study at the British Museum, and meet the Neo-Malthusians. Towards the
end of the month I rolled up to London through miles of chimney-potted
suburbs; it continued rainy and foggy, but still there was a friendly
atmosphere in the air. I seemed to be coming to a second home.
My first quarters were on the top floor of a “bed and breakfast” on
Torrington Square, just back of the British Museum. I looked out on
little rows of trees, iron fences, steps going up to all the houses.
There was but one bathroom and to use it cost extra. Every morning about
seven came a knock, and when I opened the door I discovered a midget jug
of hot water outside. I was supposed to break the ice on my large
pitcher, mix the two, and pour all into my tin tub, the back of which
rose behind me like a throne. After this winter I realized how the
British had acquired their well-known moral courage.
I had no fireplace, but two floors below was an empty room with a grate.
Occasionally I indulged myself in the luxury of renting it for the
evening, and of buying wood to keep myself warm while I worked. I made
up for it by not having the slatternly Cockney maid bring up tea, and
also went each morning to the basement dining room for my breakfast,
thereby saving a shilling a week. It was not long before I was stricken
by the first digestive upset I had ever had, and was obliged to call in
an American doctor. He looked me over casually and then, without further
examination, asked, “Have you been drinking English coffee?”
“Why, yes.”
“Well, give it up. The English can’t make coffee; they only know how to
make tea. Take up English tea.”
I followed his advice and from that time on, instead of carrying my own
eating habits with me, have tried to adjust myself to the food of the
country where I happened to be. In this way I get along much better.
Sundays I attended concerts or visited art galleries, though since it
was war time disappointingly few pictures were being shown. Each week
day, however, found me at the British Museum, going in with the opening
of the gates in the morning. In order to secure permission to work, you
had to have a card, but once you obtained it, you could take a special
seat and books were reserved for you. My aim was to present my case from
all angles, to make the trial soundly historical so that birth control
would be seriously discussed in America. Therefore, I read avidly and
voluminously many weighty tomes, and turned carefully the yellowed,
brittle pages of pamphlets and broadsides, finding much that was dull,
much that was irrelevant, but also much that was amusing, if only for
the ponderous manner of its expression. In the end I had a picture of
what had gone before.
The father of family limitation was Thomas Robert Malthus, born in 1766
at the Rookery, near Dorking, Surrey. In 1798 this curate of Albury
published his _Principle of Population_ and in the initial chapter laid
down his famous postulates: “first, that food is necessary to the
existence of man; second, that the passion between the sexes is
necessary, and will remain nearly in its present state....” Consequently
the unrestrained fertility of the human race was certain to outstrip the
available fruits of the earth, and, although the natural checks of war,
disease, and privation had controlled population for centuries, they had
brought misery, disaster, and death in their train. His solution was
voluntary and intelligent control of the birth rate by means of late
marriage, which left few years for childbearing. However, human nature
is such that Malthus might preach forever without anyone’s heeding his
advice. Not until the profound economic depression which followed the
Napoleonic Wars were people worried into concern over surplus
population.
To John Stuart Mill the production of large families was to be regarded
in the same light as drunkenness or any other physical excess. In the
very first edition of his _Political Economy_ he spoke of “prudence, by
which either marriages are sparingly contracted, or care is taken that
children beyond a certain number shall not be the fruit,” and concluded
that “the grand practical problem is to find the means of limiting the
number of births.” But he left it merely as a grand, practical problem.
Francis Place, the master tailor of Charing Cross, was born in a private
debtors’ prison kept by his father in Vinegar Yard. He was the first to
suggest the idea of contraception as a remedy for poverty, but was more
practical in his preaching than in his performance, fathering as he did
fifteen children. In 1822 he published _Illustrations and Proofs of the
Principle of Population_:
If, above all, it were once clearly understood, that it was not
disreputable for married persons to avail themselves of such
precautionary means as would, without being injurious to health, or
destructive of female delicacy, prevent conception, a sufficient
check might at once be given to the increase of population beyond
the means of subsistence; vice and misery, to a prodigious extent,
might be removed from society, and the object of Mr. Malthus, Mr.
