CHAPTER XVI

ON CHOOSING A HUSBAND

Brief reference was made in a previous chapter to woman's great function of choosing the fathers of the future. Here we must discuss, at due length, her choice of a companion for life. It is repeatedly argued, by critics of any new idea, that the eugenist, in his concern for the race, is blind to the natural interests and needs of the individual; that "we are all to be married to each other by the police," as an irresponsible jester has declared; that the sanctities of love are to be profaned or its imperatives defied. Even serious and responsible persons assume that there is here a necessary antagonism between the interests of the race and those of the individual,—that the girl would, presumably, choose one man to be her love and companion and partner for life, but another man as the father of her children. There are those whom it always rejoices to discover what they regard as antinomies and contradictions in Nature, and they verily prefer to suppose that there is in things this inherent viciousness, which sets eternal war between one set of obligations, one set of ideals, and another. But Nature is not made according to the pattern of our misunderstandings.

We have seen that all individuals are constructed by Nature for the future. We are certainly right to regard them as also ends in themselves, but Nature conceived and fashioned them with reference to the future. In so far as marriage has a natural sanction and foundation—than which nothing is more certain—we may therefore expect to discover that the interests of the individual and of the race are indeed one. In a word, the man who is most worthy to be chosen as a father of the future is always the most worthy and, in the overwhelming majority of cases, is also the most individually suitable, to be chosen as a partner and companion for life. Let the girl choose wisely and well for her own sake and in her own interests. If, indeed, she does so, the future will be almost invariably safeguarded.

Of course it is to be understood that we are here discussing general principles. Everyone knows that cases exist, and must continue to exist, where an opposition between the interests of the race and those of the individual cannot be denied. Some utterly unsuspected hereditary strain of insanity, for instance, may show itself or be discovered in the ancestry of an individual to whom a member of the opposite sex has already become devoted. I fully admit the existence of such exceptions, but it must be insisted that they are exceptions, and that they do not at all invalidate the general truth that if a girl really chooses the best man, she is choosing the best father for her children.

It is when the girl chooses for something other than natural quality that the future is liable to be betrayed. But the point to be insisted upon is that it is far more worth her while to choose for natural quality than for any other considerations. The argument of this chapter is that it will not in the long run be worth the girl's while to be beguiled by a man's money, his position or his prospects, since all of these, without the one thing needful, will ultimately fail her.

The truth is that very few girls realize how intimate and urgent and inevitable and unintermittent are the conditions of married life. It requires imagination, of course, to understand these things without experience. A girl observes a friend who has made what is called "a good marriage"; she goes to the friend's house, and sees her the triumphant mistress of a large establishment; she sees her friend at the theatre, meets her escorted by her husband at this place and that; hears of her holidays abroad, covets her jewelry, and she thinks how delightful it must be. She knows nothing at all of the realities; she sees only externals, and she is misled. Whenever thus misled she is beguiled into marrying a man for any other reason than that his personal qualities compel her love, it is her seniors who are to blame for not having enlightened her. Such a girl shall be enlightened if her eyes fall on these pages.

Happiness does not consist in external things at all. This is not to deny that external things may largely contribute to happiness if its primal conditions be first satisfied. Failing those primal conditions, externals are a mockery and a burden. In the case of the vast majority of married people we see only what they choose that we shall see. Almost everyone is concerned with keeping up appearances. Things may be and very often are what they appear, but very often they are not. Any woman of nice feeling is very much concerned to keep up appearances in the matter of her marriage. A few or none may guess her secret, but whatever we see, it is what we do not see—no matter how close our friendship may be—that determines the success or failure of marriage. The moments that really count are just those which we do not witness, and such moments are many in married life, or should be. If the marriage is what it ought to be, there is a vital communion, grave and gay, which occupies every available part of life. Only the persons immediately concerned really know how much of this they have or, if they have it not, what they have in its place. But we may be well assured that, as every married person knows, it is the personal qualities that matter everything in this most intimate sphere of life, and naught else matters at all. When the girl marries so as to become possessed of any and every kind of external advantage, but there is that in the man which is unlovely or which she, at any rate, cannot love, her marriage will assuredly be a failure. As we have occasion to observe every day, she will be glad to jump at any chance of sacrificing all externals, where essentials thus fail her.

This is only to preach once again the simple doctrine that a girl is to marry a man not for what he has but for what he is. If, as a eugenist, I am thinking at this time as much of the future as of the present, the advice is none the less trustworthy. It is certain that this advice is no less necessary than it ever was. Everyone knows how the standard of luxury has risen during the last few decades, both in England and in the United States. All history lies if this be not an evil omen for any civilization. It means, among other things, that more effectively than ever the forces of suggestion and imitation and social pressure are being brought to bear, to vitiate the young girl's natural judgment, deceiving her into the supposition that these things which seem to make other people so happy are the first that must be sought by her. If only she had the merest inkling of what the doctor and the lawyer and the priest could tell her about the inner life of many of the owners of these well-groomed and massaged faces! We hear much of the failure of marriage, but surely the amazing thing is its measure of success under our careless and irresponsible methods. For happily married people do not require intrigues nor divorces, nor do they furnish subject matter for scandal. It is because people do not marry for their personal qualities, but for things which, personal qualities failing, will soon turn to dust and ashes in their mouths, that their disappointed lives seek satisfaction in all these unsatisfactory and imperfect ways. As we all know, social practice differs in say, France and England, in such matters as this; and there are those who tell us that the method whereby natural inclinations are ignored is highly successful, and has just as much to be said for it as has the more specially Anglo-Saxon method of allowing the young people to choose each other. It is incomprehensible how any observer of contemporary France, its divorce rate and its birth-rate, can uphold such a contention. On the contrary, we may be more and more convinced that Nature knows her business, and that marriage, which is a natural institution, should be based, in each case, upon her indications.

There is need here for a reform which is more radical and fundamental than any that can be named, just because it deals with our central social institution, and concerns the natural composition and qualities of the next generation. I mean that reform in education which will direct itself towards rightly moulding and favouring the worthy choice of each other by young people, and especially the worthy choice of men by women. It will further come to be seen that everything which vitiates this choice—as, for instance, the economic dependence of women, great excess of women in a community, the inheritance of large fortunes—is ultimately to be condemned on that final ground, if on no other.

But whilst these sociological propositions may be laid down, let us see what can be said in the present state of things by way of advice to the girl into whose hands this book may fall. Perhaps it may be permitted to use the more direct form of address.

You may have been told that where poverty comes in at the door, love flies out at the window.[15] You may have heard it said that so and so has made a good marriage because her husband has a large income. You may be inclined to judge the success of marriage by what you see. I warn you solemnly that the worth or unworth of your marriage, the success or failure of your life will depend, far more than upon all other things put together, upon the personal qualities of the man you choose.

If these be not good in themselves, your marriage will fail, certainly; even if they be good in themselves your marriage will fail, probably, unless they also be nicely adapted to your own character and tastes and temperament and needs. There are thus two distinct requirements; the first absolutely cardinal, the second very nearly so. You are utterly wrong if you suppose that the first of these can be ignored: if your husband is not a worthy man, you are doomed. And you are almost certainly wrong if you suppose that lack of community in tastes and in interests, in objects of admiration and adoration does not matter. But let us consider what are the factors of the man for which a girl does choose.

For what, if it comes to that, does a man choose? Here is Herbert Spencer's reply to that question:—"The truth is that out of the many elements uniting in various proportions, to produce in a man's breast the complex emotion we call love, the strongest are those produced by physical attractions; the next in order of strength are those produced by moral attractions; the weakest are those produced by intellectual attractions; and even these are dependent less on acquired knowledge than on natural faculty—quickness, wit, insight." It will probably be agreed that, on the whole, this analysis, which is certainly true in the direction it refers to, is also true in the converse direction. The girl admires a man for physical qualities, including what may be called the physical virtues, like energy and courage. She rates highly certain moral attractions, such as unselfishness and chivalry, but perhaps she attaches far more value to intellectual attractions than the man does in her case, doubtless because they are more distinctively masculine.

No doubt, in this order of importance both sexes are consulting the eugenic end if they knew it, as Spencer, indeed, pointed out nearly half a century ago. The passage from which we have quoted he thus continues:—

"If any think the assertion a derogatory one, and inveigh against the masculine character for being thus swayed, we reply that they little know what they say when they thus call in question the Divine ordinations. Even were there no obvious meaning in the arrangement, we may be sure that some important end was subserved. But the meaning is quite obvious to those who examine. When we remember that one of Nature's ends, or rather her supreme end, is the welfare of posterity; further that, in so far as posterity are concerned, a cultivated intelligence based on a bad physique is of little worth, since its descendants will die out in a generation or two: and conversely that a good physique, however poor the accompanying mental endowments, is worth preserving, because, throughout future generations, the mental endowments may be indefinitely developed; we perceive how important is the balance of instincts above described."

