,

sell, lend or abuse as he thought fit. The Roman law makes no essential

difference between the marital law and the law of property, and modern

marriage laws in the different States of Europe and America treat the

wife as if she were in a very large degree a personal possession of her

husband.

The history of modern marriage, in short, is the history of man’s

domination of woman and the measures he has taken to assume, assert and

establish his rights of possession. Amid changing outward conditions of

life, he has made good his claim to control her destiny in accordance

with his own varying desires.

In appraising the value of our much-vaunted monogamy, we must clearly

understand that its legal basis is not, and never was, a strong personal

adhesion of sympathy and affection, but a compact respecting personal

property, involving in the cases where the “contracting parties are

possessed of wealth, both property in person and in things.” It is quite

legal, and indeed quite respectable, for marriages to be formed on a

pecuniary and social foundation, into which love does not enter. The

woman who sells herself in marriage to a man for the sake of money and

position is not regarded as a prostitute, but as a respectable, “honest”

woman who has made a “fortunate” marriage.

To understand how thoroughly marriage is based upon property and not

upon love, it should suffice to contemplate the grounds on which legal

divorce is granted. Divorce is not granted, in this country at least, on

proofs of incompatibility of nature and absence of affection, but on

proof of adultery, in which co-respondents may be compelled to

pecuniarily compensate the husband on account of having made use of his

wife without his permission as her owner. Connivance by the husband

precludes the granting of a divorce. Man’s supremacy and woman’s

subjection become evident in the fact that no amount of simple adultery

in a husband can be made the ground of a divorce, nor is a wife able to

claim any pecuniary compensation from the paramours of a husband.

Matrimony, at this epoch, is for the most part a “commercial

transaction,” but in the words of Herbert Spencer, “already increased

facilities for obtaining divorce point to the probability that whereas

in those early stages during which permanent monogamy was being evolved,

the union by law (originally the act of purchase) was regarded as the

essential part of marriage and the union by affection non-essential; and

whereas at present the union by law is thought the more important and

the union by affection the less important, there will come a time when

the union by affection will be held of primary moment, and the union by

law as of secondary moment; and hence reprobation of marital relations

in which the union by affection has dissolved. That this conclusion will

seem unacceptable to most is probable, I may say certain.” (_Principles

of Sociology_, vol. i. p. 788.)

Herbert Spencer strikes here at the very foundation of modern marriage.

Moreover, in making affection rule sexual relations, he opens up all the

possibilities of other forms of marriage than the monogamous, for

affection may not only be transitory, but unrestricted to one. In face

of the barbarous origin of marriage, there exists no reason why people

of liberal thought should make a dogged, pious stand at monogamy while

lightly dismissing promiscuity, polygamy, polyandry as disreputable

forms of sex-union. Mr. Spencer holds that “the monogamic form of the

sexual relation is manifestly the ultimate form,” but he gives no

reasons to prove his case that are not sufficiently disproved by the

form of marriage existing among the Nairs. Again, the fact of the

numerical equality of the sexes does not make monogamy the only suitable

form, although it supplies a reasonable objection to pure polygamy and

pure polyandry. Mr. Spencer says that “monogamy is a pre-requisite to a

high position of women.” Here he plainly overlooks the facts of the

respected and comparatively independent position of women among peoples

practising mixed polygamy and polyandry under fixed rules and

regulations.

With the actual facts of life before us, we are forced to admit that

under the régime of man’s dominancy and woman’s subjection, monogamy has

been gross throughout all history, while with polyandry it has not been

so. Note, in this regard, one fact alone—jealousy, that mean, selfish

emotion which destroys the happiness of so many lives, is not in

evidence among the simple polyandric Nairs. The associated husbands live

on a good understanding with one another, there is a complete absence of

jealousy. Which of us can say, in view of the monogamy that surrounds

us: Tolstoi’s graphic picture, “the wild beast of jealousy began to roar

in its den,” applies only to a marriage in fiction? It is to monogamy

that we owe the typical domestic tyrant and many tyrannous attributes

that survive in modern masculine human nature. Monogamy, too, has always

been accompanied by other sexual relations in which both sexes are

degraded and one sex is socially and physically ruined. As Mr. W. E. H.

Lecky has pointed out, monogamy on one side of the shield implies

prostitution on the other.

In its normal form, monogamy signifies the attachment of one man to one

woman, involving—first, permanent and exclusive sexual union; second,

conjoint domestic life; third, the generating and rearing of a family;

fourth, social intercourse in the class of society to which the parties

belong. Beyond these features of marriage, the economic and social

forces of the age bring about in the vast majority of marriages a

constant subjection of the wife to the husband, by reason of her being

dependent on him for her living, and a general freedom to the husband

but not to the wife to commit adultery. There is usually compelled also

lateness of marriage, which implies unhealthful, painful conditions of

life in the celibate youth of both sexes. I will ask here: Ought we to

look upon permanency and exclusiveness as essential elements in the form

of sex-union best suited to humanity at the present stage of its

evolving civilization? Permanency is necessarily essential to our ideal

of the final form of marriage, for the strongest, most valuable bond of

affection implies it, and loss of love from whatever cause is a real

calamity. But where that calamity has already befallen, for society to

enforce a mere outward permanency of the matrimonial bond is

irrational—the counterfeit union is productive only of private misery

and public disorder. And further, under our present wretched economic

conditions, the struggle for bread and absence of leisure and freedom in

the case of the workers, and, amid the upper classes, frequent financial

difficulties, false notions and customs of propriety and etiquette—all

these combine to make it rare indeed that a man or woman chances to meet

and unite with his or her counterpart or true life companion.

Commercialism is no safe guide in the quest for a vital, permanent

sex-union, and until commercialism wholly disappears, the exigencies of

life demand freedom of divorce to rectify unavoidable errors of judgment

in matrimony, and make more possible the forming of ties that are truly

and naturally permanent.

As human beings become more moral inwardly and create the outward

conditions in which they can live a truly moral existence, Mr. Emerson’s

principle that the great essentials in human conduct are to escape from

all false ties and to reveal ourselves as we are, will be more and more

acknowledged and acted upon. Great thinkers like Milton in the past and

Herbert Spencer in the present, condemn as contrary to religion and

reason a permanency that involves falsity or absence of love. “It is a

less breach of wedlock,” says Milton, “to part with wise and quiet

consent betimes, than still to foil and profane that mystery of joy and

union with a polluting sadness and perpetual distemper; for it is not

the outward continuing of marriage that keeps whole that covenant, but

whatsoever does most according to peace and love, whether in marriage or

in divorce, he it is that breaks marriage least, it being so often

written that ‘Love only is the fulfilment of every commandment.’” (John

Milton, _The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce_, chap. v.) Divorce made

attainable to all men and women, rich and poor, without any disgraceful

accompaniment, is a necessary condition of progress. And in effect, each

nation of Western Europe accepts and facilitates divorce concurrently

with its advance in civilization.

