The Project Gutenberg eBook of Woman and Womanhood: A Search for Principles

This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.

Title: Woman and Womanhood: A Search for Principles

Author: C. W. Saleeby

Release date: November 17, 2006 [eBook #19848]

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WOMAN AND WOMANHOOD: A SEARCH FOR PRINCIPLES ***

WOMAN AND WOMANHOOD

BY DR. C. W. SALEEBY

WOMAN AND WOMANHOOD

HEALTH, STRENGTH AND HAPPINESS

THE CYCLE OF LIFE

EVOLUTION: THE MASTER KEY

WORRY: THE DISEASE OF THE AGE

THE CONQUEST OF CANCER: A PLAN OF CAMPAIGN

PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE

WOMAN

AND WOMANHOOD

A SEARCH FOR PRINCIPLES

By

C. W. SALEEBY

M.D., F.R.S.E., Ch.B., F.Z.S.

Fellow of the Obstetrical Society of Edinburgh and formerly

Resident Physician Edinburgh Maternity

Hospital; Vice-President Divorce Law

Reform Union; Member of the

Royal Institution and of

Council of the Socio-

logical Society.

MITCHELL KENNERLEY

NEW YORK AND LONDON

MCMXI

Copyright 1911 by

Mitchell Kennerley

Press of J. J. Little & Ives Co.

East Twenty-fourth Street

New York

Contents

I

FIRST PRINCIPLES

1

II

THE LIFE OF THE WORLD TO COME

34

III

THE PURPOSE OF WOMANHOOD

52

IV

THE LAW OF CONSERVATION

64

V

THE DETERMINATION OF SEX

72

VI

MENDELISM AND WOMANHOOD

81

VII

BEFORE WOMANHOOD

92

VIII

THE PHYSICAL TRAINING OF GIRLS

99

IX

THE HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN

128

X

THE PRICE OF PRUDERY

132

XI

EDUCATION FOR MOTHERHOOD

151

XII

THE MATERNAL INSTINCT

163

XIII

CHOOSING THE FATHERS OF THE FUTURE

193

XIV

THE MARRIAGE AGE FOR GIRLS

197

XV

THE FIRST NECESSITY

219

XVI

ON CHOOSING A HUSBAND

234

XVII

THE CONDITIONS OF MARRIAGE

258

XVIII

THE CONDITIONS OF DIVORCE

291

XIX

THE RIGHTS OF MOTHERS

296

XX

WOMEN AND ECONOMICS

327

XXI

THE CHIEF ENEMY OF WOMEN

348

XXII

CONCLUSION

386

CHAPTER I

FIRST PRINCIPLES

We are often and rightly reminded that woman is half the human race. It is truer even than it appears. Not only is woman half of the present generation, but present woman is half of all the generations of men and women to come. The argument of this book, which will be regarded as reactionary by many women called "advanced"—presumably as doctors say that a case of consumption is "advanced"—involves nothing other than adequate recognition of the importance of woman in the most important of all matters. It is true that my primary concern has been to furnish, for the individual woman and for those in charge of girlhood, a guide of life based upon the known physiology of sex. But it is a poor guide of life which considers only the transient individual, and poorest of all in this very case.

If it were true that woman is merely the vessel and custodian of the future lives of men and women, entrusted to her ante-natal care by their fathers, as many creeds have supposed, then indeed it would be a question of relatively small moment how the mothers of the future were chosen. Our ingenious devices for ensuring the supremacy of man lend colour to this idea. We name children after their fathers, and the fact that they are also to some extent of the maternal stock is obscured.

But when we ask to what extent they are also of maternal stock, we find that there is a rigorous equality between the sexes in this matter. It is a fact which has been ignored or inadequately recognized by every feminist and by every eugenist from Plato until the present time. Salient qualities, whether good or ill, are more commonly displayed by men than by women. Great strength or physical courage or endurance, great ability or genius, together with a variety of abnormalities, are much more commonly found in men than in women, and the eugenic emphasis has therefore always been laid upon the choice of fathers rather than of mothers. Not so long ago, the scion of a noble race must marry, not at all necessarily the daughter of another noble race, but rather any young healthy woman who promised to be able to bear children easily and suckle them long. But directly we observe, under the microscope, the facts of development, we discover that each parent contributes an exactly equal share to the making of the new individual, and all the ancient and modern ideas of the superior value of well-selected fatherhood fall to the ground. Woman is indeed half the race. In virtue of expectant motherhood and her ante-natal nurture of us all, she might well claim to be more, but she is half at least.

And thus it matters for the future at least as much how the mothers are chosen as how the fathers are. This remains true, notwithstanding that the differences between men, commending them for selection or rejection, seem so much more conspicuous and important than in the case of women.

For, in the first place, the differences between women are much greater than appear when, for instance, we read history as history is at present understood, or when we observe and compare the world and his wife. Uniformity or comparative uniformity of environment is a factor of obvious importance in tending to repress the natural differences between women. Reverse the occupations and surroundings of the sexes, and it might be found that men were "much of a muchness," and women various and individualized, to a surprising extent.

But, even allowing for this, it is difficult to question that men as individuals do differ, for good and for evil, more than women as individuals. Such a malady as hæmophilia, for instance, sharply distinguishes a certain number of men from the rest of their sex, whereas women, not subject to the disease, are not thus distinguished, as individuals.

But the very case here cited serves to illustrate the fallacy of studying the individual as an individual only, and teaches that there is a second reason why the selection of women for motherhood is more important than is so commonly supposed. In the matter of, for instance, hæmophilia, men appear sharply contrasted among themselves and women all similar. Yet the truth is that men and women differ equally in this very respect. Women do not suffer from hæmophilia, but they convey it. Just as definitely as one man is hæmophilic and another is not, so one woman will convey hæmophilia and another will not. The abnormality is present in her, but it is latent; or, as we shall see the Mendelians would say, "recessive" instead of "dominant."

Now I am well assured that if we could study not only the patencies but also the latencies of individuals of both sexes, we should find that they vary equally. Women, as individuals, appear more similar than men, but as individuals conveying latent or "recessive" characters which will appear in their children, especially their male children, they are just as various as men are. The instance of hæmophilia is conclusive, for two women, each equally free from it, will respectively bear normal and hæmophilic children; but this is probably only one among many far more important cases. I incline to believe that certain nervous qualities, many of great value to humanity, tend to be latent in women, just as hæmophilia does. Two women may appear very similar in mind and capacity, but one may come of a distinguished stock, and the other of an undistinguished. In the first woman, herself unremarkable, high ability may be latent, and her sons may demonstrate it. It is therefore every whit as important that the daughters of able and distinguished stock shall marry as that the sons shall. It remains true even though the sons may themselves be obviously distinguished and the daughters may not.

The conclusion of this matter is that scientific inquiry completely demonstrates the equal importance of the selection of fathers and of mothers. If our modern knowledge of heredity is to be admitted at all, it follows that the choice of women for motherhood is of the utmost moment for the future of mankind. Woman is half the race; and the leaders of the woman's movement must recognize the importance of their sex in this fundamental question of eugenics. At present they do not do so; indeed, no one does. But the fact remains. As before all things a Eugenist, and responsible, indeed, for that name, I cannot ignore it in the following pages. There is not only to-day to think of, but to-morrow. The eugenics which ignores the natural differences between women as individuals, and their still greater natural differences as potential parents, is only half eugenics; the leading women who in any way countenance such measures as deprive the blood of the future of its due contribution from the best women of the present, are leading not only one sex but the race as a whole to ruin.

If women were not so important as Nature has made them, none of this would matter. To insist upon it is only to insist upon the importance of the sex. The remarkable fact, which seems to me to make this protest and the forthcoming pages so necessary, is that the leading feminists do not recognize the all-importance of their sex in this regard. They must be accused of neglecting it and of not knowing how important they are. They consider the present only, and not the composition of the future. Like the rest of the world, I read their papers and manifestoes, their speeches and books, and have done so, and have subscribed to them, for years; but no one can refer me to a single passage in any of these where any feminist or suffragist, in Great Britain, at least, militant or non-militant, has set forth the principle, beside which all others are trivial, that the best women must be the mothers of the future.

Yet this which is thus ignored matters so much that other things matter only in so far as they affect it. As I have elsewhere maintained, the eugenic criterion is the first and last of every measure of reform or reaction that can be proposed or imagined. Will it make a better race? Will the consequence be that more of the better stocks, of both sexes, contribute to the composition of future generations? In other words, the very first thing that the feminist movement must prove is that it is eugenic. If it be so, its claims are unchallengeable; if it be what may contrariwise be called dysgenic, no arguments in its favour are of any avail. Yet the present champions of the woman's cause are apparently unaware that this question exists. They do not know how important their sex is.

Thinkers in the past have known, and many critics in the present, though unaware of the eugenic idea, do perceive, that woman can scarcely be better employed than in the home. Herbert Spencer, notably, argued that we must not include, in the estimate of a nation's assets, those activities of woman the development of which is incompatible with motherhood. To-day, the natural differences between individuals of both sexes, and the importance of their right selection for the transmission of their characters to the future, are clearly before the minds of those who think at all on these subjects. On various occasions I have raised this issue between Feminism and Eugenics, suggesting that there are varieties of feminism, making various demands for women which are utterly to be condemned because they not merely ignore eugenics, but are opposed to it, and would, if successful, be therefore ruinous to the race.

Ignored though it be by the feminist leaders, this is the first of questions; and in so far as any clear opinion on it is emerging from the welter of prejudices, that opinion is hitherto inimical to the feminist claims. Most notably is this the case in America, where the dysgenic consequences of the so-called higher education of women have been clearly demonstrated.

The mark of the following pages is that they assume the principle of what we may call Eugenic Feminism, and that they endeavour to formulate its working-out. It is my business to acquaint myself with the literature of both eugenics and feminism, and I know that hitherto the eugenists have inclined to oppose the claims of feminism, Sir Francis Galton, for instance, having lent his name to the anti-suffrage side; whilst the feminists, one and all, so far as Anglo-Saxondom is concerned—for Ellen Key must be excepted—are either unaware of the meaning of eugenics at all, or are up in arms at once when the eugenist—or at any rate this eugenist, who is a male person—mildly inquires: But what about motherhood? and to what sort of women are you relegating it by default?

I claim, therefore, that there is immediate need for the presentation of a case which is, from first to last, and at whatever cost, eugenic; but which also—or, rather, therefore—makes the highest claims on behalf of woman and womanhood, so that indeed, in striving to demonstrate the vast importance of the woman question for the composition of the coming race, I may claim to be much more feminist than the feminists.

The problem is not easily to be solved; otherwise we should not have paired off into insane parties, as on my view we have done. Nor will the solution please the feminists without reserve, whilst it will grossly offend that abnormal section of the feminists who are distinguished by being so much less than feminine, and who little realize what a poor substitute feminism is for feminity.

There is possible no Eugenic Feminism which shall satisfy those whose simple argument is that woman must have what she wants, just as man must. I do not for a moment admit that either men or women or children of a smaller growth are entitled to everything they want. "The divine right of kings," said Carlyle, "is the right to be kingly men"; and I would add that the divine right of women is the right to be queenly women. Until this present time, it was never yet alleged as a final principle of justice that whatever people wanted they were entitled to, yet that is the simple feminist demand in a very large number of cases. It is a demand to be denied, whilst at the same time we grant the right of every man and of every woman to opportunities for the best development of the self; whatever that self may be—including even the aberrant and epicene self of those imperfectly constituted women whose adherence to the woman's cause so seriously handicaps it.

But it is one thing to say people should have what is best for them, and another that whatever they want is best for them. If it is not best for them it is not right, any more than if they were children asking for more green apples. Women have great needs of which they are at present unjustly deprived; and they are fully entitled to ask for everything which is needed for the satisfaction of those needs; but nothing is more certain than that, at present, many of them do not know what they should ask for. Not to know what is good for us is a common human failing; to have it pointed out is always tiresome, and to have this pointed out to women by any man is intolerable. But the question is not whether a man points it out, presuming to tell women what is good for them, but whether in this matter he is right—in common with the overwhelming multitude of the dead of both sexes.

As has been hinted, the issue is much more momentous than any could have realized even so late as fifty years ago. It is only in our own time that we are learning the measure of the natural differences between individuals, it is only lately that we have come to see that races cannot rise by the transmission of acquired characters from parents to offspring, since such transmission does not occur, and it is only within the last few years that the relative potency of heredity over education, of nature over nurture, has been demonstrated. Not one in thousands knows how cogent this demonstration is, nor how absolutely conclusive is the case for the eugenic principle in the light of our modern knowledge. At whatever cost, we see, who have ascertained the facts, that we must be eugenic.

This argument was set forth in full in the predecessors of this book, which in its turn is devoted to the interests of women as individuals. But before we proceed, it is plainly necessary to answer the critic who might urge that the separate questions of the individual and the race cannot be discussed in this mixed fashion. The argument may be that if we are to discuss the character and development and rights of women as individuals, we must stick to our last. Any woman may question the eugenic criterion or say that it has nothing to do with her case. She claims certain rights and has certain needs; she is not so sure, perhaps, about the facts of heredity, and in any case she is sure that individuals—such as herself, for instance—are ends in themselves. She neither desires to be sacrificed to the race, nor does she admit that any individual should be so sacrificed. She is tired of hearing that women must make sacrifices for the sake of the community and its future; and the statement of this proposition in its new eugenic form, which asserts that, at all costs, the finest women must be mothers, and the mothers must be the finest women, is no more satisfactory to her than the crude creed of the Kaiser that children, cooking and church are the proper concerns of women. She claims to be an individual, as much as any man is, as much as any individual of either sex whom we hope to produce in the future by our eugenics, and she has the same personal claim to be an end in and for herself as they will have whom we seek to create. Her sex has always been sacrificed to the present or to the immediate needs of the future as represented by infancy and childhood; and there is no special attractiveness in the prospect of exchanging a military tyranny for a eugenic tyranny: "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose."

One cannot say whether this will be accepted as a fair statement of the woman's case at the present time, but I have endeavoured to state it fairly and would reply to it that its claims are unquestionable and that we must grant unreservedly the equal right of every woman to the same consideration and recognition and opportunity as an individual, an end in and for herself, whatever the future may ask for, as we grant to men.

But I seek to show in the following pages that, in reality, there is no antagonism between the claims of the future and the present, the race and the individual. On philosophic analysis we must see that, indeed, no living race could come into being, much less endure, in which the interests of individuals as individuals, and the interest of the race, were opposed. If we imagine any such race we must imagine its disappearance in one generation, or in a few generations if the clash of interests were less than complete. Living Nature is not so fiendishly contrived as has sometimes appeared to the casual eye. On the contrary, the natural rule which we see illustrated in all species, animal or vegetable, high or low, throughout the living world, is that the individual is so constructed that his or her personal fulfilment of his or her natural destiny as an individual, is precisely that which best serves the race. Once we learn that individuals were all evolved by Nature for the sake of the race, we shall understand why they have been so evolved in their personal characteristics that in living their own lives and fulfilling themselves they best fulfil Nature's remoter purpose.

To this universal and necessary law, without which life could not persist anywhere in any of its forms, woman is no exception; and therein is the reply to those who fear a statement in new terms of the old proposition that women must give themselves up for the sake of the community and its future. Here it is true that whosoever will give her life shall save it. Women must indeed give themselves up for the community and the future; and so must men. Since women differ from men, their sacrifice takes a somewhat different form, but in their case, as in men's, the right fulfilment of Nature's purpose is one with the right fulfilment of their own destiny. There is no antinomy. On the contrary, the following pages are written in the belief and the fear that women are threatening to injure themselves as individuals—and therefore the race, of course—just because they wrongly suppose that a monstrous antinomy exists where none could possibly exist. "No," they say, "we have endured this too long; henceforth we must be free to be ourselves and live our own lives." And then, forsooth, they proceed to try to be other than themselves and live other than the lives for which their real selves, in nine cases out of ten, were constructed. It works for a time, and even for life in the case of incomplete and aberrant women. For the others, it often spells liberty and interest and heightened consciousness of self for some years; but the time comes when outraged Nature exacts her vengeance, when middle age abbreviates the youth that was really misspent, and is itself as prematurely followed by a period of decadence grateful neither to its victim nor to anyone else. Meanwhile the women who have chosen to be and to remain women realize the promise of Wordsworth to the girl who preferred walks in the country to algebra and symbolic logic:—

Thou, while thy babes around thee cling,

Shalt show us how divine a thing

A woman may be made.

Thy thoughts and feelings shall not die,

Nor leave thee, when grey hairs are nigh,

A melancholy slave;

But an old age serene and bright

And lovely as a Lapland night,

Shall lead thee to thy grave.

Where is the woman, recognizable as such, who will question that the brother of Dorothy Wordsworth was right?

In the following pages, it is sought to show that, women being constructed by Nature, as individuals, for her racial ends, they best realize themselves, are happier and more beautiful, live longer and more useful lives, when they follow, as mothers or foster-mothers in the wide and scarcely metaphorical sense of that word, the career suggested in Wordsworth's lovely lines.

It remains to state the most valuable end which this book might possibly achieve—an end which, by one means or another, must be achieved. It is that the best women, those favoured by Nature in physique and intelligence, in character and their emotional nature, the women who are increasingly to be found enlisted in the ranks of Feminism, and fighting the great fight for the Women's Cause, shall be convinced by the unchangeable and beneficent facts of biology, seen in the bodies and minds of women, and shall direct their efforts accordingly; so that they and those of their sisters who are of the same natural rank, instead of increasingly deserting the ranks of motherhood and leaving the blood of inferior women to constitute half of all future generations, shall on the contrary furnish an ever-increasing proportion of our wives and mothers, to the great gain of themselves, and of men, and of the future.

For in some of its forms to-day the Woman's Cause is not man's, nor the future's, nor even, as I shall try to show, woman's. But a Eugenic Feminism, for which I try to show the warrant in the study of woman's nature, would indeed be the cause of man, and should enlist the whole heart and head of every man who has them to offer. For here is a principle which benefits men to the whole immeasurable extent involved in decreeing that the best women must be the wives. "The best women for our wives!" is not a bad demand from men's point of view, and it is assuredly the best possible for the sake of the future.

It is claimed, then, for the teaching of this book that, being based upon the evident and unquestionable indications of Nature, it is calculated to serve her end, which is the welfare of the race as a whole, including both sexes. No one will question that the position and happiness and self-realization of women in the modern world would be vastly enhanced by the reforms for which I plead, though some men will not think that game worth the candle. But I have argued that men also will profit; nor can there be any question as to the advantage for children. It is just because our scheme and our objects are natural that they require no support from and lend no warrant to that accursed spirit of sex-antagonism which many well-meaning women now display—doubtless by a natural reflex, because it is the spirit of the worst men everywhere. It is primarily men's desire for sex-dominance that engenders a sex-resentment in women; but the spirit is lamentable, whatever its origin and wherever it be found. It is most lamentable in the bully, the drunkard, the cad, the Mammonist, the satyr, who are everywhere to be found opposing woman and her claims. There is no variety of male blackguardism and bestiality, of vileness and selfishness, of lust and greed, whose representatives' names should not be added to those of the illustrious pro-consuls and elegant peeresses and their following who form Anti-Suffrage Societies. Before we criticise sex-antagonism in women, let us be honest about it in men; and before we sneer at the type of women who most display it, let us realize fully the worthlessness of the types of men who display it. But if this be granted—and I have never heard it granted by the men who deplore sex-antagonism as if only women displayed it—we must none the less recognize that this spirit injures both sexes, and that it is necessarily false, since none can question that Nature devised the sexes for mutual aid to her end. By this first principle sex-antagonism is therefore condemned. This book, written by a man in behalf of womanhood—and therefore in behalf of manhood and childhood—is consistently opposed to all notions of sex-antagonism, or sex-dominance, male or female, or of competing claims between the sexes. Man and woman are complementary halves of the highest thing we know, and just as the men who seek to maintain male dominance are the enemies of mankind, so the women who preach enmity to men, and refusal of wise and humane legislation in their interests because men have framed it, are the enemies of womankind. At the beginning of the "Suffragette" movement in England, I had the pleasure of taking luncheon with the brilliant young lady whose name has been so prominent in this connection; and my lifelong enthusiasm for the "Vote" has been chastened ever since by the recollection of the resentment which she exhibited at every suggestion of or allusion to any legislation in favour of women—notably with reference to infant mortality and to alcoholism—whilst the suffrage was withheld. Substitute "destroyed" or "reversed" for "chastened," and you have a more typical result in quite well-meaning men of sex-antagonism as many "advanced" women now display it.

Further, this book may be regarded as an appeal to those women who are responsible for forming the ideals of girls. The idea of womanhood here set forth on natural grounds is not always represented in the ideals which are now set before the youthful aspirant for work in the woman's cause. It is not argued that the principles of eugenics are to be expounded to the beginner, nor that she is to be re-directed to the nursery. It is not necessarily argued, by any means, that marriage and motherhood are to be set forth as the goal at which every girl is to aim; such a woman as Miss Florence Nightingale was a Foster-Mother of countless thousands, and was only the greatest exemplar in our time of a function which is essentially womanly, but does not involve marriage. I desire nothing less than that girls should be taught that they must marry—any man better than none. I want no more men chosen for fatherhood than are fit for it, and if the standard is to be raised, selection must be more rigorous and exclusive, as it could not be if every girl were taught that, unmarried, she fails of her destiny. The higher the standard which, on eugenic principles, natural or acquired, women exact of the men they marry, the more certainly will many women remain unmarried.

But I believe that the principles here set forth are able to show us how such women may remain feminine, and may discharge characteristically feminine functions in society, even though physical motherhood be denied them. The racial importance of physical motherhood cannot be exaggerated, because it determines, as we have seen, not less than half the natural composition of future generations. But its individual importance can easily be over-estimated, and that is an error which I have specially sought to avoid in this book, which is certainly an attempt to call or recall women to motherhood. It is not as if physical motherhood were the whole of human motherhood. Racially, it is the substantial whole; individually, it is but a part of the whole, and a smaller fraction in our species than in any humbler form of life. Everyone knows maiden aunts who are better, more valuable, completer mothers in every non-physical way than the actual mothers of their nephews and nieces. This is woman's wonderful prerogative, that, in virtue of her psyche, she can realize herself, and serve others, on feminine lines, and without a pang of regret or a hint anywhere of failure, even though she forego physical motherhood. This book, therefore, is a plea not only for Motherhood but for Foster-Motherhood—that is, Motherhood all-but-physical. In time to come the great professions of nursing and teaching will more and more engage and satisfy the lives and the powers of Virgin-Mothers without number. Let no woman prove herself so ignorant or contemptuous of great things as to suggest that these are functions beneath the dignity of her complete womanhood.

But many a young girl, passing from her finishing-school—which has perhaps not quite succeeded, despite its best efforts, in finishing her womanhood—and coming under the influence of some of our modern champions of womanhood, might well be excused for throwing such a book as this from her, scorning to admit the glorious conditions which declare that woman is more for the Future than for the Present, and that if the Future is to be safeguarded, or even to be, they must not be transgressed. I have watched young girls, wearing the beautiful colours which have been captured by one section of the suffrage movement, asking their way to headquarters for instructions as to procedure, and I have wondered whether, in twenty years, they will look back wholly with content at the consequences. Some time ago the illustrated papers provided us with photographs of a person, originally female, "born to be love visible," as Ruskin says, who had mastered jiu-jitsu for suffragette purposes, and was to be seen throwing various hapless men about a room. And only the day before I write, the papers have given us a realistic account of a demonstration by an ardent advocate of woman, the chief item of which was that, on the approach of a burly policeman to seize her, she—if the pronouns be not too definite in their sex—fell upon her back and adroitly received the constabulary "wind" upon her upraised foot, thereby working much havoc. No one would assert that the woman's movement is responsible for the production of such people; no reasonable person would assert that their adherence condemns it; but we are rightly entitled to be concerned lest the rising generation of womanhood be misled by such disgusting examples.

Nothing will be said which militates for a moment against the possibility that a woman may be womanly and yet in her later years, when so many women combine their best health and vigour with experience and wisdom, might replace many hundredweight of male legislators upon the benches of the House of Commons, to the immense advantage of the nation. If our present purpose were medical in the ordinary sense, the reader would come to a chapter on the climacteric, dealing with the nervous and other risks and disabilities of that period, and notably including a warning as to the importance of attending promptly to certain local symptoms which may possibly herald grave disease. An abundance of books on such subjects is to be had, and my purpose is not to add to their number. Yet the climacteric has a special interest for us because the special case of those women who have passed it is constantly ignored in our discussions of the woman question—which is not exclusively concerned with the destiny of girls and the claims of feminine adolescence to the vote. The work of Lord Lister, and the advances of obstetrics and gynecology, largely dependent thereon, are increasing the naturally large number of women at these later ages—naturally large because women live longer than men. At this stage the whole case is changed. The eugenic criterion no longer applies. But though the woman is past motherhood, she is still a woman, and by no means past foster-motherhood. Though her psychological characters are somewhat modified, it is recorded by my old friend and teacher, Dr. Clouston, that never yet has he found the climacteric to damage a woman's natural love for children: the maternal instinct will not be destroyed. See, then, what a valuable being we have here; none the less so because, as has been said, she now begins to enjoy, in many cases, the best health of her life. Whatever activities she adopts, there is now no question of depriving the race of her qualities: if they are good qualities, it is to be hoped they are already represented in members of the rising generation. The scope of womanhood is now extended. The principles to be laid down later still apply, but they are entirely compatible with, for instance, the discharge of legislative functions. The nation does not yet value its old or elderly women aright. We use as a term of contempt that which should be a term of respect. Savage peoples are wiser. We need the wisdom of our older women. It would be well for us to have Mrs. Fawcett and Mrs. Humphry Ward in Parliament. The distinguished lady who approves of woman's vote in municipal affairs, and fights hard for her son's candidature in Parliament, but objects to woman suffrage on the ground that women should not interfere in politics, could doubtless find a good reason why women should sit in Parliament; and though she would scarcely be heeded on matters of political theory, her splendid championship of Vacation Schools and Play Centres would be more effective than ever in the House, and might instruct some of her male confrères as to what politics really is.

