In Germany, which we are always being asked to imitate in non-essentials by the more stupid kind of Imperialist—the kind which only very strong empires can survive—the law of divorce is vastly superior to ours. There is no such thing as judicial separation, which "is rightly condemned as being contrary to public policy." Further, as Mr. Haynes points out, "In Germany a male cannot marry under twenty-one or a female under eighteen, whether parental consent is available or not. In England a man may and not infrequently does cut his wife and family out of his will; in Germany the rights of wife and children are properly safeguarded by limiting this liberty of disposition. In England a father need not do more for his children than keep them out of the work-house unless he has brought himself under Divorce Jurisdiction; in Germany he is obliged to maintain them in a suitable manner. In England a spendthrift or dipsomaniac can only be controlled when he has spent all his money. In Germany such persons are protected from themselves by the family council. In England an illegitimate child can never be legitimated by the subsequent marriage of the parents. In Germany this humane and reasonable opportunity of making reparation to the child exists as a matter of course."

Here in England we have one law for the rich and another for the poor, for the average cost of a decree is about L100; and a case was recently reported in which a woman had saved up for twenty years in order to obtain a divorce. What an absolutely abominable scandal; how hideously beneath the level of practice amongst what we are pleased to call savage peoples. As everyone knows, the present law directly encourages immorality, pronouncing separation without the power of re-marriage—that is to say, the greater punishment, for lesser offences, and divorce with the power of re-marriage, that is to say, the lesser punishment, for greater offences.

Further, the law totally ignores the interests of the future in conspicuous cases where one or other possible parent is hopelessly unfit for such a function. In the interests not only of the individual but the future it would be advisable to grant divorce to a person whose partner had been confined in a lunatic asylum for, say five years, and who could be certified as likely to remain insane permanently, or whose partner had been confined in an Inebriates' Home for, say, two terms of one year, or who could be proved and certified to be an incurable drunkard.

We must abolish these atrocious Separation Orders, with their direct promotion of every kind of immorality, illegitimacy and cruelty to women. But perhaps this chapter may be brought to a close since in England the matter is now before a Royal Commission, and since our stupidities are of no direct interest to the American reader. It was necessary, however, to deal with the subject because of its immediate and urgent bearing upon many of the problems of Womanhood.



CHAPTER XIX

THE RIGHTS OF MOTHERS

We reach here a central question which must be approached from the right point of view or we shall certainly fail to solve it. That point of view is the child's. There is a school of thought which approaches the question otherwise—on abstract principles of justice and individual independence. The only objection to them is that, if upheld on modern conditions, these principles would soon leave us without anyone to uphold them. The relation of the mother to the State is central and fundamental, however considered, and the principles on which it must be settled must, above all, be principles which are compatible with the fundamental conditions on which States can endure.

Those principles, surely, are two. The first is that in a State we are members one of another, and that those who need help must be helped. This will be indignantly repudiated by a stern school of thought, but what if it applies, everywhere, always and above all, to children? They are members of the community who need help and they must be helped. The second principle is indeed only a special case of the first. It is that if the State is to continue, it must rear children.

We take it then, first, that the moral and social law is perfectly final as to the right of every child to existence. There are no principles of national welfare which can divorce us from the simple truth that we must regard every human individual as sacred from the moment of its coming into existence—and that is a long time before birth. A familiar medical dogma is, "Keep everything alive." There may be exceptions to it, but it is dangerous to discuss them with the unprepared. The only safe principle is to maintain, as long as possible, the life of all—the centenarian or the embryo conceived since the sun set. At times the State deliberately takes life on behalf of life. The sentence of execution passed upon the murderer may be warrantably passed by the State of the future or its officers upon a monstrous birth, a baby riddled with congenital syphilis or some such horrible fruit of our present carelessness and wickedness in such matters. The State may regard such children or their survival as illegitimate, since the laws of nature as we see them at work throughout the living world do not approve the survival of such. Apart from these cases, all children are legitimate, and all children are natural. Whatever the history of the reader's parents, he or she was assuredly both a legitimate child and a natural child—a paradox which may be left to the solution of the curious. Directly a new human being has been conceived, its right to existence and survival may be conceded. Vast numbers of human beings are conceived every year whose conception is a sin against themselves and the State. That is a question on which the present writer has written and spoken incessantly for years, and which no one can accuse him of neglecting. But here we have to deal with the facts of the world as they are and as they will be for some time to come.

All children are to be cared for. No child should die; there should be no infant mortality; the children that are not fit to live should not be conceived, and those that are fit to live should be allowed to live; all children are legitimate. If the State has any kind of business at all, this is its business.

Our subject here, the reader may say, is not children, but woman and womanhood. The reply is that unless we have our principles rightly formulated, we cannot solve this question of the rights of women as mothers. Failing our principles, we shall be reduced to the prejudices which serve as principles for our political parties. We shall have individualist and socialist at loggerheads, the friends of marriage and its enemies, and many other opposing parties who cannot solve the question for us because they have not waited first to discover its fundamentals. The rights of mothers can be approached only from the point of view of the rights of children. We may happen to believe, as the present writer certainly does, that parents should be responsible for their children. He once lectured for, and published the lectures in association with, a body called the British Constitution Association, which holds the same belief, but when he found as he did that protests were raised against any suggestion to help children whose parents do not do their duty, it became plain that principles which were right in a merely secondary and conditional way were being made absolute and fundamental. The fundamental is that the child shall be cared for; the conditional and secondary principle is that this is best effected through the parents. To say that if the parents will not do it, the child must be left to starve, is immoral and indecent. Worse words than those, if such exist, would be required to describe our neglect of illegitimate infancy; our cruelty toward widows and orphans; our utterly careless maintenance of the conditions which produce these hapless beings in such vast numbers.

If every child is sacred, every mother is sacred. If every child is to be cared for, every mother must be cared for. It is true that we may make experiment with devices for superseding the mother. Man has impudent assurance enough for anything, and if Nature has been working at the perfection of an instrument for her purpose during a few score million years—an instrument such as the mammalian mother, for instance—man is quite prepared to invent social devices, such as the incubator, the creche, the infant milk depot, and so forth; not merely to make the best of a bad case when the mother fails, but to supersede the mother altogether directly the baby is born. Such cases, except in the last resort, are more foolish than words can say. We have to save our children; we can only do so effectively through the naturally appointed means for saving children, which is motherhood. The rights of mothers follow as a necessary consequence from our first principle, which was the rights of children. Because every child must be protected, every mother must be protected, if not in one way, in another.

The State may not be able to afford this. The necessities of existence may be so difficult to obtain, not to mention for a moment such luxuries as alcohol and motor-cars and warships and fine clothes and art, and so forth, that no arrangements for the support of motherhood can be made. If we lay down the proposition that no mother should work because she is already doing the supreme work, it may be replied that this is economically impossible; the thing cannot be done. The only reply to this is that the State which cannot afford to provide rightly for the means of its continuance had better discontinue, and must in any case soon do so. Motherhood is rapidly declining as a numerical fact in civilized communities generally. Not merely does the birth-rate fall persistently and without the slightest regard to the commentators thereon, but it will continue to do so for many years to come. In the light of this fact the great argument of presidents and bishops, politicians and journalists, moralists and social censors generally is that somehow or other this decline must be arrested. To all of which one replies, for the thousand and first time, that, whatever it ought to be, it will not be arrested; that the really moral policy, the really human one, and the only possible one, is to take care of the children that are born. Then when we have abolished our infant and child mortality and have solved the substantial problem of finding room for all new-comers, having ceased to far more than decimate them, we may begin cautiously to suggest that perhaps if the birth-rate were slightly to rise we might be able to cope with the product. At present the disgraceful fact is not the birth-rate, but what we do with the birth-rate; though more disgraceful perhaps are the blindness and ignorance and assurance of the host of commentators in high places who waste their time and ours in animadverting upon a fact—the falling birth-rate—which is a necessary condition and consequence of organic progress, whilst the motherhood we have is so urgently in need of protection and idealization in the minds of the people.

