I protest, then, against many critics, especially those who used to raise their now silent voices in opposition to the beginnings of the infant mortality campaign a few years ago, that we who criticize modern motherhood and find in its defects the causes of many and great evils, as we do, are asserting nothing whatever against the women of this day as compared with the women of former days, so far as their natural constitution is concerned; and if we criticize the results of bad education, that is mainly criticism of the blindness, the stupidity, and the carelessness of men, who are responsible for the parodies of education and the misdirection of ideals which have so grossly afflicted, and still afflict, childhood and girlhood in all civilized communities.

Yet, again, there is another misconception of the maternal instinct as it exists in our own species, which is still more serious in its results. The argument is that, not only does the maternal instinct exist, but it is a sure guide to its possessor, who therefore requires no instruction—least of all at the hands of men. A woman being a woman knows all about babies, a man being a man knows nothing. Against this error the present writer has endeavoured to inveigh for many years past, and it is always retorted that insistence upon the ignorance of mothers is a very unwarrantable piece of discourtesy. It is nothing of the sort. Native ignorance is the mark of intelligence. It is just because instinct in us has not the perfection of detail which it has in, say, the insects, that it is capable of that limitless modification which shows itself in educated intelligence, and all that educated intelligence has achieved and will yet achieve. It may be permitted to quote from a former statement of this point:—[12]

"The mother has only the maternal instinct in its essence. That could not be permitted to lapse by natural selection, since humanity could never have been evolved at all if women did not love babies. But of all details she is bereft. She has instead an immeasurably greater thing, intelligence, but whilst intelligence can learn everything it has everything to learn. Subhuman instinct can learn nothing, but is perfect from the first within its impassable limits. It is this lapse of instinctive aptitude that constitutes the cardinal difficulty against which we are assembled. The mother cat not merely has a far less helpless young creature to succour, but she has a far superior inherent or instinctive equipment; she knows the best food for her kitten, she does not give it 'the same as we had ourselves'—as the human mother tells the coroner—but her own breast invariably. None of us can teach her anything as to washing her kitten, or keeping it warm. She can even play with it and so educate it, in so far as it needs education. There are mothers in all classes of the community who should be ashamed to look a tabby cat in the face."

The human mother has instinctive love and the uninstructed intelligence which is the form, at once weak and incalculably strong, that instinct so largely assumes in mankind. This cardinal distinction between the human and all sub-human mothers is habitually ignored, it being assumed that the mother, as a mother, knows what is best for her child. But experience concurs with comparative psychology in showing that the human mother, just because she is human, intelligent, which means more than instinctive, does not know. This is the theory upon which all our practice is to be based, and upon which the need for it mainly depends. We must never forget the cardinal peculiarity of human motherhood, its absolute dependence upon education, needless for the cat, needed by the human mother in every particular, small and great, since she relies upon intelligence alone, which is only a potentiality and a possibility until it be educated. Educate it, and the product transcends the cat, and not only the cat, but all other living things. As Coleridge said—

"A mother is a mother still, The holiest thing alive."

Perhaps the foregoing will make it clear that to insist upon the natural ignorance of the human mother and upon the necessity for adding instruction to the maternal instinct, and even to make comparisons with the cat (which are, in point of fact, quite worth making, even though some women resent them) is in no way to depreciate or decry womanhood, but simply to demonstrate that it is human and not animal, suffering from the disabilities or necessities which are involved in the possession of the limitless possibilities of mankind.

What, then, is it in our power to do; and how are we to do it? It may be argued that if the maternal instinct is a thing which cannot be made or acquired, our study of it has little relation to practice. But indeed it is eminently practical.

For, in the first place, this priceless possession, this parental instinct and tenderness, is inheritable. We know by observation amongst ourselves that hardness and tenderness are to be found running through families—are things which are transmissible. Let us, then, make parenthood the most responsible, the most deliberate, the most self-conscious thing in life, so that there shall be children born to those who love children, and only to those who love children, to those who have the parental instinct naturally strong, and who will, on the average, transmit a high measure of it to their offspring. In a generation bred on these principles—a generation consisting only of babies who were loved before they were born—there would be a proportion of sympathy, of tender feeling, and of all those great, abstract, world-creating passions which are evolved from the tender emotion, such as no age hitherto has seen.

It was necessary to insert this eugenic paragraph because it expresses the central principle of all real reform, as fundamental and all-important as it is unknown to all political parties, and I fear to nearly all philanthropists as well. But, for the present, our immediate concern is the application, if such be possible, of our knowledge of the parental instinct to the education of girls. Being indeed an instinct it can be neither made nor acquired, but, like every other factor of humanity that is given by inheritance, it depends upon the conditions in which it finds itself. Education being the provision of an environment, there is no higher task for the educator than to provide the right environment for the maternal instinct in adolescence. We are to look upon it as at once delicate and ineradicable. These are adjectives which may seem incompatible, yet they may both be verified. Any one will testify that, in a given environment, say that of high school or university or that of the worst types of what is called society, the maternal instinct may then and there, and for that period, become a nonentity in many a girl. Hence we are entitled to say that it is delicate; much more delicate, for instance, than what we have agreed to call the racial instinct, which is far more imperious and by no means so easily to be suppressed.

But, on the other hand, just because this is an instinct, part of the fundamental constitution, and not a something planted from without, it is ineradicable. I doubt whether even in the most abandoned female drunkard it would not be possible to find, when the right environment was provided, that the maternal instinct was still undestroyed. One is, of course, not speaking of that rare and aberrant variety of women in whom the instinct is naturally weak—naturally weak as distinguished from the atrophy induced by improper nurture.

Our business, then, having recognized, so to speak, the natural history of this instinct, and further, having come to realize its stupendous importance for the individual and the race, is to tend it assiduously as the very highest and most precious thing in the girls for whom we care. As educators we must seek to provide the environment in which this instinct can flourish. It is a good thing to be an elder sister, not merely because the girl has opportunities of learning the ways of babies and the details of their needs, but for a far deeper reason. Babies do have very detailed and urgent needs, but these can be learnt without much difficulty, and, if necessary, at very short notice. More important is it for the whole development of the character and for the making of the worthiest womanhood that an elder sister is provided with an environment in which her maternal instinct can grow and grow in grace.

Much might be said on this head as to some of our present educational practices. The kind of educationist with whom no one would trust a poodle for half an hour may and does constantly assume, on a scale involving millions of children, from year to year, that all is well if the girl be taken from home and put into a school and made to learn by heart, or at any rate by rote, the rubbish with which our youth is fed even yet in the great name of education: though perchance whilst she is thus being injured in body and mind and character, she might at home be playing the little mother, helping to make the home a home, serving the highest interests of her parents, her younger brothers and sisters and herself at the same time—not to mention the unborn. Such a protest as this, however, will be little heeded. There is no political party which cares about education or even wants to know in what it consists. The most persistent and clever and resourceful of those parties—of which, I fear, the Fabian Society is far too good to be representative—only half believes in the family, and is daily, and ever with more lamentable success, seeking to substitute for the home some collective device or other precisely as rational as that scheme of Plato's whereby the babies were to be shuffled so that no mother should recognize her own baby, while the fathers, need it be said, were to be as gloriously irresponsible as under the schemes for the endowment of motherhood. "Socialism intervenes between the children and the parents.... Socialism in fact is the State family. The old family of the private individual must vanish before it, just as the old waterworks of private enterprise, or the old gas company. They are incompatible with it." Thus Mr. H. G. Wells.

Whilst this sort of thing passes for thinking, it is a task that has little promise in it to demand a return to the study of human nature, and insist that only by obeying it can we command it, as Bacon said of Nature at large. Meanwhile the madness proceeds apace; nursery-schools, wretched parody of the nursery, are advocated at length in even Fabian tracts, and the writer who suggests that an elder sister may be receiving the highest kind of education in staying at home and helping her mother, would sound almost to himself like an echo from the dead past did he not know that neither a Plato nor a million tons of moderns can walk through human nature or any other fact as if it were not there.