The prefatory point here made is, in a word, that the following doctrines are perhaps less reactionary than the ardent suffragette might suppose, compatible as they are with an earnest belief in the fitness and the urgent desirability of women of later ages even as Members of Parliament. It may be added that, on this very point, there is a ridiculous argument against woman suffrage—that it is the precursor of a demand to enter Parliament, which would mean (it is assumed), women being numerically in the majority, that the House would be filled with girls of twenty-two and three. Men of a sort would be likelier than women, it could be argued, to vote for such girls; but the wise of both sexes might well vote for the elderly women whose existence is somehow forgotten in this connection.

No chapter will be found devoted to the question of the vote. The omission is not due to reasons of space, nor to my ever having heard a good argument against the vote—even the argument that women do not want it. That women did not want the vote would only show—if it were the case—how much they needed it. Nor is the omission due to any lukewarmness in a cause for which I am constantly speaking and writing. My faith in the justice and political expediency of woman suffrage has survived the worst follies, in speech and deed, of its injudicious advocates: I would as soon allow the vagaries of Mrs. Carrie Nation to make me an advocate of free whiskey. Causes must be judged by their merits, not by their worst advocates, or where are the chances of religion or patriotism or decency?

The omission is due to the belief that votes for women or anybody else are far less important than their advocates or their opponents assume. The biologist cannot escape the habit of thinking of political matters in vital terms; and if these lead him to regard such questions as the vote with an interest which is only secondary and conditional, it is by no means certain that the verdict of history would not justify him. The present concentration of feminism in England upon the vote, sometimes involving the refusal of a good end—such as wise legislation—because it was not attained by the means they desire, and arousing all manner of enmity between the sexes, may be an unhappy necessity so long as men refuse to grant what they will assuredly grant before long. But now, and then, the vital matters are the nature of womanhood; the extent of our compliance with Nature's laws in the care of girlhood, whether or not women share in making the transitory laws of man; and the extent to which womanhood discharges its great functions of dedicating and preparing its best for the mothers, and choosing and preparing the best of men for the fathers, of the future. The vote, or any other thing, is good or bad in so far as it serves or hurts these great and everlasting needs. I believe in the vote because I believe it will be eugenic, will reform the conditions of marriage and divorce in the eugenic sense, and will serve the cause of what I have elsewhere called "preventive eugenics," which strives to protect healthy stocks from the "racial poisons," such as venereal disease, alcohol, and, in a relatively infinitesimal degree, lead. These are ends good and necessary in themselves, whether attained by a special dispensation from on high, or by decree of an earthly autocrat or a democracy of either sex or both. For these ends we must work, and for all the means whereby to attain them; but never for the means in despite of the ends.

This first chapter is perhaps unduly long, but it is necessary to state my eugenic faith, since there is neither room nor need for me to reiterate the principles of eugenics in later chapters, and since it was necessary to show that, though this book is written in the interests of individual womanhood, it is consistent with the principles of the divine cause of race-culture, to which, for me, all others are subordinate, and by which, I know, all others will in the last resort be judged.

The whole teaching of this book, from social generalizations to the details of the wise management of girlhood, is based upon a single and simple principle, often referred to and always assumed in former writings from this pen, and in public speaking from many and various platforms. If this principle be invalid, the whole of the practice which is sought to be based upon it falls to the ground; but if it be valid, it is of supreme importance as the sole foundation upon which can be erected any structure of truth regarding woman and womanhood. Our first concern, therefore, must be to state this principle, and the evidence therefor. This will occupy not a small space: and the remainder will be amply filled with the details of its application to woman as girl and mother and grandmother, as wife and widow, as individual and citizen.

Woman is Nature's supreme organ of the future, and it is as such that she will here be regarded. The purpose of adding yet another to the many books on various aspects of womanhood is to propound and, if possible, establish this conception of womanhood, and to find in it a never-failing guide to the right living of the individual life, an infallible criterion of right and wrong in all proposals for the future of womanhood, whether economic, political, educational, whether regarding marriage or divorce, or any other subject that concerns womanhood. A principle for which so much is claimed demands clear definition and inexpugnable foundation in the "solid ground of Nature." Cogent in some measure though the argument would be, we must appeal in the first place neither to the poets, nor to our own naturally implanted preferences in womanhood, nor to any teaching that claims extra-natural authority. Our first question must be—Do Nature and Life, the facts and laws of the continuance and maintenance of living creatures, lend countenance to this idea; can it be translated from general terms, essentially poetic and therefore suspect by many, into precise, hard, scientific language; is it a fact, like the atomic weight of oxygen or the laws of motion, that woman is Nature's supreme instrument of the future? If the answer to these questions be affirmative, the evidence of the poets, of our own preferences, of religions ancient and modern, is of merely secondary concern as corroborative, and as serving curiosity to observe how far the teachings of passionless science have been divined or denied by past ages and by other modes of perception and inquiry. Therefore this is to be in its basis none other than a biological treatise; for the laws of reproduction, the newly gained knowledge regarding the nature of sex, and the facts of physiology, afford the evidence of the essentially biological truth which has been so often expressed by the present writer in the quasi-poetic terms already set forth. Let us, then, first remind ourselves how the individual, whether male or female, is to be looked upon in the light of the work of Weismann in especial, and how this great truth, discovered by modern biology and especially by the students of heredity, affects our understanding of the difference between man and woman. Setting forth these earlier pages in the year of the Darwin centenary, and the jubilee of the "Origin of Species," a writer would have some courage who proposed to discuss man and woman as if they were unique, rather than the highest and latest examples of male and female: their nature to be rightly understood only by due study of their ancestral forms, ancient and modern. The biological problem of sex is our concern, and we may have to traverse many past ages of "æonian evolution," and even to consider certain quite humble organisms, before we rightly see woman as an evolutionary product of the laws of life.

But, first, as to the individual, of whatever sex. Observing the familiar facts of our own lives and of the higher forms of life, both animal and vegetable, with which we are acquainted, we must naturally at first incline to regard as worse than paradoxical the modern biological concept of the individual as existing for the race, of the body as merely a transient host or trustee of the immortal germ-plasm. Since life has its worth and value only in individuals, and since, therefore, the race exists for the production of individuals, in any sense that we human beings, at any rate, can accept, we must be reasonable in expressing the apparently contrary but not less true view that the individual exists for the race. After all, that does not mean that individuals exist and are worth Nature's while merely in order to see the germ-plasm on its way. To say that the individual exists for the race is to say that he, and, as we shall see, pre-eminently she, exist for future individuals; and that is not a destiny to be despised of any. Let us attempt to state simply but accurately what biologists mean in regarding the individual as primarily the host and servant of something called the germ-plasm.

When the processes of development and of reproduction are closely scrutinized, we find evidence which, together with the conclusions based thereon, was first effectively stated by August Weismann, of Freiburg, in his famous little book, "The Germ-Plasm."[1] The marvellous cells from which new individuals are formed must no longer be regarded, at any rate in the higher animals and plants, as formerly parts of the parent individuals. On the contrary, we have to accept, at least in general and as substantially revealing to us the true nature of the individual, the doctrine of the "continuity of the germ-plasm," which teaches that the race proper is a potentially immortal sequence of living germ-cells, from which at intervals there are developed bodies or individuals, the business and raison d'être of which, whatever such individuals as ourselves may come to suppose, is primarily to provide a shelter for the germ-plasm, and nourishment and air, until such time as it shall produce another individual for itself, to serve the same function. This is another way of saying what will often be said in the following pages—that the individual is meant by Nature to be a parent.

We shall later see that this great truth by no means involves the condemnation of spinsterhood, but since it determines not only the physiology, but also the psychology, of the individual, and especially of woman, it will guide us to a right appreciation of the dangers and the right direction of spinsterhood, and the means whereby it may be made a blessing to self and to others. This must be said lest the reader should be deterred by the unquestionably true assertion that the individual is meant by Nature to be a parent, and has no excuse for existence in Nature's eyes except as a parent. If we are to regard the body as a trustee of the germ-plasm, it is evident that the body which carries the germ-plasm with itself to the grave—the "immortality of the germ-plasm" being only conditional and at the mercy of the acts of individuals—has stultified Nature's end; and it will be a serious concern of ours in the present work to show how, amongst human beings, at any rate, this stultification may be averted, many childless persons of both sexes having served the race for evermore in the highest degree. We must ask in what directions especially may woman, most profitably for herself or for others, seek to express herself apart from motherhood. It will appear, if our leading principle be valid, that it affords us a sure guide in the welter of controversy and baseless assertion of every kind, in which this vastly important question is at present involved.

This conception of the individual as something meant to be a parent will not be questioned by anyone who will do himself or herself the justice to look at it soberly and reverently, without a trace of that tendency to levity or to something worse which here invariably betrays the vulgar mind, whether in a princess or a prostitute. For it needs little reflection to perceive that the most familiar facts of our experience and observation never fail to confirm the doctrine based by Weismann upon the revelations of the microscope when applied to the developmental processes of certain simple animal and vegetable forms. The doctrine that the individual body was evolved by the forces of life, acted on and directed by natural selection, as guardian and transmitter of the germ-plasm, assumes a less paradoxical character when we perceive with what unfailing art Nature has constructed and devised the body and the mind for their function. We flatter ourselves hugely if we suppose that even our most enjoyable and apparently most personal attributes and appetites were designed by Nature for us. Not at all. It is the race for which she is concerned. It is not the individual as individual, but the individual as potential parent, that is her concern, nor does she hesitate to leave very much to the mercy of time and chance the individual from whom the possibility of parenthood has passed away, or the individual in whom it has never appeared. Our appetites for food and drink, well devised by Nature to be pleasant in their satisfaction—lest otherwise we should fail to satisfy them and a possible parent should be lost to her purposes—are immediately rendered of no account when there stirs within us, whether in its crude or transmuted forms, the appetite for the exercise of which these others, and we ourselves, exist, since in Nature's eyes and scheme we are but vessels of the future. In later chapters we shall have much occasion, because of their great practical importance in the conduct of woman's life from girlhood onwards, to discuss the physiological and psychological facts which demonstrate overwhelmingly the truth of the view that the individual was evolved by Nature for the care of the germ-plasm, or, in other words, was and is constructed primarily and ultimately for parenthood.

Nor is this argument, as I see it and will present it, invalidated in any degree by the case of such individuals as the sterile worker-bee; any more than the argument, rightly considered, is invalidated by any instance of a worthy, valuable, happy life, eminently a success in the highest and in the lower senses, lived amongst mankind by a non-parent of either sex. On the contrary, it is in such cases as that of the worker-bee that we find the warrant—in apparent contradiction—for our notion of the meaning of the individual, and also the key to the problem placed before us amongst ourselves by the case of inevitable spinsterhood. Here, it must be granted, is an individual of a very high and definite and individually complete type, no accident or sport, but, in fact, essential for the type and continuance of the species to which she belongs, and yet, though highly individualized and worthy to represent individuality at its best and highest, the worker-bee, so far from being designed for parenthood, is sterile, and her distinctive characters and utilities are conditional upon her sterility. But when we come to ask what are her distinctive characters and utilities we find that they are all designed for the future of the race. She is, in fact, the ideal foster-mother, made for that service, complete in her incompleteness, satisfied with the vicarious fulfilment of the whole of motherhood except its merely physical part. The doctrine, therefore, that the individual is designed by Nature for parenthood, the individual being primarily devised for the race, finds no exception, but rather a striking and immensely significant illustration in the case of the worker-bee, nor will it find itself in difficulties with the case of any forms of individual, however sterile, that can be quoted from either the animal or the vegetable world. Natural selection, of which the continuance of the race is the first and never neglected concern, invariably sees to it that no individuals are allowed to be produced by any species unless they have survival-value, a phrase which always means, in the upshot, value for the survival of the race—whether as parents, or foster-parents, protectors of the parents, feeders or slaves thereof. Our primary purpose throughout being practical, it is impossible to devote unlimited time and space to proceeding formally through the known forms of life in order to marshal all the proofs or a tithe of them, that all individuals are invented and tolerated by Nature for parenthood or its service.

We shall in due course consider the peculiar significance of this proposition for the case of woman—a significance so radical for our present argument, even to its minutiæ of practical living, that it cannot be too early or too thoroughly insisted upon. But before we proceed to the special case of woman it is well that we should clearly perceive as a general guiding truth, which will never fail us, either in interpretation, prediction, or instruction, the unfailing gaze of Nature, as manifested in the world of life, towards the future. There is no truth more significant for our interpretation of the meaning of the Universe, or at least of our planetary life: there is none more relevant to the fate of empires, and therefore to the interests of the enlightened patriot: there is none more worthy to be taken to heart by the individual of either sex and of any age, adolescent or centenarian, as the secret of life's happiness, endurance, and worth. It may be permitted, then, briefly to survey the main truths, and, therefore, the main teachings of the past, as they may be read by those who seek in the facts of life the key to its meaning and its use.

CHAPTER II

THE LIFE OF THE WORLD TO COME

When we survey the past of the earth as science has revealed it to us, we gain some conceptions which will help us in our judgments as to what this phenomenon of human life may signify in the future. We are accustomed to look upon the earth as aged, but these terms are only relative; and if we compare our own planet with its neighbours in the solar system, we shall have good reason to suppose that, though the past of the earth is very prolonged, its future will probably be far more so. As for life—and we must think not only of human life, but of life as a planetary phenomenon—that is necessarily much more recent than the formation even of the earth's crust, the existence of water in the liquid state being necessary for life in any of its forms. And human life itself, though the extent of its past duration is seen to be greater the more deeply we study the records, is yet a relatively recent thing. The utmost, it appears, that we can assign to our past would be perhaps six million years, taking our species back to mid-Miocene times. Doubtless this is a mighty age as compared with the few thousand years allotted to us in bygone chronologies; but, looked at sub specie æternitatis, and with an eye which is prepared to look forward also, and especially with relation to what we know and can predict regarding the sun, these past six million years may reasonably be held to comprise only the infantine period of man's life.

It is very true that on such estimates as those of Lord Kelvin, and according to what astronomers and geologists believed not more than twelve or even eight years ago, regarding the secular cooling of earth and sun—that, according to these, the time is by no means "unending long," and we may foresee, not so remotely, the end of the solar heat and light of which we are the beneficiaries. But the discovery of radium and the phenomena of radio-activity have profoundly modified these estimates, justifying, indeed, the acumen of Lord Kelvin, who always left the way open for reconsideration should a new source of heat and energy in general be discovered. We know now that, to consider the earth first, its crust is not self-cooling, or at any rate not self-cooling only, for it is certainly self-heating. There is an almost embarrassing amount of radium in the earth's crust, so far as we have examined it; a quantity, that is to say, so great that if the same proportion were maintained at deeper levels as at those which we can investigate, the earth would have to be far hotter than it is. Similar reasoning applies to the sun. Definite, immediate proof of the presence of radium there is not forthcoming yet, but that presence is far more than probable, especially since the existence of solar uranium, the known ancestor of radium, has been demonstrated. The reckonings of Helmholtz and others, based upon the supposition that the solar energy is entirely derived from its gravitational contraction, must be superseded. It would require but a very small proportion of radium in the solar constitution to account for all the energy which the centre of our system produces; and, as we have already seen, the earth is to no small extent its own sun—its own source of heat. The prospect thus opened out by modern physical inquiry supports more strongly than ever the conviction that the life of this world to come will be very prolonged. It is true that there is always the possibility of accident. Encountering another globe, our sun would doubtless produce so much heat as to incinerate all planetary life. But the excessive remoteness of the sun from the nearest fixed star suggests that the constitution of the stellar universe is such that an accident of this kind is extremely improbable. As for comets, the earth's atmosphere has already encountered a comet, even during the brief period of astronomical observation. This thick overcoat of ours protects us from the danger of such chances.

What, then, is the record? We are told that the belief in progress is a malady of youth, which experience and the riper mind will dissipate. Some such argument from the lips of the disillusioned or the disidealized has been possible, perhaps, with some measure of probability, until within our own times. They must now forever hold their peace. We know as surely as we know the elementary phenomena of physics or chemistry, that the record of life upon our planet, though not only a record of progress by any means, has nevertheless included that to which the name of progress cannot be denied in any possible definition of the word. For myself, I understand by progress the emergence of mind, and its increasing dominance over matter. Such categories are, no doubt, unphilosophical in the ultimate sense, but they are proximately convenient and significant. Now, if progress be thus defined, we can see for ourselves that life has truly advanced, not merely in terms of anatomical or physiological—i. e. mechanical or chemical—complexity, but in terms of mind. The facts of nutrition teach us that the first life upon the earth was vegetable; and though the vegetable world displays great complexity, and that which, on some definitions, would be called progress, yet we cannot say that there is any more mind, any greater differentiation or development of sentience, in the oak than in the alga. When we turn, however, to the animal world—which is parasitic, indeed, upon the vegetable world—we find that in what we may call the main line of ascent there has been, along with increasing anatomical complexity, the far greater emergence of mind. In its earliest manifestations, sentience, consciousness, the psychical in general, and the capacity for it, must be regarded merely as phenomena of the physical organism; the capacity to feel, as no more than a property of the living body; and such mind as there is exists for the body. But, as we may see it, there has been a gradual but infinitely real turning of the tables, so that, even in a dog, as the lover of that dog would grant, the loss of limbs and tail, or, indeed, of any portion of the body not necessary to life, does not mean the loss of the essential dog—not the loss of that which the lover of the dog loves. Already, that which is not to be seen or handled has become the more real. In ourselves, it is a capital truth, which asceticism, old or new, perverted or sane, has always recognized, that the mind is the man, and must be master, and the body the servant. Yet, historically, this creature, who by the self means not the body, but, as he thinks, its inhabitant, is historically and lineally developed—is also, indeed, developed as an individual—from an organism in which anything to be called psychical is but an apparently accidental attribute, to be discerned only on close examination. This emergence of mind is progress; and this, notwithstanding the sneers of those who do not love the word or the light, has occurred. Its history is written indelibly in the rocks. And, as we shall argue, this is the supreme lesson of evolution—that progress is possible, because progress has occurred.

Assuredly we should never use this word "progress" without reminding ourselves of the cardinal distinction that exists between two forms that it may manifest. There is a progress which consists in and depends upon an advance in the constitution of the living individual; and, so far as we are more mental and less physical than the men who have left us such relics as the Neanderthal skull, in so far we exemplify this kind of progress. But, on the other hand, we can claim progress as compared with even the Greeks in some respects, though there is no evidence whatever that, so far as the individual is concerned, there is any natural, inherent, organic progress. But we know more. Our school-boys know more than Aristotle. We stand upon Greek shoulders. This is traditional progress—something outside the germ-plasm; a thing dependent upon our great human faculty of speech.

That, surely, is why the word infantine was rightly used in our first paragraph. For we may ask why, if man be millions of years old, any record of progress should be a matter of only a few thousand years—perhaps not more than fifteen or twenty. The answer, I believe, is that traditional progress depends upon the possibility of tradition. Now speech, apart from writing, involves the possibility of tradition from generation to generation, and I am very sure that "Man before speech" is a myth; the more we learn of the anthropoid apes the surer we may be of that. But, after all, the possibilities of progress dependent upon aural memory are sadly limited; not only because it is easy to forget, but because it is also conspicuously easy to distort, as a familiar round-game testifies. The greatest of all the epochs in human history was that which saw the genesis of written speech. I believe that hundreds of thousands, nay millions, of preceding years were substantially sterile just because the educational acquirements of individuals could be transmitted to their children neither in the germ-plasm (for we know such transmission to be impossible), nor outside the germ-plasm, by means of writing. The invention of written language accounts, then, we may suppose, for the otherwise incomprehensible disparity between the blank record of long ages, and the great achievement of recent history—an achievement none the less striking if we remember that the historical epoch includes a thousand years of darkness. Thus, as was said at the Royal Institution in 1907, when discussing the nature of progress, we may argue in a new sense that the historians have made history: it is the possibility of recording that has given us something to record.

Now, it is in terms of this latter kind of progress that our duty to the past, as we conceive it, may be defined. And in its terms also must we define the grounds of our veneration for the past. None of us invented language, spoken or written; nor yet numbers, nor the wheel, nor much else. We see further than our ancestors because we stand upon their shoulders, and, as Coleridge hinted, this may be so even though we be dwarfs and they were giants. Some of us see this. How can we fail to do so? And the past becomes in our eyes a very real thing, to which we are so greatly indebted that we should even live for it. But there is a great danger, dependent upon a great error, here. Let us consider what is our right attitude towards the past. We are its children and its heirs. We are infinitely indebted to it. We must love and venerate that which was lovable and venerable in it. But are we to live for it?

If we could imagine ourselves coming from afar and contemplating the sequence of universal phenomena now for the first time, we should realize that the past, though real, because it was once real, is yet a fleeting aspect of change, and, in a very real sense also, is not. Nor, indeed, is the future; but it will be. We cannot alter, we cannot benefit, we cannot serve the past, because it is not and will not be. Our besetting tendency as individuals is to live for our own pasts, more especially as we grow old; to become retrospective, to cease to look forward, even to dedicate what remains to us of life to the service of what is not at all. In this respect, as in so many others, we are less wise than children. We will not let the dead bury its dead. This is also the tendency of all institutions. Even if there were founded an Institute of the Future, dedicated to the life of this world to come, after only one generation its administrators would be consulting the interests of the past, turning to the service of the name and the memory of their founder, though it was for the future that he lived. Throughout all our social institutions we can perceive this same worship of what no longer is at the cost of the most real of all real things, which is the life of the generation that is and the generations that are to be.

Everywhere the price for this idolatry is exacted. The perpetual image of it is Lot's wife, who, looking backwards upon that from which she had escaped, was turned into a pillar of salt. Nature may or may not have a purpose, and exhibit designs for that purpose; she may or may not, in philosophical language, be teleological. Man is and must be teleological. We must live for the morrow, for what will be, whether as individuals or as a nation, or our ways are the ways of death. This is looked upon as a human failing—that man never is, but always to be blest; that man is never satisfied, that he will not rest content with present achievement.

Well, it is stated of our first cousin, once removed, the orang-outang, that in the adult state he is aroused only for the snatching of food, and then "relapses into repose." His reach does not exceed his grasp, and one need not preach contentment to him. But we, the latest and highest products of the struggle for existence, we are strugglers by constitution; and when we relapse into repose we degenerate. Only on condition of living for the morrow can we remain human. Put a sound limb on crutches and you paralyze it; wear smoked glasses and your eyes become intolerant of light, or wear glasses that make the muscle of accommodation superfluous and it atrophies; take pepsin and hydrochloric acid and the stomach will become incapable of producing them; cease to chew and your teeth decay; let the newspaper prepare your mental food as the cook cuts up your physical food, and you will become incapable of thought—that is, of mental mastication and digestion. It is above all things imperative to strive, to have a goal, to seek it on our own legs, to cry for the moon rather than for nothing at all. And Nature teaches us unequivocally that our purpose is ever onward—

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until we die.

It is to go, and not to get, that is the glory. To be content is to have no ideal beyond the real; we were better dead and nourishing grass. It is part of the whole structure of life, as we can read it, whether in the animal or in the vegetable world, but pre-eminently in ourselves, that the very body of the individual is constructed as for purpose; nay more, as for the purposes of the future. Every little baby girl that is born into the world bears upon her soft surface signs and portents—not merely promise, but the promise of provision—for the life of the world to come. At her very birth she teaches us that she is not created for self alone, but for what will be. Running through the whole body—and this the more markedly the higher the type of life—we find organs, tissues, functions, co-ordinations existing not for the present, but for the life of the world to come. When, some day, the social organism is as rightly constructed as the body of any woman, or even, in some measure, of any man, when it is similarly dedicated to the real future, and as resolutely turned away from any worship of what no longer is, then heaven will be nearer to earth.

It is quite clear that the supreme choice for any individual or institution or nation is between unborn to-morrow and dead yesterday. No one who concerns himself in the current political controversies, as, for instance, that thing of unspeakable shame which is called the "education question," will doubt that the present and the future are constantly being sacrificed to the past. It may be that the spirit of a trust is being grossly violated; but, rather than infringe the letter of it, the life of to-day and to-morrow must suffer: thus do the worshippers of dead yesterday—the most lethal idol before which fond humanity ever prostrated itself.