Godwin, and of every philanthropic person, be promoted.
Place had educated himself on Adam Smith, Locke, Hume, Thomas Paine, and
Burke. To his remarkable library came many notable thinkers and men of
letters. Among them was Robert Owen, the textile industrialist, who, in
his _Moral Physiology_, offered openly a method of contraception:
I sit down to write a little treatise, which will subject me to
abuse from the self-righteous, to misrepresentation from the
hypocritical, and to reproach even from the honestly prejudiced.
He spoke to young men and women who still believed in virtue and
happiness. “A human being is a puppet, a slave, if his ignorance is to
be the safeguard of his virtue.” In reply to the accusation that coitus
interruptus was unnatural, he pointed out that the thwarting of any
human wish or impulse might be so termed. “If this trifling restraint is
to be called unnatural, what shall be said of celibacy?”
Owen in his youth had been impressed by the sufferings of the working
classes, and, in a first effort to lighten the burden of his employees,
had instituted many reforms in the New Lanark Mills, himself prospering
materially in so doing; he was less successful when he emigrated to the
United States and at New Harmony, Indiana, established a short-lived
communal colony. However, his coming to America had at least one
important result. His book influenced Doctor Charles Knowlton of Boston
to write a tract entitled _Fruits of Philosophy_ in which he recommended
a chemical formula and other methods to prevent conception. I had not
found a trace of this in my previous research, even in Boston where it
had been published.
Knowlton’s reaffirmation of the desirability both from a political and
social point of view for mankind to be able to limit at will the number
of offspring without sacrificing the attendant gratification of the
reproductive instinct, would have been little noticed had it not been
for the repercussion in England forty years later.
During the early Victorian uprush of industrialism a man’s children had
been breadwinners, and family limitation had naturally lapsed. But when
humanitarian legislation had begun to rescue children from factories,
the population specter had shown itself once more.
In 1861 was formed the Malthusian League, designed to influence public
opinion and overcome the prevailing misconception of Malthusianism, and
in 1876 a Bristol bookseller brought out an English edition of _Fruits
of Philosophy_. He was promptly arrested on the charge of publishing an
obscene book, and sentence was suspended on his plea of guilty.
The brilliant rationalist and freethinker, Charles Bradlaugh, a
redoubtable personality, together with Annie Besant, later the renowned
Theosophist but then a young rebel, started a printing partnership and
sold the pamphlet. Although not approving it in all its details they
determined to contest the right to publish it and to prove that
prevention of conception was not obscene.
Extraordinary interest was aroused in their trial before Lord Chief
Justice Cockburn and a special jury. The Solicitor General himself
appeared as chief counsel for the prosecution. Taking a copy of _Fruits
of Philosophy_ in his hands he opened it solemnly and said, “It is
really extremely painful to me,” then hesitating, “very painful to me to
have to read this.” But he did so.
Bradlaugh and Besant conducted their own defense. The latter with
eloquence and astonishing poise held the admiring attention of the court
for two days. Nevertheless, both were convicted of defaming the morals
of the public, sentenced to six months in jail and a thousand-dollar
fine, and required to put up guarantees of twenty-five hundred dollars
for good behavior during the next two years. The case was immediately
appealed. Fortunately the upper court dismissed it on a technicality,
because specific evidence of obscenity was not included; if the words
were polluting they had to appear in the record.
This decision settled for all time in England that contraception was not
to be classed among the obscenities. As a result, new life was injected
into the Malthusian League and its name was changed to the
Neo-Malthusian Society. In the first issue of its monthly journal it set
forth a modest claim: “We have the ONLY REMEDY that the disease of
society can be cured by.” Instead of the impractical advice of Malthus
to marry late, the Neo-Malthusians advised early marriage, the use of
contraceptive methods, and children born according to the earning
capacity of the father; a man’s station in life should determine the
number of his children. Furthermore, they intended one by one to “prick
the flimsy bubbles of emigration, lessened production, and home
colonization, which are from time to time put forward.” The emphasis was
still placed on the social and economic aspects rather than the personal
tragedies of women.
