War has thrust upon us a new internationalism. To-day the world is
united by starvation, disease and misery. We are enjoying the ironic
internationalism of hatred. The victors are forced to shoulder the
burden of the vanquished. International philanthropies and charities are
organized. The great flux of immigration and emigration has recommenced.
Prosperity is a myth; and the rich are called upon to support huge
philanthropies, in the futile attempt to sweep back the tide of famine
and misery. In the face of this new internationalism, this tangled unity
of the world, all proposed political and economic programs reveal a
woeful common bankruptcy. They are fragmentary and superficial. None
of them go to the root of this unprecedented world problem. Politicians
offer political solutions,--like the League of Nations or the limitation
of navies. Militarists offer new schemes of competitive armament.
Marxians offer the Third Internationale and industrial revolution.
Sentimentalists offer charity and philanthropy. Coordination or
correlation is lacking. And matters go steadily from bad to worse.
The first essential in the solution of any problem is the recognition
and statement of the factors involved. Now in this complex problem
which to-day confronts us, no attempt has been made to state the primary
facts. The statesman believes they are all political. Militarists
believe they are all military and naval. Economists, including under the
term the various schools for Socialists, believe they are industrial and
financial. Churchmen look upon them as religious and ethical. What is
lacking is the recognition of that fundamental factor which reflects and
coordinates these essential but incomplete phases of the problem,--the
factor of reproduction. For in all problems affecting the welfare of a
biological species, and particularly in all problems of human welfare,
two fundamental forces work against each other. There is hunger as
the driving force of all our economic, industrial and commercial
organizations; and there is the reproductive impulse in continual
conflict with our economic, political settlements, race adjustments and
the like. Official moralists, statesmen, politicians, philanthropists
and economists display an astounding disregard of this second
disorganizing factor. They treat the world of men as if it were purely
a hunger world instead of a hunger-sex world. Yet there is no phase of
human society, no question of politics, economics, or industry that is
not tied up in almost equal measure with the expression of both of
these primordial impulses. You cannot sweep back overpowering dynamic
instincts by catchwords. You can neglect and thwart sex only at your
peril. You cannot solve the problem of hunger and ignore the problem of
sex. They are bound up together.
While the gravest attention is paid to the problem of hunger and food,
that of sex is neglected. Politicians and scientists are ready
and willing to speak of such things as a "high birth rate," infant
mortality, the dangers of immigration or over-population. But with few
exceptions they cannot bring themselves to speak of Birth Control. Until
they shall have broken through the traditional inhibitions concerning
the discussion of sexual matters, until they recognize the force of the
sexual instinct, and until they recognize Birth Control as the PIVOTAL
FACTOR in the problem confronting the world to-day, our statesmen must
continue to work in the dark. Political palliatives will be mocked
by actuality. Economic nostrums are blown willy-nilly in the unending
battle of human instincts.
A brief survey of the past three or four centuries of Western
civilization suggests the urgent need of a new science to help humanity
in the struggle with the vast problem of to-day's disorder and danger.
That problem, as we envisage it, is fundamentally a sexual problem.
Ethical, political, and economic avenues of approach are insufficient.
We must create a new instrument, a new technique to make any adequate
solution possible.
The history of the industrial revolution and the dominance of
all-conquering machinery in Western civilization show the inadequacy of
political and economic measures to meet the terrific rise in population.
The advent of the factory system, due especially to the development
of machinery at the beginning of the nineteenth century, upset all the
grandiloquent theories of the previous era. To meet the new situation
created by the industrial revolution arose the new science of "political
economy," or economics. Old political methods proved inadequate to keep
pace with the problem presented by the rapid rise of the new machine and
industrial power. The machine era very shortly and decisively exploded
the simple belief that "all men are born free and equal." Political
power was superseded by economic and industrial power. To sustain their
supremacy in the political field, governments and politicians allied
themselves to the new industrial oligarchy. Old political theories and
practices were totally inadequate to control the new situation or to
meet the complex problems that grew out of it.
