"Some time ago we heard a good deal, both in and out of Parliament, about the debenture widow whose little all is invested in brewery securities. There is, on the other hand, the widow so made by alcohol. I am not aware that anyone has attempted to estimate the approximate number of each of these two classes. The following is merely a rude approximation.

It has been stated that there are half a million persons who have invested money in the licensed trade. Let us allow that half of these are men. The death-rate of all males, above fifteen years of age, is slightly over sixteen per 1,000. At the census of 1901, 536 in each 1,000 males aged fifteen years and upwards were found to be married. Ignoring the differential death-rate of the married as compared with bachelors and widows, it follows that about 4,100 male investors in the licensed trade die each year, of whom some 2,197 will be married men, leaving behind them the same number of widows entirely or partly dependent on these investments.

The widows made by drink are nearly six times as many.

Numerous inquiries at home and abroad agree somewhat closely in stating 14 per cent. of the entire death-rate to be due to alcohol. The proportion of one in seven is accepted by Dr. Archdall Eeid, who considers that all efforts to restrain drinking increase drunkenness. I do not think the justness of this figure can be disputed at all, except as an under-estimate. We are here dealing with male deaths only, and I will do my contention the obvious injustice of supposing that the proportion of deaths due wholly or in part to alcohol is no higher amongst men than amongst women. If one could allow for the existing difference, the result would be even more terrible.

Taking the figures for 1906 for England and Wales alone, we have 167,307 deaths of males over fifteen; 23,422 of these wholly or partly due to alcohol, and of this number 12,554 were married men (i. e., 536 per 1,000). The average size of a family in England and Wales is 4.62, according to Whitaker. If we multiply the number of widows, 12,554, by 3.62, we shall have an approximation to the number of widows and orphans made by alcohol in 1906. There were 45,445, or over 124 widows and orphans made by alcohol every day in the year.

We may now note some further data helping us to compare the 12,554 alcohol-made widows with the 2,197 whose husbands' fortunes were wholly or in part bound up with the welfare of the licensed trade. (Of these latter, also, of course, a large proportion would be alcohol-made.)

Dr. Tatham's recently published letter on occupational mortality in the three years, 1900, 1901, 1902, informs us as to twenty-one occupations in which the alcoholic death-rate is grossly excessive. In these twenty-one occupations selected by Dr. Tatham as having an alcohol mortality which exceeds the standard by at least 50 per cent., we can work out the alcohol factor and find that it amounts to 24.5 per cent. The table would take up too much space for me to ask you to print it, but it is ready on demand, public or private. The figures work out to show that 5,092 married men in these twenty-one trades died in each year from alcohol. (I have taken 24.5 per cent, of the whole number of deaths in the three years, and reckoned the married proportion of these.)

The calculation shows that in these twenty-one occupations the comparative alcohol mortality is 24.5 per cent., as against only 12 per cent. in all other occupations.

Amongst the occupations in Dr. Tatham's table may be noted coalheaver, coach, cab, etc., service, groom, butcher, messenger, tobacconist, general labourer, general shopkeeper, brewer, chimney sweep, dock labourer, hawker, publican, inn and hotel servants. A glance at the table will show that in most cases the men who are dying are "industrial drinkers," who frequent public-houses in the districts where the reduction in the number of the licenses under the present Bill will occur. Often nowadays the widows are heavy drinkers, and the lives of their children centre round the public-house.

If the only wealth of a nation is its life, and history teaches no more certain truth—and if, since individuals are mortal, the quantity and quality of parenthood—or of childhood, according to the point of view—are the supreme factors in the destiny of nations, do not the foregoing figures warrant the contention that he who at this date is for alcohol is against England?"

It has been shown that the effect of alcohol upon the brain persists for not less than thirty hours after the last dose. But more than two years have now passed since the foregoing was printed, leaving ample time for any member of the alcoholic party to "pull himself together" and demolish it. One is therefore entitled to assume that it cannot be demolished; on the contrary, it could easily be shown that the foregoing figures very considerably underrate the actual number of widows and orphans who must be made by alcohol in this country every year.

All students of modern life, however greatly they differ in their methods and objects, are agreed that the question of the economic position of women is one of the gravest of our time. While this is so, it may be added that only the Eugenist can adequately realize the importance of this question, since he knows that with it is involved the all-important matter of the selection amongst present women for the motherhood of the future. Unfortunately, as we have seen, the modern trend is quite definitely in the direction of those of our guides, whom most of us follow, knowingly or unknowingly, because they have the brains and we have not, in favouring the economic position of women at the expense of male responsibility. Meanwhile we have the economic basis of society as it is, and there is no more serious indictment against alcohol than this which I have attempted to formulate against it on the ground of its destruction of fatherhood. Whatever the rest of the community may incline to, it assuredly seems that the wives, from palace to hovel, ought to be enemies of this great enemy of theirs. The time will certainly come when the woman who is bringing up children will be placed in a position of economic security, and when indeed all other persons will be less secure than she because the sane State of the future will guarantee, and regard as the first charge upon itself, the maintenance of the conditions necessary for the production of the next generation. But in the chaos in which we welter, widows and orphans have to take their chance. Who will say a good word for the substance which makes them by tens of thousands in England and Wales alone every year?

At least one economic aspect of this question may, however, be dealt with here. In a rightly constituted society people are held responsible for their deeds. Parenthood is a deed; in a very true sense it is a more deliberate, a more active, more self-determined deed, on the part of the father than on the part of the mother. At present the only act for which men are held irresponsible—for our practice amounts to that—is the act for which, above all others, they should be held responsible. A large amount of the money now spent by men on alcohol and tobacco, and other things which shorten their lives, and are needed only because they create a need for themselves, is really required for the interests of the race. Such is the double destruction worked by the alcoholic form of this waste that if the average sum, say six shillings a week, expended in the working-class family on alcohol, were invested on behalf of the possible widows and orphans, not only would they be provided for, but the fathers would be saved, and they would not become widows and orphans. In days to come it will be discovered that such matters as these are the real political economy, the absence or presence of tariffs, the incidence of taxation and the like, being matters of no consequence or significance whatever compared with the question, fundamental in all times and places for every nation and for every individual: For what are you spending: for bread or a stone, for life or for death?

The foregoing has been chosen for the forefront of this chapter because of its bearing on a central economic problem of the time, and also because, for some reason or other, this alcoholic destruction of fatherhood, though it is of the utmost importance, has hitherto escaped the attention of sociological students. We pass now to a second point, of a wholly different character, which particularly well illustrates certain of the general principles with which we began. The supreme importance of alcohol or of anything else for human happiness is attained only through its influence on the selves of men and women. It is upon these that our happiness depends—upon the nature and the nurture, from hour to hour, of our selves and the selves with which we have to deal. Above all, do women as individuals depend for their happiness upon the selves of men, as we have suggested.

Now if there be anything certain about the action of alcohol upon the brain, it is that it degrades the quality of the self. Much of the cruder pathology of alcohol is open to doubt. A great many of the supposed degenerative changes in nerve-cells, which were attributed to it and thought to be irrevocable, are now interpreted otherwise. Chronic alcoholism is looked upon by such foremost students as Dr. F. W. Mott, less as a disease due to organic changes produced in the brain than as a chronic functional derangement due to the continued action of a poison. This newer interpretation of chronic alcoholism has the very important practical corollary of encouraging us to the belief, which is frequently justifiable, that if the chronic intoxication ceases, the individual may completely or all but completely recover, as would not be the case if the fine structure of his brain had been actually destroyed. The recent modification of our views on this subject has, however, only served to render clearer our understanding of the mental symptoms of alcoholism. Here is a drug which poisons the organ of the mind. The action of a single dose persists for a far longer period than used to be supposed, and thus we now know that in the great majority of civilized men everywhere, the nervous system, which is the home of the self, is continuously under the influence of alcohol.

That influence, as we have said, consistently shows itself in a degradation of the quality of the self. The poison deranges first the latest and highest products of evolution; it beheads a man, as we may say, in thin slices from above downwards. Beginning as it does with the most human, and only at the very last attacking the most animal part of our nervous constitution, it is essentially the bestializer, save only that the alcoholized human being is much lower than the beast, on the general principle, Corruptio optimi pessima—the corruption of the best is the worst.

