Essays in War-Time: Further Studies in the Task of Social Hygiene

The whole of this evolutionary process, we have to remember, is a natural process. It has been going on from the beginning of the living world. But at a certain stage in the higher development of man, without ceasing to be natural, it becomes conscious and deliberate. It is then that we have what may properly be termed Birth Control. That is to say, that a process which had before been working slowly through the ages, attaining every new forward step with waste and pain, is henceforth carried out voluntarily, in the light of the high human qualities of reason and foresight and self-restraint. The rise of birth control may be said to correspond with the rise of social and sanitary science in the first half of the nineteenth century, and to be indeed an essential part of that movement. It is firmly established in all the most progressive and enlightened countries of Europe, notably in France and in England; in Germany, where formerly the birth-rate was very high, birth control has developed with extraordinary rapidity during the present century. In Holland its principle and practice are freely taught by physicians and nurses to the mothers of the people, with the result that there is in Holland no longer any necessity for unwanted babies, and this small country possesses the proud privilege of the lowest death-rate in Europe. In the free and enlightened democratic communities on the other side of the globe, in Australia and New Zealand, the same principles and practice are generally accepted, with the same beneficent results. On the other hand, in the more backward and ignorant countries of Europe, birth control is still little known, and death and disease flourish. This is the case in those eight countries which come at the bottom of both our lists.

Even in the more progressive countries, however, birth control has not been established without a struggle, which has frequently ended in a hypocritical compromise, its principles being publicly ignored or denied and its practice privately accepted. For, at the great and vitally important point in human progress which birth control represents, we really see the conflict of two moralities. The morality of the ancient world is here confronted by the morality of the new world. The old morality, knowing nothing of science and the process of Nature as worked out in the evolution of life, based itself on the early chapters of Genesis, in which the children of Noah are represented as entering an empty earth which it is their business to populate diligently. So it came about that for this morality, still innocent of eugenics, recklessness was almost a virtue. Children were given by God; if they died or were afflicted by congenital disease, it was the dispensation of God, and, whatever imprudence the parents might commit, the pathetic faith still ruled that "God will provide." But in the new morality it is realised that in these matters Divine action can only be made manifest in human action, that is to say through the operation of our own enlightened reason and resolved will. Prudence, foresight, self-restraint—virtues which the old morality looked down on with benevolent contempt—assume a position of the first importance. In the eyes of the new morality the ideal woman is no longer the meek drudge condemned to endless and often ineffectual child-bearing, but the free and instructed woman, able to look before and after, trained in a sense of responsibility alike to herself and to the race, and determined to have no children but the best. Such were the two moralities which came into conflict during the nineteenth century. They were irreconcilable and each firmly rooted, one in ancient religion and tradition, the other in progressive science and reason. Nothing was possible in such a clash of opposing ideas but a feeble and confused compromise such as we still find prevailing in various countries of Old Europe. It was not a satisfactory solution, however inevitable, and especially unsatisfactory by the consequent obscurantism which placed difficulties in the way of spreading a knowledge of the methods of birth control among the masses of the population. For the result has been that while the more enlightened and educated have exercised a control over the size of their families, the poorer and more ignorant—who should have been offered every facility and encouragement to follow in the same path—have been left, through a conspiracy of secrecy, to carry on helplessly the bad customs of their forefathers. This social neglect has had the result that the superior family stocks have been hampered by the recklessness of the inferior stocks.

We may see these two moralities in conflict to-day in America. Up till recently America had meekly accepted at Old Europe's hands the traditional prescription of our Mediterranean book of Genesis, with its fascinating old-world fragrance of Mount Ararat. On the surface, the ancient morality had been complacently, almost unquestionably, accepted in America, even to the extent of permitting a vast extension of abortion—a criminal practice which ever flourishes where birth-control is neglected. But to-day we suddenly see a new movement in the United States. In a flash, America has awakened to the true significance of the issue. With that direct vision of hers, that swift practicality of action, and, above all, that sense of the democratic nature of all social progress, we see her resolutely beginning to face this great problem. In her own vigorous native tongue we hear her demanding: "What in the thunder is all the secrecy about, anyhow?" And we cannot doubt that America's own answer to that demand will be of immense significance to the whole world.

Thus it is that as we get to the root of the matter the whole question becomes clear. We see that there is really no standing ground in any country for the panic-monger who bemoans the fall of the birth-rate and storms against small families. The falling birth-rate is a world-wide phenomenon in all countries that are striving toward a higher civilisation along lines which Nature laid down from the beginning. We cannot stop it if we would, and if we could we should merely be impeding civilisation. It is a movement that rights itself and tends to reach a just balance. It has not yet reached that balance with us in this country. That may be seen by anyone who has read the letters from mothers lately published under the title of Maternity by the Women's Co-operative Guild; there is still far more misery caused by having too many babies than by having too few; a bonus on babies would be a misfortune, alike for the parents and the State—whether bestowed at birth as proposed in New Zealand, or at the age of twelve months as proposed in France, or fourteen years as proposed in England—unless it were confined to children who were not merely alive at the appointed age, but able to pass examination as having reached a definitely high standard. The falling birth-rate, which, it must be remembered, is affecting all civilised countries, should be a matter for joy rather than for grief.