If it be our duty to do—not "as though to breathe were life"—and if nature indicates the future as that which we are to serve, what evidence have we, or what likelihood, that such service is worth our while? Of course, such a question as this may be answered in some such terms as those of the further question, What has posterity done for us? And it is interesting, perhaps, to consider that, so far as we can judge the attitude of our ancestors towards ourselves, their chief interest in us seems to have been as to what we should think of them—"What will posterity say?" They left their records, as we leave our records, for posterity to discover. With singular lack of judgment, as I think, we bury examples of our newspapers for posterity to discover: these are amongst the things which I should rather not have posterity discover. But this is no right outlook upon the future. It is not a question of what posterity can do for us. Posterity is here within us. The life of the world to come is in our keeping. We carry it about with us in all our goings and comings. It is at the mercy of what we eat and drink, at the mercy of the diseases we contract. Its fate is involved when we fall in love with each other, or out of love with each other; it is we ourselves. Just as the father who perhaps is losing his own hair may like to see how pleasantly his children's hair is growing, and finds consolation therein; just as, indeed, all the hopes of the parent become gradually transferred from self to that further self, those further selves, which his children are, so we are to look upon the future as our continuing self. To ask, What has posterity done for us? should be looked upon as if one should say, What have my children done for me? The parallel is indeed a very close one: and it is pointed out by the fine sentence from Herbert Spencer, which should be known to all of us—"A transfigured sentiment of parenthood regards with solicitude not child and grandchild only, but the generations to come hereafter—fathers of the future, creating and providing for their remote children."

We may grant that there is no money in posterity. The germ-plasm has infinite possibilities; but, so long as it remains germ-plasm, it can write no cheques in our favour. If you serve the present, the present will pay; posterity does not pay. If you write a "Merry Widow," the present will pay; if you write an "Unfinished Symphony," you will be dust ere it is performed. If you create that which will last forever, but which makes no appeal to the transient tastes of the moment, you may starve and die and rot, because the future, for which you work, cannot reward you. Life is so constructed that only in our own day, and not always now, is the mother—even Nature's own supreme organ of the future—rewarded for her maternal sacrifice. Nature does not trouble about the fate of the present, because she is always pressing on and pressing on towards something more, higher, better. The present, the individual, are but the organs of her purpose. We are to look upon ourselves as ends in ourselves; but we are also means towards ends which we can only dimly conceive, but towards which we may rightly work, and the service of which, though by no means freedom in the ordinary sense, is yet of that higher kind, that perfect freedom, which consists in the development of all the higher attributes of our nature. For it is in our nature to work and to feel and to live for the life that will be. That, as I say, is because living creatures are so constructed.

Huxley said that if the present level of human life were to show no rising in the future, he should welcome the kindly comet that should sweep the whole thing away. None of us is content with things as they are. If we are, better were it for us to be nourishing the grass and serving the things that will be in that way, if we cannot in any other. What promise, then, have we that things as they will be are worth working for? We live now in an age to which there has been revealed the fact of organic evolution. From the fire-mist, from the mud, from the merely brutal, there have been evolved—such is the worth of Nature's womb—there have been evolved intelligence and love, sacrifice, ideals; splendours which no splendour to come can utterly dim. These things are in the power of Nature. This is what "dead matter" can mother. So much the worse for our contemptible conceptions of matter, and That of which matter is the manifestation. But if it be that from the slime, by natural processes, there can grow a St. Francis, surely our dim notions of the potencies of Nature must be exalted. The forces that have erected us from the worm, are they necessarily exhausted or exhaustible? Who will dare to set limits to the promise of Nature's womb? I mean, in a word, that the history of evolution is a warrant for the idea that we ourselves, even erected men and women, are but stages to what may be higher. We look with contempt upon the apes, but time must have been when "simian" would have been as proud an adjective as "human" is to-day: and human may become superhuman.

Many passages might be quoted to show that our expectation of future progress is well based, and I will content myself with a single excerpt from the final page of the masterpiece of which all the civilized world was lately celebrating the jubilee. Says Darwin: "Hence we may look with some confidence to a secure future of great length. And as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection."

The quotation will suffice to remind us that, if we are to serve the life of the world to come in the surest way, we must become Eugenists, accepting and applying to human life Nature's great principle of the selection of worth for parenthood and the rejection of unworth. We must modify and adapt our conceptions of education thereto. We must make parenthood the most responsible thing in life. We must teach the girl—aye, and the boy too—that the body is holy, for it is the temple of life to come. We must perceive in our most imperious instincts Nature's care for the future, and must humanize and sanctify them by conscious recognition of their purpose, and by provident co-operation with Nature towards her supreme end. We could spare from education, perhaps, those fictions concerning the past which are sometimes called history, were they replaced by a knowledge of our own nature and constitution as instruments of the future.

Let us grant even, for the argument, that nothing more is possible than mankind has yet achieved. There remains the hope that that which human nature at its best has been capable of may be realized by human nature at large. In their great moments the great men have seen this. That last sentence is, indeed, a paraphrase from a remark at the end of Herbert Spencer's "Ethics." Ruskin—to choose the polar antithesis of the Spencerian mind—declares that "there are no known limits to the nobleness of person or mind which the human creature may attain if we wisely attend to the laws of its birth and training." Wordsworth asks whether Nature throws any bars across the hope that what one is millions may be. Take it, then, that nothing more is conceivable in the way of mathematics than a Newton, or of drama than an Æschylus or a Shakespeare, or of sacrifice than a Christ. These, then, are types of what will be. They demonstrate what human nature is capable of. What one is, why may not millions be? Here is an ideal to work for. Here is something real to worship, to dedicate a life to. It is not merely that we can make smoother the paths of future generations—which George Meredith declared to be the great purpose and duty of our lives—but that, as Ruskin suggests in the foregoing quotation, we may raise the inherent quality of those future generations, so that they can make their own ways smooth and straight and high. It is our business, I repeat, to conceive of parenthood as the most responsible and sacred thing in life. True, it now follows, according to physiological law, upon the satisfaction of certain tendencies of our nature, which in themselves may be gratified, and even worthily gratified, without reference to anything but the present; yet these tendencies, commonly reviled and regarded with contempt—at least overt contempt—exist, like most of our attributes, for the life of the world to come. And that in which they may result, the bringing of new human life into the world, is the most tremendous, as it is the most mysterious, of our possibilities.

The laws of life are such that at any given moment the entire future is absolutely at the mercy of the present. The laws of life, indeed; one might have said the law of universal causation. But so it is. There is no conceivable limit to our responsibility. We act for the moment, we act for self; but there will be no end to the consequences. When the stuff of which our bodies are made has passed through a thousand cycles, the consequences of our brief moments will still be felt. This dependence of the future upon the present in the world of life is an almost unrealizable thing. Life could not have persisted upon such conditions had not Nature from the first, and increasingly up to our own day (for it is the human infant that is the most helpless, and the longest helpless), had not Nature, I say, persistently constructed the individual, in all his or her attributes, as a being whose warrant and purpose lay yet beyond. We are organs of the race, whether we will or no. We are made for the future, whether we will, whether we care, or no. We are only obeying Nature, and therefore in a position to command her, in dedicating ourselves and our purposes, our customs, our social structures, to the life of the world to come. We shall be there. Our purposes and hopes, the flesh and blood of many of us, will be there. Posterity will be what we make it, as we, alas! are what our ancestors have made us.

To this increasing purpose there will come, I suppose, an end—an inscrutable end. Yearly the evidence makes it more probable that in a sister world we are gazing upon the splendid efforts of purposeful, intelligent, co-ordinated life to battle against planetary conditions which threaten it with death by thirst. How long intelligence has existed upon Mars, if intelligence there be, no one can say; nor yet what its future will be. It would seem probable that our own fate must be similar, but it is far removed. And though the Whole may seem wanton, purposeless, stupid, we are very little folk; we see very dimly; we see only what we have the capacity to see; and there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in the philosophy of the wisest of us. So also there are many events in the womb of time which will be delivered. We are the shapers, the creators, the parents of those events. The still, small voice of the unborn declares our responsibility. There may be no reward. What does reward mean? Who rewards the sun, or the rain, or the oak, or the tigress? But there is the doing of one's work in the world, the serving of the highest and most real purpose that may be revealed to us. That is to be oneself, to fulfil one's destiny, to be a part of the universe, and worthy to be such a part. And though it be even unworthy for us to suggest that at least posterity will be grateful to us, such a thought may perhaps console us a little. At any rate, to those who worship and live for the past, we may offer this alternative: let them work for what will be. Perhaps the reward will be as real as any that the worship of what is not can offer. And, reward or no reward, it is something to have an ideal, something to believe that earth may become heavenly, and that, in some real sense which we can dimly perceive, we may be part—must be part, indeed—of that great day which is in our keeping, and which it is our privilege to have some share in shaping. Thus we may repeat, and thrill to repeat, with new meaning, the old but still living words, Expecto resurrectionem mortuorum, et vitam venturi sæculi—"I look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come."

CHAPTER III

THE PURPOSE OF WOMANHOOD

In due course we shall have to discuss the little that is yet known and to discuss the much that is asserted by both sides, for this or that end, regarding the differences between men and women. By this we mean, of course, the natural as distinguished from the nurtural differences—to use the antithetic terms so usefully adapted by Sir Francis Galton from Shakespeare. Our task, we shall soon discover, is not an easy one: because it is rarely easy to disentangle the effects of nature from those of nurture, all the phenomena, physical and psychical, of all living creatures being not the sum but the product of these two factors. The sharp allotment of this or that feature to nature or to nurture alone is therefore always wholly wrong: and the nice estimation of the relative importance of the natural as compared with the nurtural factors must necessarily be difficult, especially for the case of mankind, where critical observation, on a large scale, and with due control, of the effects of environment upon natural potentialities is still lacking.

But here, at least, we may unhesitatingly declare and insist upon, and shall hereafter invariably argue from, the one indisputable and all-important distinction between man and woman. We must not commit the error of regarding this distinction as qualitative so much as quantitative: by which is meant that it really is neither more nor less than a difference in the proportions of two kinds of vital expenditure. Nor must we commit the still graver error of asserting, without qualification, that such and such, and that only, is the ideal of womanhood, and that all women who do not conform to this type are morbid, or, at least, abnormal. It takes all sorts to make a world, we must remember. Further, the more we learn, especially thanks to the modern experimental study of heredity, regarding the constitution of the individual of either sex, the more we perceive how immensely complex and how infinitely variable that constitution is. Nay more, the evidence regarding both the higher animals and the higher plants inclines us to the view, not unsupported by the belief of ages, that woman is even more complex in constitution than man, and therefore no less liable to vary within wide limits. On what one may term organic analysis, comparable to the chemist's analysis of a compound, woman may be found to be more complex, composed of even more numerous and more various elementary atoms, so to say, than man.

And if these new observations upon the nature of femaleness were not enough to warn the writer who should rashly propose, after the fashion of the unwise, who on every hand lay down the law on this matter, to state once and for all exactly what, and what only, every woman should be, we find that another long-held belief as to the relative variety of men and women has lately been found baseless. It was long held, and is still generally believed—in consequence of that universal confusion between the effects of nature and of nurture to which we have already referred—that women are less variable than men, that they vary within much narrower limits, and that the bias towards the typical, or mean, or average, is markedly greater in the case of women than of men. A vast amount of idle evidence is quoted in favour of a proposition which seems to have some a priori plausibility. It is said—of course, without any allusion to nurture, education, environment, opportunity—that such extreme variations as we call genius are much commoner amongst men than women: and then that the male sex also furnishes an undue proportion of the insane—as if there were no unequal incidence of alcohol and syphilis, the great factors of insanity, upon the two sexes. Nevertheless, observant members of either sex will either contradict one another on this point according to their particular opportunities, or will, on further inquiry, agree that women vary surely no less generally than men, at any rate within considerable limits, whatever may be the facts of colossal genius. Indeed, we begin to perceive that differences in external appearance, which no one supposes to be less general among women than among men, merely reflect internal differences; and that, as our faces differ, so do ourselves, every individual of either sex being, in fact, not merely a peculiar variety, but the solitary example of that variety—in short, unique. The analysis of the individual now being made by experimental biology lends abundant support to this view of the higher forms of life—the more abundant, the higher the form. So vast, as yet quite incalculably vast, is the number of factors of the individual, and such are the laws of their transmission in the germ-cells, that the mere mathematical chances of a second identical throw, so to speak, resulting in a second individual like any other, are practically infinitely small. The greater physiological complexity of woman, as compared with man, lends especial force to the argument in her case. The remarkable phenomena of "identical twins," who alone of human beings are substantially identical, lend great support to this proposition of the uniqueness of every individual: for we find that this unexampled identity depends upon the fact that the single cell from which every individual is developed, having divided into two, was at that stage actually separated into two independent cells, thus producing two complete individuals of absolutely identical germinal constitution. In no other case can this be asserted; and thus this unique identity confirms the doctrine that otherwise all individuals are indeed unique.

It is necessary to state this point clearly in the forefront of our argument, both lest the reader should suppose that some foolish ideal of feminine uniformity is to be argued for, and also in the interests of the argument as it proceeds, lest we should be ourselves tempted to forget the inevitable necessity—and, as will appear, the eminent desirability—of feminine, no less than of masculine, variety.

Nevertheless, there remains the fact that, in the variety which is normally included within the female sex, there is yet a certain character, or combination of characters, upon which, indeed, distinctive femaleness depends. It may in due course be our business to discuss the subordinate and relatively trivial differences between the sexes, whether native or acquired; but we shall encounter nothing of any moment compared with the distinction now to be insisted upon.

One may well suggest that insistence is necessary, for never, it may be supposed, in the history of civilization was there so widespread or so effective a tendency to declare that, in point of fact, there are no differences between men and women except that, as Plato declared, woman is in all respects simply a weaker and inferior kind of man. Great writer though Plato was, what he did not know of biology was eminently worth knowing, and his teaching regarding womanhood and the conditions of motherhood in the ideal city is more fantastically and ludicrously absurd than anything that can be quoted, I verily believe, from any writer of equal eminence. If, indeed, the teaching of Plato were correct, there would be no purpose in this book. If a girl is practically a boy, we are right in bringing up our girls to be boys. If a woman is only a weaker and inferior kind of man, those women—themselves, as a rule, the nearest approach to any evidence for this view—who deny the weakness and inferiority and insist upon the identity, are justified. Their error and that of their supporters is twofold.

In the first place, they err because, being themselves, as we shall afterwards have reason to see, of an aberrant type, they judge women and womanhood by themselves, and especially by their abnormal psychological tendencies—notably the tendency to look upon motherhood much as the lower type of man looks upon fatherhood. It requires closer and more intimate study of this type than we can spare space for—more, even, than the state of our knowledge yet permits—in order to demonstrate how absurd is the claim of women thus peculiarly constituted to speak for their sex as a whole.

But, secondly, those women and men who assert the doctrine of the identity of the sexes are led to err, not because it can really be hidden from the most casual observer that there is a profound distinction between the sexes, apart from the case of the defeminized woman—but because, by a surprising fallacy, they confuse the doctrine of sex-equality with that of sex-identity; or, rather, they believe that only by demonstrating the doctrine that the sexes are substantially identical, can they make good their plea that the sexes should be regarded as equal. The fallacy is evident, and would not need to detain us but for the fact that, as has been said, the whole tendency of the time is towards accepting it—the recent biological proof of the fundamental and absolute difference between the sexes being unknown as yet to the laity. Yet surely, even were the facts less salient, or even were they other than they are, it is a pitiable failure of logic to suppose, as is daily supposed, that in order to prove woman man's equal one must prove her to be really identical in all essentials, given, of course, equal conditions. Controversialists on both sides, and even some of the first rank, are content to accept this absurd position.

The one party seeks to prove that woman is man's equal because Rosa Bonheur and Lady Butler have painted, Sappho and George Eliot have written, and so forth; in other words, that woman is man's equal because she can do what he can do: any capacities of hers which he does not share being tacitly regarded as beside the point or insubstantial.

The other party has little difficulty in showing that, in point of fact, men do things admittedly worth doing of which women are on the whole incapable; and then triumphantly, but with logic of the order which this party would probably call "feminine," it is assumed that woman is not man's equal because she cannot do the things he does. That she does things vastly better and infinitely more important which he cannot do at all, is not a point to be considered; the baseless basis of the whole silly controversy being the exquisite assumption, to which the women's party have the folly to assent, that only the things which are common in some degree to both sexes shall be taken into account, and those peculiar to one shall be ignored.

It is my most solemn conviction that the cause of woman, which is the cause of man, and the cause of the unborn, is by nothing more gravely and unnecessarily prejudiced and delayed than by this doctrine of sex-identity. It might serve some turn for a time, as many another error has done, were it not so palpably and egregiously false. Advocated as it is mainly by either masculine women or unmanly men, its advocates, though in their own persons offering some sort of evidence for it, are of a kind which is highly repugnant to less abnormal individuals of both sexes. Hosts of women of the highest type, who are doing the silent work of the world, which is nothing less than the creation of the life of the world to come, are not merely dissuaded from any support of the women's cause by the spectacle of these palpably aberrant and unfeminine women, but are further dissuaded by the profound conviction arising out of their woman's nature, that the doctrine of sex-identity is absurd. Many of them would rather accept their existing status of social inferiority, with its thousand disabilities and injustices, than have anything to do with women who preach "Rouse yourselves, women, and be men!" and who themselves illustrate only too fearsomely the consequences of this doctrine.

Certainly not less disastrous, as a consequence of this most unfortunate error of fact and of logic, is the alienation from the woman's cause of not a few men whose support is exceptionally worth having. There are men who desire nothing in the world so much as the exaltation of womanhood, and who would devote their lives to this cause, but would vastly rather have things as they are than aid the movement of "Woman in Transition"—if it be transition from womanhood to something which is certainly not womanhood and at best a very poor parody of manhood except in cases almost infinitely rare. I have in my mind a case of a well-known writer, a man of the highest type in every respect, well worth enlisting in the army that fights for womanhood to-day, whose organic repugnance to the defeminized woman is so intense, and whose perception of the distinctive characters of real womanhood and of their supreme excellence is so acute that, so far from aiding the cause of, for instance, woman's suffrage, he is one of its most bitter and unremitting enemies. There must be many such—to whom the doctrine of sex-identity, involving the repudiation of the excellences, distinctive and precious, of women, is an offence which they can never forgive.

One may be permitted a little longer to delay the discussion of the distinctive purpose and character of womanhood, because the foregoing has already stated in outline the teaching which biology and physiology so abundantly warrant. For here we must briefly refer to the work of a very remarkable woman, scarcely known at all to the reading public, either in Great Britain or in America, and never alluded to by the feminist leaders in those countries, though her works are very widely known on the Continent of Europe, and, with the whole weight of biological fact behind them, are bound to become more widely known and more effective as the years go on. I refer to the Swedish writer, Ellen Key, one of whose works, though by no means her best, has at last been translated into English. All her books are translated into German from the Swedish, and are very widely read and deeply influential in determining the course of the woman's movement in Germany. At this early stage in our argument I earnestly commend the reader of any age or sex to study Ellen Key's "Century of the Child." It is necessary and right to draw particular attention to the teaching of this woman since it is urgently needed in Anglo-Saxon countries at this very time, and almost wholly unknown, but for this minor work of hers and an occasional allusion—as in an article contributed by Dr. Havelock Ellis to the Fortnightly Review some few years ago. Especial importance attaches to such teaching as hers when it proceeds from a woman whose fidelity to the highest interests, even to the unchallenged autonomy, of her sex cannot be questioned, attested as it is by a lifetime of splendid work. The present controversy in Great Britain would be profoundly modified in its course and in its character if either party were aware of Ellen Key's work. The most questionable doctrines of the English feminists would be already abandoned by themselves if either the wisest among them, or their opponents, were able to cite the evidence of this great Swedish feminist, who is certainly at this moment the most powerful and the wisest living protagonist of her sex. From a single chapter of the book, to which it may be hoped that the reader will refer, there may be quoted a few sentences which will suffice to indicate the reasons why Ellen Key dissociated herself some ten years ago from the general feminist movement, and will also serve as an introduction from the practical and instinctive point of view to the scientific argument regarding the nature and purpose of womanhood, which must next concern us. Hear Ellen Key:—

"Doing away with an unjust paragraph in a law which concerns woman, turning a hundred women into a field of work where only ten were occupied before, giving one woman work where formerly not one was employed—these are the mile-stones in the line of progress of the woman's rights movement. It is a line pursued without consideration of feminine capacities, nature and environment.

"The exclamation of a woman's rights champion when another woman had become a butcher, 'Go thou and do likewise,' and an American young lady working as an executioner, are, in this connection, characteristic phenomena.

"In our programme of civilization, we must start out with the conviction that motherhood is something essential to the nature of woman, and the way in which she carries out this profession is of value for society. On this basis we must alter the conditions which more and more are robbing woman of the happiness of motherhood and are robbing children of the care of a mother.

"I am in favour of real freedom for woman; that is, I wish her to follow her own nature, whether she be an exceptional or an ordinary woman ... I recognize fully the right of the feminine individual to go her own way, to choose her own fortune or misfortune. I have always spoken of women collectively and of society collectively.

"From this general, not from the individual, standpoint, I am trying to convince women that vengeance is being exacted on the individual, on the race, when woman gradually destroys the deepest vital source of her physical and psychical being, the power of motherhood.

"But present-day woman is not adapted to motherhood; she will only be fitted for it when she has trained herself for motherhood and man is trained for fatherhood. Then man and woman can begin together to bring up the new generation out of which some day society will be formed. In it the completed man—the superman—will be bathed in that sunshine whose distant rays but colour the horizon of to-day."

CHAPTER IV

THE LAW OF CONSERVATION

Students of the physical sciences discovered in the nineteenth century a universal law of Nature, always believed by the wisest since the time of Thales, but never before proven, which is now commonly known as the law of the conservation of energy. When we say to a child, "You cannot eat your cake and have it," we are expressing the law of the conservation of matter, which is really a more or less accurate part-expression of the law of the conservation of energy. The law that from nothing nothing is made—and further, though here this concerns us less, that nothing is ever destroyed—is the only firm foundation for any work or any theory whether in science or philosophy. The chemist who otherwise bases his account of a reaction is wrong; the sociologist who denies it Nature will deny. It was the sure foundation upon which Herbert Spencer erected the philosophy of evolution; and every page of this book depends upon the certainty that this law applies to woman and to womanhood as it does to the rest of the universe. Further, it may be shown that certain less universal but most important generalizations made by two or three biologists are indeed special cases of the universal law. There is, first, the law of Herbert Spencer, which states that for every individual there is an inevitable issue between the demands of parenthood and the demands of self; and there is, secondly, the law of Professors Geddes and Thomson, which asserts that this issue specially concerns the female as compared with the male sex, the distinguishing character of femaleness being that in it a higher proportion of the vital energy is expended upon or conserved for the future and therefore, necessarily, a smaller proportion for the purposes of the individual. It is of service to one's thinking, perhaps, to regard Geddes and Thomson's law as a special case of Spencer's, and Spencer's as a special case of the law of the conservation of energy. First, then, somewhat of detail regarding the law of balance between expenditure on the self and expenditure upon the race; and then to the all-important application of this to the case of womanhood—for upon this application the whole of the subsequent argument depends.

When he set forth, with great daring, to write the "Principles of Biology," Spencer was already at an advantage compared with the accepted writers upon the subject, not merely because of his stupendous intellectual endowment, but also because the idea of the conservation of energy was a permanent guiding factor in all his thought. Thus it was, one supposes, that this bold young amateur, for he was little more, perceived in the light of the evolutionary idea of which he was one of the original promulgators, a simple truth which had been unperceived by all previous writers upon biology, from Aristotle onwards. It is in the last section of his book that Spencer propounds his "law of multiplication," depending upon what he calls the "antagonism between individuation and genesis." As I have observed elsewhere, the word antagonism is perhaps too harsh, and may certainly be misleading, for it may induce us to suppose that there is no possible reconciliation of the claims and demands of the race and the individual, the future and the present. I believe most devoutly that there is such a reconciliation, as indeed Spencer himself pointed out, and a central thesis of this book is indeed that in the right expression of motherhood or foster-motherhood, woman may and increasingly will achieve the highest, happiest, and richest self-development. Thus one may be inclined to abandon the word antagonism, and to say merely that there is a necessary inverse ratio between "individuation" and "genesis," to use the original Spencerian terms. This principle has immense consequences—most notably that as life ascends the birth-rate falls, more of the vital energy being used for the enrichment and development of the individual life, and less for mere physical parenthood. We shall argue that, in the case of mankind, and pre-eminently in the case of woman, this enrichment and development of the individual life is best and most surely attained by parenthood or foster-parenthood, made self-conscious and provident, and magnificently transmuted by its extension and amplification upon the psychical plane in the education of children and, indeed, the care and ennoblement of human life in all its stages.

