CHAPTER XII.

THE SCIENCE OF PROCREATION.

The Relationship of the Science of Procreation to the Art of Love--Sexual

Desire and Sexual Pleasure as the Conditions of Conception--Reproduction

Formerly Left to Caprice and Lust--The Question of Procreation as a

Religious Question--The Creed of Eugenics--Ellen Key and Sir Francis

Galton--Our Debt to Posterity--The Problem of Replacing Natural

Selection--The Origin and Development of Eugenics--The General Acceptance

of Eugenical Principles To-day--The Two Channels by Which Eugenical

Principles are Becoming Embodied in Practice--The Sense of Sexual

Responsibility in Women--The Rejection of Compulsory Motherhood--The

Privilege of Voluntary Motherhood--Causes of the Degradation of

Motherhood--The Control of Conception--Now Practiced by the Majority of

the Population in Civilized Countries--The Fallacy of "Racial

Suicide"--Are Large Families a Stigma of Degeneration?--Procreative

Control the Outcome of Natural and Civilized Progress--The Growth of

Neo-Malthusian Beliefs and Practices--Facultative Sterility as Distinct

from Neo-Malthusianism--The Medical and Hygienic Necessity of Control of

Conception--Preventive Methods--Abortion--The New Doctrine of the Duty to

Practice Abortion--How Far is this Justifiable?--Castration as a Method of

Controlling Procreation--Negative Eugenics and Positive Eugenics--The

Question of Certificates for Marriage--The Inadequacy of Eugenics by Act

of Parliament--The Quickening of the Social Conscience in Regard to

Heredity--Limitations to the Endowment of Motherhood--The Conditions

Favorable to Procreation--Sterility--The Question of Artificial

Fecundation--The Best Age of Procreation--The Question of Early

Motherhood--The Best Time for Procreation--The Completion of the Divine

Cycle of Life.

CHAPTER I.

THE MOTHER AND HER CHILD.

The Child's Right to Choose Its Ancestry--How This is Effected--The Mother

the Child's Supreme Parent--Motherhood and the Woman Movement--The Immense

Importance of Motherhood--Infant Mortality and Its Causes--The Chief Cause

in the Mother--The Need of Rest During Pregnancy--Frequency of Premature

Birth--The Function of the State--Recent Advance in Puericulture--The

Question of Coitus During Pregnancy--The Need of Rest During

Lactation--The Mother's Duty to Suckle Her Child--The Economic

Question--The Duty of the State--Recent Progress in the Protection of the

Mother--The Fallacy of State Nurseries.

A man's sexual nature, like all else that is most essential in him, is

rooted in a soil that was formed very long before his birth. In this, as

in every other respect, he draws the elements of his life from his

ancestors, however new the recombination may be and however greatly it may

be modified by subsequent conditions. A man's destiny stands not in the

future but in the past. That, rightly considered, is the most vital of all

vital facts. Every child thus has a right to choose his own ancestors.

Naturally he can only do this vicariously, through his parents. It is the

most serious and sacred duty of the future father to choose one half of

the ancestral and hereditary character of his future child; it is the most

serious and sacred duty of the future mother to make a similar choice.[1]

In choosing each other they have between them chosen the whole ancestry of

their child. They have determined the stars that will rule his fate.

In the past that fateful determination has usually been made helplessly,

ignorantly, almost unconsciously. It has either been guided by an

instinct which, on the whole, has worked out fairly well, or controlled by

economic interests of the results of which so much cannot be said, or left

to the risks of lower than bestial chances which can produce nothing but

evil. In the future we cannot but have faith--for all the hope of humanity

must rest on that faith--that a new guiding impulse, reinforcing natural

instinct and becoming in time an inseparable accompaniment of it, will

lead civilized man on his racial course. Just as in the past the race has,

on the whole, been moulded by a natural, and in part sexual, selection,

that was unconscious of itself and ignorant of the ends it made towards,

so in the future the race will be moulded by deliberate selection, the

creative energy of Nature becoming self-conscious in the civilized brain

of man. This is not a faith which has its source in a vague hope. The

problems of the individual life are linked on to the fate of the racial

life, and again and again we shall find as we ponder the individual

questions we are here concerned with, that at all points they ultimately

converge towards this same racial end.

Since we have here, therefore, to follow out the sexual relationships of

the individual as they bear on society, it will be convenient at this

point to put aside the questions of ancestry and to accept the individual

as, with hereditary constitution already determined, he lies in his

mother's womb.

It is the mother who is the child's supreme parent. At various points in

zoölogical evolution it has seemed possible that the functions that we now

know as those of maternity would be largely and even equally shared by the

male parent. Nature has tried various experiments in this direction, among

the fishes, for instance, and even among birds. But reasonable and

excellent as these experiments were, and though they were sufficiently

sound to secure their perpetuation unto this day, it remains true that it

was not along these lines that Man was destined to emerge. Among all the

mammal predecessors of Man, the male is an imposing and important figure

in the early days of courtship, but after conception has once been secured

the mother plays the chief part in the racial life. The male must be

content to forage abroad and stand on guard when at home in the

ante-chamber of the family. When she has once been impregnated the female

animal angrily rejects the caresses she had welcomed so coquettishly

before, and even in Man the place of the father at the birth of his child

is not a notably dignified or comfortable one. Nature accords the male but

a secondary and comparatively humble place in the home, the breeding-place

of the race; he may compensate himself if he will, by seeking adventure

and renown in the world outside. The mother is the child's supreme parent,

and during the period from conception to birth the hygiene of the future

man can only be affected by influences which work through her.

Fundamental and elementary as is the fact of the predominant position of

the mother in relation to the life of the race, incontestable as it must

seem to all those who have traversed the volumes of these _Studies_ up to

the present point, it must be admitted that it has sometimes been

forgotten or ignored. In the great ages of humanity it has indeed been

accepted as a central and sacred fact. In classic Rome at one period the

house of the pregnant woman was adorned with garlands, and in Athens it

was an inviolable sanctuary where even the criminal might find shelter.

Even amid the mixed influences of the exuberantly vital times which

preceded the outburst of the Renaissance, the ideally beautiful woman, as

pictures still show, was the pregnant woman. But it has not always been

so. At the present time, for instance, there can be no doubt that we are

but beginning to emerge from a period during which this fact was often

disputed and denied, both in theory and in practice, even by women

themselves. This was notably the case both in England and America, and it

is probably owing in large part to the unfortunate infatuation which led

women in these lands to follow after masculine ideals that at the present

moment the inspirations of progress in women's movements come mainly

to-day from the women of other lands. Motherhood and the future of the

race were systematically belittled. Paternity is but a mere incident, it

was argued, in man's life: why should maternity be more than a mere

incident in woman's life? In England, by a curiously perverted form of

sexual attraction, women were so fascinated by the glamour that surrounded

men that they desired to suppress or forget all the facts of organic

constitution which made them unlike men, counting their glory as their

shame, and sought the same education as men, the same occupations as men,

even the same sports. As we know, there was at the origin an element of

rightness in this impulse.[2] It was absolutely right in so far as it was

a claim for freedom from artificial restriction, and a demand for economic

independence. But it became mischievous and absurd when it developed into

a passion for doing, in all respects, the same things as men do; how

mischievous and how absurd we may realize if we imagine men developing a

passion to imitate the ways and avocations of women. Freedom is only good

when it is a freedom to follow the laws of one's own nature; it ceases to

be freedom when it becomes a slavish attempt to imitate others, and would

be disastrous if it could be successful.[3]

At the present day this movement on the theoretical side has ceased to

possess any representatives who exert serious influence. Yet its practical

results are still prominently exhibited in England and the other countries

in which it has been felt. Infantile mortality is enormous, and in England

at all events is only beginning to show a tendency to diminish; motherhood

is without dignity, and the vitality of mothers is speedily crushed, so

that often they cannot so much as suckle their infants; ignorant

girl-mothers give their infants potatoes and gin; on every hand we are

told of the evidence of degeneracy in the race, or if not in the race, at

all events, in the young individuals of to-day.

It would be out of place, and would lead us too far, to discuss

here these various practical outcomes of the foolish attempt to

belittle the immense racial importance of motherhood. It is

enough here to touch on the one point of the excess of infantile

mortality.

In England--which is not from the social point of view in a very

much worse condition than most countries, for in Austria and

Russia the infant mortality is higher still, though in Australia

and New Zealand much lower, but still excessive--more than

one-fourth of the total number of deaths every year is of infants

under one year of age. In the opinion of medical officers of

health who are in the best position to form an opinion, about

one-half of this mortality, roughly speaking, is absolutely

preventable. Moreover, it is doubtful whether there is any real

movement of decrease in this mortality; during the past half

century it has sometimes slightly risen and sometimes slightly

fallen, and though during the past few years the general movement

of mortality for children under five in England and Wales has

shown a tendency to decrease, in London (according to J.F.J.

Sykes, although Sir Shirley Murphy has attempted to minimize the

significance of these figures) the infantile mortality rate for

the first three months of life actually rose from 69 per 1,000 in

the period 1888-1892 to 75 per 1,000 in the period 1898-1901.

(This refers, it must be remembered, to the period before the

introduction of the Notification of Births Act.) In any case,

although the general mortality shows a marked tendency to

improvement there is certainly no adequately corresponding

improvement in the infantile mortality. This is scarcely

surprising, when we realize that there has been no change for the

better, but rather for the worse, in the conditions under which

our infants are born and reared. Thus William Hall, who has had

an intimate knowledge extending over fifty-six years of the slums

of Leeds, and has weighed and measured many thousands of slum

children, besides examining over 120,000 boys and girls as to

their fitness for factory labor, states (_British Medical

Journal_, October 14, 1905) that "fifty years ago the slum mother

was much more sober, cleanly, domestic, and motherly than she is

to-day; she was herself better nourished and she almost always

suckled her children, and after weaning they received more

nutritious bone-making food, and she was able to prepare more

wholesome food at home." The system of compulsory education has

had an unfortunate influence in exerting a strain on the parents

and worsening the conditions of the home. For, excellent as

education is in itself, it is not the primary need of life, and

has been made compulsory before the more essential things of life

have been made equally compulsory. How absolutely unnecessary

this great mortality is may be shown, without evoking the good

example of Australia and New Zealand, by merely comparing small

English towns; thus while in Guildford the infantile death rate

is 65 per thousand, in Burslem it is 205 per thousand.

It is sometimes said that infantile mortality is an economic

question, and that with improvement in wages it would cease. This

is only true to a limited extent and under certain conditions. In

Australia there is no grinding poverty, but the deaths of infants

under one year of age are still between 80 and 90 per thousand,

and one-third of this mortality, according to Hooper (_British

Medical Journal_, 1908, vol. ii, p. 289), being due to the

ignorance of mothers and the dislike to suckling, is easily

preventable. The employment of married women greatly diminishes

the poverty of a family, but nothing can be worse for the welfare

of the woman as mother, or for the welfare of her child. Reid,

the medical officer of health for Staffordshire, where there are

two large centres of artisan population with identical health

conditions, has shown that in the northern centre, where a very

large number of women are engaged in factories, still-births are

three times as frequent as in the southern centre, where there

are practically no trade employments for women; the frequency of

abnormalities is also in the same ratio. The superiority of

Jewish over Christian children, again, and their lower infantile

mortality, seem to be entirely due to the fact that Jewesses are

better mothers. "The Jewish children in the slums," says William

Hall (_British Medical Journal_, October 14, 1905), speaking from

wide and accurate knowledge, "were superior in weight, in teeth,

and in general bodily development, and they seemed less

susceptible to infectious disease. Yet these Jews were

overcrowded, they took little exercise, and their unsanitary

environment was obvious. The fact was, their children were much

better nourished. The pregnant Jewess was more cared for, and no

doubt supplied better nutriment to the foetus. After the children

were born 90 per cent. received breast-milk, and during later

childhood they were abundantly fed on bone-making material; eggs

and oil, fish, fresh vegetables, and fruit entered largely into

their diet." G. Newman, in his important and comprehensive book

on _Infant Mortality_, emphasizes the conclusion that "first of

all we need a higher standard of physical motherhood." The

problem of infantile mortality, he declares (page 259), is not

one of sanitation alone, or housing, or indeed of poverty as

such, "_but is mainly a question of motherhood_."