Now wherever alcohol is consumed women have to pay the penalty for its daily deterioration in the human scale of the men with whom they live; nor need any reader of even the smallest experience require any writer's assurance that in vast numbers of such cases the woman suffers more than the man. He has its moments of compensation, inadequate though they be; she has none.

Whilst women suffer in every respect from the influence of alcohol as a degrader of their men, most of all do they and the race suffer through the action of alcohol upon the racial instinct. In my book on personal hygiene was sought an interpretation of the difference between low and high types of mankind largely in terms of their success or failure in achieving what may be called the "transmutation" of the racial instinct. In less metaphorical language this transmutation depends upon the measure of self-control and deference of present desire to future purpose. These are supremely human characteristics, and there are none which alcohol more surely and early attacks. Men are not so constituted that they are at all likely to profit by any substance which keeps their racial instinct on its original and less than human plane, and certainly women suffer in many ways, and with them necessarily the future suffers, just because of this action of alcohol upon men.

The argument need not be elaborated, but it may be added that the disastrous action upon young womanhood of the consumption of alcohol by young manhood is greatly increased when we find, as we do, that the young women start drinking too. In these modern days, when the controlling influence of religion and especially of religious fear is steadily relaxing, the young woman's best protection is to be found in her own judgment and self-control and prevision of the future. But these are the very defences which alcohol in her nervous system saps. Every social worker is familiar with the daily truth that young womanhood connives at its own ruin under the influence of alcohol, where otherwise it need not have fallen.

This last consideration leads us to the study of a phenomenon which in many respects is new and unprecedented, while none could be of worse omen.

It has for long been alleged that the amount of drinking amongst women is increasing. When writing an academic thesis on the consequences of city life, I attempted to discover definite evidence on this point. Nothing that could be called precise was forthcoming, though the evidence was abundant that the general assertion is correct. Drinking amongst women means, of course, drinking amongst mothers. It means drinking by unborn children. No one concerned with the fundamentals of national well-being can ignore anything so minatory. Within the last few years, much attention has been directed to the subject, and the Church of England Temperance Society, for instance, sent out a form of inquiry to the medical profession as to their experience in this matter. It may now be stated, without any fear of contradiction, that drinking has greatly increased amongst women of all classes during the last twenty years, and especially, it seems probable, during the latter half of that period. Along with it has gone an increase in the amount of drug-taking; some, at any rate, of the drugs being not dissimilar to alcohol in their action upon mind and body.

It is here necessary not so much to discuss the causes of this fact as to insist upon its consequences and indicate some possible remedies. So far as one can judge there seem to be three principal causes for this increase of drinking amongst women, and quite briefly they may be named in order to guide the subsequent discussion, though it is not necessary to occupy space here in discussing all the evidence for this diagnosis.

A cause of some importance at work amongst women of the middle and upper classes would seem to be the general tendency to revolt against sex restrictions and limitations. In order to prove themselves the equals of men, women proceed to demonstrate that they are capable of imitating men's vices and indulgences. The trainer of chimpanzees for the music-hall acts on the same principle. Directly the animals can smoke and drink, they are such good imitations of men, in his judgment and that of his patrons, as to be worthy of exhibition. Any ape, any boy, any man, can learn to smoke and drink. It may be taken for granted that any woman can do likewise, but the actual demonstration is worse than superfluous.

Much more important as a cause of the increased drinking amongst women of the lower classes are the modern conditions of factory and industrial life which so largely take women out of the home; the making of life being neglected in order to serve some industry or other which, if it costs the loss of the coming life, is a national cancer, however grateful its expansion may appear to the capitalist or the Chancellor of the Exchequer. As the nation cares nothing for its girlhood nor for directing employment and education for the supreme business of motherhood, upon which the national existence is always staked, vast numbers of women in early adolescence are now exposed to the very conditions of temptation outside the home to which so many of their brothers have succumbed. The factory girl learns to drink, and when she marries she takes her drinking habits with her into her home. Modern industrialism, therefore, is to be cited as one of the causes for the increase in drinking amongst women. It may be noted that, in Italy, the temperate race which, according to one elegant but baseless theory, has been evolved through ages of past drinking, is proving itself intemperate when its members are exposed in towns to the industrial conditions which look like national success and the continuance of which would mean national ruin.

A third cause of this increase is to be found in the greatly enhanced facility with which alcoholic drinks can now be obtained by women, not merely outside the home, but within it. So far as Great Britain is concerned we must trace disastrous consequences to the "heaven-born finance" of a former illustrious Chancellor of the Exchequer, who made a little money for the State by selling to grocers permission to sell alcoholic liquors. That was a great blow at womanhood and especially motherhood; not to mention its lamentable effect in raising the death-rate amongst grocers in that intensely obvious and inevitable manner, the increase of temptation, which nothing can persuade the enemies of temperance reform to understand.

It is bad enough that women should be able to obtain alcohol as they do by means of devices which may often prevent their habits from being discovered at all until irreparable mischief has been done. Here the cunning and the greed of commercialism have set to work to fool the public and poison it by a systematic practice which is injurious to all sections of the community, but especially to women, and which cannot be too widely reprobated and exposed. All honour is due to the British Medical Journal, the official organ of the British Medical Association, for its recent attention to this subject. No one can challenge it when it makes the following assertion regarding meat-wines and other specifics containing alcohol, which are now so widely advertised and consumed:—"It may be pointed out that by the use of these meat-wines the alcoholic habit may be encouraged and established, and that it is a mistake to suppose that they possess any high nutritive qualities." The following are analyses to which everyone ought to be able to have reference, and further information regarding which may be found in the British Medical Journal for March 27 and May 29, 1909. Let the reader first note what proportions of alcohol are contained in the accepted wines, the danger of which is admitted by all, and then let him compare those figures with the figures which follow:—

ALCOHOL IN ORDINARY WINES

Port 20 per cent. or 3-1/4} Sherry 20 " " " 3-1/4}Fluid drachms Champagne 10/15 " " " 1-3/4}in a wineglassful. Hock 10 " " " 1-1/2} Claret 9 " " " 1-1/2}

ALCOHOL IN MEAT WINES

Bendle's 20.3 per cent. or 3-1/4} Bivo 19.2 " " " 3 } Bovril 20.15 " " " 3-1/4}Fluid drachms Glendenning's 20.8 " " " 3-1/3}in a wineglassful. Lemco 17.26 " " " 2-3/4} Vin Regno 16.05 " " " 2-1/2} Wincarnis 19.6 " " " 3 }

ALCOHOL IN TONIC WINES

Armbrecht's Coca Wine 15.05% Bugeaud's Wine 14.80% Baudon's Wine 12.75% Busart's Wine 16.85% Christy's Kola Wine 18.85% Hall's Wine 17.85% Mariani's Coca Wine 16.40% Marza Wine 17.48% Nourry's Iodinated Wine 11.50% Quina Laroche 16.90% St. Raphael Quinquina Wine 16.89% St. Raphael Tannin Wine 14.65% Savar's Coca Wine 23.40% Serravallo's Bark and Iron 17.26% Vana 19.20% Vibrona 19.30%

In order to complete our reference to this subject, the following may be quoted from an excellent little pamphlet which is published by the National Temperance League. The United States Government Laboratory affords striking evidence of the large percentages of alcohol contained in specifics which are stated to be largely used by persons who profess to be total abstainers. Of these the following are given as examples:—

Paine's Celery Compound 21.00% Peruna 23.00% Brown's Blood Purifier 23.00% Brown's Vervain Restorer 25.75% Hostetter's Bitters 44.30%

But indeed we are far from having covered the ground in Great Britain alone. There are many well-known preparations which consist almost entirely of alcohol and water, together with small quantities of flavouring matter nominally medicinal. Thus we find, for instance, the following proportions of alcohol in—

Powell's Balsam of Aniseed 40.0% Dill's Diabetic Mixture 35.0% Congreve's Balsamic Elixir 25.5% Steven's Consumption Cure 21.3% Hood's Sarsaparilla 19.6%

There are also other compounds such as Crosby's Balsamic Cough Elixir, Townsend's American Sarsaparilla, and Warner's Safe Cure, which contain from 8 to 10-1/2 per cent. of alcohol. As the British Medical Journal justly points out, in a mixture of which a table-spoonful is to be taken five or six times a day a proportion of 10 per cent. of alcohol is by no means negligible.

