The way the world is going

For some time sounds of confused disputation have been coming out of Denver and gathering the attention of the world. The story is complex in its telling but simple in its essentials. Judge Lindsey, of the well-known Juvenile Court in that city, is being subjected to processes of ousting that need not hold our attention too closely. Mighty forces have worked for his overthrow. The Ku Klux Klansmen have gathered in “Klavern” against the Judge. The Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, a Baptist minister in his less fiery moments, seems to be in unwonted alliance with eminent Roman Catholic leaders against him. He is violently assailed and violently supported. In detail the conflict becomes squabble, but the matter upon which issue is raised is one of quite fundamental significance to any one concerned with the present drift of things. The fight rages about the institution of marriage. Judge Lindsey has been offering to improve it.

That Juvenile Court in Denver is known throughout the civilized world. It has attracted many European students and inquirers. It is as old as the century. It owes its constitution and methods very largely to Lindsey’s indefatigable zeal. Its primary function was the separation of delinquent children and juvenile first offenders from the hard atmosphere of the common police court. They were to be dealt with upon special lines, saved from the stigma of conviction, and if possible turned back from becoming members of the criminal class. This task the court has performed admirably. Its functions developed into very valuable preventive work. It became a place of reconciliation between parents and erring and recalcitrant sons and daughters, it shepherded home a multitude of runaways, and it saved great numbers of misguided and luckless girls from shame and degradation. Naturally it antagonized the saloon and the white-slave trader. For twenty years it worked with the blessing of the Roman Catholic community. Father McMenamin, one of the leading clergy in Denver, described it as “a constructive force in our community, and a godsend to many a boy and girl.”

The Klansmen, however, were early hostile, and their first hostility was based on the good relations between the Juvenile Court and the Catholics. They denounced Judge Lindsey for sending girls, girls of Catholic antecedents, to the Catholic House of the Good Shepherd, to work for nothing, as they alleged, in the laundry and be debauched. That was their agreeable version of the methods of a well-managed Catholic Home of spotless repute. It is interesting to consider the proposals that could bring Klansmen and Catholic, in spite of this, into alliance against the Judge.

Nothing could better illuminate the struggle between innovation and conservative reaction in matrimonial relations that goes on to-day all over the civilized world. It is not a struggle between good men and bad men; it is a struggle between novel and established ideas, between projected and time-honoured social usages. Father McMenamin and Judge Lindsey are well-known men in Denver; their characters have been gauged by years of public service, and there can be no question that each is a conspicuously honest, trustworthy, disinterested leader. The Klansmen lie a little under the shadow of “Elmer Gantry,” that deadly book; there is much rant, froth, and violence upon their Denver record, and their testimonial remains in suspense, but for our present purposes we can very well restrict the issue to the two unquestionably straightforward protagonists, Judge Lindsey and Father McMenamin.

Now this is what has blown up Judge Lindsey and his Juvenile Court in Denver. After years of experience of adolescent misbehaviour he has come to the conclusion that in our modern community marriage is delayed too late, and that a long and lengthening gap has been opened between the days when school and college are left behind and the days when it seems safe and reasonable to settle down and found a family. There is a growing proportion of fretting and impatient young people in the community, and out of their undisciplined eagerness springs a tangle of furtive promiscuity, prostitution, disease, crime, and general unhappiness. Young men cannot apply themselves to sound work because of nature’s strong preoccupation, and the life of possibly even a majority of young women is a life of tormented uncertainty. Judge Lindsey, with the weight of a new immense experience upon him, and with the assertions of the advocates of birth control before him, has suggested a more orderly accommodation of social life to the new conditions.