But here it will be well to consider and meet a possible criticism. This is none the less necessary because there is a very common type of mind which listens to the enunciation of principles not in order to grasp them, but in order to point out exceptions. Such people forget that before one can profitably observe exceptions to a principle or a natural law it is necessary first of all to know rightly and wholly what the principle is. Now in this particular case our principle is that the cause of the future must not be betrayed, and the essential argument of this chapter is that faithfulness to the cause of the future does not involve, as is commonly supposed, any denial of the interests of the present, since, as I maintain, he who is best worth choosing as a partner for life is in general best worth choosing as a father of the future.

Now what one must here reckon with is the existence of individual cases,—much commoner doubtless in the imagination of critics than in reality, but nevertheless worthy of study—where a man may gain a woman's love of the real kind and may return it, and yet may be unfit for parenthood. The converse case is equally likely, but here we are concerned especially with the interests of the woman. She is, shall we say, a nurse in a sanatorium for consumptives or, to suppose a case more critical and complicated still, she may herself be a patient in such a sanatorium. There she meets another patient with whom she falls in love. Now these two may be well fitted to make each other happy for so long as fate permits, but if the interests of the future are to be considered they should not become parents. I must not be taken as here assenting to the old view, dating from a time when nothing was known of the disease, which regards consumption as hereditary. It is evident that quite apart from that question the couple of whom we are thinking should not become parents. It is possible that the disease may be completely cured, and the situation will then be altered. But only too often the patient's life will be much shortened and children will be left fatherless; they also in certain circumstances will run a grave risk of being infected by living with consumptive parents. If in the case we are supposing the woman be also consumptive, it is extremely probable that motherhood on her part would aggravate and hasten the course of the disease, it being well-known that pregnancy has an extremely unfavourable influence on consumption in the majority of cases.

Many other parallel cases may be imagined. Woman's love, based perhaps mainly upon the maternal instinct of tenderness, may be called forth by a man who suffers from, shall we say, haemophilia or the bleeding disease. He may be in every way the best of men, worthy to make any woman happy; but if he becomes the father of a son, it will probably be to inflict great cruelty upon his child.

What, in a word, are we to say of such cases as these? There is here a real opposition, as it would appear, between the interests of the present and the interests of the future. But the answer is that, just because, and just in so far as, human beings are provident and responsible and worthy of the name of human beings, the opposition can be practically solved. Not for anything must we betray the cause of the unborn, but marriage does not necessarily involve parenthood, and the right course—the profoundly right and deeply moral course—in such cases as these, is marriage without parenthood.

On every hand in the civilized world we now see childless marriages, the number of which incessantly increases; they are an ominous symptom of excessive luxury and other factors of decadence, if history is to be trusted. But it is not permissible for us, without special knowledge, to condemn individuals, whatever we may think of the phenomenon as a whole. Yet convention and prejudice are curious things, and people who are themselves married and deliberately childless, others of both sexes who are unmarried, people who have never raised their voices against themselves or their friends who, though married, are childless, because they have little courage or because they permit compliance with fashion's demands to stifle the best parts of their nature—such people, I say, will actually be found to protest, with the sort of canting righteousness which does its best to smirch the Right, against this doctrine, Marry, but do not have children, as the rule of life in the cases under discussion. Nevertheless, this is the moral doctrine; this is the right fruit of knowledge, and knowledge will more and more be applied to this high end, the service alike of the present and the future. We must not allow our minds to be bullied out of just reasoning because the possibility of marriage without parenthood is often abused. All forms of knowledge, like all other forms of power, may be used or may be abused. Knowledge has no moral sign attached to it, but neither has it any immoral sign attached to it. The power to control parenthood is neither good nor evil, but like any other power may serve either good or evil. Dynamite may cause an explosion which buries a hundred men in a living grave, or it may blast the rock which buries them and set them free. The man of science is false to his creed and his cause if he declares that there is any order of knowledge or any kind of power which were better unknown or unavailable. For many years past we have been told that the power to control parenthood is wicked, flying in the face of providence, interfering with the order of Nature—as if every act worthy of the human name were not an interference with the order of Nature, as Nature is conceived by fools; and even to-day the churches, violently differing from each other in the region of incomprehensibles, are at least agreed in anathematizing the knowledge and the power to control parenthood. The reply to them is the demonstration, here made, of the fact that this knowledge may be used for no less splendid a purpose than to make possible the happiness and mutual ennoblement of individual lives in cases where otherwise such a consummation would have been impossible without betrayal of the life of this world to come.

There is another class of cases to which convenient reference may here be made. The solution to be found in childless marriage, for many cases, does not apply to those in which there is present disease due to living organisms, microbes or protozoa which, by the mere act of drinking from an infected cup, by kissing and so forth, may be passed from the sick to the sound. So far as these modes of infection are concerned, such a supposed case as that of the nurse and the consumptive patient who fall in love with each other comes into this category. But infection of that kind is preventable. In the case, however, of the terrible diseases to which reference has been made in a previous chapter, we must clearly understand that it is not only the future which is in danger, and that therefore the solution of childless marriage does not apply. Here the danger is irremovable from the physical essentia of the marriage itself, and in such a case, no matter how high the personal qualities of the man who may, for instance, have been infected by accident in the course of his duty as a doctor, even childless marriage other than the mariage blanc must be, at any rate, postponed until the disease has been cured.

It is to be hoped that the reader will not regard these last two points, which have had to be dealt with at some length, as irrelevant. They are not strictly part of the general proposition that a girl should marry a man for his personal qualities, but they are surely necessary as practical comments upon that proposition as it will work out in real life. We may now return to our main contention.

In our quotation from Herbert Spencer we may notice the significant assertion that amongst intellectual attractions it is natural faculty, quickness, wit and insight, rather than acquired knowledge, that a man admires in a woman. In considering that point the somewhat hazardous assertion was ventured upon that the woman rates intellectual attractions in the man higher than he does in her. One has indeed heard it stated that a man marries for beauty and a woman for brains. A statement so brief cannot be accurate in such a case. But we may insist upon the contrast between acquired knowledge and natural faculty. Spencer was no doubt right in believing that man values the natural faculty rather than the acquired knowledge. A woman no doubt does so too. If she admires a man for being an encyclopaedia, it is only, one hopes, because she admires the natural qualities of studiousness, perseverance and memory which his knowledge involves. Nor would she be long in finding out whether his knowledge is digested, and the capacity to digest it, remember, is a natural faculty.

The reader who remembers our principle that the individual exists for the future will not fail to see what we are driving at. Directly we study in any critical way the causes of attraction among the sexes, we see that under healthy conditions, unvitiated by convention or money, it is always the inborn rather than the acquired that counts. If Spencer had cared to pursue his point half a century ago, he had the key to it in his hands. Youth prefers the natural to the acquired qualities.

Nature, greatest of match-makers, has so constructed youth because she is a Eugenist, and because she knows that it is the natural qualities and not the acquired ones which are transmitted to offspring.

And now it may be shown that this fact wholly consorts with our contention that there is no antinomy between the happiness of the individual and the happiness of the race in the marriage choice. For the race it is only the natural qualities of its future parents that matter, for only these are transmissible. From the strictly eugenic point of view, therefore, the girl should be counselled to choose her mate, not merely on the ground of his personal qualities but, more strictly still, on the ground of those personal qualities which are natural and not acquired. And my last point is that these qualities, which are alone of lasting consequence to the race, alone will be of lasting consequence to her during her married life. Veneers, acquirements, technical facilities, knowledge of languages, encyclopaedic information, elegance of speech and even of conventional manners—all the things which, in our rough classification, we may call acquired, may attract or please or impress her for a time, but when the ultimate reckoning is made she will find that they are less than the dust in the balance. I do not know how and where to find for my words the emphasis with which it would be so easy to endow them if, instead of addressing an unseen and strange audience, one were counselling one's own daughter. I should say to her, for instance, "My dear, be not deceived. He dresses elegantly, I know, and makes himself quite nice to look at. Yet it is not his clothes that you will have to live with, but himself; and the question is what do his clothes mean? It is his nature that you will have to live with. What fact of his nature do they stand for? Is it that he is vain and selfish, preferring to spend his money upon himself and upon the exterior of his person rather than upon others and upon the adornment of his mind; or is it that he has fine natural taste, a sense of beauty and harmony and quiet dignity in external things?" The answer to these questions involves his wife's happiness. How strange that though no girl will marry a man because she is attracted by the elegance of his false teeth, yet she will often be deceived into admiring other things which are just as much acquired and just as little likely to afford her permanent satisfaction as the products of his dentist's work-room! If only she realized that these other things, though nice to look at, are no more himself than a well-fitting dental plate.