This law of Spencer's has been discussed at length by the present writer in a previous volume,[2] and we may therefore now proceed to its notable illustration in the case of womanhood and the female sex in general, as made by Geddes and Thomson now more than twenty years ago. It is surprising that the distinguished authors do not seem to have recognized that their law is a special case of Spencer's; but one of them granted this relation in a discussion upon the present writer's first eugenic lecture to the Sociological Society.[3]

We must therefore now briefly but adequately consider the argument of the remarkable book published by the Scottish biologists in 1889, and presented in a new edition in 1900. The latter date is of interest, because it coincides with the re-discovery of the work of Mendel, published in 1865, to which we must afterwards more than once refer; and the work of the Mendelians during the subsequent decade very substantially modifies much of the authors' teaching upon the determination of sex, and the intimate nature of the physiological differences between the sexes. We have learnt more about the nature of sex in the decade or so since the publication of the new edition of the "Evolution of Sex" than in all preceding time. Such, at least, is the well-grounded opinion of all who have acquainted themselves with the work of the Mendelians, as we shall see: and therefore that book is by no means commended to the reader's attention as the last word upon the subject. The rather would one particularly direct him to the following prophetic and admirable passage in the preface of 1900:—

"Our hope is that the growing strength of the still young school of experimental evolutionists may before many years yield results which will involve not merely a revision, but a recasting of our book."

—a passage which may well content the authors to-day, when its fulfilment is so signal.

Yet assuredly the main thesis of the volume stands, and profoundly concerns every student of womanhood in any of its aspects. It will continue to stand when the brilliant foolishness of such writers as poor Weininger, the author of that evidently insane product "Sex and Character," is rightly estimated as interesting to the student of mental pathology alone. There has lately been a kind of epidemic citation from Weininger, whose book is obviously rich in characters that make it attractive to the ignorant and the many; and it is high time that we should concern ourselves less with the product of a suicidal and much-to-be-pitied boy, and more with the sober and scientific work for which daily verification is always at hand.

We cannot do better than have before us at the outset the authors' statement of their main proposition, in the preface to the new edition of their work:—

"In all living creatures there are two great lines of variation, primarily determined by the very nature of protoplasmic change (metabolism); for the ratio of the constructive (anabolic) changes to the disruptive (katabolic) ones, that is of income to outlay, of gains to losses, is a variable one. In one sex, the female, the balance of debtor and creditor is the more favourable one; the anabolic processes tend to preponderate, and this profit may be at first devoted to growth, but later towards offspring, of which she hence can afford to bear the larger share. To put it more precisely, the life-ratio of anabolic to katabolic changes, A/K, in the female is normally greater than the corresponding life-ratio, a/k, in the male. This for us, is the fundamental, the physiological, the constitutional difference between the sexes; and it becomes expressed from the very outset in the contrast between their essential reproductive elements, and may be traced on into the more superficial sexual characters."

A little further on (p. 17), the authors say:—

"Without multiplying instances, a review of the animal kingdom, or a perusal of Darwin's pages, will amply confirm the conclusion that on an average the females incline to passivity, the males to activity. In higher animals, it is true that the contrast shows itself rather in many little ways than in any one striking difference of habit, but even in the human species the difference is recognized. Every one will admit that strenuous spasmodic bursts of activity characterize men, especially in youth, and among the less civilized races; while patient continuance, with less violent expenditure of energy, is as generally associated with the work of women."

We must shortly proceed to study the origin and determination of sex, and more especially of femaleness, in the individual, and here we shall be entirely concerned with the new knowledge commonly called Mendelism, to which there is no allusion in our authors' pages. Meanwhile it must be insisted that the reader who will either read their pages for a survey of the evidence in detail, or who will for a moment consider the evident necessities imposed by the facts of parenthood, cannot possibly fail to satisfy himself that the main contention, as stated in the foregoing quotations, is correct. A further point of the greatest importance to us requires to be made.

It is that, owing to profound but intelligible causes, the contrast which necessarily obtains between the sexes in respect of their vital expenditure is most marked in the case of our own species. It is one of the conditions of progress that the young of the higher species make more demands upon their mothers than do the young of humbler forms. In other words, progress in the world of life has always leant upon and been conditioned by motherhood. Thus, as one has so frequently asserted in reference to the modern campaign against infant mortality, the young of the human species are nurtured within the sacred person—the therefore sacred person—of the mother for a longer period in proportion to the body weight than in the case of any other species; and the natural period of maternal feeding is also the longest known. On the other hand, the physical demands made by parenthood upon the male sex are no greater in our case than in that of lower forms; though upon the psychical plane the great fact of increasing paternal care in the right line of progress may never be forgotten. But thus it follows that the law of conservation, asserting that what is spent for self cannot be kept for the race, and that if the demands of the future are to be met the present must be subordinated, not merely applies to woman, but applies to her in unique degree. There are grounds, also, for believing that what is demonstrably and obviously true on the physical plane has its counterpart in the psychical plane; and that, if woman is to remain distinctively woman in mind, character, and temperament, and if, just because she remains or becomes what she was meant to be, she is to find her greatest happiness, she must orient her life towards Life Orient, towards the future and the life of this world to come. Some such doctrines may help us at a later stage to decide whether it be better that a woman should become a mother or a soldier, a nurse or an executioner.

CHAPTER V

THE DETERMINATION OF SEX

We must regard life as essentially female, since there is no choice but to look upon living forms which have no sex as female, and since we know that in many of the lower forms of life there is possible what is called parthenogenesis or virgin-birth. It has, indeed, been ingeniously argued by a distinguished American writer, Professor Lester Ward,[4] that the male sex is to be looked upon as an afterthought, an ancillary contrivance, devised primarily for the advantages of having a second sex—whatever those advantages may exactly be; and secondarily, one would add, becoming useful in adding fatherhood to motherhood upon the psychical plane of post-natal care and education as well.

But whatever was the historical or evolutionary origin of sex, we may here be excused for attaching more importance—for it is of great practical consequence—to the origin or determination of sex in the individual. At what stage and under what influences did the child that is born a girl become female? To what extent can we control the determination of sex? Why are the numbers of the sexes approximately so equal? What determines the curious disproportions observed in many families, which may be composed only of girls or only of boys; and, as is asserted, also observed after wars and epidemics or during sieges, when an abnormally high proportion of boys is said to be born? These are some of the deeply interesting questions which men have always attempted to answer—with the beginnings of substantial success during the present century at last.

In general it is true that, the more we learn of the characters and histories of living beings, the more importance we attach to nature or birth and the less to nurture or environment, vastly important though the latter be. Thus to the student of heredity nothing could well seem more improbable, at any rate amongst the higher animals, than that characters so profound as those of sex should be determined by nurture. He simply cannot but believe that the sex of the individual is as inborn as his backbone, and as incapable of being created by varying conditions of nurture. The causation of sex is therefore really a problem in heredity; and we may most confidently assert, in the first place, that the sex of every human being is already determined at the moment of conception when, indeed, the new individual is created: determined then by the nature and constitution of the living cells—or of one of them—which combine to form the new being. Subsequent attempts to affect the sex, as by means of the mother's diet and the like, are palpably hopeless from the outset and always will be. This is by no means to say that conditions affecting the mother—as, for instance, the semi-starvation of a prolonged siege—may not affect the construction of the germ-cells which she houses, and which are constantly being formed within her from the mother germ-cells, as they are called. But any given final germ-cell, such as will combine with another from an individual of the opposite sex to form a new being, is already determined, once for all, to be of one sex or the other. We naturally ask, then, how the two parents are concerned in this matter; and the first remarkable answer returned by the Mendelian workers during the last three or four years is that it is the mother who determines the sex of her children in the case of all the higher animals. Her contribution to the new being is called the ovum, and it is believed that ova are of two kinds, or, we are quite right in saying, of two sexes.

Those who are now working at these problems experimentally, actually seeing what happens in given cases, and whom we may for convenience call Mendelians after the master who gave them their method and their key, have latterly obtained results the main tenour of which must be stated here, as they indicate the lines of a portion of the succeeding argument. The task was to attack experimentally the determination of sex—a fascinating problem for which so many solutions that failed to hold water have been found, but hitherto no others. In finding the answer to it, as they appear certainly to have done so far as the higher animals are concerned, the Mendelians are also beginning to ascertain, as we shall see, certain basal facts as to the composition or constitution of the individual; and to us, who wish to know exactly what a woman is, and what she is as distinguished from a man, this discovery is of the most vital importance. The experimental facts are not yet numerous, and if they were not consonant with facts of other orders, it would be rash to proceed; but it will be evident, in the sequel, that common experience is well in accord with the experimental evidence.

It appears that, amongst at any rate the higher animals, the sex of offspring is determined by the nature of the mother's contribution. The cell derived from the father is always male—as goes without saying, we might add, if we knew little of the subject. But the ovum, the cell derived from the mother, may carry either femaleness or maleness. When an ovum bearing maleness meets the invariably maleness-bearing sperm, the resultant individual is a male, of course, and he is male all through. But when an ovum bearing femaleness meets a sperm, the resulting individual is female, femaleness being a Mendelian "dominant" to maleness; if both be present, femaleness appears. The female, however, is not female all through as the male is male all through. So far as sex is concerned, he is made of maleness plus maleness; but she is made of femaleness plus maleness. In Mendelian language the male is homozygous, so-called "pure" as regards this character. But the female is heterozygous, "impure" in the sense that her femaleness depends upon the dominance of the factor for femaleness over the factor for maleness, which also is present in her. In the Mendelian terminology, she is an instance of impure dominance. The observed practical equality in the numbers of the two sexes is in exact accord with this interpretation of the facts, this proportion being the expected and observed one in many other cases which doubtless depend upon parallel conditions of the reproductive cells.

Surely there is great enlightenment here: for the discovery of the factors determining sex is a very small affair compared with the suggestive inference as to the constitution of womanhood. Let us compare man and woman on the basis of this assumption.

In the man there is nothing but maleness. This is not to deny that he may possess the protective instinct and the tender emotion which is its correlate, even though these were undoubtedly feminine in origin. But it is to deny that any injury to, or arrested development of, the male can reveal in him characters distinctively female. He may fail to become a man and may remain a boy; or, having been a man, he may perhaps return, under certain conditions, to a more youthful state; but he will never, can never, display anything distinctive of the woman.

Not such, however, must be the woman's case. If anything should interfere with the development and dominance of the femaleness factor in her, there is not another "dose" of femaleness, so to speak, to fall back upon; but a dose of maleness. We may be right in thus seeking to explain certain familiar phenomena, observed in women under various conditions—as, for instance, the growth of hair upon the face in elderly women, the assumption of a masculine voice and aspect, and so forth. Such facts are frequently to be observed after the climacteric or "change of life," which probably denotes the termination of the dominance of the femaleness factor. They are also to be observed as a consequence of operations much more commonly and irresponsibly performed a few years ago than now, which abruptly deprived the organism of the internal secretion through which, as we may surmise, the femaleness factor in the germ makes its presence effective.

If these propositions are valid, they are certainly important. Our attitude towards them will depend upon our estimates of the worth of distinctive womanhood. We may regard it as a loss to society that what might have been a woman should become only a sort of man of rather less than average efficiency. Or we may hail with delight the possibility that, after all, we may be able, by judicious education, to make men of our daughters. But, whatever our estimates, certainly it is of great interest to inquire how far and in what directions education may affect the development of what was given in the germ. We cannot yet answer this question. In a thousand matters it is all-important to know in what degree education can control nature, but until we know what the nature of the individual is we cannot decide. Professor Bateson has clearly shown that we shall be able duly to estimate environment only when Mendelian analysis has gone much further, and has instructed us in detail as to the nature of the material upon which environment is to act.

For instance, there is the well-established fact that women who have undergone "higher education" show a low marriage-rate, and produce very few children. However considered, the fact is of great importance. But the right interpretation of it is not certain. There are women of a type approaching the masculine, who are evidently so by nature. Is it these women, already predestined for something other than distinctive womanhood, that offer themselves for "higher education"? In other words, is there a selective process at work, the results of which in choosing a certain type of woman we attribute to the education undergone? If we answer this question wrongly, and act upon our erroneous interpretation, we shall certainly do grave injury to individuals and society.

Thus, we might roundly condemn the higher education of women in toto, and hold up the "domestic woman" as the sole type to which every woman can and must be made to conform. Or, on the other hand, we may argue that it is well to provide suitable opportunities of self-development for those women whose nature practically unfits them for the ordinary career of a woman.

I do not think that any one who has had opportunities of first-hand observation will question the presence in university and college class-rooms of girls of the anomalous type. Each generation produces a certain number of such. Probably no education will alter their nature in any radical or effective way. On every ground, personal and social, we must be right in providing for them, as for their brothers, all the opportunities they may desire. But I am convinced that their relative number is not large.

The great majority of those girls who are nowadays subjected to what we call "higher education" are of the normal type; and this is none the less true because the proportion of the anomalous is doubtless higher here than in the feminine community at large. The ordinary observation of those teachers who year by year see young girls at the beginning of their higher education will certainly confirm the statement that by far the greater number of them are of the ordinary feminine type. If this be so, the necessary inference is that education has a potent influence, and that it must be held accountable for the observed facts of later years, whether those facts please or displease us.

The human being is the most adaptable—that is to say, educable—of all living creatures. This is true of women as well as men. The response of girls to ideas, ideals, suggestion, the spirit of the group, is an unquestioned thing. Further, there are basal facts of physiology, ultimately dependent on the law of the conservation of energy, and the circumstance that you cannot eat your cake and have it, which work hand-in-hand, on their own effective plane, with the psychological influences already referred to. All physiology and psychology lead us to expect those results of "higher education" upon its subjects or victims which, in fact, we find, and which, in the main, are indeed its results and not dependent upon the exceptional natures of those subjected to it. The more general higher education becomes, and the less selection is exercised upon the candidates for it, the more evident, I believe, will it appear that woman responds in high degree to the total circumstances of her life; and that if we do not like the fruits of our labour it is we indeed that are to blame.

CHAPTER VI

MENDELISM AND WOMANHOOD

We are accustomed to think of Mendelism as simply a theory of heredity, by which term we should properly understand the relation between living generations. Now Mendelism is certainly this, but I believe that it is vastly more. Already the claim has been made, though not, perhaps, in adequate measure, by the Mendelians, and I am convinced that their title to it will be upheld. Mendelism has already effected a really epoch-making advance in our knowledge of heredity—the relations between parents and offspring; but we shall learn ere long that it has yet more to teach us regarding the very constitution of living beings. As modern chemistry can analyse a highly complex molecule into its constituent elementary atoms, so the Mendelians promise ere long to enable us to effect an organic analysis of living creatures. For many decades past theory has perceived that, in the germ-cells whence we and the higher animals and plants are developed, there must exist—somewhere intermediate between the chemical molecule and the vital unit, the cell itself—units which Herbert Spencer, the first and greatest of their students, called physiological or constitutional units. Since his day they have been re-discovered—or rather re-named—by a host of students, including Haeckel, Weismann, and many of scarcely less distinction. The Mendelian "factors," as I maintain must be clear to any student of the idea, are Spencer's physiological units. Of course neither Spencer nor any one else, until the re-discovery of Mendel's work, had any notion at all of the remarkable fashion in which these units are treated in the process whereby germ-cells are prepared for their great destiny. The rule, as we now know, is that one germ-cell contains any given unit, while another does not. The process of cell-division, whereby the germ-cells or gametes[5] are made, is called gameto-genesis. Somewhere in its course there occurs the capital fact discovered by Mendel and called by him segregation. A cell divides into two—which are the final gametes. One of these will definitely contain the Mendelian factor, and the other will be as definitely without it. Definite consequences follow in the constitution of the offspring; and such is the Mendelian contribution to heredity. But we must see that these inquiries cannot be far pursued without telling us vastly more than we ever knew before of not only the relation between individuals of successive generations, but the very structure of the individuals themselves. It is by the study of heredity that we shall learn to understand the individual. For instance, experimental breeding of the fowl reveals the existence of the brooding instinct as a definite unit, which enters, or does not enter, into the composition of the individual, and which is quite distinct from the capacity to produce eggs. Here is a definite distinction suggested, for the case of the fowl, between two really distinct things which, for several years past, I have called respectively physical and psychical motherhood. The analysis will doubtless go far further, but already the facts of experiment help us to realize the composition of the individual mother—for instance, the number of possible variants, and the non-necessity of a connection between the capacity to produce children and the parental instinct upon which the care of them depends, and without which entire and perfect motherhood cannot be.

The Mendelians are teaching us, too, that their "factors," the units of which we are made, are often intertangled or mutually repellent. If such-and-such goes into the germ-cell, so must something else; or if the one, then never the other. There may thus be naturally determined conditions of entire womanhood; just as one may be externally a woman, yet lack certain of the fractional constituents which are necessary for the perfect being. Complete womanhood, like genius—rarer though not more valuable—depends upon the co-existence of many factors, some of which may be coupled and segregated together in gameto-genesis, while others may be quite independent, only chance determining the throw of them. And the question of incompatibility or mutual repulsion of factors is of the gravest concern; as, for instance, if it were the case—and the illustration is perhaps none too far-fetched—that the factor for the brooding instinct and the factor for intellect can scarcely be allotted together to a single cell.

This question of compatibilities is illustrated very strikingly by the case of the worker-bee. There is as yet no purely Mendelian interpretation of this case, Mendel's own laborious work upon heredity in bees having been entirely lost, and practically nothing having been done since. Yet, as will be evident, the main argument of Geddes and Thomson leads us to a similar interpretation of this case in terms of compatibility.

The worker-bee is an individual of a most remarkable and admirable kind, from whom mankind have yet a thousand truths to learn. She is distinguished primarily by the rare and high development of her nervous apparatus. In terms of brain and mind, using these words in a general sense, the worker-bee is almost the paragon of animals. The ancients supposed that the queen-bee was indeed the queen and ruler of the hive. Here, they thought, was the organizing genius, the forethought, the exquisite skill in little things and great, upon which the welfare of the hive and the future of the race depend. But, in point of fact, the queen-bee is a fool. Her brain and mind are of the humblest order. She never organizes anything, and does not rule even herself, but does what she is told. She is entirely specialized for motherhood; but the thinking, and the determination of the conditions of her motherhood, are in the hands of other females, also highly specialized, and certainly the least selfish of living things—yet themselves sterile, incapable of motherhood.

Observe, further, that these wonderful workers, so highly endowed in terms of brain, are amongst the children of the queen, herself a fool; and that it was the conditions of nourishment, the conditions of environment or education, which determined whether the young creatures should develop into queens or workers, fertile fools or sterile wits. We have here an absolute demonstration that environment or nurture can determine the production of these two antithetic and radically opposed types of femaleness.

Now, amongst the bees, this high degree of specialization works very well. How old bee-societies are we cannot say. We do know, at any rate, that bees are invertebrate animals, and therefore of immeasurable antiquity compared with man. No one can for a moment question the eminent success of the bee-hive; and that success depends upon the extreme specialization of the female, so as in effect to create a third sex. Further, we know that nurture alone accounts for this remarkable splitting of one sex into two contrasted varieties.

I have little doubt that a process which is, at the very least, analogous, is possible amongst ourselves; nay more, that such a process is already afoot. In Japan they have actually been talking of a deliberate differentiation between workers and breeders; such differentiation, though indeliberate, is to be seen to-day in all highly civilized communities. Is it likely to be as good for us as for the bee-hive? And, granted its value as a social structure, is it, even then, to be worth while?

No one can answer these questions, though I venture to believe that it is something to ask them. So far as the last is concerned, we must not admit the smallest infringement of the supreme principles that every human being is an end in himself or herself, and that the worth of a society is to be found in the worth and happiness of the individuals who compose it.

Can we, as human beings, regard a human society as admirable because it is successful, stable, numerous?

The question is a fundamental one, for it matters at what we aim. As it becomes increasingly possible for man to realize his ideals, it becomes increasingly important that they shall be right ones; and there is a risk to-day that the growth of knowledge shall be too rapid for wisdom to keep pace with. We are reaching towards, and will soon attain in very large and effective measure, nothing less than a control of life, present and to come. It may well be that a remodelling of human society upon the lines of the bee-hive is feasible. It was his study of bees that made a Socialist of Professor Forel, certainly one of the greatest of living thinkers; and his assumption is that in the bee-hive we have an example largely worthy of imitation. But he would be the first to admit that, as the ordinary Socialist has yet to learn, the nature of the society is ultimately determined by the nature of the individuals composing it. It follows that the bee-society can be completely, or, at all events substantially, imitated only by remodelling human nature on the lines of the individual bee. This is very far from impossible; there is a plethora of human drones already, and we see the emergence of the sterile female worker. But is such a change—or any change at all of that kind—to be desired?

The Terms of Specialization.—It surely cannot be denied that there may be a grave antagonism between the interests of the society and those of the individual. It is a question of the terms of specialization or differentiation. In the study of the individual organism and its history we discern specialization of the cell as a capital fact. Organic evolution has largely depended upon what Milne-Edwards called the "physiological division of labour." In so far as organic evolution has been progressive, it has entirely coincided with this process of cell-differentiation. That is the clear lesson which the student of progress learns from the study of living Nature. Let him hold hard by this truth, and by it let him judge that other specialization which human society presents.

For this primary and physiological division of labour has its analogue in a much later thing, the division of labour in human society, upon which, indeed, the possibility of what we call human society depends. And it is plain that the time has come when we must determine the price that may rightly be paid for this specialization. Assuredly it is not to be had for nothing. Dr. Minot considers that death, as a biological fact, is the price paid for cell-differentiation. Now surely the death of individuality is the price paid for such specialization as that of the workman who spends his life supervising the machine which effects a single process in the making of a pin, and has never even seen any other but that stage in the process of making that one among all the "number of things" of which the world is full. Here, as in a thousand other cases, it has cost a man to make an expert.

How far we are entitled to go we shall determine only when we know what it is that we want to attain.

If we desire an efficient, durable, numerous society, there are probably no limits whatever that we need observe in the process of specialization. Pins are cheaper for the sacrifice of the individual in their making. In general, the professional must do better than the amateur; the lover of chamber music knows that a Joachim or Brussels Quartet is not to be found everywhere. Specialization we must have for progress, or even for the maintenance of what the past has achieved for us; but we shall pay the right price only by remembering the principle that all progress in the world of life has depended on cell-differentiation. If we prejudice that we are prejudicing progress.

Now nothing can be more evident than that, in some of our specializations of the individual for the sake of society, we are opposing that specialization within the individual which, it has been laid down, we must never sacrifice. And so we reach the basal principle to which the preceding argument has been guiding us. It is that the specialization of the individual for the sake of society may rightly proceed to any point short of reversing or aborting the process of differentiation within himself. Every individual is an end in himself; there are no other ends for society; and that society is the best which best provides for the most complete development and self-expression of the individuals composing it.

But how, then, is the division of labour necessary for society to be effected, the reader may ask? The answer is that the human species, like all others, displays what biologists call variation—men and women naturally differ within limits so wide that, when we consider the case of genius, we must call them incalculable, illimitable. The difference of our faces or our voices is a mere symbol of differences no less universal but vastly more important. It is these differences, in reality, that are the cause of the development of human society and of that division of labour upon which it depends. In providing for the best development of all these various individuals we at the same time provide for the division of labour that we need; nor can we in any other fashion provide so well. Thus we shall attain a society which, if less certainly stable than that of the bees, is what that is not—progressive, and not merely static; and a society which is worth while, justified by the lives and minds of the individuals composing it.

We are not, then, to make a factitious differentiation of set purpose in the interests of society and to the detriment of individuals. We are not to take a being in whom Nature has differentiated a thousand parts, and, in effect, reduce him, in the interests of others, to one or two constituents and powers, thus nullifying the evolutionary course. But we shall frame a society such as the past never witnessed, and we shall achieve a rate of progress equally without parallel, by consistently regarding society as existing for the individual, and not the individual for society, and by thus realizing to the full his characteristic powers for himself and for society.

In so far as all this is true it is true of woman. It has long been asserted that woman is less variable than man; but the certainty of that statement has lately lost its edge. It is probably untrue. There is no real reason to suppose that woman is less complex or less variable than man. She has the same title as he has to those conditions in which her particular characters, whatever they be, shall find their most complete and fruitful development. There is no more a single ideal type of woman than there is a single ideal type of man. It takes all sorts even to make a sex. It has been in the past, and always must be, a piece of gross presumption on man's part to say to woman, "Thus shalt thou be, and no other." Whom Nature has made different, man has no business to make or even to desire similar. The world wants all the powers of all the individuals of either sex. On the other hand, no good can come of the attempt to distort the development of those powers or to seek conformity to any type. Much of the evil of the past has arisen from the limitation of woman to practically one profession. Even should it be incomparably the best, in general, it is by no means necessarily the best, or even good at all, for every individual. Men are to be heard saying, "A woman ought to be a wife and mother." It is, perhaps, the main argument of this book that, for most women, this is the sphere in which their characteristic potencies will find best and most useful expression both for self and others; but that is very different from saying that every woman ought to be a mother, or that no woman ought to be a surgeon. We may prefer the maternal to the surgical type, and there may be good reason for our preference; but the surgeon may be very useful, and, useful or not, the question is not one of ought. Thoughtful people should know better than to make this constant confusion between what ought to be and what is. Let us hold to our ideals, let us by all means have our scale of values; but the first question in such a case as this is as to what is. In point of fact all women are not of the same type; and our expression of what ought to be is none other than the passing of a censure upon Nature for her deeds. We may know better than she, or, as has happened, we may know worse.