Not long ago, in my hearing, a Roman Catholic barrister, whose practice

makes him familiar with all that occurs in the Divorce Court, delivered

himself to this effect: “My church anathematises divorce, and to my mind

she is right. But I am not the fool to think that the divorce law passed

in our Statute Books in the year 1858 will ever be annulled or departed

from. In the interests of morality, the pressing desideratum is that the

basis of divorce be made the same for man and woman. It is a crying

iniquity that whereas a husband by avoiding physical force, may legally

be as unfaithful to his marriage vows as he chooses, and may tyrannize

over and trample under his feet the feelings of his wife, one single

slip in an unguarded moment on her part, one act of adultery committed,

it may be in a fit of despair, entitles him by law to repudiate her

summarily as barbarian husbands dismissed their wives.”

While permanency is eminently valuable in sexual relations, can we

venture to say the same as regards exclusiveness? This distinctive

quality of exclusiveness is not an extension of love, but a narrowing of

it down—a restraint upon personal feeling. When woman wins her freedom

and is no longer under any circumstances man’s dependent and slave, but

his friend and comrade in the battle of life, will she restrain the

physical expression of sex-love, yet fearlessly respond to all the

tender ties certain to unite her with the opposite sex? To give at

present a dogmatic reply is impossible. Personally, my instincts—so far

as I know them—accord with Herbert Spencer’s dictum: the ultimate form

of sexual relation will be monogamic; but I recognize my own

limitations. Since the women of my generation are children of

bond-slaves, hampered within and without by survivals from an epoch of

sex subjection wherein man’s dominancy superimposed upon woman a

chastity he repudiated for himself, the standpoint from which the freed

being of the future will decide her sex-morality is not in the grasp of

my apprehension.

Nevertheless, the immediate path of progress is distinctly marked out. I

agree with the author who holds the opinion that: “Better indeed were a

Saturnalia of _free_ men and women than the spectacle which, as it is,

our great cities present at night.” (Edward Carpenter.) But set women

free “from the mere cash-nexus to a husband, from the money slavery of

the streets, from the nameless terrors of social opinion, and from the

threats of the choice of perpetual virginity or perpetual bondage,” and

we need not fear for sex-morality. “Sex in man is an organized passion,

an individual need or impetus; but in woman it may more properly be

termed a constructive instinct, with the larger signification that that

involves.... Nor does she often experience that divorce between the

sentiment of love and the physical passion which is so common with men.

Sex with her is a deep and sacred instinct, carrying with it a sense of

natural purity.” (_Woman_, Edward Carpenter, p. 9.) And from woman

herself let me quote a passage occurring in a women’s journal: “Love is

an emotion separate from sex-impulse, it may or may not exist in

co-relation to it. The testimony easily taken from the lives of many

women is to the effect that love enters not into the impulse which,

active and unrestrained on the part of those to whom they are yoked for

life, has created for them a life which can be called by no name save

slavery.” (_Shafts_, October, 1895.) Again, turning to the opposite sex,

Havelock Ellis states (in his study of _Man and Woman_, Contemporary

Science Series) that: “In women men find beings who have not wandered so

far as men from the typical life of earth’s creatures; women are for men

the human embodiments of the restful responsiveness of Nature.”

I am convinced that however polygamous the male-sex—under a system of

industrial commercialism may appear—the great mass of our women are not

licentious and not polyandrous in tendency. While a Saturnalia of free

men and women would, as compared with present sexual conditions, be a

preferable evil, we need not in our forecast of the future dread such a

Saturnalia, or face its possibility. It is a libel on humanity to assume

that no self-restraints are inherent to withhold mankind from sexual

excesses when freed from control by Church and State. And although it

might be said that “the growing complexity of man’s nature would be

likely to lead him into more rather than fewer sex relations, on the

other hand it is obvious that as the depth and subtlety of any

attachment that really holds him increases, so does such attachment

become more permanent and durable and less likely to be realized in a

number of persons.... In man and woman we find a distinct tendency

towards the formation of this double unit of wedded life ... and while

we do not want to stamp such natural unions with any false

irrevocability or dogmatic exclusiveness, what we do want is a

recognition to-day of the tendency to their formation as a natural fact

independent of any artificial laws.” (_Marriage_, Edward Carpenter, p.

31.)

The natural restraints or checks upon undue indulgence in

sex-intercourse extend from the physical or material plane to the

spiritual plane. These are—considerations of health; feelings of

unselfishness and social duty; and a spiritual, i.e. an ideal,

conception of humanity and of all the manifold relations of life.

Unselfishness is pre-eminently the natural check and regulator of sex

relations, and not until love is emancipated from selfishness will it

reach an ideal form. If we love unselfishly we desire the happiness and

freedom of the being loved even to the extent of self-abnegation;

tyranny and jealousy become impossible. All natural checks will

necessarily strengthen and grow as humanity rises higher in the scale of

being; moreover, education is bound—under racial progress—to become to

each succeeding generation a much more adequate guide than hitherto.

Even in the present day, it would not be difficult to get youths and

girls at the age of romance to understand that “though they may have to

contend with some superfluity of passion in early years, the most

permanent and deeply-rooted desire within them will, in all probability,

lead them at last to find their complete happiness and self-fulfilment

only in a close union with a life-mate”; to understand also that

“towards this end they must be prepared to use self-control, to prevent

the aimless straying of their passions, and patience and tenderness

towards the realization of the union when its time comes.” (Edward

Carpenter.) This teaching would bring to the young a far truer

conception of the sacredness of marriage than our marriage laws and

customs give.

It must never be forgotten, however, that this question of marriage and

every other social question must be viewed in relation to kindred

topics. A sectional treatment of society will surely mislead if we fail

to recall the changes going forward in every department of life, and the

close connexion that exists between the forces of social and individual

evolution. Scientific meliorism implies a reconstruction of domestic

life; and, within the new environment, the instructing of youth and its

guidance in sex-conduct will become comparatively easy. Nor is it only

by the training and guidance of youth that marriage will be favourably

affected in a new domestic system. The tendency to tyranny within the

home—an abhorrent feature of past monogamy—will have no opportunity to

appear; and two undesirable female types—the idle fine lady and the

household drudge—will become as extinct as the dodo.

Outside the precincts of home, large social and industrial changes will

promote the disappearance of the prostitute, and finally there will

emerge the truly emancipated woman, fearless and enlightened—a capable

guide to man in the task of consciously subordinating passions that are

selfish and transitory to those deeper attachments and higher emotions

that give birth to spiritual love. “Is marriage a failure?” has been

boldly asked and widely discussed in comparatively recent years; and

that the audible answer—sadly re-echoed in thousands of hearts—was in

the affirmative, shows a wholesome awakening to facts—an awakening that

inevitably precedes all real reforms in an epoch of conscious evolution.

