CHILDREN--THE _CUL-DE-SAC_ OF ALL REFORMS
'An early result, partly of her sex, partly of her passive strain
is the founding, through the instrumentality of the first savage
Mother, of a new and beautiful social state--Domesticity. . . . One
day there appears in this roofless room that which is to teach the
teachers of the world--a Little Child.' --HENRY DRUMMOND.
'Every good woman is by nature a mother, and finds best in
maternity her social and moral salvation. She shall be saved in
child-bearing.' --GRANT ALLEN.
'Children are a man's power and his honour.' --HOBBES.
I
TO BEGET OR NOT TO BEGET--THE QUESTION OF THE DAY
'Marriage is therefore rooted in family rather than family in
marriage.' --WESTERMARCK.
If we could leave children out of the question, the readjustment of the
conjugal conditions would be simple enough. But Amoret has truly called
this problem 'the _cul-de-sac_ of all reforms.' Any system, whatever its
form, whether leasehold marriage, free love, polygamy, polyandry, or
duogamy--any scheme that tends to confuse the fatherhood of the child,
or deprive the child of the solid advantages of a permanent home--is
hopeless from the start. This, however, obviously applies only to the
couples who have children. Formerly those who married expected to have a
family, and were disappointed if this hope were not fulfilled. That it
was possible to limit the number of their offspring, or even to avoid
parenthood entirely, was of course unknown to them. Nowadays all this is
changed, and the doctrines of Malthus obtain everywhere.
Bernard Shaw says: 'The artificial sterilisation of matrimony is the
most revolutionary discovery of the nineteenth century.' It certainly
makes possible the revolutionary suggestions about marriage, or rather
_would_ make them more feasible if the 'discovery' were universally put
into practice.
Let us take it then, that where children are desired no relaxation of
our present marriage system is advisable, and that people who wish to
experiment in new matrimonial schemes must resolutely avoid the
'_cul-de-sac_ of all reforms,' and remain childless.
To beget or not to beget--that is the question nowadays, and a very
vexed question it is. There is hardly a subject on which opinions are
more diversified. Some people regard parenthood as the most horrible
disaster; others think that to die without creating is to have lived
uselessly. I heard a woman say once: 'I hate children; it's much better
to keep a few dear dogs,' and she was not an ignorant or devitalised
girl, but a healthy, sensible, fully developed young woman of
six-and-twenty. Not long ago another woman, in announcing her engagement
to me, added in the same breath that she didn't mean to have children on
any account. Mr George Moore, in that sinister and repulsive book, _The
Confessions of a Young Man_ says: 'That I may die childless, that when
my hour comes I may turn my face to the wall, saying, I have not
increased the great evil of human life--then, though I were murderer,
fornicator, thief, and liar, my sins shall melt even as a cloud. But he
who dies with children about him, though his life were in all else an
excellent deed, shall be held accursed by the truly wise, and the stain
upon him shall endure for ever.' (One wonders on reading this why Mr
Moore continues to perpetuate the great evil of human life in his own
person, when he could so easily end his existence without paining
anyone!)
But I have heard many people, both men and women, married and single,
say that without children marriage is meaningless, in which opinion I
heartily concur. More than one young woman dowered with generous blood,
vitality, and courage has confided in me that whether she should marry
or not she wished to be a mother at all costs. It is one of the
disastrous results of men's shrinking from matrimony that fine women
like these must deliberately stifle this glorious passion of motherhood,
or pay a terrible price for expressing it--a price exacted not only from
themselves but from the child to whom they have given life. Such women,
however, are not often met with.
And now we come to the reason why people do not want children. 'We can't
afford it' is the plea most frequently heard, and a despicably selfish
one it is. I have said previously that every man can afford to
marry--when he meets the right woman. To this I add that every man who
can afford a wife can also afford a child. People who are too selfish to
afford a couple of children (or at least one, sad though it be for the
youngster to have neither brother nor sister) ought not to marry at all.
Some people say they are happy enough without little ones. A good many
women deliberately forgo their prospect of motherhood because it would
interrupt their pleasures, spoil the hunting season, interfere with
their desire to travel or their craze for games. Perhaps some day they
may think too high a price was paid for indulgence in these hobbies.