The fundamental need of the pregnant woman is _rest_. Without a large

degree of maternal rest there can be no puericulture.[4] The task of

creating a man needs the whole of a woman's best energies, more especially

during the three months before birth. It cannot be subordinated to the tax

on strength involved by manual or mental labor, or even strenuous social

duties and amusements. The numerous experiments and observations which

have been made during recent years in Maternity Hospitals, more especially

in France, have shown conclusively that not only the present and future

well-being of the mother and the ease of her confinement, but the fate of

the child, are immensely influenced by rest during the last month of

pregnancy. "Every working woman is entitled to rest during the last three

months of her pregnancy." This formula was adopted by the International

Congress of Hygiene in 1900, but it cannot be practically carried out

except by the coöperation of the whole community. For it is not enough to

say that a woman ought to rest during pregnancy; it is the business of the

community to ensure that that rest is duly secured. The woman herself, and

her employer, we may be certain, will do their best to cheat the

community, but it is the community which suffers, both economically and

morally, when a woman casts her inferior children into the world, and in

its own interests the community is forced to control both employer and

employed. We can no longer allow it to be said, in Bouchacourt's words,

that "to-day the dregs of the human species--the blind, the deaf-mute, the

degenerate, the nervous, the vicious, the idiotic, the imbecile, the

cretins and epileptics--are better protected than pregnant women."[5]

Pinard, who must always be honored as one of the founders of

eugenics, has, together with his pupils, done much to prepare the

way for the acceptance of this simple but important principle by

making clear the grounds on which it is based. From prolonged

observations on the pregnant women of all classes Pinard has

shown conclusively that women who rest during pregnancy have

finer children than women who do not rest. Apart from the more

general evils of work during pregnancy, Pinard found that during

the later months it had a tendency to press the uterus down into

the pelvis, and so cause the premature birth of undeveloped

children, while labor was rendered more difficult and dangerous

(see, e.g., Pinard, _Gazette des Hôpitaux_, Nov. 28, 1895, Id.,

_Annales de Gynécologie_, Aug., 1898).

Letourneux has studied the question whether repose during

pregnancy is necessary for women whose professional work is only

slightly fatiguing. He investigated 732 successive confinements

at the Clinique Baudelocque in Paris. He found that 137 women

engaged in fatiguing occupations (servants, cooks, etc.) and not

resting during pregnancy, produced children with an average

weight of 3,081 grammes; 115 women engaged in only slightly

fatiguing occupations (dressmakers, milliners, etc.) and also not

resting during pregnancy, had children with an average weight of

3,130 grammes, a slight but significant difference, in view of

the fact that the women of the first group were large and robust,

while those of the second group were of slight and elegant build.

Again, comparing groups of women who rested during pregnancy, it

was found that the women accustomed to fatiguing work had

children with an average weight of 3,319 grammes, while those

accustomed to less fatiguing work had children with an average

weight of 3,318 grammes. The difference between repose and

non-repose is thus considerable, while it also enables robust

women exercising a fatiguing occupation to catch up, though not

to surpass, the frailer women exercising a less fatiguing

occupation. We see, too, that even in the comparatively

unfatiguing occupations of milliners, etc., rest during pregnancy

still remains important, and cannot safely be dispensed with.

"Society," Letourneux concludes, "must guarantee rest to women

not well off during a part of pregnancy. It will be repaid the

cost of doing so by the increased vigor of the children thus

produced" (Letourneux, _De l'Influence de la Profession de la

Mère sur le Poids de l'Enfant_, Thèse de Paris, 1897).

Dr. Dweira-Bernson (_Revue Pratique d'Obstétrique et de

Pédiatrie_, 1903, p. 370), compared four groups of pregnant women

(servants with light work, servants with heavy work, farm girls,

dressmakers) who rested for three months before confinement with

four groups similarly composed who took no rest before

confinement. In every group he found that the difference in the

average weight of the child was markedly in favor of the women

who rested, and it was notable that the greatest difference was

found in the case of the farm girls who were probably the most

robust and also the hardest worked.

The usual time of gestation ranges between 274 and 280 days (or

280 to 290 days from the last menstrual period), and occasionally

a few days longer, though there is dispute as to the length of

the extreme limit, which some authorities would extend to 300

days, or even to 320 days (Pinard, in Richet's _Dictionnaire de

Physiologie_, vol. vii, pp. 150-162; Taylor, _Medical

Jurisprudence_, fifth edition, pp. 44, 98 et seq.; L.M. Allen,

"Prolonged Gestation," _American Journal Obstetrics_, April,

1907). It is possible, as Müller suggested in 1898 in a Thèse de

Nancy, that civilization tends to shorten the period of

gestation, and that in earlier ages it was longer than it is now.

Such a tendency to premature birth under the exciting nervous

influences of civilization would thus correspond, as Bouchacourt

has pointed out (_La Grossesse_, p. 113), to the similar effect

of domestication in animals. The robust countrywoman becomes

transformed into the more graceful, but also more fragile, town

woman who needs a degree of care and hygiene which the

countrywoman with her more resistant nervous system can to some

extent dispense with, although even she, as we see, suffers in

the person of her child, and probably in her own person, from the

effects of work during pregnancy. The serious nature of this

civilized tendency to premature birth--of which lack of rest in

pregnancy is, however, only one of several important causes--is

shown by the fact that Séropian (_Fréquence Comparée des Causes

de l'Accouchement Prémature_, Thèse de Paris, 1907) found that

about one-third of French births (32.28 per cent.) are to a

greater or less extent premature. Pregnancy is not a morbid

condition; on the contrary, a pregnant woman is at the climax of

her most normal physiological life, but owing to the tension thus

involved she is specially liable to suffer from any slight shock

or strain.

It must be remarked that the increased tendency to premature

birth, while in part it may be due to general tendencies of

civilization, is also in part due to very definite and

preventable causes. Syphilis, alcoholism, and attempts to produce

abortion are among the not uncommon causes of premature birth

(see, e.g., G.F. McCleary, "The Influence of Antenatal Conditions

on Infantile Mortality," _British Medical Journal_, Aug. 13,

1904).

Premature birth ought to be avoided, because the child born too

early is insufficiently equipped for the task before him.

Astengo, dealing with nearly 19,000 cases at the Lariboisière

Hospital in Paris and the Maternité, found, that reckoning from

the date of the last menstruation, there is a direct relation

between the weight of the infant at birth and the length of the

pregnancy. The longer the pregnancy, the finer the child

(Astengo, _Rapport du Poids des Enfants à la Durée de la

Grossesse_, Thèse de Paris, 1905).

The frequency of premature birth is probably as great in England

as in France. Ballantyne states (_Manual of Antenatal Pathology;

The Foetus_, p. 456) that for practical purposes the frequency

of premature labors in maternity hospitals may be put at 20 per

cent., but that if all infants weighing less than 3,000 grammes

are to be regarded as premature, it rises to 41.5 per cent. That

premature birth is increasing in England seems to be indicated by

the fact that during the past twenty-five years there has been a

steady rise in the mortality rate from premature birth. McCleary,

who discusses this point and considers the increase real,

concludes that "it would appear that there has been a diminution

in the quality as well as in the quantity of our output of

babies" (see also a discussion, introduced by Dawson Williams, on

"Physical Deterioration," _British Medical Journal_, Oct. 14,

1905).

It need scarcely be pointed out that not only is immaturity a

cause of deterioration in the infants that survive, but that it

alone serves enormously to decrease the number of infants that

are able to survive. Thus G. Newman states (loc. cit.) that in

most large English urban districts immaturity is the chief cause

of infant mortality, furnishing about 30 per cent. of the infant

deaths; even in London (Islington) Alfred Harris (_British

Medical Journal_, Dec. 14, 1907) finds that it is responsible for

nearly 17 per cent. of the infantile deaths. It is estimated by

Newman that about half of the mothers of infants dying of

immaturity suffer from marked ill-health and poor physique; they

are not, therefore, fitted to be mothers.

Rest during pregnancy is a very powerful agent in preventing

premature birth. Thus Dr. Sarraute-Lourié has compared 1,550

pregnant women at the Asile Michelet who rested before

confinement with 1,550 women confined at the Hôpital Lariboisière

who had enjoyed no such period of rest. She found that the

average duration of pregnancy was at least twenty days shorter in

the latter group (Mme. Sarraute-Lourié, _De l'Influence du Repos

sur la Durée de la Gestation_, Thèse de Paris, 1899).

Leyboff has insisted on the absolute necessity of rest during

pregnancy, as well for the sake of the woman herself as the

burden she carries, and shows the evil results which follow when

rest is neglected. Railway traveling, horse-riding, bicycling,

and sea-voyages are also, Leyboff believes, liable to be

injurious to the course of pregnancy. Leyboff recognizes the

difficulties which procreating women are placed under by present

industrial conditions, and concludes that "it is urgently

necessary to prevent women, by law, from working during the last

three months of pregnancy; that in every district there should be

a maternity fund; that during this enforced rest a woman should

receive the same salary as during work." He adds that the

children of unmarried mothers should be cared for by the State,

that there should be an eight-hours' day for all workers, and

that no children under sixteen should be allowed to work (E.

Leyboff, _L'Hygiène de la Grossesse_, Thèse de Paris, 1905).

Perruc states that at least two months' rest before confinement

should be made compulsory, and that during this period the woman

should receive an indemnity regulated by the State. He is of

opinion that it should take the form of compulsory assurance, to

which the worker, the employer, and the State alike contributed

(Perruc, _Assistance aux Femmes Enceintes_, Thèse de Paris,

1905).

It is probable that during the earlier months of pregnancy, work,

if not excessively heavy and exhausting, has little or no bad

effect; thus Bacchimont (_Documents pour servir a l'Histoire de

la Puériculture Intra-utérine_, Thèse de Paris, 1898) found that,

while there was a great gain in the weight of children of mothers

who had rested for three months, there was no corresponding gain

in the children of those mothers who had rested for longer

periods. It is during the last three months that freedom, repose,

the cessation of the obligatory routine of employment become

necessary. This is the opinion of Pinard, the chief authority on

this matter. Many, however, fearing that economic and industrial

conditions render so long a period of rest too difficult of

practical attainment, are, with Clappier and G. Newman, content

to demand two months as a minimum; Salvat only asks for one

month's rest before confinement, the woman, whether married or

not, receiving a pecuniary indemnity during this period, with

medical care and drugs free. Ballantyne (_Manual of Antenatal

Pathology: The Foetus_, p. 475), as well as Niven, also asks only

for one month's compulsory rest during pregnancy, with indemnity.

Arthur Helme, however, taking a more comprehensive view of all

the factors involved, concludes in a valuable paper on "The

Unborn Child: Its Care and Its Rights" (_British Medical

Journal_, Aug. 24, 1907), "The important thing would be to

prohibit pregnant women from going to work at all, and it is as

important from the standpoint of the child that this prohibition

should include the early as the late months of pregnancy."