Just as the eighteenth century saw the rise and proliferation
of political theories, the nineteenth witnessed the creation and
development of the science of economics, which aimed to perfect an
instrument for the study and analysis of an industrial society, and
to offer a technique for the solution of the multifold problems it
presented. But at the present moment, as the outcome of the machine
era and competitive populations, the world has been thrown into a new
situation, the solution of which is impossible solely by political or
economic weapons.
The industrial revolution and the development of machinery in Europe and
America called into being a new type of working-class. Machines were
at first termed "labor-saving devices." In reality, as we now know,
mechanical inventions and discoveries created unprecedented and
increasingly enormous demand for "labor." The omnipresent and still
existing scandal of child labor is ample evidence of this. Machine
production in its opening phases, demanded large, concentrated and
exploitable populations. Large production and the huge development of
international trade through improved methods of transport, made
possible the maintenance upon a low level of existence of these rapidly
increasing proletarian populations. With the rise and spread throughout
Europe and America of machine production, it is now possible to
correlate the expansion of the "proletariat." The working-classes bred
almost automatically to meet the demand for machine-serving "hands."
The rise in population, the multiplication of proletarian populations as
a first result of mechanical industry, the appearance of great centers
of population, the so-called urban drift, and the evils of overcrowding
still remain insufficiently studied and stated. It is a significant
though neglected fact that when, after long agitation in Great Britain,
child labor was finally forbidden by law, the supply of children dropped
appreciably. No longer of economic value in the factory, children were
evidently a drug in the "home." Yet it is doubly significant that
from this moment British labor began the long unending task of
self-organization.(1)
Nineteenth century economics had no method of studying the interrelation
of the biological factors with the industrial. Overcrowding, overwork,
the progressive destruction of responsibility by the machine discipline,
as is now perfectly obvious, had the most disastrous consequences upon
human character and human habits.(2) Paternalistic philanthropies and
sentimental charities, which sprang up like mushrooms, only tended to
increase the evils of indiscriminate breeding. From the physiological
and psychological point of view, the factory system has been nothing
less than catastrophic.
Dr. Austin Freeman has recently pointed out (3) some of the
physiological, psychological, and racial effects of machinery upon the
proletariat, the breeders of the world. Speaking for Great Britain, Dr.
Freeman suggests that the omnipresence of machinery tends toward the
production of large but inferior populations. Evidences of biological
and racial degeneracy are apparent to this observer. "Compared with the
African negro," he writes, "the British sub-man is in several respects
markedly inferior. He tends to be dull; he is usually quite helpless
and unhandy; he has, as a rule, no skill or knowledge of handicraft,
or indeed knowledge of any kind.... Over-population is a phenomenon
connected with the survival of the unfit, and it is mechanism which
has created conditions favorable to the survival of the unfit and the
elimination of the fit." The whole indictment against machinery is
summarized by Dr. Freeman: "Mechanism by its reactions on man and his
environment is antagonistic to human welfare. It has destroyed industry
and replaced it by mere labor; it has degraded and vulgarized the
works of man; it has destroyed social unity and replaced it by social
disintegration and class antagonism to an extent which directly
threatens civilization; it has injuriously affected the structural
type of society by developing its organization at the expense of the
individual; it has endowed the inferior man with political power which
he employs to the common disadvantage by creating political institutions
of a socially destructive type; and finally by its reactions on the
activities of war it constitutes an agent for the wholesale physical
destruction of man and his works and the extinction of human culture."
It is not necessary to be in absolute agreement with this diagnostician
to realize the menace of machinery, which tends to emphasize quantity
and mere number at the expense of quality and individuality. One thing
is certain. If machinery is detrimental to biological fitness, the
machine must be destroyed, as it was in Samuel Butler's "Erewhon." But
perhaps there is another way of mastering this problem.
