MARRIAGE
Forty years ago it would have been possible to say that all
encouragements to marriage necessarily meant increasing the birth
rate. Economic and other causes contribute to the decline of both
marriage and birth-rates. In this chapter I am not concerned with
the discouragements to race increase. I remark elsewhere on the
absence of national inspiration to race improvement. I am at present
concerned only with marriage as the medium for procreation, no other
aspect of marriage is the concern of Eugenists. To encourage those
marriages which will tend to produce a noble race might well befit the
consideration of a great people. The views uttered here, while I think
they would be largely shared by Eugenists as a whole, are more or less
personal to the writer who alone is responsible for their statement.
The legitimatisation in some way of the illegitimate seems to me a
necessary, urgent duty of the State. The stigma, implying moral blame
and sometimes meeting with actual ill-treatment on that account, is as
unjust and undeserved as anything that can be imagined. To overcome
the difficulty by making the marriage of the parents the sole method
of removing the reproach seems to me as unjust as it is illogical.
There is no sense in making a child suffer unnecessarily. The
absence of a home with a pair of loving parents is often the natural
sufferings inflicted on a "natural" child. We ought not to encourage
any discrimination between the adopted and the unadopted illegitimate
child. Public opinion must learn to regard all children from the moment
of their birth as having an inherent right to the best possible welcome
and the treatment best fitted to make them desirable citizens. Eugenics
studies the parents and on occasion challenges their right to produce
seed, and one of its basic reasons for doing so must inevitably be that
there can be no post-natal challenge to the child's right to exist.
Illegitimacy however greatly deprecated morally has justified itself
historically. It has produced some of earth's chosen heroes. It
can be condemned ethically because it so often inflicts hardship,
privation and misery on the unhappy mother and the innocent child. That
subsequent marriage of the parents should bring into the family records
the acknowledged previous offspring is obvious common sense, but the
child whose father refuses to do its mother the sometimes doubtful
"honour" of marriage should be regarded in this respect as a child
whose father is dead. As our records demand a name for the father,
"Anon" should serve where paternity is doubtful and the real father's
name should be acknowledged in every official document in every case
where paternity orders are obtained. In other words illegitimacy
should be abolished and, marriage or no marriage, every child should be
duly entitled to every right of inheritance, etc., which the laws at
present confine to the fruit of wedlock. It is not the form of marriage
or its absence but the racial result with which Eugenics is concerned.
Morality, religion, or the law which holds society together may have
its reproach, its deprecatory warnings, and even its punishments for
_parents_ who transgress its conventions, but humanity demands that no
stone shall be thrown at the _child_.
Eugenics is so seriously concerned with the race that it cannot accept
the pretentious puerilities which so often masquerade under the title
of marriage-law reforms. The mere refusal of a marriage certificate
to couples who cannot pass certain medical shibboleths, while their
offspring is unconsidered (except in so far as it demands immediate
public assistance) seems to be a mockery of a serious subject. The
marriage of the unfit is the concern of the Eugenists primarily
because deception on either side may lead to terrible evil. Physical
examinations and medical certificates before marriage are an urgent
necessity--not as a bar to marriage but as a hindrance to deceit. Wives
must know the man they are marrying. Men must be informed what kind
of wife is hidden beneath the attractive dress. A danger of marriage
is that a perfectly capable healthy person may unsuspectingly marry
an impotent, barren or deformed consort. Love capable of conquering a
wholesome physical repulsion is one thing; love, blinded by custom,
delivered bound into the hands of disease is a vile thing incapable
of defence. Partners for life can even now demand a certificate on
the portal of marriage, but public opinion and legislation must make
such certificates an essential preliminary to the marriage contract.
All legal barriers to breaking an engagement on grounds of physical
and mental ill-health must be swept away, and the enlightened public
must be led to learn that some promises are better broken than kept.
If these ante-matrimonial conditions are observed Eugenists will look
with a charitable if discouraging glance at marriages of the unfit.
Marriage between two "unfit" persons can be defended on very many
grounds so long as children are not born. It is, generally speaking,
improbable that the unfit at their worst will either be drawn to each
other or that they will wish to enter on any career which may tend
to deprive them of what vitality they still possess. Most often such
unions would be inevitably fruitless whatever vain attempts were made
to make the dry bones live. Such unions would in nearly every instance
simply mean that to prevent scandal a form of marriage is gone through
and thereafter two weaklings give each other the comfort of communion;
their common diet is suited to their needs, they live (as far as
they can afford it) in an atmosphere adapted to their complaint. I do
not envy the state of soul of their critics who would mar the placid
satisfaction of mutual comfort which would solace their declining
childless days.
The union of the fit and the unfit is a calamity or a catastrophe in
cases of knowledge, it is a crime where the victim is deceived into
ignorance. The union of two unfit persons entered into in complete
knowledge will be an infinitely smaller evil.
To make marriage attractive we must very greatly increase the
facilities for unmaking it, and we must lay down some general
principles for its healthy continuance. The absolute right of a woman
to her own person, and her prerogative to refuse to bear children, seem
elementary conditions of civilised wedlock. Woman must be protected
from outrage, be she wife or not. A married woman must have the same
right over her own person and her own children that an unmarried woman
has over hers. It is an unmistakable slight on marriage to compel a
woman to relinquish any of the legal or social rights she would enjoy
if unmarried. We cannot afford to throw these obstacles in the way of
marriage, we want the best women to marry and not to abstain on account
of the altogether unnecessary and unnatural disabilities which laws and
men have made.