Others honestly dislike children, and would be entirely at a loss in
possessing them. It is as well that such people should have none: the
poor little unwanted ones can always be recognised.
'Delicacy' is another plea put forward by neurotic women who are not one
whit too delicate to bear a child. Where the ill-health is genuine, or
some constitutional weakness or disorder is present, of course this plea
is sensible enough. An apparently sane woman once told me quite
seriously that she would have liked a child, only she often had a bad
cough in the winter, and would not risk the possibility of 'handing it
on.' Her lungs were perfectly sound, it was merely a temporary cough
that troubled her. On the same occasion another woman present remarked
that she too would have liked a child, only 'there wouldn't be room in
our flat, and it is so convenient, we shouldn't like to leave it.' My
state of mind on hearing these remarks could only have been adequately
expressed by knocking these two ladies down and trampling on them, and
as this course would not have found favour with our hostess, I had to
content myself with merely being rather rude to them.
I believe the root of the whole matter is that the maternal instinct is
not so general as formerly. The causes for this I am not wise enough to
determine. It may be due to the greater enfranchisement of women, the
widening of women's lives and ambitions, the new occupations, the new
interests which have so transformed feminine existence. Maternity and
the grievous and irksome processes of its accomplishment are apt to
interfere with all this. The instinct of motherhood is still doubtless
innate in the majority; when the babies come, often unwelcome, the
instinct reasserts itself as a rule, but it is certainly not general for
the average woman of to-day to feel it stirring before marriage or
actual motherhood, and I honestly believe that the number of women who,
like the female bee, are utterly without this instinct is yearly
increasing. It has often occurred to me that men are really fonder of
children than are women. In my own experience, I hardly know a man who
does not love them, whereas I know many women who positively detest
children, and many others who only endure their own because they must.
I have also observed that quite devoted mothers dislike all other
children, whereas men, if fond of the little ones at all, seem fond of
every child. Note the attention men will pay a not particularly
attractive child in a railway carriage, whilst the women present are
entirely indifferent to it. A lady who has kept a girls' school for many
years told me recently that in her opinion the very nature of girls
seems changing, and love of dolls and babies is apparently decaying.
Can this be generally true? Is it possible that the higher education of
women has such grave drawbacks?
Fortunately for the honour and ideals of our country, the
philoprogenitive element is still in an overwhelming majority and many
people who for various reasons do not actually want children are ready
enough to welcome the Stork if he does elect to pay them a visit. In
after years they will tell one that they can't imagine what life would
have been like without the noise of little feet throughout the house,
the clamour of little voices, the tender faces of little children.
II
THE PROS AND CONS OF THE LIMITED FAMILY
'The child--Heaven's gift.' --TENNYSON.
On the other hand, though I think it the greatest possible mistake for
legally married people to intentionally remain childless, for any reason
other than mental or physical degeneration, I am strongly against the
Lutheran doctrine of unlimited families. Times have changed since
Luther's day, and the necessity for small families is fairly obvious in
the twentieth century for all but very wealthy people. Where money is no
object, and the parents are thoroughly robust, the great luxury of a
large family may be indulged in. And it _is_ a luxury, let cynics sneer
as they choose. We modern parents with our two and three children, or
our one ewe lamb who can scarcely be trusted out of our sight because he
is our unique creative effort--we miss much of the real domestic joy
that our mothers and fathers must have known, with their baker's dozen
or so of lusty boys and girls. Our children can't even get up a set of
tennis among themselves without borrowing one or more from another
household. Much of the anxiety and worry we suffer over our rare
offspring was unknown in the days when blessings were numerous, and
families ran into two figures as a matter of course.
Nowadays these joys are the luxuries of the wealthy, who, however,
rarely avail themselves of this special privilege of riches. With the
necessities of life getting dearer every year, a continual panic in the
money market, and the pressure of competition assuming nightmare
proportions--a small family of two or three children is all the man of
moderate income can allow himself. Four is an outside number, but it is
worth making some sacrifices to attain it. Professor E. A. Ross has
recently stated in _The American Journal of Sociology_ that although
restriction 'results in diffusion of economic well-being; lessens infant
mortality; ceases population pressure, which is the principal cause of
war, mass poverty, wolfish competition and class conflict,' yet there
are 'disquieting effects, and in one-child or two-child families both
parents and children miss many of the best lessons of life; the type to
be standardised is not the family of one to three but the family of four
to six.' The German scientist, Möbius, has also stated his opinion that
the general adoption of the two-children system would lead to
deterioration of the race.