VII

BEFORE WOMANHOOD

We have seen that the sex of the individual is already determined as early as any other of his or her characters, though the realization of the potentialities of that sex may be much modified by nurture, as in the contrasted cases of the queen bee and the worker bee. Children, then, are already of one sex or other, and though our business in the present volume is not childhood of either sex, a few points are worth noting before we take up the consideration of the individual at the period when the distinctive characteristics of sex make their effective appearance.

Despite the abundance of the material and the opportunities for observation, we are at present without decisive evidence as to the distinctiveness of sex in any effective way during childhood. Here, as elsewhere, we have to guard ourselves against the influences of nurture in the widest sense of the word; as when, to take an extreme case, we distinguish between the boy and the girl because the hair of the one is cut and of the other is not. The natural, as distinguished from the nurtural, distinctions at this period are probably much fewer than is supposed. It is asserted—to take physical characters first—that the girl of ten gives out in breathing considerably less carbonic acid than her brother of the same age, thus foreshadowing the difference between the sexes which is recognized in later years. If this fact be critically established it is of very great interest, showing that the sex distinction effectively makes its presence felt in the most essential processes of the body. But we should require to be satisfied that the observations were sufficiently numerous, and were made under absolutely equal conditions, and with due allowance for difference in body-weight. They would be the more credible if it were also shown that the number of the red blood corpuscles were smaller in girls than in boys in parallel with the difference between the sexes in later years.

Children of both sexes have fewer red blood corpuscles in a given quantity of blood and a smaller proportion of the red colouring matter, or hæmoglobin, than adults. Women have very definitely fewer red blood corpuscles than men, and a smaller proportion of hæmoglobin, and their blood is more watery. According to one authority this difference in the hæmoglobin can be observed from the ages of eleven to fifty, but not before. The specific gravity of the blood is found to be the same in both sexes before the fifteenth year. Thereafter, that of the boy's blood rises, and between seventeen and forty-five is definitely higher than in women of the corresponding age. It thus seems quite clear that, as we should expect, these differences in the blood, which are certainly, as Dr. Havelock Ellis says, fundamental, make their appearance definitely at puberty—a fact which supports the view that fundamental differences of practical importance between the two sexes before that age are not to be found. Careful comparative study of the pulse of children is hitherto somewhat inconclusive, though it is well known that the pulse is more rapid in women than in men.

On the other hand, it seems clear as regards respiration that as early as the age of twelve there are definite differences between the sexes. Several thousands of American school children were examined, and between the ages of six and nineteen the boys were throughout superior in lung capacity. The girls had almost reached their maximum capacity at the age of twelve, and thereafter the difference, till then slight, rapidly increased.[6] It appears that from eight to fifteen years of age a boy burns more carbon than a girl, the difference, however, being not great. But at puberty the boy proceeds to consume very nearly twice as much carbon per hour as his sister.

Perhaps the matter need not be pursued further. It is sufficient for us to recognize that puberty is really the critical time, and that in the consideration of womanhood we may, on the whole, be justified in looking upon the problem of the girl before that age as almost identical with her brother's. Yet we must be reasonably cautious, since our knowledge is small, and there is some by no means negligible evidence of fundamental physiological differences between the sexes before puberty, relatively slight though these may be. Therefore, though on the whole we need make few distinctions between the girl and her brother, and though we are doubtless wrong in the magnitude of the practical distinctions which we have often made hitherto, yet we must remember that these are going to be different beings, and that the main principles which determine our nurture of womanhood may be recalled when we are doubtful as to practice in the care of the girl child.

Physiological distinctions, we have seen, probably exist during these early years, but are of less importance than we sometimes have attached to them, and of no importance at all compared with what is to come. Psychological distinctions, we may believe, are still more dubious. For instance, it is generally believed that the parental instinct shows itself much more markedly in girls than in boys, and the commonly observed history of the liking for dolls is quoted in this connection. As this instinct bears so profoundly upon the later life of the individual, and as we may reasonably suppose the child to be the mother of the woman as well as the father of the man, the matter is worth looking at a little further.

But, in the first place, it has been asserted that the doll instinct has really nothing whatever to do with the parental instinct in either sex. Psychologists, whom one suspects of being bachelors, tell us that what we really observe here is the instinct of acquisition: it really does not matter what we give the child, though it so happens that we very commonly present it with dolls; it is the lust of possession that we satisfy, and in point of fact one thing will satisfy it as well as another.

The evidence against this view is quite overwhelming. We might quote the universal distribution of dolls in place and in time as revealed by anthropology. Wherever there is mankind there are dolls, whether in Mayfair or in Whitechapel, Japan, the South Sea Islands, Ancient Egypt or Mexico. Further, there is the observed behaviour of the child, opportunities for which have presumably been denied to the psychologists whose opinion has been quoted. The only objection to the theory that the child will be content with the possession of anything else as well as of a doll is the circumstance that the child is not so content, but asks for a doll for choice, and will lavish upon any doll, however diagrammatic, an amount of love and care which no other toy will ever obtain. Further, if the child has opportunities for playing with a real baby, it will be perfectly evident, even to the bachelor psychologist, that the doll was the vicarious substitute for the real thing.

But now, what as to the comparative strength of this instinct in the two sexes? Here we must not be deceived by the effects of nurture, environment, or education. Though finding, as we do, that the little boy enjoys playing with his dolls as his sister does, we refrain from buying dolls for him, and may indeed, underestimating the importance of human fatherhood, declare that dolls are beneath the dignity of a boy though good enough for his sister. He, destined rather for the business of destroying life, so much more glorious than saving it, must learn to play with soldiers. In this fashion we at least deprive ourselves of any opportunity of critically comparing the strength and the history of the instinct in the two sexes.

There is good reason to suppose that the distinction between the psychology of the boy and that of the girl in these early years is very small. If boys are not discouraged they will play with dolls for choice, just as their sisters do, and may be just as charming with younger brothers or sisters. Nor is it by any means certain that this misleading of ourselves is the worst consequence of the common practice. It is possible that we lose opportunities for the inculcation of ideals which are of the highest value to the individual and the race. I am reminded of the true story of a small boy, well brought up, who, being jeered at in the street by bigger boys because he was carrying a doll, turned upon his critics with the admirable retort—slightly wanting in charity, let us hope, but none the less pertinent—"None of you will ever be a good father."

Thus, on the whole, one is inclined to suppose that the general resemblance in facial appearance, bodily contour, and interests which we observe in children of the two sexes, indicates that deeper distinctions are latent rather than active. This is much more than an academic question, for if our subject in the present volume were the care of childhood, it is plain that we should have to base upon our answer to this question our treatment of boy and girl respectively. Probably we are on the whole correct in instituting no deep distinction of any kind in the nurture, either physical or mental, of children during their early years. Nor can there be any doubt, at least so far, as to the rightness of educating them together, and allowing them to compete, in so far as we allow competition at all, freely both in work and in games.

However this may be, there comes at an age which varies somewhat in different races and individuals, a period critical to both sexes, in which the factors of sex differentiation, hitherto more or less latent, begin conspicuously to assert themselves. Here, plainly, is the dawn of womanhood, and here, in our consideration of woman the individual, we must make a start. If we recall the tentative Mendelian analysis already referred to, we may suppose that the "factor" for womanhood begins to assert itself, at any rate in effective degree, at this period of puberty, when a girl becomes a woman; and that its most effective reign is over at the much later crisis which we call the change of life or climacteric. In other words, though sex is determined from the first, and though certain of its distinctive characters remain to the end, we may say that our study of womanhood is practically concerned with the years between twelve or thirteen, and forty-five or fifty. Before this period, as we have suggested, the distinction between the sexes is of no practical importance so far as regimen and education are concerned. After this period also it is probable that the difference between the two sexes is diminished, and would be still more evidently diminished were it not for the effects which different experience has permanently wrought in the memory. We begin our practical study, then, of woman the individual, with the young girl at the age of puberty; and we must concern ourselves first with the care of her body.

VIII

THE PHYSICAL TRAINING OF GIRLS

We shall certainly not reach right conclusions about the physical training of girls unless we rightly understand what physical training does and does not effect, and what we desire it should effect. This applies to all education—that our aim be defined, that we shall know "what it is we are after," and it applies pre-eminently to the education, both physical and mental, of girls.

Now it will be granted, in the first place, that by physical training—whether in the form of gymnastics or games or what not—we desire to produce a healthier and more perfectly developed body. Some will add a stronger body, but as this term has two meanings constantly confused, it really contains the crux of the question. Stronger may mean stronger in the sense of resistance to disease or fatigue or strain of any kind, or it may mean stronger in the sense of the capacity to perform feats of strength. It being commonly assumed that vitality and muscularity are identical, this distinction is, on that assumption, merely academic and trivial. But as muscularity and vitality are not identical, and have indeed very little to do with each other, and as muscularity may even in certain conditions prejudice vitality, the distinction is not academic but all-important. I freely assert that it is substantially ignored by those who concern themselves with physical training, whether of boys or girls or recruits, all the world over.

Though a woman is naturally less muscular than a man, her vitality is higher. This seems to be a general truth of all female organisms. The evidence is of many orders. Thus, to begin with, women live longer, on the average, than men do. In the light of our modern knowledge of alcohol, however, we cannot regard this fact by itself as conclusive, since the average age attained by men is undoubtedly considerably lowered by alcohol, and of course to a much greater extent than obtains in the case of women. But women recover better from poisoning, such as occurs in infectious disease, and they are far more tolerant of loss of blood, as indeed they have to be. The same applies to loss of sleep or food, and to injurious influences generally. These indisputable proofs of superior vitality co-exist with much inferior muscularity, and are conclusive on the point. If men would make observations among themselves and think for a moment, they would soon perceive how foolish they are in crediting the assumptions of the strong men who so successfully persuade the public that the great thing is for a man to have big muscles. Men, muscular by nature, and still more so by nurture, are often in point of fact really weak compared with much less muscular men who, though they cannot put forth so much mechanical energy at a given moment, can yet endure fifty times the fatigue or stress or poisoning of any order. From the point of view of any sound physiology there is no comparison at all between the absurd strong man and the slight Marathon runner of small muscles but splendid vitality. If we are to test vitality in muscular terms at all—that in itself being a quite indefensible assumption—we must do so in terms of endurance, and not in terms of horse power or ass power, at any given moment.

If, then, vitality be our aim in physical training, and not muscularity as such, nor in any degree except in so far as it serves vitality, it is plain that we shall to some extent reconsider our methods.

Pre-eminently will this apply to the girl. Just because she is now becoming a woman, her vital energies are in no small degree pledged for special purposes of the highest importance, from which we cannot possibly divert them if we desire that she shall indeed become a woman. Thus, though muscular exercise of any kind is certainly not to be condemned, we must be cautious; for, in the first place, muscular exercise is no end in itself; in the second, the production of big muscles by exercise is no end in itself; and in the third place, all muscular exercise is expenditure of energy in those outward directions which are not characteristic of womanhood, and which must always be subordinated to those interests that are.

At this period of which we are speaking there are constructions of the most important kind going on in the girl's body, compared with which the construction of additional muscular tissue is of much less than no importance. These building-up processes are, we know, characteristic of the woman. Their right inception is a matter of the greatest importance. They involve the actual accumulation of food material and the building up of it into gland cells and other highly organized tissues upon which complete womanhood depends. These all-important concerns are prejudiced by excessive external expenditure, and thus the care necessary for the boy at puberty is a thousandfold more necessary for the girl, though the obvious changes in her appearance and her voice may be much less marked. Greater and more costly constructions are afoot in her case than her brother's, grossly though these facts are at present ignored in what we are pleased to call education, both physical and mental.

If we are to decide what kinds of physical exercise will be most desirable, we must come to some conclusion as to what is the object of our labours, it being granted that muscular activity and the making of big muscles are not ends in themselves. The answer to this question is to be found in what I have elsewhere called the new asceticism.

In tracing the history of animal progress, we find that it coincides with and has consisted in the emergence of the psychical and its predominance over the physical. The history of progress is the history of the evolving nervous system. Muscles are the servants of the nervous system. In man progress has reached its highest phase in that the nervous system, which at first was merely a servant of the body, has become the essential thing, so that the brain is the man. The old asceticism was at least right in regarding the soul as all-important, though it was utterly wrong in considering the interests of soul and body to be entirely antagonistic, and in teaching that for the elevation of the soul we must outrage, mutilate, and deny the body. The new asceticism accepts the first principle of the old, but bases its practice on a truer conception of the relations between mind and body. The greater part of the body is composed of muscles, and it is with muscles that physical training is concerned. On our principles, then, any system of physical training worth a straw must have primary reference to the brain, since the body, including the muscles, is only the servant of the ego or self which resides in the brain. For this reason, if for no other, the development of muscle as an end in itself is beneath human dignity; the value of a muscle lies not in its size or strength, but in its capacity to be a useful and skilful agent of the brain.

The exceptions to this rule are furnished by precisely those muscles which the usual forms of physical training and gymnastics ignore and subordinate to the development of the muscles of the limbs. It does matter very much that man or woman shall have the heart, which is the most important muscle in the body, and the muscles of respiration in good order. These muscles are directly necessary for life, and are therefore servants of the brain, even though they are not in any appreciable degree the direct agents of its purposes. Any kind of physical exercise then which, while developing the muscles of the arm, for instance, throws undue strain upon the heart or involves the fixation of the chest for a considerable period—as occurs in various feats of strength, whether with weights or upon bars or the like—is ipso facto to be condemned. It is now recognized that in the training of soldiers much harm is often done in this way to the essential muscles, while others, more conspicuous but of relatively no importance, are being developed.

But before we consider in detail what kinds of exercise and with what accompaniment may be permitted for the muscles of the limbs, it is well that we should agree upon some method of deciding as to the quantity of such exercise. We cannot go by such measures as hours per week, for individuals vary. We must find some criterion which will guide us for each individual. The pendulum has swung in this regard from one extreme to another. Both extremes were adopted and permitted because in our guidance of girlhood we ignored facts of physiology, and, notably, because educators had not a clear conception of what it was that they desired to attain. By the consent of all who have given any attention to the subject, the great educational reformer of the nineteenth century was Herbert Spencer, and not the least of his services was his liberation of girls from the extraordinary regimen of fifty years ago. There needs no excuse for a long quotation from the volume in which, just short of half a century ago, Herbert Spencer discussed this matter. Thereafter we may observe how the pendulum has swung to the other extreme:—

"To the importance of bodily exercise most people are in some degree awake. Perhaps less needs saying on this requisite of physical education than on most others; at any rate, in so far as boys are concerned. Public schools and private schools alike furnish tolerably adequate play-grounds; and there is usually a fair share of time for out-door games, and a recognition of them as needful. In this, if in no other direction, it seems admitted that the promptings of boyish instinct may advantageously be followed; and, indeed, in the modern practice of breaking the prolonged morning's and afternoon's lessons by a few minutes' open-air recreation, we see an increasing tendency to conform school-regulations to the bodily sensations of the pupils. Here, then, little need be said in the way of expostulation or suggestion.

"But we have been obliged to qualify this admission by inserting the clause in so far as boys are concerned. Unfortunately, the fact is quite otherwise with girls. It chances, somewhat strangely, that we have daily opportunity of drawing a comparison. We have both a boys' school and a girls' school within view; and the contrast between them is remarkable. In the one case nearly the whole of a large garden is turned into an open, gravelled space, affording ample scope for games, and supplied with poles and horizontal bars for gymnastic exercises. Every day before breakfast, again towards eleven o'clock, again at mid-day, again in the afternoon, and once more after school is over, the neighbourhood is awakened by a chorus of shouts and laughter as the boys rush out to play; and for as long as they remain, both eyes and ears give proof that they are absorbed in that enjoyable activity which makes the pulse bound and ensures the healthful activity of every organ. How unlike is the picture offered by the Establishment for Young Ladies! Until the fact was pointed out, we actually did not know that we had a girls' school as close to us as the school for boys. The garden, equally large with the other, affords no sign whatever of any provision for juvenile recreation; but is entirely laid out with prim grass-plots, gravel-walks, shrubs, and flowers, after the usual suburban style. During five months we have not once had our attention drawn to the premises by a shout or a laugh. Occasionally girls may be observed sauntering along the paths with their lesson-books in their hands, or else walking arm-in-arm. Once, indeed, we saw one chase another round the garden; but, with this exception, nothing like vigorous exertion has been visible.

"Why this astonishing difference? Is it that the constitution of a girl differs so entirely from that of a boy as not to need these active exercises? Is it that a girl has none of the promptings to vociferous play by which boys are impelled? Or is it that, while in boys these promptings are to be regarded as stimuli to a bodily activity without which there cannot be adequate development, to their sisters Nature has given them for no purpose whatever—unless it be for the vexation of schoolmistresses? Perhaps, however, we mistake the aim of those who train the gentler sex. We have a vague suspicion that to produce a robust physique is thought undesirable; that rude health and abundant vigour are considered somewhat plebeian; that a certain delicacy, a strength not competent to more than a mile or two's walk, an appetite fastidious and easily satisfied, joined with that timidity which commonly accompanies feebleness, are held more lady-like. We do not expect that any would distinctly avow this; but we fancy the governess-mind is haunted by an ideal young lady bearing not a little resemblance to this type. If so, it must be admitted that the established system is admirably calculated to realize this ideal. But to suppose that such is the ideal of the opposite sex is a profound mistake. That men are not commonly drawn towards masculine women is doubtless true. That such relative weakness as asks the protection of superior strength is an element of attraction we quite admit. But the difference thus responded to by the feelings of men is the natural, pre-established difference, which will assert itself without artificial appliances. And when, by artificial appliances, the degree of this difference is increased, it becomes an element of repulsion rather than of attraction.

"'Then girls should be allowed to run wild—to become as rude as boys, and grow up into romps and hoydens!' exclaims some defender of the proprieties. This, we presume, is the ever-present dread of schoolmistresses. It appears, on inquiry, that at Establishments for Young Ladies noisy play like that daily indulged in by boys is a punishable offence; and we infer that it is forbidden, lest unladylike habits should be formed. The fear is quite groundless, however. For if the sportive activity allowed to boys does not prevent them from growing up into gentlemen, why should a like sportive activity prevent girls from growing up into ladies? Rough as may have been their play-ground frolics, youths who have left school do not indulge in leap-frog in the street, or marbles in the drawing-room. Abandoning their jackets, they abandon at the same time boyish games, and display an anxiety—often a ludicrous anxiety—to avoid whatever is not manly. If now, on arriving at the due age, this feeling of masculine dignity puts so efficient a restraint on the sports of boyhood, will not the feeling of feminine modesty, gradually strengthening as maturity is approached, put an efficient restraint on the like sports of girlhood? Have not women even a greater regard for appearances than men? and will there not consequently arise in them even a stronger check to whatever is rough or boisterous? How absurd is the supposition that the womanly instincts would not assert themselves but for the rigorous discipline of schoolmistresses!

"In this, as in other cases, to remedy the evils of one artificiality, another artificiality has been introduced. The natural, spontaneous exercise having been forbidden, and the bad consequences of no exercise having become conspicuous, there has been adopted a system of factitious exercise—gymnastics. That this is better than nothing we admit, but that it is an adequate substitute for play we deny."

The pendulum has indeed swung across from those days to these of the hockey-girl, not to mention the girl who throws a cricket-ball and bowls very creditably overhand. There can be no doubt that this state of things is vastly better than that was, yet, as one has endeavoured to insist, this also has its risks. Apart from the question as to the particular game or form of exercise, we must be guided in each case by the first signs of anything approaching undue strain. We must look out for lack of energy, for a lessening of joy in the exercise and of spontaneous desire therefor. Fatigue that interferes with appetite, digestion, or sleep is utterly to be condemned.

The Specific Criterion.—Such criteria apply, of course, equally to either sex, though it is more important to be on the look-out for them in the case of the developing girl. But in her case there is another criterion, which is of special importance, because it concerns not only her development as an individual, but her development as a woman. That criterion is furnished us by the menstrual function. It may safely be said that that exercise is excessive and must be immediately curtailed which leads to the diminution of this function, much more to its disappearance. I would, indeed, urge this as a test of the highest importance, always applicable to whatever circumstances. Defect in this respect should never be looked upon lightly; it may, indeed, be a conservative process, as in cases of anæmia, but the cause which produces such an effect is always to be combated.

The Kinds of Exercise.—Given, then, this most important test as to the quantity of exercise of whatever kind—a test which indeed applies no less to mental exercise—we may pass on to consider the kinds of exercise best suited for the girl, it being premised that any one of them, however good in itself and in moderation, is capable of being pursued to excess, and that the danger of this is specially noticeable in the case of the girl, because, as we have seen, the effects of excess are more serious in her case, and also because girls are very apt to take things up with immense keenness, and sometimes, in even greater degree than their brothers, to devote themselves too much to the competitive aspect of things. The girl should certainly be content to play a game for the joy of it, and be scarcely less happy to lose than to win if her side has played the game and made a good fight of it. The competitive element is excessive in almost all sports to-day, and it is especially to be deplored in the games of girls, who are so liable to overstrain and so apt to take trifles to heart.

In what has been already said and in the end of our quotation from Herbert Spencer, it will be evident that purposeful games rather than exercises are to be commended. There is indeed no comparison for a moment possible between Nature's method of exercise, which is obtained through play, and the ridiculous and empty parodies of it which men invent. The truth is that Nature is aiming at one thing, and man at another. Man's aim, for reasons already exploded, is the acquirement of strength; Nature's is the acquirement of skill. It is really nervous development that Nature is interested in when she appears to be persuading the young thing to exercise its muscles. Man notices only the muscular contractions involved, thinks he can improve upon Nature, and invents absurdities like dumb-bells.

It is the nervous system by which we human beings live. Our voluntary muscles are agents of the will, agents of purpose; and while strength is a trifle, skill is always everything. We know now that it is impossible to carry out any human purpose by the contraction of one muscle or even one group of muscles. Even when we merely bend the arm we are doing things with the muscles which extend it, and when we raise it sideways we are modifying the whole trunk in order to preserve the balance. We have only to watch the clumsiness of an infant or a small child to realize how much skill the nervous system has to acquire. This skill may be mainly expressed as co-ordination, the balanced use of many muscles for a purpose and, as a rule, their co-ordinated use with one of the senses, more especially vision, but also touch and hearing.

This is the first of the physiological reasons why games and play of all sorts are so incomparably superior to the use of dumb-bells and developers, where movement and increase of muscular strength are made ends in themselves; whereas in play we are making relations with the outside world, responding to stimuli, educating our nerve muscular apparatus as an instrument of human purpose.

It is in part true to suppose that the play of children expresses an overflow of superfluous energy, but a still deeper and much more important conception of play is that which recognizes in it Nature's method of nervous development, the attainment of control and co-ordination, the capacity of quick and accurate response to circumstances and obedience to the will. Compare, for instance, the girl who has played games, avoiding danger as she crosses the road, with another whose youth has been made dreary by dumb-bells. It may freely be laid down, then, that systems of physical training are good in proportion as they approximate to play, and bad in proportion as they depart from it; and, further, that the very best of them ever devised is worthless in comparison with a good game. This evidently does not refer to, say, special exercises for a curved back.

However, systems of physical training we shall still have with us for a long time to come, and perhaps the mere difficulty of finding room for games makes them necessary, though it may be noted in passing that the last touch of absurdity is accorded to our frequent preference for exercises over games when we conduct the exercises in foul air and prefer them to games in the open air. If exercises we are to have, then they must at least be modelled so as to come as near as possible to play in the two essentials. The first of these has already been mentioned—the preference of skill to strength as an object.

The second, though less obvious, is no less important. What is the most palpable fact of the child's play? It is enjoyment. We have done for ever with the elegant morality which grown-up people, very particular about their own meals, used to impose upon children, and which was based upon the idea that everything which a child enjoys is therefore bad for it. We are learning the elements of the physiology of joy. We find that pleasure and boredom have distinct effects upon the body and the mind, notably in the matter of fatigue. Careful study of fatigue in school children has shown that the hour devoted to physical exercise of the dreary kind under a strict disciplinarian may, instead of being a recreation, actually induce more fatigue than an hour of mathematics. If, then, we cannot allow the girl to play, but must give her some kind of formal exercise, we must at least make it as enjoyable as possible. There are Continental systems of gymnastics which do not believe in the use of music because, forsooth, they find that the music diminishes the disciplinary effect! Such an argument dismisses those who adduce it from the category of those entitled to have anything to do with young people. They should devote themselves to training the rhinoceros, these martinets; the human spirit is not for their mauling. In point of fact one of the redeeming features of physical training is the use of music, which goes far to supply the pleasure that accrues from the natural exercise of games, and greatly reduces the fatigue of which the risk is otherwise by no means inconsiderable. We leave this subject, then, for the nonce, having arrived at the conclusion that the objects of physical training are skill and pleasure rather than strength and discipline; that the system is best which is nearest to play; and that the use of music is specially to be commended.