He has proposed a type of preliminary marriage which he calls Companionate Marriage. This is to be a marriage undertaken by two people for “mutual comfort,” as the Prayer-book has it, with a full knowledge of birth control, and with the deliberate intention of not having children. So long as there are no children and with due deliberation, this companionate marriage may be dissolved by mutual consent. On the other hand, at any time the couple may turn their marriage into the permanent “family marriage” form. That is his proposal, and the State of Colorado has full power to make the experiment of such an institution. He wants such laws to be made. He believes that in most cases such marriages would develop naturally into permanent unions and that their establishment would clear the social atmosphere of a vast distressful system of illicit relationships, irrevocable blunders, abortions, desertions, crimes, furtive experimenting and all those dangers to honour, health, and happiness that go with furtiveness in these matters. He believes it would mean a great simplification and purification of social life and the release of much vexed and miserable energy.

Now before we consider the opposition of Father McMenamin to this project it may be well to note the fact that there is a considerable conflict of authority about this birth control. It is certainly not a sure and complete avoidance of offspring in all cases, though with due observances and with most people it works as Judge Lindsey counts upon its working. But a certain small percentage of his companionate marriages will unintentionally convert themselves into normal family marriages. Birth control does not certainly remove, it does but diminish, the probability of consequences, and it affords no such opening of “flood gates” to “unbridled licence,” and so forth, as its antagonists assume. Furtive and illicit indulgence are not relieved of anxiety by current birth-control knowledge. That is one point in this question not generally made clear.

Another criticism of wilfully restrained fecundity seems to be of far less value. People of medical and quasi-scientific standing who dislike birth control talk of its disastrous effects upon the nerves and general health. They babble of “nervous wrecks.” They produce no evidence of these effects, they assert that they exist and talk copiously of their own remarkable opportunities for observation. But equally authoritative witnesses of an opposite school of thought, with equally remarkable opportunities for observation, will talk of the disastrous consequences of chastity and suppression. It is a field in which most people seem to think with individual bias and a violent disregard of fact. The truth seems to be that the human constitution is remarkably adaptable in these matters, a normal individual can establish habits of self-indulgence or habits of restraint, can pass from phases of great liveliness to phases of apathy and remain a happy and healthy organism. We can build up systems of habit either way. There is no standard sexual life.

Quite apart from the varieties of temperamental type, each type is capable of living in a variety of ways and there is practically nothing in any of these vehement asseverations for or against this or that liberty or this or that restriction. Many abstinent people and many declared birth-controllers are obviously healthy and vigorous people; the way of living of one sort is just as healthy as the way of living of the other sort; there are sturdy old rakes, equally sturdy priests and other celibates, hale grandmothers of a multitude, and brisk and happy old maids. One has but to look around one at the people one meets to make all this alarmist propaganda dissolve away.

Speaking very loosely and generally I would give it as my own matured impression that amidst the strains, provocations, challenges, incessant suggestions and reminders of modern life, it conduces to calm of mind and personal pride, it is the least troublesome and easiest way of living for most people, to lead a life of normal sexual reactions reasonably safeguarded against overwhelming offspring, and that all the specific demands of nature upon the nerves and health of even the most feminine of women are to be met by bringing one or two children into the world. Nature is much more accommodating than moral and social theories. The question of physical health has indeed very little to do with these discussions. It is a pity that each side will drag it in.

But after dismissing that much of the argument there still remains a complex tangle of perplexities about marriage. It is a tangle that it may be perhaps impossible to resolve altogether. Many modern people discuss it as though it was a simple problem for the comfortable satisfaction of physical desire. But in the human being there is no such thing as unmixed physical desire; there is always in matters sexual a stir of the imagination. Thereby even the grossest sexual indulgence is lifted to a plane above gourmandize or gluttony. And also, long before one begins to think about the way in which children affect the problem, there is a vast system of reactions between men and women over and above sexuality. There is a general magic, there are elements of admiration, vague pleasure, fear and friendship long before the development of those crowding preferences that become love. Further beyond the passion of love, resting upon that as a basis, resting upon the intimacy and association it establishes, is married love, which is the deepest and tenderest relationship on earth. It is in its fullness a slow growth; perhaps it needs youth and a struggle in common for its perfect establishment, perhaps like some sorts of fruit it needs cold and storm as well as sunshine for its ripening.

In the atmosphere created by this sure, deep-rooted married love alone can one find the happy assurance, the perfect security of help and loyal sympathy in which children will grow easily and insensibly to the loyalties, the habitual serviceableness, the necessary generosities, of modern citizenship.

I believe at the bottom of the mind of such a good man as Father McMenamin in his antagonism to Judge Lindsey is an intense conviction that for most people married love is the highest good, and certainly that is the persuasion of all his more reputable allies. They think it is not only the highest personal good but the highest social good. And because they know it is a thing of slow growth, they want to protect people against hasty and fitful breaches, to tie them irrevocably, to bind their habits and interests into one indissoluble bundle, so that they may grow together in spite of themselves. They hate any thought of divorce. They distrust birth control because it seems to them to minimize fidelity. They will not trust people to find out for themselves in time how good and precious this thorough, permanent, inseparable union can be. They are afraid that Judge Lindsey’s companionate marriages will be too readily voided and that a shallow, promiscuous habit of mind will be established in young people. Judge Lindsey argues, on the contrary, that his project enables them to begin a lifelong association at the very outset of their emotional lives and that the greater danger of promiscuity and the trivialization of the sexual life lies in a delayed marriage. He thinks that the rigidities of the established system defeat its own ends. The real issue lies there.

This is not fundamentally a religious question. People are too inclined to think that the Roman Catholic Church is opposed to any dissolution of marriage or the family, as a part of its faith, but this is a complete mistake. The Roman Catholic Church, it is true, sets its face against divorce, but on the other hand it will annul a marriage with great facility and so reduce children who have imagined themselves to be legitimate to the status of bastards, a thing no sort of civil divorce has ever done. If such annulments are infrequent in the Roman Catholic community, that is not because of any doctrinal bar to them, but because the habits and organization and common sense of that community are against a ready resort to such releases. It is as unfair to accuse Roman Catholicism of distinctive rigidity here as it is to charge liberal thinkers with immoral motives. Religious prejudice is as much out of place in this discussion as medical prejudice. The real issue is one of social psychology; whether one universal binding, invariable, intolerant marriage contract does or does not conduce to the establishment in the larger number of cases of this deep, fine, full, rich, socially beneficial, child-protecting relationship of married love or whether that is a harmful delusion. Those who are with Father McMenamin are of the former opinion; those who are with Judge Lindsey, of the latter.

For my own part I must confess myself not so much on the side of Judge Lindsey as further away from Father McMenamin on the other side out beyond Judge Lindsey. I want people to have all the knowledge and freedom I can in these things as in all things. I think that compulsion defeats its own ends and that animals and human beings have an instinctive disposition to resist being forced along paths that, left to themselves, they would quite naturally follow. A vast amount of sexual misbehaviour is provoked by prohibitions and proscriptions. It does not follow that because a thing is very, very good it ought to be forced upon everybody. There are great varieties of character in the world and for many of them married love is impossible. There are many who miss a full natural development of married love and yet have a reasonable claim for respect and consideration in less complete or less enduring relationships.

People are needlessly afraid of a variety of reputable contracts and of freedom in the unions of men and women because they do not realize how natural and necessary is the habitual association of one man with one woman in the workaday world. It is a thing you can safely leave most people to discover and realize for themselves. If people were completely free to do anything they pleased in sexual matters, they would do, only more easily and happily, much the same things that we take great pains to insist they shall do and compel them to do now. As many would pair as pair now and perhaps more, and the unfortunate and the unpairable would not be made to suffer for bad luck or singularity of temperament. People would not be constrained; there would be less shame and less persecution through it all. There would be easier readjustment after mistakes, earlier mating in most cases, and a great diminution of prostitution and the quasi-criminal sexual underworld.

On the whole, I think that popular thought and will are moving steadily in the direction of rationalism, candour, and charity in sexual things and away from emotionalism, concealment, compulsion, and repression. This dispute at Denver is certainly only one of the opening incidents in a very wide and far-reaching movement for the courageous revision and modernization of marriage.

26 June, 1927.