The first step towards the reduction of disease is beginning at the beginning to provide for the health of the unborn.—Dr. Richardson.
The whole theory concerning heredity and its marvellous influence for good or evil is a nauseous draught for mankind to swallow. No wonder we revolt instinctively from a doctrine that charges tender parents with transmitting an evil heritage to the offspring they passionately love. “Although many important books draw attention to the facts, as far as they are ascertained, these momentous facts have as yet made no impression on the general mind.” (Scientific Meliorism and the Evolution of Happiness, p. 329.) This statement is no longer true. It was written in 1884, and since then immense strides have been made in the realization of the action of heredity. The subject is frequently and persistently brought forward now, and urged upon the attention of the public. Zola’s mère idée is not found only in French fiction, the new Russian school of fiction is permeated by it; and even in England some novelists, following in the footsteps of George Eliot, are assuming a scientific attitude towards life, and the facts of heredity are not ignored.
Moreover, in science and in all high-class criticism of life the doctrine of heredity is directly taught.
Apart from purely literary work, the examination of criminal statistics as a whole, and the practical observations of physicians, doctors, dentists, schoolmasters, poor-guardians, systematized and made public at congresses and stored in scientific handbooks so inexpensive as to be well within reach of all students—these, I say, combine to impress upon the general mind the conviction that racial degeneracy is a palpable fact; and that inheritance is prime factor in the degenerating process. And recently indeed a suspicion of danger in over-estimating this factor has been publicly expressed. Whereas formerly, it is said, a child was supposed to be born with a mind like a clean sheet of paper, on whose fair surface we might write what we chose, opinion points in the present day to an opposite extreme, viz., this, that the hereditary tendencies born with the child determine its future career, and that education cannot modify this destiny in any essential respect. Now, to disallow the importance of education as also a prime factor in progress is an error of judgment; but so long as the human race continues scourged by sickness, martyred by pain, demoralized by disease and innate debility, and decimated by premature death, it is not possible for thinkers to over-estimate the profound significance for weal or woe of this question of heredity.
Where individual life is not menaced by poverty or destitution, disease is the bane of existence, the barrier to physical comfort and to both mental and moral advance. Alas! how few of us have any permanent possession of sound health. In spite of medical science, sanitary protection, progress made during the last hundred years in knowledge of pathological conditions, and vast resources now at our command for subduing and mitigating every form of physical evil, disease dogs our footsteps from infancy to maturity and onwards to the grave. We have the young attacked by consumption, the middle-aged suffering from failing health, the aged struck by paralysis or bowed down by rheumatism; and everywhere we meet husbands and wives permanently saddened by the loss of the chosen companion of their life, and mothers whose light-hearted buoyancy died out for ever when the babe, prized beyond all treasure, was snatched from their arms to be laid in our appallingly numerous children’s graves.
In order to form an approximately correct conception of disease, we must glance for a moment at the conditions of health. Life in all its forms, physical or mental, morbid or healthy, is in close relation to the individual organism and external forces. Health, as the consequence and evidence of a successful adaptation to the conditions of existence, implies the preservation, well-being and development of the organism; while disease marks a failure in organic adaptation to external conditions, and leads to disorder, decay and death.
If we could perceive all the conditions, outward and inward, and take them into account, a distinct line of causation would become apparent. We should find disease no more an accident than the storm that breaks upon the seaboard or the volcanic flames that burst from the mountain top. The extreme complexity and delicacy of biological phenomena precludes a wide grasp of conditions in individual cases, but scientific investigation has established the point that of the antecedents to disease the largest proportion is some heritage of weakness transmitted from parents—some disabilities for healthy life resulting from a bad descent.
When, for instance, mental anxiety produced by adverse circumstances is said to have made a man mad, there is implied some inherent infirmity of nervous element which has co-operated. “Were the nervous system in a state of perfect soundness and in possession of that reserve power which it then has of adapting itself, within certain limits, to the varying external conditions, it is probable,” says Maudsley, “that the most unfavourable circumstances would not disturb permanently the relation and initiate mental disease. But when unfavourable action from without conspires with an infirmity of nature within, then the conditions of disorder are established and a discord or madness is produced.” (The Physiology and Pathology of the Mind, p. 199.)
Thus although outward circumstances often decide the character of a disease, inherited infirmity is its primary cause. A being liable to madness, if subjected to anxiety, may, under different conditions, acquire not madness but consumption. A child may fall a victim to the special ailment from which one or both parents suffered; but equally it is possible that disease in him may assume a totally different form. All that can be affirmed with certainty is this: of diseased parents the offspring invariably inherit a constitution liable to “some kind of morbid degeneration, or a constitution destitute of that reserve power necessary to meet the trying occasions of life!”