Eugenists are willing to concede that divorce should be cheap, easy and
free from shameful scandal. This can only be done however without grave
injustice to women and the race if, apart from religious and moral
considerations, the family is made the first consideration. The problem
is largely an economic one. It is not likely that the State willingly
intends to take upon itself the burden of maintaining thousands of
wives unable to maintain themselves discarded by husbands wealthy
enough to incur new responsibilities and expense. Whether marriage
should be regarded as giving a claim to equal shares in the property
and income of either partner is worthy of discussion. It is likely
enough that the thinking woman of the present day and her successors
will insist on wages for wives, wages for motherhood, and wages for
housekeeping, and that these stipulations will receive the sanction
of State law wherever they are reasonably scheduled and definitely
approved. The children of divorced parents occupy an onerous position.
Mr. Henry James, in "What Maisie Knew," has touched convincingly on
this point. It cannot be dismissed as unimportant for there is hardly
a single good environment in children's lives so potent as that of
a happy home in which the two parents' love for each other is only
rivalled by their united love for the young lives their love has so
miraculously created. But there is no worse condition for children than
the home of hate. Divorce may be horrid, but the atmosphere of love
turned to indifference and hate is hell for all who breathe there.
While marriage does not exhaust all the possibilities of increasing
the race it may be said to be not only the best but the only socially
desirable way. Preventing divorce, or railing marriage round with
difficulties not only encourages illicit relations outside marriage,
it inevitably tends to prevent marriages being as fecund as the
interests of the race demands. There is no need to sigh for a uniform
marriage-law. If the ideal rule could be discovered it would be a pity
not to make it universal. States which have experimented under present
conditions become valuable examples or warnings, and the only need is
that the least enlightened (or the least speculative) State should
come into line with the most advanced without undue delay. Fortunately
already there has been a number of very interesting enterprises by
individual States, and the time is ripe for the more general adoption
of those marriage laws which have given general satisfaction where
tried.
The "age of consent" and the age of marriage must be brought to a
common minimum. If a girl is mature enough for one she is mature enough
for the other. The condition of parental consent seems at first glance
an anachronism, but may have some Eugenic value if modified to mean
that the age of consent can be pre-dated in exceptional cases.
No husband or wife should be tied for life to a person who develops
symptoms of such diseases as tuberculosis, syphilis, chronic alcoholism
and the like. Felony and even incurable laziness or incapacity should
be good grounds for divorce. There is no necessary connection between
Socialism and Eugenics but neither is there any essential antagonism.
Eugenics recognises the responsibilities of parenthood and to that
extent is individualistic; it claims also that the children born to
all men, rich or poor, are bound to be born as healthy as advancing
science can make them. That is why Eugenics is sometimes regarded as
socialistic, but we have long ago decided that health is a national
concern and therefore the State builds hospitals, passes sanitary laws
and insists on the notification of certain diseases. In a Republic it
ought not to be necessary to say that classes should not exist. At
the risk of accentuating the socialistic accusation it has to be made
plain that matrimonial selection must ignore distinctions of wealth
and class and creed. The fit must wed the fittest, that is the keynote
of Eugenics. Eugenics speaks with no uncertain voice on the "Colour
question"--every race must work out its own salvation, and in the
interests of each race there must be no intermarrying. It is a healthy
and natural objection which causes a white woman to shudder at the idea
of a mixed marriage. The mating of a black woman with a white man is
seldom a wedding, it generally means degradation to both and excessive
suffering to the victims--the woman and the child.
After we have done all we can to make marriage a more perfect
institution we are only beginning the ideal of Eugenic life. We have
to know more than we know at present of what characteristics are best
combined with what others, and to know which unions are fraught with
dangers both to the partners and still more to the offspring. The
old Stirpiculturists have very much to say on the subject of "likes
and contrasts" from the days of Byrd Powell up till the time when
scientific Eugenics under Sir Francis Galton gave new light to the
study: Phrenology, freed from its showman and charlatan element, may
yet help us in our quest. For there is no divorce law which can ever
cure the ills of ill-assorted marriage. Our ignorance may not be
criminal, it is nevertheless deplorable. Science gathers increasing
information about all other things and we spend our millions on
investigating the prevention of utilisation of waste, shall we not
hope that this great institution of marriage may too in its turn be
the subject of our scientists', philosophers' and statisticians'
concern. Marriage has its origin in the profoundest needs of social
man. The _raison d'etre_ of marriage is human happiness now and in the
generations to follow. Throwing legislative obstacles in the way of
marriage has never had any effect except the increase of illegitimacy.
The scientific remedy here as elsewhere is enlightenment. We have
to safeguard the race and educate the present generation. We cannot
tell those who would marry more than we know ourselves, but every
ascertained fact and every reasonable probability about marriage
should be at the disposal of every candidate for the "holy order." The
mere necessity of systematising our knowledge ready for distribution
will be a gain, the sum of actual fact about the mating of various
temperaments and characteristics may be larger than we think. Anyhow
it offers a promising field of research. Eugenics will encourage the
endowment of such knowledge, it will seek subsidies from the State
towards its acquisition, it will strive to popularise it in every way
until it will be much rarer than it is to-day unhappily to hear the
complaints "If youth but knew," and "It might have been."