Let it be noted further that though most malt extracts are free from alcohol, that which is called "bynin" contains 8.3 per cent, and "standard liquid" 5 per cent. The British Medical Journal has also shown that there is at least one "inebriety cure" in Great Britain which consists of a liquid containing just under 30 per cent. of alcohol.

On this whole subject it is impossible to speak too strongly, more especially when one is concerned with the interests of woman and womanhood. It is true that in consequence of the labours of those few keen workers whom the impotent and the meaningless and the selfish call fanatics, we are making a beginning in the matter of education on Temperance. But apart from that, which amounts only to very little as yet, it is the lamentable truth that the State does absolutely nothing whatever to protect the community and especially its women from the manifold evils which are involved in such figures as those here quoted. The State wants money, and life is a trifle. Anything that can pay toll to the State may therefore go without further question. A tax has been paid on all the alcohol in these things. In many cases, also, a further tax has been paid for the government stamp on patent medicines. That the medicine may be dangerous, that it may be a cruel swindle, that it may take from consumptives and others money which is sorely needed for air and food, and give them in return what is worse than nothing—all these things are nothing to the State if the tax is paid.

Preparations such as those which have been mentioned above have no place or status whatever in scientific medicine. Their constituents are known and their action is known. The public pays for sarsaparilla, for instance, and simply gets a 20 per cent. solution of flavoured alcohol, and there is no one to inform it that sarsaparilla has been exhaustively studied by pharmacologists, employing every means of observation and experiment in their power, and that none of them have yet been able to detect its capacity to modify the body or any function of the body in any degree at all whether in health or disease. This is only one of many instances that might be named; every preparation of which the composition is not stated is suspect. Men are paying for these things at this moment under the impression that they are buying valuable tonics which will save their wives from the consequences of the drink craving and help to avert it. Large numbers of women are ruining themselves in purse and in body quite secretly under cover of these scandalous abuses which are allowed to go on from year to year, and which are undoubtedly doing more injury to the feminine—that is to say, to the more important—half of the community in each succeeding year. At least let the facts be known. Let liberty be believed in and encouraged; but if these things are to be made and sold and bought, let their composition be stated on the bottles. The composition of milk is supervised by the State; margarine, which is harmless and an excellent food, may not be sold as butter; alcohol, which is noxious, may be sold under any lying name, but so long as the State gets its percentage, it is well pleased. The official organ of the medical profession in this country has done well to draw renewed attention to this subject. Surely it ought to be possible for the profession and the advocates of temperance to join hands for the promotion of legislation in a direction where reform cannot otherwise be obtained. Something, one hopes and believes, can be done by merely writing on the subject. A certain number of women who read this book will be deterred from buying these things on finding that they are simply "masked alcohol" and that their medicinal virtues are less than nil. But though all that is to the good, only legislation can meet the real need. These preparations offer insidious means of teaching women to drink, and when the habit is established, nothing can be accomplished by revealing to the victim the history of its origin. The minimum demand for legislation should be, at the very least, that all preparations of this kind should have their composition stated with every portion of them that is vended to the public. Assuredly the champions of womanhood will have to take this matter up soon, and the sooner the better. There is no need to be a fanatic, there is no need even to be a teetotaler, in order to satisfy oneself that here is a crying abuse which is ruining the unwarned and the unprotected up and down the land, and which is quite definitely and obviously within the capacity of legislation to control effectively and finally.

Let us turn now to the general question of the organic or physiological relations between womanhood and alcohol. Both sexes of human beings are identical in a vast majority of their characters, and the various reactions to alcohol come within this number. There is no need to repeat here any of the facts and conclusions which have been set forth at length elsewhere. What was said there applies to women as to men. That is true so far as the individual is concerned and it is also true that, so far as the race is concerned, the germ-plasm or germ-cells in both sexes alike may be injured by the continued consumption of large quantities of alcohol.

There remains the important fact, which it is the present writer's constant effort to bring to the notice of Eugenists, that alcohol has special relations to motherhood, to which there can necessarily be no correspondence in the case of the other sex, and though motherhood, as such, is not the subject of this book, yet it would be most pedantically to limit the usefulness which one hopes it may possess if we were to omit the discussion, as brief as possible, of the effect of alcohol upon womanhood at the time when womanhood is expressing itself in its supreme function.

In my book on Eugenics there is merely the briefest allusion in a foot-note to this subject, and I confess myself now ashamed of having dealt with it in that utterly inadequate fashion. In practical eugenics,—though sooth to say when eugenics begins to become practical many professing eugenists seem to think that it is wandering from the point—the great fact of expectant motherhood must be reckoned with. To decline to do so is in effect to declare that we are greatly concerned with bringing the right germ-cells together, but have nothing to do with what may or may not happen to the product of their union. We desire, however, not merely conjugated germ-cells, but worthy men and women, and expectant motherhood is therefore part of the eugenic province. Unfortunately it is easier to invent terms and categories and get people to accept them than to control their use of one's terms thereafter. Otherwise, I should forbid the use of the term Eugenist at all by anyone who is unprepared to move a finger or utter a word on behalf of the care and the protection of expectant motherhood.

It is quite true that the question of expectant motherhood has nothing to do with heredity in the proper sense of that term. We are dealing now with "nurture," not with "nature," but we are dealing with a department of nurture which can only be understood when we realize that human beings begin their lives nine months or so before they are born, and that the first stage of their nurture is coincident with what we call expectant motherhood, whilst the second stage of their nurture, normally and properly, ought to be coincident with what we may call nursing motherhood.

Let us then acquaint ourselves with the fact, fully established by experimental and chemical observation, that alcohol given to the expectant mother finds its way into the organism of the child. Thus, as we should expect, alcohol can readily be demonstrated in a newborn child when the drug has been given to the mother just before its birth.

It must be understood that the circulation of the mother and of her child are each complete and self-contained. They come into relation in the double organ called the placenta, and it has been exhaustively proved that this organ is so constituted as in large measure to protect the child from injurious influences acting upon and in the mother. We may therefore speak of the placenta as a filter. Its protective action explains the facts, so familiar to medical men and philanthropic workers, that healthy and undamaged children are often born to mothers who are stricken with mortal disease—most notably, perhaps, in the case of consumption. It becomes a most important matter to ascertain the limits of the placental power, and by observation upon human beings and experiment upon the lower animals this matter has been very thoroughly elucidated of late years. There are many kinds of poison, and many varieties of those living poisons that we call microbes, which the placenta does not allow to pass through from the mother's blood-vessels into those of the child, and which are unable, fortunately for the child, to break down the placental resistance. On the other hand, there are certain microbes and certain poisons which readily pass through the placenta. Conspicuous amongst these are alcohol, lead and arsenic, and it is especially important to realize that alcohol injures the child not merely by its own passage through the placenta, but by injuring that organ, so that its efficiency as a filter is impaired. On the whole subject of expectant motherhood and the morbid influences which may act upon it, the greatest living authority is my friend and teacher, Dr. J. W. Ballantyne of Edinburgh. He contributed an important paper on this subject to our first National Conference on Infantile Mortality held in 1906.[22] I only wish it were possible to reproduce in full here Dr. Ballantyne's paper on the Ante-Natal Causes of Infantile Mortality. The unread critic who is so ready with the word fanatic whenever alcohol is attacked might begin to derive from it some faint idea of the quality and massiveness of the evidence upon which our case is based. Here it must suffice merely to quote the verdict at which Dr. Ballantyne arrives after surveying all the evidence on the subject that had been obtained up to the year 1906. He summarizes as follows:—

"It must then be concluded that parental and especially maternal alcoholism of the kind to which the name of chronic drunkenness or persistent soaking is applied, is the source of both ante-natal and post-natal mortality. It acts in all the three ways in which I indicated that ante-natal causes can be shown to act in relation to the increase of infantile mortality, viz.,.by causing abortions., by predisposing to premature labours, and by weakening the infant by disease or deformity so that it more readily succumbs to ordinary morbid influences at and after birth. By causing diseases of the kidneys and of the placenta it also leads to that failure of the filter to which I have already referred; the placenta being damaged, not only does the alcohol more readily pass through it itself, but it is also possible for other poisons, germs, and toxins to cross over into the fatal economy. So it comes about that the most disastrous consequences are entailed upon the unborn infant in connection with syphilis, lead-poisoning, fevers, and the like in the intemperate mother."