Or again: "You like his talk; he strikes you as well versed in human affairs; his knowledge of men and things impresses you; he has travelled and can talk easily of what he has seen, and his voice is elegant and can be heard in many tongues. But if he is going to say bitter things to you, will the facility of his diction make them less bitter? If he is a fool in his heart—and indeed the heart alone is the residence of folly or wisdom—do you think that he will be a fool the less for venting his folly in seven languages rather than in one? I quite understand your admiring his cleverness; people who study the subject tell us, you know, that a woman admires in a man things which are more characteristic of men than of women, and that men's admiration of women is based upon the same good principle. But in this bargain men have the best of it because the most characteristic thing in woman is tenderness, and the most characteristic thing in man is cleverness; and which do you think is the better to live with? What is the virtue in cleverness coupled with, for instance, a malicious tongue? What is the virtue in clever things if he says them at your expense? The vital thing for you is, what are the uses to which he puts his knowledge and capacities? That he knows the ways of the world may impress you, but does he know them to admire them? And if so, where does he stand compared with another, who is less versed and versatile, but who, as your heart tells you, would hate the ways of the world if he did know them?" ...

Indeed, I seem to see that one cannot adequately write a book on Womanhood without including in it somewhere a statement of what manhood is and ought to be. Surely one of our duties to girlhood is to teach it the elemental truths of manhood. Such teaching must recognize the facts which modern psychology perceives more clearly every day, and it must combine that knowledge with the eternal truths of morality, which are so intensely real and practical in the great issues of life, such as this. The great fact which modern psychology has discovered is that intellect is less important, and emotion more important than we used to suppose; that knowledge, as we lately observed, is non-moral, and may be for good or for evil; that cleverness is merely cleverness, and may serve God or mammon; that it is the nature of the man or the woman which determines the influence and the uses of education. A girl should know something of what I have elsewhere called the transmutation of sex as it shows itself in the higher as distinguished from the lower types of manhood: she should know that it is good for a youth to spend his energy in visible ways and in the light of day; there is the less likelihood that it is being spent otherwise. She should prefer the man who is visibly active and who keeps his mind and body moving; she should know, as the school boy should know, that the capacity to smoke and drink really proves nothing as regards manhood. Doubtless there is some courage required in learning to smoke, and so much, but it is not much, is to the smoker's credit; but for the rest, smoking and drinking are simply forms of self-indulgence, and though they are doubtless very excusable and are often practised by splendid men, they are of no virtue in themselves. Further, they are open to the fundamental objection that they lessen the measure of a man's self-mastery. Women should set a high standard in such matters as these.

To take the case of smoking, very few smokers realize, in the first place, how much money they expend. It is money which, if not spent, would appreciably contribute to the cost of house-keeping in not a few cases. Many a man who says he cannot afford to marry spends on tobacco and alcohol a sum quite sufficient to turn the scale. It will be argued that the smoking brings rest and peace, that it soothes, aids digestion, and so forth. But the non-smoker is not in need of these assistances: it is only the smoker who requires to smoke for these purposes. On this point I have said, in the volume of personal hygiene which this present work is meant to succeed, all that really requires to be said. It was there pointed out that nicotine doubtless produces secondary products in the blood which require a further dose of the nicotine as an antidote to them. Thus there is initiated a vicious circle, the details of which have been fully worked out in the case of opium, or rather, morphia. All the good results which are obtained from smoking are essentially of the nature of neutralizing the secondary effects of previous smoking. Here, then, is the scientific argument for the girl's hand if she proposes to deal with her lover on this point.

It may be added that the writer can now quote personal experience in favour of his advice. He smoked incessantly for fourteen years—from seventeen to thirty-one—his quantum being five ounces in all per week—of the strongest Egyptian cigarettes and the strongest pipe tobacco procurable. The practice did him no observable harm whatever. When he wrote the paragraph on "How to control one's smoking," in the book referred to, he was only wishing that he could control his own. At last he got disgusted with himself and stopped altogether. Personally he is neither better nor worse, but he is buying books in proportion to the money formerly wasted on tobacco, and perhaps the change is worth while. The girl who reads this book may tell her lover with confidence that it is quite possible to stop smoking, and that after a little while the craving wholly disappears. If he has been a really confirmed, systematic smoker, he may have a very uncomfortable three weeks after he stops, but soon after that the time will come when he can stay in a room where others are smoking and not even desire to join them, which he could never have done before. He will have the advantage that he is definitely less likely to die of cancer of the mouth, more especially cancer of the tongue. That is a point which will affect his wife as well as himself. He will save a quite remarkable sum of money, and since object lessons are very valuable, he may follow the suggestion to lay it out in the form of books, as time goes on, though perhaps my reader can give him better advice from the point of view of the future housekeeper.

Of course there is the point of view expressed in a poem of Mr. Kipling's:

"A woman is only a woman, But a good cigar is a smoke."

If a man takes that point of view he is not good enough for a woman, I think; she may remember Dogberry, Take no note of him but let him go ... and thank God she is rid of a —— fool.

Certainly, I am not saying anything which will be grateful to all ears, but while we are at it, and since this book is written in the interests of women, I must say what I believe. I counsel the girl to stop her lover's smoking; a thousandfold more strongly would I counsel her to stop his drinking. In a former volume on eugenics, some of the effects of parental drinking have been dealt with at length, and that subject need not be returned to here. But also from the point of view of the individual, a girl may be counselled to stop her lover's drinking. An excellent eugenic motto for a girl, as my friend Canon Horsley pointed out in discussing my paper on this subject read before the Society for the Study of Inebriety in 1909, is "the lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine."

There are always plenty of people to sneer at the teetotaler; people who make money out of drink naturally do so; people who drink themselves naturally do so; the unmarried girl may do so, thinking that the teetotaler is a prig and not quite a man. But there is one great class of the community, the most important of all, which does not sneer at teetotalers, and that is the wives. They know better, nay, they know best, and their verdict stands and will remain against that of all others. I am now addressing the girl who may become a wife, and I tell her most solemnly that from her point of view she cannot afford to laugh at the teetotaler; and if she can stop her lover's drinking, whether he drinks much or little, she will do well for him and herself. She should know what the effect of alcohol is upon a man, and she should have imagination enough to realize that his hot breath, coming unwelcome, will not be more palatable in the future for its flavouring of whisky. It may be admitted that in saying all this the interests of the future are perhaps paramount in my mind. I am trying to do a service to the principle, "Protect parenthood from alcohol," which I advocate as the first and most urgent motto for the real temperance reformer. Yet the question of parenthood may be entirely left out of consideration, and even so the advice here given to the girl about to choose a husband—alas, that only a small proportion of maidenhood can be in that fortunate state, which is yet the right and natural one!—is warranted and more than warranted. We may go so far as to declare that it is a great duty, laid upon the young womanhood of civilization, to protect itself and the future, and to serve its own contemporary manhood, by taking up this attitude towards alcohol. Would that this great missionary enterprise were now unanimously undertaken by these most effective and cogent of missionaries, whose own happiness so largely depends upon its success!

Of course it should not be necessary for any man to set forth, for the instruction of girlhood, the qualities which it should value in men. All who train and teach girlhood and form its ideals should devote themselves scarcely less to this than to the inculcation of high ideals for girlhood itself; yet it is not done. We do not yet recognize the supreme importance of the marriage choice for the present and for the future.

Fortunately, if Nature alone gets a fair chance, she teaches the girl that a man should "play the game," and should not be afraid of "having a go," that of the two classes into which, as one used to tell a little girl, people are divided—those who "stick to it," and those who do not—the former are the worthy for her. But Nature is specially handicapped by stupid convention, not least in Anglo-Saxon countries, as regards a woman's estimation of tenderness in a man. The parental instinct with its correlate emotion of tenderness, is the highest of existing things, and though it is less characteristic of men than of women, it is none the less supreme when men exhibit it. In days to come, when women can choose, as they should be able to choose to-day, they may well be counselled to use as a touchstone of their suitor's quality that line of Wordsworth, "Wisdom doth live with children round her knees." A man who thinks that "rot" is rot, or soon will be.