So permeated with selfishness is the mental atmosphere surrounding all

questions of sex that the rule of life I here indicate will be utterly

distasteful to those who accept the régime of custom. Yet as regards

morality or an ethical code, there are two, and two only, logical

attitudes of mind. Either we must think of the stamping out of all

sexual feeling on the ground of its purely animal nature, and limiting

physical union to the utmost that is compatible with perpetuation of

species; or we must think of a gradual elevating of sexual instinct and

action to a dignified position in human life with due consideration for

the desires and needs of every one after puberty is reached. The first

is practically impossible to the vast majority of the race at its

present stage of development. They would simply refuse submission to the

intolerable restraints necessitated. In effect, the ascetic answer to

problems of sex is no actual solution, but a shelving of the fundamental

question, with a tacit acceptance of the prodigious evils around us in

respect both of sex-union and the advent of children. The only rational

course is that of elevating and regulating these relations in view of

human happiness. This implies a steady repression of anti-social

emotions and persistent cultivation of unselfishness. Our marital habits

of selfish appropriation and jealous control are in direct opposition to

the moral elevation of sexual instinct. Selfishness degrades where it

penetrates, and the problem is to rescue our sexual forces from

selfishness, and utilize these forces, i.e. make them subserve the

interests of social virtue. Hitherto, they have been ignored and

neglected—a result of false thinking and ascetic teaching, while in

actual life they have run riot, creating incalculable evils.

The British race publicly professes monogamy and preaches to the young a

Puritan doctrine. Privately the drama enacted would disgrace a

civilization of the Middle Ages. In the lower classes wife-beating and

murder, in the upper classes the hideous revelations of the Divorce

Court, witness to the impurity and the misery of our boasted monogamy.

We tolerate licence, we condemn and conceal vicious propensities; we

harbour a social evil of gigantic magnitude, we permit hypocrisy to

prevail, we instigate the young to form self-interested mercantile

marriages. We are corrupt in our social life and mentally debased, for

we refuse to think out a rational code of sex morals, and without that

we shall never attain to a lofty conception, a true ideal of what life

ought to be. Our modern monogamy in its inwardness is not falsely

pictured in this indictment: “The commercialism which buys and sells all

human things; the narrow physical passion of jealousy; the petty sense

of private property in another person; social opinions and legal

enactments, have all converged to choke and suffocate wedded love in

egoism, lust and meanness.” (Edward Carpenter’s _Marriage_, p. 38.)

In view of general happiness and virtue, we must seek the abrogation of

all laws based on or involving sex-inequality. And, further, that

marriage may become transformed into a sacred, sympathetic and permanent

bond—a deeper and truer relation of life—we must seek facilities for

divorce or the abrogation of the specific law that binds beings together

for life in ill-assorted or artificial unions.

CHAPTER V

PARENTAGE

The simple fact that the birth of a human being, the image of God, as

religious people say, is in so many cases regarded as of very much

less importance than that of a domestic animal, proves the degraded

condition in which we live.—AUGUST BEBEL.

The reproduction of species yields to no other special function of life

in respect of importance and the wide scope of its vital issues.

Notwithstanding that vast numbers of illegitimate children are born in

every civilized country where monogamy reigns, this function of

reproduction is popularly regarded as allied with marriage in the order

of a natural and necessary consequence—a result irrespective of human

will. Now scientific meliorism makes a clear distinction between

marriage and parentage on the ground that, while the former

comparatively is of insignificant importance to the interests of

humanity in general, parentage is of vital moment to these interests;

moreover, between the two there exists no integral or essential

relation. On the one hand, progeny spring from unions not legalized by

marriage; on the other, many married people, swayed by motives chiefly

egoistic, but sometimes altruistic, are consciously exercising a

voluntary restraint over propagation.

The late Matthew Arnold tells us that when gazing on one occasion in

company with a benevolent man upon a multitude of slum children eaten up

with disease, half-sized, half-fed, half-clothed, neglected by their

parents, without health, without home, without hope, the good man said:

“The one thing really needful is to teach these little ones to succour

one another, if only with a cup of cold water.” Mr. Arnold promptly

rejected that theory. “So long as the multitude of these poor children

is perpetually swelling,” said he, “they must be charged with misery to

themselves and us, whether they help one another with a cup of cold

water or no, and the knowledge how to prevent them accumulating is what

we want.” That knowledge is no longer inaccessible to man. There are

known rational methods by which to keep the populating tendency within

due limits, and at the same time to promote individual prudence,

foresight and self-dependence.

Neo-Malthusianism, with its power of subjugating the law of population

and deferring parentage, is a new key to the social position, and

neo-Malthusian practice has already taken root in British society. The

discovery is of vast significance, so great are its latent possibilities

of promoting universal happiness. But as long as reproduction of human

physical life is left to haphazard, and the rule of private, personal

interests alone, without any honourable recognition, intelligent

guidance, or moral and economic support, the immediate effect on

national life is, and will continue to be, the very reverse of

beneficial.

Matthew Arnold’s exhortation in respect of the slum children was: “We

must let conscience play freely and simply upon the facts of the case;

we must listen to what it tells us of the intelligible law of things as

concerns these children, and what it tells us is that a man’s children

are not really sent any more than the pictures upon his walls or the

horses in his stable are sent, and that to bring people into the world

when one cannot afford to keep them and oneself decently, or to bring

more of them into the world than one can afford to keep thus, is by no

means an accomplishment of the Divine Will or a fulfilment of nature’s

simplest laws, but is contrary to reason and the will of God.” (_Culture

and Anarchy_, p. 246.)

This remonstrance addressed to the rich (these alone have pictures on

their walls and horses in their stables) may have had some effect, for

certain it is that in the upper classes artificial checks to conception

are now widely used, while slum children show no tendency to

proportionately diminish in number. Individuals whose standard of living

is high, and whose pecuniary means are small, or who are thoughtful,

intelligent, prudent, either refrain from marriage, or, marrying, check

propagation. The natural result is that children of the comparatively

superior types are becoming numerically weaker than children of the

thoughtless, reckless members of society who exercise their reproductive

powers to the utmost. It is supremely important that we should recognize

how parentage bears upon human life and happiness in far wider relations

than either sexual union alone or marriage alone.

Maintenance of species has hitherto been accomplished at an enormous

sacrifice of individual life. The requirement that there shall arise a

full number of adults in successive generations is fulfilled by means

which subordinate the existing and next succeeding members of the

species in various degrees. (See Herbert Spencer’s _Principles of

Sociology_, vol. i. p. 621.)

Among low forms—inferior to the human organism—the germs of new

individuals are produced in immense numbers, the larger part of the

parental substance being sometimes transformed into these germs. Birth

here may be immediately followed by the death of the parent organism,

and an immense mortality of the young may take place—consequent on

defenceless exposure, insufficient food and other untoward conditions.

“Of a million minute ova left uncared for, the majority are destroyed

before they are hatched, so that very few have considerable amounts of

individual life.” (Ibid. p. 622.)

Throughout the course of evolution the natural order in moving from

higher to higher types is a gradual decrease of this condition, viz. the

sacrifice of individual life to the life of the species, and at the same

time an increase of compensating pleasures allied with the reproductive

function. When illustrating this natural order, Herbert Spencer points

to the methods among fishes and amphibians contrasted with those among

birds and mammals. The spawn of the former when safely deposited is

generally left to its fate.[3] There is physical cost to adults with

apparently no accompanying gratifications. Birds and mammals, however,

carefully rear and tend their offspring. “The activities of parenthood

are sources of agreeable emotions, just as are the activities which

achieve self-sustentation.”

Footnote 3:

There are exceptions to the rule, as in the case of the male

stickleback.