Whatever be our duty to the girl of the working-classes, no man can deny the importance of performing it aright. She will become the wife of the working-man. From her thus flows most of the birth-rate. If our education of her is wrong, it is a very great wrong for millions of individuals and for the whole of society. But let us look at the case of her more fortunate sister.

The girl of the more fortunate classes is certain to be well cared for in the matter of air and food and light and exercise. We have already seen how this matter of exercise requires to be qualified and determined as for motherhood—that is, unless we desire most suicidally to educate all the most promising stocks of the nation out of existence. But now what do we owe to her in the matter of providing the right kind of intellectual, moral, spiritual, psychical environment? It is a pity to flounder with so many adjectives, but nearly all the available ones are forsworn and fail to express my meaning. Let us, however, speak of the spiritual environment, seeking to free that word from all its lamentable associations of superstition and cant, and to associate it rather with a humanized kind of religion that deals with humanity as made by, living upon, and destined for, this earth, whatever unseen worlds there may or may not be to conquer.

It is our business, then, to provide the spiritual environment in which the maternal instinct is favoured and seen to be supremely honourable. If in the "best" girls' schools ideas of marriage and babies are ridiculed, the sooner these schools be rubbed down again into the soil, the better. There is no need to substitute one form of cant for another, but it is possible—possible even though the head-mistress should be a spinster, for whom physical motherhood has not been and never will be—to incorporate in the very spirit of the school, as part of its public opinion, no less potent though its power be not consciously felt, the ideals of real and complete womanhood, which mean nothing less than the consecration of the individual to the future, and the belief that such consecration serves not only the future but also the highest satisfaction of her best self.

If it were our present task to define and specify the details of a school in which girls should be educated for womanhood, for motherhood, and the future, it would not be difficult, I think, to show how the services of painting and sculpture, of poetry and prose, should be enlisted. A word or two of outline may be permitted.

There is, for instance, a noble Madonna of Botticelli which is supremely great, not because of the skill of the painter's hand, nor yet the delicacy of his eye, but because of the spirit which they express. Botticelli speaks across the centuries, and is none other than an earlier voice uttering the words of Coleridge, teaching that a mother is the holiest thing alive. The master may or may not have perceived that the Madonna was a symbol; that what he believed of one holy mother was worth believing just in so far as it serves to make all motherhood holy and all men servants thereof. The painter can scarcely have looked at his model and appreciated her fitness for his purpose without realizing that he was concerned with depicting a truth not local and unique, but universal and commonplace. Whether or not the painter saw this, we have no excuse for not seeing it. Copies of such a painting as this should be found in every girls' school throughout the world.

Girls learn drawing and painting at school, and these are amongst the numerous subjects on which the present writer is entitled to no technical or critical opinion. But he sometimes supposes that a painting is not necessarily the worse because it represents a noble thing, and that it may even be a worthier human occupation to portray the visage of a living man or woman than the play of light upon a dead wall or a dead partridge. It might even be argued by the wholly inexpert that if the business of art is with beauty, the art is higher, other things being equal, in proportion as the beauty it portrays is of a higher order. Thus in the painting of women, the ignorant commentator sometimes asks himself in what supreme sense it was worth while for an artist to expend his powers upon the portrait of some society fool who could pay him twelve hundred pounds therefor; or in what supreme sense a painter can be called an artist who prefers such a task, and the flesh-pots, to the portrayal of womanhood at its highest. There are attributes of womanhood which directly serve human life, present and to come—attributes of vitality and faithfulness, attributes of body and bosom, of mind and of feeling, which it is within the power of the great artist to portray; and it is in worthily portraying the greatest things, and in this alone, that he transcends the status of the decorator.

It is worth while also to refer here to sculpture; something can be taught by its means. The Venus of Milo is not only a great work of art; it is also a representation of the physiological ideal. Its model was a woman eminently capable of motherhood. The corset is beyond question undesirable from every point of view, and it may be of service by means of such a statue as this to teach the girl's eye what are the right proportions of the body. She is constantly being faced with gross and preposterous perversions of the female figure as they are to be seen in the fashion plates of every feminine journal. It is as well that she should have opportunities of occasionally seeing something better.

A note upon the corset may not be out of place here. We know that its use is of no small antiquity. We have lately come to learn that civilization stepped across to Europe from Asia, using Crete as a stepping-stone; and in frescoes found in the palace of Minos, at Knossos, by Dr. Arthur Evans, we find that the corset was employed to distort the female figure nearly four thousand years ago, as it is to-day. There must be some clue deep in human nature to the persistence of a custom which is in itself so absurd. Those who have studied the work of such writers as Westermarck, and who cannot but agree that on the whole he is right in the contention that each sex desires to accentuate the features of its sex, will be prepared to accept Dr. Havelock Ellis's interpretation of the corset. By constricting the waist it accentuates the salience of the bosom and hips. This may simply be an expression of the desire to emphasize sex, but it may with still more insight be looked upon, as the latter writer has suggested, as the insertion of a claim to capacity for motherhood. This claim is of course unconscious, but Nature does not always make us aware of the purposes which she exercises through us. Now, though the corset serves to draw attention to certain factors of motherhood, in point of fact it is injurious to that end, and is on that highest of all grounds to be condemned. I return to the point that possibly the direct and formal condemnation of the corset may be in some cases less effective than the method, which must have some value for every girl, of placing before her eyes representations of the female figure, showing beauty and capacity for motherhood as completely fused because they are indeed one. Constrain the girl to admit that that is as beautiful as can be, and then ask her what she thinks the corset applied to such a figure could possibly accomplish.

Surely the same principle applies to what the girl reads. Some of us become more and more convinced that youth, being naturally more intelligent than maturity, prefers and requires more subtlety in its teaching. In addressing a meeting of men, say upon politics, a speaker's first business is to be crude. He has no chance whatever unless he is direct, unqualified, allowing nothing at all for any kind of intelligence or self-constructive faculty in the minds of his hearers. Let any one recall the catchwords, styled watchwords, of politics during the last ten or twenty years, and he will see how men are to be convinced.

But it is all very well to treat men as fools, provided that you do not say so—the case is different with young people, and certainly not less with girls than with boys. Mr. Kipling, in one of those earlier moments of insight that sometimes almost persuade us to pardon the brutality which year by year becomes more than ever the dominant note of his teaching, once told us of the discomfiture of a member of Parliament, or person of that kind, who went to a boys' school to lecture about Patriotism, and who unfurled a Union Jack amid the dead silence of the disgusted boys. He forgot that, for once, he was speaking to an intelligent audience, which demands something a little less crude than the kind of thing which wins elections and makes and unmakes governments and policies.

There is certainly a lesson here for those who are entrusted with the supreme responsibility, so immeasurably more political than politics, of forming the girl's mind for her future destiny. Suggestion is one of the most powerful things in the world, but we must not forget that inverted form of it which has been called contra-suggestion. We all know how the first shoots of religion are destroyed on all sides in young minds by contra-suggestion. Crude, ill-timed, unsympathetic, excessive, religious teaching and religious exercises achieve, as scarcely anything else could, exactly the opposite of that which they seek to attain. Thus it is not here proposed that we should take any course at home or at school which should have the result of making motherhood as nauseous to the girl's mind through contra-suggestion, as it easily could be made if we did not set to work upon judicious lines.