But in the minds of men and women there is a half implicit assumption that tenderness is incompatible with manliness. "Let not women's weapons, water-drops, stain my man's cheeks," says Lear. But it is quite possible for a man to be manly and yet tender, and to the highest type of women it is the combination of strength and tenderness in a man that appeals beyond aught else.

It has always seemed to the present writer that the followers of Christ have done him far less than justice in insisting upon one aspect of his character disproportionately with another. They speak of him as the "Gentle Jesus, meek and mild "; they tend to describe him as almost or wholly effeminate; and the representations of him in art, with small, feminine and conspicuously un-Jewish features, with long feminine hair and the hands of a consumptive woman, join with sacred poetry in furthering this impression. Nothing can be truer than that he was tender, and that he had a passion for childhood and realized, as we may dare to say, its divinity, as only the very few in any age have done. But this "Gentle Jesus, meek and mild," was also he whose blazing words against established iniquity and hypocrisy constitute him the supreme exemplar not only of love but of moral indignation, and of a sublime invective which has been equalled not even by Dante at his highest. We forget, perhaps, when we use such a phrase as "whited sepulchre," that we are quoting the untamable fierceness, the courage, fatal and vital, of the "Gentle Jesus, meek and mild," who was murdered not for loving children, but for hating established wickedness. Why have Christians not recognized that it is this perhaps unexampled combination of strength and tenderness which makes their Founder worthy for all time to be regarded as the Highest of Mankind?

One more counsel to the girl who can choose. It is contained in the saying of Marcus Aurelius that the worth of a man may be measured by the worth of the things to which he devotes his life.

We must now pass to consider the sociological fact that, under present conditions, the sole use of this chapter for a very large proportion of women can merely consist in suggesting to them that they are better unmarried than married without love. It is not possible for them to exercise the great function of choice which is theirs by natural right. Evil and ominous of more evil are whatever facts deprive woman of this her birthright.



CHAPTER XVII

THE CONDITIONS OF MARRIAGE

In my volume introductory to Eugenics I have dealt at length with marriage from that point of view. Here our concern is with the individual woman, and though neither in theory nor in practice can we entirely dissociate the question of the future from that of the individual's needs, it is necessary here to discuss the present conditions of marriage in the civilized world, from the woman's point of view. We have to ask ourselves how these conditions act in selecting women from the ranks of the unmarried; whether the transition proceeds from random chance, or whether there is a selection in certain definite directions, and if so, what directions? We have to ask whether different women would pass into the ranks of the married if the conditions of marriage were other than they are; and we shall assuredly arrive at the principle that whatever changes are necessary in the conditions of marriage, so that the best women shall become the mothers of the future, must be and will be effected.

One has elsewhere argued at length that monogamy is the marriage form which has prevailed and will be maintained because of its superior survival-value—in other words, because it best serves the interests of the future. But what of the individual in a country where there are thirteen hundred thousand adult women in excess of men, which is the case of Great Britain? Plainly, there is need for very serious criticism of such an institution in such circumstances. Let the reader briefly be reminded, then, that, as I have previously argued, Nature makes no arrangement for such a disproportion between the sexes. More boys than girls are indeed born, but from our infantile mortality, which is largely a male infanticide, onwards, morbid influences are at work which result in the disproportion already named.

Two excellent reasons may be adduced why any disproportion in the numbers of the sexes should be the opposite of that which now obtains. The ideal condition, no doubt, is that of numerical equality. Failing that, the evils of a male preponderance, though very real, are comparatively small. For one thing, celibacy affects a woman more than a man: men, on the whole, suffer less from being unmarried. It is a more serious deprivation for the woman than for the man, in general, to be debarred from parenthood. This is a proposition which we need not labour here, for no reader will dispute its importance and its relevance.

No less important is the economic question. Specially consecrated as she is to the future, woman as distinctive woman is necessarily handicapped in relation to the present. She is at an economic disadvantage. One's blood boils at the cruel effrontery of men who protest against women's efforts to gain an honest living, but who have never a word or a deed against prostitution or against the causes which produce the numerical preponderance of women. But here again our proposition, though unfamiliar, and indeed so far as I know never yet stated, needs no labouring—that owing to the economic opportunities of the sexes, it is, at any rate, on that ground, of no significance that men shall be in excess in a community, but it is of very grave significance that women shall be in excess. It is pitiable, and indeed revolting, in this country where the excess of women is so marked, to hear from year to year the comments of men upon the supposed degeneration of women, upon their unnatural selfishness, their desire to invade spheres which do not belong to them, and so forth and so forth ad nauseam; whilst these commentators are themselves hand in hand with drink, with war and with Mammon, destroying male children of all ages in disproportionate excess, sending our manhood to be slain in war, and sending it also in the cause of industry—that is to say, in the cause of gold—to our colonies, as if the culture of the racial life were not the vital industry of any people.

A third very important reason why a numerical preponderance of women is more injurious to a country than a numerical preponderance of men is that, though the duty and responsibility of selection for parenthood devolves upon both sexes, it is normally discharged with greater efficiency by women than by men; and a numerical preponderance of women gravely interferes with their performance of this great function. It may obviously be argued that such a preponderance leaves a greater choice to the men. But I believe that men do not exercise their choice so well. In a word, women are more fastidious; the racial instinct is weaker in them, less rampant and less roving. In the exercise of this function women are therefore, on the whole, naturally more capable, more responsible, less liable to be turned aside by the demands of the moment. In his "Pure Sociology," Professor Lester Ward has very clearly and forcibly discussed the comparative behaviour of the two sexes in this matter, and he shows how the great feminine sentiment, not confined merely to the human species, is to choose the best. The principle is also a factor in masculine action, but much less markedly so. What we call, then, the greater fastidiousness of the female sex is a definite sex character, and has a definite racial value, raising the standard of fatherhood where it is allowed free play. But in a nation which contains a great excess of women, under economic conditions which are greatly to their disadvantage, the value of this natural fastidiousness is practically lost. Such are the conditions in Great Britain at present that practically any man, of however low a type, however diseased, however unworthy for parenthood, may become a father, if he pleases.

The natural condition suitable to monogamy being a numerical equality of the sexes, the suggestion may obviously be made that where there is a great excess of women, monogamy should yield to polygamy; and indeed where there is such excess monogamy is more apparent than real—an ideal rather than a practice. Thus we have one or two modern authors who have installed themselves in sociology by the royal road of romance—though even to this branch of learning, as to mathematics, there is no short cut whatsoever, even for those whose pens are naturally skilful—authors who tell us that, given this numerical preponderance of women, some kind of polygamous modification of the present marriage system should certainly be adopted. To one aspect of this contention we shall later return. Meanwhile, the answer is that, rather than abolish monogamy, we should strive to alter the conditions which produce such an excess of women. If such an aim were necessarily impracticable, we might well feel inclined to vote for polygamy rather than the present state of things. It is a very decent alternative to prostitution. But in point of fact our aim of equalizing the numbers of the sexes, which I assert as a canon of fundamental politics, is eminently practicable; and here we may briefly outline, as very relevant to the problems of womanhood, the methods by which that aim is to be realized for the good of both sexes in the present and the future.

Nature gives us more than a fair start, almost as if she knew that the wastage of male life is apt to be higher at all ages even under the best conditions. She sends more male children into the world, as if to secure, on the whole, an equality of the sexes in adult life. That ideal is realizable, even allowing for a considerable excess of male deaths. One of our duties, then, is to control that part of the male death-rate, if any, which is controllable. To begin at the beginning, we find that infant mortality claims our attention at once. For years past in the campaign against infant mortality I have urged this as an apparently somewhat remote, yet very real and important issue. Infant mortality bears heaviest upon male babies. It is largely, as I have so often said, a male infanticide, notably contrasting with the practice of deliberate female infanticide which is known in so many times and places. In lowering the infant mortality we shall reduce this disproportion of male deaths, and shall make for the survival of a larger number of men. Bring down the infant mortality to proper limits and we shall have in adult life possible male partners for a large number of women who are now without such because of the male infanticide of twenty and thirty years ago.