Passing from the less intelligent vertebrates which produce many young

at short intervals and abandon them at an early age, to the more

intelligent higher vertebrates which produce few young at longer

intervals and aid them for longer periods, this principle clearly

emerges—“While the rate of juvenile mortality is diminished, there

results both a lessened physical cost of maintaining the species and an

augmented satisfaction of the affections.” (_Principles of Sociology_,

vol. i. p. 628.)

There is no reversal of this genetic order of nature in the epoch of

conscious evolution. The processes are different, because man possesses

developed intellect, aided by scientific knowledge and invention as a

new and skilled ally in the struggle to maintain his species at less and

less cost of individual life and happiness; but the general forward

movement takes precisely the same course. With the highest evolved type

of man this sacrifice of individual life to the species is reduced to a

minimum, while the interests of species are conserved in a painless, a

wholly superior manner. And, further, the entire range of domestic

feelings—parental, filial, fraternal and intimately social, become

extended and increasingly capable of bestowing enduring pleasure. The

ultimate goal is easy maintenance of species, without—to any

unpleasurable extent—subordinating single members of species to that

end.

Love of offspring, as already explained, has no reproductive instinct at

its base. It is a feeling—superimposed on organic nature—dependent on

family life or arrangements that involve parental care and more or less

of adult activity directed to the well-being of the young. This

sentiment of love of offspring or philoprogenitiveness, is well

established in the British race; but with rampant poverty in our midst,

can we wonder that in hundreds of thousands of individual cases the

paternal relation—so capable of filling the heart with tender emotions

and joy—creates an actual disgust, or a feeling of despair, malignancy,

even injustice, as is shown in the touching little satire, _Ginx’s

Baby_. Ginx frankly gave his wife notice that, as his utmost efforts

could scarcely maintain their existing family, if she ventured to

present him with any more, either single or twins ... “he would most

assuredly drown him.” Later, when the arrival of number thirteen is

imminent—the wife being unable longer to hide the impending event—Ginx

fixed his determination by much thought and a little extra drinking. He

argued thus: “He wouldn’t go on the parish. He couldn’t keep another

youngster to save his life. He had never taken charity and never would.

There was nothink to do with it but drown it.”

Nor is even the maternal relation proof against bitterness in untoward

conditions, although the feelings will be differently expressed, and may

possibly assume a pious garb. “I’ve ’ad my fifteen or my twenty on ’em,

but, thank ’eaven, the churchyard ’as stood my friend.” These or similar

words have often been heard in an English factory town. The women

speaking thus were not otherwise callous or incapable of mother-love.

They were gentle, patient, toiling drudges, who had had the

philoprogenitiveness of average human nature and the tender joys of

maternity perverted into secret care and open hypocritical cant by the

physical strain of a too-frequent child-bearing, combined with the

miseries of ceaseless labour, pinched means, and comfortless, crowded

homes.

The frequent advent of children who are unwelcome to their own parents

in a society no longer ignorant of the scientific means by which its

weakest members may avoid parentage, without any destruction of life or

any injury to sexual function, is marvellously irrational, and it

indicates divergence from the well-marked path of evolutional progress.

Opposition to neo-Malthusian practice arises from primitive conceptions

of life (conceptions antecedent to evolutional theory), while all the

various undefined scruples painfully experienced by individuals are

survivals of the sentiment allied with these false conceptions.

Prejudice dies slowly, as ignorance is dispelled by the growing light of

new knowledge.

I have shown that asceticism is an immoral principle, the action of

which tends to fill individual life with gloom and depression, and to

thwart or counteract general happiness. I have also shown the absolute

necessity for retarding the multiplication of human beings to suit the

limits of available subsistence. And now, after pointing out that

philoprogenitiveness—which is the groundwork of domestic and social

virtue, and ought to be the mainspring of reproduction of species—is

continually liable to be strained, depressed or perverted into

anti-social bitterness in parental bosoms among the lower classes, I

must ask the question: How otherwise than by the easiest method known to

science could the difficulties of the position be met and overcome?

Messrs. Patrick Geddes and J. A. Thomson, in their treatise on the

_Evolution of Sex_, urge the necessity of what they call “an ethical

rather than a mechanical prudence after marriage, of a temperance

recognized to be as binding on husband and wife as chastity on the

unmarried.” (_The Evolution of Sex_, p. 297.) But what do these

gentlemen mean by the temperance here recommended? It is surely well

known that the birth of a large family is perfectly consistent with a

sparing, most temperate exercise of the procreative function; and surely

also it would be folly on our part to look for parental conduct

controlled by ethical motive in the warrens of the poor of our large

cities, from whence springs an important section of the national life.

(_Social Control of the Birth Rate_, Pamphlet by G. A. Gaskell.)

In the homes of the upper classes, adorned with all the amenities and

refinements of civilization, parental prudence results mainly from

egoistic motive. Practical reformers will hesitate to assume that

those—the less favoured social units—are likely to surpass these in

moral elevation, and demean themselves generally in a superior manner!

But further, a parental prudence, dispensing with mechanical methods of

checking propagation, may even prove the converse of ethical conduct.

Advanced sexual morality requires a free and healthful exercise of

sexual function. That such freedom is not possible under present social

conditions is irrelevant to the question at issue; the point is that

conduct unnecessarily traversing this advanced sexual morality is not in

accordance with rationalized social ethics; it has no scientific basis.

Parental morals must conform to the principle indicated by Herbert

Spencer—reduce to a minimum the sacrifice of individual life and

happiness to the life of the species; augment to the maximum the joys of

affection involved in parental relations. This is possible to a race

among which are beings of low intelligence and unrestrained passion only

by bringing into play the laws of heredity through rational breeding.

But rational breeding depends on an appeal to ordinary egoistic motive

and practical resort to the painless mechanical means of checking

conception.

There is no general unwillingness to limit their families among the

poor; what is lacking consists simply in power of control over the

physical conditions of fertility. To see children half-starved and wives

sickly and miserable is no more pleasant to parents of the Ginx order

than to those of us who view it from a safe distance; and there is ample

intelligence to perceive the connexion between, on the one hand,

discomfort and poverty attendant on a family of ten or twelve, on the

other, comparative comfort allied with a family of only three or four.

A code of ethics covering the interests of the entire nation commands

strenuous effort on the part of all thoughtful, intelligent people to

make the artificial checks known to the thoughtless and unintelligent.

It is not by proudly rejecting scientific invention in this matter that

we shall attain to development of higher and higher types of man, but by

skilfully using it as a powerful ally in our struggle to maintain and

regenerate species at less and less cost to individual happiness.

Apart altogether from man’s partial practice of neo-Malthusian art,

under egoistic motives, civilization has created an interference with

the original order of race preservation under generous or altruistic

motive. Social feeling slowly developing revolts—in detail—from the

cruel method of the law of natural selection. It spontaneously

supersedes that law by one of sympathetic selection. But whereas the

former law issued in survival of the fittest, the latter issues day by

day in indiscriminate survival, and consequent race deterioration. A

controlled rate of increase is not therefore the only position to which

reason and science must guide us; we have further to escape from the

disastrous consequences of the above law and pass to conditions of life

evolved under the benign influence of a rational and moral law—a law of

social selection, resulting in appropriate birth, or the birth of the

socially fit.