If we are in any measure to gain, by means of books, our end of forming right ideals in the girl's mind, I am certain that we must not expect to accomplish much with the help of any but very great writers. We may very well doubt the substantial value for the purpose of anything written for the purpose. Such books may be of value for the teacher; they may possibly be of value in disposing of curiosity that has become overweening or even morbid, but their value as preachments I much question. The kind of writing upon which the young girl's mind will be nourished in years to come is best represented by the lecture on "Queens' Gardens" in Ruskin's "Sesame and Lilies," though in that magnificent and immortal piece of literature there is nowhere any direct allusion to motherhood as the natural ideal for girlhood. Yet if only one girl in a hundred who read that lecture can be persuaded, in the beautiful phrase to be found there, that she was "born to be love visible," how excellent is the work that we shall have accomplished! A chapter might well be devoted entirely to the teaching of Wordsworth regarding womanhood. We need scarcely remind ourselves that this great poet owed an immeasurable debt to his sister, and in lesser, though very substantial, degree to his wife and daughters. He has left an abundance of poetry which testifies directly and indirectly to these influences. This poetry is not only utterly lovely as poetry; at once sane and passionate, steadying and thrilling, but it is also not to be surpassed, I cannot but believe, as a means for rightly forming the ideals of girlhood. Every year sees an inundation of new collections of poetry. The anthologist might do worse than collect from Wordsworth a small, but precious and quintessential volume under some such title as "Wordsworth and Womanhood." One would do it oneself but that literary people of a certain school regard it as an impertinence that any one who believes in knowledge should intrude into their sphere. Wordsworth, it is true, said that "poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science." But most literary people are so busy writing that they have no time to read, and they forget these sayings of the immortal dead. Yet that is just a saying which directly bears upon the present contention. We must be very careful lest we insult and outrage girlhood with our physiology, not that physiology is either insolent or outrageous, but that girlhood is girlhood. It is the "breath and finer spirit" of our knowledge of sex and parenthood that we must seek to impart to her. Poetry is its vehicle, and the time will come when we shall consciously use it for that great purpose.

But we cannot expect the adolescent girl to be content even with Ruskin and Wordsworth. She must, of course, have fiction, and under this heading there is more or less accessible to her every possibility in the gamut of morality, from the teaching of such a book as "Richard Feverel" down to the excrement and sewage that defile the railway book-stalls to-day under the guise of "bold, reverent, and fearless handling of the great sex problems." The present writer is one of those old-fashioned enough to believe that it matters a great deal what young people read. We are all hygienists nowadays, and very particular as to what enters our children's mouths. But what is the value of these precautions if we relax our care as to what enters their minds?

It is my misfortune to be scarcely acquainted at all with fiction, and I can presume to offer no detailed guidance in this matter. The name of Mr. Eden Phillpotts must certainly be mentioned as foremost among those living writers who care for these things. In the Eugenics Education Society it was at one time hoped to see the formation of a branch of fiction in the library which might form the nucleus of a catalogue, well worth disseminating if only it could be compiled, of fiction worthy the consumption of girlhood. Perhaps it would hardly be necessary for the present writer to protest that the didactic, the unnaturally good, the well-meaning, the entirely amateur types of fiction, including those which ignore the facts of human nature, and, above all, those which decry instead of seeking to deify the natural, would find no place in this catalogue. It is possible, though I much doubt it, that there may be many books unknown to me of the order and quality of "Richard Feverel." At any rate, that represents in its perfection—save, perhaps, for the unnecessary tragedy of its close, which the illustrious author himself in conversation did not find it quite possible to defend—the type of novel whose teaching the Eugenist and the Maternalist must recommend for the nourishment of youth of both sexes.

As has been already hinted, discourses on how to wash a baby are less in place here; and in the following chapter the argument will be set forth in detail that the sequence of the common schemes for the education of girlhood and womanhood is, in one essential respect, logically and practically erroneous.



XIII

CHOOSING THE FATHERS OF THE FUTURE

We live in a social chaos of which the evolution into anything like a cosmos is scarcely more than incipient. In such a case the reformer has to do the best he may; in the only possible sense in which that phrase can be defended, he has to take the world as he finds it. Heartless heads will of course be found to comment upon the logical error of his ways, to which his only reply is that, while they stand and comment, what can be done he now will do.

In this whole matter of the care and culture of motherhood—which is, verily, the prime condition, too often forgotten, of the care and culture of childhood—we have to do what we can, when and as we can. We live in a society where mankind, held individually responsible for all other acts whatsoever, is held entirely irresponsible for the act of parenthood which, being more momentous than any other, ought to be held more responsible than any other. Marriage, the precedent condition of most parenthood, is thus regarded as the concern of the individuals and the present. Individuals and the present therefore decide what marriages shall occur; but by some obscure fatality which no one had thought of, the future appears upon the scene: and when it is actually present, or rather not only present but visible, the responsibility for it is recognized. We have not yet gone so far as to see that a girl may be a good mother, in the highest sense, in her choice of a mate. But as things are, it is agreed that we are to act like blind automata, as improvident and irresponsible as the lower fishes, until the actual birth of the future. The philosophic truth that the future is nascent in the present—a truth so genuinely philosophic that it is also practical—is still hidden from us, and thus we are faced, in town and country alike, with ignorant motherhood, set to the most difficult, responsible, and expert of tasks—the right nurture of babyhood; babyhood, a ridiculous subject for grown men, yet somehow the condition of them and all their doings.

In this state of affairs, those who began the modern campaign against infant mortality, or rather that small section of them who were not to be beguiled by secondaries, such as poverty, alcoholism, and the like, set to work to remedy maternal ignorance. Having been engaged in this campaign for many years, one is not likely to decry it now, nor is there any occasion to do so. The movement for the instruction of motherhood and for the instruction even of girls in the duties of actual motherhood, is now not only started but making real progress, and will assuredly prosper.

But here our business is to think a little in front of action done and doing, and we shall very soon discover that there is more for public opinion yet to learn, while we may be very certain that this last lesson will be less easily learnt than the former was, for it is based upon evidence much less obvious. I have long maintained that the movement against infant mortality must precede in logic and in practice movements for the physical training of boys and girls, for the medical inspection and treatment of school children, and so forth. Relatively to these I have always asserted that the right care of babies has the immense superiority that it means beginning at the beginning, but I have always denied that it means beginning at the absolute beginning, if such a phrase be permitted.

Given the world as it is, the conditions of marriage as they are, the economic position of woman, the power of prudery, and the conventional supposition that babies occur by providential dispensation, we must act as if we really made the assumption that human parenthood, until the moment of birth, is as irresponsible as any sequence of events in the atmosphere or the world of electrons. But we who are thinking in front for humanity must make no such assumption. We must look forward to and hasten the time when we can act upon the true assumption, which is that the more the knowledge the greater the responsibility, and more especially that our knowledge of heredity, so far from abolishing human responsibility—as the enemies of knowledge declare—immeasurably extends and deepens it. In the present volume we are proceeding upon the true assumption, and therefore in the study of womanhood we must now proceed, in defiance of conventional assumptions, to study the responsibility and duties of motherhood as they exist for maidenhood. To this end, it will be necessary that we remind ourselves of certain great biological facts which are of immense significance for mankind, and are doubtless indeed more important in their bearing upon ourselves than upon any other living species.

The first of these is the fact of heredity; the second the fact that hereditary endowment, whether for good or for evil, or, as is the rule, both for good and for evil, goes vastly further than any one has until lately realized, in determining individual destiny. These are amongst the first principles of Eugenics or race culture, and as they have been discussed at length elsewhere, one may here take them for granted. Scarcely less important is the fact that the conditions of mating in the sub-human world—conditions which beyond dispute make for the continuance, the vigour, the efficiency, and therefore the happiness of the species—are largely modified amongst ourselves in consequence of certain human facts which have no sub-human parallel. The parallels and the divergences between the two cases are both alike of the utmost significance, and cannot be too carefully studied. It will here be possible, of course, merely to look at them as briefly as is compatible with the making of a right approach to the subject now before us, which is the girl's choice of a husband.

But in right priority to the question of choice, we may for convenience discuss first the marriage age. The choice at one age may not be the choice at another, and in any case the question of the marriage age is so important for the individual woman, and so immensely effective in determining the composition of any society, that we cannot study it too carefully.



XIV

THE MARRIAGE AGE FOR GIRLS

Let us clearly understand, in the first place, that in this chapter we discuss principles and averages, and that, supposing our conclusions be accepted as true, they cannot for a moment be quoted as decisive in their bearing upon special cases. The impartial reader will not suppose that such folly is contemplated, but those who discuss and advocate new views very soon learn that many readers are not impartial, and that for one cause or another they do not fail of misrepresentation. This is not a case, then, of "science laying down the law," and ordering this individual to marry at this age, and that not to marry at another; and yet though this rigorous individual application of our principles is absurd, they are none the less worth formulating, if it be possible.