In England little progress has yet been made as regards this

question of rest during pregnancy, even as regards the education

of public opinion. Sir William Sinclair, Professor of Obstetrics

at the Victoria University of Manchester, has published (1907) _A

Plea for Establishing Municipal Maternity Homes_. Ballantyne, a

great British authority on the embryology of the child, has

published a "Plea for a Pre-Maternity Hospital" (_British Medical

Journal_, April 6, 1901), has since given an important lecture on

the subject (_British Medical Journal_, Jan. 11, 1908), and has

further discussed the matter in his _Manual of Ante-Natal

Pathology: The Foetus_ (Ch. XXVII); he is, however, more

interested in the establishment of hospitals for the diseases of

pregnancy than in the wider and more fundamental question of rest

for all pregnant women. In England there are, indeed, a few

institutions which receive unmarried women, with a record of good

conduct, who are pregnant for the first time, for, as

Bouchacourt remarks, ancient British prejudices are opposed to

any mercy being shown to women who are recidivists in committing

the crime of conception.

At present, indeed, it is only in France that the urgent need of

rest during the latter months of pregnancy has been clearly

realized, and any serious and official attempts made to provide

for it. In an interesting Paris thesis (_De la Puériculture avant

le Naissance_, 1907) Clappier has brought together much

information bearing on the efforts now being made to deal

practically with this question. There are many _Asiles_ in Paris

for pregnant women. One of the best is the Asile Michelet,

founded in 1893 by the Assistance Publique de Paris. This is a

sanatorium for pregnant women who have reached a period of seven

and a half months. It is nominally restricted to the admission of

French women who have been domiciled for a year in Paris, but, in

practice, it appears that women from all parts of France are

received. They are employed in light and occasional work for the

institution, being paid for this work, and are also occupied in

making clothes for the expected baby. Married and unmarried women

are admitted alike, all women being equal from the point of view

of motherhood, and indeed the majority of the women who come to

the Asile Michelet are unmarried, some being girls who have even

trudged on foot from Brittany and other remote parts of France,

to seek concealment from their friends in the hospitable

seclusion of these refuges in the great city. It is not the least

advantage of these institutions that they shield unmarried

mothers and their offspring from the manifold evils to which they

are exposed, and thus tend to decrease crime and suffering. In

addition to the maternity refuges, there are institutions in

France for assisting with help and advice those pregnant women

who prefer to remain at home, but are thus enabled to avoid the

necessity for undue domestic labor.

There ought to be no manner of doubt that when, as is the case

to-day in our own and some other supposedly civilized countries,

motherhood outside marriage is accounted as almost a crime, there

is the very greatest need for adequate provision for unmarried

women who are about to become mothers, enabling them to receive

shelter and care in secrecy, and to preserve their self-respect

and social position. This is necessary not only in the interests

of humanity and public economy, but also, as is too often

forgotten, in the interests of morality, for it is certain that

by the neglect to furnish adequate provision of this nature women

are driven to infanticide and prostitution. In earlier, more

humane days, the general provision for the secret reception and

care of illegitimate infants was undoubtedly most beneficial. The

suppression of the mediæval method, which in France took place

gradually between 1833 and 1862, led to a great increase in

infanticide and abortion, and was a direct encouragement to crime

and immorality. In 1887 the Conseil Général of the Seine sought

to replace the prevailing neglect of this matter by the adoption

of more enlightened ideas and founded a _bureau secret

d'admission_ for pregnant women. Since then both the abandonment

of infants and infanticide have greatly diminished, though they

are increasing in those parts of France which possess no

facilities of this kind. It is widely held that the State should

unify the arrangements for assuring secret maternity, and should,

in its own interests, undertake the expense. In 1904 French law

ensured the protection of unmarried mothers by guaranteeing their

secret, but it failed to organize the general establishment of

secret maternities, and has left to doctors the pioneering part

in this great and humane public work (A. Maillard-Brune,

_Refuges, Maternités, Bureaux d'Admission Secrets, comme Moyens

Préservatives des Infanticide_, Thèse de Paris, 1908). It is not

among the least benefits of the falling birth rate that it has

helped to stimulate this beneficent movement.

The development of an industrial system which subordinates the human body

and the human soul to the thirst for gold, has, for a time, dismissed from

social consideration the interests of the race and even of the individual,

but it must be remembered that this has not been always and everywhere so.

Although in some parts of the world the women of savage peoples work up to

the time of confinement, it must be remarked that the conditions of work

in savage life do not resemble the strenuous and continuous labor of

modern factories. In many parts of the world, however, women are not

allowed to work hard during pregnancy and every consideration is shown to

them. This is so, for instance, among the Pueblo Indians, and among the

Indians of Mexico. Similar care is taken in the Carolines and the Gilbert

Islands and in many other regions all over the world. In some places,

women are secluded during pregnancy, and in others are compelled to

observe many more or less excellent rules. It is true that the assigned

cause for these rules is frequently the fear of evil spirits, but they

nevertheless often preserve a hygienic value. In many parts of the world

the discovery of pregnancy is the sign for a festival of more or less

ritual character, and much good advice is given to the expectant mother.

The modern Musselmans are careful to guard the health of their women when

pregnant, and so are the Chinese.[6] Even in Europe, in the thirteenth

century, as Clappier notes, industrial corporations sometimes had regard

to this matter, and would not allow women to work during pregnancy. In

Iceland, where much of the primitive life of Scandinavian Europe is still

preserved, great precautions are taken with pregnant women. They must lead

a quiet life, avoid tight garments, be moderate in eating and drinking,

take no alcohol, be safeguarded from all shocks, while their husbands and

all others who surround them must treat them with consideration, save them

from worry and always bear with them patiently.[7]

It is necessary to emphasize this point because we have to realize that

the modern movement for surrounding the pregnant woman with tenderness and

care, so far from being the mere outcome of civilized softness and

degeneracy, is, in all probability, the return on a higher plane to the

sane practice of those races which laid the foundations of human

greatness.

While rest is the cardinal virtue imposed on a woman during the later

months of pregnancy, there are other points in her regimen that are far

from unimportant in their bearing on the fate of the child. One of these

is the question of the mother's use of alcohol. Undoubtedly alcohol has

been a cause of much fanaticism. But the declamatory extravagance of

anti-alcoholists must not blind us to the fact that the evils of alcohol

are real. On the reproductive process especially, on the mammary glands,

and on the child, alcohol has an arresting and degenerative influence

without any compensatory advantages. It has been proved by experiments on

animals and observations on the human subject that alcohol taken by the

pregnant woman passes freely from the maternal circulation to the foetal

circulation. Féré has further shown that, by injecting alcohol and

aldehydes into hen's eggs during incubation, it is possible to cause

arrest of development and malformation in the chick.[8] The woman who is

bearing her child in her womb or suckling it at her breast would do well

to remember that the alcohol which may be harmless to herself is little

better than poison to the immature being who derives nourishment from her

blood. She should confine herself to the very lightest of alcoholic

beverages in very moderate amounts and would do better still to abandon

these entirely and drink milk instead. She is now the sole source of the

child's life and she cannot be too scrupulous in creating around it an

atmosphere of purity and health. No after-influence can ever compensate

for mistakes made at this time.[9]

What is true of alcohol is equally true of other potent drugs and poisons,

which should all be avoided so far as possible during pregnancy because of

the harmful influence they may directly exert on the embryo. Hygiene is

better than drugs, and care should be exercised in diet, which should by

no means be excessive. It is a mistake to suppose that the pregnant woman

needs considerably more food than usual, and there is much reason to

believe not only that a rich meat diet tends to cause sterility but that

it is also unfavorable to the development of the child in the womb.[10]

How far, if at all, it is often asked, should sexual intercourse be

continued after fecundation has been clearly ascertained? This has not

always been found an easy question to answer, for in the human couple many

considerations combine to complicate the answer. Even the Catholic

theologians have not been entirely in agreement on this point. Clement of

Alexandria said that when the seed had been sown the field must be left

till harvest. But it may be concluded that, as a rule, the Church was

inclined to regard intercourse during pregnancy as at most a venial sin,

provided there was no danger of abortion. Augustine, Gregory the Great,

Aquinas, Dens, for instance, seem to be of this mind; for a few, indeed,

it is no sin at all.[11] Among animals the rule is simple and uniform; as

soon as the female is impregnated at the period of oestrus she absolutely

rejects all advance of the male until, after birth and lactation are over,

another period of oestrus occurs. Among savages the tendency is less

uniform, and sexual abstinence, when it occurs during pregnancy, tends to

become less a natural instinct than a ritual observance, or a custom now

chiefly supported by superstitions. Among many primitive peoples

abstinence during the whole of pregnancy is enjoined because it is

believed that the semen would kill the foetus.[12]

The Talmud is unfavorable to coitus during pregnancy, and the

Koran prohibits it during the whole of the period, as well as

during suckling. Among the Hindus, on the other hand, intercourse

is continued up to the last fortnight of pregnancy, and it is

even believed that the injected semen helps to nourish the embryo

(W.D. Sutherland, "Ueber das Alltagsleben und die Volksmedizin

unter den Bauern Britischostindiens," _Münchener Medizinische

Wochenschrift_, Nos. 12 and 13, 1906). The great Indian physician

Susruta, however, was opposed to coitus during pregnancy, and the

Chinese are emphatically on the same side.

As men have emerged from barbarism in the direction of civilization, the

animal instinct of refusal after impregnation has been completely lost in

women, while at the same time both sexes tend to become indifferent to

those ritual restraints which at an earlier period were almost as binding

as instinct. Sexual intercourse thus came to be practiced after

impregnation, much the same as before, as part of ordinary "marital

rights," though sometimes there has remained a faint suspicion, reflected

in the hesitating attitude of the Catholic Church already alluded to, that

such intercourse may be a sinful indulgence. Morality is, however, called

in to fortify this indulgence. If the husband is shut out from marital

intercourse at this time, it is argued, he will seek extra-marital

intercourse, as indeed in some parts of the world it is recognized that he

legitimately may; therefore the interests of the wife, anxious to retain

her husband's fidelity, and the interests of Christian morality, anxious

to uphold the institution of monogamy, combine to permit the continuation

of coitus during pregnancy. The custom has been furthered by the fact

that, in civilized women at all events, coitus during pregnancy is usually

not less agreeable than at other times and by some women is felt indeed to

be even more agreeable.[13] There is also the further consideration, for

those couples who have sought to prevent conception, that now intercourse

may be enjoyed with impunity. From a higher point of view such intercourse

may also be justified, for if, as all the finer moralists of the sexual

impulse now believe, love has its value not only in so far as it induces

procreation but also in so far as it aids individual development and the

mutual good and harmony of the united couple, it becomes morally right

during pregnancy.

From an early period, however, great authorities have declared themselves

in opposition to the custom of practicing coitus during pregnancy. At the

end of the first century, Soranus, the first of great gynæcologists,

stated, in his treatise on the diseases of women, that sexual intercourse

is injurious throughout pregnancy, because of the movement imparted to the

uterus, and especially injurious during the latter months. For more than

sixteen hundred years the question, having fallen into the hands of the

theologians, seems to have been neglected on the medical side until in

1721 a distinguished French obstetrician, Mauriceau, stated that no

pregnant woman should have intercourse during the last two months and that

no woman subject to miscarriage should have intercourse at all during

pregnancy. For more than a century, however, Mauriceau remained a pioneer

with few or no followers. It would be inconvenient, the opinion went, even

if it were necessary, to forbid intercourse during pregnancy.[14]

During recent years, nevertheless, there has been an increasingly strong

tendency among obstetricians to speak decisively concerning intercourse

during pregnancy, either by condemning it altogether or by enjoining great

prudence. It is highly probable that, in accordance with the classical

experiments of Dareste on chicken embryos, shocks and disturbances to the

human embryo may also produce injurious effects on growth. The disturbance

due to coitus in the early stages of pregnancy may thus tend to produce

malformation. When such conditions are found in the children of perfectly

healthy, vigorous, and generally temperate parents who have indulged

recklessly in coitus during the early stages of pregnancy it is possible

that such coitus has acted on the embryo in the same way as shocks and

intoxications are known to act on the embryo of lower organisms. However

this may be, it is quite certain that in predisposed women, coitus during

pregnancy causes premature birth; it sometimes happens that labor pains

begin a few minutes after the act.[15] The natural instinct of animals

refuses to allow intercourse during pregnancy; the ritual observance of

primitive peoples very frequently points in the same direction; the voice

of medical science, so far as it speaks at all, is beginning to utter the

same warning, and before long will probably be in a position to do so on

the basis of more solid and coherent evidence.