There are thousands of our present day population with whom family life

is no whit superior to that of birds, whose pairing is immediately

followed by rapid breeding and a complete scattering of the brood when

the young are barely fledged. A wise philanthropy in line with the march

of progressive evolution may lift these thousands to the level of the

higher vertebrates, “which produce few young at longer intervals and

give them aid for longer periods.” The recalcitrant minority refusing to

practice parental prudence must be treated by society as abnormal

individuals, incapable of rising to the standard of average civilized

human nature, and these must be subjected to social restraint.

_PART III_

ABNORMAL HUMANITY

Men may rise on stepping-stones

Of their dead selves to higher things.

—From _In Memoriam_.

THE ELIMINATION OF CRIME

Many a man thinks that it is his goodness which keeps him from crime,

when it is only his full stomach. On half allowance, he would be as

ugly and knavish as anybody. Don’t mistake potatoes for

principles.—CARLYLE.

A normal child of five years once asked the meaning of this

expression—“hanging a murderer,” and after explanation said eagerly,

“But will hanging the man make that other man alive again?” On receiving

a negative reply, the remonstrance burst forth, “Then why kill him,

since when he is dead we can never make him good again?”

This is a true picture of the thinking and feeling about crime which is

natural to the best types of our present-day humanity. These demand that

our punishments shall either reform the criminal or protect society

effectively from his malfeasance. As a matter of fact, our criminal code

and whole machinery and procedure relative to crime accomplish neither,

and this is freely admitted by men whose position enables them to judge

accurately and entitles them to express an opinion.

Mr. Justice Matthew has said at the Birmingham Assizes that the present

state of the criminal law is a hundred years behind the times. Sir

Edmund Du Cane, Chairman of the Directors of Convict Prisons, says of

the solitary system practised in our penal prisons: “It is an artificial

state of existence, absolutely opposed to that which nature points out

as the condition of mental, moral and physical health.... The minds of

the prisoners become enfeebled by long-continued isolation.” In the

Official Report of the Departmental Committee on Prisons, 1895, these

words occur: “The prisoners have been treated too much as a hopeless or

worthless part of the community. The moral condition in which a large

number of prisoners leave the prison, and the serious number of

recommittals, have led us to think there is ample cause for a searching

inquiry into the main features of prison life.” The late Judge

Fitz-Stephen published his _History of the Criminal Law_ in 1883, and

pointed there to “notorious evils of which it is difficult,” said he,

“to find a satisfactory remedy.” Nevertheless, he put down his finger on

the crucial spot when he wrote “the law proceeds upon the principle that

it is morally right to hate criminals. It confirms and justifies that

sentiment by inflicting upon criminals punishment which expresses it.”

But it is not right to hate criminals. It is morally wrong, i.e. it is

contrary to these laws of nature, by which alone an elevated and happy

social life may be attained. The emotion of hatred creates vibrations

producing evil on the moral plane, as certainly as discordant sounds,

acting on sensitive ears, produce discomfort; and, if persisted in,

produce organic disorganization on the physical plane. Hence, all

punishment or legal procedure directed against crime, having hatred at

its foundation, or historic base, must fail. On the negative side,

hatred has proved ineffectual in protecting society from crime. On the

positive side, it increases the anti-social feelings, whose natural

outcome is crime, and frustrates, or annuls, the human forces of love,

which already widely existent, and swaying humanity’s best types, are

the true evolutional factors by which to annihilate crime.

Mr. Justice Matthew was simply asserting a fact of social science when

he stated that the criminal law is out of date. It consists with a

primitive stage of social life; but it is totally inconsistent with even

the semi-civilization of to-day. The fundamental discord between our

action and feeling relative to crime declares itself in the uncertainty

of a criminal’s fate and the steady survival of his type. But, my

reader, while accepting Justice Matthew’s premise, may doubt the

conclusion at which Judge Fitz-Stephen arrived—that vindictiveness or

hate lies at the root of our criminal code, and that our punishments

express it. Moreover, he may condemn by anticipation a supposed tendency

on my part to censure all punishments, and rely solely on a

_laissez-faire_ system of dealing with crime. Scientific meliorism,

however, does not imply anarchy or the absence of governing law. Its

methods repudiate the _laissez-faire_ principle in every department of

life, for this reason: Our developed faculties and accumulated knowledge

make untenable the negative or inert position. We are impelled in an

epoch of conscious evolution to take positive action favourable to

progress.

My contention is this: love of all men, not hatred of any man or class

of men ought to be the basis of our criminal code. Modern science,

experience and skill are competent to redeem the criminal class,

speaking generally, and in exceptional cases, where redemption is

impossible, can render the criminal innocuous to society, while giving

him throughout life such innocent happiness as a being organically

defective may enjoy.

This thesis embraces a very wide range of action. It means the

systematic rational treatment of evil-doers, from the refractory infant

and juvenile pickpocket to the burglar, the fraudulent bankrupt, the

felon, the traitor, the murderer, and if any exist, the born criminal.

It signifies, in short, a complete science complementary to that of true

education. For whereas the latter comprises all manner of attractive

stimuli to noble living, this is the science of necessary social

restraints to be applied in nursery, school and prison with the

universal gentleness which springs from universal love. The purpose to

be aimed at is, first, improving character by restraining obnoxious

tendencies; second, reforming character already become anti-social;

third, protecting society from all corrupt infusion that might proceed

from morally diseased character.

A leading principle of the criminal law of Great Britain is that

punishment be adjusted in proportion to the supposed magnitude of each

individual offence. If we study this principle, we must perceive the

truth of Judge Fitz-Stephen’s allegation, for what connexion has it with

the reformation of the criminal? A judge or a jury makes no attempt to

compute the amount of prison restraint and discipline necessary to

reformation, nor are they possessed of facts for forming a judgment.

Their whole attention has been focussed on the crime, not on the

character of the criminal, or the antecedent and future conditions

affecting the character. Neither does the judicial sentence connect

itself proportionately with the mischief done to society. A fraudulent

banker or commercial speculator, whose downfall involves the ruin of

thousands, is not dealt with, as compared with a petty thief, on a scale

of severity expressive of the magnitude of suffering entailed. And the

petty thief, who steals the rich man’s goods, as compared with the

criminal who beats and abuses his wife, is adjudged a severer penalty—a

measure of punishment indicating the superior value of goods over wives,

which is a sentiment appropriate only to barbarous times.

These anomalies, however, are explainable. Our laws have descended to us

from a barbarous age, when might was right, irrespective of justice; and

from a race whose punishments sprang from revenge, and were roughly

proportioned to the feeling of revenge. They are little else than

reactionary forces, of which some are always present in an inchoate

society. Their inapplicability to the task of reforming criminals is

easily proved.

In Scotland in a single year not fewer than “six hundred and ninety

persons were committed to prison who had been in confinement at least

ten times before. Of these, three hundred and ninety-three had been in

prison at least twenty times before, and twenty-three at least fifty

times!” (_Hill on Crime_, p. 28.) These figures speak for themselves.