The question before us is very far from simple: it is not in the nature of human problems to be simple, the individual and society being so immeasurably complex. We have to consider far more points than occur on first inspection. We have to ascertain when the average woman becomes fit for marriage. But we must remember that we are dealing with marriage under the conditions imposed by law and public opinion. Therefore, fit for mating and fit for marriage are not synonymous, and to ascertain the age of physiological fitness for mating, though an important contribution to our problem, is not the solution of it. We have further to consider how the taste and inclination of the individual vary in the course of her development. We have to ask ourselves at what age in general she is likely to make that choice which her maturity and middle age will ratify rather than for ever regret. We have to consider the relations of different ages to motherhood, both as regards the quality of the children born, and as regards their probable number under natural conditions. These are questions which certainly affect the individual's happiness profoundly, and yet that is the least of their significance. Again, we have to observe how the constitution of society varies as regards the age of its members, according as marriage be early or late. In the former case more generations are alive at the same time, and in the latter case fewer. The increasing age at marriage would have more conspicuous results in this respect if it were not for the great increase in longevity; so that, though the generations are becoming more spread out, we may have as many representatives of different generations alive at the same time as there used to be; but of course there is the great difference that society is older as a whole. This is a fact which in itself must affect the doings and the prospects of civilization. An assemblage of people in the twenties will not behave in the same way as those in the forties. The probable effect must be towards conservatism, and increasing rigidity. It is a question to be asked by the historian of civilization how far these considerations bear upon the history of past empires.

Another and most notable result of the modified relation between the generations which ensues from increasing the age at marriage, is that the parents, under the newer conditions, must necessarily be, on the average, psychologically further from their children. The man who first becomes a father at twenty-five, shall we say, may well expect still to have something of the boy in him at thirty, especially as children keep us young. He is thus a companion for his child and his child for him. The same is true of women. It is good that a woman who still has something of girlhood in her should become a mother. When the marriage age is much delayed, people of both sexes tend to grow old more quickly than if they had children to keep them young, and then when the children come the psychological disparity is greater than it ought to be—greater than is best either for parents or children.

Before we consider the question of individual development, let us note the general trend of the marriage age. There is no doubt that this is progressively towards a delay in marriage. We have only to study the facts amongst primitive races, and in low forms of civilization, to see that increase in civilization involves, amongst other things, increasing age at marriage. In his book, "The Nature of Man," Professor Metchnikoff quotes some statistics, now very nearly fifty years old, showing the age at first marriage in various European countries. The figure for England was nearly 26 for males and 24.6 for females; in France, Norway, Holland, and Belgium the figures for both sexes were considerably higher, the average age in Belgium being very nearly 30 for men and more than 28 for women. In England the age has been rising for many years past, and probably stands now at about 28 for men and 26 for women. It need hardly be pointed out that this increase in the age of marriage is one of the factors in the fall of the birth-rate, which is general throughout the leading countries of the world, proceeding now with great rapidity even in Germany.

On the whole, it is further true that the marriage age rises as we ascend from lower to higher classes within a given civilization, though a very select class among the wealthy offer an exception to this.

Now nothing is more familiar to us all than that there is a disharmony, as Professor Metchnikoff puts it, between these ages for marriage and the age at which the development of the racial instinct is unmistakable and parenthood is indeed possible. The tendency of civilization is to increase this disharmony, and it is impossible to believe that this tendency can be healthy either for the civilization or for the individual.

Still concerning ourselves with the more general aspects of the question, let it be observed that, as regards men, this unnatural delay of marriage very frequently brings consequences which, bearing hardly on themselves, later bear not less hardly on hapless womanhood. The later the age to which marriage is delayed, the more are men handicapped in their constant struggle to control the racial instinct under the unnatural conditions in which they find themselves. The great majority of men fail in this unequal fight, and of those who fail an enormous number become infected by disease, with which, when they marry, they infect their wives, sometimes killing them, often causing them lifelong illness, often destroying for ever their chances of motherhood, or making motherhood a horror by the production of children that are an offence against the sun. These are facts known to all who have looked into the matter, but there is no such thing as decent public opinion on the subject, and the author or speaker who dares to allude to them takes his means of living, if not his life, into his hands.

No doubt men are largely responsible themselves for the rising marriage age, but women are also responsible in some measure. This must mean on the whole an injury to themselves as individuals, to their sex, and to society. Both sexes demand a higher standard of living; the man spends enough in alcohol and tobacco, as a rule, to support one or two children, and then says he is too poor to marry. There is everything to be said for the doctrine that people should be provident, and should bring no more children into the world than they are able to support; but before we accept this plea in any particular case, we should first inquire how the available income is being spent. At present, every indication goes to show that we are following in the track of all our predecessors, spending upon individual indulgence that which ought to be dedicated to the future, and thereby compromising the worth or the possibility of any future at all.

In the light of these considerations and many more, some of which we shall later consider, I deplore and protest against with all my heart, as blind, ignorant, and destructive, the counsel of those women, some of them conspicuous advocates of the cause of woman's suffrage—in which I nevertheless believe—who advise women to delay in marriage, or who publish opinions throwing contempt upon marriage altogether. Later, we must deal in detail with marriage; here we are only concerned with the marriage age. It will then be argued that the conditions of marriage must sooner or later be modified in so far as they are at present inacceptable to a certain number of women of the highest type. This may be granted without in any degree accepting the deplorable teaching of such writers as Miss Cicely Hamilton, in her book entitled "Marriage as a Trade." Every individual case requires individual consideration, and no less than any individual case ever yet received. But in general those women who counsel the delay of the marriage age are opposing the facts of feminine development and psychology. They are indirectly encouraging male immorality and female prostitution, with their appalling consequences for those directly concerned, for hosts of absolutely innocent women, and for the unborn. Further, those who suppose that the granting of the vote is going to effect radical and fundamental changes in the facts of biology, the development of instinct, and its significance in human action, are fools of the very blindest kind. Some of us find that it needs constant self-chastening and bracing up of the judgment to retain our belief in the cause of woman's suffrage, of the justice and desirability of which we are convinced, assaulted as we almost daily are by the unnatural, unfeminine, almost inhuman blindness of many of its advocates.

We have constantly to remind ourselves that our immediate concern and duty are not with the world as it might be, or ought to be, or will be, but with the world as it is. There are many good arguments, admirably adapted to an imaginary world, why the marriage age should be increased. But these forget the possible, nay the inevitable, consequences, if such an increase show itself in one nation and not in another, in one class of society and not in another. It is a good thing, and it is the ideal of the eugenist, as I ventured to formulate some years ago, that every child who comes into the world should be desired, designed, and loved in anticipation. But if in France, shall we say, such a tendency begins to obtain a generation earlier than it does in Germany, there will come to be a disparity of population which, continuing, must inevitably mean sooner or later the disappearance of France.

Or again, difference in the marriage age in different classes within a given community has very notable consequences, as Sir Francis Galton showed in his book, "Hereditary Genius," and later, in more detail, in his "Inquiries into Human Faculty." He shows that, other things being equal, the earlier marrying class or group will in a few generations breed down the others and completely supplant them. If the natural quality of the one class differ from that of the other, the ultimate consequences will be tremendous. It has been proved up to the hilt that in Great Britain these differences in marriage in different classes exist, and that, on the whole, the marriage age varies directly as the means of support for the children, to say nothing of natural and transmissible differences in different classes. One can only, therefore, repeat what was said some time ago in contribution to a public discussion on this subject that, "considering the present distribution of the birth-rate, nothing strikes a more direct blow at the future of England than that which tends to increase the marriage age of the responsible, careful, and provident amongst us whilst the improvident and careless multiply as they do."

Let us now consider another possible factor in this question, and then we must proceed to look at the individual woman as the question of the marriage age affects her.

The Marriage Age and the Quality of the Children.—Both from the point of view of the race and from that of the individual who desires happy parenthood it is necessary to learn, if possible, how the age of the parents affects the quality of their offspring. If motherhood is to be a joy and a blessing, the children must be such as bring joy and blessing. My provisional judgment on this matter is that we are at present without anything like conclusive evidence proving that the age of the parents affects the quality of their children.