Altruism, humanitarianism and philanthropy have aided and abetted
machinery in the destruction of responsibility and self-reliance among
the least desirable elements of the proletariat. In contrast with
the previous epoch of discovery of the New World, of exploration
and colonization, when a centrifugal influence was at work upon the
populations of Europe, the advent of machinery has brought with it a
counteracting centripetal effect. The result has been the accumulation
of large urban populations, the increase of irresponsibility, and
ever-widening margin of biological waste.
Just as eighteenth century politics and political theories were unable
to keep pace with the economic and capitalistic aggressions of the
nineteenth century, so also we find, if we look closely enough, that
nineteenth century economics is inadequate to lead the world out of the
catastrophic situation into which it has been thrown by the debacle
of the World War. Economists are coming to recognize that the purely
economic interpretation of contemporary events is insufficient. Too
long, as one of them has stated, orthodox economists have overlooked
the important fact that "human life is dynamic, that change, movement,
evolution, are its basic characteristics; that self-expression, and
therefore freedom of choice and movement, are prerequisites to a
satisfying human state".(4)
Economists themselves are breaking with the old "dismal science" of the
Manchester school, with its sterile study of "supply and demand,"
of prices and exchange, of wealth and labor. Like the Chicago Vice
Commission, nineteenth-century economists (many of whom still survive
into our own day) considered sex merely as something to be legislated
out of existence. They had the right idea that wealth consisted solely
of material things used to promote the welfare of certain human beings.
Their idea of capital was somewhat confused. They apparently decided
that capital was merely that part of capital used to produce profit.
Prices, exchanges, commercial statistics, and financial operations
comprised the subject matter of these older economists. It would have
been considered "unscientific" to take into account the human factors
involved. They might study the wear-and-tear and depreciation of
machinery: but the depreciation or destruction of the human race did
not concern them. Under "wealth" they never included the vast, wasted
treasury of human life and human expression.
Economists to-day are awake to the imperative duty of dealing with the
whole of human nature, with the relation of men, women, and children to
their environment--physical and psychic as well as social; of dealing
with all those factors which contribute to human sustenance, happiness
and welfare. The economist, at length, investigates human motives.
Economics outgrows the outworn metaphysical preconceptions of nineteenth
century theory. To-day we witness the creation of a new "welfare" or
social economics, based on a fuller and more complete knowledge of the
human race, upon a recognition of sex as well as of hunger; in brief, of
physiological instincts and psychological demands. The newer economists
are beginning to recognize that their science heretofore failed to take
into account the most vital factors in modern industry--it failed
to foresee the inevitable consequences of compulsory motherhood; the
catastrophic effects of child labor upon racial health; the overwhelming
importance of national vitality and well-being; the international
ramifications of the population problem; the relation of indiscriminate
breeding to feeble-mindedness, and industrial inefficiency. It
speculated too little or not at all on human motives. Human nature riots
through the traditional economic structure, as Carlton Parker pointed
out, with ridicule and destruction; the old-fashioned economist looked
on helpless and aghast.
Inevitably we are driven to the conclusion that the exhaustively
economic interpretation of contemporary history is inadequate to
meet the present situation. In his suggestive book, "The Acquisitive
Society," R. H. Tawney, arrives at the conclusion that "obsession
by economic issues is as local and transitory as it is repulsive and
disturbing. To future generations it will appear as pitiable as the
obsession of the seventeenth century by religious quarrels appears
to-day; indeed, it is less rational, since the object with which it is
concerned is less important. And it is a poison which inflames every
wound and turns each trivial scratch into a malignant ulcer. Society
will not solve the particular problems of industry until that poison is
expelled, and it has learned to see industry in its proper perspective.