We have reached the conclusion that all motherhood is to be protected. This means that from some source or other the money shall be forthcoming for the maintenance of the mother and her children. For, in the first place, the children are not to work because, if they do, they will not be able to work as they should in the future. The State cannot afford to let them work. Further, the proper care of childhood is so continuous and exacting a task, and of such supreme moment, that it is the highest and foremost work that can be named; and therefore, in the second place, she whose business it is must not be hampered by having to do anything else. If any labourer is worthy of his hire, she is. Her economic security must be absolute. She must be as safe as the Bank of England, because England and its banks stand or fall with her. In the rightly constituted State, if there be any one at all whose provision and maintenance are absolutely secure, it will be the mothers. Whoever else has financial anxiety, they shall have none. Any State that can afford to exist can afford to see to this. No economist can inform me what proportion of the labour and resources of England are at this moment devoted to the means of life, and what proportion to superfluities, luxuries and the means of death. But it is a very simple matter with which the reader, who is doubtless a better arithmetician than I am, may amuse himself, to estimate the number of married women of reproductive age in the community, and allowing anything in reason for illegitimate motherhood and nothing at all for infertile wives, to satisfy himself that the total cost which would be involved in the adequate care of motherhood, is a mere fraction of the national expenditure. Few of us realize how extraordinary and how unprecedented is the margin of security for existence which modern civilization affords. A savage community may have scarcely any margin at all. The same may be true of many primitive communities which cannot be called savage. They maintain life under such conditions, whether in Greenland or in a thousand other parts of the world, that they cannot afford to labour for anything which is not bread. The primary necessities of existence take all their getting. Some transient accident of weather or the balance of Nature in the sea or in the fields imperils the existence of the whole community. They, at any rate, are wise enough to take good care of their women and children. But in civilization we have an enormous margin of security. Not only are we dependent on no local crop or harvest, but the getting of necessities has become so effective and secure that we are able to spend a vast amount of our time and energy on the production of luxuries and evils. How little, then, is our excuse if we fail to provide the first conditions for continuance and progress!

Our first principles of the value of the child and therefore of motherhood are unchallengeable, nor will anyone nowadays be found to question that neither children nor mothers should work in the ordinary sense of that word, since the proper work of children who are to work well when they grow up is play, and since the mother's natural work is the most important that she can perform. It remains, then, for us to determine by whom mothers and children in the modern and future State are to be provided for.

The conditions of mothers are various, and we shall best approach the problem by the consideration of different cases.

The simplest is that of the widowed mother who is without means. It is only too common a case, and we have already seen certain causes which contribute to the enormous number of widows in the community. Men do not live as long as women, and men are older when they marry. These natural causes of widowhood, as they may be called, are greatly aggravated by the destructive influence of alcohol upon fatherhood, as will be shown in the chapter dealing with alcohol and womanhood.

On the individualistic theory of the State, a theory so brutal and so impracticable that no one consistently upholds it, the widow's misfortune is her private affair, but does not really concern us. Her husband should have provided for her. Indeed she should, and indeed we should have seen that he did. But if he and we failed in our duty to her, the consequences must be met. The hour is at hand when the State will discover that children are its most precious possessions, more precious as they grow scarcer, and efficient support will then be forthcoming, as a matter of course, for the widowed mother and her children. The feature which will distinguish this support from any past or present provision will be that it recognizes the natural sanctity and the natural economy of the relation between mother and children. It will be agreed not merely that the children must be provided for, but that they must be provided for through her. The current device is to divorce mother and children. "Whom God hath joined together, let no man put asunder," is quoted by many against the divorce of a married pair whom, as is plain, not God but the devil has joined together; but the principle of that quotation verily applies to the natural and divine association of mother and children.

If, then, the State is to provide in future for all widowed mothers and their children, husbands need no longer trouble to insure or make provision for them. Such is the proper criticism. The reply to it is that the State will have to see to it that, in future, husbands do take this trouble. To this we shall return.

Next we may consider the case of the unmarried mother and her "illegitimate" child or children. Here, again, the child must be cared for, and the care of the child is the work which has been imposed upon the mother. We must enable her to do it, nor must we countenance the monstrous and unnatural folly, injurious to both and therefore to us, of separating them. Napoleon, desirous of food for powder, forbade the search for the father in such a case, though the French are now seeking to abrogate that abominable decree. Our law recognizes that the father is responsible, and under it he may be made to pay toward the upkeep of the child. Some contemporary writers on the endowment of motherhood are advocating changes which would make this law absurd, for they are seeking to free the married father from any responsibility for his children, and could scarcely impose it upon the unmarried father. Such proposals, however, are palpable reversions to something much lower and aeons older in the history of life than mere barbarism, and I have no fear of their success. Assuredly the unmarried father must be held responsible; and no less certainly must we see to it that, with or without his help, the unmarried mother and her children are adequately provided for. The present death-rate amongst illegitimate children is a scandal of the first order and must be ended. If we are wise, our provision will involve protecting ourselves against the need for new provision, especially where the mother is feeble-minded or otherwise defective, as is so often the case: but provision there must be.

Finally, we come to the central problem of the mother who has a living husband in employment. It is the case of the working classes that really concerns us, not least because the greater part of the birth-rate comes therefrom. It is the contemporary settling-down of the birth-rate in this class, combined with the novel consequences of modern industrialism, especially in the form of married women's labour, that makes the question so important. Before we go any further, the proposition may be laid down that married women's labour, as it commonly exists, is an intolerable evil, condemned already by our first principles. It need scarcely be said that one is not here referring to the labours of the married woman who writes novels or designs fashion-plates. There is no condemnation of any kind of labour, in the home or outside it, if the condition be complied with, that it does not prejudice the inalienable first charge upon the mother's time and energy. Her children are that first charge. It may perfectly well be, and often is, chiefly though not exclusively in the more fortunate classes, that the mother may earn money by other work without prejudice to her motherhood. Such cases do not concern us, but we are urgently concerned with married women's labour in the ordinary sense of the term, which means that the mother goes out to tend some lifeless machine, whilst her children are left at home to be cared far anyhow or not at all. No student of infant mortality or the conditions of child life and child survival in general has any choice but to condemn this whole practice as evil, root and branch. And from the national and economic point of view it may be said that whatever the mother makes in the factory is of less value than the children who consequently die at home. The culture of the racial life is the vital industry of any people, and any industry that involves its destruction and needs the conditions which make up that destruction, is one which the country cannot afford, whatever its merely monetary balance-sheet. A complete balance-sheet, with its record of children slain, would only too readily demonstrate this.

Our right attitude toward married women's labour must depend upon a right understanding of the social meaning of marriage. This was a question which had to be dealt with at length in a previous volume and I can only state here in a word, what was the conclusion come to. It was that marriage is a device for supporting and buttressing motherhood by fatherhood. Its mark is that it provides for common parental care of offspring. A more prosaic way of stating the case would be that marriage is a device for making the father responsible. If we go far back in the history of the animal world, we find mating but not marriage. The father's function is purely physiological, transient and wholly irresponsible. The whole burden of caring for offspring, when first there comes to be need for that care, in the history of organic progress, falls upon the mother. But even amongst the fishes we find that sometimes, as in the case of the stickleback, the father helps the mother to build a sort of nest, and does "sentry-go" outside it to keep off marauders. In this common care of the young we see what is in all essentials marriage, though some may prefer to dignify the word by confining it to those human associations which have been blessed by Church and State, even though the father throws the baby at the mother, or sends her into the streets to earn her bread and his beer.

If some of our modern reformers knew any biology, or even happened to visit a music-hall where the biograph was showing scenes of bird-life, they would learn that the human arrangement whereby the father goes out and forages for mother and children has roots in hoary antiquity. The pity is that there is no one to point the moral to the crowd when the father-bird is seen returning with delicacies for the mother, who tends her nest and its occupants.

The reader will already have anticipated the conclusion, to which, as I see it, the study of the fundamental laws of life must lead the sociologist in this case. It is that the duty of the father is to support the mother and children, and that the duty of the State is to see that he does this.

