CHAPTER V
PARENTAGE
The simple fact that the birth of a human being, the image of God, as religious people say, is in so many cases regarded as of very much less importance than that of a domestic animal, proves the degraded condition in which we live.—August Bebel.
The reproduction of species yields to no other special function of life in respect of importance and the wide scope of its vital issues. Notwithstanding that vast numbers of illegitimate children are born in every civilized country where monogamy reigns, this function of reproduction is popularly regarded as allied with marriage in the order of a natural and necessary consequence—a result irrespective of human will. Now scientific meliorism makes a clear distinction between marriage and parentage on the ground that, while the former comparatively is of insignificant importance to the interests of humanity in general, parentage is of vital moment to these interests; moreover, between the two there exists no integral or essential relation. On the one hand, progeny spring from unions not legalized by marriage; on the other, many married people, swayed by motives chiefly egoistic, but sometimes altruistic, are consciously exercising a voluntary restraint over propagation.
The late Matthew Arnold tells us that when gazing on one occasion in company with a benevolent man upon a multitude of slum children eaten up with disease, half-sized, half-fed, half-clothed, neglected by their parents, without health, without home, without hope, the good man said: “The one thing really needful is to teach these little ones to succour one another, if only with a cup of cold water.” Mr. Arnold promptly rejected that theory. “So long as the multitude of these poor children is perpetually swelling,” said he, “they must be charged with misery to themselves and us, whether they help one another with a cup of cold water or no, and the knowledge how to prevent them accumulating is what we want.” That knowledge is no longer inaccessible to man. There are known rational methods by which to keep the populating tendency within due limits, and at the same time to promote individual prudence, foresight and self-dependence.
Neo-Malthusianism, with its power of subjugating the law of population and deferring parentage, is a new key to the social position, and neo-Malthusian practice has already taken root in British society. The discovery is of vast significance, so great are its latent possibilities of promoting universal happiness. But as long as reproduction of human physical life is left to haphazard, and the rule of private, personal interests alone, without any honourable recognition, intelligent guidance, or moral and economic support, the immediate effect on national life is, and will continue to be, the very reverse of beneficial.
Matthew Arnold’s exhortation in respect of the slum children was: “We must let conscience play freely and simply upon the facts of the case; we must listen to what it tells us of the intelligible law of things as concerns these children, and what it tells us is that a man’s children are not really sent any more than the pictures upon his walls or the horses in his stable are sent, and that to bring people into the world when one cannot afford to keep them and oneself decently, or to bring more of them into the world than one can afford to keep thus, is by no means an accomplishment of the Divine Will or a fulfilment of nature’s simplest laws, but is contrary to reason and the will of God.” (Culture and Anarchy, p. 246.)
This remonstrance addressed to the rich (these alone have pictures on their walls and horses in their stables) may have had some effect, for certain it is that in the upper classes artificial checks to conception are now widely used, while slum children show no tendency to proportionately diminish in number. Individuals whose standard of living is high, and whose pecuniary means are small, or who are thoughtful, intelligent, prudent, either refrain from marriage, or, marrying, check propagation. The natural result is that children of the comparatively superior types are becoming numerically weaker than children of the thoughtless, reckless members of society who exercise their reproductive powers to the utmost. It is supremely important that we should recognize how parentage bears upon human life and happiness in far wider relations than either sexual union alone or marriage alone.
Maintenance of species has hitherto been accomplished at an enormous sacrifice of individual life. The requirement that there shall arise a full number of adults in successive generations is fulfilled by means which subordinate the existing and next succeeding members of the species in various degrees. (See Herbert Spencer’s Principles of Sociology, vol. i. p. 621.)
Among low forms—inferior to the human organism—the germs of new individuals are produced in immense numbers, the larger part of the parental substance being sometimes transformed into these germs. Birth here may be immediately followed by the death of the parent organism, and an immense mortality of the young may take place—consequent on defenceless exposure, insufficient food and other untoward conditions. “Of a million minute ova left uncared for, the majority are destroyed before they are hatched, so that very few have considerable amounts of individual life.” (Ibid. p. 622.)