Pinard, the greatest of authorities on puericulture, asserts that

there must be complete cessation of sexual intercourse during the

whole of pregnancy, and in his consulting room at the Clinique

Baudelocque he has placed a large placard with an "Important

Notice" to this effect. Féré was strongly of opinion that sexual

relations during pregnancy, especially when recklessly carried

out, play an important part in the causation of nervous troubles

in children who are of sound heredity and otherwise free from all

morbid infection during gestation and development; he recorded in

detail a case which he considered conclusive ("L'Influence de

l'Incontinence Sexuelle pendant la Gestation sur la Descendance,"

_Archives de Neurologie_, April, 1905). Bouchacourt discusses the

subject fully (_La Grossesse_, pp. 177-214), and thinks that

sexual intercourse during pregnancy should be avoided as much as

possible. Fürbringer (Senator and Kaminer, _Health and Disease in

Relation to Marriage_, vol. i, p. 226) recommends abstinence from

the sixth or seventh month, and throughout the whole of pregnancy

where there is any tendency to miscarriage, while in all cases

much care and gentleness should be exercised.

The whole subject has been investigated in a Paris Thesis by H.

Brénot (_De L'Influence de la Copulation pendant la Grossesse_,

1903); he concludes that sexual relations are dangerous

throughout pregnancy, frequently provoking premature confinement

or abortion, and that they are more dangerous in primiparæ than

in multiparæ.

Nearly everything that has been said of the hygiene of pregnancy, and the

need for rest, applies also to the period immediately following the birth

of the child. Rest and hygiene on the mother's part continue to be

necessary alike in her own interests and in the child's. This need has

indeed been more generally and more practically recognized than the need

for rest during pregnancy. The laws of several countries make compulsory a

period of rest from employment after confinement, and in some countries

they seek to provide for the remuneration of the mother during this

enforced rest. In no country, indeed, is the principle carried out so

thoroughly and for so long a period as is desirable. But it is the right

principle, and embodies the germ which, in the future, will be developed.

There can be little doubt that whatever are the matters, and they are

certainly many, which may be safely left to the discretion of the

individual, the care of the mother and her child is not among them. That

is a matter which, more than any other, concerns the community as a whole,

and the community cannot afford to be slack in asserting its authority

over it. The State needs healthy men and women, and by any negligence in

attending to this need it inflicts serious charges of all sorts upon

itself, and at the same time dangerously impairs its efficiency in the

world. Nations have begun to recognize the desirability of education, but

they have scarcely yet begun to realize that the nationalization of health

is even more important than the nationalization of education. If it were

necessary to choose between the task of getting children educated and the

task of getting them well-born and healthy it would be better to abandon

education. There have been many great peoples who never dreamed of

national systems of education; there has been no great people without the

art of producing healthy and vigorous children.

This matter becomes of peculiar importance in great industrial states like

England, the United States, and Germany, because in such states a tacit

conspiracy tends to grow up to subordinate national ends to individual

ends, and practically to work for the deterioration of the race. In

England, for instance, this tendency has become peculiarly well marked

with disastrous results. The interest of the employed woman tends to

become one with that of her employer; between them they combine to crush

the interests of the child who represents the race, and to defeat the laws

made in the interests of the race which are those of the community as a

whole. The employed woman wishes to earn as much wages as she can and with

as little interruption as she can; in gratifying that wish she is, at the

same time, acting in the interests of the employer, who carefully avoids

thwarting her.

This impulse on the employed woman's part is by no means always and

entirely the result of poverty, and would not, therefore, be removed by

raising her wages. Long before marriage, when little more than a child,

she has usually gone out to work, and work has become a second nature. She

has mastered her work, she enjoys a certain position and what to her are

high wages; she is among her friends and companions; the noise and bustle

and excitement of the work-room or the factory have become an agreeable

stimulant which she can no longer do without. On the other hand, her home

means nothing to her; she only returns there to sleep, leaving it next

morning at day-break or earlier; she is ignorant even of the simplest

domestic arts; she moves about in her own home like a strange and awkward

child. The mere act of marriage cannot change this state of things;

however willing she may be at marriage to become a domesticated wife, she

is destitute alike of the inclination or the skill for domesticity. Even

in spite of herself she is driven back to the work-shop, to the one place

where she feels really at home.

In Germany women are not allowed to work for four weeks after

confinement, nor during the following two weeks except by medical

certificate. The obligatory insurance against disease which

covers women at confinement assures them an indemnity at this

time equivalent to a large part of their wages. Married and

unmarried mothers benefit alike. The Austrian law is founded on

the same model. This measure has led to a very great decrease in

infantile mortality, and, therefore, a great increase in health

among those who survive. It is, however, regarded as very

inadequate, and there is a movement in Germany for extending the

time, for applying the system to a larger number of women, and

for making it still more definitely compulsory.

In Switzerland it has been illegal since 1877 for any woman to be

received into a factory after confinement, unless she has rested

in all for eight weeks, six weeks at least of this period being

after confinement. Since 1898 Swiss working women have been

protected by law from exercising hard work during pregnancy, and

from various other influences likely to be injurious. But this

law is evaded in practice, because it provides no compensatory

indemnity for the woman. An attempt, in 1899, to amend the law by

providing for such indemnity was rejected by the people.

In Belgium and Holland there are laws against women working

immediately after confinement, but no indemnity is provided, so

that employers and employed combine to evade the law. In France

there is no such law, although its necessity has often been

emphatically asserted (see, e.g., Salvat, _La Dépopulation de la

France_, Thèse de Lyon, 1903).

In England it is illegal to employ a woman "knowingly" in a

work-shop within four weeks of the birth of her child, but no

provision is made by the law for the compensation of the woman

who is thus required to sacrifice herself to the interests of the

State. The woman evades the law in tacit collusion with her

employers, who can always avoid "knowing" that a birth has taken

place, and so escape all responsibility for the mother's

employment. Thus the factory inspectors are unable to take

action, and the law becomes a dead letter; in 1906 only one

prosecution for this offense could be brought into court. By the

insertion of this "knowingly" a premium is placed on ignorance.

The unwisdom of thus beforehand placing a premium on ignorance

has always been more or less clearly recognized by the framers of

legal codes even as far back as the days of the Ten Commandments

and the laws of Hamurabi. It is the business of the Court, of

those who administer the law, to make allowance for ignorance

where such allowance is fairly called for; it is not for the

law-maker to make smooth the path of the law-breaker. There are

evidently law-makers nowadays so scrupulous, or so simple-minded,

that they would be prepared to exact that no pickpocket should be

prosecuted if he was able to declare on oath that he had no

"knowledge" that the purse he had taken belonged to the person he

extracted it from.

The annual reports of the English factory inspectors serve to

bring ridicule on this law, which looks so wisely humane and yet

means nothing, but have so far been powerless to effect any

change. These reports show, moreover, that the difficulty is

increasing in magnitude. Thus Miss Martindale, a factory

inspector, states that in all the towns she visits, from a quiet

cathedral city to a large manufacturing town, the employment of

married women is rapidly increasing; they have worked in mills or

factories all their lives and are quite unaccustomed to cooking,

housework and the rearing of children, so that after marriage,

even when not compelled by poverty, they prefer to go on working

as before. Miss Vines, another factory inspector, repeats the

remark of a woman worker in a factory. "I do not need to work,

but I do not like staying at home," while another woman said, "I

would rather be at work a hundred times than at home. I get lost

at home" (_Annual Report Chief Inspector of Factories and

Workshops for 1906_, pp. 325, etc.).

It may be added that not only is the English law enjoining four

weeks' rest on the mother after childbirth practically

inoperative, but the period itself is absurdly inadequate. As a

rest for the mother it is indeed sufficient, but the State is

still more interested in the child than in its mother, and the

child needs the mother's chief care for a much longer period than

four weeks. Helme advocates the State prohibition of women's work

for at least six months after confinement. Where nurseries are

attached to factories, enabling the mother to suckle her infant

in intervals of work, the period may doubtless be shortened.

It is important to remember that it is by no means only the women

in factories who are induced to work as usual during the whole

period of pregnancy, and to return to work immediately after the

brief rest of confinement. The Research Committee of the

Christian Social Union (London Branch) undertook, in 1905, an

inquiry into the employment of women after childbirth. Women in

factories and workshops were excluded from the inquiry which only

had reference to women engaged in household duties, in home

industries, and in casual work. It was found that the majority

carry on their employment right up to the time of confinement and

resume it from ten to fourteen days later. The infantile death

rate for the children of women engaged only in household duties

was greatly lower than that for the children of the other women,

while, as ever, the hand-fed infants had a vastly higher death

rate than the breast-fed infants (_British Medical Journal_, Oct.

24, 1908, p. 1297).

In the great French gun and armour-plate works at Creuzot (Saône

et Loire) the salaries of expectant mothers among the employees

are raised; arrangements are made for giving them proper advice

and medical attendance; they are not allowed to work after the

middle of pregnancy or to return to work after confinement

without a medical certificate of fitness. The results are said to

be excellent, not only on the health of the mothers, but in the

diminution of premature births, the decrease of infantile deaths,

and the general prevalence of breast-feeding. It would probably

be hopeless to expect many employers in Anglo-Saxon lands to

adopt this policy. They are too "practical," they know how small

is the money-value of human lives. With us it is necessary for

the State to intervene.

There can be no doubt that, on the whole, modern civilized

communities are beginning to realize that under the social and

economic conditions now tending more and more to prevail, they

must in their own interests insure that the mother's best energy

and vitality are devoted to the child, both before and after its

birth. They are also realizing that they cannot carry out their

duty in this respect unless they make adequate provision for the

mothers who are thus compelled to renounce their employment in

order to devote themselves to their children. We here reach a

point at which Individualism is at one with Socialism. The

individualist cannot fail to see that it is at all cost necessary

to remove social conditions which crush out all individuality;

the Socialist cannot fail to see that a society which neglects to

introduce order at this central and vital point, the production

of the individual, must speedily perish.

It is involved in the proper fulfilment of a mother's relationship to her

infant child that, provided she is healthy, she should suckle it. Of

recent years this question has become a matter of serious gravity. In the

middle of the eighteenth century, when the upper-class women of France had

grown disinclined to suckle their own children, Rousseau raised so loud

and eloquent a protest that it became once more the fashion for a woman to

fulfil her natural duties. At the present time, when the same evil is

found once more, and in a far more serious form, for now it is not the

small upper-class but the great lower-class that is concerned, the

eloquence of a Rousseau would be powerless, for it is not fashion so much

as convenience, and especially an intractable economic factor, that is

chiefly concerned. Not the least urgent reason for putting women, and

especially mothers, upon a sounder economic basis, is the necessity of

enabling them to suckle their children.

No woman is sound, healthy, and complete unless she possesses

breasts that are beautiful enough to hold the promise of being

functional when the time for their exercise arrives, and nipples

that can give suck. The gravity of this question to-day is shown

by the frequency with which women are lacking in this essential

element of womanhood, and the young man of to-day, it has been

said, often in taking a wife, "actually marries but part of a

woman, the other part being exhibited in the chemist's shop

window, in the shape of a glass feeding-bottle." Blacker found

among a thousand patients from the maternity department of

University College Hospital that thirty-nine had never suckled at

all, seven hundred and forty-seven had suckled all their

children, and two hundred and fourteen had suckled only some.