Thus, if asked whether I believe in the endowment of motherhood, I reply, yes, indeed, I believe in the endowment of motherhood by the corresponding fatherhood. If our first principles are sound, we must believe that the mother must be endowed or provided for; there can be no difference of opinion so far. Often, as we have seen, there is no corresponding fatherhood, for the mother may be a widow, or unmarried and unable to find the father. But where the corresponding fatherhood exists, we fly directly in the face of Nature, we deny the consistent teaching of evolution as the study of sub-human life reveals it to us, if we do not turn to the father and say, this is your act, for which you are responsible.

At all times the community has been entitled to say this to the father. It is even more entitled to say so now, when, as everyone knows, parenthood has come so entirely under the sway of human volition. The more knowledge and power the more responsibility. The more important the deed, the more responsible must we hold the doer. The time has come when fatherhood, whether within marriage or without it, must be reckoned a deliberate, provident, foreseen, all-important, responsible act, for which the father must always be held to account.

On a recent public occasion, having endeavoured to show that the history of animal evolution teaches us the increasing importance and dignity of fatherhood, I was asked whether I had any argument in favour of parental responsibility. To this the fitting reply seemed to be that, primarily, I believe in parental responsibility because I believe in human responsibility. It need hardly be said that the questioner belonged to that important political party which loathes the idea of paternal responsibility and styles it a "fetish." Without it none of us would be here. Yet the Socialists are less likely than any other party to abandon the idea of human responsibility. They propose to hold men responsible for the remoter effects of their acts—upon the present—as no other party does. The maker of money is held to account for his deeds and their effect upon the life around him. I agree with the principle: but I maintain that the maker of men is also to be held to account for his deeds and their effect upon the future and the life of this world to come. No Socialist can afford to question the practical political principle that men are to be held responsible for their deeds: and no Socialist can explain the sudden and unexplained abandonment of this principle when we come to the most important of all a man's deeds. To be consistent, the Socialist should uphold the doctrine of a man's responsibility for the remoter consequences of his acts in this supreme sphere, more earnestly and thoughtfully and providently than any of his opponents.

The position of those who would free the father from responsibility is even less defensible when, as we commonly find, they are prepared to make the mother's responsibility more extensive and less avoidable than ever. Why this distinction? And if parental responsibility is a "fetish" when it refers to a father, why is it not the same when it refers to a mother? In the schemes of Mr. H. G. Wells, kaleidoscopic in their glitter and inconsistency, there remains from year to year this one permanent element, that while the mother must attend to her business, it is no business of the father. This is the essential feature, the one novelty of his scheme. Already the married mother—he proposes nothing for the unmarried mother—is legally entitled to some measure of support. His endowment of motherhood is essentially a discharge of fatherhood, and should be so called. There can be no compromise, nothing but a fight to the finish, between the principle of endowing motherhood by making fatherhood less responsible, and the principle here fought for, of endowing motherhood by making fatherhood more responsible. As Nature has been doing so, in the main line of progress for many millions of years,—a statement not of interpretation or theory but of observed fact—I have no fear of the ultimate issue. But it might well be that any portion of mankind, perhaps a portion ill to be spared, should destroy itself by an attempt to run counter to the great principle of progress here stated. There is an abundance of men who will be very happy to side with Mr. Wells. Men have never been wanting, in any time or place, who were happy to gratify their instincts without having to answer for the consequences; and it has always been the first issue of any society that was to endure, to see that they did not have their way: hence human marriage. The "endowment of motherhood" sounds as if it were a scheme greatly for the benefit of women. Let them beware. Let them begin to think of, not the remoter, but the immediate and obvious consequences of any such schemes as are proffered by the overt or covert enemies of marriage, and they will quickly perceive that the last way in which to secure the rights of women is to abrogate the duties of men. The support allotted to such schemes as these is not feminine but masculine. That is the impression I derive from discussions following lectures on the subject; and that is what I should expect, judging from the natural tendencies of men, and the profound intuition of women in such matters. And, conversely, the opposition to such principles as are expressed here, and embodied in the "Women's Charter," will be masculine. But woman has been civilizing man from the beginning, and she will have her way here also—for, in the last resort, not merely youth, but the Unborn must be served.

Before we consider the alternative suggestions that some are making, and proceed to indicate how the paternal endowment of motherhood can be enforced in every class, as public opinion practically enforces it in the upper and middle classes, let us meet the objection that, if fatherhood is to be made so serious an act, and if so much self-sacrifice is to be exacted from those who undertake it, the marriage-rate and the birth-rate will fall more rapidly. And as regards the marriage-rate, the answer is that marriage and parenthood are not inseparable, a proposition which might be much amplified if a writer who wishes to be heard could afford to have the courage of everybody's convictions. But already, in the middle classes, men limit their families to the number they can support. They simply practise responsible fatherhood, and the mothers and children are protected. On what moral grounds this is to be condemned, no one has yet told us.

And as regards the effect of more stringent responsibility for fatherhood upon the birth-rate, it must be replied, for the thousandth time in this connection, that the question for a nation is not how many babies are born, but how many survive. The idea of a baby is that it shall grow up and become a citizen; if babies remained babies people would soon cease to complain about the fall in the birth-rate. But, in point of fact, a vast number of babies and children are unnecessarily slain, and if we could suddenly arrest the whole of this slaughter, the increase of population would become so formidable that everyone would deplore the unmanageable height of the birth-rate. Its present fall is quite incapable of arrest, and is perfectly compatible with as rapid an increase of population as any one could desire. We must arrest the destruction of so much of the present birth-rate, so that it means nought for the future. By nothing else will this arrest be so accelerated as by those very measures for making fatherhood more responsible for the care of motherhood, which are here advocated. Let it be freely granted that these measures will lower the birth-rate. Much more will they lower the infant mortality and child death-rate, and diminish the permanent damaging of vast multitudes of children who escape actual destruction.

And now we can turn to those proposals which have lately been revived by one or two popular writers in England, for the endowment of motherhood by the State, leaving the fathers in peace to spend their earnings as they please, whilst others support their children. Detailed criticism is not needed, for the details to criticize are not forthcoming, and the opinions on principles and on details of these imaginative writers are never twice the same. It suffices that proposals such as these, apart from their vagueness and their obvious impracticability in any form, are directly condemned by the fundamental principle that a man shall be responsible for his acts. The endowment of motherhood, as Mr. Wells means it, is simply a phrase for making men responsible for their neighbours' acts and for striking hard and true at the root principle of all marriage, human or sub-human, which is the common parental care of offspring. Reference is made to this proposal here, not that it really needs criticism, but in order that one may be clearly excluded from any participation in such proposals.

The difference between such schemes for the endowment of motherhood and the proposal here advocated is that those seek to endow the mother by making the father less responsible—or, rather, wholly irresponsible—while this seeks to endow her by making the father more responsible. The whole verdict of the ages is, as we have seen, on the side of this principle. It has been practised for aeons, and it is the aim of sound legislation and practice everywhere to-day.

As has been admitted, the more we express this principle, the lower will fall, not necessarily the marriage-rate, but the parent-rate; fewer men will become fathers, but they will be fitter. There will be fewer children born, but they will be children planned, desired and loved in anticipation, as every child should be, and will be in the golden future. These children will not die, but survive; nor will their development be injured by early malnutrition and neglect. The believer in births as births will not be gratified, but there will be abundance of gratification for the believer in births as means to ends.

The practical working-out of our principle is no more difficult than might be expected if it be remembered that we are counselling nothing revolutionary nor even novel. The demand simply is that the practice which obtains among the more fortunate classes shall be made universal, and that the State shall see that all fathers who can, do their duty. The State will be quite busy and well employed in this task, which may legitimately be allotted to it even on the strictly individualist and Spencerian principles, that the maintenance of justice is alone the State's province. We allot a great function to the State, but deny that it can rightly or safely set the father aside and perform his duty for him.

The kind of means whereby the rights of mothers may be granted them is indicated in the Women's Charter which has lately been formulated and advocated by Lady Maclaren. The principle there recognized is that the husband's wages are not solely his own earnings, but are in part handed to him to be passed on to his wife. Directly children are concerned, the State should be.