Our whole system is glaringly unscientific. We do not remove the

conditions that act as causes of crime. We punish, and sometimes

severely, yet we let loose again offenders not one whit more prepared

than before to withstand the temptations of freedom. We calmly support

and approve an enormous expenditure of public funds upon criminals and

crime; we carefully select good men to be prison managers, officers and

chaplains; we secure cleanliness and sanitation within the prisons, and

so forth; but these efforts are utterly futile because the system is

wrong—the criminal law of Great Britain is based upon a false, an

irrational principle.

The causes of crime within our province to deal with are of a two-fold

nature—objective and subjective. Poverty, i.e. hunger and want, a slum

environment, rough handling in infancy and childhood, a mischievous

training and the absence of all conditions favourable to gentle,

virtuous life—these are some of the objective causes creating crime

which society is bound to remove. Among causes deciding the innate

character of every newly-born babe, the forces of heredity stand out

conspicuously. I have demonstrated that aggregate humanity, in a

scientific age, has the means of controlling these forces and directing

them to the production of physical, mental and moral health in the

individual, and consequently in the community. The born criminal type

may become gradually improved by careful and wise treatment under

life-long restraints. Meanwhile, to seek reformation of this type, by

prison discipline alone, and treat it by methods adapted to corrigible

culprits, is a folly dishonouring to the developed reason of man. We

have abundant evidence that the type exists. Mr. Frederick Hill, late

Inspector of Prisons, says: “Nothing has been more clearly shown in the

course of my inquiries than that crime is hereditary to a considerable

extent ... it proceeds from father to son in a long line of succession.”

(_Hill on Crime_, p. 55.) Mr. J. B. Thomson, Resident Surgeon of the

Perth Prison, states of the facts of prison life: “They press on my mind

the conviction that crime in general is a moral disease of a chronic and

congenital nature, intractable when transmitted from generation to

generation.” And Mr. George Combe, speaking of prisons in the United

States of America, wrote: “I have put the question to many keepers of

prisons whether they believed in the possibility of reforming all

offenders. From those whose minds were humane and penetrating, I have

received the answer—they did not, for experience had convinced them that

some criminals are incorrigible by any human means hitherto discovered.

These incorrigibles,” says George Combe—and this is the point to

observe, “were always found to have defective organizations; ... they

are morally idiotic; and justice, as well as humanity, dictates our

treating them as patients. They labour under great natural defects; ...

to punish them for actions proceeding from these natural defects is no

more just or beneficial to society than it would be to punish men for

having crooked spines or club feet.” (George Combe’s _Moral Philosophy_,

p. 306.) And I could refer to many more authorities on the subject were

it necessary.

Accepting the theory that our born-criminals are victims of moral

disease, the question arises—how should we treat them? Fifty years ago

we sorely maltreated our victims to mental disease. We bound them hand

and foot, we punished them sternly for their congenital defects, we

shunned and hated them, and because they were martyrs to a pitiful

disease we made them also the victims of unnecessary and cruel

sufferings. Few men to-day could glance without a shudder at the record

of our treatment of lunatics. We consign the history gladly to oblivion,

and point to changes betokening the better feeling of to-day. “No one

thinks of sending a madman to a lunatic asylum for a certain number of

days, weeks or months. We carefully ascertain that he is unfit to be at

large, and that those in whose hands we are about to place him act under

due inspection and have the knowledge and skill which afford the best

hope for his cure; that they will be kind to him, and inflict no more

pain than is necessary for his secure custody ... we leave it to them to

determine if, or when, he can be safely liberated.” (_Hill on Crime_, p.

151.)

These are the lines on which also should run our treatment of moral

disease. If a man is unfit morally to be at large, we must narrow the

conditions of his life, but make it as enjoyable within the coercive

restraints as is compatible with improvement. And on no account must we

restore his liberty until those who professionally and officially watch

his daily conduct are convinced that he will not again be likely to

abuse that liberty.

But apart altogether from individual delinquents, the subjective racial

tendency to crime demands special treatment, and in this regard I

maintain that the enlightened action of an advanced society will be

analogous to the ignorant action of an earnest church in the Middle Ages

with precisely opposite results. “The long period of the Dark Ages,

under which Europe lay, was due, I believe, in a very considerable

degree,” says Francis Galton, “to the celibacy enjoined by religious

orders on their votaries. Whenever a man or woman was possessed of a

gentle nature that fitted him or her to deeds of charity, to meditation,

to literature or to art, the social condition of the time was such that

they had no refuge elsewhere than in the bosom of the church. But the

church preached and exacted celibacy. The consequence was that these

gentle natures had no continuance, and by a policy so singularly unwise

and suicidal that I am hardly able to speak of it without impatience,

the church brutalized the breed of our forefathers. She acted as if she

aimed at selecting the rudest portion of the community to be alone the

parents of future generations. She practised the arts which breeders

would use who aimed at creating ferocious, currish and stupid natures.

No wonder that club law prevailed for centuries over Europe; the wonder

is, that enough good remained in the veins of Europeans to enable their

race to rise to its present very moderate level of natural morality.”

(_Hereditary Genius_, F. Galton, p. 356.)

A humane society, guided by rational forces in the epoch of conscious

evolution, will practise the policy of the church of the Middle Ages on

a different class of subjects. It will gather poor criminals into its

bosom, and secure for them a safe and happy refuge while exacting

celibacy. The racial blood shall not be poisoned by moral disease. The

guardians of the present-day social life dare not be careless of future

social life and the happiness of generations unborn; therefore the

criminal breed must be forcibly restrained from perpetuating its kind.

Now mark the result. Not gentle natures—as in the case of the church—but

the innately vicious natures will have no continuance. The criminal type

slowly but surely disappears.

To promote the contentment and comfort of congenital criminals within

their asylum or prison home an alternative to celibacy might be offered,

viz. surgical treatment, to render the male incapable of reproduction.

(The treatment indicated is not the operation ordinarily performed upon

some domestic animals; this, applied to human beings, would be morally

and physically injurious. Particulars of the appropriate method were

published in the _British Medical Journal_ as early as May 2, 1874, at

p. 586.) Were this course voluntarily chosen, the sexes might

intermingle without danger to posterity; and since fuller social life

tends to make all human beings happier, these convicts would become more

manageable, and coercive restraints cease to be indispensable.

But the criminal stock is not great when compared with the actual crimes

of to-day. Crime in a vast measure is simply produced by the outward

accidental conditions of life—an evil environment and a grossly

inadequate training. If we alter the environment of our masses—by

establishing a new industrial system that banishes poverty from the

land, by initiating a Malthusian and neo-Malthusian practice that puts

the physical life on a healthy basis, by creating a family life suitable

to man’s emotional nature, and supplying a true education that embraces

scientific restraints on all anti-social tendencies—then, but not till

then, will crime and the criminal type alike become things of the past.

We are surrounded to-day in our reformatories and board schools, in our

homes and on our streets, by children of naïvely-disobedient or

rebellious tendency. These are the embryo criminals of a few years

hence. When a clever romanticist makes one his hero, and describes the

development of trickiness in the child, and how he uses it as a weapon

of defence against the “polissman” whom he defies, trips up and

otherwise evades (_Cleg Kelly_, by Crockett), we read the account

without compunction, nay, we relish the humour of the situation, and

half approve the issue! Yet this assuredly is no legitimate outcome of

childish bravery and sportiveness. Our levity arises from the underlying

conviction, or the universal feeling begotten of genetic evolution, that

the policeman’s jurisdiction here is flagrantly inappropriate.