The trying occasions of life have multiplied with every new complexity in social structure; and there has been no corresponding increase of constitutional strength; but, on the contrary, a growing feebleness of physique and instability of nerve-function. “Our children in these times,” remarks Dr. Richardson, “are our reproach. Where is there a healthy child? You may put before me a child showing to the unskilled mind no trace of disease.... It is sure to have some inherited failure. We are as yet unacquainted with all the phenomena of disease that pass in the hereditary line.... We admit, as proved, scrofula or struma, cancer, consumption, epilepsy, rheumatism, gout. It would be wrong to limit the hereditary proclivities of disease to this list. The further my own observations extend, the stronger is the impression made on my mind that the majority of the phenomena of disease have hereditariness of character.” (Diseases of Modern Life, p. 38.) Sir James Paget and Sir William Jenner gave evidence of a similar kind before a Committee of the House of Lords in 1882. From the former eminent physician’s speech I may quote one passage: “We now know that certain diseases of the lungs, liver and spleen are all of syphilitic origin, and the mortality from syphilis in its later forms is every year found to be larger and larger, by its being found to be the source of a number of diseases which previously were referred to other origins.” (The Times Report, August 11th, 1882.)
In August Bebel’s work on Woman, her Position in the Past, Present and Future, this passage occurs: “With regard to the decimating effects of venereal disease, we will only mention that in England between 1857 and 1865 the authenticated cases which ended fatally amounted to over 12,000, among which no fewer than 69 per cent. were children under twelve months, the victims of parental infection.” (p. 101.)
Of the original source from which syphilis sprang, of its implication in the sex problem, and of the ultimate eradication of its virus—to be attained only by the true solution of the sex problem—we cannot here speak; the point under immediate consideration is the fact that the civilized races of mankind persist in propagating and perpetuating disease. They unscrupulously bring into the world individual organisms that are pre-destined to failure because not endowed with the potential qualities indispensable to complete and successful life.
In America the same conditions are noted and publicly referred to. Mr. Nathan Allen, M.D., before a medical society at Massachusetts, reported: “A gradual change is taking place in the organization of our New England people—a change which has occurred principally within the last two or three generations. The nervous temperament with all its advantages and disadvantages is becoming too predominant for other parts of the body. The frame-work of the body generally is not so large ... the countenance is paler, the features are more pointed and not so expressive of health. We have a larger class of diseases arising from general debility ... we have more disease of the brain and nervous system, more sudden deaths from apoplexy, paralysis, and also diseases of the heart. In sound healthy stock we have in a far higher degree the recuperative powers of nature; while the original constitution is feeble, diseases of almost every kind become complicated, and their treatment more difficult as well as doubtful in result.”
Laws of inheritance affect the moral as well as the physical and mental health of the nation. Their action is fatally legible in the public records of crime. Not that many criminals inherit the actual attributes of crime—brutality, cruelty, malignity, propensity to abnormal sexual practices—these develop through the interaction of external with internal forces—but the ordinary criminal is born deficient in the elemental qualities necessary to the establishment of the average moral nature.
From observations carried on in English prisons, it appears that in these days of careful school-board education 25 per cent. of prisoners can neither read nor write, and a certain number are quite incapable of receiving and benefiting by school instruction. “The memory and reasoning powers are so utterly feeble that attempts to school them is a waste of time.” (Crime and its Causes, William Douglas Morrison, of H.M. Prison, Wandsworth, p. 195.) Intellectually, criminals are “unquestionably less gifted than the rest of the community”; emotionally they “have the family sentiment only feebly developed,” and morally the will is “morbidly variable.” A prisoner may be animated by good resolutions, anxious to do what is right, often possessing a sense of moral responsibility, yet may plunge again and again into crime from the absence of a sustained power of volition. “Persons afflicted in this way are generally convicted for crimes of violence, such as assault, manslaughter, murder. They experience real sentiments of remorse, but neither remorse nor penitence enables them to grapple with their evil star. The will is stricken with disease, and the man is dashed hither and thither a helpless wreck on the sea of life.”
The harmony of the social organism depends upon congruity of thought and feeling in its members and upon action made promptly conformable through exercise of the power of control centred in the inner part or spiritual nature of man.
A criminal is an unsocial man, an undeveloped being, one, generally speaking, whose pregenital stock was below par, and failed in the conservation, development and transmission of a physical, mental and moral capacity equalling that of the average of his race. The physical debility or inherited tendency to nerve weakness—so universal in the present day—has clearly a causal relation with the increase of crime deplored by the principal authorities on the subject in Europe and America.