It is characteristic of the fashion in which the surface gains our attention while the substance evades it, that the question of the disproportion of the sexes should have been brought to the public notice in regard to a subject which, though not unimportant, is quite secondary compared with those which we are now discussing. Only three or four years ago people were startled and incredulous when one told them by the pen or in lectures that there was a very great excess of women in these islands. Nowadays everybody knows it. This is not because people have suddenly come to realize the fundamental importance for the State of such matters, but simply because the fact provides an argument regarding Woman Suffrage. This immensely important fact of female preponderance, with its gigantic consequences, which affect every aspect of the national life, was totally ignored by the public until, forsooth, it became an argument against Woman Suffrage; and then the foolish people whose voices are allowed to be heard on these complicated matters, but who would be laughed out of court if they expressed their opinions on other subjects equally outside their competence, told us that woman's suffrage would mean government by women, they being in the majority. For all other consequences of this gigantic fact they have no concern; not even the mental capacity to grasp that it must have consequences. But this, which happens not to be a consequence of it, they are loud to insist upon. At any rate, they have done this service until the public at last is acquainted with the demographic fact; and one of the suffragist leaders some time ago publicly expressed an old argument of the present writer's that in point of fact this grave supposed consequence of woman's suffrage need not be feared if only for the reason that Woman Suffrage would certainly mean increased attention to infant mortality, and therefore increased control of the morbid causes which at present account for female preponderance.

It might indeed be added also that, in so far as Woman Suffrage operated against war, it would contribute in another way to the correction of this numerical disparity. Not the least of the many evils which have flowed from the last hideous war in which Great Britain engaged—evils which glass-eyed politicians have since been exploiting in the interests of their own charlatanry—is the loss to scores of thousands of women in this country of the complemental manhood which was destroyed by wounds and more especially by disease in South Africa. The wickedness with which that war was entered upon, and the criminal ignorance with which it was mismanaged, and the elementary principles of hygiene defied, have their consequences to-day in much of the unmated and handicapped womanhood of Great Britain. It may be noted that polygamy as a historical phenomenon has commonly and necessarily been associated with militarism. Large destruction of manhood by war leads to a numerical excess of women, and polygamy is a consequence. If the consequences in our modern civilization are less decent than polygamy, which would affront the beautiful minds that are unconcerned for Regent Street, surely our duty is more strenuously than ever to combat the causes which, as we see, are quite definitely traceable and controllable.

The increased attention paid to the conditions of child life is of direct service to the nation, and to womanhood in especial, by tending to interfere with the excessive and unnecessary mortality of boys. As we have elsewhere observed, the male organism has less vitality than the female organism. When both sexes at any age are subjected to the same injurious influences, more males than females die. Thus all our work with such a measure as the Children Act, keeping children out of public-houses, and so forth, directly serves the womanhood of the not distant future by preserving a certain amount of manhood to keep it company. Accepting the truth of the dictum that it is not good for man to be alone, we have to learn the still more general and profound truth that it is not good for woman to be alone, and, as we now learn, the modern movement for the care of childhood has this notable consequence, which I have been pointing out for many years and now insist upon once again, that it makes for the greater numerical equality of the sexes in adult life, and therefore for the relief of the many evils near and remote which flow from the numerical excess of women. Answering the question, "Whither are we tending?" in Christmas, 1909, Mr. G. K. Chesterton referred to our liability to "float feebly towards every sociological fad or novelty until we believe in some plain, cold, crude insanity, such as keeping children out of public-houses."[16] Considering the authority, I think this is fairly good testimony toward the wisdom of the achievement to which some of us devoted the greater part of three strenuous years; and if the question is to be asked "whither are we tending," part of the answer will be that by such measures as this for the care of child life, which means in practice especially for the keeping alive of boys, we are tending toward the correction of one of the gravest, though least recognized, evils of the present day.

Our business in the present volume is not with childhood. It is not possible to go fully into the statistical details of the comparative death-rate of the sexes, but the data can readily be obtained by any interested reader.[17]

It may be argued that the questions now under consideration are foreign to a chapter entitled "The Conditions of Marriage," but the excess of women in a community is one of the most fundamental conditions of marriage therein, and the question is not the less necessary to be dealt with because, so far as one can ascertain, its consequences have escaped the notice of previous students.

Having dealt with the waste of male life in infancy, in childhood and in war, we must pass on to a totally different factor of our problem, and that is the emigration to our colonies and elsewhere of a greatly disproportionate number of men. One does not assert for a moment that the men should not go, but merely that if they do, so should women also. As everyone knows they go for many reasons and purposes. These are largely industrial and imperial. The Civil Service claims a large number. These bachelors go in the cause of Empire, whether as actual servants of the State or in the interests of commerce. They are largely picked men, capable of discipline and initiative and of withstanding hardships; and also in large degree intellectually able. It is certainly not good for them to be alone, and it is worse for the women whom they leave behind. All this may seem right and the only practicable thing for the day, but it is fundamentally wrong because it is wrong for the morrow.

If other needs were not so pressing, one might well devote an entire volume, not inappropriately in these days of fiscal controversy, to the question of vital imports and exports. Year after year passes, and politicians in Great Britain grow more and more voracious and, if possible, less and less veracious on the subject of what they misunderstand by imports and exports. The subject is really one for knowledge, not for politicians. With great ceremony at intervals, they go through the highly superfluous performance of calling each other liars, as who should say that Queen Anne is dead: and while this tragical farce continues the question of vital imports and exports is ignored. Within it there lies the key to the Irish question, for instance, since no nation can be saved which persistently exports the best of its life. And in this question also lies the key to a great part of the woman question and to a great part of the colonial question. Politicians who have not even discovered yet that trade is a process of exchange, and who assume that in every bargain someone is being worsted, pay no heed to the questions what sort of people leave our shores, and what sort of people enter them. Or rather, as if in order to emphasize their blindness to fundamentals, they make a point about passing an act against alien immigration, which merely serves to throw into prominence our national neglect of this great issue. This is not the time and the place in which I can deal with it in its entirety, but it must be referred to in so far as it bears on the proportion of the sexes. Toward the end of 1909 there was a long correspondence in the Times on the subject of "Unmarried Daughters." One may print in the text the admirable letter in which a finger is put upon the heart of the question. We are told about the incompetence of women to deal with national affairs, but here we find a woman writing to the Times on a fundamental matter for the Imperialist, though no member of our Houses of Parliament has yet given any attention to it.

SIR: Only two of your numerous correspondents on this subject have really reached the root of the matter.

For more than thirty years the young men of the British Isles have found it increasingly difficult to make a living in their native land. Therefore there has been—and still is—a steady exodus of our male population to our Colonies, where they are unhampered by the many disadvantages prevailing here. Unfortunately they are obliged to leave the corresponding proportion of women behind. The result is a surplus of 1,000,000 women in Great Britain; but let me hasten to add (lest the mistake be laid upon Nature when it is not hers) that there is a proportionate shortage of 1,000,000 women in our colonies. I have recently been on a tour throughout Canada and the States, and was most struck by the scarcity of women in Western Canada—there are about eight men to one woman. And in America the saddest sight of all is the appalling number of half-castes, a blot on the civilization of the States, but a blot for which Europeans are responsible. The absence of white women is answerable for the worst type of population, so that in reality this is a very pressing Imperial question; and all those interested in the growth and future of Canada should turn their attention to it. For, unless we can induce the right sort of British women to emigrate we shall not have the Colonies peopled with our own race or speaking our own mother tongue.

Canada wants unmarried women, her cry is for our marriageable daughters, and each one would find her vocation out there.

Canadian men are one of the finest types of manhood possible, but they are too hard working to be able to return here in search of a wife. How gladly they would welcome the possibility of sharing their homes with a sister or a wife can only be guessed by those who have been there.

I am so greatly impressed with the advisability of encouraging English women to go out there that I strongly urge every suitable, healthy, and useful woman between the age of twenty-five and thirty-five to depart (if she has nothing to prevent her), and, through the British Emigration Society, Imperial Institute, I shall hope to do all that I can to assist them financially.

I am, sir, Yours faithfully, SOPHIE K. BEVAN.

(Times, Dec. 24, 1909.)

It was of interest for the student of opinion and practice to compare this letter with another which appeared in the Times within a few days of it. This was an official letter from another Emigration Society and advocated the object, worthy in itself, of sending boys to Australasia. The letter ended with the following assertion regarding such boys: "They are the pioneers of Empire, they will be the founders of nations to come."

But the point exactly is that at present the nations to come in our Colonies are not coming: much more likely as nations to come in Australasia, as things go at present, are the Chinese and Japanese. Before nations can be founded, the co-operation of women is indispensable. We complain of the birth-rate in our Colonies, or at least those few persons do who know that parenthood is the key to national destiny. But we should complain of our own folly in so interfering with the natural balance of the sexes as to create pressing problems, wholly insoluble, alike at home and in our Colonies. At all times "England wants men," but wherever it wants men it wants women,—even in war we are now beginning to realize the importance of the trained nurse. There can be no future for our Colonies if they are to be inhabited by a bachelor generation, and the excess of women at home prejudices the stability of the heart of empire. Either we must cease exporting our boys and young manhood—which I certainly do not advocate—or our girlhood must go also—which I certainly do advocate. This is only one aspect of the question of vital imports and exports, upon which a book of vital importance for any nation, and above all, for England, might well be written.