But, as we have said, artificial physical training at its best is not to be compared with the real thing; more especially if, as is usually the case, the real thing has the advantage of being practised in pure air. We must ask ourselves, then, what sort of games are suitable for girls, and to what extent, if at all, mixed games are desirable. We must first remind ourselves of the proviso that any game may be played to excess, whether physical excess or mental excess, the risk of both of these being involved when the competitive element is made too conspicuous. If this risk be avoided there is no objection, perhaps, to even such a vigorous game as hockey in moderation for girls. The present writer has observed mixed hockey for many years, and finds it impossible to believe that the game should be condemned for girls, but he has always seen it under conditions where the game was simply played for the fun of the thing, and that makes a great difference.

It is certainly open to argument whether, in such a game as hockey, it is not better, on the whole, that girls shall play by themselves, but, as has been urged elsewhere, there is a good deal to be said for the meeting of the sexes elsewhere than in the artificial conditions of the ball-room, since these mixed games widen the field of choice for marriage and provide far more natural and desirable conditions under which the choice may be made. There can be no question that an epoch has been created by the freedom of the modern girl to play games, and to enjoy the movements of a ball, as her brother does. The very fact of her pleasure in games indicates, to those who do not believe that the body is constructed on essentially vicious principles, that they must be good for her. The mere exercise is the least of the good they do. The open air counts for more, as does the development of skill, and the girl's opportunity of sharing in that moral education which all good games involve and which there is no need to insist upon here. Amongst the many things alleged against woman as natural defects by those who have never for a moment troubled to distinguish between nature and nurture, are an incapacity to combine with her sisters, petty dishonour in small things, a blindness to the meaning of "playing the game." It is similarly alleged by such persons against the lower classes that they also do not know how to "play the game," and do not understand the spirit of true sportsmanship, preferring to win anyhow rather than not at all. But those who conduct the Children's Vacation Schools in London—that remarkable arrangement by which children are damaged in school time and educated in holidays—are aware that in a short time children of any class can be taught to "play the game," if only they can be made to see it from that point of view. So also women can learn to combine, to be unselfish, to avoid petty deceits even in games, to obey a captain and to accept the umpire's decision, when they are taught, as we all have to be taught, that that is playing the game.

These immense virtues of the new departure must by no means be forgotten in the course of the reaction which is bound to occur, and is indeed necessary, against the contemporary practice of trying to demonstrate that boys and girls are substantially identical. He who pleads for the golden mean is always abused by extremists of both parties, but is always justified in the long run, and this is a case where the golden mean is eminently desirable, being indeed vital, which is much more than golden. Safety is to be found in our recognition of elementary physiological principles, assuming from the first that though it is not difficult to turn a girl into something like a boy, it is not desirable; and especially in attending carefully, in the case of each individual, to the indications furnished by that characteristic physiological function, interference with which necessarily imperils womanhood.

The organism is a whole; it reacts not only to physical strain but to mental strain. There are parts of the world, including a country no less distinguished as a pioneer of education than Scotland, where serious mental strain is now being imposed upon girls at this very period of the dawn of womanhood, when strain of any kind is especially to be deplored. Utterly ignoring the facts of physiology, the laws and approximate dates of human development, official regulations demand that at just such ages as thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen large numbers of girls—and picked girls—shall devote themselves to the strain of preparing for various examinations, upon which much depends. Worry combines to work its effects with those of excessive mental application, excessive use of the eyes at short distances, and defective open-air amusement. The whole examination system is of course to be condemned, but most especially when its details are so devised as to press thus hardly upon girlhood at this critical and most to be protected period. Many years ago Herbert Spencer protested that we must acquaint ourselves with the laws of life, since these underlie all the activities of living beings. The time is now at hand when we shall discover that education is a problem in applied biology, and that the so-called educator, whether he works destruction from some Board of Education or elsewhere, who knows and cares nothing about the laws of the life of the being with whom he deals, is simply an ignorant and dangerous quack.

What has been said about the reaction against excess in the physical education of girls applies very forcibly to excess in their mental education. We are undoubtedly coming upon a period when more and more will be heard of the injurious consequences of such ill-timed preparation for stupid examinations as has been referred to; and there will be not a few to sigh for the return to the bad old days which a certain type of mind always calls good. Here, again, we must find the golden mean, recognizing that the danger lies in excess, and especially in ill-timed excess. We shall further discover that if we desire a girl to become a woman, and not an indescribable, we must provide for her a kind of higher education which shall take into account the object at which we aim. It will be found that there are womanly concerns, of profound importance to a girl and therefore to an empire, which demand no less of the highest mental and moral qualities than any of the subjects in a man's curriculum, and the pursuit of which in reason does not compromise womanhood, but only ratifies and empowers it.

Muscles worth Developing.—When men and women are carefully compared, it is found that women, muscularly weaker as a whole, are most notably so as regards the arms, the muscles of respiration, and the muscles of the back. The muscles of the legs, and especially of the thighs, are relatively stronger. In these facts we can find some practical guidance. The muscles of all the limbs may be left comparatively out of account; whether naturally weak or naturally strong they are of subordinate importance. On the other hand, it is always worth while to cultivate the muscles of respiration, as it is always worth while to keep the heart in good order. Again, the weakness of the muscles of the back, and more especially in the case of the growing girl, is not a thing to be accepted as readily as the weakness of the biceps and the forearm muscles. Various observers find a proportion of between 85 per cent. and 90 per cent. of those suffering from lateral curvature of the spine to be girls, the great majority of these cases occurring between the ages of ten and fifteen. Everywhere it is our duty to prevent such cases, and everywhere physical training will find only too abundant opportunities for endeavouring to correct them. It may be doubted perhaps whether we may rightly follow Havelock Ellis in attributing woman's liability to backache to the relative weakness of the muscles of the back, for we know how often this symptom depends upon not muscular but internal causes peculiar to woman. On the other hand, we may certainly follow Havelock Ellis when he says, regarding this lateral curvature of the spine, from which so many girls and women suffer: "There can be no doubt that defective muscular development of the back, occurring at the age of maximum development, and due to the conventional restraints on exercises involving the body, and also to the use of stays, which hamper the freedom of such movements, is here a factor of very great importance." We shall not here concern ourselves with the details of practice, but the principle is to be laid down that perhaps second only in importance to the right development of the heart and the muscles of respiration is that of the muscles of the back.

Always, however, we are apt to judge by the obvious and to value it unduly. Nature makes the biceps and the muscles of the forearm naturally the weakest in woman compared with man, but it is just the bending of the elbow that makes a good show on a horizontal bar or rope; and so we devote too much time to the training of these muscles in our girls, with the results which make such creditable exhibitions at the end of the session, while we forget the muscles of the back, the right development of which is far more valuable, but does not lend itself to display.

In this connection it is to be added last, but not least, that special importance attaches in woman to those muscles which one may perhaps call the muscles of motherhood. It is common experience amongst physicians to find the appropriate muscularity defective at childbirth in women the muscles of whose limbs may have been very highly developed. Thus Dr. Havelock Ellis, amongst other evidence, quotes that of a physician, who says: "In regard to this interesting and suggestive question, it does seem a fact that women who exercise all their muscles persistently meet with increased difficulties in parturition. It would certainly seem that excessive development of the muscular system is unfavourable to maternity. I hear from instructors in physical training, both in the United States and in England, of excessively tedious and painful confinements among their fellows—two or three cases in each instance only, but this within the knowledge of a single individual among his friends. I have also several such reports from the circus—perhaps exceptions. I look upon this as a not impossible result of muscular exertion in women, the development of muscle, muscular attachments, and bony frame leading to approximation to the male."

In his lectures ten years ago, the distinguished obstetrician, Sir Halliday Croom, now professor of Midwifery in the University of Edinburgh, used to criticise cycling on this score, not as regards its development of the muscles of the lower limbs, but as tending towards local rigidity unfavourable to childbirth. It may be doubted, perhaps, whether longer and wider experience of cycling by women warrants this criticism, but it is probably worth noting.

On the other hand, while exercise of certain muscles may interfere obscurely or mechanically with motherhood, we are to remember that the muscles of the abdomen are indeed the accessory muscles of motherhood, and therefore specially to be considered. According to Mosso of Turin, it is only in modern times that civilized woman shows the comparative weakness of these muscles which is indeed commonly to be found. There is verily no sign of it in the Venus of Milo, as any one can see. That statue represents very highly developed abdominal muscles in a woman less notably muscular elsewhere. The muscles lie near the skin, the disposition of fat being very small, yet the woman is distinctively maternal in type, and every kind of æsthetic praise that may be showered upon the statue may be supplemented by the encomiums of the physiologist and the worshipper of motherhood. It is highly desirable that, in physical training to-day, attention should be paid to the development of the abdominal muscles. Holding the abdomen together by means of a corset may serve its own purpose, but does less than nothing in the crisis of motherhood. The corset indeed conduces to the atrophy of the most important of all the voluntary muscles for the most important crisis of a woman's life. "Some of the slower Spanish dances" are commended for the development of the abdominal muscles, but one would rather recommend swimming, the abandonment of the corset, and, if the gymnasium is to be used, some of the various exercises which serve these muscles, however little they may serve to exploit the apparatus of the gymnasium when visitors are invited.

There is no occasion in the present volume to discuss in detail any such thing as a course of physical exercises, but it is a pleasure, and, for the English reader, a convenience to direct attention to the Syllabus of Physical Exercises for Public Elementary Schools, issued by the English Board of Education in 1909.[7] After nearly forty years of folly, the dawn is breaking in our schools. It is evident that the Board of Education has followed the best medical advice. Indeed, now that medical knowledge is actually represented upon the Board, and represented as it is, there is no need to go far. The principles which have been laid down in previous pages are abundantly recognized in this admirable syllabus. The exercises recommended for the nation's children are based upon the Swedish system of educational gymnastics. But it is fortunately recognized that that system requires modification, since "freedom of movement and a certain degree of exhilaration are essentials of all true physical education. Hence it has been thought well not only to modify some of the usual Swedish combinations in order to make the work less exacting, but to introduce games and dancing steps into many of the lessons." "The Board desire that all lessons in physical exercises in public elementary schools should be thoroughly enjoyed by the children." "Enjoyment is one of the most necessary factors in nearly everything which concerns the welfare of the body, and if exercise is distasteful and wearisome, its physical as well as its mental value is greatly diminished." An interesting paragraph on music recognizes its value in avoiding fatigue, but underestimates, perhaps, the desirability of including music for use at later years as well as for infant classes.

The syllabus contains admirably illustrated exercises in detail. They are earnestly to be commended to the reader who is responsible for girlhood, and notably to those who are interested in the formation and conducting of girls' clubs. The syllabus is excellent in the attention paid to games, in the commendation of skipping and of dancing. The following quotation well illustrates the spirit of wisdom which is at last beginning to illuminate our national education:—"The value of introducing dancing steps into any scheme of physical training as an additional exercise especially for girls, or even in some cases for boys, is becoming widely recognized. Dancing, if properly taught, is one of the most useful means of promoting a graceful carriage, with free, easy movements, and is far more suited to girls than many of the exercises and games borrowed from boys. As in other balance exercises, the nervous system acquires a more perfect control of the muscles, and in this way a further development of various brain centres is brought about.... Dancing steps add very greatly to the interest and recreative effect of the lesson, the movements are less methodical and exact, and are more natural; if suitably chosen they appeal strongly to the imagination, and act as a decided mental and physical stimulus, and exhilarate in a wholesome manner both body and mind."

Plainly, our educators have begun to be educated since 1870.

Of course, there is dancing and dancing. The real thing bears the same relation to dancing as it is understood in Mayfair, as the music of Schubert does to that of Sousa. The ideal dancing for girls is such as that illustrated by the children trained by Miss Isadora Duncan. Some of these girls were seen for a short time at the Duke of York's Theatre in London not long ago, and the American reader, rightly proud of Miss Duncan, should not require to be told what she has achieved. Just as we are learning the importance of games and play, so that a syllabus issued by the Board of Education instructs one how to stand when "giving a back" at leap-frog, so also we shall learn again from Nature that dancing of the natural and exquisite kind, never to be forgotten or confused with imitations by any one who has seen Miss Duncan's children, must be recognized as a great educative measure—educative alike of mind, body, ear, and eye, and better worth while for any girl of any rank than volumes of fictitious history concocted by fools concerning knaves.

Girls' Clubs.—Allusion has been made to girls' clubs, and one may be fortunate enough to have some readers who may feel inclined to partake in the splendid work which may be done by this means. It requires high qualities and a certain amount of expert knowledge. Much of the latter can be obtained from the little book recommended above. For the rest, it is worth while briefly to point out what the girls' club may effect, and why it is so much needed.

It has been insisted that puberty is a critical age because it means the dawn of womanhood. It is critical in both sexes, not only for the body but also for the mind. It is now that the intellect awakes; it is now that the real formation of character begins. We often talk about spoilt children at three or four, but any kind of making or marring of character at such ages can be undone in a few weeks or less—that is, in so far as it is an effect of training and not of nature that we are dealing with. The real spoiling or making is at that birth of the adult which we call puberty. During adolescence the adult is being made, and everything matters for ever. This is true of physique, of mind, and of character. The importance of this period is recognized by modern churches in their rite of Confirmation, and it was recognized by ancient religions, by Greeks and by Romans. Our national appreciation of it is expressed by our devotion of vast amounts of money and labour to the child, until the all-important epoch is reached, when we wash our hands of it. We educate away, for all we are worth, when what is mainly required is plenty of good food and open air; and we have done with the matter when the age for real education arrives. In time to come our neglect of adolescence in both sexes, more especially in girls, will be marvelled at, and many of the evils from which we suffer will cease to exist because the fatal and costly economy of the practical man is dismissed as a delusion and a sham, and it is perceived that whether for the saving of life or for the saving of money, adolescence must be cared for.

Meanwhile, it behoves private people who care about these things to do what they can. If they rightly influence but ten girls, it was well worth doing. The girls' club is a very inexpensive mode of social activity. Practically the only substantial item of expenditure is the hire of a gymnasium, say for two evenings in a week. The girls' dresses can be made at home at quite a trivial cost. The primary attraction would be the gymnasium. It must, of course, contain a piano, not necessarily one on which Pachmann would play, but a piano nevertheless. There is also required a pianist, not necessarily a Pachmann. Two girls are better than one to run such a club. They will not find it difficult to obtain material to work upon. They must acquire at a Polytechnic, or perhaps they have acquired themselves at school, some knowledge of how to conduct the work and play of the gymnasium. It will depend upon the conductors of the club how far its virtues extend. Much elementary hygiene may be taught as well as practised, and if it confine itself only to matters of ventilation, clothing, care of the teeth and feet, it is abundantly worth while. It is often possible to get medical men or women to come and talk to the girls, and in the best of these clubs there will be some more or less conscious and overt preparation in one way and another for matters no less momentous alike for the individual and the race than marriage and motherhood.

Girls' Clothing.—There is little good to be said about much of the clothing of girls and women. All clothing should of course be loose, on grounds which have been fully gone into in the previous volume on personal hygiene. A woman's headgear is perhaps too often the only article of her dress which conforms to this rule. It is good that the stimulant effect of air, and air in motion, upon the skin should be as widely extended as is compatible with sufficient warmth and decency. Thus most women wear far too many clothes, apart from the question of tightness. A woman handicaps herself seriously as compared with a man, in that, while she is much less muscular, her clothes are often so much heavier. All this applies with great force to girls. The following quotation from the syllabus referred to above is worth making:—

"A Suitable Dress for Girls.—A simple dress for girls suitable for taking physical exercises or games consists of a tunic, a jersey or blouse, and knickers. The tunic and knickers may be made of blue serge, and, if a blouse is worn, it should be made of some washing material.

The tunic, which requires two widths of serge, may be gathered or, preferably, pleated into a small yoke with straps passing over the shoulders. The dress easily slips on over the head, and the shoulder straps are then fastened. It should be worn with a loose belt or girdle. In no case should any form of stiff corset be used.

The knickers, with their detachable washing linen, should replace all petticoats. They should not be too ample, and should not be visible below the tunic. They are warmer than petticoats and allow greater freedom of movement.

Any plain blouse may be worn with the tunic, or a woollen jersey may be substituted in cold weather.

With regard to the cost of such a dress, serge may be procured for 1s. 6d. to 2s. per yard. For the tunic some 2 to 2-1/2 yards are usually required, and for the knickers about 1-1/2 to 2 yards. It may be found possible in some schools to provide patterns, or to show girls how to make such articles for themselves. Such a dress, though primarily designed for physical exercises, is entirely suitable for ordinary school use.

Though it is, of course, not practicable to introduce this dress into all Public Elementary Schools, or in the case of all girls, yet in many schools there are children whose parents are both willing and able to provide them with appropriate clothing. The adoption of a dress of this kind, which is at the same time useful and becoming, tends to encourage that love of neatness and simplicity which every teacher should endeavour to cultivate among the girls. And as it allows free scope for all movements of the body and limbs, it cannot fail to promote healthy physical development."

IX

THE HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN

In the last chapter brief reference was made to the effects of ill-timed mental strain. Our principles have already led us to the conclusion that there are special risks for girls involved in educational strain, and that is, of course, equally true whatever the curriculum. But that being granted, it is necessary to draw very special attention to a new movement in the higher education of women which is based upon the principle that a woman is not the same as a man; that she has special interests and duties which require no less knowledge and skill than those with which men are concerned. A tentative experiment in this direction has already, we are assured, altered the whole attitude towards life of those girls who partook in it, and there is no question that we now see the beginning of a new epoch in the higher education of women upon properly differentiated lines such as have been utterly ignored in the past. I refer to the "Special Courses for the Higher Education of Women in Home Science and Household Economics," which now form part of the activities of the University of London at King's College. "The main object of these courses," we are told, "is to provide a thoroughly scientific education in the principles underlying the whole organization of 'Home Life,' the conduct of Institutions, and other spheres of civic and social work in which these principles are applicable." The lecturers are mainly highly qualified women, and the courses are extremely thorough and comprehensive. The following are the subjects which are dealt with: economics and ethics, psychology, biology, business matters, physiology, bacteriology, chemistry, domestic arts, sanitary science and hygiene, applied chemistry and physics.[8]

It will be seen that there is no underrating here of the capacities of women. The courses are not limited merely to cooking and washing, though these are most carefully gone into. It is a far cry from them to psychology and ethics or "A Sketch of the Historical Development of the Household in England." One can imagine the joy with which girls, largely nourished on the husks which constitute most of the educational curricula of boys, will turn to a series of lectures on Child Psychology, that deal with the general course of mental development in the child, with interest and attention, the processes of learning, mental fatigue and adolescence. The highest capacities of the mind in women are not ignored when we find included a course of which the special text-book is Spencer's "Data of Ethics." One can imagine also that the course on the elements of general economics, with its study of wealth and value and price, the laws of production and distribution, may bring into being a kind of housewife who, whether or not eligible for Parliament, would certainly be a much more desirable member thereof than nine-tenths of the prosperous gentlemen who daily record their opinions there upon matters they know not of. All who care at all for womanhood or for England must rejoice in the beginnings of this revised version of higher education for women which, for once in a way, finds London a pioneer. We must have such courses all over the country. Every father who can afford it must give his girls the incalculable benefit of such opportunities. The girl thus educated will glory in her womanhood, and will help to gain for it its right estimation and position in the state.

But it is to be pointed out that such courses as these, admirable though they be, are yet not everything. The influence of our great national deity, which is Mrs. Grundy, is apparent still. It is not specifically recognized that the highest destiny of a woman is motherhood, though in such courses as this motherhood will doubtless be served directly and indirectly in many ways. There is, nevertheless, required something more—something indeed no less than conscious, purposeful education for parenthood. The chief obstacle in the way of this ideal is Anglo-Saxon prudery, and, perhaps, the reader will not be persuaded that education for parenthood is our greatest educational need to-day, more especially for girls, until he or she has been persuaded of the magnitude of the preventable evils which flow from our present neglect of this matter. In the following chapter, therefore, one may point out what prudery costs us at present, and indeed, the reader may then be persuaded that education for parenthood, or, as it may be called, eugenic education, is, perhaps, the most important subject that can be discussed to-day in any book on womanhood.

X

THE PRICE OF PRUDERY

Just after we had succeeded in getting the Notification of Births Act put upon the Statute Book, the present writer occupied himself in various parts of the country in the efforts which were necessary to persuade local authorities to adopt the provisions of that Act. Addressing a meeting of the clergy of Islington, he endeavoured to trace back to the beginning the main cause of infant mortality, and endeavoured to show that that lay in the natural ignorance of the human mother, about which more must later be said. In the discussion which followed, an elderly clergyman insisted that the causes had not been traced far enough back, maternal ignorance being itself permitted in consequence of our national prudery.

Ever since that day one has come to see more and more clearly that the criticism was just. Maternal ignorance, as we shall see later, is a natural fact of human kind, and destroys infant life everywhere, though prudery be or be not a local phenomenon. But where vast organizations exist for the remedying of ignorance, prudery indeed is responsible for the neglect of ignorance on the most important of all subjects. Let it not be supposed for a moment that in this protest one desires, even for the highest ends, to impart such knowledge as would involve sullying the bloom of girlhood. It is not necessary to destroy the charm of innocence in order to remedy certain kinds of ignorance; nor are prudery and modesty identical. Whatever prudery may be when analyzed, it seems perfectly fair to charge it as the substantial cause of the ignorance in which the young generation grows up, as to matters which vitally concern its health and that of future generations. Let us now observe in brief the price of prudery thus arraigned.

There is, first, that large proportion of infant mortality which is due to maternal ignorance, as we shall see in a subsequent chapter. At present we may briefly remind ourselves that the nation has had the young mother at school for many years; much devotion and money have been spent upon her. Yet it is necessary to pass an Act insuring, if possible, that when she is confronted with the great business of her life—which is the care of a baby—within thirty-six hours the fact shall be made known to some one who, racing for life against time, may haply reach her soon enough to remedy the ignorance which would otherwise very likely bury her baby. Prudery has decreed that while at school she should learn nothing of such matters. For the matter of that she may even have attended a three-year course in science or technology, and be a miracle of information on the keeping of accounts, the testing of drains, and the principles of child psychology, but it has not been thought suitable to discuss with her the care of a baby. How could any nice-minded teacher care to put such ideas into a girl's head? Never having noticed a child with a doll, we have somehow failed to realize that Nature, her Ancient Mother and ours, is not above putting into her head, when she can scarcely toddle, the ideas at which we pretend to blush. Prudery on this topic, and with such consequences, is not much less than blasphemy against life and the most splendid purposes towards which the individual, "but a wave of the wild sea," can be consecrated.

This question of the care of babies offers us much less excuse for its neglect than do questions concerned with the circumstances antecedent to the babies' appearance. Yet we are blameworthy, and disastrously so, here also. Prudery here insists that boys and girls shall be left to learn anyhow. That is not what it says, but that is what it does. It feebly supposes not merely that ignorance and innocence are identical, but that, failing the parent, the doctor, the teacher, and the clergyman—and probably all these do fail—ignorance will remain ignorant. There are others, however, who always lie in wait, whether by word of mouth or the printed word, and since youth will in any case learn—except in the case of a few rare and pure souls—we have to ask ourselves whether we prefer that these matters shall be associated in its mind with the cad round the corner or the groom or the chauffeur who instructs the boy, the domestic servant who instructs the girl, and with all those notions of guilty secrecy and of misplaced levity which are entailed; or with the idea that it is right and wise to understand these matters in due measure because their concerns are the greatest in human life.

After puberty, and during early adolescence, when a certain amount of knowledge has been acquired, we leave youth free to learn lies from advertisements, carefully calculated to foster the tendency to hypochondria, which is often associated with such matters. Of this, however, no more need now be said, since it scarcely concerns the girl.

It is the ignorance conditioned by prudery that is responsible later on for many criminal marriages; contracted, it may be, with the blind blessing of Church and State, which, however, the laws of heredity and infection rudely ignore. Parents cannot bring themselves to inquire into matters which profoundly concern the welfare of the daughter for whom they propose to make what appears to be a good marriage. They desire, of course, that her children shall be healthy and whole-minded; they do not desire that marriage should be for her the beginning of disease, from the disastrous effects of which she may never recover. But these are delicate matters, and prudery forbids that they should be inquired into; yet every father who permits his daughter to marry without having satisfied himself on these points is guilty, at the least, of grave delinquency of duty, and may, in effect, be conniving at disasters and desolations of which he will not live to see the end.

Young people often grow fond of each other and become engaged, and then, if the engagement be prolonged—as all engagements ought to be, as a general rule—they may find that, after all, they do not wish to marry. Yet the girl's mother, an imprudent prude, may often in this and other cases do her utmost to bring the marriage about, not because she is convinced that it means her daughter's highest welfare and happiness, but because prudery dictates that her daughter must marry the man with whom she has been so frequently seen; hence very likely lifelong unhappiness, and worse.