Let us look at some of the arguments which have been advanced. The school of biometricians, represented most conspicuously in latter years by Professor Karl Pearson, have desired us to accept certain conclusions which are singularly incompatible with the opinion of their illustrious founder, Sir Francis Galton, in favour of early marriages among those of sound stock. By their special procedure, as rigorously critical in the statistical treatment of data as it is sweetly simple in its innocent assumption that all data are of equal value, they have proposed to show that the elder members of a family are further removed from the normal, average, or mean type than the younger members. This, according to them, may sometimes work out in the production of great ability or genius in the eldest or elder members, but oftener still shows itself in highly undesirable characters, whether of mind or of body, the latter often leading to premature decease. There is hence inferred a powerful argument against the limitation of families, which means a disproportionate increase amongst the aberrant members of the population.

This argument really offers as good an example as can be desired of the almost unimaginable ease with which these skilful mathematicians allow themselves to be confused. Their inquiry has ignored the age of the parents at marriage—or, better still, at the births of their respective children—and has assumed that the number of the family was the all-important point: a good example of that idolatry of number as number which is the "freak religion" of the biometrician. Supposing that the conclusion reached by this method be a true one—which it would need more credulity than I possess to assert—we must conclude that, somehow, primogeniture, as such, affects the quality of the offspring, and, on the other hand, that to be born fifth or tenth or fifteenth involves certain personal consequences of a special kind. Evidently we here approach less sophisticated forms of number-worship, as that which attached a superstitious meaning to the seventh son of a seventh son.

It seems, therefore, necessary to point out—surprising though the necessity be—that, if the biometrical conclusion be valid, what it demonstrates must surely be not the occult working of certain changes in the germ-plasm, for instance, of a father, because a certain number of his germ-cells, after separation from his body, have gone to form new individuals (changes which would not have occurred if those germ-cells had perished!), but rather a correlation between the age of the parents and the quality of their offspring. How cleverly the biometricians have involved one muddle within another will be evident not only from considering the evident absurdity of supposing—as their argument, analyzed, necessarily supposes—that a man's body can be affected by the diverse fates of germ-cells that have left it, but also when we observe that one of the commonest and most obvious causes of the reduction in the size of families is the increasing age at marriage of both sexes. Two persons may thus marry and become parents at the age of say thirty, their child ranking as first-born, of course, in the biometricians' tables; but had they married ten years sooner, a child born when the parents were thirty might rank as the tenth child, and would be so reckoned by the biometricians. One does not need to be a biologist to perceive that conclusions based upon assumptions so uncritical are worth nothing at all, and it is tempting to suggest that the biometricians are so called, on a principle long famous, because they measure everything but life.

It is plainly unnecessary, therefore, for us to trouble about collecting the innumerable instances where children late in the family sequence have turned out to be illustrious, or have proved to be idiots. It is unnecessary because the most obvious criticism of the contention before us disposes of the proof upon which it is sought to be based. Nevertheless, of course, though the particular contention about the size of the family must necessarily be meaningless, unless, as is so very improbable, it should be shown some day that the bearing of children affects the maternal organism in some way so as to cause subsequent children to approximate ever nearer to the type of the race; yet it is quite conceivable, though quite unproved, that the age of the parents involves changes in the body which affect, for good or for evil, either the construction or the general vigour of the germ-cells. As to this nothing is known, but a great weight of evidence suggests that little importance, if any, can be attached to this question. Women marrying at forty or more may give birth to splendid specimens of humanity or to indifferent ones, and the same may be said of the girl of seventeen, though as to this more must be said. Similarly, also, it is impossible to make any general contrasts between the offspring of fathers of eighteen or fathers of eighty. Correlations may exist, but we know nothing of them yet.

Our conclusion then is that, with regard to the quality of the children of any given mother, we cannot say that she should marry at any particular age, within limits, rather than another. On the other hand, it is evident that if she be highly worthy of motherhood we shall desire her to have a large family, and therefore must encourage her early marriage, as the late Sir Francis Galton so long maintained.

Physical Fitness for Marriage.—We must carefully distinguish between the question we have just been discussing and that of the marriage age from the mother's point of view. We shall find that the best age for marriage, so far as this question is concerned, is neither puberty, on the one hand, nor the average marriage age amongst civilized women, on the other hand.

If things were as we should like them to be, there would be a harmony between the occurrence of puberty and fitness for marriage. But there can be no question that the goal of evolution, which is perfect adaptation, has not yet been attained by mankind, and indeed reason can be given to show that the goal recedes as we advance towards it. The practice of lower races, amongst whom the girls often marry at puberty or before it, is much less injurious to the individual and the race than we might suppose; but the harmony between the maternal body and the maternal function is much less imperfect in lower races of mankind than it is among ourselves. Just as we find that, among the lower animals, the phenomena of motherhood are simple, easy, and almost painless, so we find that, though owing to the erect attitude, as much cannot be said for human beings anywhere, yet these phenomena are far less severe among the lower races of mankind than among ourselves. The reason is to be found in the astonishing progressive increase in the size of the human head in the higher races. The large size of the head in adult life is foreshadowed in its size at birth, and this it is which constitutes the crux of motherhood among the higher races. It is undoubtedly true that the maternal body, by a process of natural selection, has been evolved in the direction of better correspondence with, and capacity for, that enlarged head of which civilization is the product. But at the present stage in evolution the great function of giving birth to a human being of high race—more especially to a boy of such a race—is graver, more prolonged, and more hazardous than the maternal function has ever been before. The gravity of the process has increased proportionately with the worth of the product.

There are yet further consequences of the development which will convince us how important it is that we should come to right conclusions regarding the physical fitness of girls for marriage. Even to-day, when the work of Lord Lister has been done, and when maternity hospitals—far more dangerous than a battlefield less than two generations ago—can show records from year to year without the loss of a single mother, the fact remains that several thousands of women in Great Britain alone lose their lives every year in the discharge of their supreme duty. It is also the case that large numbers of infants lose their lives during, or shortly after, birth, owing to causes inherent in the conditions of birth, and practically beyond any but the most expert control. In many cases no skill will save the child. A considerable preponderance of the victims are of the male sex, so that there is thus early begun that process of higher male mortality, which is the chief cause of the female preponderance that is so injurious to womanhood and to society. There are thus many and weighty reasons, individual and social—reasons in the present generation and in the next—which conduce to the importance of discovering the best age for marriage from the physical point of view.

We may probably accept the long-standing figures of Dr. Matthews Duncan, one of Edinburgh's many famous obstetricians, who found that the mortality rate in childbirth, or as a consequence of it, was lowest among women from twenty to twenty-four years of age. Therefore it may safely be said that, on the average, and looking at the question, for the present, solely from this point of view, a girl of twenty-one to twenty-two is by no means too young to marry. Of course it would be monstrously absurd to take such a statement as this and regard it as conclusive, even had it been communicated from on high, for any particular case; but as an average statement it may be confidently put forward. At this age, the all-important bones of the pelvis have reached all the development of which they are capable. This may be accepted, notwithstanding the fact that, especially in men, the growth of the long bones of the limbs continues to a considerably later age. Women reach maturity sooner than men, and the pelvis reaches its full capacity at the age stated. Obstetricians know further that if motherhood be begun at a considerably later date, there is less local adaptability than when the bones and ligaments are younger. The point lies in the date of the beginning of motherhood, for this is in general a conspicuous instance of the adage that the first step is the most costly.[13]

Psychical Fitness for Marriage.—At the beginning of this chapter it was insisted that we must carefully distinguish between physical or physiological fitness for mating and complete fitness for marriage—which, though it includes mating, is vastly more. Few will question the proposition that physical fitness for marriage is reached only some years after puberty; so complete psychical fitness for marriage may well be later still. We should thus have a second disharmony superposed upon the first. But, instead, when we look round us, we may often be inclined to ask whether, for many girls and women, the age of psychical fitness for marriage is ever reached at all; and we have to ask ourselves how far this delay or indefinite postponement of such fitness is due to natural conditions, or how far it is due to the fact that we bring up our girls to be, for instance, sideboard ornaments, as Ruskin said a generation ago.