The foregoing was written as long ago as 1906, and various workers have helped to confirm it since that date.

We must further learn that alcohol taken by the mother who nurses her child has an organic relation to the child after birth. It is true, indeed, that according to a celebrated observer, Professor von Bunge, the influence of alcoholism in preceding generations is such that the daughters of such a stock are mostly unable to nurse their children. It is not quite certain that Professor von Bunge has proved his case, but it is definitely proved that even if alcoholism in the maternal grandparent has not altogether prevented a child from being fed in the natural fashion, it may yet suffer gravely in consequence of receiving alcohol in its mother's milk. In the case of the nursing mother, there is one fresh avenue of excretion which the organism can employ for ridding itself of the poison, and to the efforts of the lungs and the kidneys are added those of the breasts. Alcohol can be readily traced in the mother's milk within twenty minutes of its entry into her stomach, and may be detected in it for as long as eight hours after a large dose. Many cases are on record where infants at the breast have thus become the subjects of both acute and chronic alcoholic poisoning. We have numerous reports of convulsions and other disorders occurring in infants when the nurse has taken liquor, and ceasing when she has been put on a non-alcoholic diet. A most distinguished lady, Dr. Mary Scharlieb, may be quoted in this connection, or the reader may indeed refer to the chapter, "Alcoholism in Relation to Women and Children," contributed by her to the volume "The Drink Problem" in my New Library of Medicine. She says, "The child, then, absolutely receives alcohol as part of his diet with the worst effect upon his organs, for alcohol has a greater effect upon cells in proportion to their immaturity." Further, as she points out, "the milk of the alcoholic mother not only contains alcohol, but it is otherwise unsuitable for the infant's nourishment; it does not contain the proper proportions of proteid, sugar, fat, etc., and it is therefore not suited for the building up of a healthy body."

It is plain that here we cannot avoid criticism of an almost universal medical practice. Our concern in the present volume is not with children but women; and in dealing with the effects of maternal alcoholism upon childhood, the main intention is being kept in view. As regards the giving of alcohol to the nursing mother, there is no doubt that the child is more seriously in danger than she is. There is no doubt also that, as one has often pointed out, the Children Act which forbids the giving of alcohol to children under five years old is being broken when the nursing mother takes alcohol. I refer to this subject here because only thus can we come to a decision on the question whether the nursing mother owes the taking of alcohol as a duty to her child. She may be a teetotaler; she may fear to take alcohol; and she may be authoritatively told that it is her duty to do so because the quality of her milk will be improved. In such a case she may yield, though often with a wry face; and thus we have the frequent beginning of disasters to which there is no end.

The truth is that the medical profession has long erred in this respect. Judgment has gone by superficials. Undoubtedly there is a greater bulk of milk when stout and porter are taken. But everyone knows that ordinary household milk may come from the cow or from the pump. The question is not how much bulk is there, but what does the bulk consist of? Definite chemical evidence, which may be repeated a thousand times, and which is allowed to go unchallenged by the vast host of doctors who are prescribing alcohol for nursing mothers all over the world, shows us that its influence is to increase the bulk of the milk while reducing the amount of its nutritive constituents, and adding to them one which is poisonous. The increase of bulk is easy to explain. Alcohol is exceedingly avid of water. Thus the common experience that alcoholic liquors tend to increase the desire for liquid can readily be explained. Alcohol, leaving the blood, tends to withdraw with itself, if it can, a quantity of water. These two, in the milk, between them maintain the added bulk on account of which alcoholic liquors are so widely ordered for and drunk by nursing mothers throughout the civilized world. The infant mortality is thus contributed to, and many women are urged and deceived by their love for their children into a practice which achieves their own ruin. Doctors look back a hundred years or so and observe the amazing practices of their predecessors. They have record of prescriptions and treatments which were ridiculous or disgusting or trivial or painful; they have abundant record of practices which were deadly, and for which any medical man at the present day might be called upon to pay heavy damages or indicted for manslaughter. Yet in the matter of the indiscriminate and ignorant employment of alcohol, in defiance of overwhelmingly proved facts which will not be challenged by any of those whom this criticism hits and who will virulently resent it and decry its author, doctors of the present day are assuredly earning the astonished contempt of their successors in times by no means remote. A certain number of women who nurse or will nurse will read this book. Of these not a few will be ordered various alcoholic beverages by their medical attendant in order to aid this function. Let them obey his orders when he has satisfactorily answered the following questions: Are you aware that part of the alcohol will pass unchanged through my breast into my baby's body? Are you aware that if my milk is analyzed it will be found to contain less food for the baby with more bulk than if I were to do without the alcohol? Are you aware that careful enquiry and observation have shown that the best foods for the making of milk are those which contain the constituents of milk—as seems not unreasonable—like milk itself and bread and butter and meat? Can you begin to explain any imaginable process by which either the animal or the vegetable body could build up a molecule composed as the molecule of alcohol is into any of the nutritive ingredients in milk? That catechism is quite short, but it will suffice.

A serious error which has long been made by temperance workers consists in supposing that the problem of alcoholism is the problem of drunkenness. They speak of "the sin of intemperance," and by that term they mean only such intemperance as produces what should properly be called acute alcoholic intoxication. The friends of alcohol eagerly accept an error which suits their case so admirably. Nothing can suit them better than to assume that alcohol does no ill apart from causing drunkenness. Better still, they are able to quote the case of the incurable drunkard, suffering from an uncontrollable craving, and to point out quite truly that he will get drunk in any case no matter how many public-houses, for instance, we close.

It was always a gross error to suppose that drunkenness was the whole of the evil done by alcohol; if, indeed, it be one per cent. of it, which we may doubt. This is not a point which one need trouble to argue here, except in so far as our right understanding of it is necessary if we are to see the meaning of current changes in the drinking habits of the people. That women are drinking more, everyone grants. That this is evil not merely for the women of the present but for both sexes in the future, I am constantly asserting. But it will not do at all to use mere drunkenness as our measure of what is happening amongst women. We know that in either sex a single bout of drinking, say once a week on Saturday night, may leave the individual little worse, may injure health quite inappreciably, if at all; it may not interfere with his work, and may even be of small economic importance. In such a coal-mining county as Durham, for instance, where alcohol cannot be drunk in association with work because the workman and his fellows know that the safety of their lives will not permit it, we find a huge proportion of arrests for drunkenness, and it might be supposed that in this most drunken county in England we should find the highest proportion of permanent consequences of alcoholism. On the contrary, as Dr. Sullivan says, "owing to their relative freedom from industrial drinking coal-miners show a remarkably low rate of alcoholic mortality, ranking in fact with the agriculturists and below all the other industrial groups." Here is a simple statistical fact which continues true year by year, and the significance of which must be insisted upon.

In the case of women, the very obvious and natural tendency is for the proportion of drunkenness to the alcohol consumed to be much lower than in the case of men. Drunkenness is commonly the result of convivial drinking. A company of men get together, and they help each other to get drunk. Women are not subjected to so many temptations in this respect. Their drinking is industrial drinking,—above all, at the supreme industry, which is the culture of the racial life. Like other industrial drinking, it is less conspicuous than convivial drinking; it leads to few arrests for drunkenness, but it has far graver effects on the individual, and it shows its consequences in the industrial product with which in this case no other industrial product can compare. Now unless we disabuse ourselves once and for all of the notion that the drink question is merely the drunkenness question, we shall never succeed in rightly approaching and dealing with this most ominous development of modern civilization, to which I have done such imperfect justice in the present chapter.