Throughout the course of evolution the natural order in moving from higher to higher types is a gradual decrease of this condition, viz. the sacrifice of individual life to the life of the species, and at the same time an increase of compensating pleasures allied with the reproductive function. When illustrating this natural order, Herbert Spencer points to the methods among fishes and amphibians contrasted with those among birds and mammals. The spawn of the former when safely deposited is generally left to its fate.[3] There is physical cost to adults with apparently no accompanying gratifications. Birds and mammals, however, carefully rear and tend their offspring. “The activities of parenthood are sources of agreeable emotions, just as are the activities which achieve self-sustentation.”
3. There are exceptions to the rule, as in the case of the male stickleback.
Passing from the less intelligent vertebrates which produce many young at short intervals and abandon them at an early age, to the more intelligent higher vertebrates which produce few young at longer intervals and aid them for longer periods, this principle clearly emerges—“While the rate of juvenile mortality is diminished, there results both a lessened physical cost of maintaining the species and an augmented satisfaction of the affections.” (Principles of Sociology, vol. i. p. 628.)
There is no reversal of this genetic order of nature in the epoch of conscious evolution. The processes are different, because man possesses developed intellect, aided by scientific knowledge and invention as a new and skilled ally in the struggle to maintain his species at less and less cost of individual life and happiness; but the general forward movement takes precisely the same course. With the highest evolved type of man this sacrifice of individual life to the species is reduced to a minimum, while the interests of species are conserved in a painless, a wholly superior manner. And, further, the entire range of domestic feelings—parental, filial, fraternal and intimately social, become extended and increasingly capable of bestowing enduring pleasure. The ultimate goal is easy maintenance of species, without—to any unpleasurable extent—subordinating single members of species to that end.
Love of offspring, as already explained, has no reproductive instinct at its base. It is a feeling—superimposed on organic nature—dependent on family life or arrangements that involve parental care and more or less of adult activity directed to the well-being of the young. This sentiment of love of offspring or philoprogenitiveness, is well established in the British race; but with rampant poverty in our midst, can we wonder that in hundreds of thousands of individual cases the paternal relation—so capable of filling the heart with tender emotions and joy—creates an actual disgust, or a feeling of despair, malignancy, even injustice, as is shown in the touching little satire, Ginx’s Baby. Ginx frankly gave his wife notice that, as his utmost efforts could scarcely maintain their existing family, if she ventured to present him with any more, either single or twins ... “he would most assuredly drown him.” Later, when the arrival of number thirteen is imminent—the wife being unable longer to hide the impending event—Ginx fixed his determination by much thought and a little extra drinking. He argued thus: “He wouldn’t go on the parish. He couldn’t keep another youngster to save his life. He had never taken charity and never would. There was nothink to do with it but drown it.”
Nor is even the maternal relation proof against bitterness in untoward conditions, although the feelings will be differently expressed, and may possibly assume a pious garb. “I’ve ’ad my fifteen or my twenty on ’em, but, thank ’eaven, the churchyard ’as stood my friend.” These or similar words have often been heard in an English factory town. The women speaking thus were not otherwise callous or incapable of mother-love. They were gentle, patient, toiling drudges, who had had the philoprogenitiveness of average human nature and the tender joys of maternity perverted into secret care and open hypocritical cant by the physical strain of a too-frequent child-bearing, combined with the miseries of ceaseless labour, pinched means, and comfortless, crowded homes.
The frequent advent of children who are unwelcome to their own parents in a society no longer ignorant of the scientific means by which its weakest members may avoid parentage, without any destruction of life or any injury to sexual function, is marvellously irrational, and it indicates divergence from the well-marked path of evolutional progress.
Opposition to neo-Malthusian practice arises from primitive conceptions of life (conceptions antecedent to evolutional theory), while all the various undefined scruples painfully experienced by individuals are survivals of the sentiment allied with these false conceptions. Prejudice dies slowly, as ignorance is dispelled by the growing light of new knowledge.