But whether the family numbers one or six, it is all one to Father
Bernard Vaughan, who in his violent attack on modern parents draws no
distinction between the rich man who has but one child and the
hard-working professional man who has several. To limit one's family at
all is in his eyes a heinous and revolting sin, 'a vile practice,' and
people who do it are 'traitors to an all-important clause in the sacred
contract which they called upon God to witness they meant to keep.' This
last is hardly logical--none of us are responsible for the wording of
the marriage service, and we cannot very well interrupt the recital of
its barbaric formulæ to explain that there are limitations to our desire
for multiplication.
Father Vaughan also says that this disinclination to multiply means 'the
extinction of Christian morality,' and constitutes 'defiance of God.' It
is not clear to me why a respectable middle-class couple who decide that
three children is a more suitable number than twelve or fourteen for an
income of, say, £300 a year, should be accused of defying God by this
exercise of common-sense and self-control. Is the idea that the children
will only be sent if the Almighty wishes us to have them, and it is
therefore impious to regulate the number? It would be just as fair to
accuse a young woman who refuses several offers of marriage of defying
God, since He clearly wishes her to marry. Bodily ills and accidents
presumably come from the same divine agency, yet no one thinks it sinful
to seek to remedy these with the means science has provided for the
purpose. Why are the means of regulating families made known to us if we
are not to use them when population-pressure becomes acute? The doctrine
of Free-will becomes a positive farce if Father Vaughan is right. If he
confined his remarks to people who deliberately refuse to have _any_
children, he would have found many adherents, but he alienates our
sympathy by the very excess of his denunciation. He even brands as
immoral the practice of regulating the time between the births of
children, which is so essential to the mother's health. Apparently he
would think it right for a woman to have a baby every eleven months or
so, irrespective of her husband's limited income, until she became an
ailing wreck or died of over-production, leaving her family in the
plight of being motherless. His remarks are of course directed
principally at 'smart' society people, but as Father Vaughan considers
lack of means no excuse for 'deliberate regulation of the marriage
state,' his strictures must be taken as applying to all alike. One feels
inclined to echo with a character in _The Merry-Go-Round_: 'In this
world it is the good people who do all the harm.'
I learn that as long ago as 1872, before there was any perceptible fall
in the birth-rate to consider, an article by Mr Montagu Crackenthorpe,
Q.C., appeared in _The Fortnightly Review_, contending that small
families were a sign of progress rather than of retrogression. This
article was recently republished in a book entitled _Population and
Progress_. There are many other books on the subject, and to them I must
refer those of my readers who desire further knowledge of this very
important problem. I have no space for an exhaustive consideration of it
here. It is a subject essentially considered by the majority from a
narrow, personal point of view, for it is impossible to expect people
struggling for existence to 'think imperially,' and put the needs of the
Empire before the limitations of their income. The question from the
economic standpoint has been exhaustively dealt with by that master of
political economy, Mr Sidney Webb in a pamphlet entitled _The Decline of
the Birth Rate_, published by the Fabian Society at 1d.
* * *
I wish I could convince people, however, of the mistake of having only
one child. The loss to the parents is heavy and to the child
incalculable. All parents who have tried it know what disadvantages they
experience in their early attempts at training, when there is 'no one to
play with,' and no one to give up to--perhaps the most important of
life's lessons. Two or more children growing up together are twice as
easy to manage and to teach as is one alone, and infinitely happier in
every way. Later on, schoolfellows to a certain extent supply the
deficiency, but the only child is still no less an object for
commiseration, as are his parents. All their hopes are centred in the
one, and, as the circumstances almost inevitably combine to spoil the
one, their hopes are more or less handicapped. Parents find out too late
that they have made a mistake.