But we need not therefore fold our hands and do nothing. There is still much to be effected for the protection of Motherhood and the better care of children. We cannot, and should not, attempt to increase the number of children. But we may well attempt to work for their better quality. There we shall be on very safe ground. More knowledge is necessary so that all would-be parents may know how they may best become parents and how they may, if necessary, best avoid it. Procreation by the unfit should be, if not prohibited by law, at all events so discouraged by public opinion that to attempt it would be counted disgraceful. Much greater public provision is necessary for the care of mothers during the months before, as well as during the period after, the child's birth. The system of Schools for Mothers needs to be universalised and systematically carried out. Along such lines as these we may hope to increase the happiness of the people and the strength of the State. We need not worry over the falling birth-rate.

XVIII

BIRTH CONTROL

I.

REPRODUCTION AND THE BIRTH-RATE

The study of the questions relating to sex, so actively carried on during recent years, has become more and more concentrated on to the practical problems of marriage and the family. That was inevitable. It is only reasonable that, with our growing scientific knowledge of the mysteries of sex, we should seek to apply that knowledge to those questions of life which we must ever regard as central. How can we add to the stability or to the flexibility of marriage? How can we most judiciously regulate the size of our families?

At the outset, however, we cannot too deeply impress upon our minds the fact that these questions are not new in the world. If we try to find an answer to them by confining our attention to the phenomena presented by our own species, at our own particular moment of civilisation, it is very likely indeed that we may fall into crude, superficial, even mischievous conclusions.

The fact is that these questions, which are agitating us to-day, have agitated the world ever since it has been a world of life at all. The difference is that whereas we seek to deal with them consciously, voluntarily, and deliberately, throughout by far the greater part of the world's life they have been dealt with unconsciously, by methods of trial and error, of perpetual experiment, which has often proved costly, but has all the more clearly brought out the real course of natural progress. We cannot solve problems so ancient and deeply rooted as those of sex by merely rational methods which are only of yesterday. To be of value our rational methods must be the revelation in deliberate consciousness of unconscious methods which go far back into the remote past. Our conscious, deliberate, and purposive methods, carried out on the plane of reason, will not be sound unless they are a continuation of those methods which have already, in the slow evolution of life, been found sound and progressive on the plane of instinct. This must be borne in mind by those people—always to be found among us, though not always on the side of social advance—who desire their own line of conduct in matters of sex to be so closely in accord with natural and Divine law that to question it would be impious.

A medical friend of my own, when once in the dentist's chair under the influence of nitrous oxide anaesthesia (a condition, as William James showed, which frequently leads us to believe we are solving the problems of the universe), imagined himself facing the Almighty and insistently demanding the real object of the existence of the world. And the Almighty's answer came in one word: "Reproduction." My friend is a man of philosophic mind, and the solution of the mystery of the world's purpose thus presented to him in vision may perhaps serve as a simple and ultimate statement of the object of life. From the very outset the great object of Nature to our human eyes seems to be primarily reproduction, in the long run, indeed, an effort after economy of method in the attainment of an ever greater perfection, but primarily reproduction. This tendency to reproduction is indeed so fundamental, it is impressed on vital organisation with so great a violence of emphasis, that we may regard the course of evolution as much more an effort to slow down reproduction than to furnish it with any new facilities.

We must remember that reproduction appears in the history of life before sex appears. The lower forms of animal and plant life often reproduce themselves without the aid of sex, and it has even been argued that reproduction and sex are directly antagonistic, that active propagation is always checked when sexual differentiation is established. "The impression one gains of sexuality," remarks Professor Coulter, foremost of American botanists, "is that it represents reproduction under peculiar difficulties."72 Bacteria among primitive plants and protozoa among primitive animals are patterns of rapid and prolific reproduction, though sex begins to appear in a rudimentary form in very lowly forms of life, even among the protozoa, and is at first compatible with a high degree of reproduction. A single infusorian becomes in a week the ancestor of millions, that is to say, of far more individuals than could proceed under the most favourable conditions from a pair of elephants in five centuries, while Huxley calculated that the progeny of a single parthenogenetic aphis, under favouring circumstances, would in a few months outweigh the whole population of China.73 That proviso—"under favouring conditions"—is of great importance, for it reveals the weak point in this early method of Nature's for conducting evolution by enormously rapid multiplication. Creatures so easily produced could be, and were, easily destroyed; no time had been spent on imparting to them the qualities that would enable them to lead, what we should call in our own case, long and useful lives.