Society, from the highest to the lowest of its strata, is afflicted with certain forms of understood and eminently preventable disease, about which not a word has been spoken in Parliament for twenty years, and any public mention of which by mouth or pen involves serious risk of various kinds. Here it is perhaps not necessary for us to consider the case of the outcast, and of the diseases with which, poor creature, she is first infected, and which she then distributes into our homes. Our present concern is simply to point out that prudery, again, is largely responsible for the continuance of these evils at a time when we have so much precise knowledge regarding their nature and the possibility of their prevention. Medical science cannot make distinctions between one disease and another, nor between one sin and another, as prudery does. Prudery says that such and such is vice, that its consequences in the form of disease are the penalties imposed by its abominable god upon the guilty and the innocent, the living and the unborn alike, and that therefore our ordinary attitude towards disease cannot here be maintained. Physiological science, however, knowing what it knows regarding food and alcohol, and air and exercise and diet, can readily demonstrate that the gout from which Mrs. Grundy suffers is also a penalty for sin; none the less because it is not so hideously disproportionate, in its measure and in its incidence, to the gravity of the offence. These moral distinctions between one disease and another have little or no meaning for medical science, and are more often than not immoral.

It would be none too easy to show that the medical profession in any country has yet used its tremendous power in this direction. Professions, of course, do not move as a whole, and we must not expect the universal laws of institutions to find an exception here. But though they do not move, they can be moved. It is when the public has been educated in the elements of these matters, and has been taught to see what the consequences of prudery are, that the necessary forces will be brought into action. Meanwhile, what we call the social evil is almost entirely left to the efforts made in Rescue Homes and the like. Despite the judgment of a popular novelist and playwright, it is much more than doubtful whether Rescue Homes—the only method which Mrs. Grundy will tolerate—are the best way of dealing with this matter, even if the people who worked in them had the right kind of outlook upon the matter, and even if their numbers were indefinitely multiplied. Every one who has devoted a moment's thought to the matter knows perfectly well that this is merely beginning at the end, and therefore all but futile. I mention the matter here to make the point that the one measure which prudery permits—so that indeed it may even be mentioned upon our highly moral stage, and passed by the censor, who would probably be hurried into eternity if M. Brieux's Les Avariés were submitted to him, and who found "Mrs. Warren's Profession" intolerable—is just the most useless, ill-devised, and literally preposterous with which this tremendous problem can be mocked.

This leads us to another point. It is that the means of our education, other than the schools, are also prejudiced by prudery. Upon the stage there is permitted almost any indecency of word, or innuendo, or gesture, or situation, provided only that the treatment be not serious. Almost anything is tolerable if it be frivolously dealt with, but so soon as these intensely serious matters are dealt with seriously, prudery protests. The consequence is that a great educative influence, like the theatre, where a few playwrights like M. Brieux, and Mr. Bernard Shaw, and Mr. Granville Barker, and Mr. John Galsworthy, might effect the greatest things, is relegated by Mrs. Grundy to the plays produced by Mr. George Edwardes and other earnest upholders of the censorship.

Publishers also, while accepting novels which would have staggered the Restoration Dramatists, can scarcely be found, even with great labour, for the publication of books dealing with the sex question from the most responsible medical or social standpoints.

It is just because public opinion is so potent, and, like all other powers, so potent either for good or for evil, that its present disastrous workings are the more deplorable. It is not unimaginable that prudery might undergo a sort of transmutation. As I have said before, we might make a eugenist of Mrs. Grundy, so that she might be as much affronted by a criminal marriage as she is now by the spectacle of a healthy and well-developed baby appearing unduly soon after its parents' marriage. The power is there, and it means well, though it does disastrously ill. Public opinion ought to be decided upon these matters; it ought to be powerful and effective. We shall never come out into the daylight until it is; we shall not be saved by laws, nor by medical knowledge, nor by the admonitions of the Churches. Our salvation lies only in a healthy public opinion, not less effective and not more well-meaning than public opinion is at present, but informed where it is now ignorant, and profoundly impressed with the importance of realities as it now is with the importance of appearances.

So much having been said, what can one suggest in the direction of remedy? First, surely it is something that we merely recognize the price of prudery. Personally, I find that it has made all the difference to my calculations to have had the thing pointed out by the clerical critic whose eye these words may possibly meet. It is something to recognize in prudery an enemy that must be attacked, and to realize the measure of its enmity. In the light of some little experience, perhaps a few suggestions may be made to those who would in any way join in the campaign for the education and transmutation of public opinion on these matters.

First, we must compose ourselves with fundamental seriousness—with that absolute gravity which imperils the publication of a book and entirely prohibits the production of a play on such matters. There is something in human nature beyond my explaining which leads towards jesting in these directions. An instinct, I know, is an instinct; of which a main character is that its exercise shall be independent of any knowledge as to its purpose. We eat because we like eating, rather than because we have reckoned that so many calories are required for a body of such and such a weight, in such and such conditions of temperature and pressure. It is not natural, so to say, just because man is in a sense rather more than natural, that we should be provident and serious, self-conscious, and philosophic, in dealing with our fundamental instincts. But it is necessary, if we are to be human: and only in so far as, "looking before and after," we transcend the usual conditions of instinct, are we human at all.

The special risk run by those who would deal with these matters seriously—or rather one of the risks—is that they will be suspected, and may indeed be guilty, of a tendency to priggishness and cant. Youth is very likely not far wrong in suspecting those who would discuss these matters, for youth has too often been told that they are of the earth earthy, that these are the low parts of our nature which we must learn to despise and trample on, and youth knows in its heart that whatever else may or may not be cant, this certainly is. So any one who proposes to speak gravely on the subject is a suspect.

Meetings confined to persons of one sex offer excellent opportunities. Much can be done, if the suspicion of cant be avoided, by men addressing the meetings of men only which gather in many churches on Sunday afternoons, and which have a healthy interest in the life of this world and of this world to come, as well as in matters less immediate. It seems to me that women doctors ought to be able to do excellent work in addressing meetings of girls and women, provided always that the speaker be genuinely a woman, rightly aware of the supremacy of motherhood.

Most of us know that it is possible to read a medical work on sex, say in French, without any offence to the æsthetic sense, though a translation into one's native tongue is scarcely tolerable. This contrasted influence of different names for the same thing is another of those problems in the psychology of prudery which I do not undertake to analyze, but which must be recognized by the practical enemy of prudery. It is unquestionably possible to address a mixed audience, large or small, of any social status, on these matters without offence and to good purpose. But certain terms must be avoided and synonyms used instead. There are at least three special cases, the recognition of which may make the practical difference between shocking an audience and producing the effect one desires.

Reproduction is a good word from every point of view, but its associations are purely physiological, and it is better to employ a word which renders the use of the other superfluous and which has a special virtue of its own. This is the term parenthood, a hybrid no doubt, but not perhaps much the worse for that. One may notice a teacher of zoology, say, accustomed to address medical students, offend an audience by the use of the word reproduction, where parenthood would have served his turn. It has a more human sound—though there is some sub-human parenthood which puts much of ours to shame—and the fact that it is less obviously physiological is a virtue, for human parenthood is only half physiological, being made of two complementary and equally essential factors for its perfection—the one physical and the other psychical. Thus it is possible to speak of physical parenthood and of psychical parenthood, and thus not only to avoid the term reproduction, but to get better value out of its substitutes. One may be able to show, perhaps, that in the case of other synonyms also a hunt for a term that shall save the face of prudery may be more than justified by the recovery of one which has a richer content. Terms are really very good servants, if they are good terms and we retain our mastery of them. Let any one without any previous practice start to write or speak on "human reproduction," and on "human parenthood, physical and psychical," and he will find that, though naming often saves a lot of thinking, as George Meredith said, wise naming may be of great service to thought.

In these matters there is to be faced the fact of pregnancy. Here, again, is a good word, as every one knows who has felt its force or that of the corresponding adjective when judiciously used in the metaphorical sense. The present writer's rule, when speaking, is to use these terms only in their metaphorical sense, and to employ another term for the literal sense. I should be personally indebted to any reader who can inform me as to the first employment of the admirable phrase, "the expectant mother." The name of its inventor should be remembered. In any audience whatever—perhaps almost including an audience of children, but certainly in any adult audience, whether mixed or not, medical or fashionable, serious or sham serious—it is possible to speak with perfect freedom on many aspects of pregnancy, as for instance the use of alcohol, exposure to lead poisoning, the due protection at such a period, by simply using the phrase "the expectant mother," with all its pregnancy of beautiful suggestion. Here, again, our success depends upon recognizing the psychical factor in that which to the vulgar eye is purely physiological—not that there is anything vulgar about physiology except to the vulgar eye.

For myself, the phrase "the expectant mother" is much more than useful, though in speaking it has made all the difference scores of times. It is beautiful because it suggests the ideal of every pregnancy—that the expectant mother shall indeed expect, look forward to the life which is to be. Her motto in the ideal world or even in the world at the foundations of which we are painfully working, will be those words of the Nicene creed which the very term must recall to the mind—Expecto resurrectionem mortuorum et vitam venturi sæculi.

Let any one who fancies that these pre-occupations with mere language are trivial or misplaced here take the opportunity of addressing two drawing-rooms under similar conditions, on some such subject as the care of pregnancy from the national point of view. Let him in the one case speak of the pregnant woman, and so forth, and in the other of the expectant mother. He will be singularly insensitive to his audience if he does not discover that sometimes a rose by any other name is somehow the less a rose. The more fools we perhaps, but there it is, and in the most important of all contemporary propaganda, which is that of the re-establishment of parenthood in that place of supreme honour which is its due, even such "literary" debates as these are not out of place.

Sex is a great and wonderful thing. The further down we go in the scale of life, whether animal or vegetable, the more do we perceive the importance of the evolution of sex. The correctly formed adjective from this word is sexual, but the term is practically taboo with Mrs. Grundy. Only with caution and anxiety, indeed, may one venture before a lay audience to use Darwin's phrase, "sexual selection." The fact is utterly absurd, but there it is. One of the devices for avoiding its consequences is the use of sex itself as an adjective, as when we speak of sex problems; but the special importance of this case is in regard to the sexual instinct, or, if the term offends the reader, let us say the sex instinct. Here prudery is greatly concerned, and our silence here involves much of the price of prudery. Now since the word sexual has become sinister, we cannot speak to the growing boy or girl about the sexual instinct, but we may do much better.

For what is this sexual instinct? True, it manifests itself in connection with the fact of sex, but essentially that is only because sex is a condition of human reproduction or parenthood. It is this with which the sexual instinct is really concerned, and perhaps we shall never learn to look upon it rightly or deal with it rightly until we indeed perceive what the business of this instinct is, and regard as somewhat less than worthy of mankind any other attitude towards it. Of course there are men who live to eat, yet the instincts concerned with eating exist not for the titillation of the palate but for the sustenance of life; and, likewise, though there are those who live to gratify this instinct, it exists not for sensory gratification, but for the life of this world to come. Can we not find a term which shall express this truth, shall be inoffensive and so doubly suitable for the purposes of our cause?

The term reproductive instinct is often employed. It is vastly superior to sexual instinct, because it does refer to that for which the instinct exists; but it hints at reproduction, and though Mrs. Grundy can tolerate the idea of parenthood, reproduction she cannot away with. We cannot speak of it as the parental instinct, because that term is already in employment to express the best thing and the source of all other good things in us. Further, the sexual instinct and the parental instinct are quite distinct, and it would be disastrous to run the possibility of confusing them—one the source of all the good, and the other the source of much of the evil, though the necessary condition of all the good and evil, in the world.

For some years past, in writing and speaking, I have employed and counselled the employment of the term "the racial instinct." This seems to meet all the needs. It avoids the tabooed adjective, and if it fails to allude at all to the fact of sex, who needs reminding thereof? It is formed from the term race, which prudery permits, and it expresses once and for all that for which the instinct exists—not the individual at all, but the race which is to come after him. Doubtless its satisfaction may be satisfactory for him or her, but that does not testify to Nature's interest in individuals, but rather to her skill in insuring that her supreme concern shall not be ignored, even by those who least consciously concern themselves with it.

These are perhaps the three most important instances of the verbal, or perhaps more than verbal, issues that arise in the fight with prudery. One has tried to show that they are not really in the nature of concessions to Mrs. Grundy, but that the terms commended are in point of fact of more intrinsic worth than those to which she objects. Other instances will occur to the reader, especially if he or she becomes in any way a soldier in this war, whether publicly or as a parent instructing children, or on any other of the many fields where the fight rages.

It is not the purpose of the present chapter to deal with that which must be said, notwithstanding prudery, and in order that the price of prudery shall no longer be paid. But one final principle may be laid down which is indeed perhaps merely an expression of the spirit underlying the foregoing remarks upon our terminology. It is that we are to fly our flag high. We may consult Mrs. Grundy's prejudices if we find that in doing so we may directly serve our own thinking, and therefore our cause. This is very different from any kind of apologizing to her. All such I utterly deplore. We must not begin by granting Mrs. Grundy's case in any degree. Somewhere in that chaos of prejudices which she calls her mind, she nourishes the notion, common to all the false forms of religion, ancient or modern, that there is something about sex and parenthood which is inherently base and unclean. The origin of this notion is of interest, and the anthropologists have devoted much attention to it. It is to be found intermingled with a by no means contemptible hygiene in the Mosaic legislation, is to be traced in the beliefs and customs of extant primitive peoples, and has formed and forms an element in most religions. But it is not really pertinent to our present discussion to weigh the good and evil consequences of this belief. Without following the modern fashion, prevalent in some surprising quarters, of ecstatically exaggerating the practical value of false beliefs in past and present times, we may admit that the cause of morality in the humblest sense of that term may sometimes have been served by the religious condemnation of all these matters as unclean, and of parenthood as, at the best, a second best.

But for our own day and days yet unborn this notion of sex and its consequences as unclean or the worser part is to be condemned as not merely a lie and a palpably blasphemous one, grossly irreligious on the face of it, but as a pernicious lie, and to be so recognized even by those who most joyfully cherish evidence of the practical value of lies. Whatever may have been the case in the past or among present peoples in other states of culture than our own, no impartial person can question that during the Christian Era what may be called the Pauline or ascetic attitude on this matter has been disastrous; and that if the present forms of religion are not completely to outlive their usefulness, it is high time to restore mother and child worship to the honour which it held in the religion of Ancient Egypt and in many another. If the mother and child worship which is to be found in the more modern religions, such as Christianity, is to be worth anything to the coming world it must cease to have reference to one mother and one child only; it must hail every mother everywhere as a Madonna, and every child as in some measure deity incarnate. By no Church will such teaching be questioned to-day; but if it be granted the Churches must cease to uphold those conceptions of the superiority of celibacy and virginity which, besides involving grossly materialistic conceptions of those states, are palpably incompatible with that worship of parenthood to which the Churches must and shall now be made to return.

All this will involve many a shock to prudery; to take only the instance of what we call illegitimate motherhood, our eyes askance must learn that there are other legitimacies and illegitimacies than those which depend upon the little laws of men, and that if our doctrine of the worth of parenthood be a right one it is our business in every such case to say, "Here also, then, in so far as it lies in our power, we must make motherhood as good and perfect as may be."

These principles also will lead us to understand how differently, were we wise, we should look upon the outward appearances of expectant motherhood. In his masterpiece, Forel—of all living thinkers the most valuable—has a passage with which Mrs. Grundy may here be challenged. It is too simple to need translating from the author's own French:[9]—

"La fausse honte qu'out les femmes de laisser voir leur grossesse et tout ce qui a rapport à l'accouchement, les plaisanteries dont on use souvent à l'égard des femmes enceintes, sont un triste signe de la dégénérescence et même de la corruption de notre civilization raffinée. Les femmes enceintes ne devraient pas ce cacher, ni jamais avoir honte de porter un enfant dans leur ventre; elles devraient au contraire en être fières. Pareille fierté serait certes bien plus justifiée que celle des beaux officiers paradant sous leur uniforme. Les signes extérieurs de la formation de l'humanité font plus d'honneur à leurs porteurs que les symboles de sa destruction. Que les femmes s'imprègnent de plus en plus de cette profonde vérité! Elles cesseront alors de cacher leur grossesse et d'en avoir honte. Conscientes de la grandeur de leur tâche sexuelle et sociale, elles tiendront haut l'étendard de notre descendance, qui est celui de la véritable vie à venir de l'homme, tout en combattant pour l'émancipation de leur sexe."

This passage recalls one of Ruskin's, which is to be found in "Unto This Last":—

"Nearly all labour may be shortly divided into positive and negative labour—positive, that which produces life; negative, that which produces death; the most directly negative labour being murder, and the most directly positive the bearing and rearing of children; so that in the precise degree in which murder is hateful on the negative side of idleness, in that exact degree child-rearing is admirable, on the positive side of idleness."

Here is the right comment upon the swaggering display of the means of death and the hiding as if shameful of the signs of life to come. What has Mrs. Grundy to say to this? Will she consider the propriety of urging in future that it is murder and the means of murder, and the organized forces of capital and politics making for murder, that must not be mentioned before children, and must be hidden as shameful from the eyes of men; and while a woman may still glory in her hair, according to that spiritual precept of St. Paul: "But if a woman have long hair it is a glory to her; for her hair is given her for a covering," perhaps she may be permitted even to glory in her motherhood, contemptible as such a notion would doubtless have seemed to the Apostle of the Gentiles.

XI

EDUCATION FOR MOTHERHOOD

It is our first principle in this discussion that the individual exists for parenthood, being a natural invention for that purpose and no other. It has been shown further that this is more pre-eminently true of woman than of man, she being the more essential—if such a phrase can be used—for the continuance of the race. If these principles are valid they must indeed determine our course in the education of girls. Some incidental reference has already been made to this subject, but the matter must be more carefully gone into here. We have seen that there are right and wrong ways of conducting the physical training of girls, according as whether we are aiming at muscularity or motherhood. We have seen also that there is a thing called the higher education of women, apparently laudable and desirable in itself, which may yet have disastrous consequences for the individual and the race.

In a book devoted to womanhood, and written at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, the reader might well expect that what we call the higher education of women would be a subject treated at great length and with great respect. Such a reader, turning to the chapter that professedly deals with the subject, might well be offended by its brevity. It might be asked whether the writer was really aware of the importance of the subject—of its remarkable history, its extremely rapid growth, and its conspicuous success (in proving that women can be men if they please—but this is my comment, not the reader's). Nor can any one question that the so-called higher education of women is a very large and increasingly large fact in the history of womanhood during the last half century in the countries which lead the world—whither it were perhaps not too curious to consider. Further, this kind of education does in fact achieve what it aims at. Women are capable of profiting by the opportunities which it offers, as we say. This is itself a deeply interesting fact in natural history, refuting as it does the assertions of those who declared and still declare that women are incapable of "higher education," except in rare instances. It is important to know that women can become very good equivalents of men, if they please.

Further, this higher education of women—and we may be content to accept the adjective without qualification, since it is after all only a comparative, and leaves us free to employ the superlative—may be and often is of very real value in certain cases and because of certain local conditions, such as the great numerical inequality of the sexes in nearly all civilized countries. It is valuable for that proportion of women, whatever it be, who, through some throw of the physiological dice, seem to be without the distinctive factor for psychical womanhood, the existence of which one has tentatively ventured to assume. These individuals, like all others, are entitled to the fullest and freest development of their lives, and it is well that there shall be open to them, as to the brothers they so closely resemble, opportunities for intellectual satisfaction and self-development. Therefore, surely, by far the most satisfactory function of higher education for women is that which it discharges in reference to these women. Their destiny being determined by their nature, and irrevocable by nurture, it is well that, though we cannot regard it as the highest, we should make the utmost of it by means of the appropriate education.

Only because sometimes we must put up with second bests can we approve of higher education for women other than those of the anomalous semi-feminine type to which we have referred. At present we must accept it as an unfortunate necessity imposed upon us by economic conditions. So long as society is based economically, or rather uneconomically, upon the disastrous principles which so constantly mean the sacrifice of the future to the present, so long, I suppose, will it be impossible that every fully feminine woman shall find a livelihood without some sacrifice of her womanhood. This is a subject to which we must return in a later chapter. Meanwhile it is referred to only because its consideration shows us some sort of excuse, if not warrant, for the higher education of woman, even though in the process of thus endowing her with economic independence, we disendow her of her distinctive womanhood, or at the very least imperil it; even though, more serious still, we deprive the race of her services as physical and psychical mother.

We have seen that there is just afoot a new tendency in the higher education of women, and it is indeed a privilege to be able to do anything in the way of directing public attention to this new trend. In reference thereto, it was hinted that though this newer form of higher education for woman is a great advance upon the old, and is so just because it implies some recognition of woman's place in the world, yet for one reason or another it falls short of what this present student of womanhood, at any rate, demands. As has been hinted further, probably those responsible for the new trend are by no means unaware that, though their line is nearer to the right one, the direct line to the "happy isles" has not quite been taken. But great is Mrs. Grundy of the English, and those who devised the new scheme—one is willing to hazard the guess—had to be content with an approximation to what they knew to be the ideal. That is why we devoted the last chapter to the question of prudery, inserting that between a discussion of the "higher education" of women and the present discussion, which is concerned with the highest education of women.

Words are only symbols, but, like other symbols, they are capable of assuming much empire over the mind. Man, indeed, as Stevenson said, lives principally by catchwords, and though woman, beside a cot, is less likely to be caught blowing bubbles and clutching at them, she also is in some degree at the mercy of words. The higher education of women is a good phrase. It appeals, just because of the fine word higher, to those who wish women well, and to those who are not satisfied that woman should remain for ever a domestic drudge. The phrase has had a long run, so to say, but I propose that henceforth we should set it to compete with another—the highest education of women. Whether this phrase will ever gain the vogue of the other even a biased and admiring father may well question. But if there is anything certain, having the whole weight of Nature behind it, and only the transient aberrations of men opposed thereto, it is that what I call the highest education of women will be and will remain the most central and capital of society's functions, when what is now called the higher education of women has gone its appointed way with nine-tenths of all present-day education, and exists only in the memory of historians who seek to interpret the fantastic vagaries of the bad old days.

Perhaps it is well that we should begin by freeing the word education from the incrustations of mortal nonsense that have very nearly obscured its vitality altogether. Before we can educate for motherhood, we must know what education is, and what it is not. We must have a definition of it and its object; in general as well as in this particular case, otherwise we shall certainly go wrong. Perhaps it may here be permitted to quote a paragraph from a lecture on "The Child and the State," in which some few years ago I attempted to express the first principles of this matter:—

"Now, as a student of biology, I will venture to propose a definition of education which is new, so far as I know, and which I hope and believe to be true and important. Comprehensively, so as to include everything that must be included, and yet without undue vagueness, I would define education as the provision of an environment. We may amplify this proposition, and say that it is the provision of a fit environment for the young and foolish by the elderly and wise. It has really scarcely anything in the world to do with my trying to make you pay for the teaching to my children of dogmas which I believe, and you deny. It neither begins nor ends with the three R's; and it does not isolate, from that whole which we call a human being, the one attribute which may be defined as the intellectual faculty. It is the provision of an environment, physical, mental, and moral, for the whole child, physical, mental, and moral. That is my definition of education. Now, what are we to say of the object of education? In providing the environment—from its mother's milk to moral maxims—for our child, what do we seek? Some may say, to make him a worthy citizen, to make him able to support himself; some may say, to make him fit to bear arms for his king and country; but I will give you the object of education as defined by the author of the most profound and wisest treatise which has ever been written upon the subject—Plato, Locke, and Milton not forgotten. 'To prepare us for complete living,' says Herbert Spencer, 'is the function which education has to discharge.' The great thing needed for us to learn is how to live, how rightly to rule conduct in all directions under all circumstances; and it is to that end that we must direct ourselves in providing an environment for the child. Education is the provision of an environment, the function of which is to prepare for complete living."

Perhaps the only necessary qualification of the foregoing is that, though it refers specially to the child, yet the need of education does not end with childhood, becoming indeed pre-eminent when childhood ends. So we may apply what has been said in the case of the girl, and we shall find it a sure guide to the highest education of women.

First, education being the provision of an environment in the widest sense of that very wide word, always misused when it is used less widely, we must be sure that in our scheme we avoid the errors of past or passing schemes which concern themselves only with some aspect of the environment, and so in effect prepare for something much less than complete living. It is not sufficient to provide an environment which regards the girl as simply a muscular machine, as is the tendency, if not actually the case, in some of the "best" girls' schools to-day; it is not sufficient to provide an environment which looks upon the girl as merely an intellectual machine, as in the higher education of women; it is not sufficient to provide an environment which looks upon the girl as a sideboard ornament, in Ruskin's phrase, such as was provided in the earlier Victorian days. In all these cases we are providing only part of the environment, and providing it in excess. None of them, therefore, satisfies our definition of education, which conceives of environment as the sum-total of all the influences to which the whole organism is subjected—influences dietetic, dogmatic, material, maternal, and all other.[10]

Who will question that, according to this conception of education, such a thing as the higher education of women must be condemned as inadequate? No more than a man is woman a mere intellect incarnate. Her emotional nature is all-important; it is indeed the highest thing in the Universe so far as we know. The scheme of education which ignores its existence, and much more than fails to provide the best environment for it, is condemnable. But the scheme of education which derides and despises the emotional nature of woman, looking upon it as a weakness and seeking to suppress it, is damnable, and has led to the damnation—or loss, if the reader prefers the English term—of this most precious of all precious things in countless cases.

The only right education of women must be that which rightly provides the whole environment. The simpler our conception of woman, the more we underrate her complexity and the manifoldness of her needs, the more certainly shall we repeat in one form or another the errors of our predecessors.