That was in 1876; now in 1914 the Drysdales, Dr. C. V. and his wife,
Bessie, were the guiding spirits of the Society. They had a long
heritage of Malthusianism behind them; the uncle of the former, Dr.
George Drysdale, fresh from Edinburgh in 1854, had anonymously published
his _Elements of Social Science_, which had gone into fifteen languages.
He had even himself studied Chinese to ensure a reasonably accurate
translation in that tongue. In the darkest days of Victorianism, this
young physician had included the New Woman in his interpretation of
Malthus. Both he and his brother Charles, also a physician, had been in
love with Alice Vickery, who had chosen the latter and borne him a son,
the present C.V.
Alice Vickery was as great in her day as Mary Wollstonecraft in hers.
After a tremendous struggle, which included getting her degree in Dublin
and her training in Paris, she had proved her right to enter the medical
profession, and had become the first woman doctor in England.
My keenest desire was to get in touch with the Drysdales. They invited
me to tea at their offices—offices in the English sense, not ours. I
squelched through the inevitable rain to Queen Anne’s Chambers and was
astonished to find nothing on the door except Dr. C. V. Drysdale’s name.
The term Malthusian was not considered proper according to the
landlord’s ideas of propriety. In fact, throughout England the word
brought up antagonism. People crossed the street to avoid it.
I entered a sitting room, gay with chintz-covered chairs and a sofa,
pillows at the back, quite fitted to Queen Anne’s own day. A fire was
burning cheerily, yet even this was not so welcome as the open arms and
excitement with which I was greeted, not only by the Drysdales but also
by Dr. Binnie Dunlop, dark, Scotch, thin, and dapper, intellectually
enthusiastic although not emotionally so; by Olive Johnston, the
faithful secretary who had worked for many years with the Drysdales; and
by F. W. Stella Browne, an ardent Feminist whose faintly florid face,
hair never quite white, and indefatigable vivacity are the same a
quarter of a century later. Many women in causes are like that;
something in their spirit keeps them forever young.
Dr. Drysdale was then in his early forties, slender, fair, inclined to
be bald. In his ebullience he was not at all British, but his pleasing,
warm, and courteous personality was British at its best. Bessie
Drysdale, about her husband’s age, was the practical member, dispensing
charming hospitality. The others were like an army meeting me, but she
brought up the rear with tea and cakes and comforting things.
It seemed to me I had seen them and known them all before. I was
immediately certain I had come to the right place. In the United States
I had been alone, pulling against all whose broad, general principles
were the same as mine but who disapproved of my actions. But these new
friends saw eye to eye with me. Instead of heaping criticism and fears
upon me, they offered all the force of an international organization as
well as their encyclopedic minds to back me up.
The policy of the Neo-Malthusians had been to educate the educators.
They believed that once the practice of family limitation had been
established among the well-to-do and socially prominent, it would be
taken up by the lower strata. They were not discouraged, although after
almost forty years success seemed as far away as ever; the working
classes not only evinced no desire for the benefits of family
limitation, but did not even know such a thing existed.
Everybody in the room appreciated my rebellion and extended
congratulations on a name having been coined which was so simple and
easy to understand as birth control. When I told them how I had managed
the distribution of the _Family Limitation_ pamphlets Dr. Drysdale stood
up impetuously and said, “Oh, would to God we had a Comstock law!
There’s nothing can so stir the British people as a bad law. Then they
will do something to change it!”
That afternoon was one of the most encouraging and delightful of my
life. The warmth of my reception strengthened me to face the future. It
lessened my dreadful homesickness and curbed the ever-growing impulse to
escape from war-sick London and hurry back to the children. During my
stay I saw much of the Drysdales and their group, and between us all
grew up a close kinship which has lasted through the stormy years.
I like to think of London at this time chiefly because of all my new
friends and the laughter they brought me. Of late there had been little
of it in my life, but with every friend I had in England—more than with
any other people I have ever known—I laughed, and this laughter knit and
welded the bonds of comradeship.
One day in the British Museum I was standing by the catalogs, which were
in the form of books, waiting until a man near me finished the volume I
wanted to consult. I glanced at him idly, then more closely, thinking I
identified the profile from pictures I had seen. When he had put the
book down I ventured tentatively, “Aren’t you Edward Carpenter?”
Almost without looking at me he replied, “Yes, and aren’t you Margaret
Sanger?”
It was a shock for Bertha Watson to hear this name repeated out loud in
a public place. However, Mr. Carpenter’s recognition was readily
explainable. He had been more or less prepared to see me because he had
already received my letter and had that morning at my rooming house been
told I never returned from the British Museum until evening. Since we
could not talk in this hall of silence, we adjourned to the Egyptian
Room, and then to lunch. He was human, full of wit, fun, and humor—a
live person who exuded magnetism.
Edward Carpenter reassured me that what I was doing was not merely of
the present but belonged even more to the future. From this fine spirit
I drew confirmation of the purity of my endeavor, something essential
for me to take back to America if others there were to experience the
same sense of justification. We beyond the Atlantic were still uncertain
of our ethics, and even of our morals. We needed the sanction of British
public opinion and the approval of their great philosophers, so that we
could be strong in our beliefs.
During the first weeks in England I did not feel vehemently about the
War, especially as signs were displayed everywhere, “Business as usual.”
I supposed it would be a little flurry, soon over. War talk, of course,
was universal. The German espionage system was much discussed. I
wondered whether it were not the general characteristic of the German
always to observe and be accurate in detail which made his information
valuable. He did the same thing in the United States, where nobody
thought of calling him a spy. Everywhere women were knitting socks and
mitts, but I was more impressed by the fact they were smoking in hotel
lobbies—a new indication of emancipation to me—and even rolling their
own cigarettes. If a woman came in for tea, without a word being said, a
bell hop produced her own box of tobacco. When she left, it was returned
to its proper place.
As the months went on, however, to be an American became almost as
unlucky as to be a German. Whoever wished to remain safely in England
must agree with England, give over every vestige of independent thinking
or free expression. Wherever I went I heard mention of “Traitorous
America.” At one dining-car table a gray-haired Englishman, unaware of
my nationality, asserted, “Americans will do anything for money.”
“Yes,” agreed his companion. “They do not care whom their bullets kill.
They get paid for them.” He was a young Dutchman, apparently just
returned from the East Indies, and the conversation between the two
developed briskly. Americans were a “mixed breed without souls; they had
none of the qualities which make a nation great—no traditions, history,
art, music, absolutely nothing but their money; they had to come to
Europe for everything—to England for laws, customs, and morals, to
France for fashions and arts; they were human leeches fastened on Europe
without incentive, originality, or creative ability; they—”
I interrupted, “What do you want America to do? Why should she get into
this? Does she owe loyalty to England or France or Russia?”
“Oh, no, but for Belgium. America signed the Hague Treaty with the rest
of us, and she has not stood by it.”
To this I advanced the argument, “We Americans are not like Europeans.
We are a heterogeneous mixture of all the fighting forces and nations of
the world. We include the Irish who hate England, and Jews who hardly
can be said to love Russia. A large part of our population—industrious,
civil, reliable, and prosperous—are Germans, with whom our Scandinavians
are sympathetic. Who then have we to ally against Germany? And why?—a
very small far-back mention of gratitude to France for her help in our
Revolution against British rule—and the Statue of Liberty.”
On the whole I came more nearly being a nationalist when I left England
than when I went there. I had to do such battle to explain the United
States that, almost involuntarily, I felt myself becoming less of an
internationalist. It was a strange feeling, as though somebody you knew
and loved were being criticized, and you took up the cudgels in defense.
_Chapter Eleven_
HAVELOCK ELLIS
“_He who ascends to mountain-tops shall find
Their loftiest peaks most wrapt in clouds and snow;
Round him are icy rocks, and loudly blow
Contending tempests on his naked head._”
LORD BYRON
As Christmas approached, my loneliness for the children increased. This
was their particular time. I had messages from and about them, but these
could not give the small, intimate details; the Atlantic was a broad
span, seeming more vast to letter writers. I missed their voices, their
caresses, even their little quarrels. I almost wondered whether solitary
confinement in prison were not preferable to my present isolation.
In the midst of this stark yearning to be with them and share their tree
I received a cordial note from Havelock Ellis asking me to come to tea.
With kindly foresight he had given me explicit directions how to reach
Fourteen Dover Mansions in Brixton across the Thames. I boarded a
crowded bus at Oxford Circus. Though it was a miserable day near the
dark end of 1914, the spirit of Christmas was in the air and everyone
was laden with beribboned bundles and bright packages.
Looking askance at the police station which occupied the lower floor I
climbed up the stairs, and, with the shyness of an adolescent, full of
fears and uncertainties, lifted the huge brass knocker. The figure of
Ellis himself appeared in the door. He seemed a giant in stature, a
lovely, simple man in loose-fitting clothes, with powerful head and
wonderful smile. He was fifty-five then, but that head will never
change—the shock of white hair, the venerable beard, shaggy though
well-kept, the wide, expressive mouth and deep-set eyes, sad even in
spite of the humorous twinkle always latent.
I was conscious immediately that I was in the presence of a great man,
yet I was startled at first by his voice as he welcomed me in. It was
typically English, high and thin. I once talked to a prisoner at Sing
Sing who had been in the death house for three years and could speak
only in whispers thereafter. Ellis had been a hermit for twenty-five. He
had lived in the Bush in Australia, and later secluded himself in his
study. Nevertheless, the importance of what he had to say much more than
made up for the instrument which conveyed it.
He led me to the living room through which the cheerless twilight of a
winter afternoon in London barely penetrated, and seated me before a
little gas fire. Some rooms impress you as ghastly cold even when hot.
This one, though lacking central heating, had the warmth of many books.
He lit two candles on the mantel, which flickered softly over his
features, giving him the aspect of a seer.
We sat down and quiet fell. I tried a few aimless remarks but I
stuttered with embarrassment. Ellis was still. Small talk was not
possible with him; you had to utter only the deepest truths within you.
No other human being could be so silent and remain so poised and calm in
silence.
While Ellis was preparing tea in the kitchen he left me to look over his
library and the most recent news from America. He had laid out and
marked certain pertinent items which he thought might not have come to
my attention. This, I later found, was one of his most endearing
characteristics. He always entered into the life of the other person in
little details, never forgetting even the kind of bread or olives,
fruits or wines, you preferred. His detachment was not incompatible with
sympathy.
Soon appeared a large tray, laden with tea, cakes, and bread and butter,
and we sat down before the humming flame and talked and talked; and as
we talked we wove into our lives an intangible web of mutual interests.
I began to realize then that the men who are truly great are the easiest
to meet and understand. After those first few moments I was at peace,
and content as I had never been before. Entirely unaware of the
reverence he aroused, Ellis pasted no labels on himself, had no poses,
made no effort to impress. He was simply, quite un-self-consciously,
what he was.
When he asked me to describe the details of how I had locked horns with
the law, I spoke glowingly of the heartening approval which the
Drysdales had just given me. He did not show the same enthusiasm; in
fact he was rather concerned, and not so ready with praise for my lack
of respect for the established order, believing so strongly in my case
that he wanted me to avoid mistakes. I think his influence was always
more or less subduing and moderating; he tried to get me, too, to take
the middle road. Though he occasionally alluded to some of the more
amusing phases of the trial of his own work, he had pushed it into the
back of his mind.