The chief reason given for not suckling was absence or

insufficiency of milk; other reasons being inability or

disinclination to suckle, and refusal of the child to take the

breast (Blacker, _Medical Chronicle_, Feb., 1900). These results

among the London poor are certainly very much better than could

be found in many manufacturing towns where women work after

marriage. In the other large countries of Europe equally

unsatisfactory results are found. In Paris Madame Dluska has

shown that of 209 women who came for their confinement to the

Clinique Baudelocque, only 74 suckled their children; of the 135

who did not suckle, 35 were prevented by pathological causes or

absence of milk, 100 by the necessities of their work. Even those

who suckled could seldom continue more than seven months on

account of the physiological strain of work (Dluska,

_Contribution à l'Etude de l'Allaitement Maternel_, Thèse de

Paris, 1894). Many statistics have been gathered in the German

countries. Thus Wiedow (_Centralblatt für Gynäkologie_, No. 29,

1895) found that of 525 women at the Freiburg Maternity only half

could suckle thoroughly during the first two weeks; imperfect

nipples were noted in 49 cases, and it was found that the

development of the nipple bore a direct relation to the value of

the breast as a secretory organ. At Munich Escherich and Büller

found that nearly 60 per cent. of women of the lower class were

unable to suckle their children, and at Stuttgart three-quarters

of the child-bearing women were in this condition.

The reasons why children should be suckled at their mothers' breasts are

larger than some may be inclined to believe. In the first place the

psychological reason is one of no mean importance. The breast with its

exquisitely sensitive nipple, vibrating in harmony with the sexual organs,

furnishes the normal mechanism by which maternal love is developed. No

doubt the woman who never suckles her child may love it, but such love is

liable to remain defective on the fundamental and instinctive side. In

some women, indeed, whom we may hesitate to call abnormal, maternal love

fails to awaken at all until brought into action through this mechanism by

the act of suckling.

A more generally recognized and certainly fundamental reason for suckling

the child is that the milk of the mother, provided she is reasonably

healthy, is the infant's only ideally fit food. There are some people

whose confidence in science leads them to believe that it is possible to

manufacture foods that are as good or better than mother's milk; they

fancy that the milk which is best for the calf is equally best for so

different an animal as the baby. These are delusions. The infant's best

food is that elaborated in his own mother's body. All other foods are more

or less possible substitutes, which require trouble to prepare properly

and are, moreover, exposed to various risks from which the mother's milk

is free.

A further reason, especially among the poor, against the use of any

artificial foods is that it accustoms those around the child to try

experiments with its feeding and to fancy that any kind of food they eat

themselves may be good for the infant. It thus happens that bread and

potatoes, brandy and gin, are thrust into infants' mouths. With the infant

that is given the breast it is easier to make plain that, except by the

doctor's orders, nothing else must be given.

An additional reason why the mother should suckle her child is the close

and frequent association with the child thus involved. Not only is the

child better cared for in all respects, but the mother is not deprived of

the discipline of such care, and is also enabled from the outset to learn

and to understand the child's nature.

The inability to suckle acquires great significance if we realize

that it is associated, probably in a large measure as a direct

cause, with infantile mortality. The mortality of

artificially-fed infants during the first year of life is seldom

less than double that of the breast-fed, sometimes it is as much

as three times that of the breast-fed, or even more; thus at

Derby 51.7 per cent. of hand-fed infants die under the age of

twelve months, but only 8.6 per cent. of breast-fed infants.

Those who survive are by no means free from suffering. At the end

of the first year they are found to weigh about 25 per cent. less

than the breast-fed, and to be much shorter; they are more liable

to tuberculosis and rickets, with all the evil results that flow

from these diseases; and there is some reason to believe that the

development of their teeth is injuriously affected. The

degenerate character of the artificially-fed is well indicated by

the fact that of 40,000 children who were brought for treatment

to the Children's Hospital in Munich, 86 per cent. had been

brought up by hand, and the few who had been suckled had usually

only had the breast for a short time. The evil influence persists

even up to adult life. In some parts of France where the

wet-nurse industry flourishes so greatly that nearly all the

children are brought up by hand, it has been found that the

percentage of rejected conscripts is nearly double that for

France generally. Corresponding results have been found by

Friedjung in a large German athletic association. Among 155

members, 65 per cent. were found on inquiry to have been

breast-fed as infants (for an average of six months); but among

the best athletes the percentage of breast-fed rose to 72 per

cent. (for an average period of nine or ten months), while for

the group of 56 who stood lowest in athletic power the percentage

of breast-fed fell to 57 (for an average of only three months).

The advantages for an infant of being suckled by its mother are

greater than can be accounted for by the mere fact of being

suckled rather than hand-fed. This has been shown by Vitrey (_De

la Mortalité Infantile_, Thèse de Lyon, 1907), who found from the

statistics of the Hôtel-Dieu at Lyons, that infants suckled by

their mothers have a mortality of only 12 per cent., but if

suckled by strangers, the mortality rises to 33 per cent. It may

be added that, while suckling is essential to the complete

well-being of the child, it is highly desirable for the sake of

the mother's health also. (Some important statistics are

summarized in a paper on "Infantile Mortality" in _British

Medical Journal_, Nov. 2, 1907), while the various aspects of

suckling have been thoroughly discussed by Bollinger, "Ueber

Säuglings-Sterblichkeit und die Erbliche functionelle Atrophie

der menschlichen Milchdrüse" (_Correspondenzblatt Deutschen

Gesellschaft Anthropologie_, Oct., 1899).

It appears that in Sweden, in the middle of the eighteenth

century, it was a punishable offense for a woman to give her baby

the bottle when she was able to suckle it. In recent years Prof.

Anton von Menger, of Vienna, has argued (in his _Burgerliche

Recht und die Besitzlosen Klassen_) that the future generation

has the right to make this claim, and he proposes that every

mother shall be legally bound to suckle her child unless her

inability to do so has been certified by a physician. E.A.

Schroeder (_Das Recht in der Geschlechtlichen Ordnung_, 1893, p.

346) also argued that a mother should be legally bound to suckle

her infant for at least nine months, unless solid grounds could

be shown to the contrary, and this demand, which seems reasonable

and natural, since it is a mother's privilege as well as her duty

to suckle her infant when able to do so, has been insistently

made by others also. It has been supported from the legal side by

Weinberg (_Mutterschutz_, Sept., 1907). In France the Loi Roussel

forbids a woman to act as a wet-nurse until her child is seven

months old, and this has had an excellent effect in lowering

infantile mortality (A. Allée, _Puériculture et la Loi Roussel_,

Thèse de Paris, 1908). In some parts of Germany manufacturers are

compelled to set up a suckling-room in the factory, where mothers

can give the breast to the child in the intervals of work. The

control and upkeep of these rooms, with provision of doctors and

nurses, is undertaken by the municipality (_Sexual-Probleme_,

Sept., 1908, p. 573).

As things are to-day in modern industrial countries the righting of these

wrongs cannot be left to Nature, that is, to the ignorant and untrained

impulses of persons who live in a whirl of artificial life where the voice

of instinct is drowned. The mother, we are accustomed to think, may be

trusted to see to the welfare of her child, and it is unnecessary, or even

"immoral," to come to her assistance. Yet there are few things, I think,

more pathetic than the sight of a young Lancashire mother who works in the

mills, when she has to stay at home to nurse her sick child. She is used

to rise before day-break to go to the mill; she has scarcely seen her

child by the light of the sun, she knows nothing of its necessities, the

hands that are so skilful to catch the loom cannot soothe the child. The

mother gazes down at it in vague, awkward, speechless misery. It is not a

sight one can ever forget.

It is France that is taking the lead in the initiation of the scientific

and practical movements for the care of the young child before and after

birth, and it is in France that we may find the germs of nearly all the

methods now becoming adopted for arresting infantile mortality. The

village system of Villiers-le-Duc, near Dijon in the Côte d'Or, has proved

a germ of this fruitful kind. Here every pregnant woman not able to secure

the right conditions for her own life and that of the child she is

bearing, is able to claim the assistance of the village authorities; she

is entitled, without payment, to the attendance of a doctor and midwife

and to one franc a day during her confinement. The measures adopted in

this village have practically abolished both maternal and infantile

mortality. A few years ago Dr. Samson Moore, the medical officer of health

for Huddersfield, heard of this village, and Mr. Benjamin Broadbent, the

Mayor of Huddersfield, visited Villiers-le-Duc. It was resolved to

initiate in Huddersfield a movement for combating infant mortality.

Henceforth arose what is known as the Huddersfield scheme, a scheme which

has been fruitful in splendid results. The points of the Huddersfield

scheme are: (1) compulsory notification of births within forty-eight

hours; (2) the appointment of lady assistant medical officers of help to

visit the home, inquire, advise, and assist; (3) the organized aid of

voluntary lady workers in subordination to the municipal part of the

scheme; (4) appeal to the medical officer of help when the baby, not being

under medical care, fails to thrive. The infantile mortality of

Huddersfield has been very greatly reduced by this scheme.[16]

The Huddersfield scheme may be said to be the origin of the

English Notification of Births Act, which came into operation in

1908. This Act represents, in England, the national inauguration

of a scheme for the betterment of the race, the ultimate results

of which it is impossible to foresee. When this Act comes into

universal action every baby of the land will be entitled--legally

and not by individual caprice or philanthropic condescension--to

medical attention from the day of birth, and every mother will

have at hand the counsel of an educated woman in touch with the

municipal authorities. There could be no greater triumph for

medical science, for national efficiency, and the cause of

humanity generally. Even on the lower financial plane, it is easy

to see that an enormous saving of public and private money will

thus be effected. The Act is adoptive, and not compulsory. This

was a wise precaution, for an Act of this kind cannot be

effectual unless it is carried out thoroughly by the community

adopting it, and it will not be adopted until a community has

clearly realized its advantages and the methods of attaining

them.

An important adjunct of this organization is the School for

Mothers. Such schools, which are now beginning to spring up

everywhere, may be said to have their origins in the

_Consultations de Nourrissons_ (with their offshoot the _Goutte

de Lait_), established by Professor Budin in 1892, which have

spread all over France and been widely influential for good. At

the _Consultations_ infants are examined and weighed weekly, and

the mothers advised and encouraged to suckle their children. The

_Gouttes_ are practically milk dispensaries where infants for

whom breast-feeding is impossible are fed with milk under medical

supervision. Schools for Mothers represent an enlargement of the

same scheme, covering a variety of subjects which it is necessary

for a mother to know. Some of the first of these schools were

established at Bonn, at the Bavarian town of Weissenberg, and in

Ghent. At some of the Schools for Mothers, and notably at Ghent

(described by Mrs. Bertrand Russell in the _Nineteenth Century_,

1906), the important step has been taken of giving training to

young girls from fourteen to eighteen; they receive instruction

in infant anatomy and physiology, in the preparation of

sterilized milk, in weighing children, in taking temperatures and

making charts, in managing crêches, and after two years are able

to earn a salary. In various parts of England, schools for young

mothers and girls on these lines are now being established, first

in London, under the auspices of Dr. F.J. Sykes, Medical Officer

of Health for St. Pancreas (see, e.g., _A School For Mothers_,

1908, describing an establishment of this kind at Somers Town,

with a preface by Sir Thomas Barlow; an account of recent

attempts to improve the care of infants in London will also be

found in the _Lancet_, Sept. 26, 1908). It may be added that some

English municipalities have established depôts for supplying

mothers cheaply with good milk. Such depôts are, however, likely

to be more mischievous than beneficial if they promote the

substitution of hand-feeding for suckling. They should never be

established except in connection with Schools for Mothers, where

an educational influence may be exerted, and no mother should be

supplied with milk unless she presents a medical certificate

showing that she is unable to nourish her child (Byers, "Medical

Women and Public Health Questions," _British Medical Journal_,

Oct. 6, 1906). It is noteworthy that in England the local

authorities will shortly be empowered by law to establish Schools

for Mothers.