In the United States we are told by Mr. D. A. Wells and by Mr. Howard Wines, an eminent specialist in criminal matters, that crime is steadily increasing at a faster rate than in due proportion to the increase of population. Nearly all the chief statisticians abroad tell the same tale. Dr. Mischler, of Vienna, and Professor Von Liszt, of Marburg, draw a deplorable picture of the increase of crime in Germany. In France, the criminal problem is as formidable and perplexing as in Germany. M. Henri Joli estimates that crime has increased 133 per cent. within the last half century, and is steadily rising. Taking Victoria as a typical Australasian colony, we find that even in the antipodes, which are not vexed to the same extent as Europe with social and economic difficulties, crime is persistently raising its head ... it is a more menacing danger among the Victorian Colonists than it is at home. (Crime and its Causes, W. D. Morrison. Published in 1891, pp. 12 and 13.)
While physical degeneracy creates crime, a non-moral life on the other hand causes further physical deterioration. The pursuit of wealth for purely personal ends is pre-eminently anti-social. Breadth of thought and social feeling grow impossible to the man whose life is devoted to the business of amassing riches; and Dr. Henry Maudsley gives it as his conviction, based upon wide observation of family life, that such men are extremely unlikely to beget healthy children. In cases where the father has toiled upwards from poverty to vast wealth, “I have witnessed the results,” he says, “in a degeneracy mental and physical of his offspring which has sometimes gone as far as extinction of the family in the third or fourth generation. I cannot but think after what I have seen that the extreme passion for getting rich does predispose to mental degeneration in the offspring, either to moral defect or to moral and intellectual deficiency, or to outbreaks of positive insanity under the conditions of life.” (The Physiology and Pathology of the Mind, p. 206.)
This fact alone is amply sufficient to condemn an industrial system that creates monopolies, concentrates wealth, stimulates greed, degrades the upper classes by superfluous luxury, the lower by envy, poverty, despair, and tends generally to physical, mental and moral decay. But were the entire economic system judiciously reconstructed, fatal elements would remain so long as man fails to grapple with the biological problem and fails to bring the great life forces of reproduction under conscientious direction and control.
Gravitation and all well studied mechanical and chemical forces have been adapted by man to special purposes in relation with his civilized life; even so must the sexual forces that belong to his basic existence be in their turn dominated and made conformable with his higher moral and spiritual needs. In this regard his primary need is that there shall be no transmission of disease or constitutional debility from one generation to another; but that the entire strength of the laws of heredity shall create an improvement of stock and thereby lift humanity to a higher level of physical health and efficiency.
In seeking the true method of attaining this end, it is our duty to look first to the teaching of the great founders of social philosophy. Without their invaluable services in discovering and setting forth the one unbroken process of law which “connects all phenomena from the motion of molecules and the courses of the suns to the phenomena of human thought and the destinies of nations” (J. M. Robertson), no intellects could to-day grasp the causes of misery and, conceiving the possibility of circumventing these causes, devise a scheme of scientific action to reverse the trend of general movement and evolve conditions of genuine and universal happiness.
In this sphere, however—the sphere of eugenics, or improvement of the human stock, as also in regard to the population and sex problems—Darwin and Herbert Spencer have failed us. The mind of the former, habituated to dwell on the favourable aspects of the struggle for existence during the early epochs of man’s history, was blind to the consequences of the genesis and growth of the broadly social element in man. Barbarous man could let cosmic forces prevail to exterminate the weak. Sympathetic man is compelled by virtue of his enlarged subjective nature to institute a new struggle, viz., a struggle against the struggle for existence (a phrase used by Lange), and already his triumph is everywhere visible in the survival of the unfit to struggle.
Darwin opposed the proposal to restrain population on the score that this would minimize the struggle which had created civilization in the past and which must needs, he thought, carry it on in the future, and both Darwin and Herbert Spencer “assumed that a generalization which sums up the progressive forces of a collectively unconscious society, i.e. a society without the conception of evolution and of a universal sociology, must equally sum up the progressive principles of a collectively conscious society, a society which has realized evolution and is constructing a universal sociology. Though they themselves are our greatest helpers towards such consciousness, they failed to realize that our attainment of it must revolutionize human history.” (Modern Humanists, J. M. Robertson, p. 234).
Turning then to less illustrious men, Mr. Francis Galton is our most advanced teacher in the field of eugenics. He faces the problem of race regeneration and has put forth a scheme or policy of action, resting on Dr. Matthews Duncan’s alleged facts regarding the relative fertility in early and late marriages. He shows that a group of a hundred mothers whose marriages and those of their daughters should take place at the age of twenty, would, in the course of a few generations, breed down a group of a hundred mothers whose marriages and those of their daughters were delayed until the age of twenty-nine. Let us then, he reasons, promote by every means in our power the early marriage of human beings of superior quality, whilst we discountenance early marriage in those social members who are less favourably endowed. And “few,” he says, “would deserve better of their country than those who determine to live celibate lives through a reasonable conviction that their issue would probably be less fitted than the generality to play their part as citizens.” (Inquiries into Human Faculty, p. 336.)