IF IT IS TO DO THAT IT MUST REARRANGE THE SCALE OF VALUES. It must
regard economic interests as one element in life, not as the whole of
life...."(5)
In neglecting or minimizing the great factor of sex in human society,
the Marxian doctrine reveals itself as no stronger than orthodox
economics in guiding our way to a sound civilization. It works within
the same intellectual limitations. Much as we are indebted to the
Marxians for pointing out the injustice of modern industrialism, we
should never close our eyes to the obvious limitations of their own
"economic interpretation of history." While we must recognize the great
historical value of Marx, it is now evident that his vision of the
"class struggle," of the bitter irreconcilable warfare between the
capitalist and working classes was based not upon historical analysis,
but upon on unconscious dramatization of a superficial aspect of
capitalistic regime.
In emphasizing the conflict between the classes, Marx failed to
recognize the deeper unity of the proletariat and the capitalist.
Nineteenth century capitalism had in reality engendered and cultivated
the very type of working class best suited to its own purpose--an inert,
docile, irresponsible and submissive class, progressively incapable
of effective and aggressive organization. Like the economists of the
Manchester school, Marx failed to recognize the interplay of human
instincts in the world of industry. All the virtues were embodied in the
beloved proletariat; all the villainies in the capitalists. The greatest
asset of the capitalism of that age was, as a matter of fact, the
uncontrolled breeding among the laboring classes. The intelligent and
self-conscious section of the workers was forced to bear the burden of
the unemployed and the poverty-stricken.
Marx was fully aware of the consequences of this condition of things,
but shut his eyes tightly to the cause. He pointed out that capitalistic
power was dependent upon "the reserve army of labor," surplus labor,
and a wide margin of unemployment. He practically admitted that
over-population was the inevitable soil of predatory capitalism. But he
disregarded the most obvious consequence of that admission. It was all
very dramatic and grandiloquent to tell the workingmen of the world to
unite, that they had "nothing but their chains to lose and the world
to gain." Cohesion of any sort, united and voluntary organization, as
events have proved, is impossible in populations bereft of intelligence,
self-discipline and even the material necessities of life, and cheated
by their desires and ignorance into unrestrained and uncontrolled
fertility.
In pointing out the limitations and fallacies of the orthodox Marxian
opinion, my purpose is not to depreciate the efforts of the Socialists
aiming to create a new society, but rather to emphasize what seems to me
the greatest and most neglected truth of our day:--Unless sexual science
is incorporated as an integral part of world-statesmanship and the
pivotal importance of Birth Control is recognized in any program of
reconstruction, all efforts to create a new world and a new civilization
are foredoomed to failure.
We can hope for no advance until we attain a new conception of sex, not
as a merely propagative act, not merely as a biological necessity for
the perpetuation of the race, but as a psychic and spiritual avenue of
expression. It is the limited, inhibited conception of sex that vitiates
so much of the thought and ideation of the Eugenists.
Like most of our social idealists, statesmen, politicians and
economists, some of the Eugenists suffer intellectually from a
restricted and inhibited understanding of the function of sex. This
limited understanding, this narrowness of vision, which gives rise to
most of the misconceptions and condemnations of the doctrine of Birth
Control, is responsible or the failure of politicians and legislators to
enact practical statutes or to remove traditional obscenities from the
law books. The most encouraging sign at present is the recognition by
modern psychology of the central importance of the sexual instinct in
human society, and the rapid spread of this new concept among the more
enlightened sections of the civilized communities. The new conception
of sex has been well stated by one to whom the debt of contemporary
civilization is well-nigh immeasurable. "Sexual activity," Havelock
Ellis has written, "is not merely a baldly propagative act, nor, when
propagation is put aside, is it merely the relief of distended
vessels. It is something more even than the foundation of great social
institutions. It is the function by which all the finer activities of
the organism, physical and psychic, may be developed and satisfied."(6)
No less than seventy years ago, a profound but neglected thinker, George
Drysdale, emphasized the necessity of a thorough understanding of man's
sexual nature in approaching economic, political and social problems.