Infantile disobedience and full-fledged crime seem far apart, but they

are united by an inward deteriorating process, an outward chain of

trespasses more or less petty. The links are all there, connecting the

tender babe and fascinating street-arab with the thief and murderer.

Similarly, on the moral plane, flow the sequences of cause and effect

that bring retribution—that inalienable feature of the law of evolution.

The crime that society deplores is the natural penalty for society’s

neglect of children; and there is no escape from the penalty as long as

the cause continues. Nor can society plead ignorance here. Herbert

Spencer and Ruskin have spoken out plainly on this subject. “What we

need is cessation from all these antagonisms which keep alive the brutal

elements of human nature, and persistence in a peaceful life, giving

unchequered play to the sympathies.” (_Herbert Spencer on Arbitration._)

“It is,” says Ruskin, “the lightest way of killing to stop a man’s

breath. But if you bind up his thoughts by lack of true education, if

you blind his eyes, if you blunt his hopes, if you steal his joys, if

you stunt his body and blast his soul ... this you think no sin!”

Verily, there _is sin_, acknowledged by the noblest, wisest of men, and

brought home to us on the lips of babes—“Why kill the man, since when he

is dead we can never make him good again!”

Society has to compass the task of making men good from the beginning;

and in exceptional cases, where the task is impossible, the victims are

simply society’s patients, to be impounded without hurt. We are as able

to protect our social life from moral as from mental lunatics. The

initial step, however (hardly yet taken), is to pass from the mental

attitude of a barbarous race, whose habits of defence are those of

arbitrary punishment, to that of a civilized nation bent on reforming

its criminals, and treating its morally diseased members with uniform

humanity and brotherly love. As yet the resources of man’s reason and

scientific knowledge and aptitude have never been called into play to

devise a system of consecutive restraints on the “brutal elements,” a

system to make men good from the beginning by “working out the beast.”

The crux of the problem is how to imbue children painlessly with the

truth that social life has responsibilities and limitations, obedience

to which is indispensable. And I submit that this may be done in the

homes and nurseries of the future, under a scientifically adapted system

of training. Hard blows and even chiding tones of the human voice must

have no place in childhood’s environment, but authority may be exercised

through the use of a simple appliance for limiting infant freedom. When

baby trespasses against some natural law of health or social life, of

which he knows nothing, he is gently but promptly and firmly placed in a

baby-prison standing within reach, viz. a goodly-sized basket, high at

the sides, softly cushioned all round and weighted, so that it cannot be

overturned by the infant culprit, who, if refractory, may kick or scream

in safety there till the paroxysm passes, and he falls asleep. On waking

he recalls vaguely, when older, more clearly the occurrence, and he

becomes lightly possessed by a subtle sense of authority quite distinct

from individual kindness or unkindness. His human relations are unhurt

by the necessary training in infancy. He has been checked in wrong-doing

without any wrong association of ideas, and without an awakening of

anti-social feeling.

I have seen an ignorant nurse teach a child to seek solace for pain in

an anti-social emotion! “Beat the naughty chair that has hurt poor

baby’s head,” was the evil counsel, and the child held out to the chair

struck his tiny revengeful blows, and was kissed and caressed in

consequence. This happened in a rich man’s nursery. Could one blame the

ignorant nurse? Her infancy was passed in a city slum, and in every such

locality children swarm who freely strike out both in self-protection

and brutal aggressiveness. From birth these little ones live more or

less in an atmosphere of savage assault. Tyranny and force are the

ruling conditions of their childhood, and the natural result—under the

unalterable law of cause and effect—is this: vindictive, barbaric

feeling is carried hither and thither throughout society at large, and

degrades every social class.

When home-life in the middle classes has been reorganized, and nursery

training is the outcome of scientific thought, children there at least

will escape this taint. They will pass from nursery to schoolroom with

nerves that have never been unnecessarily jarred. They will be

physically stronger, and in temperament more serene. Reared without

harshness, they will know no craven fear; and since the native attitude

of childhood towards elders never seen angry or cross is that of

confiding love, teachers will have no difficulty in bringing into play

the tender emotions that are natural checks upon evil doing, and natural

incentives to effort in action that is right. If playfulness intrudes,

and the serious work of a class is hindered by some little urchin’s fun,

the master or mistress needs neither to scold nor to cane the offender,

for unspoken satisfaction and dissatisfaction are quickly perceived and

responded to by children unused to punishment or an elder’s frown.

But even in the schoolroom an appeal to mechanism may sometimes prove

useful. An instrument called “a characterograph” was described by its

inventor to an Edinburgh audience half a century ago. This instrument

for registering had been in use in Lady Byron’s Agricultural School at

Ealing Grove, with moral effects markedly beneficial. There were many

comments in the press of that period. It supersedes all necessity for

prizes, place-taking, or any kind of reward or punishment, and renders

unnecessary the master’s expressing anger or irritation—“the worst

example a teacher can set to his pupils.” (Mr. E. T. Craig was inventor

of the characterograph.)

If we bear in mind that the supreme object of training is _social

solidarity_, and that social solidarity rests fundamentally on tender

relations between the old, the young, and the middle-aged, we shall

recognize the wisdom of elders resigning at the earliest possible moment

all manifestations of personal authority. The average boy and girl, if

well trained, has at fifteen, or about that age, moral powers

sufficiently developed to control innate propensities. At that epoch to

the young themselves should be relegated the ruling of youthful conduct

in the interests of society. Not to the young singly, however, but in

their corporate capacity. The organizing of juvenile committees and

conduct clubs will ensue. I need not, however, treat of these here. They

belong to the subject of general education, and I am merely touching on

training in its relations to specific crime.

The point in social science to emphasize is this: At every stage of the

nation’s history its moral health or disease is the actual resultant of

previous conditions of its child-life throughout the length and breadth

of the land. At the present moment the public mind is astray on this

subject. There is no understanding of the restraints necessary on

infantile wrong-doing, the wholesome because painless checks to apply to

juvenile delinquents. Science must guide us to the right path of action,

society must enlist parental authority, or, if need be, coerce the child

to take the indicated course. By the absence of wholesome checks and the

presence of brutal conditions in childhood we suffer a vast amount of

preventible crime. We evolve the criminal by sins of omission outside

the prison; we brutalize him further inside the prison by undue,

ill-adapted restraints.

Very significant was the experience of Mr. Obermair, of the State Prison

in Munich. When appointed governor there, he found from six to seven

hundred prisoners in the worst state of insubordination, and whose

excesses he was told defied the harshest, most stringent discipline. The

prisoners were chained together. The guard consisted of about 100

soldiers, who did duty not only at the gates and round the walls, but in

the passages, and even in the workshops and dormitories; and, strangest

of all, from twenty to thirty large dogs of the bloodhound breed were

let loose at night in the passages and courts to keep watch and ward.