The great benefits produced by these institutions in France, both

in diminishing the infant mortality and in promoting the

education of mothers and their pride and interest in their

children, have been set forth in two Paris theses by G. Chaignon

(_Organisation des Consultations de Nourrissons à la Campagne_,

1908), and Alcide Alexandre (_Consultation de Nourrissons et

Goutte de Lait d'Arques_, 1908).

The movement is now spreading throughout Europe, and an

International Union has been formed, including all the

institutions specially founded for the protection of child life

and the promotion of puericulture. The permanent committee is in

Brussels, and a Congress of Infant Protection (_Goutte de Lait_)

is held every two years.

It will be seen that all the movements now being set in action for the

improvement of the race through the child and the child's mother,

recognize the intimacy of the relation between the mother and her child

and are designed to aid her, even if necessary by the exercise of some

pressure, in performing her natural functions in relation to her child. To

the theoretical philanthropist, eager to reform the world on paper,

nothing seems simpler than to cure the present evils of child-rearing by

setting up State nurseries which are at once to relieve mothers of

everything connected with the production of the men of the future beyond

the pleasure--if such it happens to be--of conceiving them and the trouble

of bearing them, and at the same time to rear them up independently of the

home, in a wholesome, economical, and scientific manner.[17] Nothing seems

simpler, but from the fundamental psychological standpoint nothing is

falser. The idea of a State which is outside the community is but a

survival in another form of that antiquated notion which compelled Louis

XIV to declare "L'Etat c'est moi!" A State which admits that the

individuals composing it are incompetent to perform their own most sacred

and intimate functions, and takes upon itself to perform them instead,

attempts a task which would be undesirable, even if it were possible of

achievement. It must always be remembered that a State which proposes to

relieve its constituent members of their natural functions and

responsibilities attempts something quite different from the State which

seeks to aid its members to fulfil their own biological and social

functions more adequately. A State which enables its mothers to rest when

they are child-bearing is engaged in a reasonable task; a State which

takes over its mothers' children is reducing philanthropy to absurdity. It

is easy to realize this if we consider the inevitable course of

circumstances under a system of "State-nurseries." The child would be

removed from its natural mother at the earliest age, but some one has to

perform the mother's duties; the substitute must therefore be properly

trained for such duties; and in exercising them under favorable

circumstances a maternal relationship is developed between the child and

the "mother," who doubtless possesses natural maternal instincts but has

no natural maternal bond to the child she is mothering. Such a

relationship tends to become on both sides practically and emotionally the

real relationship. We very often have opportunity of seeing how

unsatisfactory such a relationship becomes. The artificial mother is

deprived of a child she had begun to feel her own; the child's emotional

relationships are upset, split and distorted; the real mother has the

bitterness of feeling that for her child she is not the real mother. Would

it not have been much better for all if the State had encouraged the vast

army of women it had trained for the position of mothering other women's

children, to have, instead, children of their own? The women who are

incapable of mothering their own children could then be trained to refrain

from bearing them.

Ellen Key (in her _Century of the Child_, and elsewhere) has

advocated for all young women a year of compulsory "service,"

analogous to the compulsory military service imposed in most

countries on young men. During this period the girl would be

trained in rational housekeeping, in the principles of hygiene,

in the care of the sick, and especially in the care of infants

and all that concerns the physical and psychic development of

children. The principle of this proposal has since been widely

accepted. Marie von Schmid (in her _Mutterdienst_, 1907) goes so

far as to advocate a general training of young women in such

duties, carried on in a kind of enlarged and improved midwifery

school. The service would last a year, and the young woman would

then be for three years in the reserves, and liable to be called

up for duty. There is certainly much to be said for such a

proposal, considerably more than is to be said for compulsory

military service. For while it is very doubtful whether a man

will ever be called on to fight, most women are liable to be

called on to exercise household duties or to look after children,

whether for themselves or for other people.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] It is not, of course, always literally true that each parent supplies

exactly half the heredity, for, as we see among animals generally, the

offspring may sometimes approach more nearly to one parent, sometimes to

the other, while among plants, as De Vries and others have shown, the

heredity may be still more unequally divided.

[2] It should scarcely be necessary to say that to assert that motherhood

is a woman's supreme function is by no means to assert that her activities

should be confined to the home. That is an opinion which may now be

regarded as almost extinct even among those who most glorify the function

of woman as mother. As Friedrich Naumann and others have very truly

pointed out, a woman is not adequately equipped to fulfil her functions as

mother and trainer of children unless she has lived in the world and

exercised a vocation.

[3] "Were the capacities of the brain and the heart equal in the sexes,"

Lily Braun (_Die Frauenfrage_, page 207) well says, "the entry of women

into public life would be of no value to humanity, and would even lead to

a still wilder competition. Only the recognition that the entire nature of

woman is different from that of man, that it signifies a new vivifying

principle in human life, makes the women's movement, in spite of the

misconception of its enemies and its friends, a social revolution" (see

also Havelock Ellis, _Man and Woman_, fourth edition, 1904, especially Ch.

XVIII).

[4] The word "puericulture" was invented by Dr. Caron in 1866 to signify

the culture of children after birth. It was Pinard, the distinguished

French obstetrician, who, in 1895, gave it a larger and truer significance

by applying it to include the culture of children before birth. It is now

defined as "the science which has for its end the search for the knowledge

relative to the reproduction, the preservation, and the amelioration of

the human race" (Péchin, _La Puériculture avant la Naissance_, Thèse de

Paris, 1908).

[5] In _La Grossesse_ (pp. 450 et seq.) Bouchacourt has discussed the

problems of puericulture at some length.

[6] The importance of antenatal puericulture was fully recognized in China

a thousand years ago. Thus Madame Cheng wrote at that time concerning the

education of the child: "Even before birth his education may begin; and,

therefore, the prospective mother of old, when lying down, lay straight;

when sitting down, sat upright; and when standing, stood erect. She would

not taste strange flavors, nor have anything to do with spiritualism; if

her food were not cut straight she would not eat it, and if her mat were

not set straight, she would not sit upon it. She would not look at any

objectionable sight, nor listen to any objectionable sound, nor utter any

rude word, nor handle any impure thing. At night she studied some

canonical work, by day she occupied herself with ceremonies and music.

Therefore, her sons were upright and eminent for their talents and

virtues; such was the result of antenatal training" (H.A. Giles, "Woman in

Chinese Literature," _Nineteenth Century_, Nov., 1904).

[7] Max Bartels, "Isländischer Brauch," etc., _Zeitschrift für

Ethnologie_, 1900, p. 65. A summary of the customs of various peoples in

regard to pregnancy is given by Ploss and Bartels, _Das Weib_, Sect. XXIX.

[8] On the influence of alcohol during pregnancy on the embryo, see, e.g.,

G. Newman, _Infant Mortality_, pp. 72-77. W.C. Sullivan (_Alcoholism_,

1906, Ch. XI), summarizes the evidence showing that alcohol is a factor in

human degeneration.

[9] There is even reason to believe that the alcoholism of the mother's

father may impair her ability as a mother. Bunge (_Die Zunehmende

Unfähigkeit der Frauen ihre Kinder zu Stillen_, fifth edition, 1907), from

an investigation extending over 2,000 families, finds that chronic

alcoholic poisoning in the father is the chief cause of the daughter's

inability to suckle, this inability not usually being recovered in

subsequent generations. Bunge has, however, been opposed by Dr. Agnes

Bluhm, "Die Stillungsnot," _Zeitschrift für Soziale Medizin_, 1908 (fully

summarized by herself in _Sexual-Probleme_, Jan., 1909).

[10] See, e.g., T. Arthur Helme, "The Unborn Child," _British Medical

Journal_, Aug. 24, 1907. Nutrition should, of course, be adequate. Noel

Paton has shown (_Lancet_, July 4, 1903) that defective nutrition of the

pregnant woman diminishes the weight of the offspring.

[11] Debreyne, _Moechialogie_, p. 277. And from the Protestant side see

Northcote (_Christianity and Sex Problems_, Ch. IX), who permits sexual

intercourse during pregnancy.

[12] See Appendix A to the third volume of these _Studies_; also Ploss and

Bartels, loc. cit.

[13] Thus one lady writes: "I have only had one child, but I may say that

during pregnancy the desire for union was much stronger, for the whole

time, than at any other period." Bouchacourt (_La Grossesse_, pp. 180-183)

states that, as a rule, sexual desire is not diminished by pregnancy, and

is occasionally increased.

[14] This "inconvenience" remains to-day a stumbling-block with many

excellent authorities. "Except when there is a tendency to miscarriage,"

says Kossmann (Senator and Kaminer, _Health and Disease in Relation to

Marriage_, vol. i, p. 257), "we must be very guarded in ordering

abstinence from intercourse during pregnancy," and Ballantyne (_The

Foetus_, p. 475) cautiously remarks that the question is difficult to

decide. Forel also (_Die Sexuelle Frage_, fourth edition, p. 81), who is

not prepared to advocate complete sexual abstinence during a normal

pregnancy, admits that it is a rather difficult question.

[15] This point is discussed, for instance, by Séropian in a Paris Thesis

(_Fréquence comparée des Causes de l'Accouchement Prémature_, 1907); he

concludes that coitus during pregnancy is a more frequent cause of

premature confinement than is commonly supposed, especially in primiparæ,

and markedly so by the ninth month.

[16] "Infantile Mortality: The Huddersfield Scheme," _British Medical

Journal_, Dec., 1907; Samson Moore, "Infant Mortality," ib., August 29,

1908.

[17] Ellen Key has admirably dealt with proposals of this kind (as put

forth by C.P. Stetson) in her Essays "On Love and Marriage." In opposition

to such proposals Ellen Key suggests that such women as have been properly

trained for maternal duties and are unable entirely to support themselves

while exercising them should be subsidized by the State during the child's

first three years of life. It may be added that in Leipzig the plan of

subsidizing mothers who (under proper medical and other supervision)

suckle their infants has already been introduced.

CHAPTER II.

SEXUAL EDUCATION.

Nurture Necessary as Well as Breed--Precocious Manifestations of the

Sexual Impulse--Are They to be Regarded as Normal?--The Sexual Play of

Children--The Emotion of Love in Childhood--Are Town Children More

Precocious Sexually Than Country Children?--Children's Ideas Concerning

the Origin of Babies--Need for Beginning the Sexual Education of Children

in Early Years--The Importance of Early Training in Responsibility--Evil

of the Old Doctrine of Silence in Matters of Sex--The Evil Magnified When

Applied to Girls--The Mother the Natural and Best Teacher--The Morbid

Influence of Artificial Mystery in Sex Matters--Books on Sexual

Enlightenment of the Young--Nature of the Mother's Task--Sexual Education

in the School--The Value of Botany--Zoölogy--Sexual Education After

Puberty--The Necessity of Counteracting Quack Literature--Danger of

Neglecting to Prepare for the First Onset of Menstruation--The Right

Attitude Towards Woman's Sexual Life--The Vital Necessity of the Hygiene

of Menstruation During Adolescence--Such Hygiene Compatible with the

Educational and Social Equality of the Sexes--The Invalidism of Women

Mainly Due to Hygienic Neglect--Good Influence of Physical Training on

Women and Bad Influence of Athletics--The Evils of Emotional

Suppression--Need of Teaching the Dignity of Sex--Influence of These

Factors on a Woman's Fate in Marriage--Lectures and Addresses on Sexual

Hygiene--The Doctor's Part in Sexual Education--Pubertal Initiation Into

the Ideal World--The Place of the Religious and Ethical Teacher--The

Initiation Rites of Savages Into Manhood and Womanhood--The Sexual

Influence of Literature--The Sexual Influence of Art.