Once again let us remind ourselves how cogently this question concerns the conditions of marriage. It means that the conditions are now such that in our Colonies a woman can exercise her rightful function of choosing the best man to be her husband and a father of the future, while at home this is possible only for the very few, and for vast numbers marriage is wholly impossible. I return, then, to the original proposition: are we to follow the advice of our gay, irresponsible sociologists so-called, who advise us to abolish monogamy in the circumstances, or are we to alter the alterable conditions which so disastrously prejudice and complicate that great institution in the heart of our empire to-day? Surely there can be but one answer to this question when we realize that all the causes of the present disproportion between the sexes at home—causes such as infant mortality, child mortality, war, and the exportation of one sex in great excess to the Colonies—are evil in themselves quite apart from their influence upon the practice of monogamy. Unfortunately, it is a modern custom in this age of transition for clever people to criticize on abstract, patriotic, sociological, quasi-ethical, and such like grounds, institutions and practices which irk them personally. Unfortunately, also, sociology is in the position, at present and yet for a little while inevitable, of shall we say medicine in its earliest stages, when anyone may be accepted as qualified who simply asserts that he is. Lastly, sociology is the most complicated of all the sciences because the chain of causation is longer; and very few of those who write or read about it have the patience to go back through psychology to biology and the laws of life in their analyses. An institution like marriage is criticized by those who think that it is an ecclesiastical invention of yesterday, and that what hands have made, hands can destroy, though marriage is aeons older even than the mammalian order. They take transient, artificial conditions, lasting not for a second in the history of mankind seen as a whole, and simply accepting these conditions as part of the order of nature, they ask us to overthrow an institution which is immeasurable ages older than man himself. The odds are somewhat against them, one may surmise, but they may do considerable injury to their own age notwithstanding.

After having dealt with this fundamental biological condition of marriage, we must next turn to a psychological question which is scarcely less important. The human being is immensely complex both in composition and in needs, and the institution of monogamy does not become easier of maintenance as human complexity increases. Amongst the lower animals or even amongst the lower races of mankind, the relations between the sexes are mostly confined to one sphere, but amongst ourselves the problem is to mate for life complex individuals whose needs are many, ranging from the purely physical to the purely psychical. Thus it is a matter of common experience that whilst one woman meets one part of a man's needs, another meets another, and this of course with grave prejudice to monogamy. Some of the modern writers to whom allusion has been made suggest that these different needs want sorting out; that one woman is to be the intellectual companion of a man, and another the mother of his children. But though men and women are multiple and complex, they are in the last resort unities. These absolute distinctions between one need and another do not work out in practice. Anything which tends toward splitting up the human personality must be a disservice to it. Nor do we desire that women of the higher type, best fitted to be the intellectual companions of men, shall be those who do not contribute to the future of the race. From the eugenic point of view the mother is every whit as important as the father. I do not believe for a moment that these more or less definite proposals of Mr. Shaw and Mr. Wells are soundly based, and perhaps indeed it is not necessary to argue against them at greater length. Of more value is it to ask ourselves whether feminine nature may not prove itself quite equal to the task of meeting all the needs of masculine nature.

It seems to me that the right answer, in many cases at any rate, to the wife's question, how is she to retain the whole of her husband's interest, is hinted at in Mr. Somerset Maugham's recent play "Penelope"—she must be many women to him herself. And this the wise and happy woman is, though I do not think the phrase "many women" at all covers the variety of feeling to which the ideal woman can appeal.

The ideal love is that in which the whole nature is joined, in all its parts, upon one object which appeals alike to every fundamental instinct in our composition. The ideal woman does not require to be "many women" to a man of the right kind in the sense suggested in Mr. Maugham's play. She requires rather to be in herself at one and the same time or at different times, mother, wife and daughter. This condition satisfied, behold the ideal marriage.

It is probably fair to say that the three strongest and most important needs of a man's nature are those which are satisfied by mother, wife, and daughter. Primarily, perhaps, his wife must be to him his wife, his contemporary and partner, and there must be a physical bond between them. (Doubtless there are many happy marriages where this primary condition is not satisfied, this primitive form of affection being substantially absent, and its presence being proved non-essential: but such must be a state of unstable equilibrium at best, though the concession must be made.) Now the problem for the wife is to unite in her person and in her personality those other feelings which are part of normal human nature. Every man likes to be mothered at times, and it is for his wife to see that she performs that function better than any other; better even than his own mother. Where he finds merely physical satisfaction, he also finds, happy man, sympathy and comfort, protection and solace, balm for wounded self-esteem—everything that the hurt or slighted child knows he will find in his mother's arms.

Yet again, a man likes not only to be mothered but he likes to play the father. Let his wife be a daughter to him; let her be capable of shrinking, so to say, into small space, becoming little and confident and appealing and calling forth every protective impulse of her husband's nature.

To one who knew nothing of human nature it might sound as if we were asking more of womanhood than is within its capacity. But many a man and many a woman will know better. The right kind of woman can be and is mother, wife and daughter to her husband; and in every one of these capacities she strengthens her hold in the other two. Let the happily married examine their happiness, and they will discover that the Preacher was right when he said: "and a threefold cord is not quickly broken."

What has here been said is perhaps far more fundamental, just because it is based upon the primary instincts of humanity, than much of the ordinary talk about intellectual companionship and the like. What a man wants is sympathy, not intellectual companionship as such; what a man wants from another man, indeed, is sympathy, and not merely intellectual parity as such. The man who annoys us is not he who is incapable of appreciating our arguments, or he who does not share our knowledge, but he who is out of sympathy with us, and we find far more happiness with the rawest youth who, though entirely ignorant, is at least on our side—caring for the things for which we care. Capacity to share the same intellectual work may be a very pleasant addition to marriage, but it is no essential. What a man wants is that his wife shall be on his side in his pursuits. A boy does not require that his mother shall be able to play football with him, but he does require that she shall care whether his side wins or loses. The wife who is a true mother to her husband, in this sense, need not be concerned because she cannot, let us say, follow his working out of a geometrical proposition. Let her be on his side whether he fails or succeeds, thus playing the mother; and for the rest, if she asks him what those funny marks mean, she can play the daughter too, and hold his heart with both hands at once.

It is to be hoped that such arguments as these will persuade the reader to assent to our rejection of the psychological grounds on which it is proposed to abolish monogamy. We extend all the sympathy in the world to those whose fortune has been unfortunate, and we admit that the ideal does not always coincide with the real, but we deny that the supposed argument against monogamy is based upon a sound understanding of human nature, its needs and its unity in multiplicity.

If we are to stand by monogamy it behoves us to examine very carefully certain of its present conditions which militate against the full realization of its value for the individual and for the race. The disproportion of the sexes we have already discussed, and it may here be assumed that that grave obstacle to the success of monogamy is removed. There remains the fact, probably on the whole a quite new fact of our day, that under modern conditions a large proportion of women, whose quality we must consider, are declining monogamy as at present constituted.

Let it be granted that a certain number of these women are cranks, aberrant in various directions, unfitted for any kind of marriage, undesirable from the eugenic standpoint, and perhaps less often declining to be married than failing of the opportunity. There remains the fact that a large and probably increasing number of women are nowadays being educated up to such a standard of ideals that, even though their decision involves the sacrifice of motherhood, they cannot consent to marriage under present conditions. It is not that they are without opportunity, for many of them during ten or fifteen years of their lives may refuse one proposal after another, and spend the intervals in avoiding the onset of such attentions. It is not necessarily that the men who propose are of an inferior type. Such women may refuse many men who come well up to or far surpass the modern male standard. It is not that they are by any means without capacity for affection; nor can one be at all certain that in many cases they would not do better to marry, after all, heavy though the price may be.

What we have to recognize is that this is a phenomenon in every way evil. There must be something wrong with any institution which does not appeal to many members of the highest types of womanhood. Perhaps in certain of its details this institution must be an anachronism, a survival from times to which it may have been well suited when the development of womanhood was habitually stunted, but inadequate to satisfy the demands of fully developed womanhood in our own days. Now from the eugenic point of view it is of course the finest kind of women that we desire to be the mothers of the future—the more and not the less fastidious, those who are capable of the highest development, those who hold themselves in the highest honour, those who are least willing to renounce their possession of themselves.