In examination for official appointments he would have attention paid to a candidate’s ancestral qualifications as well as his personal ability. The man of inherited sound constitution and average ability should be preferred to the man of superior ability who belongs to a delicate and short-lived family. The former will in all probability become the more valuable servant of the two. Some scheme should be devised by which to bestow marks for family merit, to put, as it were, a guinea stamp to the sterling guinea’s worth of natural nobility; and this, he conceives, might set a great social avalanche in motion. It would open the eyes of every family, and of society at large, to the importance of marriage alliance with a good stock; it would introduce the subject of race as a permanent topic of consideration, and lead to a careful collecting of family histories and noting of those facts which are absolutely necessary for guidance in right conduct. Late marriage, as advised by Malthus, Mr. Galton utterly condemns. The prudent alone are influenced by that doctrine, and it is, he says, a most pernicious rule of conduct in its bearing upon race. His policy, then, is early and fruitful marriage for the best specimens of our race, and widespread celibacy in the case of those less highly favoured, whilst everywhere the sentiment should prevail that eugenics, or the improvement of the human stock, is the primary consideration in marriage and the guiding principle in sex relations.
This theory I hold to be one-sided, and the policy misleading and to some extent false. Mr. Galton ignores the fundamental principle of social life, viz., that the happiness of all, at all times, should be the aim and object of rational man, and he mistakes the quality of human nature in highly civilized man. To demand celibacy of men and women whose defective organisms it is not desirable to perpetuate, would be in hundreds and thousands of instances to sacrifice unnecessarily present happiness to future gain—to build up the comfort and enjoyment of coming generations at the expense of the comfort and enjoyment of our own generation. The sentiment of justice repudiates this action as well as condemns the reverse position of a reckless self-indulgent procreating to the deterioration of the human stock, whilst reason distinctly shows that individual liberty, in respect of marriage, is a social necessity perfectly compatible with the well-being of all. Physical regeneration of race will not be achieved by an overstrained morality that does violence to the emotional human nature of the normal and average man.
Mr. Galton’s system of social reform accords in some respects with that which it is the purpose of this work to set forth. Both systems premise teaching that it is man’s duty and within his power to improve the physical, intellectual and moral structure of his race. He may, in part, achieve this by intelligent forethought and careful action in exercising the function of propagating his kind. Population must not be kept up by consumptives or persons whose pedigree is tainted by any disease known to be hereditary, and public opinion must enforce the necessary restraints. (Temporary illness ought also to be considered. It is when parents are in their best state of health only that they are morally justified in bringing children into the world.)
Of these, celibacy is a restraint commended and advised by Mr. Galton, whilst scientific meliorism deliberately rejects it, for celibacy is a vital evil, destroying individual happiness and tending obviously to social disorder. Wherever love in its highest form exists between two individuals, union is eminently desirable; but if either or both be afflicted by disease or hereditary taint, the sacrifice demanded of them is to carefully abstain from giving birth to children. Whether the means adopted be those of natural self-control or of artificial aids to self-control will depend on the views of the individuals immediately concerned, and in this matter society has no right of interference.
It is the business, however, of society to sweep away ignorance and make it possible for the poor as well as the rich to enter on the right path voluntarily, and where, from physical or moral degeneracy, self-regulation is impossible, society must exercise authority and coercively restrain the vital social force of propagation. It will not be by means of the lonely lives celibacy entails that civilized men and women will refrain from having children disqualified for useful citizenship. We shall, to quote the late poet laureate’s words, “move upward, working out the beast, and let the ape and tiger die,” by other means more worthy of humanity, i.e. by socialized freedom and sex equality; by intelligent self-control voluntarily practised (with or without artificial appliance), and by control, enforced wherever necessary by the State in fulfilment of its responsible duty—the careful guardianship of the congenital blood of future generations.
In the savage epoch of our history, the force of natural selection produced survival of the fittest. From that epoch we have long since passed into a semi-civilized epoch in which the force of sympathetic selection produces a miserable state of indiscriminate survival; we have now to pass forward to the epoch in which the rational force of a wise, intelligent selection will systematically secure the birth of the physically fit.
Marriage is that union of the sexes which is most in accordance with the moral and physical necessities of human beings and which harmonizes best with their other relations of life.—Richard Harte.