It may seem to some that in attaching weight to the ancestry, the

parentage, the conception, the gestation, even the first infancy, of the

child we are wandering away from the sphere of the psychology of sex. That

is far from being the case. We are, on the contrary, going to the root of

sex. All our growing knowledge tends to show that, equally with his

physical nature, the child's psychic nature is based on breed and nurture,

on the quality of the stocks he belongs to, and on the care taken at the

early moments when care counts for most, to preserve the fine quality of

those stocks.

It must, of course, be remembered that the influences of both

breed and nurture are alike influential on the fate of the

individual. The influence of nurture is so obvious that few are

likely to under-rate it. The influence of breed, however, is less

obvious, and we may still meet with persons so ill informed, and

perhaps so prejudiced, as to deny it altogether. The growth of

our knowledge in this matter, by showing how subtle and

penetrative is the influence of heredity, cannot fail to dispel

this mischievous notion. No sound civilization is possible except

in a community which in the mass is not only well-nurtured but

well-bred. And in no part of life so much as in the sexual

relationships is the influence of good breeding more decisive. An

instructive illustration may be gleaned from the minute and

precise history of his early life furnished to me by a highly

cultured Russian gentleman. He was brought up in childhood with

his own brothers and sisters and a little girl of the same age

who had been adopted from infancy, the child of a prostitute who

had died soon after the infant's birth. The adopted child was

treated as one of the family, and all the children supposed that

she was a real sister. Yet from early years she developed

instincts unlike those of the children with whom she was

nurtured; she lied, she was cruel, she loved to make mischief,

and she developed precociously vicious sexual impulses; though

carefully educated, she adopted the occupation of her mother, and

at the age of twenty-two was exiled to Siberia for robbery and

attempt to murder. The child of a chance father and a prostitute

mother is not fatally devoted to ruin; but such a child is

ill-bred, and that fact, in some cases, may neutralize all the

influences of good nurture.

When we reach the period of infancy we have already passed beyond the

foundations and potentialities of the sexual life; we are in some cases

witnessing its actual beginnings. It is a well-established fact that

auto-erotic manifestations may sometimes be observed even in infants of

less than twelve months. We are not now called upon to discuss the

disputable point as to how far such manifestations at this age can be

called normal.[18] A slight degree of menstrual and mammary activity

sometimes occurs at birth.[19] It seems clear that nervous and psychic

sexual activity has its first springs at this early period, and as the

years go by an increasing number of individuals join the stream until at

puberty practically all are carried along in the great current.

While, therefore, it is possibly, even probably, true that the soundest

and healthiest individuals show no definite signs of nervous and psychic

sexuality in childhood, such manifestations are still sufficiently

frequent to make it impossible to say that sexual hygiene may be

completely ignored until puberty is approaching.

Precocious physical development occurs as a somewhat rare

variation. W. Roger Williams ("Precocious Sexual Development with

Abstracts of over One Hundred Cases," _British Gynæcological

Journal_, May, 1902) has furnished an important contribution to

the knowledge of this anomaly which is much commoner in girls

than in boys. Roger Williams's cases include only twenty boys to

eighty girls, and precocity is not only more frequent but more

pronounced in girls, who have been known to conceive at eight,

while thirteen is stated to be the earliest age at which boys

have proved able to beget children. This, it may be remarked, is

also the earliest age at which spermatozoa are found in the

seminal fluid of boys; before that age the ejaculations contain

no spermatozoa, and, as Fürbringer and Moll have found, they may

even be absent at sixteen, or later. In female children

precocious sexual development is less commonly associated with

general increase of bodily development than in boys. (An

individual case of early sexual development in a girl of five has

been completely described and figured in the _Zeitschrift für

Ethnologie_, 1896, Heft 4, p. 262.)

Precocious sexual impulses are generally vague, occasional, and

more or less innocent. A case of rare and pronounced character,

in which a child, a boy, from the age of two had been sexually

attracted to girls and women, and directed all his thoughts and

actions to sexual attempts on them, has been described by Herbert

Rich, of Detroit (_Alienist and Neurologist_, Nov., 1905).

General evidence from the literature of the subject as to sexual

precocity, its frequency and significance, has been brought

together by L.M. Terman ("A Study in Precocity," _American

Journal Psychology_, April, 1905).

The erections that are liable to occur in male infants have

usually no sexual significance, though, as Moll remarks, they may

acquire it by attracting the child's attention; they are merely

reflex. It is believed by some, however, and notably by Freud,

that certain manifestations of infant activity, especially

thumb-sucking, are of sexual causation, and that the sexual

impulse constantly manifests itself at a very early age. The

belief that the sexual instinct is absent in childhood, Freud

regards as a serious error, so easy to correct by observation

that he wonders how it can have arisen. "In reality," he remarks,

"the new-born infant brings sexuality with it into the world,

sexual sensations accompany it through the days of lactation and

childhood, and very few children can fail to experience sexual

activities and feelings before the period of puberty" (Freud,

"Zur Sexuellen Aufklärung der Kinder," _Soziale Medizin und

Hygiene_, Bd. ii, 1907; cf., for details, the same author's _Drei

Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie_, 1905). Moll, on the other hand,

considers that Freud's views on sexuality in infancy are

exaggerations which must be decisively rejected, though he admits

that it is difficult, if not impossible, to differentiate the

feelings in childhood (Moll, _Das Sexualleben des Kindes_, p.

154). Moll believes also that psycho-sexual manifestations

appearing after the age of eight are not pathological; children

who are weakly or of bad heredity are not seldom sexually

precocious, but, on the other hand, Moll has known children of

eight or nine with strongly developed sexual impulses, who yet

become finely developed men.

Rudimentary sexual activities in childhood, accompanied by sexual

feelings, must indeed--when they are not too pronounced or too

premature--be regarded as coming within the normal sphere, though

when they occur in children of bad heredity they are not without

serious risks. But in healthy children, after the age of seven or

eight, they tend to produce no evil results, and are strictly of

the nature of play. Play, both in animals and men, as Groos has

shown with marvelous wealth of illustration, is a beneficent

process of education; the young creature is thereby preparing

itself for the exercise of those functions which in later life it

must carry out more completely and more seriously. In his _Spiele

der Menschen_, Groos applies this idea to the sexual play of

children, and brings forward quotations from literature in

evidence. Keller, in his "Romeo und Juliet auf dem Dorfe," has

given an admirably truthful picture of these childish

love-relationships. Emil Schultze-Malkowsky (_Geschlecht und

Gesellschaft_, Bd. ii, p. 370) reproduces some scenes from the

life of a little girl of seven clearly illustrating the exact

nature of the sexual manifestation at this age.

A kind of rudimentary sexual intercourse between children, as

Bloch has remarked (_Beiträge_, etc., Bd. ii, p. 254), occurs in

many parts of the world, and is recognized by their elders as

play. This is, for instance, the case among the Bawenda of the

Transvaal (_Zeitschrift für Ethnologie_, 1896, Heft 4, p. 364),

and among the Papuans of Kaiser-Wilhelms-Land, with the approval

of the parents, although much reticence is observed (id., 1889,

Heft 1, p. 16). Godard (_Egypte et Palestine_, 1867, p. 105)

noted the sexual play of the boys and girls in Cairo. In New

Mexico W.A. Hammond (_Sexual Impotence_, p. 107) has seen boys

and girls attempting a playful sexual conjunction with the

encouragement of men and women, and in New York he has seen boys

and girls of three and four doing the same in the presence of

their parents, with only a laughing rebuke. "Playing at pa and

ma" is indeed extremely common among children in genuine

innocence, and with a complete absence of viciousness; and is by

no means confined to children of low social class. Moll remarks

on its frequency (_Libido Sexualis_, Bd. i, p. 277), and the

committee of evangelical pastors, in their investigation of

German rural morality (_Die Geschlechtliche-sittliche

Verhältnisse_, Bd. i, p. 102) found that children who are not yet

of school age make attempts at coitus. The sexual play of

children is by no means confined to father and mother games;

frequently there are games of school with the climax in exposure

and smackings, and occasionally there are games of being doctors

and making examinations. Thus a young English woman says: "Of

course, when we were at school [at the age of twelve and earlier]

we used to play with one another, several of us girls; we used to

go into a field and pretend we were doctors and had to examine

one another, and then we used to pull up one another's clothes

and feel each other."

These games do not necessarily involve the coöperation of the

sexual impulse, and still less have they any element of love. But

emotions of love, scarcely if at all distinguishable from adult

sexual love, frequently appear at equally early ages. They are of

the nature of play, in so far as play is a preparation for the

activities of later life, though, unlike the games, they are not

felt as play. Ramdohr, more than a century ago (_Venus Urania_,

1798), referred to the frequent love of little boys for women.

More usually the love is felt towards individuals of the opposite

or the same sex who are not widely different in age, though

usually older. The most comprehensive study of the matter has

been made by Sanford Bell in America on a basis of as many as

2,300 cases (S. Bell, "A Preliminary Study of the Emotion of Love

Between the Sexes," _American Journal Psychology_, July, 1902).

Bell finds that the presence of the emotion between three and

eight years of age is shown by such actions as hugging, kissing,

lifting each other, scuffling, sitting close to each other,

confessions to each other and to others, talking about each other

when apart, seeking each other and excluding the rest, grief at

separation, giving gifts, showing special courtesies to each

other, making sacrifices for each other, exhibiting jealousy. The

girls are, on the whole, more aggressive than the boys, and less

anxious to keep the matter secret. After the age of eight, the

girls increase in modesty and the boys become still more

secretive. The physical sensations are not usually located in the

sexual organs; erection of the penis and hyperæmia of the female

sexual parts Bell regards as marking undue precocity. But there

is diffused vascular and nervous tumescence and a state of

exaltation comparable, though not equal, to that experienced in

adolescent and adult age. On the whole, as Bell soundly

concludes, "love between children of opposite sex bears much the

same relation to that between adults as the flower does to the

fruit, and has about as little of physical sexuality in it as an

apple-blossom has of the apple that develops from it." Moll also

(op. cit. p. 76) considers that kissing and other similar

superficial contacts, which he denominates the phenomena of

contrectation, constitute most frequently the first and sole

manifestation of the sexual impulse in childhood.

It is often stated that it is easier for children to preserve

their sexual innocence in the country than in the town, and that

only in cities is sexuality rampant and conspicuous. This is by

no means true, and in some respects it is the reverse of the

truth. Certainly, hard work, a natural and simple life, and a

lack of alert intelligence often combine to keep the rural lad

chaste in thought and act until the period of adolescence is

completed. Ammon, for instance, states, though without giving

definite evidence, that this is common among the Baden

conscripts. Certainly, also, all the multiple sensory excitements

of urban life tend to arouse the nervous and cerebral

excitability of the young at a comparatively early age in the

sexual as in other fields, and promote premature desires and

curiosities. But, on the other hand, urban life offers the young

no gratification for their desires and curiosities. The publicity

of a city, the universal surveillance, the studied decorum of a

population conscious that it is continually exposed to the gaze

of strangers, combine to spread a veil over the esoteric side of

life, which, even when at last it fails to conceal from the young

the urban stimuli of that life, effectually conceals, for the

most part, the gratifications of those stimuli. In the country,

however, these restraints do not exist in any corresponding

degree; animals render the elemental facts of sexual life clear

to all; there is less need or regard for decorum; speech is

plainer; supervision is impossible, and the amplest opportunities

for sexual intimacy are at hand. If the city may perhaps be said

to favor unchastity of thought in the young, the country may

certainly be said to favor unchastity of act.