Dr. Sullivan[23] has some important remarks on this subject from which one cannot do better than freely quote. As a distinguished and experienced Medical Officer in H. M. Prison Service, notably at Holloway, where so many women have been under his care, Dr. Sullivan has very special credentials, even if the internal evidence of his book did not convince us. He says that:—

"The domestic occupations which are the chief field of women's activities obviously allow ample opportunity for the continuance of alcoholic habits formed prior to marriage. This is a matter of much importance. For the ordinary existence of the working man's wife, with its succession of pregnancies and sucklings, and the management of a brood of children in cramped surroundings, will of itself be very likely to promote tippling; and if a knowledge of the effect of alcohol as an industrial excitant has been acquired by the factory girl, it is pretty sure of further development in the married woman. Instances of this sort, in which the discomforts of the first pregnancy stimulate the growth of a rudimentary habit of industrial drinking to confirmed intemperance, are tolerably common in any wide experience of the alcoholic."

The following paragraph must also be quoted for its clear indication of a matter which is of prime importance, which no one denies, and yet of which no statesman or politician has begun to take cognizance:—

"The employment of women in the ordinary industrial occupations not only involves a disorganization of their domestic duties if they are married, but it also interferes with the acquisition of housewifely knowledge during girlhood. The result is that appalling ignorance of everything connected with cookery, with cleanliness, with the management of children, which make the average wife and mother in the lower working class in this country one of the most helpless and thriftless of beings, and which therefore impels the workman, whose comfort depends on her, not only to spend his free time in the public-house, but also tends to make him look to alcohol as a necessary condiment with his tasteless and indigestible diet. Both directly and indirectly, therefore, the employments that withdraw women from domestic pursuits are likely to increase alcoholism, and, it may be added, to increase its greatest potency for evil, namely its influence on the health of the stock."

Elsewhere I have endeavoured to deal with the general physiology of alcohol and its relations to race-culture. Here our special concern has been woman, and not woman as mother, but rather woman as individual. We have had specially to refer, however, to expectant and nursing motherhood because each of these offers special temptations and opportunities for the beginning of the alcoholic habit or strengthening its hold in a deadly fashion, and it is certainly necessary for us to know that the supposed advantages to the child, which constitute a new argument for alcohol at these times, are not advantages but injuries which may be grave and often fatal. The utterly incomprehensible thing is how anyone can suppose or ever could suppose otherwise.

It is necessary to add a few words to the foregoing since there has recently appeared what purports to be a contribution to some of the problems that have concerned us. Part of the foregoing argument has rested upon the fact, only too definitely, variously and frequently proved, that alcoholism in women prejudices the performance of their supreme functions. Complicated as the maternal relation to the future is, the relations of alcohol to the problem are correspondingly so, and in any discussion that is to be of value we must draw the necessary distinctions. In many scientific contributions to the subject this has already been done. We have identified certain degenerate stocks who display the symptoms of alcoholism. The alcohol may aggravate their degeneracy but it is not the prime cause of it in them, though it may have been so in their ancestors. The children of such persons are degenerate also, and as the class is numerous and fertile there is here a social problem which is not primarily a problem in alcohol, but is accidentally connected therewith simply because the proneness to alcoholism is a symptom of the degeneracy.

Quite distinct from the foregoing there is the influence of alcohol upon mothers and motherhood that would otherwise have been healthy. Alcohol, like lead, as has been shown elsewhere, may injure the racial elements in the mother before even expectant motherhood occurs. Later, it may prejudice both expectant motherhood and nursing motherhood; further it is often the primary cause of over-laying and of chronic cruelty and neglect. Until quite lately there was also the action of the public-house upon the children to be reckoned with, where the mother visited it and was allowed to take them with her. That, however, has been at last put a stop to in England, following the example of civilization elsewhere.

But it will be clear that the problem is a complicated one. It has been confidently attacked by Professor Karl Pearson in a Report upon "the influence of parental alcoholism upon the offspring," and the conclusions of that Report have been widely circulated and are being circulated almost wherever the monetary interest of alcohol has power. Briefly, Professor Pearson came to the conclusion that the children of drunken parents are, on the average, superior to those of sober parents in physique and in intelligence, in sight and in freedom from epilepsy and other diseases. This, of course, as everybody knows, is obvious nonsense, and the only problem remaining is how to account for its assertion. I have dealt with that question at length elsewhere,[24] and here need only note in a word that Professor Pearson's Report includes no comparison between the children of abstainers and drinkers, since the number of abstainers was too few to be treated separately; that Professor Pearson attaches no strict meaning to the term alcoholism, by which he means anything from what the word really means down to a general suspicion that the parents were drinking more than was good for themselves or their home; and finally that in studying the influence of alcohol upon offspring Professor Pearson has omitted to enquire in a single case whether the alcoholism or the offspring came first. The Report has no scientific basis whatever and has been riddled with criticism by expert students of every kind, including not merely students of alcoholism but also Professor Alfred Marshall of Cambridge, the greatest English-speaking economist of the time, who has shown that there are no grounds for the assumptions made by Professor Pearson in that part of his argument which is based upon the economic efficiency of drinking and non-drinking parents. The publication of this Report merely hastens the rapid decadence of "biometry," the foundations of which have already been sapped by the re-discovery of Mendelism in 1900; but it was necessary to refer to the matter here, since in the advertisements and the other printed matter paid for by the alcoholic party, the public is being informed that the children of alcoholic parents have been proved to be, on the whole, superior to those of non-alcoholic parents. This question has been exhaustively studied, yet again, in London by Dr. Sullivan, in Helsingfors by Professor Laitinen, and also in New York in an enquiry which actually embraced no less than fifty-five thousand school children. The elementary fallacies entertained by Professor Pearson were of course avoided and the uniform result in these and in a host of other enquiries that might be named is the only result which could be imagined in a universe where causes have effects.

The particular causes under consideration have been having their effects for a very long time. It begins to be more and more clear that they have played a great part in the history of mankind. As the "history" we learnt at school is more and more discredited, there is slowly coming into being a real kind of history which deals with the essentials of national life and death, and is based upon the principles of organic evolution. This is a thesis which one has attempted to justify in a previous book, but one aspect of it must be recurred to here. Our modern study of various diseases and poisons is throwing a light on the life of nations. Take for instance the modern theories as to the influence of malarial poison upon Greece. In the case of alcohol, we now have evidence which is real and unchallengeable. The properties which it displays when we study it to-day have always been and always will be its properties. We find that it has certain actions on living protoplasm in the twentieth century; we know enough of the uniformity of nature to realize that it had those actions in the tenth century, and will have them in the thirtieth. As we study under the microscope the influence of alcohol upon the racial tissues in the individual,[25] and therein find confirmation of experimental study and observation by all the other means available to science, we begin to see that the greatest facts of history are those of which historians have no word, and not least amongst these has ever been the influence of alcohol upon parenthood. It is possible to adduce arguments in favour of the view that the practically complete immunity of their parenthood from alcohol is one of the great factors that explain the all but unexampled persistence of the Jews and their present status in the van of the world's thought and work. For history it is the parents that matter as against the non-parents, and of the parents it is the mothers even more than the fathers. The freedom of the Jews as a whole from alcoholism is more marked than ever in the case of their women; that is to say, in the case of their mothers.

We see the part-results of this in our own time when we compare the infant mortality amongst the Jews with that of their Gentile neighbours in a great city such as London or Leeds. As everyone should know, there is a huge disparity between the figures in the two cases, and in some records it has been found that under equal conditions two Gentile babies will die for each Jewish baby. The conditions are of course not equal, because the Jewish babies have Jewish motherhood, splendidly backed up as it usually is by Jewish fatherhood; whereas the Gentile babies have a very inferior parental care. Now if it were that infant mortality, as most people suppose, simply meant the death of a certain number of babies, the foregoing facts would have no particular bearing upon the questions of racial survival, except in so far as those questions depend upon mere numbers. But the advocates of the great campaign against infant mortality have always maintained that the actual mortality is only one effect of the causes which produce it. When people have said that the loss of a certain number of babies mattered little, we have always replied that for every baby killed many were damaged. This contention has now been proved up to the hilt in the remarkable official enquiry, the first of its kind, made by Dr. Newsholme, now Chief Medical Officer of the Local Government Board.[26] He studied infant mortality in relation to the mortality of children and young people at all subsequent ages, and he proved, once and for all, that infant mortality is what we have always maintained it to be, not merely a disaster in itself but an evidence of causes which injure the health and vigour of the survivors at all ages. Wherever infant mortality is highest, there child mortality is highest, and the mortality of boys and girls at puberty and during the early years of adolescence when the body is preparing for and becoming capable of parenthood. The evil conditions that cause infant mortality are thus proved to be far-reaching and much wider in their effects than any but the students of the subject have yet realized.