Yet the method of rapid multiplication was not readily or speedily abandoned by Nature. Still speaking in our human way, we may say that she tried to give it every chance. Among insects that have advanced so far as the white ants, we find that the queen lays eggs at an enormous rate during the whole of her active life, according to some estimates at the rate of 80,000 a day. Even in the more primitive members of the great vertebrate group, to which we ourselves belong, reproduction is sometimes still on almost as vast a scale as among lower organisms. Thus, among herrings, nearly 70,000 eggs have been found in a single female; but the herring, nevertheless, does not tend to increase in the seas, for it is everywhere preyed upon by whales and seals and sharks and birds, and, not least, by man. Thus early we see the connection between a high death-rate and a high birth-rate.

The evidence against reckless reproduction at last, however, proved overwhelming. With whatever hesitation, Nature finally decided, once and for all, that it was better, from every point of view, to produce a few superior beings than a vast number of inferior beings. For while the primary end of Nature may be said to be reproduction, there is a secondary end of scarcely less equal urgency, and that is evolution. In other words, while Nature seems to our human eyes to be seeking after quantity, she is also seeking, and with ever greater eagerness, after quality. Now the method of rapid and easy reproduction, it had become clear, not only failed of its own end, for the inferior creatures thus produced were unable to maintain their position in life, but it was distinctly unfavourable to any advance in quality. The method of sexual reproduction, which had existed in a germinal form more or less from the beginning, asserted itself ever more emphatically, and a method like that of parthenogenesis, or reproduction by the female unaided by the male (illustrated by the aphis), which had lingered on even beside sexual reproduction, absolutely died out in higher evolution. Now the fertilisation involved by the existence of two sexes is, as Weismann insisted, simply an arrangement which renders possible the intermingling of two different hereditary tendencies. The object of sex, that is to say, is by no means to aid reproduction, but rather to subordinate and check reproduction in order to evolve higher and more complex beings. Here we come to the great principle, which Herbert Spencer developed at length in his Principles of Biology, that, as he put it, Individuation and Genesis vary inversely, whence it followed that advancing evolution must be accompanied by declining fertility. Individuation, which means complexity of structure, has advanced, as Genesis, the unrestricted tendency to mere multiplication, has receded. This involves a diminished number of offspring, but an increased amount of time and care in the creation and breeding of each; it involves also that the reproductive life of the organism is shortened and more or less confined to special periods; it begins much later, it usually ends earlier, and even in its period of activity it tends to fall into cycles. Nature, we see, who, at the outset, had endowed her children so lavishly with the aptitude for multiplication, grown wiser now, expends her fertile imagination in devising preventive checks on reproduction for her children's use.

The result is that, though reproduction is greatly slackened, evolution is greatly accelerated. The significance of sex, as Coulter puts it, "lies in the fact that it makes organic evolution more rapid and far more varied." It is scarcely necessary to emphasise that a highly important, and, indeed, essential aspect of this greater individuation is a higher survival value. The more complex and better equipped creature can meet and subdue difficulties and dangers to which the more lowly organised creature that came before—produced wholesale in a way which Nature seems now to look back on as cheap and nasty—succumbed helplessly without an effort. The idea of economy begins to assert itself in the world. It became clear in the course of evolution that it is better to produce really good and highly efficient organisms, at whatever cost, than to be content with cheap production on a wholesale scale. They allowed greater developmental progress to be made, and they lasted better. Even before man began it was proved in the animal world that the death-rate falls as the birth-rate falls.

If we wish to realise the vast progress in method which has been made, even within the limits of the vertebrates to which we ourselves belong, we have but to compare with the lowly herring, already cited, the highly evolved elephant. The herring multiplies with enormous rapidity and on a vast scale, and it possesses a very small brain, and is almost totally unequipped to grapple with the special difficulties of its life, to which it succumbs on a wholesale scale. A single elephant is carried for about two years in his mother's womb, and is carefully guarded by her for many years after birth; he possesses a large brain; his muscular system is as remarkable for its delicacy as for its power and is guided by the most sensitive perceptions. He is fully equipped for all the dangers of his life, save for those which have been introduced by the subtle devilry of modern man, and though a single pair of elephants produces so few offspring, yet their high cost is justified, for each of them has a reasonable chance of surviving to old age. The contrast from the point of view of reproduction of the herring and the elephant, the low vertebrate and the high vertebrate, well illustrates the tendency of evolution. It clearly brings before us the difference between Nature's earlier and later methods, the ever growing preference for quality of offspring over quantity.