"Before we can undertake the calm and impartial investigation of any
social problem, we must first of all free ourselves from all those
sexual prejudices which are so vehement and violent and which so
completely distort our vision of the external world. Society as a whole
has yet to fight its way through an almost impenetrable forest of sexual
taboos." Drysdale's words have lost none of their truth even to-day:
"There are few things from which humanity has suffered more than the
degraded and irreverent feelings of mystery and shame that have been
attached to the genital and excretory organs. The former have been
regarded, like their corresponding mental passions, as something of a
lower and baser nature, tending to degrade and carnalize man by their
physical appetites. But we cannot take a debasing view of any part of
our humanity without becoming degraded in our whole being."(7)
Drysdale moreover clearly recognized the social crime of entrusting to
sexual barbarians the duty of legislating and enforcing laws detrimental
to the welfare of all future generations. "They trust blindly to
authority for the rules they blindly lay down," he wrote, "perfectly
unaware of the awful and complicated nature of the subject they are
dealing with so confidently and of the horrible evils their unconsidered
statements are attended with. They themselves break through the most
fundamentally important laws daily in utter unconsciousness of the
misery they are causing to their fellows...."
Psychologists to-day courageously emphasize the integral relationship
of the expression of the sexual instinct with every phase of human
activity. Until we recognize this central fact, we cannot understand the
implications and the sinister significance of superficial attempts
to apply rosewater remedies to social evils,--by the enactment of
restrictive and superficial legislation, by wholesale philanthropies and
charities, by publicly burying our heads in the sands of sentimentality.
Self-appointed censors, grossly immoral "moralists," makeshift
legislators, all face a heavy responsibility for the miseries, diseases,
and social evils they perpetuate or intensify by enforcing the primitive
taboos of aboriginal customs, traditions, and outworn laws, which
at every step hinder the education of the people in the scientific
knowledge of their sexual nature. Puritanic and academic taboo of sex in
education and religion is as disastrous to human welfare as prostitution
or the venereal scourges. "We are compelled squarely to face the
distorting influences of biologically aborted reformers as well as the
wastefulness of seducers," Dr. Edward A. Kempf recently declared. "Man
arose from the ape and inherited his passions, which he can only refine
but dare not attempt to castrate unless he would destroy the fountains
of energy that maintain civilization and make life worth living and the
world worth beautifying.... We do not have a problem that is to be solved
by making repressive laws and executing them. Nothing will be more
disastrous. Society must make life worth the living and the refining for
the individual by conditioning him to love and to seek the love-object
in a manner that reflects a constructive effect upon his fellow-men
and by giving him suitable opportunities. The virility of the automatic
apparatus is destroyed by excessive gormandizing or hunger, by excessive
wealth or poverty, by excessive work or idleness, by sexual abuse or
intolerant prudishness. The noblest and most difficult art of all is the
raising of human thoroughbreds."(8)
(1) It may be well to note, in this connection, that the
decline in the birth rate among the more intelligent classes
of British labor followed upon the famous Bradlaugh-Besant
trial of 1878, the outcome of the attempt of these two
courageous Birth Control pioneers to circulate among the
workers the work of an American physician, Dr. Knowlton's
"The Fruits of Philosophy," advocating Birth Control, and
the widespread publicity resulting from his trial.
(2) Cf. The Creative Impulse in Industry, by Helen Marot.
The Instinct of Workmanship, by Thorstein Veblen.
(3) Social Decay and Regeneration. By R. Austin Freeman.
London 1921.
(4) Carlton H. Parker: The Casual Laborer and other
essays: p. 30.
(5) R. H. Tawney. The Acquisitive Society, p. 184.
(6) Medical Review of Reviews: Vol. XXVI, p. 116.
(7) The Elements of Social Science: London, 1854.
(8) Proceedings of the International Conference of Women
Physicians. Vol. IV, pp. 66-67. New York, 1920.