Whatever the answer to the crudely-stated question, "Should Wives have Wages?" it is certain that mothers should and must have wages or their equivalent.

To many of the well-wishers of women it is disappointing that the Women's Charter is not more keenly supported by women themselves. Unfortunately the suffrage has become a fetish, the mere means has become an end, preferred even to the offer of the real ends, such as would be attained in very large measure by this Charter. We see here, it is to be feared, the same spirit which protests against the wisest and most humane legislation in the interests of women and children because "men have no business to lay down the law for women."

In general terms, one would argue that the principle of insurance must be applied to this case, as it is now voluntarily applied by thousands of provident fathers. Here the State may guarantee and help, even by the expenditure of money. It should help those who help themselves. This is a principle which may apply to many forms of insurance or provision, whether for old age or against invalidity; just as non-contributory old-age provisions are fundamentally wrong in principle, and have never been defended on any but party-political grounds of expedience, even by their advocates, so the "endowment of motherhood" which meant the complete liberation of fatherhood from its responsibilities would be wrong in principle. But in both of these cases the State might rightly undertake to help those who help themselves.

Fatherhood of the new order will not be so wholly irksome and unrewarded as might at first appear to the critic who does not reckon children as rewards themselves. It may involve some momentary sacrifices, but it needs very little critical study of the ordinary man's expenditure to discover that, on the whole, these sacrifices will be more apparent than real. It is, for instance, a very great sacrifice indeed for the smoker to give up tobacco; but once he has done so, he is as happy as he was, and suffers nothing at all for the gain of his pocket. Both as regards alcohol and tobacco, the common expenditure which would so amply provide milk and the rest for children, is necessitated by an acquired habit which, like all acquired habits, can be discarded. The non-smoker and non-drinker does not suffer the discomfort of the smoker and drinker who is deprived of his need. These things cease to be needs at all, soon after they are dispensed with, or if the habit of taking them is never begun. They are luxuries only to those who use them. To those who do not they are nothing, and the lack of them is nothing. The sheer waste they entail is gigantic, and the expenditure on them in such a country as England would endow all its motherhood and provide good conditions for all its children. The father who, in the future, is compelled to yield the rights of mothers and children, may sometimes be compelled to practise what at first looks like great self-restraint in these respects. The point I wish to make is that the sacrifice and the need for restraint are transient, and that thereafter there is simply more liberty and the promise of longer life for the wise.

The working-out will be that the legislation of the future will benefit the right kind of husband and father, but will restrain and irk the wrong kind. But that is precisely what good legislation should do. Thus the right kind of father, who in any case will do his best to care for his wife and children, will be helped in the future by the State. It will insist that he does the duty which in any case he means to do, but it will make the doing easier. We see admirably working parallels to this in the German insurance laws and their provision for death, disease and old age. They benefit those whom they appear to harass. Insurance against fatherhood will work in the same way. The State will not be antagonistic to the father, but will be his best friend, knowing that its best friends are good fathers and mothers. There will be far less worry and anxiety for well-meaning parents, especially for mothers, but also for fathers. Nor do I, for one, much mind how substantial may be the State's contribution to the father's efforts, provided only that those efforts are demanded and obtained.

Nothing is more certain than that we are about to free ourselves from the crass blindness of the nineteenth century in its great delusion that the wealth of a nation consists in the number of things it makes and possesses. Parenthood and childhood will shortly come to be recognized as the first concern of the State that is to continue, and whilst the birth-rate continues to fall, the honour paid to fathers and mothers will continue to rise. We shall become as wise in time as the Jews have been ever since we have record of them. We shall estimate the relative value of these things as well as if we were the kinds of people we call "Savages." Fatherhood will not be such an uncompensated sacrifice in those days, even apart from its inherent rewards.

The point I am trying to make is that the legislation and the social changes here advocated as necessary in the interests of women, and indeed asserted to be their rights, do not involve any injury to men. This common delusion is a mere instance of the poisonous principle of politicians, notably fiscal politicians, and of many business men. Their belief is that what benefits Germany must hurt England, that what hurts Germany must benefit England, that all trade is a question of somebody scoring off another or being scored off. The idea that there are great games in which both sides stand to win, if they "play the game," is meaningless to them. That German prosperity can favour English prosperity, that true commerce is a mutual exchange for mutual benefit—these are notions obviously absurd to people who think on this horrible assumption which reigns unchallenged in a thousand columns of fiscal controversy every morning. And when these people turn to the question of legislation as between the sexes, they naturally assume that anything which promises to benefit women will injure men. The vote is thus regarded as a means of injuring men—necessarily, because it advantages women—and assuredly such people will suppose that any measures in the direction of granting what I here prefer to call the "rights of mothers" (leaving to one side the "rights of women"), necessarily involve a proportionate disadvantage to men. I deny it utterly:

The woman's cause is man's: they rise or sink Together, dwarfed or God-like, bond or free.

The rights of mothers, we have seen, are fundamental for any society, and to satisfy them is to meet the most clearly primary of social needs. But there will be some readers of this book, perhaps, who miss any discussion of the "rights of women." I do not care for the phrase, because I do not think that we often see it usefully employed. For me the propositions are self-evident that men and women, being human beings, have the rights of human beings. Each of us has the right to the conditions of the most complete self-development and expression that is compatible with the granting of the same right to others. It is true that women have been largely debarred from these conditions as a sex, and in so far there is some meaning in the phrase "Women's rights." But otherwise we all agree that men and women alike have the right which has just been stated in terms that are a paraphrase of Herbert Spencer's definition of liberty. Men's rights and women's rights are the rights to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." If any one disputes the application of this principle to women as unreservedly as to men, I will not argue with him. I write for decent people.

At this stage in the development of civilization, our business is to see, first, that our social proceedings and reconstructions of enterprises are compatible with the nature of the human individual, male and female. It is always necessary for us to be reminded of the facts of the individual, for in the last resort they will determine the failure or the success of all our schemes. And then we must see where our existing social structure fails to satisfy the needs of individual development and of individual duty. In seeking to rectify what may here be wrong, of course we must take first things first—we must set the case right for the most important people before we go on to the others.

Now it is the simple, obvious truth,—so obvious and unchallengeable that somehow it has never been stated—that in any human society the parents are the most important people. The division is not between education and the lack of it, or wealth and the lack of it, or breeding and the lack of it. It is not the aristocracy that matters supremely; nor the "great middle-class"; nor the masses; nor the teachers; nor the doctors; nor the servants of modern industrialism. The classification is a biological one—into parents and non-parents. The non-parents may be invaluable in their way, if only they beget something that is valuable. Heaven forbid that I should undervalue the children of the mind. But if we are to classify any nation, the first and last classification of any moment is none of those in which we always indulge and which all our customs and traditions and prejudices are ever seeking to perpetuate; but the classification into those who will die childless and those who create the future race. That is why, for me at any rate, the subject of women's rights is jejune and sterile compared with the subject of this chapter. First let us ascertain the rights of mothers and grant them, to the very uttermost; then let us do the same for the fathers. Let us exact of each the corresponding duties; and the next generation, brought into being under such conditions, will solve all our problems. But whilst we neglect the first things we shall permanently solve no problem at all. We may seem to do so, but if we dishonour parenthood, if we leave the inferior women to mother the future, the degenerate race that must ensue will find itself in difficulties compared with which ours are trivial, and our solutions of them impotent.

That is why I seek to draw attention to the rights not of women as women,—for neither men nor women have any peculiar rights as men or women—nor yet to the rights of wives as wives, but to the rights of mothers as mothers, whether married or unmarried, whether husbanded or widowed. The rights of women are the rights of human beings, and no special concern of a writer on woman and womanhood, paradoxical as the assertion may be. The rights of wives are often discussed, but I question whether the discussion ever helped a wife yet, except solely in the matter of her monetary claims upon her husband. Discussion and public opinion and consequent legislation can effect, and have effected, something for wives as wives in this matter. In other matters, much more vital to their happiness, each case is unique because all individuals are unique; and the discussion of the questions can amount to no more than futile and obvious platitude.