The elaborate investigations of the Committee of Lutheran pastors

into sexual morality (_Die Geschlechtich-sittliche Verhältnisse

im Deutschen Reiche_), published a few years ago, demonstrate

amply the sexual freedom in rural Germany, and Moll, who is

decidedly of opinion that the country enjoys no relative freedom

from sexuality, states (op. cit., pp. 137-139, 239) that even the

circulation of obscene books and pictures among school-children

seems to be more frequent in small towns and the country than in

large cities. In Russia, where it might be thought that urban and

rural conditions offered less contrast than in many countries,

the same difference has been observed. "I do not know," a Russian

correspondent writes, "whether Zola in _La Terre_ correctly

describes the life of French villages. But the ways of a Russian

village, where I passed part of my childhood, fairly resemble

those described by Zola. In the life of the rural population into

which I was plunged everything was impregnated with erotism. One

was surrounded by animal lubricity in all its immodesty. Contrary

to the generally received opinion, I believe that a child may

preserve his sexual innocence more easily in a town than in the

country. There are, no doubt, many exceptions to this rule. But

the functions of the sexual life are generally more concealed in

the towns than in the fields. Modesty (whether or not of the

merely superficial and exterior kind) is more developed among

urban populations. In speaking of sexual things in the towns

people veil their thought more; even the lower class in towns

employ more restraint, more euphemisms, than peasants. Thus in

the towns a child may easily fail to comprehend when risky

subjects are talked of in his presence. It may be said that the

corruption of towns, though more concealed, is all the deeper.

Maybe, but that concealment preserves children from it. The town

child sees prostitutes in the street every day without

distinguishing them from other people. In the country he would

every day hear it stated in the crudest terms that such and such

a girl has been found at night in a barn or a ditch making love

with such and such a youth, or that the servant girl slips every

night into the coachman's bed, the facts of sexual intercourse,

pregnancy, and childbirth being spoken of in the plainest terms.

In towns the child's attention is solicited by a thousand

different objects; in the country, except fieldwork, which fails

to interest him, he hears only of the reproduction of animals and

the erotic exploits of girls and youths. When we say that the

urban environment is more exciting we are thinking of adults, but

the things which excite the adult have usually no erotic effect

on the child, who cannot, however, long remain asexual when he

sees the great peasant girls, as ardent as mares in heat,

abandoning themselves to the arms of robust youths. He cannot

fail to remark these frank manifestations of sexuality, though

the subtle and perverse refinements of the town would escape his

notice. I know that in the countries of exaggerated prudery there

is much hidden corruption, more, one is sometimes inclined to

think, than in less hypocritical countries. But I believe that

that is a false impression, and am persuaded that precisely

because of all these little concealments which excite the

malicious amusement of foreigners, there are really many more

young people in England who remain chaste than in the countries

which treat sexual relations more frankly. At all events, if I

have known Englishmen who were very debauched and very refined in

vice, I have also known young men of the same nation, over

twenty, who were as innocent as children, but never a young

Frenchman, Italian, or Spaniard of whom this could be said."

There is undoubtedly truth in this statement, though it must be

remembered that, excellent as chastity is, if it is based on mere

ignorance, its possessor is exposed to terrible dangers.

The question of sexual hygiene, more especially in its special aspect of

sexual enlightenment, is not, however, dependent on the fact that in some

children the psychic and nervous manifestation of sex appears at an

earlier age than in others. It rests upon the larger general fact that in

all children the activity of intelligence begins to work at a very early

age, and that this activity tends to manifest itself in an inquisitive

desire to know many elementary facts of life which are really dependent on

sex. The primary and most universal of these desires is the desire to know

where children come from. No question could be more natural; the question

of origins is necessarily a fundamental one in childish philosophies as,

in more ultimate shapes, it is in adult philosophies. Most children,

either guided by the statements, usually the misstatements, of their

elders, or by their own intelligence working amid such indications as are

open to them, are in possession of a theory of the origin of babies.

Stanley Hall ("Contents of Children's Minds on Entering School,"

_Pedagogical Seminary_, June, 1891) has collected some of the

beliefs of young children as to the origin of babies. "God makes

babies in heaven, though the Holy Mother and even Santa Claus

make some. He lets them down and drops them, and the women or

doctors catch them, or He leaves them on the sidewalk, or brings

them down a wooden ladder backwards and pulls it up again, or

mamma or the doctor or the nurse go up and fetch them, sometimes

in a balloon, or they fly down and lose off their wings in some

place or other and forget it, and jump down to Jesus, who gives

them around. They were also often said to be found in

flour-barrels, and the flour sticks ever so long, you know, or

they grew in cabbages, or God puts them in water, perhaps in the

sewer, and the doctor gets them out and takes them to sick folks

that want them, or the milkman brings them early in the morning;

they are dug out of the ground, or bought at the baby store."

In England and America the inquisitive child is often told that

the baby was found in the garden, under a gooseberry bush or

elsewhere; or more commonly it is said, with what is doubtless

felt to be a nearer approach to the truth, that the doctor

brought it. In Germany the common story told to children is that

the stork brings the baby. Various theories, mostly based on

folk-lore, have been put forward to explain this story, but none

of them seem quite convincing (see, e.g., G. Herman,

"Sexual-Mythen," _Geschlecht und Gesellschaft_, vol. i, Heft 5,

1906, p. 176, and P. Näcke, _Neurologische Centralblatt_, No. 17,

1907). Näcke thinks there is some plausibility in Professor

Petermann's suggestion that a frog writhing in a stork's bill

resembles a tiny human creature.

In Iceland, according to Max Bartels ("Isländischer Brauch und

Volksglaube," etc., _Zeitschrift für Ethnologie_, 1900, Heft 2

and 3) we find a transition between the natural and the fanciful

in the stories told to children of the origin of babies (the

stork is here precluded, for it only extends to the southern

border of Scandinavian lands). In North Iceland it is said that

God made the baby and the mother bore it, and on that account is

now ill. In the northwest it is said that God made the baby and

gave it to the mother. Elsewhere it is said that God sent the

baby and the midwife brought it, the mother only being in bed to

be near the baby (which is seldom placed in a cradle). It is also

sometimes said that a lamb or a bird brought the baby. Again it

is said to have entered during the night through the window.

Sometimes, however, the child is told that the baby came out of

the mother's breasts, or from below her breasts, and that is why

she is not well.

Even when children learn that babies come out of the mother's

body this knowledge often remains very vague and inaccurate. It

very commonly happens, for instance, in all civilized countries

that the navel is regarded as the baby's point of exit from the

body. This is a natural conclusion, since the navel is seemingly

a channel into the body, and a channel for which there is no

obvious use, while the pudendal cleft would not suggest itself to

girls (and still less to boys) as the gate of birth, since it

already appears to be monopolized by the urinary excretion. This

belief concerning the navel is sometimes preserved through the

whole period of adolescence, especially in girls of the so-called

educated class, who are too well-bred to discuss the matter with

their married friends, and believe indeed that they are already

sufficiently well informed. At this age the belief may not be

altogether harmless, in so far as it leads to the real gate of

sex being left unguarded. In Elsass where girls commonly believe,

and are taught, that babies come through the navel, popular

folk-tales are current (_Anthropophyteia_, vol. iii, p. 89)

which represent the mistakes resulting from this belief as

leading to the loss of virginity.

Freud, who believes that children give little credit to the stork

fable and similar stories invented for their mystification, has

made an interesting psychological investigation into the real

theories which children themselves, as the result of observation

and thought, reach concerning the sexual facts of life (S. Freud,

"Ueber Infantile Sexualtheorien," _Sexual-Probleme_, Dec., 1908).

Such theories, he remarks, correspond to the brilliant, but

defective hypotheses which primitive peoples arrive at concerning

the nature and origin of the world. There are three theories,

which, as Freud quite truly concludes, are very commonly formed

by children. The first, and the most widely disseminated, is that

there is no real anatomical difference between boys and girls; if

the boy notices that his little sister has no obvious penis he

even concludes that it is because she is too young, and the

little girl herself takes the same view. The fact that in early

life the clitoris is relatively larger and more penis-like helps

to confirm this view which Freud connects with the tendency in

later life to erotic dream of women furnished with a penis. This

theory, as Freud also remarks, favors the growth of homosexuality

when its germs are present. The second theory is the fæcal theory

of the origin of babies. The child, who perhaps thinks his mother

has a penis, and is in any case ignorant of the vagina, concludes

that the baby is brought into the world by an action analogous to

the action of the bowels. The third theory, which is perhaps less

prevalent than the others, Freud terms the sadistic theory of

coitus. The child realizes that his father must have taken some

sort of part in his production. The theory that sexual

intercourse consists in violence has in it a trace of truth, but

seems to be arrived at rather obscurely. The child's own sexual

feelings are often aroused for the first time when wrestling or

struggling with a companion; he may see his mother, also,

resisting more or less playfully a sudden caress from his father,

and if a real quarrel takes place, the impression may be

fortified. As to what the state of marriage consists in, Freud

finds that it is usually regarded as a state which abolishes

modesty; the most prevalent theory being that marriage means that

people can make water before each other, while another common

childish theory is that marriage is when people can show each

other their private parts.

Thus it is that at a very early stage of the child's life we are brought

face to face with the question how we may most wisely begin his initiation

into the knowledge of the great central facts of sex. It is perhaps a

little late in the day to regard it as a question, but so it is among us,

although three thousand five hundred years ago, the Egyptian father spoke

to his child: "I have given you a mother who has carried you within her, a

heavy burden, for your sake, and without resting on me. When at last you

were born, she indeed submitted herself to the yoke, for during three

years were her nipples in your mouth. Your excrements never turned her

stomach, nor made her say, 'What am I doing?' When you were sent to school

she went regularly every day to carry the household bread and beer to your

master. When in your turn you marry and have a child, bring up your child

as your mother brought you up."[20]

I take it for granted, however, that--whatever doubt there may be as to

the how or the when--no doubt is any longer possible as to the absolute

necessity of taking deliberate and active part in this sexual initiation,

instead of leaving it to the chance revelation of ignorant and perhaps

vicious companions or servants. It is becoming more and more widely felt

that the risks of ignorant innocence are too great.

"All the love and solicitude parental yearning can bestow,"

writes Dr. G.F. Butler, of Chicago (_Love and its Affinities_,

1899, p. 83), "all that the most refined religious influence can

offer, all that the most cultivated associations can accomplish,

in one fatal moment may be obliterated. There is no room for

ethical reasoning, indeed oftentimes no consciousness of wrong,

but only Margaret's 'Es war so süss'." The same writer adds (as

had been previously remarked by Mrs. Craik and others) that among

church members it is the finer and more sensitive organizations

that are the most susceptible to sexual emotions. So far as boys

are concerned, we leave instruction in matters of sex, the most

sacred and central fact in the world, as Canon Lyttelton remarks,

to "dirty-minded school-boys, grooms, garden-boys, anyone, in

short, who at an early age may be sufficiently defiled and

sufficiently reckless to talk of them." And, so far as girls are

concerned, as Balzac long ago remarked, "a mother may bring up

her daughter severely, and cover her beneath her wings for

seventeen years; but a servant-girl can destroy that long work by

a word, even by a gesture."

The great part played by servant-girls of the lower class in the

sexual initiation of the children of the middle class has been

illustrated in dealing with "The Sexual Impulse in Women" in vol.

iii, of these _Studies_, and need not now be further discussed.

I would only here say a word, in passing, on the other side.

Often as servant-girls take this part, we must not go so far as

to say that it is the case with the majority. As regards Germany,

Dr. Alfred Kind has lately put on record his experience: "I have

_never_, in youth, heard a bad or improper word on

sex-relationships from a servant-girl, although servant-girls

followed one another in our house like sunshine and showers in

April, and there was always a relation of comradeship between us

children and the servants." As regards England, I can add that my

own youthful experiences correspond to Dr. Kind's. This is not

surprising, for one may say that in the ordinary well-conditioned

girl, though her virtue may not be developed to heroic

proportions, there is yet usually a natural respect for the

innocence of children, a natural sexual indifference to them, and

a natural expectation that the male should take the active part

when a sexual situation arises.