This chapter must be brought to a close, but it may be added that the emergence of sober nations, such as Japan and Turkey, into contemporary history, and the possibilities latent in China,—to mention none other of the "dying nations," so very much alive, at whom glass-eyed politicians used to sneer—constitutes one of the major facts of contemporary history. No one can yet say whether these nations will have the wisdom to retain their ancient habits or whether they will accept our whisky along with our parliamentary institutions and motor-cars. Much future history rests upon this issue.

But I have little doubt that whatever happens in the case of Japan and Turkey, Jewish parenthood will retain the quality which has long ago become fixed as a racial characteristic, and that the race which has survived so much oppression and so many of its oppressors will survive contemporary abuse and the abusers. Its women nurse their own babies and have retained the power to do so. Neither before birth nor after do they feed the life that is to be on alcohol; they lay rightly the foundations of the future, where alone those foundations can be durably laid. The reader is not necessarily asked to admire them or to like them or to speak well of them, but if he desires the strength and continuance of whatever race or nation he belongs to, he will do well to imitate them.

It seems necessary to believe in the yellow peril, though not, of course, in its absurd form of a military nightmare. The pressure of population is the irresistible force of history. It depends, of course, upon parenthood, and more especially upon motherhood and therefore upon womanhood. At present the motherhood of the yellow races is sober. If it remains so, and if the motherhood of Western races takes the course which motherhood has taken for many years past in England, it is very sure that in the Armageddon of the future, those ancient races, Semitic and Mongol, which had achieved civilization when Europe was in the Stone Age, will be in a position of immense advantage as against our own race, which is threatening, at any rate in England, to follow the example of many races of which little record, or none, now remains, and drink itself to death.



CHAPTER XXII

CONCLUSION

The plan of this book has now been satisfied. The reader may be very far from satisfied, but not, it is to be hoped, on the ground that many subjects have been omitted which might quite well have been included under the title of Woman and Womanhood. It was better to confine our search to principles.

For it seems evident that civilization is at the parting of the ways in these fundamental matters. The invention of aeroplanes and submarine and wireless telegraphy and the like is of no more moment than the fly on the chariot wheel, compared with the vital reconstructions which are now proceeding or imminent. The business of the thoughtful at this juncture is to determine principles, for principles there are in these matters, if they can be discovered, as certain, as all-important as those on which any other kind of science proceeds. Just as the physicist must hold hard by his principles of motion and thermodynamics and radiation and the like, so the sociologist must hold hard by the organic principles which determine the life and continuance of living things. Unless we base our projects for mankind upon the laws of life, they will come to naught, as such projects have come to naught not once but a thousand times in the past.

None will dare dispute these assertions, yet what do we see at the present time? On what grounds is the woman question fought, and by what kind of disputants? It is fought, as everyone knows, on the grounds of what women want, or rather, what a particular section of half-instructed women, in some particular time and place, think they want,—or do not want—under the influence of suggestion, imitation and the other influences which determine public opinion. It is fought on the grounds of precedent: women are not to have votes in England because women have never had votes in England, or they are to have votes in England because they have them in New Zealand. It is fought on party political grounds, none the less potent because they are not honestly acknowledged: the Liberal and the Conservative parties favour or disfavour this or that Suffrage Bill, or whatever it may be, according to what they expect to be its effect upon their voting strength. It is fought upon financial grounds, as when we see the entire force of the alcoholic party arrayed against the claims of women, as in the nature of things it always has been and always will be. It is fought on theological grounds by clerics who quote the first chapter of Genesis; and on anti-theological grounds by half-instructed rationalists who attack marriage because they suppose it was invented by the Church.

And whose voices never fail among the disputants? Loudest of all are those of youth of both sexes, who know nothing and want to know nothing and who have no idea that there is anything to know in attempting to decide such questions as this. It is argued in the House of Gramophones and such places, by common politicians of the type the many-headed choose, who would do better to confine themselves to the soiled questions of tariffs and the like, in which they find a native joy. It is argued by vast numbers of men who hate or fear women, and women who hate or fear men, as if any imaginable wisdom on this question or any other could possibly be born of such emotions.

Yet all the while we are dealing with a problem in biology, with living beings, obeying and determined by the laws of life, and with a species exhibiting those fundamental facts of heredity, variation, bi-parental reproduction, sexual selection, instinct and the like, which are mere meaningless names to nine out of ten of the disputants, and yet which determine them and their disputes and the issues thereof.

If these contentions be correct, there is plainly much need for an attempt, however imperfect, to set forth the first principles of woman and womanhood. Evidently the time for discussion of detailed questions has not yet come, since, to take a single instance, there is not yet to be heard on either side of the controversy a single voice asserting the fundamental eugenic necessity that, at whatever cost, the best women must be selected for motherhood, and the contribution of their superiority to the future stock.

Let us briefly sum up the substance of the foregoing pages.

First, we have stated the eugenic postulate, failing to grant which we and our schemes, our votes and our hopes, will assuredly disappear or decay, as must all living races which are not recruited from their best, Secondly, we have proceeded to analyze the nature of womanhood, its capacities and conditions, assuming that we can scarcely discover whither it should go unless we know what it is. To the party politician, hungry for the prizes that suit his soul or stomach, such an assumption is mere foolish pedantry; and the ardent suffragist will have little more to say to it. That, however, cannot be helped. It is to be hoped that all parties, as parties, will unite in banning the views herein expressed, and then one may take heart of grace and dare to hope that there is something in them.

They may be crystallized in the dictum that woman is Nature's supreme organ of the future. This is not a theory, but a statement of evident truth. It is an essential canon of what one might call the philosophy of biology, and applies to the female sex throughout living nature. Birth is of the female alone. No sub-human male, nor even man himself, can directly achieve the future; the greatest statesman or law-giver or founder of nations can only work, if he knew it, through womanhood. The greatest of these, and their name is very far from legion, was evidently Moses, as history shows, and he acted on this principle. On the other hand, those who have sought to achieve the future, as Napoleon did, failed because they defiled and flouted womanhood. The best men died on the battlefield and the worst were left to aid the women in that supreme work of parenthood by which alone, and only through the co-operation of men and women, the future is made.

Thirdly, we have seen it to follow from this dedication of the greater and vastly more valuable part of woman's energies to the future that, just in proportion as she serves it and devotes herself thereto, she needs present support. Biology teaches us that the male sex was invented for this purpose; doubtless one should say for this "increasing purpose," since it is scarcely more than foreshadowed at first in the history of the male sex. The study of life has clearly proved that the male sex is secondary and adjuvant, and that its essentially auxiliary functions for the race have been increasing from the beginning until we find them in perfection wherever two parents join in common consecration and devotion to their supreme task, upon which all else depends and without which nothing else could be.

And just as woman is mediate between man and the future, so man is mediate between woman and the present. Woman is the more immediate environment, the special providence, so to say, of childhood; and man, in a rightly constituted society, is the special providence, the more immediate environment of woman, standing between her and inanimate Nature, guarding her, taking thought for her, feeding her, using his special masculine qualities for her—that is to say, in the long run, for the future of the race; this indeed being the purpose for which Nature has contrived all individuals of both sexes. If we prefer such phrases, we may say that the future or the children are parasitic upon woman, and that woman is "parasitic upon the male," which is one woman's way of putting it. Or we may say that these are the natural and therefore divine relations of the various forms in which human life is cast, and that our business is to make them more effective, more provident and freer from the factors which in all ages have tended to injure them.