I believe that this disparity between the age of physical fitness for marriage and the attainment of that outlook upon life and its duties, without which marriage must be so perilous, is one of the most important practical problems of our time, and that its solution is to be found in the principle of education for parenthood, which we have already considered at such length. It is a most serious matter that marriage should be delayed as it is beyond the best age for the commencement of motherhood; it is injurious to the individual and her motherhood, and whether delay occurs, as it does, disproportionately in different cases, or disproportionately within a nation, in the different classes of which it is composed, the consequences, as we have seen, are of the most stupendous possible kind.

Yet observe what a difficulty we are faced with. Perceiving the injurious consequences of delay in marriage—consequences which, as we have seen, if considered only as they show themselves in the most horrible department of pathology, would be sufficient to demand the most urgent consideration—we may almost feel inclined to agree with the utterly blind and deplorable doctrine too common amongst parents and schoolmistresses, who should know so much better, that it is good to see the young things falling in love, and that the sooner they are married the better. Every one whose eyes are open knows how often the consequences of such teaching and practice are disastrous; and if there is anything which we should discourage in our present study, it is that marriage in haste and repentance at leisure to which these blind guides so often lead their blind victims.

Very different, however, will the case be when the victims are no longer blind. The condemnation of their blind guides at the present time is not that they regard it as right and healthy that young people should mate in their early twenties, but it is that by every means in their power, positive and negative, these blind guides have striven to prevent the light from reaching their victim's eyes. The day is coming, however, when the principles of education for parenthood—for which, if for anything, this book is a plea—will be accepted and practised, and then the case will be very different.

Convinced though I certainly am of the vast importance of nature or heredity in the human constitution, I am not one of those eugenists who, to the grave injury of their cause, declare that there are no such things as nurture and education, in that they effect nothing; nor do I believe it in any way inherently necessary that perhaps ten years after puberty a girl should still be irresponsible in those matters which, incomparably beyond all others, demand responsibility; or incapable, with wise help or even without it, of guiding her course aright. It is we, as I repeat for the thousandth time, who are to blame, for our deliberate, systematic, and disastrous folly in scrupulously excluding from her education that for which the whole of education, of any other kind, should be regarded as the preparation.

No one can attach more than its due importance to woman's function of choosing the fathers of the future; rejecting the unworthy and selecting the worthy for this greatest of human duties. It would be a most serious difficulty for those who hold such a creed if it were that a girl's taste and judgment could be trusted, if at all, only some years after she had reached physical maturity for motherhood. It may be that in the present conditions of girls' education, such right direction of this choice as occurs, is just as likely to occur at the earlier age as at any later one, when indeed it may happen that considerations more worldly and prudential, less generally natural and eugenic, may come to have greater weight. One can, therefore, only leave it to the reader's consideration whether it is not high time that we should so seek to prepare the girl's mind, that when her body Is ready for marriage her mind may, if possible, be ready also to guide her towards a worthy choice which the whole of her future life may ratify, and the life of her descendants thereafter.

It must be insisted again that this question has many ramifications, and that not the least important of them are those which concern themselves with the kinds of disease already referred to. Some enemy of God and man once invented a phrase about the desirability of young men sowing their wild oats, and subsequent enemies of life and the good and progress, or perhaps mere fools, animated gramophones of a cheap pattern, have repeated and still propagate that doctrine. It is poisonous to its core; it never did any one any good, and has done incalculable harm. It has blinded the eyes of hundreds of thousands of babies; it has brought hundreds of thousands more rotten into the world. Hosts of dead men, women, and children are its victims. It is indeed good that a man should be a man, and not a worm on stilts; it is indeed good that women should prefer men to be men, and that as soon as possible they should cease to accept in marriage the feeble, the cowardly, the echoers, and the sheep. But this is a very different thing from asserting that it is good for young men, before marriage, to adopt a standard of morality which would be thought shameful beyond words in their sisters, and which has all the horrible consequences that have been alluded to, and many more. Now, vicious though the wild oats doctrine be in itself and in its consequences, we have to grant that there is little need of it, for young manhood needs the insertion of no doctrines from without to encourage it towards the satisfaction of what are in themselves natural and healthy tendencies. Our right procedure therefore should be—notwithstanding the unhealthy tendency of high civilization in this respect, and notwithstanding the terrible folly, traitorous to their sex, of those women who decry marriage, and seek to delay it—to prepare girlhood and public opinion, and even to modify, so far as may be necessary, economic conditions, in order that the girls who are worthy to marry at all shall do so at the right age, and shall join themselves for life with rightly chosen men.

One more point may be conveniently considered here, though it is not strictly a matter of the marriage age for girls. The point is as to the most generally desirable age relation between husband and wife. Here, again, we must remind ourselves that it is impossible to lay down the law for any case, and that that is not what we are now attempting to do.

As every one knows, there is an average disparity of some few years in the ages of husband and wife. This may be referred probably to economic conditions in part, and also to the fact that girlhood becomes womanhood at a somewhat earlier age than boyhood becomes manhood. The girl is more precocious. Thus though she be twenty and her husband twenty-three, she is as mature.

It is probable that the economic tendencies of the day are in the direction of increasing this disparity, since more is demanded of the man in the material sense, and he therefore must delay. Some authorities consider that seniority of six or eight years on the part of the husband constitutes the desirable average. But there are considerations commonly ignored that should qualify this opinion in my judgment.

It is not that science has any information regarding the consequence upon the sex or quality of offspring of any one age ratio in marriage rather than another. On subjects like this wild statements are incessantly being made, and we are often told that certain consequences in offspring follow when the husband is older than the wife, and others when he is younger, and so forth. As to this, nothing is known, and it is improbable that there is anything to know. But it has usually been forgotten, so far as I am aware, that the disparity of age has a very marked and real consequence, which is, in its turn, the cause of many more consequences.

We have seen that the male death-rate is higher than the female death-rate. At all ages, whether before birth or after it, the male expectation of life is less than the female. This is more conspicuously true than ever now that the work of Lord Lister, based upon that of Pasteur, has so enormously lowered the mortality in childbirth. Even now that mortality is falling, and will rapidly fall for some time to come, still further increasing the female advantage in expectation of life; the more especially this applies to married women. If now, this being the natural fact, we have most husbands older than their wives, it follows that in a great preponderance of cases the husband will die first; and so we have produced the phenomenon of widowhood. The greater the seniority of the husband, the more widowhood will there be in a society. Every economic tendency, every demand for a higher standard of life, every aggravation for the struggle for existence, every increment of the burden of the defective-minded, tending to increase the man's age at marriage, which, on the whole, involves also increasing his seniority—contributes to the amount of widowhood in a nation.

We therefore see that, as might have been expected, this question of the age ratio in marriage, though first to be considered from the average point of view of the girl, has a far wider social significance. First, for herself, the greater her husband's seniority, the greater are her chances of widowhood, which is in any case the destiny of an enormous preponderance of married women. But further, the existence of widowhood is a fact of great social importance because it so often means unaided motherhood, and because, even when it does not, the abominable economic position of woman in modern society bears hardly upon her. It is not necessary to pursue this subject further at the present time. But it is well to insist that this seniority of the husband has remoter consequences far too important to be so commonly overlooked.



CHAPTER XV

THE FIRST NECESSITY

At this stage in our discussion it is necessary to consider a subject which ought rightly to come foremost in the provident study of the facts that precede marriage—a subject which craven fear and ignorance combine to keep out of sight, yet which must now see the light of day. For the writer would be false to his task, and guilty of a mere amateur trifling with the subject, who should spend page after page in discussing the choice of marriage, the best age for marriage, and so forth, without declaring that as an absolutely essential preliminary it is necessary that the girl who mates shall at least, whatever else be or be not possible, mate with a man who is free from gross and foul disease.