It has been necessary to touch on the wider aspects of reproduction in Nature, even when our main concern is with particular aspects of reproduction in man, for unless we understand the progressive tendency of reproduction in Nature, we shall probably fail to understand it in man. With these preliminary observations, we may now take up the question as it affects man.

It is not easy to ascertain the exact tendencies of reproduction in our own historical past or among the lower races of to-day. On the whole, it seems fairly clear that, under ordinary savage and barbarous conditions, rather more children are produced and rather more children die than among ourselves; there is, in other words, a higher birth-rate and a higher infantile death-rate.74 A high birth-rate with a low death-rate seems to have been even more exceptional than among ourselves, for under inelastic social conditions the community cannot adjust itself to the rapid expansion that would thus be rendered necessary. The community contracts, as it were, on this expanding portion and largely crushes it out of life by the forces of neglect, poverty, and disease.75 The only part of Europe in which we can to-day see how this works out on a large scale is Russia, for here we find in an exaggerated form conditions, which once tended to rule all over Europe, side by side with the beginnings of better things, with scientific progress and statistical observation. Yet in Russia, up till recently, if not even still, there has only been about one doctor to every twelve thousand inhabitants, and the witch-doctor has flourished. Small-pox, scarlet fever, diphtheria, typhoid, and syphilis also flourish, and not only flourish, but show an enormously higher mortality than in other European countries. More significant still, famine and typhus, the special disease of filth and overcrowding and misery—both of them banished, save in the most abnormal times, from the rest of Europe—have in modern times ravaged Russia on a vast scale. Ignorance, superstition, insanitation, filth, bad food, impure water, lead to a vast mortality among children which has sometimes destroyed more than half of them before they reach the age of five; so that, enormously high as the Russian birth-rate is, the death-rate has sometimes exceeded it.76 Nor is it found, as some would-be sagacious persons confidently assert, that the high birth-rate is justified by the better quality of the survivors. On the contrary, there is a very large proportion of chronic and incurable diseases among the survivors; blindness and other defects abound; and though there are many very large and fine people in Russia, the average stature of the Russians is lower than that of most European peoples.77

Russia is in the era of expanding industrialism—a fateful period for any people, as we shall see directly—and the results resemble those which followed, and to some extent exist still, further west. The workers, whose hours often extended to twelve or fourteen, frequently had no homes but slept in the factory itself, in the midst of the machinery, or in a sort of dormitory above it, with a minimum of space and fresh air, men and women promiscuously, on wooden shelves, one above the other, under the eye of Government inspectors whose protests were powerless to effect any change. This is, always and everywhere, even among so humane a people as the Russians, the natural and inevitable result of a high birth-rate in an era of expanding industrialism. Here is the goal of unrestricted reproduction, the same among men as among herrings. This is the ideal of those persons, whether they know it or not, who in their criminal rashness would dare to arrest that fall in the birth-rate which is now beginning to spread its beneficent influence in every civilised land.

We have no means of ascertaining precisely the birth-rate in Western Europe before the nineteenth century, but the estimates of the population which have been made by the help of various data indicate that the increase during a century was very moderate. In England, for instance, families scarcely seem to have been very large, and, even apart from wars, many plagues and pestilences, during the eighteenth century more especially small-pox, constantly devastated the population, so that, with these checks on the results of reproduction, the population was able to adjust itself to its very gradual expansion. The mortality fell heavily on young children, as we observe in old family records, where we frequently find two or even three children of the same Christian name, the first child having died and its name been given to a successor.

During the last quarter of the eighteenth century, a new phase of social life, profoundly affecting the reproductive habits of the community, made its appearance in Western Europe, at first in England. This was the new industrial era, due to the introduction of machinery. All the social methods of gradual though awkward adaptation to a slow expansion were dislocated. Easy expansion of population became a possibility, for factories were constantly springing up, and "hands" were always in demand. Moreover, these "hands" could be children for it was possible to tend machinery at a very early age. The richest family was the family with most children. The population began to expand rapidly.

It was an era of prosperity. But when it began to be realised what this meant it was seen that such "prosperity" was far from an enviable condition. A community cannot suddenly adjust itself to a sudden expansion, still less can it adjust itself to a continuous rapid expansion. Disease, misery, and poverty flourished in this prosperous new industrial era. Filth and insanitation, immorality and crime, were fostered by overcrowding in ill-built urban areas. Ignorance and stupidity abounded, for the child, placed in the monotonous routine of the factory when little more than an infant, was deprived alike of the education of the school and of the world. Higher wages brought no higher refinement and were squandered on food and drink, on the lowest vulgar tastes. Such "prosperity" was merely a brutalising influence; it meant nothing for the growth of civilisation and humanity.