The place was a perfect pandemonium, comprising the worst passions, the

most slavish vices, and the most heartless tyranny within the limits of

a few acres.

Mr. Obermair quickly dispensed with dogs, and nearly all the guards. He

gradually relaxed the harsh system, and treated the prisoners with a

consideration that gained their confidence. In the year 1852 Mr. Baillie

Cochrane visited the prison, and his account is as follows: “The gates

were wide open, without any sentinel at the door, and a guard of only

twenty men idling away their time in a room off the entrance hall....

None of the doors were provided with bolts and bars; the only security

was an ordinary lock, and as in most of the rooms the key was not

turned, there was no obstacle to the men walking into the passage....

Over each workshop some of the prisoners with the best characters were

appointed overseers, and Mr. Obermair assured me that when a prisoner

transgressed a regulation, his companions told him ‘_es ist verboten_,’

and it rarely happened that he did not yield to the will of his

fellow-prisoners. Within the prison walls every description of work is

carried on ... each prisoner by occupation and industry maintains

himself. The surplus of his earnings is given him on release, which

avoids his being parted with in a state of destitution.” (This account

is taken from Herbert Spencer’s _Essay on Prison Ethics_.) It is then

clearly proved by actual experience that rough handling and brutal

words—bolts and bars and bloodhounds—are alike unnecessary in the case

of first offenders and in the case of the “desperate gang.”

But, turning once more from the criminal to the ultimate causes of

crime, these are—destitution, or more or less grinding poverty,

inherited disease, ignorance and all the degraded nurture that crushes

the humanities and develops the brutalities of man. A scientific

treatment of crime will eradicate these various causes of crime. No

summary methods are applicable. There is no short cut to the end in

view; but by patient perseverance in the scientific meliorism indicated

in my chapters on Industrial Life, Sex Relations and Parentage, and to

be further explained in those on Education and Home Life, the forces

brought into play will prove effective in social redemption. They are

essentially radical and all-embracing. Within reformatories and prisons

there may be partially supplied the training for forming and reforming

character that is nowhere present in the homes and schools of the lower

classes to-day. Those criminals who are not structurally defective may

recover moral health, and become virtuous or at least harmless social

units. In all such cases liberty should be restored; but the State can

never be justified in discharging its rescued criminals without

resources and without protection. They must be supplied with work, i.e.

some means of self-support, and guarded from dangers besetting the

critical period of liberation. The educating of ignorant criminals, the

reforming of corrigible criminals, the restraining from further crime of

incurable criminals—these are duties of the State.

The time, however distant, will finally arrive when science, applied for

generations to the task of skilfully removing all the causes of crime,

will accomplish that glorious aim. By attention to the laws of heredity,

by checking the too rapid increase of population, by the moral training

of every member of the community, and by well-ordered, happy, domestic,

industrial and social life, the criminal nature will die out, and crime

itself be simply historical—a thing to study with interest, an

extirpated social disease.

_PART IV_

EVOLUTION OF THE EMOTIONS

We must never forget that human aspirations, human ideals, are as much a

part of the phenomena which makes up this causally-connected Universe as

the instincts and appetites that are common to man and the other

animals.—DAVID G. RITCHIE.

CHAPTER I

THE SENTIMENTS OF INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS AND SOCIAL JUSTICE

The dawning century will have to undertake a new education of mankind

if we are not to relapse.... New inventions are less needed than new

ethics.—Dr. MAX NORDAU.

Herbert Spencer tells us that: “Free institutions can only be properly

worked by men, each of whom is jealous of his own rights and

sympathetically jealous of the rights of others—who will neither himself

aggress on his neighbour in small things or great, nor tolerate

aggression on them by others.”

The state of mind or sentiment to which Mr. Spencer here points is

complex. It comprises an egoism that is not anti-social, and an altruism

that is broadly social. The genesis of this sentiment is intellectual,

implying a recognition in some sort of the laws of nature, by virtue of

which individual rights do not conflict with nature’s harmonies or its

fundamental organic unity. It is possible, therefore, only to a race

comparatively advanced, i.e. intellectually endowed; but the children

and children’s children of that race may possess the sentiment of

individual rights as an instinct with no apprehension whatever of its

source or its justification. Its alliance with, and perfect conformity

to, natural law are certainly not understood, and confusion is increased

in the public mind by the unscientific teaching of the daily press.

Here, for instance, is a paragraph from a middle-class journal. “Law is

command, control. Nature is instinctive force, and can neither give nor

receive laws. There are no laws of nature, and there are no rights of

man. We are using meaningless phrases when we speak of either. Man has

no natural rights any more than the wolf and the bear. All rights are

conventional.”

Now, before man had made a direct study of nature, and, marking the

invariability of sequence in the precision of its phenomena, had

attached to that invariability the term “laws of nature,” the word “law”

denoted a lawgiver issuing arbitrary commands. It is in this primitive

sense that our journalist uses the word “law.” He entirely ignores its

appropriation by science and the modern acceptation of the term “laws of

nature.” Nature has no arbitrary commands, he says, and therefore infers

no laws. We admit the premise while denying the inference. The laws of

health are invariable, although they do not necessarily dominate, since

other and opposing laws of disorganization may at any moment get the

upper hand. Man is competent to disregard the laws of life; but if he so

acts, another course of natural order is initiated, and he becomes

subject to pathological laws which conduct him steadily to the grave.

Necessity without arbitrary command rules in the cosmos; and if

happiness, which all humanity desires, is attained, it will be by

conforming to all the laws of nature that favour that end. Within, there

are the laws of human organization, without, the laws of circumstance or

environment. The humanity that has intellect and scientific knowledge

may, by union and co-operation, take a firm advantage of these laws or

uniformities of nature and march steadily forward, controlling the

forces of nature by a willing obedience to natural law.

No sooner, observe, does this control become possible than natural

rights come into existence. Man rises in the scale of being to a sphere

of self-direction and comparative liberty. The wolf and bear and all

wild animals are on the lower level, and have no natural rights. They

are controlled by forces external to themselves, and the struggle for

existence and survival of the fittest is the law of destiny to them. It

is not so, however, with the horse, dog, cat, etc., for man has lifted

all domesticated animals from under the rule of genetic forces, and

placed them under the rule of reasoned forces. He controls their

breeding, limits their numbers, and gives them a happy life consistent

with his own. Further, he claims for them and concedes to them natural

rights; and note this point, the last phrase of our journalist’s

misleading paragraph is strictly true: “All rights are conventional.”

Convention means by tacit agreement, and it is by tacit agreement on the

part of civilized men that rights of men and rights of animals exist and

are respected. An impulse of the higher life, viz., a law of sympathy,

impels civilized man to seek happiness for other beings as well as

himself, and intelligence shows him that individual happiness promotes

general happiness, and further that no individual happiness is possible

without a certain amount of personal liberty.

Individual rights, then, are a claim for a certain amount of personal

liberty, and the sentiment of individual rights is an unconscious inward

preparedness to defend that claim. It lies at the very foundation of

modern ethics, since from it there springs the outward equipoise of

egoistic and altruistic forces, the inward, subtle, delicate sense of

equitable relations, in other words, _justice_—the moral backbone of the

modern conscience.