Fourthly, we have everywhere seen cause to condemn sex-antagonism, and it is my hope that no page or line or word of this book can be accused of illustrating or justifying or inciting to or even attempting to palliate either form of this wholly abominable spirit of the pit. If such places there be, there assuredly is misdirection and falsity. This spirit is one of the great enemies of mankind. As aroused in women against men, it has done and is doing no little harm; as exhibited by men against the righteous claims of women, it is one of the supremely malign forces of history. Wherever and however displayed, it is false to the first and most essential facts of life, from the moment of the evolution of sex, hundreds of millions of years ago, until our own time. All who display it, however excellent their intentions, are enemies of mankind; all who work upon it for their own ends, political and personal, without feeling it, are beneath disgust. These are things true and necessary to be said, though they should not deter us from sympathizing with the unhappy individuals, not a few, whose lives have been blasted by individuals of the other sex, and who show the natural but tragic tendency to make their private injury cause for resentment against one-half of mankind. Surveying the pages that are past, I am almost inclined to regret that, the plan of the book notwithstanding, a special chapter was not devoted to Sex-Antagonism and to a demonstration on biological grounds of its wickedness and pestilence wherever it be found, and whatever plausible case for it may anywhere be made.

If the sound of hope is not heard as the ground-tone of these chapters, let it ring through all else at the end. I am an optimist because I am an evolutionist, and because I believe, as every one of those whom I call Eugenists must, that the best is yet to be. The dawn is breaking for womanhood, and therefore for all mankind. If we are asked to express in one phrase the reason why this hope is justified, it is because the long struggle between two antithetic conceptions of human society is reaching a definite issue.

These radically opposed ideas may for convenience be called the organic and the internecine. The internecine conception of society forever sets nation against nation, race against race, class against class, sex against sex, individual against individual, on the ground that the interest of one must be the injury of the other. It is false. Nay, more, for man living his life on this earth as he must and will, it is the Great Lie.

And it is being found out. Even international trade and commerce, from which such a service could scarcely have been expected, are here contributing to philosophy. Our fathers talked of the comity of nations; we are beginning to discover their interdependence. The coming of that discovery is one of the few really new things under the sun. Not so very long ago, when mankind was far less numerous, such interdependence of nations did not exist; they were self-sufficient, just as the patriarchal family was self-sufficient still further ago.

But the interdependence of the sexes is so far from being a new fact that it is as old as the evolution of sex, and the decadence and disappearance of parthenogenesis or reproduction from the female sex alone. Once bi-parental reproduction becomes necessary for the continuance of the race, both sexes sink with either, and neither can swim but with both. Yet so far are we from realizing this most ancient of facts to-day that, on both sides of the woman question, wonderful to relate, are to be found controversialists who are seeking to deny this continuous lesson of so many million ages. The reader may take his choice of folly between them. On the one hand, there are the feminists who seek to do without man,—except for the minimum physiological purpose. The women are to sustain the present and create the future simultaneously, and man is to be reduced, apparently, to the function of the drone. Thus Mrs. Gilman in "Women and Economics." Over against her and those who think with her are to be set the men, and women too, who tell us that "men made the State,"—a sufficiently shameful admission—and that women have no business with these things. Do not their mothers blush for such; to have travailed so much, and to have achieved so little?

Fortunately, however, the greater number of those who think and determine the deeds of the mass are beginning, though the dawn is yet very faint, to perceive that this truth of the interdependence of the sexes, which is part of the greater truth that mankind is an organic whole, is not only much truer than ever to-day, but is vital to our salvation; and save us it will. In so far as we are keeping women inferior to men, we must raise them; in so far as we are keeping men, in other and certainly no less important respects, inferior to women, we must raise them. The future needs and will obtain the utmost of the highest of both sexes. Thus and thus only "springs the crowning race of human kind": wherein, as we hasten to the dust, living for a day, yet for ever, our eyes prophetic may behold the sure and certain hope of a glorious resurrection.

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INDEX OF SUBJECTS

Adolescence, 124 —— and advertisements, 135 —— and alcohol, 228

Alcohol, 54, 100 —— accessibility of, 360 —— and expectant motherhood, 367 —— and breast-feeding, 371 —— and industrialism, 360, 377 —— and tobacco versus children, 201, 251, 354 —— widows and orphans, 350 —— and womanhood, 348 et seq.

Alcoholism and lead poisoning, 379 —— and offspring, 380 —— and Jewish survival, 382 et seq.

Anti-Suffrage societies, 16

Asceticism, old and new, 102

Bees, arguments from, 31, 84, 322

Birth-rate, fall of, 288 et seq. —— and infant mortality, 301 —— and marriage-rate, 312

Board of Education Syllabus, 121

Breast feeding, 333 et seq. —— and alcohol, 371

"British Medical Journal" on meat, wines, etc., 361 et seq.

Brooding instinct in fowls, 82

Canada's need of women, 269

Childless marriage, 244

Children Act, 265, 372

Climacteric, 21, 77, 98

Confirmation and adolescence, 124

Conservation of energy, 64 —— and higher education, 79

Contagious diseases, 219

Corset, 120, 186 et seq.

Cycling for women, 119

Dancing, 120, 122

Degeneracy and inaction, 42

Determination of sex, 72 et seq.

Divorce, conditions of, 291 et seq. —— versus separation, 293 —— in Germany, 293 —— Law Reform Union, 293

Dolls and their significance, 95, 166

Education, definition of, 156 —— and instruction, 161, 172 —— for motherhood, 151, 158 et seq.

Educational question, 43

Endowment of motherhood, 282 et seq., 308

Engagements, length of, 135

Eugenic feminism, 7

Eugenics, passim.

"Evolution of Sex," 67

Exercise in girls' schools, Herbert Spencer on, 104 et seq.

Expectant mother, 143, 367

Fabian Society, 182

Femaleness, constitution of, 76

Games versus dumb-bells, 110 —— mixed, 113

Gameto-genesis, 82

Germ cells and germ plasm, 27, 28, 81, 206, 367 —— its immortality, 29 —— and sex inheritance, 74

Girls' clubs, 123 —— clothing, 125

Gonorrh[oe]a, 223 et seq.

Gymnastics versus play, 109

Haemophilia, 3

Happiness in marriage, 236

Heredity and responsibility, 195

Heredity of sex, 73

Higher education, 151 —— in London, 128 —— and marriage rate, 78 —— and conservation of energy, 79

Highest education, 154

Identical twins, 55

Illegitimacy, 148, 304, 336, 384

Infant mortality, 70, 172, 177, 194, 259, 325

Infant mortality and alcohol, 370

Insanity, 54, 225

Instinct and emotion, 164

Instinct, Spencer's definition of, 164

Insurance for motherhood, 315

Joy, physiological value of, 112

Kaiser's creed, 11

Knossos, 186

Law of multiplication, 66

Leprosy, 220

Maleness, constitution of, 76

"Man before speech," 39

Marriage age, 196 —— Metchnikoff on, 199 —— and quality of children, 204 —— conditions of, 258 —— and the "superfluous woman," 259 et seq.

"Marriage as a Trade," 202

Marriage, social function of, 307

Married women's labour, 306

Mars, the parallel from, 50

Maternal instinct, 163 et seq. —— McDougall on, 168 et seq. —— in the cat, 171, 177 —— alleged decadence of, 174 et seq.

Mendelism, 4, 67, 74, 75, 81 et seq., 330

Menstrual function, 108

Monogamy and its critics, 272

Monogamy and polygamy, 261

"Morning Post," quotation from, 340

Mortality in childbirth, 217

Mosaic legislation, 147

Mother and child worship, 148

Motherhood, endowment of, 282 —— physical and psychical, 83

Motherhood insurance, 315

"Mrs. Warren's Profession," 138

Muscles, relative value of, for women, 117

Muscularity and vitality, 99

Natural selection, 32

Nature and nurture, 52, 214

Neanderthal skull, 38

Notification of Births Act, 132

Organic analysis by Mendelism, 81

Parental instinct, 95

Parthenogenesis, 72

Patent medicines and alcohol, 361 et seq.

Physical fitness for marriage, 208

Physical training of girls, 99

Physiological division of labour, 87

Play centres, 22

Preventive eugenics, 24

Progress and the nervous system, 102 —— definition of, 37 —— the two kinds of, 38

Prudery, 130, 132 et seq.

Psychical fitness for marriage, 211

Puberty, 98, 124

Racial instinct, 167, 180, 225

Racial poisons, 24, 382

Radium, 35

"Reproduction" and "parenthood," 141

Rescue homes, 137

"Richard Feverel," 191

Rights of mothers, 293 et seq. —— of women, 319

Scotland, educational strain at puberty, 115

Separation versus divorce, 293

"Sex and Character," 68

Sex equality and sex identity, 56 et seq.