It is of vast importance to bear clearly in mind that all the great social institutions that confront us to-day are of genetic origin and evolution. They have not been devised by man to bring about the true end of all intelligent effort—namely, happiness. They are simply the undesigned, unforeseen results of various natural and social forces of the past. They survive through their tendency to maintain the existence of the race. They subserve life, not happiness. It is not my intention to treat marriage historically and trace back the various forms of it to their social origins. It is sufficient to bear in mind the fact of the natural, undevised origin of every form, including that form of monogamy which prevails in the most civilized countries of to-day. A priori, we should have expected that monogamy, being the ideal sex-union of the civilized races of Western Europe, would have been everywhere the last form to appear; that, in short, its fitness to survive all other forms would be shown by lateness of development as well as by superior qualifications for satisfying the needs of a highly developed humanity. This is not so, however. Mr. Herbert Spencer gives reasons for believing that monogamy dates as far back as any other marital relation. “Indeed, certain modes of life necessitating wide dispersion such as are pursued by the lowest forest tribes in Brazil and the interior of Borneo—modes of life which in earlier stages of human evolution must have been commoner than now—hinder other relations of the sexes.” (Sociology, vol. i. p. 698.) Two of the lowest tribes of savages existing, the Wood-Veddahs of Ceylon and the Bushmen of South Africa, are customarily monogamous. It is plain, therefore, that if monogamy is to be reckoned the final form of sexual relations, no argument can be based on any theory of its recent date in evolution. The opinion must seek to rest upon different ground—upon the quality of the institution, its fitness and adequateness, not only to human needs in the present system of society, but in the reformed system of the future.
While a number of primitive tribes are monogamous, as also are certain monkeys and birds, many civilized peoples have adopted polygamy, sometimes openly, at other times in a masked form. Polyandry is also a form of marriage not uncommon among semi-civilized peoples, as the Nairs of Malabar, the Kandyans of Ceylon and the Tibetans.
The Nairs are especially interesting because there is among them a regulated system of complex marriage which will compare in its results very favourably with the monogamous marriage of Western nations. The rule of the Matriarchate prevails, “inheritance is from mother to daughter and from the uncle to the children of the eldest sister; the household is directed by the mother or the eldest girl; polyandry and polygamy exist side by side or are inextricably mixed. Thus each woman is the wife of several men, each of whom has in turn several wives.” (Elisee Reclus, Primitive Folk, p. 162.) The men are under well-understood obligations to assist in the support of the domestic establishments, while the children look up to their mothers and uncles as their special protectors. The result of these customs on the status of women is most remarkable. It is said that “in no country are women more influential and respected than in Malabar.” (Ibid. p. 156.) The Nair lady may possess property, choose her own husbands and rule her own children. Marriage is not, as elsewhere, the taking possession of a woman by the man, but is really her emancipation from male thraldom. It puts her as nearly on a footing of social equality with the man as is possible in a semi-militant community. What is it that has decided the selection or unconscious choice—if we may call it so—of matrimonial usage among the various races of mankind, since no special form is necessarily connected with the degree of general civilization? The conditions and exigencies of social life; and as those conditions and exigencies change in the future, matrimonial usages will also change. As a matter of fact, every possible method, speaking generally, has been adopted. Sometimes a regulated promiscuity—for each man claimed his rights—sometimes the mixed polyandric and polygamic household; occasionally simple polyandry or polygamy; at other times monogamy; marriage experimental also, as with the Redskins of Canada, who pair and unite for a few days, then quit each other if the trial has not proved satisfactory to both parties; or temporary marriage as in the case of the Jews in Morocco, who unite for three or six months according to agreement; or free marriages as those of the Hottentots and Abyssinians, who marry, part, and remarry at will; or partial, as the marriages of the Assanyeh Arabs, which only bind the parties for certain days of the week. Every possible general method, I repeat, has been tried, and when the practice hit upon has served human needs and also promoted the solidarity and increase of the group, it has tended to persist.
In tracing the evolution of the modern European form of monogamous marriage, we become aware that at a very early period, and for a long time subsequently, the wife was regarded as the absolute property of the husband. The wife was a bought or a captured article, and like other articles of property was at the entire disposal of the owner to use, sell, lend or abuse as he thought fit. The Roman law makes no essential difference between the marital law and the law of property, and modern marriage laws in the different States of Europe and America treat the wife as if she were in a very large degree a personal possession of her husband.
The history of modern marriage, in short, is the history of man’s domination of woman and the measures he has taken to assume, assert and establish his rights of possession. Amid changing outward conditions of life, he has made good his claim to control her destiny in accordance with his own varying desires.
In appraising the value of our much-vaunted monogamy, we must clearly understand that its legal basis is not, and never was, a strong personal adhesion of sympathy and affection, but a compact respecting personal property, involving in the cases where the “contracting parties are possessed of wealth, both property in person and in things.” It is quite legal, and indeed quite respectable, for marriages to be formed on a pecuniary and social foundation, into which love does not enter. The woman who sells herself in marriage to a man for the sake of money and position is not regarded as a prostitute, but as a respectable, “honest” woman who has made a “fortunate” marriage.