Men are to be heard who say that this is all nonsense; that it is natural for women to surrender themselves, that motherhood is a splendid reward, and that they are handsomely paid as well in material things. But how many men would be willing to marry on the conditions with which marriage is offered to a woman? How many men would be willing to surrender their possession of themselves to an owner for life, so that at no future hour can they have the right to privacy? Of course if the conditions for marriage were for a man what they are for a woman, scarcely any men would marry, and men would very soon see to it that these conditions were utterly altered. They are conditions imposed in a past age by the stronger sex upon the weaker, and no moral defence of them is possible. It may be argued, and might long have been argued, that a practical defence of them is possible, but that is undermined in our own time when we find that under these conditions marriage is declined by a large number of the best women. The practical argument is now the other way. In the interests of elementary justice, of marriage, of the individual and of the race, the conditions of marriage must be so modified that they shall be equal for both sexes, and that the best members of both sexes shall find them acceptable. This last is of course the fundamental eugenic requirement.

The initial criticism of some will be, no doubt, that many men who now marry will decline the bargain. But surely we need not care at all—if the right kind of men accept it. As for the others, in the coming time, when we take more care of our womanhood, and when they are deprived of the economic weapon, they may go whither they will, their non-representation in the future of the race being precisely what we desire.

Women, then, are entitled to demand that the conditions of marriage be so modified as, above all things, to allow them the possession of themselves as the married man has possession of himself. The imposition of motherhood upon a married woman in absolute despite of her health and of the interests of the children is none the less an iniquity because it has at present the approval of Church and State. It is woman who bears the great burden of parenthood, and with her the decision must rest. It is idle to reply that this is impossible, for it is possible, as there are not a few happy wives throughout the civilized world to bear testimony. Every new life that comes into being is to be regarded as sacred from the first. The accident of birth at a particular stage in its development does not in the slightest degree affect this ethical principle, as even the law, for a wonder, recognizes. The full acceptance of the principle that woman must decide is, I am convinced, the only right and effective way in which to abolish altogether the dangers at present run by the life which is at once unborn and unwanted. The decision must be made once and for all before the new life is called into initial being, and the last word must lie with her who is to bear it. I am strengthened in the enunciation of this principle by the reflection that it would be ridiculed and condemned by the vote of every public-house and music-hall throughout the civilized world.

Let it be observed that in thus allowing the wife the possession of her own person, we are giving her only what her husband possesses, and that her possession of herself is of vastly more moment to her than his own liberty to him. Nothing more than sheer equality is being claimed for her, and the claim in her case has a double strength, since it is made valid not only by her own interests but by those of the future. The future must be protected, and therefore she who is its vessel must be protected. This is no more than the sub-human mother everywhere has as her birthright, and however much this teaching may offend the common male assumption that a wife is a form of property, the future certainly holds within itself the establishment of this principle.

The question of divorce is so important that we must defer it to the next chapter.

We have briefly alluded to the question of the wife's possession of herself. We must now refer to the question, scarcely less important, of her possession of her own property and her claims upon her husband's. It is difficult for the present generation to realize that very few decades have passed since the time when everything which a woman possessed became, when she married, the property of her husband. That is now a question which there is no need to discuss, but there remains a very great issue, lately become prominent, and suggested by the popular phrase, the endowment of motherhood.

We should obviously be false to our first principles if we did not assent with all our hearts to the fundamental principle expressed by this phrase. If it is necessary that the wife be protected as a wife, it is even more necessary that she be protected as a mother. There are twelve hundred thousand widows in this country at the present time, and of these a large number stand in unaided parental relation to a great multitude of children. I showed some years ago that, as we shall see in more detail in a later chapter, alcohol makes not less than forty-five thousand widows and orphans every year in England and Wales. Nothing can be more certain than that, in the interests of all except the worthless type of man, the economic protection of motherhood is an urgent need, less open to criticism perhaps than any other economic reconstruction proposed by the reformer. Some will argue, of course, that the State is to look after children directly, but I, for one, as a biologist, have no choice but to believe that the way to save children is to safeguard parenthood, and I cannot question that our duty is to provide the mother with the necessary means for performing her supreme function, whether she has a living husband or is a widow or is unmarried.

The question remains, how is this to be done, and whence is the money to be obtained?

Here we join issue with those Socialist writers who advocate the endowment of motherhood and give it their own meaning; and that is why in a preceding paragraph the word fundamental has been emphasized, since in the endowment of motherhood as understood by socialists there are two principles, one which I call fundamental, and a second—that the endowment shall be by the State—which now falls to be considered. I do not see how any one can challenge the following sentences from Mr. H. G. Wells:

"So the monstrous injustice of the present time which makes a mother dependent upon the economic accidents of her man, which plunges the best of wives and the most admirable of children into abject poverty if he happens to die, which visits his sins of waste and carelessness upon them far more than upon himself, will disappear. So too the still more monstrous absurdity of women discharging their supreme social function, bearing and rearing children in their spare time, as it were, while they earn their living by contributing some half mechanical element to some trivial industrial product, will disappear."[18]

But the remarkable circumstance is that Mr. Wells proposes to remedy these consequences of, for instance, "sins of waste and carelessness," not by dealing with those sins but by the simple method that "a woman with healthy and successful offspring will draw a wage for each one of them from the State so long as they go on well. It will be her wage. Under the State she will control her child's upbringing. How far her husband will share in the power of direction is a matter of detail upon which opinion may vary—and does vary widely amongst Socialists." How far a father is to share in directing his children's upbringing is "a matter of detail," we are told. The phrase suffices to show that whatever we are dealing with here is either sheer fantasy or else thinking of so crude a kind as to be unworthy of the name. Since early in the history of the fishes paternal responsibility has been a factor of ascending evolution. It has ever been a more and more responsible thing to be a father. It is now proposed to reduce fatherhood to the purely physiological act—as amongst, shall we say, the simpler worms; and the proposal is only "a matter of detail."

Probably we had better go our own way, and waste no more time upon this kind of thing. There remains to answer our question, how is motherhood to be endowed; and the answer I propose is by fatherhood. Motherhood is already so endowed in many a happy case. There are quite a number of men to be found who take such a remarkable pride and interest in their own children that their "share in the power of direction" is a real one, and would never occur to them to be "a matter of detail." They regard their earnings, these unprogressive fathers, as in large measure a trust for their wives and children, and expend them accordingly. They are not guilty of "sins and waste and carelessness"; and some of them are even inclined to question whether they should pay for the results of such sins on the part of other men: and since those who believe in the "fetish of parental responsibility," to quote the favourite Socialist cliche, can show that this is not a fetish but a tutelary deity of Society, whose power has been increasing since backbones were invented, they may be well assured that the last word will be with them.

What we require is the application of the principle of insurance; we must compel a husband and father to do his duty, as many husbands and fathers do their duty now without compulsion. We must regard him as responsible in this supremely important sphere, as we do in every other. Doubtless, this will often mean some interference with his "sins of waste and carelessness"; and so much the better for everybody. Those who prefer to be wasteful and careless had best remain in the ranks of bachelorhood. We have no desire for any representation of their moral characteristics in future generations, but if they do marry they must be controlled. Meanwhile our champions of paternal irresponsibility are having things all their own way. Every year more children are being fed at the expense of the State, and there is no one to challenge the father who smokes and drinks away any proportion of his income that he pleases.

* * * * *

Perhaps we may now attempt to sum up the suggestion of this chapter. It is based upon a belief in the principle of monogamy—without, as some would assert, a credulous acceptance of all the present conditions of that institution. The principle underlying it may be right and impossible of improvement, but our practice may be hampered by any number of superstitions, traditions, injustices, economic and other difficulties, which nevertheless do not invalidate our ideal.

Therefore, instead of proposing to abolish monogamy or that great principle of common parental care of children, the support of motherhood by fatherhood, which is perfectly expressed in monogamy alone, let us seek rather, in the interests of the future—which will mean proximately in the interests of woman, the great organ of the future—to make the conditions of marriage such that it best serves the highest interests. We need not cavil at those who look upon marriage as a symbol of the union between Christ and His Church, but we must look upon it also as a human institution which exists to serve mankind and must be treated accordingly. We are quite prepared to accept in its place any other institution which will serve mankind better, and we adhere to monogamy only because such an alternative cannot be named.

We are to regard any disproportion in the number of the sexes as inimical to monogamy. We know that in the past, when there has been a great excess of women, as owing to chronic militarism, polygamy has been the natural consequence; and we must recognize that such an excess of women at the present day is a predisposing cause, if not of polygamy, of something immeasurably worse. The causes of that excess of women have therefore been examined in some degree, and our duty of opposing them is laid down as a fundamental political proposition.