But when motherhood is concerned the monetary question becomes worthy of the adjective economic, so often prostituted, for the making of future life depends upon the provision of adequate means. The whole essence of motherhood is that it is a dedication of the present to the future. Every mother is in the position of the inventor or the poet or the musician for whose work the present makes no demand and no payment. The future is being served, but the future is not there to pay. The rights of mothers are the rights of the future, and its claims upon the present.

It can be abundantly shown that increasing prevision or provision marks the ascent of organic Nature; that as life ascends the present is more and more dedicated to the future. The completeness of this dedication is the most exemplary fact of the many which the bee-hive provides for our instruction and following. Consider the dedication of the hive to the queen. Realize that she is not in any way the ruler of the hive, but she is the only mother in it. She is the parent, and, on our principles, she is therefore the most important person in the hive. No one else has any rights but to serve her, for the future absolutely depends upon her. So does the future of our society depend upon its mothers. In our species there are many and not one, as in the bee-hive. If there were just one individual who was to be the mother of the next generation, even our politicians would perceive that she was the most important person in the community, and that her rights were supreme. But the principle stands, though, as it happens, human mothers are not one in each generation, but many. They are in our society what the queen bee is in the hive, and the future will transcend the present and the past just in so far as they are well-chosen, and well cared for.

To the best of my belief this principle has not yet been recognized by any one. The rights of women and the rights of wives are often discussed, but the rights of mothers is a term expressing a principle which is not to be called new, only because in the bee-hive, for instance, we see it expressed and inerrably served.

Perhaps it may be permitted to close with a personal reminiscence which, at any rate, bears on the genesis of this chapter. Some nine years ago when I was resident-surgeon to the Edinburgh Maternity Hospital, I proposed to get up a concert for the patients on Boxing Day, and on asking permission of the distinguished obstetrician who was in supreme charge, was met with the question, "Do they deserve it?" After several seconds there slowly dawned the fact which I knew but had long forgotten, that the mothers in the large ward where the music was proposed, were all unmarried, and finally I answered, "I don't know." Nor do I know to this day, and though the answer was given in weakness and in a disconcerted voice, I doubt whether any wiser one could be framed. We all know what desert means, and merit and credit, until we begin to think and study: and we end by discovering that we do not know what, in the last analysis, these terms mean. But, at any rate, these women,—one of them, I remember, was a child of fourteen—were mothers, and whatever favoured their convalescence unquestionably made for the survival of their babies. It might have been argued that if the patients did not deserve music, they did not deserve the air and light and food and skill and kindness with which they were being restored to health. But it is not a question of deserts. These women were mothers. If they should not have been, they should not have been, and if the blame was theirs, they were blameworthy. But mothers they were, with the duties of mothers to perform, and therefore with the rights of mothers. They got their concert and were all the better for the remarkably indifferent music of which it consisted, as such concerts commonly do; and I am only very sorry if any of them argued therefrom that she had nothing in the past to regret.

But the spiritual attitude revealed in the question, "Do they deserve it?" is one which must speedily go to its own place. Let us strive to dignify marriage, to educate the young of both sexes for parenthood, to reduce illegitimacy, to reward virtue. But where there is motherhood in being, whether expectant or achieved, we have a duty which is the highest and most sacred of all because it is the Future that we are called upon to serve, and upon us it wholly depends.

As Mr. John Burns said to our first Infant Mortality Conference in Great Britain in 1907, "Let us dignify, purify and glorify motherhood by every means in our power." Evidently this can only be done through marriage, which is in its very essence an institution for the dignifying of motherhood. But a biological writer cannot distinguish as a theologian can between legal and extra-legal motherhood. He may declare that motherhood is hideously illegitimate when it is forced upon a wife married to an inebriate degenerate. He may accept marriage with all his heart as an institution which for him has natural sanctions millions of years older than any Church or State or mankind itself. But for him as a student of life all motherhood must be guarded as such—even if it be guarded in such a fashion that it can never recur, which is our duty to the feeble-minded mother.

If there be any reader who is unacquainted with M. Maeterlinck's "Life of the Bee," let him or her study that instructive book. Let him ask why the queen is the End of the hive, why all is for her. Let him ask whether the natural law upon which this depends—the law that all individuals are mortal—does not apply to all races, even our own, and perhaps he will come to agree that the rights of mothers are the oldest and deepest and most necessary of any rights that can be named.

And the recognition and granting of them—as they must necessarily be recognized and granted in every living race that depends upon motherhood—is even more imperative in our case than in any other, since human motherhood makes more demands upon the individual than any other. By our constitution we human beings must devote more of our energies to the Future than any other race. But it is a Future better worth working for than any of theirs.



CHAPTER XX

WOMEN AND ECONOMICS

It will be evident that the writer of the foregoing chapter must have something to say on the question of women and economics, but though what must be said seems to me to be very important, it can be stated at no great length.

If we turn to the most widely-read and applauded of the feminist books on this subject, Women and Economics, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, we are by no means encouraged to find it stated in the first chapter that woman's present economic inferiority to man is not due to "any inherent disability of sex." Wherever Mrs. Gilman may be right, here the biologist knows that she is wrong. The argument has been fully stated in earlier pages, and need not here be restated. But we shall not be surprised if a premise which denies any natural economic disadvantage of women leads to more than dubious conclusions.

Only a few pages later, Mrs. Gilman refers to the argument that the economic dependence of women upon their husbands is defensible on the ground that they perform the duties of motherhood, and the following is her comment thereon:

"The claim of motherhood as a factor in economic exchange is false to-day. But suppose it were true. Are we willing to hold this ground, even in theory? Are we willing to consider motherhood as a business, a form of commercial exchange? Are the cares and duties of the mother, her travail and her love, commodities to be exchanged for bread?

"It is revolting so to consider them; and if we dare face our own thoughts, and force them to their logical conclusion, we shall see that nothing could be more repugnant to human feeling, or more socially and individually injurious, than to make motherhood a trade."

Surely this is special pleading and not very plausible at that. It may be replied, "Is not the labourer worthy of his hire?"—however noble the labour. If we choose to call society's or a husband's support of motherhood "a form of commercial exchange," it is indeed "revolting" so to see it; let us then look at the case as it is. We applaud the "cares and duties of the mother, her travail and her love"; but the more assiduous her maternity, and the more admirable, the more certainly will she require to be fed. If she cannot simultaneously feed her child and forage for herself, somebody must forage for her; and to say that therefore the cares and duties of the mother, her travail and her love, become commodities to be exchanged for bread, is simply to cloud a clear case with question-begging epithets. Always, everywhere, if motherhood is to be performed at its highest, the mother must be supported. It is not a question of commercial exchange, but of obvious natural necessity. The foregoing chapter with its argument for the rights of mothers as a great and neglected social principle, may be unsound throughout, but it will certainly not be refuted by sentences such as these.

Briefly, Mrs. Gilman proposes to "do away with the family kitchen and dining-room, to transform all domestic service from the incapable, hand-to-mouth standard of untrained amateurs to that of professional experts, to raise the work of child nursing and rearing to a scientific and skilled basis, to secure the self-support of the wife and mother through skilled labour, so that she may be economically independent of her husband."

But if her child nursing and rearing are to be scientific and skilled, and she is simultaneously to support herself through skilled labour, she clearly requires to be two women or one woman in two places at the same time. This, in effect, is what Mrs. Gilman expects. We have seen that Mr. H. G. Wells's proposed help for motherhood consists in discharging fatherhood from its duties: Mrs. Gilman's idea is to double the mother's work. Both come to much the same thing.