The two forms of disease to which we must refer are appalling in their consequences, both for the individual and the future. In technical language they are called contagious; meaning that the infection is conveyed not through the air as, say, in the case of measles or small-pox, but by means of contact with some infected surface—it may be a lip in the act of kissing, a cup in drinking, a towel in washing, and so forth. Of both these terrible diseases this is true. They therefore rank, like leprosy, as amongst the most eminently preventable diseases. Leprosy has in consequence been completely exterminated in England, but though venereal disease—the name of the two contagions considered together—diminishes, it is still abundant everywhere and in all classes of society. Here regarding it only from the point of view of the girl who is about to mate, I declare with all the force of which I am capable that, many and daily as are the abominations for which posterity will hold us up to execration, there is none more abominable in its immediate and remote consequences, none less capable of apology than the daily destruction of healthy and happy womanhood, whether in marriage or outside it, by means of these diseases. At all times this is horrible, and it is more especially horrible when the helpless victim is destroyed with the blessing of the Church and the State, parents and friends; everyone of whom should ever after go in sackcloth and ashes for being privy to such a deed.

The present writer, for one, being a private individual, the servant of the public, and responsible to no body smaller than the public, has long declined and will continue to decline to join the hateful conspiracy of silence, in virtue of which these daily horrors lie at the door of the most honoured and respected individuals and professions in the community. More especially at the doors of the Church and the medical profession there lies the burden of shame that, as great organized bodies having vast power, they should concern themselves, as they daily do, with their own interests and honour, without realizing that where things like these are permitted by their silence, their honour is smirched beyond repair in whatever Eyes there be that regard.

I propose therefore to say in this chapter that which at the least cannot but have the effect of saving at any rate a few girls somewhere throughout the English-speaking world from one or other or both of these diseases, and their consequences. Let those only who have ever saved a single human being from either syphilis or gonorrh[oe]a dare to utter a word against the plain speaking which may save one woman now.

The task may be much lightened by referring the reader to a play by the bravest and wisest of modern dramatists, M. Brieux, more especially because the reader of "Les Avaries" will be enabled to see the sequence of causation in its entirety. When first our attention is called to these evils, we are apt to blame the individuals concerned. The parents of youths, finding their sons infected, will blame neither their guilty selves nor their sons, but those who tempted them. It is constantly forgotten that the unfortunate woman who infected the boy was herself first infected by a man. Either she was betrayed by an individual blackguard, or our appalling carelessness regarding girlhood, and the economic conditions which, for the glory of God and man, simultaneously maintain Park Lane and prostitution, forced her into the circumstances which brought infection. But she was once as harmless and innocent as the girl child of any reader of this book; and it was man who first destroyed her and made her the instrument of further destruction.

Ask how this came to be so, and the answer is that he in his turn was infected by some woman.

It is time, then, that we ceased to blame youth of either sex, and laid the onus where it lies—upon the shoulders of older people, and more especially upon those who by education and profession, or by the functions they have undertaken, such as parenthood, ought to know the facts and ought to act upon their knowledge. It is necessary to proceed, therefore: though perfectly aware that in many ways this chapter will have to be paid for by the writer: that he has yet to meet the eye of his publisher; that there will be abundance of abuse from those "whose sails were never to the tempest given": but aware also that in time to come those few who dared speak and take their chance in this matter, whether remembered or not, will have been the pioneers in reforming an abuse which daily makes daylight hideous. He who does betray the future for fear of the present should tread timidly upon his Mother Earth lest he awake her to gape and bury her treacherous son.

Something is known by the general public of the individual consequences of syphilis. It is known by many, also, that there is such a thing as hereditary syphilis—babies being born alive but rotted through for life. Further, it is not at all generally known, though the fact is established, that of the comparatively few survivors to adult life from amongst such babies, some may transmit the disease even to the third generation. There is a school of so-called moralists who regard all this as the legitimate and providential punishment for vice, even though ten innocent be destroyed for one guilty. Such moralists, more loathsome than syphilis itself, may be left in the gathering gloom to the company of their ghastly creed. Love and man and woman are going forward to the dawn, and if they inherit from the past no God that is fit to be their companion, they and the Divine within them will not lose heart.

The public knowledge of syphilis, though far short of the truth, is not merely so inadequate as that of gonorrh[oe]a.

"No worse than a bad cold" is the kind of lie with which youth is fooled. The disease may sometimes be little worse than a bad cold in men, though very often it is far more serious; it may kill, may cause lasting damage to the coverings of the heart and to the joints, and often may prevent all possibility of future fatherhood.

These evils sink almost into insignificance when compared with the far graver consequences of gonorrh[oe]a in woman. Our knowledge of this subject is comparatively recent, being necessarily based upon the discovery of the microbe that causes the disease. Now that it can be identified, we learn that a vast proportion of the illnesses and disorders peculiar to women have this cause, and it constantly leads to the operations, now daily carried out in all parts of the world, which involve opening the body, and all that that may entail. Curable in its early stages in men, gonorrh[oe]a is scarcely curable in women except by means of a grave abdominal operation, involving much risk to life and only to be undertaken after much suffering has failed to be met by less drastic means. The various consequences of gonorrh[oe]a in other parts of the body may and do occur in women as in men. Perhaps the most characteristic consequence of the disease in both sexes is sterility; this being much more conspicuously the case in women, and being the more cruel in their case.

Of course large numbers of women are infected with these diseases before marriage and apart from it, but one or both of them constitute the most important of the bridegroom's wedding presents, in countless cases every year, all over the world. The unfortunate bride falls ill after marriage; she may be speedily cured; very often she is ill for life, though major surgery may relieve her; and in a large number of cases she goes forever without children. One need scarcely refer to the remoter consequences of syphilis to the nervous system, including such diseases as locomotor ataxia, and general paralysis of the insane; the latter of which is known to be increasing amongst women. Even in these few words, which convey to the layman no idea whatever of the pains and horrors, the shocking erosion of beauty, the deformities, the insanities, incurable blindness of infants, and so forth, that follow these diseases, enough will yet have been said to indicate the importance of what is to follow. Medical works abound in every civilized language which, especially as illustrated either by large masses of figures or by photographs of cases, will far more than justify to the reader everything that has been said.

And now for the whole point of this chapter. We are not here concerned to deal with prostitution or its possible control. We are dealing with girlhood before marriage and in relation to marriage, and the plea is Goethe's—for more light. There is no need to horrify or scandalize or disgust young womanhood, but it is perfectly possible in the right way and at the right time to give instruction as to certain facts, and whilst quite admitting that there are hosts of other things which we must desire to teach, I maintain that this also must we do and not leave the others undone. It is untrue that it is necessary to excite morbid curiosity, that there is the slightest occasion to give nauseous or suggestive details, or that the most scrupulous reticence in handling the matter is incompatible with complete efficiency. Such assertions will certainly be made by those who have done nothing, never will do anything, and desire that nothing shall be done; they are nothing, let them be treated as nothing.

It is supposed by some that instruction in these matters must be useless because, in point of fact, imperious instincts will have their way. It is nonsense. Here, as in so many other cases, the words of Burke are true—Fear is the mother of safety. It is always the tempter's business to suggest to his victim that there is no danger. Often and often, if convinced there is danger, and danger of another kind than any he refers to, she will be saved. This may be less true of young men. In them the racial instinct is stronger, and perhaps a smaller number will be protected by fear, but no one can seriously doubt that the fear born of knowledge would certainly protect many young women.

There is also the possible criticism, made by a school of moralists for whom I have nothing but contempt so entire that I will not attempt to disguise it, who maintain that these are unworthy motives to which to appeal, and that the good act or the refraining from an evil one, effected by means of fear, is of no value to God. In the same breath, however, these moralists will preach the doctrine of hell. We reply that we merely substitute for their doctrine of hell—which used to be somewhere under the earth, but is now who knows where—the doctrine of a hell upon the earth, which we wish youth of both sexes to fear; and that if the life of this world, both present and to come, be thereby served, we bow the knee to no deity whom that service does not please.

How then should we proceed?