To understand how thoroughly marriage is based upon property and not upon love, it should suffice to contemplate the grounds on which legal divorce is granted. Divorce is not granted, in this country at least, on proofs of incompatibility of nature and absence of affection, but on proof of adultery, in which co-respondents may be compelled to pecuniarily compensate the husband on account of having made use of his wife without his permission as her owner. Connivance by the husband precludes the granting of a divorce. Man’s supremacy and woman’s subjection become evident in the fact that no amount of simple adultery in a husband can be made the ground of a divorce, nor is a wife able to claim any pecuniary compensation from the paramours of a husband. Matrimony, at this epoch, is for the most part a “commercial transaction,” but in the words of Herbert Spencer, “already increased facilities for obtaining divorce point to the probability that whereas in those early stages during which permanent monogamy was being evolved, the union by law (originally the act of purchase) was regarded as the essential part of marriage and the union by affection non-essential; and whereas at present the union by law is thought the more important and the union by affection the less important, there will come a time when the union by affection will be held of primary moment, and the union by law as of secondary moment; and hence reprobation of marital relations in which the union by affection has dissolved. That this conclusion will seem unacceptable to most is probable, I may say certain.” (Principles of Sociology, vol. i. p. 788.)
Herbert Spencer strikes here at the very foundation of modern marriage. Moreover, in making affection rule sexual relations, he opens up all the possibilities of other forms of marriage than the monogamous, for affection may not only be transitory, but unrestricted to one. In face of the barbarous origin of marriage, there exists no reason why people of liberal thought should make a dogged, pious stand at monogamy while lightly dismissing promiscuity, polygamy, polyandry as disreputable forms of sex-union. Mr. Spencer holds that “the monogamic form of the sexual relation is manifestly the ultimate form,” but he gives no reasons to prove his case that are not sufficiently disproved by the form of marriage existing among the Nairs. Again, the fact of the numerical equality of the sexes does not make monogamy the only suitable form, although it supplies a reasonable objection to pure polygamy and pure polyandry. Mr. Spencer says that “monogamy is a pre-requisite to a high position of women.” Here he plainly overlooks the facts of the respected and comparatively independent position of women among peoples practising mixed polygamy and polyandry under fixed rules and regulations.
With the actual facts of life before us, we are forced to admit that under the régime of man’s dominancy and woman’s subjection, monogamy has been gross throughout all history, while with polyandry it has not been so. Note, in this regard, one fact alone—jealousy, that mean, selfish emotion which destroys the happiness of so many lives, is not in evidence among the simple polyandric Nairs. The associated husbands live on a good understanding with one another, there is a complete absence of jealousy. Which of us can say, in view of the monogamy that surrounds us: Tolstoi’s graphic picture, “the wild beast of jealousy began to roar in its den,” applies only to a marriage in fiction? It is to monogamy that we owe the typical domestic tyrant and many tyrannous attributes that survive in modern masculine human nature. Monogamy, too, has always been accompanied by other sexual relations in which both sexes are degraded and one sex is socially and physically ruined. As Mr. W. E. H. Lecky has pointed out, monogamy on one side of the shield implies prostitution on the other.
In its normal form, monogamy signifies the attachment of one man to one woman, involving—first, permanent and exclusive sexual union; second, conjoint domestic life; third, the generating and rearing of a family; fourth, social intercourse in the class of society to which the parties belong. Beyond these features of marriage, the economic and social forces of the age bring about in the vast majority of marriages a constant subjection of the wife to the husband, by reason of her being dependent on him for her living, and a general freedom to the husband but not to the wife to commit adultery. There is usually compelled also lateness of marriage, which implies unhealthful, painful conditions of life in the celibate youth of both sexes. I will ask here: Ought we to look upon permanency and exclusiveness as essential elements in the form of sex-union best suited to humanity at the present stage of its evolving civilization? Permanency is necessarily essential to our ideal of the final form of marriage, for the strongest, most valuable bond of affection implies it, and loss of love from whatever cause is a real calamity. But where that calamity has already befallen, for society to enforce a mere outward permanency of the matrimonial bond is irrational—the counterfeit union is productive only of private misery and public disorder. And further, under our present wretched economic conditions, the struggle for bread and absence of leisure and freedom in the case of the workers, and, amid the upper classes, frequent financial difficulties, false notions and customs of propriety and etiquette—all these combine to make it rare indeed that a man or woman chances to meet and unite with his or her counterpart or true life companion.
Commercialism is no safe guide in the quest for a vital, permanent sex-union, and until commercialism wholly disappears, the exigencies of life demand freedom of divorce to rectify unavoidable errors of judgment in matrimony, and make more possible the forming of ties that are truly and naturally permanent.
As human beings become more moral inwardly and create the outward conditions in which they can live a truly moral existence, Mr. Emerson’s principle that the great essentials in human conduct are to escape from all false ties and to reveal ourselves as we are, will be more and more acknowledged and acted upon. Great thinkers like Milton in the past and Herbert Spencer in the present, condemn as contrary to religion and reason a permanency that involves falsity or absence of love. “It is a less breach of wedlock,” says Milton, “to part with wise and quiet consent betimes, than still to foil and profane that mystery of joy and union with a polluting sadness and perpetual distemper; for it is not the outward continuing of marriage that keeps whole that covenant, but whatsoever does most according to peace and love, whether in marriage or in divorce, he it is that breaks marriage least, it being so often written that ‘Love only is the fulfilment of every commandment.’” (John Milton, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, chap. v.) Divorce made attainable to all men and women, rich and poor, without any disgraceful accompaniment, is a necessary condition of progress. And in effect, each nation of Western Europe accepts and facilitates divorce concurrently with its advance in civilization.