All women, mothers or other, are to become economically independent, instead of being "parasitic on the male," our author's unpleasing way of recognizing that fatherhood has reached high and responsible estate amongst mankind. Now if Mrs. Gilman's solution be feasible, we must return to our fundamentals and see whether they are compatible with it. She has no doubt of it. Thus:—

"If it could be shown that the women of to-day were growing beards, were changing as to pelvic bones, were developing bass voices, or that in their new activities they were manifesting the destructive energy, the brutal combative instinct, or the intense sex-vanity of the male, then there would be cause for alarm. But the one thing that has been shown in what study we have been able to make of women in industry is that they are women still, and this seems to be a surprise to many worthy souls ... 'the new woman' will be no less female than the 'old' woman ... she will be, with it all, more feminine.

"The more freely the human mother mingles in the natural industries of a human creature, as in the case of the savage woman, the peasant woman, the working-woman everywhere who is not overworked, the more rightly she fulfils these functions."[20]

We may not be so sure that there is not some evidence for "growing beards," "developing bass voices," and "manifesting the destructive energy, the brutal combative instinct, or the intense sex-vanity of the male"; and in our brief attempt to make a first study of womanhood in the light of Mendelism, we have seen good reason to understand why masculine characters may come to the surface in the female whose femininity has worn thin. Several of the lower animals definitely show us the possibilities.

But we need not accept the issue on the grounds of such superficial manifestations as these, for there are others, more subtle and vastly more important, on which must be fought the question whether women in industry are women still, and whether the "new woman" is more feminine than the old. Let us dismiss the extremes in both directions. We need not adduce the members of the Pioneer Club, who show their increasing femininity by donning male attire; nor need we question that large numbers of women in industry continue to remain feminine still. The practical question which we must determine, if possible, is the average effect of industrial conditions and the assumption of the functions commonly supposed to be more suitably masculine, upon women in general. Here we definitely join issue with Mrs. Gilman.

It is impossible to discuss, as we might well do, the available evidence as to the effect of external activities upon that wonderful function of womanhood which, in its correspondence with the rhythm of the tides, hints, like many other of our attributes, at our distant origin in the Sea—the mother of all living. Reference was made in an earlier chapter to this function, and its use as, in most cases at any rate, a criterion of womanhood and a gauge of the effect of physical exercise or mental exercise thereupon. The writer of "Women and Economics" has nothing to say on this subject—less, if possible, than on the subject of lactation. The menstrual function would admirably and fundamentally illustrate the present contention, but it will be better to take the great maternal and mammalian function of nursing as a criterion of womanhood, and as a test of the contention that the more freely the mother works as do the savage woman and the peasant woman, the more rightly she fulfils the "primal physical functions of maternity."

Before we consider the actual evidence (and Mrs. Gilman does not deal at all in evidence on these fundamentals to her argument) let us meet the argument about the "savage woman," who works as hard as men do,—though much less hard than early observers of savage life supposed—and who is nevertheless a successful mother. It is completely forgotten that, just as parenthood, both fatherhood and motherhood, demands more of the individual as we rise in the scale of animal evolution, so, within our own species, the same holds good. In general, the mothers of civilized races are the mothers of babies whose heads are larger at birth (as they will be in adult life), than those of savage babies. It is true that the civilized woman has, on the average, a considerably larger pelvis than that of, for instance, the negress. There must be a feasible, practicable ratio between the two sets of measurements if babies are to enter the world at all. But the increasing size of the human head is a great practical problem for women. No one can say how many millions have perished in the past because their pelves were too narrow for the increasing demands thus made upon them, and doubtless the greater capacity of the female pelvis in higher races is mainly due to this terrible but racially beneficent process of selection, by which women with pelves nearer (e. g.) to negro type, have been rejected, and women with wider pelves have survived, to transmit their breadth of pelvis to their daughters and carry on the larger-headed races. But even now obstetricians are well aware that the practical mechanical problem for the civilized woman is much more serious than for her savage sister; and the argument that civilized women would discharge maternal functions as well as savage women if they worked as hard is therefore worthless.

Let us return now to the question of nursing capacity. "Bass voices" and "beards" are doubtless unlovely in woman, but their extensive appearance would be of no consequence at all compared with the disappearance or weakening of the mammalian function which, as everyone knows or should know, is the dominating factor in the survival or death of infancy. Now it may be briefly asserted that civilized woman, and more especially industrial woman, threatens to cease to be a mammal. If this assertion can be substantiated, and if the "economic independence of women" necessarily involves it, no biologist, no medical man, no first-hand student of life, will hesitate to condemn finally the ideal toward which Mrs. Gilman and those who think with her would have us go. Things may be bad, things are very bad: the lot of woman must be raised immensely, because the race must be raised, and cannot be raised otherwise; but progress is going forward and not backward, Mr. Chesterton notwithstanding. Woman will not become more than a mammal by becoming less, and going back on that great achievement of ascending life. Individuals may do so, and are doing so, lamentably misdirected as many of them now are; but that is the end of them and their kind. It is quite easy to stamp out motherhood and its inevitable economic dependence, but with it you stamp out the future.

It is generally admitted that our women nurse their babies less than they used to do. It is as generally admitted that this is often deliberate choice, and we all know that it is often economic necessity: the human mother "mingles in the natural industries of a human creature," such as the factory affords, and cannot simultaneously stay at home to nurse her baby, making men—for which, as a "natural industry" of women, even as against making, say, lead-glaze for china, there may be something to be said.

But whilst popular preachers and castigators of the sins of society fulminate against the fine lady who asks for belladonna and refuses to do her duty, we must enquire to what extent, if any, women no longer nurse their babies because they cannot, try they never so patiently and strenuously. It is the general belief amongst those whose daily work qualifies them for an opinion, that women are tending to lose the power of nursing. Professor von Bunge, whose name is honoured by all students of the action of drugs, has satisfied himself that alcoholism in the father is a great cause of incapacity to nurse in daughters. However that interpretation may be, the fact seems clear; and the change in this direction is evidently much more rapid than might be accounted for by the improvement in artificial feeding of infants leading to the survival of daughters of mothers unable to nurse, and transmitting their inability to their children. Mrs. Gilman—having ignored menstruation altogether—makes only one allusion to this vastly important subject, and we shall see to what extent her sanguine assumption is justified. According to her, "A healthy, happy, rightly occupied motherhood should be able to keep up this function (of nursing) longer than is now customary—to the child's great gain." There can be no question about the child's great gain; but what is the evidence for supposing that a mother earning her own living in free competition with men—which is what a "healthy, happy, rightly occupied motherhood" means in this connection—can thus spend her energies twice over, unlike any other source of energy known?

According to official statistics, maternal lactation is steadily decreasing in several German cities, notably in Berlin, where only 56.2 per cent. of infants under one month were suckled by their mothers in 1905, as against 65.6 per cent. in 1895, and 74.3 per cent. in 1885. At nine months of age 22.4 per cent. were suckled in 1905, 34.6 per cent. in 1895, 49 per cent. in 1885. Other towns show more favourable results; a general decrease, however, is marked. These facts cannot be ascribed, according to the author,[21] to a growing disinclination to breast-feeding, nor to the employment of mothers (in Prussia only 5 per cent. of the married women are employed in manufacture). The question whether the decrease in breast-feeding is due to the industrial employment of women before marriage, or to (inherited) degeneration, remains to be determined.

According to a recent statement by Professor von Bunge, the conditions are very similar now in Switzerland, where only about one mother in five can nurse her children.

Similar evidence could be cited from other sources, and the fact being admitted must evidently be reckoned with.

That the modern development of infant feeding will serve to replace natural lactation, must be denied, and this without prejudice to the magnificent work of the late Professor Budin of Paris and Professor Morgan Rotch of Harvard. These pioneers and their followers have devised some admirable second bests—admirable, that is, relatively to some of the pitiable methods which they have superseded, but relatively to the mother's breast not admirable at all. At the beginning of the campaign against infant mortality, the creche and the sterilized milk depot and the fractional analysis of cow's milk and its recomposition in suitable proportions of proteid, fat, etc., as devised by Rotch, were rightly acclaimed and admitted to save vast numbers of infant lives. All this is mere stop-gap, wonderfully effective, no doubt, but only stop-gap nevertheless. In France they are going ahead, and public opinion in London is being slowly persuaded to follow along the more recent French lines. The modern principle upon which we should act is Nature's principle—saving the children through their mothers. Expectant motherhood must be taken care of; we must feed, not the child, but the nursing mother, and the child through her. If we rightly take care of her, she will construct a perfect food for the child. There is no other path of racial safety. It is not our present concern to deal with the problems of infancy and childhood as they require, and surely we need not wait to prove that nursing motherhood cannot safely be superseded, but must be retained and safeguarded.