It seems to me that instruction in this matter may well be delayed until the danger is near at hand. This is not really education for parenthood in the more general sense. That, on the principles of this book, can scarcely begin too soon; it is, further, something vastly more than mere instruction, though instruction is one of its instruments. But here what we require is simply definite instruction to a definite end and in relation to a definite danger. At some stage or other, before emerging into danger, youth of both sexes must learn the elements of the physiology of sex, and must be made acquainted with the existence and the possible results of venereal disease. A father or a teacher may very likely find it almost impossible to speak to a boy; even though he has screwed his courage up almost to the sticking place, the boy's bright and innocent eyes disarm him. Unfortunately boys are often less innocent than they look. There exists far more information among youth of both sexes than we suppose; only it is all coloured by pernicious and dangerous elements, the fruit of our cowardice and neglect. Let us confine ourselves to the case of the girl.

Before a girl of the more fortunate classes goes out into society, she must be protected in some way or another. If she be, for instance, convent bred, or if she come from an ideal home, it may very well be and often is that she needs no instruction whatever, because she is in fact already made unapproachable by the tempter. Fortunate indeed is such a girl. But those forming this well-guarded class are few, and parents and guardians may often be deceived and assume more than they are entitled to. At any rate, for the vast majority of girls some positive instruction is necessary. It is the mother who must undertake this responsible and difficult task before she admits the girl to the perils of the world. Further, by some means or other, instruction must be afforded for the ever-increasing army of girls who go out to business. It is to me a never ceasing marvel that loving parents, devoted to their daughters' welfare, should fail in this cardinal and critical point of duty, so constantly as they do.

Many employers of female labour nowadays show a genuine and effective interest in the welfare of their employees. As one might expect, this is notably the case with the Quaker manufacturers of chocolate and cocoa. I have visited the works of one of these firms, and can testify to the splendidly intelligent and scrupulous care which is taken of the girls' general health, their eye-sight, their reading, and many aspects of their moral welfare. Yet there still remains something to be done in regard to protection from venereal disease, and surely the suggestion that conscientious employers should have instruction given in these matters is one which is well worthy of consideration.

It is known by all observers—but it is a very meagre "all"—of the realities of politics that in Great Britain, at any rate, there is an increase of drinking amongst women and girls. This is doubtless in considerable measure due to the increase of work in factories, and the greater liberty enjoyed by adolescence—liberty too often to become enslaved. This bears directly upon our present subject. In a very large number of cases, the first lapse from self-restraint in young people of both sexes occurs under the influence of alcohol, the most pre-eminent character of whose action upon the nervous system is the paralysis of inhibition or control. Not only is alcohol responsible in this way, but also in any given case it renders infection more probable for more reasons than one. This abominable thing—in itself the immediate cause of many evils and, except as a fuel for lifeless machines and for industrial purposes, of no good—is thus the direct ally of the venereal diseases as of consumption and many more. We must return to this important subject later: meanwhile let it be noted that the influence of alcohol upon youth of both sexes greatly favours not only immorality but also venereal disease. The girl, therefore, who would protect herself directly will avoid this thing, and the girl who desires that neither she nor her children shall be destroyed after marriage, will exact from the man she chooses the highest possible standard of conduct in this matter. A friendly critic has told me that my books would be all very well, but that I have alcohol on the brain, and I am inclined to reply, Better on the brain than in the brain. But a subject so serious demands more serious treatment, and the due reply is that there is no human prospect for which I care, no public advantage to be advocated, no good I know, of which alcohol is not the enemy; no abomination, physical, mental or moral, individual or social, of which it is not the friend. Further, words like these will stand on record, and may be remembered when there has been achieved that slow but irresistible education of public opinion, to which some few have devoted themselves, and of which the triumph is as certain as the triumph of all truth was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. To the many charges against alcohol made by the champions of life in the past, let there be added that on which all students of venereal diseases are agreed—that it is the most potent ally of the most loathsome evils that afflict mankind.

This chapter is not yet complete. In many cases it may be read not by the girl who is contemplating marriage, but by one or both of her parents. If the reader be such an one I here charge him or her with the solemn responsibility which is theirs whether they realize it or not. You desire your daughter's welfare; you wish her to be healthy and happy in her married life; perhaps your heart rejoices at the thought of grand-children; you concern yourself with your prospective son-in-law's character, with his income and prospects; you wish him to be steady and sober; you would rather that he came of a family not conspicuous for morbid tendencies. All this is well and as it should be; yet there is that to be considered which, whilst it is only negative, and should not have to be considered at all, yet takes precedence of all these other questions. If the man in question is tainted with either or both of these diseases, he is to be summarily rejected at any rate until responsible and, one may suggest, at least duplicated medical opinion has pronounced him cured. Microscopic examination of the blood or otherwise can now pronounce on this matter with much more definiteness than used to be possible. But even so, there are possibilities of error, for experts are more and more coming to recognize the existence and the importance of latent gonorrh[oe]a, devoid of characteristic symptoms but yet liable to wake in the individual and always dangerous from the point of view of infection. No combination of advantages is worth the dust in the balance when weighed against either of these diseases in a prospective son-in-law: infection is not a matter of chance but of certainty or little short of it. Everything may seem fair and full of promise, yet there may be that in the case which will wreck all in the present; not to mention destroying the chance of motherhood or bringing rotten or permanently blinded children into the world.

It follows, therefore, that parents or guardians are guilty of a grave dereliction of duty if they neglect to satisfy themselves in time on this point. Doubtless, in the great majority of cases no harm will be done. But in the rest irreparable harm is often done, and the innocent, ignorant girl who has been betrayed by father and mother and husband alike, may turn upon you all, perhaps on her death-bed, perhaps with the blasted future in her arms, and say "This is your doing: behold your deed."

"But if ye could and would not, oh, what plea, Think ye, shall stead you at your trial, when The thunder-cloud of witnesses shall loom, With Ravished Childhood on the seat of doom At the Assizes of Eternity?"

These pages may disgust or offend nine hundred and ninety-nine readers out of a thousand. They may yet save one girl, and will have justified themselves.

One final word may be added on the relation of this subject to Eugenics, to which this pen and voice have been for many years devoted. The subject of venereal disease is one of which we Eugenists, like the rest of the world, fight shy; yet just because the rest of the world does so, we should not. Nevertheless I mean to see to it that this subject becomes part of the Eugenic campaign which will yet dominate and mould the future. For surely the present spectacle has elements in it which would be utterly farcical if they were not so tragic. Here we have life present and life to come being destroyed for lack of knowledge. These horrible diseases, ravaging the guilty and the innocent, equally and indifferently, are at present allowed to do so with scarcely a voice raised against them. Every day husbands infect their wives, who have no kind of protection or remedy, and the wicked, grinning face of the law looks on, and says "She is his wife; all is well." If we had courage instead of cowardice—the capital mark of an age that has no organ voice but many steam whistles—we could accelerate incalculably the gradual decrease of these diseases. The body of eugenic opinion which is being made and multiplied might succeed in allying the Church and Medicine and the Law, with splendid and lasting effect. But we spend thousands of pounds in estimating correlations between hair colour and conscientiousness, fertility and longevity, stature and the number of domestic servants, and so forth, meanwhile protesting against too hasty attempts to guide public opinion on these refined matters; and this tremendous eugenic reform, which awaits the emergence of some courage somewhere, is left altogether out of account. There was no allusion to the existence of venereal disease, far and away the most appalling of what I have called dysgenic forces, in any official eugenic publication until April, 1909, when in the Eugenics Review we dared to make a cautious and half-ashamed beginning; half-ashamed to stand up against syphilis and gonorrh[oe]a. When one thinks of the things that we are not ashamed to do, as individuals or as nations, it is to reflect that perhaps we have "let the tiger die" too utterly, and that just as woman is ceasing to be a mammal, man is perhaps ceasing to be even a vertebrate. Is there no Archbishop or Principal of a University or Chief Justice or popular novelist or preacher or omnipotent editor, boasting a backbone still, who will serve not only his day and generation but all future days and generations, by devoting himself and his powers to this long-delayed campaign wherein, if it be but undertaken, success is certain, and reward so glorious?[14]