Not long ago, in my hearing, a Roman Catholic barrister, whose practice makes him familiar with all that occurs in the Divorce Court, delivered himself to this effect: “My church anathematises divorce, and to my mind she is right. But I am not the fool to think that the divorce law passed in our Statute Books in the year 1858 will ever be annulled or departed from. In the interests of morality, the pressing desideratum is that the basis of divorce be made the same for man and woman. It is a crying iniquity that whereas a husband by avoiding physical force, may legally be as unfaithful to his marriage vows as he chooses, and may tyrannize over and trample under his feet the feelings of his wife, one single slip in an unguarded moment on her part, one act of adultery committed, it may be in a fit of despair, entitles him by law to repudiate her summarily as barbarian husbands dismissed their wives.”
While permanency is eminently valuable in sexual relations, can we venture to say the same as regards exclusiveness? This distinctive quality of exclusiveness is not an extension of love, but a narrowing of it down—a restraint upon personal feeling. When woman wins her freedom and is no longer under any circumstances man’s dependent and slave, but his friend and comrade in the battle of life, will she restrain the physical expression of sex-love, yet fearlessly respond to all the tender ties certain to unite her with the opposite sex? To give at present a dogmatic reply is impossible. Personally, my instincts—so far as I know them—accord with Herbert Spencer’s dictum: the ultimate form of sexual relation will be monogamic; but I recognize my own limitations. Since the women of my generation are children of bond-slaves, hampered within and without by survivals from an epoch of sex subjection wherein man’s dominancy superimposed upon woman a chastity he repudiated for himself, the standpoint from which the freed being of the future will decide her sex-morality is not in the grasp of my apprehension.
Nevertheless, the immediate path of progress is distinctly marked out. I agree with the author who holds the opinion that: “Better indeed were a Saturnalia of free men and women than the spectacle which, as it is, our great cities present at night.” (Edward Carpenter.) But set women free “from the mere cash-nexus to a husband, from the money slavery of the streets, from the nameless terrors of social opinion, and from the threats of the choice of perpetual virginity or perpetual bondage,” and we need not fear for sex-morality. “Sex in man is an organized passion, an individual need or impetus; but in woman it may more properly be termed a constructive instinct, with the larger signification that that involves.... Nor does she often experience that divorce between the sentiment of love and the physical passion which is so common with men. Sex with her is a deep and sacred instinct, carrying with it a sense of natural purity.” (Woman, Edward Carpenter, p. 9.) And from woman herself let me quote a passage occurring in a women’s journal: “Love is an emotion separate from sex-impulse, it may or may not exist in co-relation to it. The testimony easily taken from the lives of many women is to the effect that love enters not into the impulse which, active and unrestrained on the part of those to whom they are yoked for life, has created for them a life which can be called by no name save slavery.” (Shafts, October, 1895.) Again, turning to the opposite sex, Havelock Ellis states (in his study of Man and Woman, Contemporary Science Series) that: “In women men find beings who have not wandered so far as men from the typical life of earth’s creatures; women are for men the human embodiments of the restful responsiveness of Nature.”
I am convinced that however polygamous the male-sex—under a system of industrial commercialism may appear—the great mass of our women are not licentious and not polyandrous in tendency. While a Saturnalia of free men and women would, as compared with present sexual conditions, be a preferable evil, we need not in our forecast of the future dread such a Saturnalia, or face its possibility. It is a libel on humanity to assume that no self-restraints are inherent to withhold mankind from sexual excesses when freed from control by Church and State. And although it might be said that “the growing complexity of man’s nature would be likely to lead him into more rather than fewer sex relations, on the other hand it is obvious that as the depth and subtlety of any attachment that really holds him increases, so does such attachment become more permanent and durable and less likely to be realized in a number of persons.... In man and woman we find a distinct tendency towards the formation of this double unit of wedded life ... and while we do not want to stamp such natural unions with any false irrevocability or dogmatic exclusiveness, what we do want is a recognition to-day of the tendency to their formation as a natural fact independent of any artificial laws.” (Marriage, Edward Carpenter, p. 31.)
The natural restraints or checks upon undue indulgence in sex-intercourse extend from the physical or material plane to the spiritual plane. These are—considerations of health; feelings of unselfishness and social duty; and a spiritual, i.e. an ideal, conception of humanity and of all the manifold relations of life.