I was at a children's party not long ago where 'sole hopes' were greatly
in the majority. A lovely little family trio consisting of a boy and two
tiny girls was much admired and the mother openly envied. Several of the
mothers present said they often wished that Joan or Tommy had a brother
or sister. As few of the children mentioned were over five, the
difficulty did not seem insuperable, but opinions were unanimous among
the ladies that it was 'too late to start the nursery again'; 'it was no
good unless the two could grow up together, five years was too great a
gap,' and so on. No doubt they will one day bitterly regret their
timidity, as many women to my personal knowledge have already done. Joan
or Tommy may be taken from them, or what is worse may turn out unloving
and undutiful, and in that sad day they will have no other children to
turn to.
If the facile writers of those endless newspaper articles on the
degeneracy of modern women really wish to make good their case, they had
better abandon their foolish complaints as to women's inability to
manage the spinning-wheel or preserve pickles, and other tasks which the
progress of machinery have rendered unnecessary. Let them instead turn
their attention for proof of degeneracy to the strange helplessness of
middle-class mothers in training their children, and their dread of
nursery complications. I know many a woman whose financial ability and
capacity for organising almost amounts to genius, who would doubtless
not be at a loss in dealing with a burglar, yet who would on no account
face the terrors of a longish railway journey in sole charge of her
two-year-old child, whilst to 'take the baby at night' once in a way
during the nurse's absence from home is a nerve-shattering experience
which necessitates at least one day's complete rest in bed afterwards.
'To start the nursery again,' with all its complicated machinery, when
the sole hope has got over its teething torments, can walk, feed itself,
and generally be companionable, is a prospect before which modern
mothers seem to quail. The remedy is to multiply the number of hopes
before the nursery has time to be outgrown by Hope No. 1, in fact to
keep the nursery going a good many years longer than is nowadays
fashionable--though by no means for the unlimited period advised by
Father Vaughan and other celibate priests entirely ignorant of nurseries
and their exigences!
III
PARENTHOOD: THE HIGHEST DESTINY
'O happy husband! happy wife!
The rarest blessing Heaven drops down
The sweetest treasure in spring's crown,
Starts in the furrow of your life.'
--GERALD MASSEY.
Perhaps I may be accused of dealing with marriage in a too flippant
manner. Most of the treatises that I have read have erred in the
opposite direction and have treated the subject from a tediously
transcendental point of view. I have purposely tried to deal with
realities, with facts, with matrimony as it really is--I mean as it
really appears to me--in this very workaday world, and not as it might
be in a glorious ideal world of noble spirits.
In truth, marriage, as it is carried out by the large majority does not
seem to me to possess much of a sacred element. What is there holy in
the fact of two human beings agreeing to live together to suit their own
convenience, for purely social and domestic reasons, and very often with
a strong commercial motive? There is, of course, a certain sanctity
about all love, but, of the various kinds of human love, the sexual
variety seems the least holy in itself. Family love, where the tie of
blood exists, the love between friends--purest of all affections--is
often more essentially sacred than the so-called holy love between
husband and wife. Marriage, the mere social and physical union of men
and women, _apart from parenthood_, is simply a partnership--resulting,
if you like, in an enormous increase of happiness and good to the
contracting parties--essentially an excellent contract, but a mere
mundane contract for all that. But when the children come, when the
divine and wonderful miracle is accomplished, then, indeed, is marriage
placed on a wholly different basis, and in dealing with it, I willingly
take my shoes from off my feet, for it is holy ground.
On the birth of a child the union that produced it acquires an immortal
significance. Formerly of importance only to the two people concerned,
the union is now of importance to the State and to posterity, and
consequently a truly awful responsibility devolves on the parents. On
the physique, the character, the intelligence of each child the fate of
future generations may depend. If we do not feed our child properly he
may be rickety, and a future generation may be deformed for our
carelessness. If we do not teach him thoroughly the duty of self-control
he may become a drunkard or a libertine, and a thousand subsequent evils
may curse our grandchildren. 'The responsibilities of perpetuating the
existence of a race, with all its immeasurable possibilities of sin and
suffering, is one from which the boldest might recoil. But the only
effective way of improving the lot of man is to rear up a new generation
of better stock. For the reflecting to shirk parentage is to make over
the future to the spawn of unreflecting indulgence. In the world's great
field of battle no duty is higher than to keep the ranks of the forces
of Light well filled with recruits. It is to no holiday that our
offspring are called--rather it is to a combat long and stern, ending in
inevitable death.'[5]
[Footnote 5: W. T. Stead, _Review of Reviews_, January 1908.]