If this postulate be granted, we have to determine how it comes about that the German figures, for instance, are showing this extraordinarily rapid decline in maternal lactation. As has already been noted in passing, we must reject the suggestion that the natural type of women is changing. Such a change of natural type in any living race can occur only through selection for parenthood, and such selection in the case in question can scarcely be imagined to occur in the direction of choosing women who are naturally less capable of nursing. On the contrary, the tendency of the selective principle must always be toward the greater survival of infants whose mothers can nurse them, and who in their turn, if they are to be women, will be more likely to be able to nurse their children. Further, the action of selection cannot demonstrate itself more quickly than is permitted by the length of human generations. It must therefore be rejected as any interpretation of this case. If women are ceasing to be able to nurse their babies, and if this change is occurring with such extraordinary rapidity as the German figures indicate, plainly the explanation must be found in the action of some recent and novel condition or conditions upon womanhood.

Perhaps it need scarcely be insisted that the distinction here sought to be made is of the utmost importance. If the natural type of womanhood were actually changing, we could scarcely do more than observe and despair, but if it be merely that the capacities of this generation of women are being modified by the particular conditions to which they are subjected, plainly we who have made those conditions can modify them—"What man has made, man can destroy."

If we come to ask ourselves what these recent and novel conditions are, the answer is only too ready at hand. The principles which will guide us toward discovering it have been set forth at length in the earlier chapters of this book. Let us recur to our Geddes and Thomson, and at once we have the key. The production of milk is an act of anabolism or building-up, such as we have seen to be characteristic of the female sex, involving the accumulation and storage of quantities of energy so large that if they were stated in the units of the physicist they would astonish us. If we consider what the child achieves in the way of movement and development and growth, and if we realize that at the most rapid period of development and growth, all the energy therefor has been gathered, prepared, and is dispensed by the nursing mother, we shall begin to realize what an astonishing feat that is which she performs. It is in reality, of course, the same feat which is performed by the expectant mother, only that it is slightly less arduous, since after birth the child can breathe and digest for itself.

Perhaps the reader will begin to realize what Mrs. Gilman and those who think with her are asking us to believe when they say that the primal physical functions of maternity will be best fulfilled by the mother who "mingles in the natural industries of a human creature." This statement is either ridiculously false or can be rendered true by rendering it as a truism. The primal physical functions of maternity are the natural industries of the particular human creature we call a mother; and the better she fulfils them, the better she fulfils them, certainly. But the so-called natural industries in which the modern mother is desired to be engaged whilst she is bearing or nursing her children are as unnatural as anything can be. As at present practised, they are morbid products of civilization which it will require to cast off if it is to survive.

It is the student of life and its laws who must have the last word in these matters. If he utters it wrongly or is unheeded, Nature is not mocked, but will be avenged. The writer who can lay down a new principle on which our life is to be based, without paying any more attention to lactation than is to be found in the argument we have been considering, has left out the beginning, has omitted the foundations. No measure of earnestness or literary skill can save her case.

Of course the reply will be that the biological criticism is simply the ancient and oriental idea of woman as a helpless dependent, reasserted for male advantage in our own day. One cannot believe that it is necessary to rebut that accusation. It is necessary, however, to examine somewhat the words "economic dependence" and "economic independence" which are employed with such naive antithesis in this controversy.

When we examine Mrs. Gilman's proposal for the salvation of woman, we find it to mean that in future mothers are to do double work. The glorious consummation is to be that woman is no longer "parasitic on the male," which is Mrs. Gilman's way of expressing the great truth that the mother for whom the father works, represents the future supported by the present.

But the future is always supported by the present. Woman, we began by saying, is Nature's supreme organ of the future, and the present must live for her and die for her. When we say the future, we mean childhood. If childhood is to appear and to survive, womanhood must be dedicated to it, and manhood, which stands for the present, must supply its own link in the chain. The following paragraph from an unsigned article which appeared some years ago in the Morning Post states the case in a form which may convince the reader. It was headed "Repairs and Renewals of the People," and ran as follows:—

"It is, indeed, seldom sufficiently realized how much a nation, so to speak, lives always in and for the future. Broadly speaking, of every ten persons living in the United Kingdom now, four are less than twenty years of age, while three of the rest are women (two of them married women)—that is to say, people also mainly concerned, through the care of children, with the future rather than with the present. Upon the remaining three men, one of whom be it noted is over fifty-five, falls the bulk of the work of providing for immediate needs and so releasing the others to provide for the continuance of the race. A definite large share of all the present activities of a people is required and, as it were, pledged to provide for its renewal. If it fails to allow sufficient, it may, just like a company or a municipal concern with an inadequate depreciation fund, show large profits and great prosperity for a time; it cannot be regarded as a sound concern."

The reader must decide whether there is more light and leading in the interpretation that upon men falls the bulk of the work of providing for immediate needs, and so enabling women to provide for the continuance of the race, or, in Mrs. Gilman's version that woman is parasitic upon the male. The future, if she likes to state it in that way, is parasitic upon the present, always has been and always will be. The case which she imagines to be unique and morbid, peculiar to civilized mankind, is precisely the case of the hen bird who sits upon her eggs, incubating the future, whilst the male goes and forages for her. She is parasitic upon the male, as Mrs. Gilman would put it.

The truth is that, like many other women dominated by sex antagonism—which glares ferociously from such paragraphs as that which was quoted regarding "the brutal combative instinct or the intense sex-vanity of the male"—Mrs. Gilman, in seeking to further the interests of her sex, proposes to dispense with the help of its best friend, which is the other sex. It is not easy to speak with patience of those who thus seek to set the house of mankind against itself, to the injury of men, women and children alike.

No doubt it is true that Mrs. Gilman's attitude is engendered by sex antagonism as we see it everywhere in men—though for some obscure reason it is only so labelled when displayed by women. No doubt, also, a much better case can be made out for Mrs. Gilman's proposals, up to a point, than could be made out for corresponding proposals on the other side. No one who thinks for a moment can question that all proposals whatsoever to make either sex independent of the other are stark madness; yet there is a certain short-lived plausibility in the argument that women are to be independent of men, and this depends upon the fact which we have already attempted to demonstrate and interpret by means of Mendelism, that women are more than men, and that womanhood includes latent manhood. If, therefore, we are careful with the argument and boldly rush past the really crucial places, such as the conditions and needs of expectant and nursing motherhood, we can make out what looks like a case for the economic dependence of women. Each sex is to work for itself, and then there need be no more quarrelling.

But we could not go even so far with any theory for making men independent of women without seeing that we were no less wrong on that side than Mrs. Gilman is on the other. Man's apparent economic independence of women is as complete a myth as women's projected economic independence of men. In the last resort, when we come down to realities, and remember that both men and women are mortal, and that unless they are replaced, everything ends, we see that the introduction of the word economic into this question simply serves to confuse thought, just as the older political economy confused thought and laid itself open to the mercilessly magnificent attacks of Ruskin. Economy is literally the law of the house or the home—where life begins. Of all economies, life is the last judge, because there is no wealth but life. In the last resort the economic dependence of the sexes means nothing because the sexes cannot independently reproduce themselves.