Sex and breathing, 93, 94

Sex and the blood, 93

Sex in childhood, 92

Sex antagonism, 391

"Sexual instinct" and "racial instinct," 144 et seq.

Sexual attraction, Spencer on, 240 et seq.

Sexual selection, 144

Skipping, 122

Socialism, 182 —— and motherhood, 282

Socialism and responsibility, 309

Swedish gymnastics, 121

Swimming, 120

Syphilis, 54, 222 et seq.

Terms of specialization, 87

Transmutation of instinct, 171 —— of sex, 251

Vacation schools, 22, 114

Variation within a sex, 89 —— amongst women, 90

Venereal diseases, 219 et seq.

Venus of Milo, 120, 186

Vital imports and exports, 267

Vitality superior in women, 99

Widowhood, causes of, 217 —— and motherhood, 303

Women and colonization, 268 et seq.

"Women's Charter," 311, 315

Women and economics, 327 et seq.

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INDEX OF NAMES

Aristotle, 39

Aurelius, Marcus, 257

Bacon, 182

Ballantyne, Dr. J. W., 370

Bateson, 77

Bonheur, Rosa, 58

Botticelli, 184

Bouchard, 290

Brieux, 138, 221

Budin, Prof., 336

Bunge, Prof. von, 334, 371

Burke, 225

Burns, John, 325

Butler, Lady, 58

Carlyle, 8

Chesterton, G. K., 266, 333

Clouston, 21

Coleridge, 40, 178, 184

Croom, Sir Halliday, 119

Darwin, 26, 47

Duncan, Miss Isadora, 123

Duncan, Dr. Matthews, 210

Ehrlich, 233

Eliot, George, 58

Ellis, Dr. Havelock, 61, 93, 118, 119, 186

Evans, Dr. Arthur, 186

Fawcett, Mrs., 21

Forel, 86, 149

Galton, 7, 52, 203, 205, 208, 211

Geddes and Thomson, 65, 84

Gilman, Mrs. C. P., 327, 393

Goethe, 225

Haeckel, 82

Hamilton, Miss Cicely, 202

Haynes, E. S. P., 293

Helmholtz, 36

Horsley, 254

Huxley, 46

Kelvin, 35

Key, Ellen, 8, 59, 347

Kipling, 188

Laitinen, Prof. Taav, 381

Lamarck, 158

Lister, 20, 209

Maclaren, Lady, 315

Maeterlinck, Maurice, 325

Marshall, Prof. Alfred, 381

McDougall, Dr. W., 165

Meredith, 48, 142

Metchnikoff, 199

Mill, J. S., 174

Milne-Edwards, 87

Minot, 87

Mosso, 120

Mott, Dr. F. W., 356

Napoleon, 305

Nation, Carrie, 23

Newman, Sir George, 121

Newsholme, Dr. A., 384

Nightingale, Florence, 17

Pasteur, 217

Pearson, Karl, 205, 380

Phillpotts, Eden, 191

Plato, 2, 56, 182

Rotch, Prof. Morgan, 336

Ruskin, 19, 48, 150, 157, 189, 345

Sappho, 58

Scharlieb, Dr. Mary, 371

Shakespeare, 52

Spencer, Herbert, 6, 45, 48, 64, 81, 104, 129, 156, 159, 171, 240, 320

St. Francis, 46

St. Paul, 150

Stevenson, 154

Sullivan, Dr. W. C., 376, 381

Thales, 64

Ward, Mrs. Humphry, 21

Ward, Lester, 72, 261

Weininger, 68

Weismann, 26, 28, 82

Wells, H. G., 182, 282, 310, 313

Westermarck, 186

Wordsworth, Dorothy, 14

Wordsworth, 13, 48, 159, 189, 256

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FOOTNOTES:

[1] "The Germ-Plasm." English translation in Contemporary Science Series, London: New York.

[2] "Parenthood and Race-Culture: An Outline of Eugenics."

[3] "The Obstacles to Eugenics," published in the Sociological Review, July 1909.

[4] See his "Pure Sociology."

[5] I. e. marrying cells.

[6] Here, as in many other cases, I am indebted to that invaluable repertory of facts, Dr. Havelock Ellis's "Man and Woman."

[7] This may be obtained from any bookseller at the price of 9d.

[8] Further particulars may be obtained from the Vice-Principal, King's College (Women's Department), 13 Kensington Square, London, W.

[9] From La Question Sexuelle, French edition, p. 62. The author wrote the book first in German and then in French.

[10] The modern use of the word environment really dates from Lamarck's original phrase. In his discussion of the characters of living beings, he spoke of the milieu environnant. The higher the type of organism the more comprehensive must the term become, not only quantitatively but qualitatively.

[11] "An Introduction to Social Psychology," by William McDougall, M.A., M.B., M.Sc., Wilde Reader in Mental Philosophy in the University of Oxford.

[12] From the writer's paper, "The Human Mother," in the Report of the Proceedings of the National Conference on Infantile Mortality, 1908, p. 30.

[13] It it well to quote here the most recent comment of the late Sir Francis Galton upon this subject. It is to be found in his celebrated Huxley lecture, now published by the Eugenics Education Society, together with much of the illustrious author's other work, under the title, "Essays in Eugenics." The passage relevant to our discussion runs as follows:—

"There appears to be a considerable difference between the earliest age at which it is physiologically desirable that a woman should marry and that at which the ablest, or at least the most cultured, women usually do. Acceleration in the time of marriage, often amounting to seven years, as from twenty-eight or twenty-nine to twenty-one or twenty-two, under influences such as those mentioned above, is by no means improbable. What would be its effect on productivity? It might be expected to act in two ways:—

"(1) By shortening each generation by an amount equally proportionate to the diminution in age at which marriage occurs. Suppose the span of each generation to be shortened by one-sixth, so that six take the place of five, and that the productivity of each marriage is unaltered, it follows that one-sixth more children will be brought into the world during the same time, which is roughly equivalent to increasing the productivity of an unshortened generation by that amount.

"(2) By saving from certain barrenness the earlier part of the child-bearing period of the woman. Authorities differ so much as to the direct gain of fertility due to early marriage that it is dangerous to express an opinion. The large and thriving families that I have known were the offspring of mothers who married very young."

[14] An unavoidable delay in the publication of this book makes possible reference to Professor Ehrlich's synthetic compound of arsenic, known as "606," the anti-syphilitic potency of which will render even less excusable the cowardice and neglect against which the foregoing is a protest.

[15] This is a libel upon poor people everywhere. There has been some confusion between drink and poverty.

[16] "T. P.'s Weekly," Christmas Number, 1909.

[17] The first treatise on Infant Mortality in English, written by Sir George Newman at the present writer's request, and published in his New Library of Medicine in 1906, gives abundant and trustworthy information as to the initial incidence of this disproportionate mortality.

[18] "Socialism and the Family," Sixpenny Edition, p. 59.

[19] The address of this Union is 20, Copthall Avenue, London, E. C.

[20] "The primal physical functions of maternity."

[21] W. Claassen in the Archiv fuer Rassen-und-Gesellschafts-Biologie, Nov.—Dec., 1909. See the Eugenics Review, July, 1910, p. 154.

[22] We decided to reprint the Report of that Conference, and a few copies of the reprint are still obtainable.

[23] In his "Alcoholism." 1906.

[24] In the articles, "Racial Poisons: Alcohol," Eugenics Review, April, 1910, and "Professor Karl Pearson on Alcoholism and Offspring," British Journal of Inebriety, Oct., 1910.

[25] This study has only just begun, but remarkable results have already been obtained. The interested reader should refer to the Proceedings of the Twelfth International Congress on Alcoholism held in London in 1909.

[26] This Report, published in 1910, can readily be obtained through any bookseller. Its number is Cd. 5263, and the price only 1s. 3d.

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Transcriber's Notes:

1. Original chapter titles were inconsistently named. For example "CHAPTER VI" was followed by simply "VII" without the "CHAPTER" designation. The original printing has been retained.

2. p. 269: word omitted in original ("on") has been added: "I have recently been on a tour throughout Canada...."

THE END