It has been truly said that children are the wealth of nations: if we
were to take our parenthood very seriously indeed--far, far more
seriously than we now do, surely this would prove the strongest defence
against the moral and physical decay of which we hear so much. I would
like to see parenthood elevated to the dignity of a great spiritual
ideal. Not that I advocate the ultra-glorification of mere procreation
in itself, though to bring fine and healthy children into the world is
an excellent service, and one that men and women ought to take the
highest pride in, but 'to summon an immortal soul into being--what act
is comparable to this?' To train the new-born spirit to grow towards the
sun, striving to develop in it the nobler possibilities of the complex
human organism and make of it an 'upright, heaven-facing speaker'--what
better lifework can a man or woman hope to achieve, what greater
monument to leave behind?
If parenthood were to become a great ideal, in time public opinion--that
mighty weapon--would grow so strong that unworthy parenthood would be
regarded with disfavour by all decent people. The unfit would not dare
to commit the crime of perpetuating their kind, and the stigma attached
to this sin against the community might eventually even equal the stigma
attached nowadays to the awful crime of cheating at cards!
Inspired by the ideal of noble parenthood, maidens would look for the
father's heart in their lovers; men would seek the beautiful maternal
qualities in the girls they were wooing, and the material considerations
that now so largely influence both would obtain less and less. The bond
of marriage would be strengthened a hundredfold. Infidelity would be
rarer, for the husband and wife who had been blessed with children would
feel that their union had been dignified, made truly indissoluble. The
father and mother who had embraced for the first time over the form of
their first-born could never forget that ineffable moment. The man and
woman who had shared a baby between them, taught it to talk and to play
and guided its first faltering steps, could never lightly set aside the
vows that bound them. The soft hands of little children were made to
link men and women's hearts together, and wonderfully they fulfil the
task!
'Only when we become fathers and mothers do we realise all that our
fathers and mothers have done for us'--and what a revelation it is! What
a new heaven and a new earth are opened to us by the magic of a little
child's presence in our home--the little body that has been mysteriously
fashioned in our image, the little soul given into our keeping.
But for the children, marriage would indeed be a universal failure. In
their interest it was instituted and it is they who make it possible.
Children make a happy union perfect and an indifferent one happy. Very
often they patch up an utter failure into at least an endurable
partnership. When a childless marriage proves happy--really happy--it is
generally because the man and woman are particularly attached to each
other, or are people of unusual character.
One knows of rare instances where husband and wife have grown dearer and
more closely knit by reason of having no other object to divide their
affection. The wife, with lesser cares, not needing to merge the
sweetheart in the mother, remains more youthful in her husband's eyes
than would otherwise be possible, whilst on the man is lavished her
maternal as well as her wifely devotion, and he is at once husband and
child to her. In such a union one can see the sacred element, although
it has produced no children; a couple of this kind does not seem to miss
the little ones that never come. The same is sometimes the case with
artists, whose whole interest and creative energies are absorbed in
their work.
With all my heart I despise those married people in full possession of
health and strength who deliberately elect to remain childless. With all
my heart I pity the celibate and those to whom children are denied. Yet
they have compensations--though they lose the rapture, they miss also
the infinite anxieties, the innumerable worries, the constant
self-denial, the often bitter disappointments. Children bring many other
pains than those of birth. Tennyson says, 'the saddest soul in all the
world is she that has a child and sees him err.' Yet by some subtle
alchemy of nature, the strings of mother hearts are sometimes attuned
even more tenderly to the children who err. I think one of the most
beautiful lines ever written occurs in Stephen Philips' _Marpessa_. When
the maid Marpessa rejects the god in favour of the humble mortal lover,
of the latter she says:
'And he shall give me passionate children, not
Some radiant god that will despise me quite,
But clamouring limbs, and little hearts that err.'
But the clamouring limbs soon wax great, alas! out of all recognition;
the little hearts become wise and worldly and err in a less pleasing
manner--our passionate children outgrow us quickly nowadays. That is the
real tragedy of motherhood--_to be outgrown_.