We then discussed and criticized a second argument for polygamy, based upon the assumption that a man requires more from women than one woman can afford him. The answer to that argument is that many women exist who meet all their husbands' needs and satisfy all their instincts, and that for this end the intensive education of woman's intellect is not a necessary condition. It may be added that if the race is to rise, the highest type of women as well as the highest type of men must be its parents, the mothers being exactly as important as the fathers on the score of heredity. Any attempt, therefore, to split up womanhood, so that the lower types shall become the mothers, and the higher the companions of men, is a directly dysgenic proposal, opposing the great eugenic principle that the best of both sexes must be the parents of the future.

When we find, therefore, that marriage under present conditions does not satisfy many of the highest kinds of women, we must ask whether their dissatisfaction is warranted, and if, as we do, we find it based upon the fact that the present conditions are grossly unjust to women, we must modify those conditions so that, at the very least, the wife and mother shall not have the worst of them.

Finally, whatever we may fail to achieve because, for instance, of some fundamental facts of human nature against which it is vain to legislate, at least we have economic conditions under our control, and control them we must, so that, whoever shall be in a position of economic insecurity, at least it shall not be the mothers of the future. Our first concern must be to safeguard them, whosoever else is inconvenienced. In deciding how this is effected we are to be guided by that great fact of increasing paternal responsibility which is demonstrated by the history of animal evolution since the appearance of the earliest vertebrates, and of which marriage, in all its forms, is at bottom the human and social expression. We are to recognize that if sub-human fathers are in any degree held by nature responsible with their mates for the care of their offspring, much more should this be true of man, "made with such large discourse, looking before and after," who is to be held responsible for all his acts, and most of all for those most charged with consequence. The man who brings children into the world is responsible to their mother and through her to society at large, which must see to it that that responsibility is not evaded. At present in England the working man spends on the average not less than one-sixth of his entire income on alcoholic drinks, whilst society yearly pays for the feeding of more of his children. But it is not good enough that the father shall swallow the interests of the future in this fashion. As the State in Germany takes a percentage of his earnings in order to protect him against the risks of the future, so we must see to it that the necessary proportion of his earnings is devoted towards discharging the responsibilities which he has incurred.

A notable consequence must follow from many such reforms as this chapter suggests. The marriage rate must fall, and the birth-rate, already falling, must fall much further; and so assuredly in any case they will; nor need anyone be alarmed at such a prospect. Even from the point of view of quantity, the future supply of "food for powder," and so forth, the question is not how many babies are born, as people persist in thinking, but how many babies survive. For seven years past I have been preaching, in season and out of season, that our Bishops and popular vaticinators in general are utterly wrong in bewailing the falling birth-rate, whilst the unnecessary slaughter of babies and children stares them in the face. How dare they ask for more babies to be similarly slain! It may be permitted to quote a passage written several years ago. "My own opinion regarding the birth-rate is that so long as we continue to slay, during the first year of life alone, one in six or seven of all children born (the unspeakably beneficent law of the non-transmission of acquired characters permitting these children to be born amazingly fit and well, city life notwithstanding), the fall in the birth-rate should be a matter of humanitarian satisfaction. Let us learn how to take care of the fine babies that are born, and when we have shown that we can succeed in this, as we have hitherto most horribly failed, we may begin to suggest that perhaps, if the number were increased, we might reasonably expect to take care of that number also. Babies are the national wealth, and in reality the only national wealth; and just as a sensible father will satisfy himself that his son can take care of his pocket-money, before he listens to a demand for its augmentation, so, as a people, we are surely responsible to the Higher Powers, or our own ideals, for the production of proof that we can take care of the young helpless lives which are daily entrusted to us, before we cry for more. It would be easy to quote episcopal denouncements regarding the birth-rate, but I am at a loss for references to similarly influential opinions about the slaughter of the babies that are born—a matter which surely should take precedence. May I, in all deference, commend for consideration a parable which always comes to my mind when I read clerical comments on the birth-rate, without reference to the infant-mortality? It was figured by the Supreme Lover of Children that a wicked servant, entrusted with a portion of his master's wealth to turn to good account, went and hid it in the earth. He was not rewarded by the charge of more such wealth. We, as a people, are entrusted with living wealth, and, whilst we demand more, we go and bury much of it in the earth—whence, alas! it cannot be recovered. Not an increase of opportunity, thus wasted, was the reward of the unprofitable servant, but to be cast into outer darkness. Is there no moral here?"

Very distinguished recent authority may be quoted in favour of this principle. At the Annual Public Meeting of the Academy of Sciences, held in Paris in December, 1909, Professor Bouchard discussed the question of the population of France, and came to the conclusion that the birth-rate "depended upon social conditions which it was difficult if not altogether impossible to modify, and in these circumstances the alternative remedy was to reduce the number of deaths."

It must surely be plain that those reforms in the conditions of marriage which have been advocated in this chapter will meet this need, and are not necessarily to be feared even by those who, in this matter, devote their solicitude entirely to the question of numbers, quality apart. For the eugenist who is primarily concerned with quality these reforms are surely unchallengeable.



CHAPTER XVIII

THE CONDITIONS OF DIVORCE

A brief chapter must be devoted to the question of the conditions of divorce, which are really part of the conditions of marriage. Here, as in every other case, we must apply the universal and unchallengeable eugenic criterion: the conditions of divorce, like the conditions of marriage itself, must be such as best serve the future of the race. This will mean that, in the first place, in entering upon marriage—which of necessity means so much more to a woman than it does to a man—the woman must have the assurance that when the conditions of the contract are broken she will be liberated. The law must bear equally upon the two sexes. This condition of safety, once established, may determine toward marriage a certain number of women at present deterred by what they know of the manner in which our unjust laws now work.

Secondly, Divorce Law Reform in the right interests of women and the future must involve the complete protection of both from, for instance, the drunken husband. The male inebriate is on all grounds unfitted to be a father, and the laws of divorce must ensure that if he be married, his wife and therefore the future shall be protected from him. Those of us who believe in the movement for Women Suffrage will be grievously disappointed if, when that movement at last succeeds, such fundamental and urgent reforms as these are not promptly effected.

A Royal Commission is now sitting in England upon this subject of Divorce Law Reform, and I wish to repeat here with all the emphasis possible what has been already said in indirect contribution to the evidence laid before that Commission. It is that the first principle of judgment in all such matters is the Eugenic one. Primarily marriage is an invention for serving the future by buttressing motherhood with fatherhood. The judgment of all our methods of marriage and divorce lies with their products. "By their fruits ye shall know them." If there were any antagonism between the interests of the individual and those of the race we should indeed be in a quandary, but as I have shown a hundred times there is no such antagonism. The man or woman from whom a divorce ought to be obtained is ipso facto the man or woman who ought not to be a parent.

When it is a question of life or gold, we in England are consistent Mammon worshippers. Woe to the poacher, but the wife beater has only strained a right and may be leniently dealt with; woe to the destroyer of pheasants, but the destruction of peasants is a detail. Thus it is that the great fundamental questions which, because they determine the destiny of peoples, are the great Imperial questions, are unknown even by repute to our professed Imperialists. Every kind of industry except the culture of the racial life interests them profoundly—if there is money in it. The whole nation can go wild over a budget or the proposal to revive protection, but the conditions under which the race is recruited are the concern of but a few, who are looked upon as cranks. In the case of such a question as our Divorce Laws the public is substantially unaware that we are hundreds of years behind the rest of the civilized world; that our practice is utterly unthought out, and that the supposed compromise of Separation Orders is insane in principle and hideous in result. The present law bears very hardly upon both sexes in a thousand cases, but more especially upon women, toward whom it is grossly unjust. All honour is due to the Divorce Law Reform Union,[19] which for many years has devoted itself to this important subject, and has at last succeeded in obtaining the formation of a Royal Commission, the upshot of which, we may hope, will be to reform our law on moral, humane, and eugenic lines. The following is a striking quotation from a pamphlet written on behalf of this Union by Mr. E. S. P. Haynes, a distinguished expert.

"But our law of divorce is only one example among many of our hide-bound attachment to ancient abuses. It is of the utmost importance to realize that Divorce Law Reform will merely bring our jurisprudence up to the level of the modern enlightened State. It involves no revolutionary disturbance of anything but our crusted ignorance of how modern civilization works outside England. It sets out to place the family on a firmer basis, to regulate the marriage contract on equitable lines, and to improve the chances of the future generation in a country where deserted wives fill the work-houses and forty thousand illegitimate children are born every year."