Complete living is a great phrase; perhaps not for a lizard or a mushroom, but assuredly for men and women. Perhaps it involves more for women even than for men; indeed it must do so if we are to adhere to our conception of women as more complex than men, having all the possibilities of men in less or greater measure, and also certain supreme possibilities of their own. Whatever complete living may mean for men, it cannot mean for women anything less than all that is implied in Wordsworth's great line—

"Wisdom doth live with children round her knees."

That line was written in reference to the unwisdom of a man, Napoleon, the greatest murderer in recorded time, and I believe it to be true of men, but it is pre-eminently true of women. There needs no excuse for quoting from Herbert Spencer, since we have already accepted his definition of the subject of education, a notable passage which is perhaps at the present time the most needed of all the wisdom with which that great thinker's book on education is filled:—

"The greatest defect in our programmes of education is entirely overlooked. While much is being done in the detailed improvement of our systems in respect both of matter and manner, the most pressing desideratum, to prepare the young for the duties of life, is tacitly admitted to be the end which parents and schoolmasters should have in view; and, happily, the value of the things taught, and the goodness of the methods followed in teaching them, are now ostensibly judged by their fitness to this end. The propriety of substituting for an exclusively classical training, a training in which the modern languages shall have a share, is argued on this ground. The necessity of increasing the amount of science is urged for like reasons. But though some care is taken to fit youth of both sexes for society and citizenship, no care whatever is taken to fit them for the position of parents. While it is seen that, for the purpose of gaining a livelihood, an elaborate preparation is needed, it appears to be thought that for the bringing up of children no preparation whatever is needed. While many years are spent by a boy in gaining knowledge of which the chief value is that it constitutes the education of a gentleman; and while many years are spent by a girl in those decorative acquirements which fit her for evening parties, not an hour is spent by either in preparation for that gravest of all responsibilities—the management of a family. Is it that the discharge of it is but a remote contingency? On the contrary, it is sure to devolve on nine out of ten. Is it that the discharge of it is easy? Certainly not; of all functions which the adult has to fulfil, this is the most difficult. Is it that each may be trusted by self-instruction to fit himself, or herself, for the office of parent? No; not only is the need for such self-instruction unrecognized, but the complexity of the subject renders it the one of all others in which self-instruction is least likely to succeed."

If we were wise enough, therefore, we should recognize all education, in the great sense of that word, to be as for parenthood. That ideal will yet be recognized and followed for both sexes, as it has for long been followed, consciously as well as unconsciously, by that astonishing race which has survived all its oppressors, and is in the van of civilization to-day as it was when it produced the Mosaic legislation. The time is not yet when one could accept with a light heart an invitation to lecture on fatherhood to the boys at Eton. Boys to-day are taught by each other, and by those who give them what they call "smut jaws," that what exists for fatherhood, and thus for the whole destiny of mankind, is "smut." When such blasphemies pass for the best pedagogic wisdom, to preach parenthood as the goal of all worthy education is to run the risk of being looked upon as ridiculous. But the time will come when the hideous Empire-wrecking Imperialisms of the present are forgotten, and when we have a new Patriotism—which suggests, first and foremost, as that word well may, the duty of fatherhood; and then, perhaps, "smut jaws" will not be the phrase at Eton for discussion of those instincts which determine the future of mankind.

But girls are our present concern, and we may indeed hope that, though the day is still far when the motto of Eton will be education as for fatherhood, yet the ideal of education as for motherhood may yet triumph wherever girls are taught within even a few years to come. On all sides to-day we see the aberrations of womanhood in a hundred forms, and the consequences thereof. Wrong education is partly, beyond a doubt, to be indicted for this state of things, and the right direction is so clearly indicated by nature and by the deepest intuitions of both sexes that we cannot much longer delay to take it.

Perhaps the reader will have patience whilst for a little we discuss the facts upon which right education for motherhood must be based. Some may suppose that by education for womanhood is meant simply one form or other of instruction; say, for instance, in the certainly important matter of infant feeding. At present, however, I am not thinking of instruction at all, but of education—the leading forth, that is to say, in right proportion and in right direction of the natural constituents of the girl. If we are to be right in our methods we must have some clear understanding of what those constituents are, and we must therefore address ourselves now to getting, if possible, clear and accurate notions of the material with which we have to deal; in other words, we must discuss the psychology of parenthood. We shall perhaps realize then that though the instruction of mothers in being is very necessary and very important, that comes in at the end of our duty, and that we shall never achieve what we might achieve unless we begin at the beginning.

XII

THE MATERNAL INSTINCT

The deeds of men and women proceed from certain radical elements of their nature, some evidently noble, others, when looked at askew, apparently ignoble. These elements are classed as instinctive. We are less intelligent than we think. Reason may occupy the throne, but the foundations upon which that throne is based are not of her making. To change the image, reason is the pilot, not the gale or the engine. She does not determine the goal, but only the course to that goal. We are what our nature makes us; our likes and our dislikes determine our acts, and we are guided to our self-determined ends by means of our intelligence. More often, indeed, we use our intelligence merely to justify to ourselves the likes and dislikes, the action and the inaction, which our instinctive tendencies have determined.

Many of our natural instincts, impulses, and emotions bear only remotely upon our present inquiry; as, for instance, the instinct of flight and the emotion of fear, the instinct of curiosity and the emotion of wonder, the instinct of pugnacity and the emotion of anger. Certain others, however, are not merely radical and permanent parts of our nature, but determine human existence, the greater part of its failures and successes, its folly and wisdom, its history and its destiny. Two of these—the parental and racial instincts—we must carefully consider here, and also, very briefly, a supposed third, the filial instinct. I am inclined to question whether such a specific entity as the filial instinct exists at all; it is rather, I believe, a product, by transmutation, of the parental instinct which, in its various forms and potencies and through the tender emotion which is its counterpart in the affective realm of our natures, is the noblest, finest, and most promising ingredient of our constitution.

Instinct and Emotion.—We must be sure, in the first place, that we have a sound idea of what we mean by the word "instinct." It is absurd, for instance, to speak of "acquiring a political instinct"—or any other. That is the most erroneous possible use of the word. An instinct is eminently something which cannot be "acquired"; it is native if anything is native; as native as the nose or the backbone. Instincts may be developed or repressed; it is the great mark of man that in him they may even be transmuted—but acquired never.

When we come to examine the laws of activity we find that, on the application of certain kinds of stimulus, there are certain very definite responses, and these we call instinctive. If the arm or the leg of a sleeper be stroked or touched, or a cold breath of air blows thereon, it will be withdrawn, and such withdrawal is what we call a reflex action. Now, an instinctive action, as Herbert Spencer saw long ago, is a "complex reflex action." It differs from a simple reflex, a mere twitch, such as winking, but it is a complicated, and possibly prolonged, action, which is, at bottom, of the nature of a reflex. One may instance the instinct of flight, which is correlated with fear. In crossing the street we hear "toot, toot," and we run. We do not ratiocinate, we run. All the primary instincts of mankind act similarly. Take, for contrast, the instinct of curiosity. Consider a child watching a mechanical toy; the impulse of this instinct of curiosity is such that he goes to the thing and examines it. By means of the transmutation, which it is the prerogative of man to effect, this instinct may work out into a lifetime devoted to the study of Nature. There is an unbroken sequence from the interest in the unknown which we see in a kitten or a child up to that which triumphs in a Newton or a Darwin.

Thus we begin to learn that human nature is largely a collection of instincts, more or less correlated, and that at bottom we act on our instincts—in accordance with certain innate predilections, likings, and dislikings with which we were born, and which we have inherited from our ancestors. Indissolubly associated therewith is what we call emotion. For instance, in the exercise of the instinct of curiosity we feel a certain emotion, which we call wonder. There is an ignoble wonder and there is a noble wonder; but whether it be an astronomer watching the stars, or the crowd at a cinematograph show, there exists an association between the emotion of wonder and the instinct of curiosity. Dr. McDougall, of Oxford, elaborated some few years ago, and has now established, an extremely important theory of the relation between instinct and emotion. He has shown that our emotions are correlated with our instincts; that the emotion is the inward or subjective side of the working of the instinct. Thus an instinct is more than a "complex reflex action"; it is more than merely that, on hearing something, or seeing something, certain muscles are thrown into action, because along with the action there is emotion, and this is a natural and necessary correlation. We should do well to carry about with us, as part of our mental furniture, this idea of the correlation between instinct and emotion.

Now, if it be true that man is not primarily a rational animal, if he be rather, au fond, a bundle, an assemblage, an organism of instincts, it behoves us to recognize in ourselves and in others the primary instincts, because from them flows all that goes to make up human nature, whether it be good or evil. Amongst these, certainly, is the parental instinct.

Let us first consider its development in the individual, for this bears on the question when to begin education for motherhood. We find it very early indeed. It is commonly asserted that the doll instinct is the precursor, the infantile and childish form, of the parental instinct. Some psychologists, as we have already noted, assure us that this is wrong, that a small child will be just as content to play with anything else as with a doll; that the child gets fond of its possession, and that what we are really witnessing is the instinct of acquisitiveness. The rest may reason and welcome, but those who are fathers know. We have only to watch a child to learn that it very soon differentiates its doll, or rather, the shapeless mass it calls its doll, from other things. Try with your own children and see if you can get them to like anything else as well as they like a doll. They will not. There are few settled questions as yet in psychology, but we may certainly be sure that the parental instinct and its associated emotion may be unmistakably displayed as the master-passion in a child who is not yet two years old. In a case where the possibility of imitation was excluded I have seen a little girl adore a small baby, stroke its hands, whisper quasi-maternal sweet nothings to it—"mother it," in short—as plainly as I have seen the sun at noon; and there is no reason to suppose that this deeply impressive spectacle was exceptional.

The parental instinct is connected subtly with the racial instinct; and it is undisputed that, except in utterly degraded persons, the object of the feelings which are associated with the racial instinct becomes the object of the feelings which are associated with the parental instinct. The object of the emotion of sex becomes also the object of tender emotion. Thus "love," in its lower sense, becomes exalted by Love in the noble sense.

There is also in us an instinct of pugnacity, which especially appears when the working of any other instinct is thwarted. We know that the parental instinct when thwarted, as in the tigress robbed of her whelps, shows itself in pugnacity—even in the female, which commonly has no pugnacity; and in the emotion of anger. It is a reasonable supposition that the fine anger, the passion for justice, the passion against, say, slavery or cruelty to children—that these indignations which move the world are at bottom traceable to the workings of the outraged parental instinct. When we have tender emotion towards a child, or towards an animal, whatever it be, this is really the subjective side of the working of the parental instinct. Now, tender emotion is what has made and makes everything that is good in the individual, and in human society. It is the basis of all morality—all morality that is real morality—everything that permits us to hold up our heads at all, or to hope for the future of the race. That is why the study of the parental instinct, its correlate or source, is as important and serious as any that can be imagined.

Let us begin by a quotation from Dr. McDougall, author of the best and most searching account of this instinct yet written:—

"The maternal instinct, which impels the mother to protect and cherish her young, is common to almost all the higher species of animals. Among the lower animals the perpetuation of the species is generally provided for by the production of an immense number of eggs or young (in some species of fish a single adult produces more than a million eggs), which are left entirely unprotected, and are so preyed upon by other creatures that on the average but one or two attain maturity. As we pass higher up the animal scale, we find the number of eggs or young more and more reduced, and the diminution of their number compensated for by parental protection. At the lowest stage this protection may consist in the provision of some merely physical shelter, as in the case of those animals that carry their eggs attached in some way to their bodies. But, except at this lowest stage, the protection afforded to the young always involves some instinctive adaptation of the parent's behaviour. We may see this even among the fishes, some of which deposit their eggs in rude nests and watch over them, driving away creatures that might prey upon them. From this stage onwards protection of offspring becomes increasingly psychical in character, involves more profound modification of the parent's behaviour, and a more prolonged period of more effective guardianship. The highest stage is reached by those species in which each female produces at a birth but one or two young, and protects them so efficiently that most of the young born reach maturity; the maintenance of the species thus becomes in the main the work of the parental instinct. In such species the protection and cherishing of the young is the constant and all-absorbing occupation of the mother, to which she devotes all her energies, and in the course of which she will at any time undergo privation, pain, and death. The instinct becomes more powerful than any other, and can override any other, even fear itself; for it works directly in the service of the species, while the other instincts work primarily in the service of the individual life, for which Nature cares little.... When we follow up the evolution of this instinct to the highest animal level, we find among the apes the most remarkable examples of its operation. Thus in one species the mother is said to carry her young one clasped in one arm uninterruptedly for several months, never letting go of it in all her wanderings. This instinct is no less strong in many human mothers, in whom, of course, it becomes more or less intellectualized and organized as the most essential constituent of the sentiment of parental love. Like other species, the human species is dependent upon this instinct for its continual existence and welfare. It is true that reason, working in the service of the egotistic impulses and sentiments, often circumvents the ends of this instinct and sets up habits which are incompatible with it. But when that occurs on a large scale in any society, that society is doomed to rapid decay. But the instinct itself can never die out save with the disappearance of the human species itself; it is kept strong and effective just because those families and races and nations in which it weakens become rapidly supplanted by those in which it is strong.

"It is impossible to believe that the operation of this, the most powerful of the instincts, is not accompanied by a strong and definite emotion; one may see the emotion expressed unmistakably by almost any mother among the higher animals, especially the birds and the mammals—by the cat, for example, and by most of the domestic animals; and it is impossible to doubt that this emotion has in all cases the peculiar quality of the tender emotion provoked in the human parent by the spectacle of her helpless offspring. This primary emotion has been very generally ignored by the philosophers and psychologists; that is, perhaps, to be explained by the fact that this instinct and its emotion are in the main decidedly weaker in men than women, and in some men, perhaps, altogether lacking. We may even surmise that the philosophers as a class are men among whom this defect of native endowment is relatively common."

Dr. McDougall goes on to show how from this emotion and its impulse to cherish and protect spring generosity, gratitude, love, true benevolence, and altruistic conduct of every kind; in it they have their main and absolutely essential root without which they would not be. He argues that the intimate alliance between tender emotion and anger is of great importance for the social life of man, for "the anger invoked in this way is the germ of all moral indignation, and on moral indignation justice and the greater part of public law are in the main founded."[11]

The reader may be earnestly counselled to acquaint himself with Dr. McDougall's book, which, in the judgment of those best qualified, definitely advances the science of psychology in its deepest and most important aspects.

The Transmutation of Instinct.—The last thing here meant by the transmutation of instinct is that by any political alchemy it is possible—to quote Herbert Spencer's celebrated aphorism—to get golden conduct out of leaden instincts. But it is the mark of man, the intelligent being, that in him the instincts are plastic, and even capable of amazing transmutations. In the lower animals there is instinct, but that instinct is an almost completely fixed, rigid, and final thing. In ourselves there is a limitless capacity for the development, the humanization of instinct along many lines, as when the primitive infantile curiosity works out into the speculations of a thinker. In other words, we are educable, the lower animals are not, or only within very narrow limits.

Yet in one respect the lower animals have the advantage over us. Their instincts are often perfect. We cannot teach a cat anything about how to look after a kitten; but parallel instincts amongst ourselves, though not less numerous or potent, are not perfected, not sharp-cut. In the cat there is no need for education; in woman there is eminent need for it. Indeed it is the lack of education that is largely responsible for our large infant mortality; not that woman is inferior to the cat, but that, being not instinctive but intelligent, she requires education in motherhood.

Human instincts in general are capable of modification; sometimes they may take bizarre forms, and so we find that there are people without children of their own—more commonly women—who will have twenty cats in the house and look after them, or who will devote their whole lives to the cause of the rat or the rabbit, or whatever it may be, while the children of men are dying around them. These things are indications of the parental instinct centred on unworthy objects. It is a common thing to laugh at these aberrations—thoughtlessly, may we not say? While orphans are to be found, we should do better if we try to bring together the woman who needs to "mother" and the child who needs to be "mothered."

Conduct is at least three-fourths of life, and the great business of education is the direction of conduct. We have seen how modern psychology illuminates what has been so long dark, by directing us to our instincts as the sources of our needs, and by showing us that it is the possibility of the education of instinct which essentially distinguishes us from the lower animals.

We must therefore distinguish between education for motherhood and education or instruction in motherhood. It is very important that a woman should know the elements of infant feeding, but it is more important that, in the first place, her whole life before she becomes a mother—nay, even before she chooses her child's father—shall centre in the education of her instincts for motherhood. Finding good evidence, as we do, of the maternal instinct at a very early age, and recognizing its importance in conduct and in the formation of ideals long before the marriage age, we are justified in discussing the maternal instinct here instead of postponing it, as some might argue, until after we have discussed marriage. There is nothing which I wish to assert more strongly than that we are radically wrong in this postponement, which is indeed our customary practice. Partly because we are blind, partly because of our most imprudent prudery, we ignore and pervert the due sequence of development, but here I deliberately prefer to follow the indications of nature, and to discuss the maternal instinct now because, in the matter of the education of girls, this is precisely the most important subject that can be named.

Let us now note some popular misconceptions which cumber our minds and often interfere with the work of the reformer.

To begin with what is perhaps the oldest of these, though indeed scarcely entitled to the appellation of popular, let us assure ourselves once and for all that we are talking about a fact natural, innate, not acquired. The modern criticism of ancient notions of human nature, such as those expressed in the theologians' conception of "conscience," has inclined some to the view that our best feelings are indeed not at all innate. No one can for a moment analyze conscience without observing the immense disparity between the facts and the theologians' theory. And thus we are apt to fall into the opposite error of supposing that our impulses towards good action are entirely the products of education, training, public opinion, and so forth. Let the reader refer, for instance, to such a celebrated work as John Stuart Mill's "Utilitarianism," and it will be seen how wide of the mark it was possible for even a great thinker to go, when his ideas of mind were unguided by the light of evolution. Even in the greatest writer of that time not a syllable do we find as to the parental instinct. "As is my own belief," says Mill, "the moral feelings are not innate but acquired." Yet we have seen convincing evidence which teaches us that the moral feelings spring essentially from the root of the parental instinct, without which mankind could not continue for another generation, and than which there is nothing more fundamental and essential in any type of human nature that can persist.

The importance of noting this can be clearly stated. We are here dealing with something which is not for us to implant, but which is already part of the plant, so to speak, and which it is for us to tend. Like other innate features of mankind, its transmission from generation to generation is notably independent of the effects of education, the effects of use and disuse. This is a difficult thing of which to persuade people, but it is the fact. Education, environment, training, opportunity, habit, public opinion, social prejudice—all these and such other influences may and do affect the maternal instinct in the individual for good or for evil. No fact is more certain or important, and that is precisely why we must study this instinct. But the effect upon the individual does not involve any effect upon the native constitution of the individual's children. From age to age the general facts and features of the human backbone persist. We do not expect to find notable differences between the generations in such a radical feature of our constitution, no matter what particular habits of posture, play, and the like we adopt. The maternal instinct is scarcely less fundamental; it is certainly no whit less essential for the species. It is the very backbone of our psychological constitution. Thus it is nonsense to assert that, for instance, women are becoming less motherly, if by this is meant that the maternal instinct is failing. That bad education may affect it for evil no one can question, but we must distinguish between nature and nurture. We may be perfectly confident that so far as the natural material of girl-childhood and girlhood is concerned, there is no falling off; there will not, for there cannot, be any falling off either in the quality or in the quantity of the maternal instinct. On the contrary, it can, and will later be shown that through the action of heredity this instinct will be strengthened in the future, just in so far as motherhood becomes more and more a special privilege of those women in whom this instinct is strong, and who become mothers for the only good reason—that they love to have children of their own.

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

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

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

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

"A mother is a mother still,

The holiest thing alive."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XIII

CHOOSING THE FATHERS OF THE FUTURE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XIV

THE MARRIAGE AGE FOR GIRLS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XV

THE FIRST NECESSITY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The public knowledge of syphilis, though far short of the truth, is not merely so inadequate as that of gonorrhœa.

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

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

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

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

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

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

How then should we proceed?

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

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

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

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

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

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

"But if ye could and would not, oh, what plea,

Think ye, shall stead you at your trial, when

The thunder-cloud of witnesses shall loom,

With Ravished Childhood on the seat of doom

At the Assizes of Eternity?"

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

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

CHAPTER XVI

ON CHOOSING A HUSBAND

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"A woman is only a woman,

But a good cigar is a smoke."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XVII

THE CONDITIONS OF MARRIAGE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am, sir,

Yours faithfully,

SOPHIE K. BEVAN.

(Times, Dec. 24, 1909.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XVIII

THE CONDITIONS OF DIVORCE

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

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

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

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

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

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 £100; 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 crèche, the infant milk dépôt, 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 æons 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 æons, 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 crèche and the sterilized milk dépôt 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 naïve 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:—

"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

per cent.

Fluid drachms in a wineglassful.

Port

20

3¼

Sherry

20

3¼

Champagne

10/15

1¾

Hock

10

1½

Claret

9

1½

ALCOHOL IN MEAT WINES

per cent.

Fluid drachms in a wineglassful.

Bendle's

20.3

3¼

Bivo

19.2

3

Bovril

20.15

3¼

Glendenning's

20.8

3^1/3

Lemco

17.26

2¾

Vin Regno

16.05

2½

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.

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

Gonorrhœa, 223 et seq.

Gymnastics versus play, 109

Hæmophilia, 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.

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

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 für 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.

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...."

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WOMAN AND WOMANHOOD: A SEARCH FOR PRINCIPLES ***

Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will be renamed.

Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG™ concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away—you may do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially commercial redistribution.

START: FULL LICENSE

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK

To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work (or any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project Gutenberg™ License available with this file or online at www.gutenberg.org/license.

Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works

1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg™ electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property (trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in your possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project Gutenberg™ electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.

1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg™ electronic works even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project Gutenberg™ electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg™ electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.

1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in the collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the United States and you are located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg™ works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg™ name associated with the work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg™ License when you share it without charge with others.

1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project Gutenberg™ work. The Foundation makes no representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any country other than the United States.

1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:

1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg™ License must appear prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg™ work (any work on which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed, copied or distributed:

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.

1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase “Project Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg™ trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is posted with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms will be linked to the Project Gutenberg™ License for all works posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.

1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg™ License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg™.

1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project Gutenberg™ License.

1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary, compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg™ work in a format other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official version posted on the official Project Gutenberg™ website (www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other form. Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg™ License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.

1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying, performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg™ works unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing access to or distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works provided that:

- • You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from the use of Project Gutenberg™ works calculated using the method you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark, but he has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in Section 4, “Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.”

- • You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg™ License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg™ works.

- • You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of receipt of the work.

- • You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.

1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg™ electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark. Contact the Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.

1.F.

1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project Gutenberg™ collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg™ electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain “Defects,” such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.

1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the “Right of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark, and any other party distributing a Project Gutenberg™ electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further opportunities to fix the problem.

1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’, WITH NO OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.

1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.

1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone providing copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg™ work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg™ work, and (c) any Defect you cause.

Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg™

Project Gutenberg™ is synonymous with the free distribution of electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from people in all walks of life.

Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg™’s goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg™ collection will remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure and permanent future for Project Gutenberg™ and future generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org.

Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation

The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit 501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal Revenue Service. The Foundation’s EIN or federal tax identification number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state’s laws.

The Foundation’s business office is located at 809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up to date contact information can be found at the Foundation’s website and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact

Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation

Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without widespread public support and donations to carry out its mission of increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be freely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the widest array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations ($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt status with the IRS.

The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate.

While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who approach us with offers to donate.

International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.

Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate.

Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg™ electronic works

Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg™ concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and distributed Project Gutenberg™ eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.

Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several printed editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.

Most people start at our website which has the main PG search facility: www.gutenberg.org.

This website includes information about Project Gutenberg™, including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.

Table of Contents

WOMAN AND WOMANHOOD

Contents

CHAPTER I

FIRST PRINCIPLES

CHAPTER II

THE LIFE OF THE WORLD TO COME

CHAPTER III

THE PURPOSE OF WOMANHOOD

CHAPTER IV

THE LAW OF CONSERVATION

CHAPTER V

THE DETERMINATION OF SEX

CHAPTER VI

MENDELISM AND WOMANHOOD

VII

BEFORE WOMANHOOD

VIII

THE PHYSICAL TRAINING OF GIRLS

IX

THE HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN

X

THE PRICE OF PRUDERY

XI

EDUCATION FOR MOTHERHOOD

XII

THE MATERNAL INSTINCT

XIII

CHOOSING THE FATHERS OF THE FUTURE

XIV

THE MARRIAGE AGE FOR GIRLS

CHAPTER XV

THE FIRST NECESSITY

CHAPTER XVI

ON CHOOSING A HUSBAND

CHAPTER XVII

THE CONDITIONS OF MARRIAGE

CHAPTER XVIII

THE CONDITIONS OF DIVORCE

CHAPTER XIX

THE RIGHTS OF MOTHERS

CHAPTER XX

WOMEN AND ECONOMICS

CHAPTER XXI

THE CHIEF ENEMY OF WOMEN

CHAPTER XXII

CONCLUSION

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

INDEX OF NAMES

FOOTNOTES:

Transcriber's Notes

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE