The laws of heredity constitute the most important agency whereby the vital forces, the vigour and soundness of the physical system, are changed for better or worse.—Nathan Allen, M.D., LL.D.

The population question is the real riddle of the Sphinx, to which no political Oedipus has as yet found the answer. In view of the ravages of the terrible monster over-multiplication all other riddles sink into insignificance.—Huxley.

No human life can be maintained without food, and no healthy individual life can be maintained without good food in sufficient quantity; therefore, the relation of numbers to the actual food supply—in other words, the Population Question—stands at the threshold of our social inquiries and at the base of all social reform.

At the beginning of last century, Malthus, who knew nothing of evolution, expounded the doctrine that man tends to increase more rapidly than the means of subsistence; that population and food, like two runners of unequal swiftness chained together, advance side by side, but the pace or natural rate of increase of the former is so immensely superior to that of the latter that it is necessarily greatly checked. And the checks are of two kinds. They are either positive—that is, deaths occur from famine, accident, war or disease, and keep down the population so that the means of subsistence are just sufficient to enable the poorer classes barely to exist; or they are preventive—that is, fewer births take place than man is capable of causing.

This doctrine was a fertile germ of thought in the mind of Charles Darwin. He, while conscious to some extent of the process of evolution, was grappling with the great problems of differentiation and genesis of species. How came it that the life which is assumed to develop from low and simple to the highest and most complex forms everywhere exhibited breaks, or sudden changes, in the apparently natural order? Darwin perceived that a key to the enigma lay in the marvellous fecundity of organisms. Each group reproduced its kind in overflowing numbers, and accidental conditions destroyed individuals and groups that failed to secure sufficient food or to protect themselves from enemies. Here were factors of progress, but factors by no means admirable—a murderous slaughter of the weak, a frantic struggle for existence, culminating in violent death or slow starvation, ultimately in extinction. Nevertheless, the medal had two sides, for the race is to the swift, the battle to the strong; bread is the portion of the wise, favour the reward of skill. Should we feel surprise that in a semi-theological and metaphysical era, rather than a scientific one, Darwin formulated his great discovery in terms suggesting not a cruel, but a beneficent Nature? His law of natural selection, or survival of the fittest, established itself in many minds as a sacred principle that man could neither deny nor seek to counteract.

Now this conception, carried into the field of economics, confused the minds of men engaged in the study of facts and problems of human life and progress. Political economists had to contemplate a social strife and struggle for existence among men as fierce and relentless as that holding sway in the brute kingdom. And in this struggle society as a whole stood on the side of external nature as opposed to the mass of striving individuals. A genetic, spontaneously developed system of industry favoured a high birth-rate that kept wages low, an unscrupulous exploitation of labour in the interests of capital, a wholesale slaughter of infants, a crushing out or trampling down of the weak, and a perpetual grinding of the face of the poor, while, simultaneously, wealth was multiplying and capital becoming concentrated and easy of control by the so-called princes of industry. Conditions of life to the great mass of the people were fraught with constant misery; yet, since Darwin had demonstrated—in his Origin of Species, published in 1858—that a struggle for existence eventuates in the survival of the fittest, enlightened thinkers, with a few rare exceptions, accepted the cruel facts of industrial life without any conscious moral revolt from the system.

“Laissez-faire” was the logical outcome of Darwinian law applied to human affairs, and Darwin’s authority dominated the public mind of the period. Christianity was teaching the principle that the poor would be with us always; a poet cheerfully sang “God’s in His Heaven; All’s right with the world; All’s love and all’s law,” and political economists expounded the laws of demand and supply, of rent, of wages, of profits, of interest, etc., without one hint or surmise that man himself was bound to interfere with the action of derivative laws, to modify or even annul them.

Meanwhile an instinct of sympathy, rudimentary in primitive man, was steadily growing and strengthening during all the transitions of tribal, village-communal, feudal and national life, in the stormy militant epoch, till the moment arrived when it compelled man’s interference. Spontaneously, impulsively, individual philanthropy interposed between a suffering humanity on the one hand, and on the other external nature and a social system that were alike relentless. It supported the weak and helped the unfit to survive. It deliberately selected the half-starved, the diseased, the criminals, and enabled them to exist and propagate. Finally it forced society to make laws subversive of the policy of “laissez-faire,” thereby introducing a new order of things, irrespective of all doctrinaire principles or authoritative teaching. That new order of things is socialism, and the genesis of socialism is distinctly to be traced to the vital element in human nature—unselfish sympathy.

The rise and progress of philanthropic action carries momentous issues in various directions, both unfavourable and favourable to human welfare. It has made the law of natural selection and survival of the fittest obsolete for us as applied to man. It tends to a lowering of the level of average health and a gradual degenerating of the race through selection of the unfit, and through the power of hereditary transmission. It counteracts the positive or destructive checks to the increase of population, and thereby extends the area of general misery. Nevertheless, at the same time, it increases the strength and the solidarity of human society, and becomes a new law of life. That law may be called “Sympathetic Selection” and “Survival of the Gentle.” Darwin in 1878 acknowledged its existence. He recognized it as a law in human society superseding that of Natural Selection and Survival of the Fittest.

In 1801 the population of England and Wales was 8,892,536, or let us say about nine millions. Eighty years later it had risen to about twenty-six millions! The increase showed an accelerated rate according to the census returns. Whereas in the ten years between 1841 and 1851 the percentage of increase was 12·65, in those from 1861 to 1871 it was 13·19, and between 1871 and 1881 it was 14·34. In the United Kingdom in 1900 there has been an increase of 18 per cent. since 1880.

Now Malthus had pointed out that with conditions of life comparatively favourable, and an increase of food supply comparatively easy, population was found to double itself in twenty-five years or less. Our numbers during these eighty years had been, roughly speaking, trebled! and the increase took place under conditions not favourable but unfavourable to the bulk of the nation. Manufacturing industries had enabled us to purchase food from abroad, and consequently a larger number of children survived. Food, however, cannot always be forthcoming in greater and greater abundance from countries that need more and more of their own food supply, and which, by manufacturing for themselves, are gradually reducing their demand for our manufactured commodities.

Notwithstanding this patent fact, there are social reformers to-day who persist in ignoring the population difficulty, and there are thinkers who, basing their views on Herbert Spencer’s dictum that “man’s fertility will be checked by his individuation,” pass it over lightly. Generally speaking, however, the public conscience is now aroused, and enlightened men and women are tolerably well alive to the fundamental nature and the grave importance of the population question.

“In some parts of the United States of America,” says an able writer, “population has actually doubled itself, apart from immigration, in twenty-five years; and this in the face of the ordinary retarding influences. If such a rate of increase upon the present population of the whole globe were to prevail for only 250 years, there would be left but one square yard of standing room for each individual.”

Again: “If we grant that a scientific treatment of crops would enable food supplies to keep pace with population, and for this purpose supposing that all the land in the planet Jupiter were available for a market garden, it would not ultimately be want of food but want of room that would put a stop to the increase of the multitude.” But further, the above author—a mathematician—examines what the potentiality of increase represents on the supposition that each individual merely died the natural death of old age. “Under such favourable conditions as the absence of war, famine and disease, the race might treble its numbers in thirty years. To show the significance of the numerical law, let us imagine it to operate undisturbed 3,000 years upon the progeny of a single pair. The number of human beings finally existing would be expressed by twice the 100th power of 3. An easy computation will show that if these people were packed together, allowing six cubic feet of space for each person, they would fill up the whole solar system in every direction, and extend beyond it to a distance 430 times that of the planet Neptune. In fact, a solid sphere of human beings would be formed having a diameter of 2,400,000,000,000 miles. Such considerations lead us to realize the absolute inevitableness of Nature’s checks upon reproduction.” (Social Evolution and the Evolution of Socialism, by George Shoobridge Carr, M.A., Cantab.)

Turning now from scientific speculation to recognized authority in practical politics, let me quote from a paper read at the Registrar-General’s office on March 18, 1890, by Dr. William Ogle, Superintendent of Statistics: “The population of England and Wales is, as we all know, growing in a most formidable manner, and though persons may differ in their estimates of the time when that growth will have reached its permissible limits, no one can doubt that, if the present rate of increase be maintained, the date of that event cannot possibly be very remote.”

Premising that the rate of increase is not due to the birth-rate only, but also to a fall in the death-rate, and that voluntary philanthropy and State interference influence the latter, we pass to the consideration of conditions that affect the marriage-rate—consequently the birth-rate—in the artisan and labouring classes, composing the bulk of the nation. The Registrar-General, in his report for the year 1876, wrote as follows: “The state of trade and national industry is strikingly exhibited in the fluctuations of the marriage-rate of the last nine years.... The period of commercial distress, which began about the middle of 1866 and continued during five years ... influenced the marriage-rates of these years, which were 17·5, 16·5, 16·1, 15·9, 16·1 and 16·7 (in the 1,000) respectively. In 1872 and 1873 the working classes became excited under the rapid advance of wages and the diminution of the hours of labour, and the marriage-rates rose to 17·5 and 17·6 respectively.” In his report for 1881 the Registrar-General again accentuated this important point: “The marriage-rate reflects with much accuracy the condition of public welfare.” And further on: “The birth-rate was at its maximum in 1876, and fell uninterruptedly from that date year by year in natural accordance with the corresponding decline in the marriage-rate.” These years represented another period of commercial depression. We have here then incontrovertible proof of the national tendency. The mass of our people increase their numbers so soon as they are more comfortable, and the marriage-rate for each year may be called the pulse or indicator of the nation’s economic well-being. Its fluctuations coincide with the upward and downward movements of commercial activity.

In this connexion we have also to note that the most rapid growth of our population is taking place in the great industrial centres, the mining, manufacturing and trading districts; and the type that there prevails is necessarily affecting the British race.

By the Parliamentary return of marriages, births and deaths registered in England and Wales in the year 1881, it appeared that in different districts the percentages of marriages varied considerably. It was greater in the mining, manufacturing and trading districts than in the farming districts, and much higher in London than in the provinces. In the district comprising Hertford, Buckingham, Oxford, Bedford, Cambridge, the rate equalled twelve persons per annum for each thousand of the population. In London it was eighteen persons for each thousand, and in the divisions which comprise Yorkshire and Lancashire the rate was sixteen and seventeen persons to each thousand. As regards births, the proportions stated were somewhat similar. In London there were thirty-five births to one thousand of the population, whilst in the southeastern division there were only thirty-one; but the rate rose again to thirty-five and thirty-six in the great manufacturing districts of the Midlands and the North.

Dr. Ogle’s examination of statistics on the subject shows that this state of things has continued, in its main features, up to the present day. “Men marry,” he says, “in greater numbers when trade is brisk. The fluctuations in the marriage-rate follow the fluctuations in the amount of industrial employment.” “The rates vary very greatly in the different registration counties.” “In London the rate is invariably high. Almost all the counties in which the marriage-rate is high are counties in which the population is also high of women engaged in industrial occupations, and therefore presumably in receipt of independent wages, while all the counties in which the marriage-rate is very low are also counties in which but a very small population of the women are industrially occupied.” The general drift of the figures leads to the conclusion that early marriage is most common where there is the largest amount of employment for women.

The age at which marriage takes place is examined by Dr. Ogle as “a subject of scarcely less importance than the rate in its bearing upon the growth of the population.” And the point is of special interest in view of the fact that delayed marriage was valued by Malthus as a desirable preventive check. Dr. Ogle finds that the lowest average age at marriage for both bachelors and spinsters, viz., 25·6 and 24·2 respectively, was in 1873, the year in which the marriage-rate was highest; and from that date to the present time the ages have gone up gradually but progressively in harmony with the general decline in the marriage-rate. In 1888 the average age of bachelors at marriage was 26·3 years, and of spinsters was 24·7.

Observe of late years there has been a slight decline of the marriage-rate and a certain retardation of marriage, consequently the birth-rate has fallen, but says Dr. Ogle, “so also has the death-rate, and almost in equal amount; so that the balance between the two, or natural increment of the population, has practically scarcely changed. We may,” he observes, “dismiss altogether the notion that any adequate check to the increase of population is hereafter to be found in retardation of marriage. Such retardation may defer the day when a stationary population will be necessary, but, when that day has come, will be insufficient to prevent further growth. If a stationary population is to be obtained by simple diminution of the marriage-rate, that rate would have to be reduced 45 per cent. below the lowest point it has ever yet reached. In short, almost one-half of those who marry would have to remain permanently celibate. This seems as hopeless a remedy as the retardation.” He makes clearer still this important matter: “If one-quarter of the women who now marry were to remain permanently celibate, and the remaining three-quarters were to retard their marriages for five years, the birth-rate would be reduced to the level of the present death-rate. It is manifest that if the growth of population is hereafter to be arrested ... by increase of permanent celibacy, or by retardation of marriage, these remedies will have to be applied on a scale so enormously in excess of any experience as to amount to a social revolution.”

What, then, is the present position?

Population tends to increase faster than actual subsistence. Obviously it cannot outrun the supply of food because people cannot live upon nothing. There ensues therefore a state of chronic starvation among the most helpless, and premature deaths keep population reduced to the means of subsistence.

Let us glance at facts concerning London alone. London now contains over 4,300,000 persons. Three hundred thousand of these earn less than 18s. per week per family, and live in a chronic state of want. One person in every five will die in the workhouse, hospital, or lunatic asylum. Moreover, the percentage is increasing. Considering that comparatively few of the deaths are those of children, it is probable that one of every four London adults will be driven into these refuges to die.

One in every eleven of the whole population is a pauper. One in every five of persons over 65 is a pauper. The appalling statistics of the pauperism of the aged are carefully concealed in all official returns. In 1885 Canon Blackley found that 42·7 per cent. of deaths of persons over 60 in twenty-five rural parishes were those of paupers. Very many children in the Board Schools go to school without sufficient food unless supplied gratuitously. Over 30,000 persons in London have no home but the fourpenny “doss-house” or the causal ward. (Fabian Tracts, Nos. 10 and 17.)

The death-rate of children in the poorest districts of the East End of London is three times as great as among the rich at the West End. In barbarous ages the death-rate was, as far as we can learn, far higher than now, and even now the death-rate of children in Russia is extremely high.

We have little cause to rejoice in the absence of famine, pestilence and war so long as the lowering of the death-rate—by sanitation, the hospital system and the outcome generally of sympathetic feeling—increases the proportion of human beings in a state of chronic want, and produces a gradual enfeeblement and deterioration of the human race. Yet it is inconceivable that rationalized man could withhold his efforts to reduce the death-rate in the future because of the fatal effects of his philanthropic action in the past.

Darwin acknowledged this dilemma. In the year 1878 he somewhat sadly wrote: “The evils that would follow by checking benevolence and sympathy in not fostering the weak and diseased would be greater than by allowing them to survive and procreate.” Ten years later Professor Huxley wrote: “So long as unlimited multiplication goes on, no social organization which has ever been devised, no fiddle-faddling with the distribution of wealth, will deliver society from the tendency to be destroyed by the reproduction within itself in its intensest form of that struggle for existence, the limitation of which is the object of society.” (Nineteenth Century, February, 1888.)

Further than this he did not go; Huxley, like Darwin, brings us up to the dilemma and leaves us there. Not such, however, is the position of all scientific men in the present day. “We stand on the threshold of a new departure in social evolution,” says the author already quoted, “a new and potent factor in the process is about to make itself felt. This factor is man’s intellect.... The intelligence of man will act intelligently; population will not be subjected to mere haphazard restriction; it will be regulated with a wise adaptation of means to an end.” (Social Evolution and the Evolution of Socialism, G. S. Carr, pp. 65, 66.) Man’s intelligence already perceives the right policy to pursue. It is to lower the birth-rate, to limit births to a proportion conformable with the food supply; in other words, to create a painless, instead of a painful, equalization of births and deaths.

Is there any other means of escape from the existent dilemma? I answer, there is none. Emigration has sometimes been regarded as an efficient check to over-population, and Dr. Ogle allows that “hitherto some of the excess of births over deaths has been met by emigration, or rather by excess of emigration over immigration; but never on such a scale as to free the country from more than one-twentieth part of its redundant growth.” Moreover, this minimum of good is counterbalanced by evil, for emigration “carries off the more vigorous and enterprising of our working men to the necessary deterioration of the residue left at home.” And further: “The facilities for successful emigration are yearly diminishing; the time must inevitably come—sooner or later—when this means of reducing our population will altogether fail us.”

In view of the obvious tendency of better conditions—when brought about—to create a reduction of the death-rate and an acceleration of the birth-rate, eventuating in an increase of general misery, neither Malthus, Darwin, Huxley, nor any other great teacher of the past, has given us applicable and available counsel. There only remains for us now to consider Herbert Spencer’s opinion regarding this all-important matter. He is credited with the demonstration of a law of population wider than the laws discerned by Malthus and Darwin. The law is this: “Other things equal, multiplication and individuation vary inversely, i.e. the rate of reproduction of all living things becomes lowered as the development is raised, and conversely.” (Lecture on “Claims of Labour,” Edin., 1886, Patrick Geddes.)

We have to do with this so-called law in respect only of its bearing on practical action. The corollary deduced from it is: Individuate, educate and refine your masses, for the rate of increase will fall as organisms rise in the scale of culture.

Now what are our prospects of any rapid advance in individuation (development and culture) among the seething masses of a people who are helpless and frightfully overcrowded by the action of the very law which individuation is to counteract? In how long a period will the process be likely to take effect? It is on the answer to these questions that the worth of the principle as a law of practical guidance for humanity must depend.

Accepting it as a fact that in the families of our higher classes the average number is distinctly smaller than in the families of our lower classes, let us look for a moment at some of the causes creating this difference. First, in the higher classes men may have mistresses whose children are unacknowledged; and frequently they form the marriage tie with heiresses whose hereditary tendency is necessarily—as expounded by Francis Galton—towards sterility. Second, women of the higher classes are often delicate. They cannot support the strain of frequent maternity. Is this a condition that, in an advancing civilization, will persist? By no means. The ideal of womanhood, as of manhood, points to strength, not weakness—“a combination of brain power and skill with bodily health and vigour. Many intellectual men are physically robust and capable in a polygamous state of patriarchal propagation.” (Over-population, John M. Robertson.) And it is impossible to doubt that a rational education, embracing free play to activities hitherto denied to the sex, and promoting physical development, will lift women to a superior level of health and of physiological capacity. Third, the higher classes avail themselves to some extent of neo-Malthusian preventive checks, whereas the mass of the people are either ignorant of them or opposed to their use. Fourth, enforced celibacy in the case of a large proportion of women of the cultured classes is a cause of relatively fewer numbers. Obviously it is from the “warrens of the poor” that prolific life persistently springs. There we have the highest rate of genesis; and as the refined restrain propagation and limit their numbers, the poor enter the breach and fill up the ranks from their own inferior stock. Now, mark the result. The individuating process is checked, and ultimately fails, through the crowding out of the individuated. What occurs, naturally, inevitably, by the action of the process is a gradual subsidence, finally a limiting of the individuating factor, the very social force to which Herbert Spencer directs attention! Surely it suffices to point out “that no theory of the ultimate effects of mere refinement on rate of increase can give us help while nine-tenths of the human race are not refined, and not visibly in the way of becoming so.” (Over-population, John M. Robertson.)

We are compelled to dismiss Herbert Spencer’s “law of population” as irrelevant to the situation, and to declare that he has no more solved the riddle of the Sphinx than have Malthus, Darwin and Huxley.

The population problem, as it faces us to-day, is serious beyond all comparison. It is impossible to over-estimate the importance of finding its true solution. But while thousands of men and women are ready now to admit the seriousness, nowhere as yet has a movement appeared of united action applicable and adequate to the exigency.

How glorious will be the awakening when man’s desires will be honoured, his passions utilized, his labour exalted, whilst life is loved, and ever and ever creates love afresh.—Zola.

The Law of Population derives its force from an innate, powerful instinct or passion in man, the unguarded exercise of which brings about reproduction of the species. The thing therefore of greatest importance to general well-being is the discovery of means whereby to prevent this imperious instinct dominating and controlling the reproductive conditions—which imperatively need to be governed by reason and moral sense.

The sexual instinct, irresponsibly exercised, keeps population up to the margin of the means of subsistence—whatever that may be at the time—perpetuates disease, constitutional weakness and inherited taint, and frustrates the community’s best efforts to make life easier and happier to all.

My immediate purpose is to show that the prevention of all this evil is possible, for rational man may slowly and surely guide the above vital instinct into a new course—a course that will lead to the redemption of his physical nature, the purifying and elevating of his intellectual and emotional nature, and the direct creation of social virtue and happiness.

I must first point out the obstacles standing in the way of this fundamental far-reaching readjustment. There is a fatal ignorance of the true nature of the instinct in question, there is an obstinate prejudice that prevents frank discussion of the subject, there is Puritan or ascetic feeling that shuns pleasure as evil, and there is an optimistic fatalism which, basing itself on Darwinian law—already superseded by man’s interference—persists in the laissez-faire policy, however suicidal.

Sexual relations form the background of human life and are the primary sources of our finest emotions. Therefore the instinct that prompts to sex-union ought to hold a supremely honourable place in public estimation, and be carefully guarded from reproach and every hurtful or degrading condition. This great factor in physical and emotional life stands, at present, in disgrace. It is ignominiously repressed, it produces heart-rending misery and unmitigated evil. Publicly and in current literature, either it is ignored (hypocritically) or misjudged and condemned; and all the time privately it is intensely felt; and in every direction throughout society its licentious, furtive indulgence swirls into the vicious circles of destruction, the broken hearts and lives of women, the fallen dignity and besmirched consciences of men.

If we look at the matter of sexual intercourse calmly and in the light of pure reason alone, we must perceive that its intrinsic qualities are good, not evil. It creates happiness in the giving and receiving of pleasure, and the physiological exaltation connected with pleasure promotes individual health and buoyancy. To quote Herbert Spencer: “Pleasure increases vitality and raises the tide of life.” If man “eats and drinks immoderately,” said W. R. Greg, “nature punishes him with dyspepsia and disease; but nature never forbids him to eat when he is hungry and to drink when he is thirsty, provided he does so with discretion. Indeed, she punishes him equally if he abstains, as if he exceeds.” Mr. Greg further showed that the action of nature is precisely similar in respect of the sexual function. If man indulges to excess, he is punished by premature exhaustion, with appropriate maladies, not otherwise however. On the contrary, enforced and total abstinence is punished often, if not habitually, by “nervous disturbance and suffering and by functional disorder.” (Enigmas of Life, Chapter II.) Observe also the sexual desire “is the especial one of all our animal wants which is redeemed from animalism by being blended with our strongest and least selfish affections; which is ennobled by its associations in a way in which the appetites of eating and drinking and sleeping can never be ennobled in a degree to which the pleasures of the eye and ear can be ennobled only by assiduous and lofty culture.” (Enigmas of Life. W. R. Greg, p. 71.) We have no fastidious recoil from eating and drinking because these are merely animal functions. We take pains to improve our methods of preparing food, and we embellish our repasts with super-sensual surroundings in order to elevate the nutritive functions and free them from grossness or brutality. The fundamentally animal nature of sexual passion does not imply brutality, it is sociable to a far greater degree than eating or drinking, and this element of sociality purifies and ennobles, causing the function to become the basis of tender unselfish love. In its physiological aspect we may rest assured that the average normal human being has as little inherent tendency to sexual excess as to gluttony or drunkenness.

But apart from the question of excess, an attitude of mind towards the whole subject is common which must be condemned. This attitude consists of an element of shame, misnamed delicacy, and a sense of moral superiority. Women chiefly cherish the feeling, but men pay homage to it, with the result that in no friendly communion of men and women does it seem compatible with good taste to discuss questions of sex.

All vulgar allusions to love, all flippant talk on the subject of sex are distinctly contrary to good taste, they dishonour human nature, but I submit that it is an outrage on common sense, and an immoral action, when students of the Population—or any other grave social question—allow this spurious delicacy to interfere with their facing the whole facts of life, or to bias judgment in reasoning from the facts.

On the publication of my previous volume, Scientific Meliorism and the Evolution of Happiness, in 1885, a woman of superior intellect and attainments reviewed the book. One passage in her criticism stands thus: “A certain instinct that in such matters the instinct of reprobation is as healthy as it is superficially unreasonable, may make one sicken at the suggestions of neo-Malthusianism.” (The Academy of May 15th, 1886.) Such squeamishness is no indication of health or good taste. Its unreasonableness condemns it, and the source from which it springs is prejudice induced through specific conditions. The reviewer appears to suspect as much, for, later she remarks: “One cannot put down the book without a greatly increased sense of the supreme necessity of criticizing all established theories and institutions and of the supreme duty of refraining from precipitate action.” This is a sentiment one can endorse, and I appeal to all my readers, especially to women, to refrain from forming any judgment on any part of this difficult, all-important problem, until they have mastered the subject in all its aspects. To pursue the opposite course is to act irrationally and immorally. It causes to spring up in other minds the prejudice which distorts and disguises truth.

In nutritive functions, all repulsive animalism becomes overborne, as human nature refines and civilizes, and in a profounder sense the brutality of sex-passion vanishes through the growth of a higher love, which has for its dominant quality—not eagerness for possession—but unselfish tenderness. This tenderness, permeating the individual and extending its benign influence into society, issues in the gentle manners and virtuous actions that seem to spring directly from a universal principle of sympathy and love.

The scientific exposition of the phenomena has long been before the public. G. H. Lewes, in his Problems of Life and Mind, demonstrated that whilst the individual functions of man (alimentation being one of these) arise in relation to the cosmos, his general functions, including sex-appetite, arise in relation to the social medium, and “animal impulses become blended with human emotions,” until “in process of evolution, starting from the merely animal appetite of sexuality, we arrive at the purest and most far-reaching tenderness.” The social instincts, which he calls analogues of the individual instincts, tend more and more to make “sociality dominate animality and thus subordinate personality to humanity.” (Problems of Life and Mind, vol. 1, p. 159.)

It is only recently that the full significance of these facts has begun to influence general thought and to create a revolt against the unscientific attitude of mind that covers the sexual instinct with contumely and hypocritical disdain. There dawns in consequence a new light upon the afflicting problem of our social impurity. It is seen that the horrible struggle for existence which makes grief and pain, exhausting mental effort and physical restraint, enter so largely into the lot of unhappy man, is the paramount evil to cast out. “The wonderful cycles of normal life are for ever clean and pure.” (The New Spirit, Havelock Ellis.) And with far more of sex-union—especially for the young—and all the tender social joys that emanate from that union, and far more of ease and happiness in life, there becomes possible a great increase of goodness.^[2]

The late James Hinton spoke truly of the matter when he said: “Sensuous pleasure will be to the moral life of the future as sense-impressions are to the knowledge of the present, and with the same history. It will not be a thing put aside as evil or degrading or misleading, but recognized as the very basis and means of the life, and used with enhancements and multiplied powers undreamt of by us.” And again, “This is what sets the soul on fire—the union of goodness and pleasure. It is a new possibility, a hope we never saw before, a means whereby all may be brought into goodness.” (The Law Breaker, pp. 275, 236.) The key to the position, he points out, is the taking of pleasure unselfishly and with complete regard to the happiness of others.

The region of sex is indeed to this day unreclaimed, but, as Mr. Ellis asks: “Why should the sweetening breath of science be guarded from this spot? Our attitude towards this part of life affects profoundly our attitude towards life altogether.” (The New Spirit, pp. 127, 125). Which of us has not felt the truth of that deep saying of Thoreau’s that “for him to whom sex is impure there are no flowers in nature.”

It is precisely here that development in the sense of purity gives a sure hope of moral regeneration. And very remarkable is it that as in the old days when prophetic poetry took the lead in all religious reforms so now we have art in the van of social reform boldly confronting the great enemies of progress—ignorance, pride, prejudice and malicious insinuation. When Ibsen’s “Ghosts” was first put upon the stage of a London theatre, a dramatic critic delivered himself thus: “It is a dream of revolt—the revolt of the ‘joy of life’ against the gloom of hidebound, conventional morality, the revolt of the natural man and woman, the revolt of the individual against the oppression of social prejudice. The joy of life, the joy of life—it rings like a clarion through the play.” (Star of March 14th, 1891.) The fine women of Ibsen’s creation speak out upon questions of sex with a pure, earnest candour that breathes a new morality, and this moral element is one of the central features in Whitman’s attitude towards sex. For the lover, there is nothing in the loved one impure or unclean; a breath of passion has passed over, and all things are sweet. For most of us this influence spreads no farther, for the man of strong moral instinct it covers all human things in infinitely widening circles; his heart goes out to every creature that shares the loved one’s delicious humanity, henceforth there is nothing human that he cannot touch with reverence and love. Leaves of Grass is penetrated by this moral element. (The New Spirit, Havelock Ellis, p. 123.)

Walt Whitman himself says: “Difficult as it will be, it has become, in my opinion, imperative to achieve a shifted attitude from superior men and women towards the thought and fact of sexuality as an element in character, personality, the emotions, and a theme in literature.” (How I made a Book. An Essay by Walt Whitman.)

The principles underlying the new morality may be thus stated: Goodness does not consist in starving or denying any normal animal appetite, therefore chastity in the sense of total abstinence is essentially immoral. Life is not so prodigal of joys that man can wisely forego any source of innocent happiness, hence asceticism has no place in a rational theory and code of morals. The course for rational man to adopt in reference to sexual appetite is duly to satisfy and regulate it; and by removing every loathsome condition that superinduces degradation, to compel it to raise the tide of life in promoting individual comfort and general virtue.

To the reader who grasps the population problem it may seem that this moral code would place society on the horns of a painful dilemma, for while morality is said to require a closer union between the sexes than has hitherto prevailed, propagation—which is the actual result of that union—must be limited to an extent hitherto unknown, and by many people deemed impossible of attainment. By its patient investigations of nature, however, science here comes to the rescue of those whose standpoint in viewing the sexual problem is one of ardent sympathy with the essential needs and the moral aspirations of man in a social position truly pathetic.

Physiology has revealed that sexual organs are naturally divided into amative and reproductive organs, each class functionally distinct from the other. Amative organs relate primarily to sexual union, while reproductive organs relate primarily to impregnation and gestation. The process of reproduction may take place without use of the amative organs by simply bringing spermatozoa to ova (this has been done), and on the other hand the amative organs can be exercised without effecting reproduction. Sexual intercourse and procreation are not vitally related, as they are ordinarily assumed to be.

Moreover, the instincts connected with sexual union and with offspring are separate and distinct. In popular, confused thought, a reproductive instinct is attributed to animals and man. In reality, no direct instinct to reproduce the species exists. Animals unite sexually from an instinct directed to a pleasurable exercise of function; and although, in man, the relation has been made complex by his knowledge of the facts of reproduction and of social life, the sexual instinct is connected solely with pleasure and social feeling—not with reproduction. On the other hand, instincts associated with the presence and nurture of the young are not sexual or related to sexual passion. Therefore any doctrine requiring man’s exercise of the sexual function to be restricted to the end of reproduction is without justification in nature and directly conflicts with the facts of life.

The sexual act, in the natural order of things, is only occasionally in accidental relation to the reproductive process, for with married people in a thousand acts only a dozen may be reproductive. If social morality then requires the satisfaction of normal sexual feeling—and I think I have shown this to be the case—the desideratum is to prevent at will instead of leaving to accident the above occasional relation, and make the separation between amative and reproductive conditions as complete as their functional separation.

An American writer has well said: “If there is one social phenomenon which human ingenuity ought to bring completely under the control of the will, it is the phenomenon of procreation.” “Just as everyone is his own judge of how much he shall eat and drink, of what commodities he wants to render life enjoyable, so everyone should be his own judge of how large a family he desires, and should have power in the same degree to leave off when the requisite number is reached.” (Lester F. Ward. Dynamic Sociology, vol. 2, p. 465.) The Bible Communists of Oneida Creek practised voluntary control over the propagative function during thirty years with marked success. The number of births was regulated in accordance with the wishes of the community, and such careful attention was paid to the laws of heredity that no children of defective organisms or unsound constitutions were born. Were man universally intelligent and morally self-controlled, the knowledge of physiological facts and of invention applied to those facts would suffice to create general spontaneous limitation of the birth-rate and hygienic propagation of species. But one has only to think of the battered humanity in the back slums of every great city—the physical, mental and moral weaklings of our degraded populace—to realize that it is fantastic folly to expect individual intelligence under vicious and utterly depressing conditions, to counteract habit and save society from a rising tide of overwhelming numbers, the product of random pregnancy and sportive chance.

It cannot be a solution nor even a relief to the population difficulty that the intelligent—comparatively few—should limit their families so long as the masses refuse or fail to limit theirs. When society, becoming fully alive to the imminent danger of a too rapid birth-rate solves the population and social problems combined—in the only way possible—it will facilitate and promote the use of scientific checks to conception, and, if necessary, exact their adoption by some legislative device. (See Social Control of the Birth-rate, by G. A. Gaskell.)

By the aid of these personal means of avoiding or preventing conception the desired complete separation of amative and reproductive conditions is effected. Love is set free to rule in its own domain, and reason controls procreation to the infinite benefit of all future generations. In an article by Mr. J. Holt Schooling in the Contemporary Review for February, 1902, entitled “The Natural Increase of Three Populations,” it is shown how widely in the United Kingdom the use of preventive checks has spread within the last twenty years. The writer says in comparing the birth-rates of Germany, England and France since 1880: “There has been a fall in the birth-rate during each period in each country. But England’s fall has been larger than all; larger than the fall in the French birth-rate. During 1880–1884 there were 323 births per year per 10,000 of our population; during 1895–1899 there were only 291 births per year per 10,000 of population—a yearly fall of 32 births per 10,000 of population. France’s fall was 28 births and Germany’s fall was only 10 births, although Germany’s birth-rate was higher throughout than that of England or of France.” This is very satisfactory, and in regard to the strength of a nation that depends upon the adults, and there are more adults in a population where the children are fewer. The death-rate in England during the last twenty years has been always the lowest of the three countries.

At the present moment, society has no scientific sex-philosophy whatever. It affects to be governed by Puritanism—a vague doctrine belonging to the past history of the race and not in connexion with any ethical code directed to the development of goodness through a careful regard to the happiness of man and the satisfaction of his normal human nature. Puritanism, whether affected or real, spreads abroad hypocrisy, deceit, lying; it tends to licentiousness in men and the utter defilement of women, to social disorder and decay. Above all, it frustrates the development of that higher love, which, having animalism allied, but subordinate, fills the mind with exquisite emotion and creates unselfish delights.

Many years ago Miss Martineau wrote: “A thing to be carefully remembered is that asceticism and licentiousness universally co-exist. All experience proves this, and every principle of human nature might prophesy the proof. Passions and emotions cannot be extinguished by general rules.” (How to observe Morals and Manners, p. 169.) Puritanism ignores the sexual needs of the young. In a scientific age man is bound to recognize physiological reasons for early satisfaction of the sexual appetite and physiological reasons for delayed parentage.

Of the former, I have here to say that an early moderate stimulation of the female sexual organs (after puberty is reached) tends, by the law of exercise promoting development of structure, to make parturition in mature life easy and safe; and that the healthy functional and emotional life of love and gratified passion is the best preventive of hysteria, chlorosis, love melancholy, and other unhappy ailments to which our young women are cruelly and barbarously exposed, and which, I do not hesitate to say, make them in many cases feel their youth to be an almost insufferable martyrdom.

There are no less serious sexual evils which overtake masculine youth, if continent, namely, persistent and miserable cravings, abnormally directed instinct, spermatorrhoea, self-abuse; and these are usually hidden from sight and knowledge in consequence of a feeling that, in sexual matters, adults have no sympathy with the young.

In Lecky’s History of European Morals, vol. 2, p. 301, prostitution is thus referred to:—“However persistently society may ignore this form of vice, it exists, nevertheless, and on the most gigantic scale, and an evil rarely assumes such inveterate and perverting forms as when it is shrouded in obscurity and veiled by a hypocritical appearance of unconsciousness. The existence in England of unhappy women, sunk in the very lowest depths of vice and misery ... shows what an appalling amount of moral evil is festering uncontrolled, undiscussed and unalleviated under the fair surface of decorous society.” The number of London prostitutes was estimated at 80,000 in the year 1870. Since then, it has probably increased. In Paris, according to Von Dettingen, the actual number at that period was upwards of 60,000; in Berlin, 25,000 to 30,000. In Hamburg, in 1860, every ninth woman above the age of 15 was a prostitute, and in Leipzig the women depending principally or exclusively on prostitution was estimated at 2,000. This field of prostitution encloses whole armies of women finding there their only means of earning a miserable livelihood and a corresponding number of victims claimed by death and disease. (Woman in the Past, Present and Future. August Bebel, pp. 100–101.)

The prostitute, in her thousands; the married drudge, weary of child-bearing; the desolate old maid; these are all alike victims to social oppression. They are compelled to abstain from, or compelled to engage in, a specific function which is only natural, pleasurable, healthful and virtuous in the absence of all tyranny. Love to be real must be prompted by personal desire, and free to express itself in unhurtful conditions: I mean conditions that involve individual liberty, social respect and human dignity. The facts of prostitution alone would amply suffice to put Puritanism out of court in social reform. As a result of conduct, it has no control over vicious propensities, whilst it restrains tormentingly impulses that are normal and virtuous, that need only fitting conditions of healthful freedom.

Discarding asceticism and conventional purism as alike immoral, the social reforms that are based on a knowledge of human nature and a knowledge of the possibilities allied with conscious evolution, will bring all the institutions of our social life into accordance with the needs of the individual; and one essential condition of happy life is sexual love, with such union of the sexes as conforms to the general or collective interests.

In view of the law of population, and the fact that science has made plain how practically to separate the amative from the reproductive conditions of physical union, the love of the sexes can harmonize with the highest interests of our collective social life, and eugenics, not sexual love, may become paramount in generation.

What social morality requires is that the forces of philoprogenitiveness and a public conscience combined should dominate the function of reproduction, while love is left free from coercive control in the sphere of individual life.