Unselfishness is pre-eminently the natural check and regulator of sex relations, and not until love is emancipated from selfishness will it reach an ideal form. If we love unselfishly we desire the happiness and freedom of the being loved even to the extent of self-abnegation; tyranny and jealousy become impossible. All natural checks will necessarily strengthen and grow as humanity rises higher in the scale of being; moreover, education is bound—under racial progress—to become to each succeeding generation a much more adequate guide than hitherto. Even in the present day, it would not be difficult to get youths and girls at the age of romance to understand that “though they may have to contend with some superfluity of passion in early years, the most permanent and deeply-rooted desire within them will, in all probability, lead them at last to find their complete happiness and self-fulfilment only in a close union with a life-mate”; to understand also that “towards this end they must be prepared to use self-control, to prevent the aimless straying of their passions, and patience and tenderness towards the realization of the union when its time comes.” (Edward Carpenter.) This teaching would bring to the young a far truer conception of the sacredness of marriage than our marriage laws and customs give.
It must never be forgotten, however, that this question of marriage and every other social question must be viewed in relation to kindred topics. A sectional treatment of society will surely mislead if we fail to recall the changes going forward in every department of life, and the close connexion that exists between the forces of social and individual evolution. Scientific meliorism implies a reconstruction of domestic life; and, within the new environment, the instructing of youth and its guidance in sex-conduct will become comparatively easy. Nor is it only by the training and guidance of youth that marriage will be favourably affected in a new domestic system. The tendency to tyranny within the home—an abhorrent feature of past monogamy—will have no opportunity to appear; and two undesirable female types—the idle fine lady and the household drudge—will become as extinct as the dodo.
Outside the precincts of home, large social and industrial changes will promote the disappearance of the prostitute, and finally there will emerge the truly emancipated woman, fearless and enlightened—a capable guide to man in the task of consciously subordinating passions that are selfish and transitory to those deeper attachments and higher emotions that give birth to spiritual love. “Is marriage a failure?” has been boldly asked and widely discussed in comparatively recent years; and that the audible answer—sadly re-echoed in thousands of hearts—was in the affirmative, shows a wholesome awakening to facts—an awakening that inevitably precedes all real reforms in an epoch of conscious evolution.
So permeated with selfishness is the mental atmosphere surrounding all questions of sex that the rule of life I here indicate will be utterly distasteful to those who accept the régime of custom. Yet as regards morality or an ethical code, there are two, and two only, logical attitudes of mind. Either we must think of the stamping out of all sexual feeling on the ground of its purely animal nature, and limiting physical union to the utmost that is compatible with perpetuation of species; or we must think of a gradual elevating of sexual instinct and action to a dignified position in human life with due consideration for the desires and needs of every one after puberty is reached. The first is practically impossible to the vast majority of the race at its present stage of development. They would simply refuse submission to the intolerable restraints necessitated. In effect, the ascetic answer to problems of sex is no actual solution, but a shelving of the fundamental question, with a tacit acceptance of the prodigious evils around us in respect both of sex-union and the advent of children. The only rational course is that of elevating and regulating these relations in view of human happiness. This implies a steady repression of anti-social emotions and persistent cultivation of unselfishness. Our marital habits of selfish appropriation and jealous control are in direct opposition to the moral elevation of sexual instinct. Selfishness degrades where it penetrates, and the problem is to rescue our sexual forces from selfishness, and utilize these forces, i.e. make them subserve the interests of social virtue. Hitherto, they have been ignored and neglected—a result of false thinking and ascetic teaching, while in actual life they have run riot, creating incalculable evils.
The British race publicly professes monogamy and preaches to the young a Puritan doctrine. Privately the drama enacted would disgrace a civilization of the Middle Ages. In the lower classes wife-beating and murder, in the upper classes the hideous revelations of the Divorce Court, witness to the impurity and the misery of our boasted monogamy. We tolerate licence, we condemn and conceal vicious propensities; we harbour a social evil of gigantic magnitude, we permit hypocrisy to prevail, we instigate the young to form self-interested mercantile marriages. We are corrupt in our social life and mentally debased, for we refuse to think out a rational code of sex morals, and without that we shall never attain to a lofty conception, a true ideal of what life ought to be. Our modern monogamy in its inwardness is not falsely pictured in this indictment: “The commercialism which buys and sells all human things; the narrow physical passion of jealousy; the petty sense of private property in another person; social opinions and legal enactments, have all converged to choke and suffocate wedded love in egoism, lust and meanness.” (Edward Carpenter’s Marriage, p. 38.)
In view of general happiness and virtue, we must seek the abrogation of all laws based on or involving sex-inequality. And, further, that marriage may become transformed into a sacred, sympathetic and permanent bond—a deeper and truer relation of life—we must seek facilities for divorce or the abrogation of the specific law that binds beings together for life in ill-assorted or artificial unions.