If Mrs. Gilman is to be arraigned for her error let us see to it most carefully that we do not fail to arraign the men who, with not one-thousandth part of her excuse and with no iota of her ability, fall into the corresponding error on their side. When Women's Suffrage is being debated, there never fails a supply of men who write to the papers to say that men must vote and not women because men and not women "made the State." How much simpler our problems would be if there were some means of distinguishing children who will grow up into men of this type, and carefully refraining from teaching them to read or write! Make the State, indeed!—they can make nothing but fools of themselves, and without women's assistance could not even reproduce their folly. Of course the retort to all this nonsense is that neither sex ever yet created anything without the other. Every human act and achievement is the product of both sexes. When some friend of the past assures us that women should not vote because they cannot bear arms, he is of course reminded that women bear the soldiers. It is true and it is unanswerable. In just the same way, when Mrs. Gilman wishes women to be economically independent of men, whom she considers as animals distinguished by their destructive energy, brutality and intense sex vanity, she is simply ignoring half the truth. Let either sex try to run the earth alone till Halley's comet returns, and what would be left for it to see? Of all follies uttered on this subject, and they are many, the cry, each sex for itself, is the wickedest and worst.

The reader may well declare that such criticism is easy, but of little worth unless it be accompanied by some kind of constructive proposals for the amelioration of present conditions. Nothing is destroyed until it is replaced. If the present economic conditions of women involve the most hideous wickedness and cruelty and injure the entire progress of mankind, as they assuredly do, and if they therefore must be destroyed, we must have something to replace them with; and if Mrs. Gilman's proposals would simply make the difficulty a thousand times worse by depriving women of men's help, what proposals are there to offer instead?

The reply is that we must go back to first principles. We must drop all our phrases about economic independence or dependence. They have urgent and real meanings for each one of us at any given time, but when applied to the problems of the reconstruction of society as a whole, they mean nothing because they are based upon no vital truths whatever. A man may be economically secure when he is producing absinthe or whisky, or he may die of starvation because he is producing the songs of Schubert. Economic independence and dependence mean very much to the prosperous distiller whom men pay for poison, and to the immortal composer whom men do not pay at all, but who yet produces that which nourishes the life of all the future. The maker of death may live, and the maker of life may die; we see it every day and history is the continuous record of it. These economic dependences and independences consist only in the relations of one man or woman to the others. They have nothing to do with the real issue, which is the relation of mankind as a whole to Nature. These economic questions are simply concerned with money—the means whereby one man has more or less claim upon another: society may have to be reconstructed in such a fashion that economic independence and dependence, as at present understood, would have no meaning whatever. Yet all the real economic questions would remain, even though money or private property were abolished. The real economy is the making and preserving of life and the means of life. We live in a chaos where the elementary conditions of human existence are constantly forgotten. The real politics, the real economy, the real political economy, are the questions of the birth-rate and the wheat supply—the relations not between man and man, or class and class, or sex and sex, but mankind, living and dying and being born, and the world in which he has to live. The time is near at hand when the first conditions of national life will be recognized as they have never been since the dawn of modern industrialism. The products of men's labour and women's labour will be appraised and paid for in proportion to their real value, their strength or availableness for life.

In "Unto This Last" and "Munera Pulveris," Ruskin has laid down, on what are really unchallengeable biological grounds, the foundations of the political economy of the future. We are going to have done with the industries which eat up men. We cannot much longer afford to grow whisky where we might grow wheat, for there are ever more mouths to be fed, and wheat is running short. Cheap and dear mean nothing when we get down to realities. Is a thing vital or is it mortal?—that is the only question. It may be vital and costless, like air, or mortal and dear, like alcohol. The question is not how much money can you get from another man for your product, but how much life can mankind get from Nature for it. Thus we shall return to a sane appreciation of the primary importance of agriculture as against manufacture, of food as against anything else,—for unless one is fed, of what use is anything else? And as nations gradually begin to discover that the means of life are the really valuable things, they will go on to learn, what primitive races, hard-pressed races, races making their way in the world against heavy odds, have always known—that at all costs the insatiable destructiveness of Death must be compensated for by Birth. If the means of life are the real wealth, the life itself is more real still, and unless we abolish death, the makers and bearers and nourishers of life are at all times and everywhere the producers, the manufacturers, the workers of the community above and beyond all others. And these are the women in their great functions as mothers and foster-mothers, nurses, teachers.

The economics of the future will be based upon these elemental and perdurable truths. No writer in his senses will then be guilty of such immeasurable folly as to place the "natural industries of a human creature" in antithesis to "the primal physical functions of maternity." The sex which came first and remains first in the immediacy and indispensableness of its relations to the coming life will base its economic claims—in the vulgar and narrow sense of that term—upon the worth of those relations. The society which cannot afford to pay for—that is, to sustain—the characteristic functions of womanhood, cannot continue; and societies have continued and will continue in proportion as they hold hard by these first conditions of their lives. The case of Jewish womanhood is the supreme illustration of a thesis which requires no experimental demonstration, but is necessarily true.

Here, then, is the solution, as the future will prove, of the problem of the economic status of woman. At present, though Ellen Key is the only feminist writer who recognizes it, women can compete successfully with men only at the cost of complete womanhood,—and that is a price which society as a whole cannot afford to pay, if it wishes to continue. Therefore we must, in effect, pay women in advance for their work, the actual realization of the value of which is always necessarily deferred. The case is parallel to that of expenditure upon forestry. In the planting of trees or the nurture of babies the State will get value for its money in the long run, but it must be prepared to wait. States are slowly becoming more provident, and already we are coming to see this about trees. Soon we shall see it about babies, and the problem of the economic status of woman will then be solved in practice as it is assuredly soluble in principle.

Mankind must first learn to renounce Mammon and set up Life as its God; but to that also we shall come—or perish, for Life is a jealous God and visits the sins of the fathers upon the third and fourth generation.



CHAPTER XXI

THE CHIEF ENEMY OF WOMEN

If we believe that the sexes are mutually dependent and, in the long run, can neither be injured nor befriended apart, we shall be prepared to expect that the chief enemy of civilized mankind is no less inimical to women than to men. So long as it was supposed that drinking merely injured the drinker, and so long as the drinkers were almost entirely men, it could be argued by persons sufficiently foolish that indulgence in alcohol was a male vice or delight which really did not concern women at all—if men choose to drink or to smoke or to bet or to play games, what business is that of women? It is an argument which would not appeal to the mind of the primitive law-giver, and can be accepted by no one who thinks to-day.

For the least effects of drink are those which are seen in the drinker. The question of alcoholism is not one of the abuse of a good thing, here and there injuring those who take it to excess, but is a national question which affects the entire community, abstainers, and drinkers, men, women and children, present and to come. No one who has seriously studied the action of alcohol on civilization can question that it is our chief external enemy. We must use the word external for the best of good reasons, since we know that always and everywhere man's chief foes are those of his own household—his own proneness to injure himself and others. And alcohol, indeed, would not be our chief external enemy were it not for the very fact that its malign power is chiefly exerted by a degradation of the man within. It is a material thing and no part of our psychological nature. So long as it is kept outside us it has the most admirable uses, which are yearly becoming more various and important; but, taken within, it alters the human constitution, and hereby achieves its title as our worst enemy.

People who estimate the influence of alcohol by means of the alcoholic death-rate or by the rate of convictions for drunkenness will not readily accept the doctrine that alcohol is a greater enemy of women than of men. Yet assuredly this is true. It is an axiomatic and first principle that whatever injures one sex injures the other, and whilst drinking on the part of women at present injures men as a whole in comparatively small degree, the consumption of alcohol by men works enormous injury upon women indirectly, in addition to that direct injury which civilized women are yearly inflicting more gravely upon themselves, at any rate in Great Britain.

Woman, we have argued, is Nature's supreme organ of the future, and just as she is mediate between men and the future, so men are mediate between her and the present. For the individual woman and the present, the quality of the manhood which constitutes her human environment is more important than anything else. If the manhood is withdrawn and she is thrown upon her own resources, there is disaster; if the manhood be damaged or degenerate, so much the worse for the woman; if the manhood be of the best, there and only there are the best conditions provided for the highest womanhood.

First, then, let us observe how alcohol injures women by its contribution to the male death-rate. Allusion has already been made to a simple statistical enquiry which I made a few years ago in regard to the influence of alcohol as a maker of widows and orphans. The results of that enquiry may here be quoted, having only appeared in the daily press hitherto. They will suffice to show that alcohol on this ground alone is a great enemy of women, and especially of wives. The following is the conclusion published in several papers in England in November, 1908:—