I have shown that asceticism is an immoral principle, the action of which tends to fill individual life with gloom and depression, and to thwart or counteract general happiness. I have also shown the absolute necessity for retarding the multiplication of human beings to suit the limits of available subsistence. And now, after pointing out that philoprogenitiveness—which is the groundwork of domestic and social virtue, and ought to be the mainspring of reproduction of species—is continually liable to be strained, depressed or perverted into anti-social bitterness in parental bosoms among the lower classes, I must ask the question: How otherwise than by the easiest method known to science could the difficulties of the position be met and overcome?
Messrs. Patrick Geddes and J. A. Thomson, in their treatise on the Evolution of Sex, urge the necessity of what they call “an ethical rather than a mechanical prudence after marriage, of a temperance recognized to be as binding on husband and wife as chastity on the unmarried.” (The Evolution of Sex, p. 297.) But what do these gentlemen mean by the temperance here recommended? It is surely well known that the birth of a large family is perfectly consistent with a sparing, most temperate exercise of the procreative function; and surely also it would be folly on our part to look for parental conduct controlled by ethical motive in the warrens of the poor of our large cities, from whence springs an important section of the national life. (Social Control of the Birth Rate, Pamphlet by G. A. Gaskell.)
In the homes of the upper classes, adorned with all the amenities and refinements of civilization, parental prudence results mainly from egoistic motive. Practical reformers will hesitate to assume that those—the less favoured social units—are likely to surpass these in moral elevation, and demean themselves generally in a superior manner! But further, a parental prudence, dispensing with mechanical methods of checking propagation, may even prove the converse of ethical conduct. Advanced sexual morality requires a free and healthful exercise of sexual function. That such freedom is not possible under present social conditions is irrelevant to the question at issue; the point is that conduct unnecessarily traversing this advanced sexual morality is not in accordance with rationalized social ethics; it has no scientific basis.
Parental morals must conform to the principle indicated by Herbert Spencer—reduce to a minimum the sacrifice of individual life and happiness to the life of the species; augment to the maximum the joys of affection involved in parental relations. This is possible to a race among which are beings of low intelligence and unrestrained passion only by bringing into play the laws of heredity through rational breeding. But rational breeding depends on an appeal to ordinary egoistic motive and practical resort to the painless mechanical means of checking conception.
There is no general unwillingness to limit their families among the poor; what is lacking consists simply in power of control over the physical conditions of fertility. To see children half-starved and wives sickly and miserable is no more pleasant to parents of the Ginx order than to those of us who view it from a safe distance; and there is ample intelligence to perceive the connexion between, on the one hand, discomfort and poverty attendant on a family of ten or twelve, on the other, comparative comfort allied with a family of only three or four.
A code of ethics covering the interests of the entire nation commands strenuous effort on the part of all thoughtful, intelligent people to make the artificial checks known to the thoughtless and unintelligent. It is not by proudly rejecting scientific invention in this matter that we shall attain to development of higher and higher types of man, but by skilfully using it as a powerful ally in our struggle to maintain and regenerate species at less and less cost to individual happiness.
Apart altogether from man’s partial practice of neo-Malthusian art, under egoistic motives, civilization has created an interference with the original order of race preservation under generous or altruistic motive. Social feeling slowly developing revolts—in detail—from the cruel method of the law of natural selection. It spontaneously supersedes that law by one of sympathetic selection. But whereas the former law issued in survival of the fittest, the latter issues day by day in indiscriminate survival, and consequent race deterioration. A controlled rate of increase is not therefore the only position to which reason and science must guide us; we have further to escape from the disastrous consequences of the above law and pass to conditions of life evolved under the benign influence of a rational and moral law—a law of social selection, resulting in appropriate birth, or the birth of the socially fit.
There are thousands of our present day population with whom family life is no whit superior to that of birds, whose pairing is immediately followed by rapid breeding and a complete scattering of the brood when the young are barely fledged. A wise philanthropy in line with the march of progressive evolution may lift these thousands to the level of the higher vertebrates, “which produce few young at longer intervals and give them aid for longer periods.” The recalcitrant minority refusing to practice parental prudence must be treated by society as abnormal individuals, incapable of rising to the standard of average civilized human nature, and these must be subjected to social restraint.