3.—“... _impartial range_ ...”
Preparation in this direction is going steadily forward, not only in the
Western hemisphere, but in the Eastern. It is announced (in August,
1892) that
“Lady students at the five Universities in Switzerland number 224.
Berne is the most popular, with 78 female undergraduates; Zurich has
70; Geneva 70; the new University of Lausanne has five; and Basle one.
The medical faculty is in most favour with the female students, and
counts 157 of the whole number; the philosophical faculty follows with
62; five prefer the faculty of jurisprudence; the theological faculty
has not yet been invaded by the sex. More than half of the female
students, 116, are Russians, 21 Germans, 21 Swiss, 11 Americans, nine
Austrians, seven Bulgarians, four English, three Roumanians, and three
from the Turkish Empire, all of whom are young Armenian ladies.”
4.—“... _wider wisdom_ ...”
Such wider wisdom—without the preliminary suffering—as the poet had
attained to, when he wrote:—
“I have climbed to the snows of Age, and I gaze at a field in the Past,
Where I sank with the body at times in the sloughs of a low desire;
But I hear no yelps of the beast, and the man is quiet at last,
As he stands on the heights of his life with a glimpse of a height
that is higher.”
—Tennyson (“By an Evolutionist”).
_Id._—“... _juster ethics, teach_; ...”
“For we see that it is possible to interpret the ideals of ethical
progress, through love and sociality, co-operation and sacrifice, not as
mere utopias contradicted by experience, but as the highest expressions
of the central evolutionary process of the natural world.... The older
biologists have been primarily anatomists, analysing and comparing the
form of the organism, separate and dead; however incompletely, we have
sought rather to be physiologists, studying and interpreting the highest
and intensest activity of things living.... It is much for our pure
natural history to recognise that ‘creation’s final law’ is not
struggle, but love.”—Geddes and Thomson (“The Evolution of Sex,” pp.
312, 313).
5; 6.—“_Conformed to claims of intellect and need,
The tempered numbers of their high-born breed_;”
“There is a problem creeping gradually forward upon us, a problem that
will have to be solved in time, and that is the steady increase of
population.... I believe that with the emancipation of women we shall
solve this problem now. Fewer children will be born, and those that are
born will be of a higher and better physique than the present order of
men. The ghastly abortions, which in many parts pass muster nowadays,
owing to the unnatural physical conditions of society, as men, women,
and children, will make room for a nobler and higher order of beings,
who will come to look upon the production of mankind in a diseased or
degraded state as a wickedness and unpardonable crime, against which all
men and women should fight and strive.”—Lady Florence Dixie (“Gloriana,”
p. 137).
_Id._... And Mrs. Mona Caird says:—“If the new movement had no other
effect than to rouse women to rebellion against the madness of large
families, it would confer a priceless benefit on humanity.”—(_Nineteenth
Century_, May, 1892.)
_Id._... “To bring a child into existence without a fair prospect of
being able, not only to provide food for its body, but instruction and
training for its mind, is a moral crime, both against the unfortunate
offspring and against society.... The fact itself of causing the
existence of a human being, is one of the most responsible actions in
the range of human life. To undertake this responsibility—to bestow a
life which may be either a curse or a blessing—unless the being on whom
it is bestowed will have at least the ordinary chances of a desirable
existence, is a crime against that being. And in a country either
over-peopled, or threatened with being so, to produce children, beyond a
very small number, with the effect of reducing the reward of labour by
their competition, is a serious offence against all who live by the
remuneration of their labour.”—J. S. Mill (“Liberty,” Chap. V.).
_Id._... A. Dumas fils draws a true and piteous picture in which this
element of the unintelligent overproduction of human beings has the
largest share:—
“Il y a, et c’est la masse, les femmes du peuple et de la campagne suant
du matin au soir pour gagner le pain quotidien, faisant ainsi ce que
faisaient leurs mères, et mettant au monde, sans savoir pourquoi ni
comment, des filles qui, à leur tour, feront comme elles, à moins que,
plus jolies, et par conséquent plus insoumises, elles ne sortent du
groupe par le chemin tentant et facile de la prostitution, mais où le
labeur est encore plus rude. Le dos courbé sous le travail du jour,
regardant la terre quand elles marchent, domptées par la misère,
vaincues par l’habitude, asservies aux besoins des autres, ces créatures
à forme de femme ne supposent que leur condition puisse être modifiée
jamais. Elles n’ont pas le temps, elles n’ont jamais eu la faculté de
penser et de réfléchir; à peine un souhait vague et bientôt refoulé de
quelque chose de mieux! Quand la charge est trop lourde elles tombent,
elles geignent comme des animaux terrassés, elles versent de grosses
larmes à l’idée de laisser leurs petits sans ressources, ou elles
remercient instinctivement la mort, c’est-à-dire le repos dont elles ont
tant besoin.” (“Les Femmes qui Tuent,” etc., p. 101.)
_Id._... And again, the advanced biological writers say:—
“The statistician will doubtless long continue his fashion of
confidently estimating the importance and predicting the survival of
populations from their quantity and rate of reproduction alone; but at
all this, as naturalists, we can only scoff. Even the most conventional
exponent of the struggle for existence among us knows, with the
barbarian conquerors of old, that ‘the thicker the grass, the easier it
is mown,’ that ‘the wolf cares not how many the sheep may be.’ It is the
most individuated type that prevails in spite, nay, in another sense,
positively because of its slower increase; in a word, the survival of a
species or family depends not primarily upon quantity, but upon quality.
The future is not to the most numerous population, but to the most
individuated....
“Apart from the pressure of population, it is time to be learning (1)
That the annual child-bearing still so common, is cruelly exhaustive to
the maternal life, and this often in actual duration as well as quality;
(2) That it is similarly injurious to the standard of offspring; and
hence, (3) That an interval of two clear years between births (some
gynæcologists even go as far as three) is due alike to mother and
offspring.” (It is to be noted that this period of three years is
postulated as a necessity for the well-being of the offspring; it is by
no means a recommendation to even a triennial maternity on the part of
the mother, who is indeed to be, in all fulness, “free mistress of her
person’s sacred plan,” with a duty to herself, as well as to her child).
“It is time, therefore, as we heard a brave parson tell his flock
lately, ‘to have done with that blasphemous whining which constantly
tries to look at a motherless’ (ay, or sometimes even fatherless) ‘crowd
of puny infants as a dispensation of mysterious providence.’ Let us
frankly face the biological facts, and admit that such cases usually
illustrate only the extreme organic nemesis of intemperance and
improvidence, and these of a kind far more reprehensible than those
actions to which common custom applies the names, since they are
species-regarding vices, and not merely self-regarding ones, as the
others at least primarily are....
“It seems to us, however, essential to recognise that the ideal to be
sought after is not merely a controlled rate of increase, but regulated
married lives.... We would urge, in fact, the necessity of an ethical
rather than of a mechanical ‘prudence after marriage,’ of a temperance
recognised to be as binding on husband and wife as chastity on the
unmarried.... Just as we would protest against the dictum of false
physicians who preach indulgence rather than restraint, so we must
protest against regarding artificial means of preventing fertilisation
as adequate solutions of sexual responsibility. After all, the solution
is primarily one of temperance. It is no new nor unattainable ideal to
retain, throughout married life, a large measure of that self-control
which must always form the organic basis of the enthusiasm and idealism
of lovers.”—Geddes and Thomson (“The Evolution of Sex,” Chap. XX.).
As a fitting exemplification of the words of the “parson” above
narrated, compare the following verbatim extract from a conversation
in this year of grace 1892. The —— referred to is a man about 35,
middle-class, and of “good ‘education’” (!) The same description would
also apply to the speaker, who said, “Poor —— is a brave fellow, and
keeps up his head in the worst of luck. He has a lot of home troubles;
he has lost three children, and his wife always has a bad time at the
birth of each baby.”
No word of sympathy for the wife and mother, or even of recognition
that it was really _she_ who bore the pain at each “bad time.” As the
children left alive still numbered two at the time of the speech, the
whole incident can but imply—on the part of both actor and speaker—the
hideous, even if unconscious, inhumanity so widely prevalent. Never
will “high-born breed” be attained till such action of low-bred
intellect is reprobated and amended; in accordance with the enunciated
truth, that:—
“Especially in higher organisms, a distinction must obviously be drawn
between the period at which it is possible for males and females to
unite in fertile sexual union, and the period at which such union will
naturally occur or will result in the fittest offspring.”—Geddes and
Thomson (_op. cit._, p. 243).
7, 8.—“_Not overworn with childward pain and care,
The mother—and the race—robuster health shall share_.”
“It is not the true purpose of any intellectual organism to live solely
to give birth to succeeding organisms; its duty is also to live for its
own happiness and well-being. Indeed, in so doing, it will be acting in
one of the most certain ways to ensure that faculty and possession of
happiness that it aims to secure for its progeny.”—Ben Elmy (“Studies in
Materialism,” Chap. III.).
_Id._... Even the placid and precisian American poet bears strong, if
involuntary, testimony to the evil and wrong of the non-cultured and
untempered begetting of children:—
“She wedded a man unlearned and poor,
And many children played round her door;
But care and sorrow, and child-birth pain
Left their traces on heart and brain.”
—Whittier (“Maud Müller”).
_Id._... Mr. Andrew Lang also promises us “a world that is glad and
clean, and not overthronged and not overdriven.”—(Introduction to
“Elizabethan Songs.”)
_Id._... “_Justice never loses sight of self._... The language of
Justice is ‘to Me and to You; or to You and to Me.’ ... We have to
learn, for the action and spirit worthy of the coming time, that woman
is never to sacrifice herself to a man, but, when needful, to the
_Manhood_ she hopes or desires to develop in him. In this she will also
attain her own development. But after the hour when her faith in the
hope of worthy results fails her (reason instructing her nobler
affections by holding candidly in view all the premises, past, present,
and future), she is bound by all her higher obligations to bring that
career, whether it be of the daughter, sister, mother, wife, or friend,
to a close. For the inferior cannot possibly be worth the sacrifice of
the superior. True self-sacrifice, which necessarily involves the
temporary descent of the nobler to the less noble—the higher to the
lower—is made only when the lower is elevated, improved, carried forward
in its career, thereby.”—Eliza W. Farnham (“Woman and Her Era,” Vol.
II., p. 149).
_Id._... “I have urged on woman independence of man, not that I do not
think the sexes mutually needed by one another; but because in woman
this fact has led to an excessive devotion which has cooled love,
degraded marriage, and prevented either sex from being what it should be
to itself or the other.... Woman, self-controlled, would never be
absorbed by any relations; it would be only an experience to her as to
man. It is a vulgar error that love, a love to woman, is her whole
existence; she is also born for truth and love in their universal
energy.”—Margaret Fuller Ossoli (“The Woman of the Nineteenth Century”).
_Id._... Professor Alfred Russell Wallace has written an article,
concerning part of which Mr. W. T. Stead rightly says: “It is a
scientific reinforcement of the cause of the emancipation of women, and
shows that progress of the cause of female enfranchisement is identified
with the progress of humanity.”—(_Review of Reviews_, Vol. V., p. 177.)