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+Project Gutenberg's Little Essays of Love and Virtue, by Havelock Ellis
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Little Essays of Love and Virtue
+
+Author: Havelock Ellis
+
+Release Date: April 23, 2005 [EBook #15687]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Michael Ciesielski, Melissa Er-Raqabi and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+LITTLE ESSAYS
+OF
+LOVE AND VIRTUE
+BY
+HAVELOCK ELLIS
+
+
+
+
+BY THE SAME AUTHOR
+
+STUDIES IN THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SEX
+Six Volumes
+Philadelphia: _F.A. Davis Company_
+
+MAN AND WOMAN
+London: _Walter Scott_
+New York: _Charles Scribners' Sons_
+
+THE TASK OF SOCIAL HYGIENE
+London: _Constable and Company_
+Boston: _Houghton Mifflin Company_
+
+IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS
+First and Second Series
+London: _Constable and Company_
+Boston: _Houghton Mifflin Company_
+
+
+BY MRS. HAVELOCK ELLIS
+
+THE NEW HORIZON IN LOVE AND LIFE
+With a Preface by EDWARD CARPENTER
+and an Introduction by MARGUERITE TRACY
+London: _A. and C. Black, Ltd._
+
+
+
+
+LITTLE ESSAYS
+OF
+LOVE AND VIRTUE
+BY
+HAVELOCK ELLIS
+
+
+
+
+
+A. & C. BLACK, LTD. 4, 5 & 6 SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W. 1 1922
+
+
+
+
+COPYRIGHT 1922
+_In Great Britain by A. and G. Black, Ltd., London_
+_In America by George H. Doran Co., New York_
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+In these Essays--little, indeed, as I know them to be, compared to the
+magnitude of their subjects--I have tried to set forth, as clearly as I
+can, certain fundamental principles, together with their practical
+application to the life of our time. Some of these principles were stated,
+more briefly and technically, in my larger _Studies_ of sex; others were
+therein implied but only to be read between the lines. Here I have
+expressed them in simple language and with some detail. It is my hope that
+in this way they may more surely come into the hands of young people,
+youths and girls at the period of adolescence, who have been present to my
+thoughts in all the studies I have written of sex because I was myself of
+that age when I first vaguely planned them. I would prefer to leave to
+their judgment the question as to whether this book is suitable to be
+placed in the hands of older people. It might only give them pain. It is
+in youth that the questions of mature age can alone be settled, if they
+ever are to be settled, and unless we begin to think about adult problems
+when we are young all our thinking is likely to be in vain. There are but
+few people who are able when youth is over either on the one hand to
+re-mould themselves nearer to those facts of Nature and of Society they
+failed to perceive, or had not the courage to accept, when they were
+young, or, on the other hand, to mould the facts of the exterior world
+nearer to those of their own true interior world. One hesitates to bring
+home to them too keenly what they have missed in life. Yet, let us
+remember, even for those who have missed most, there always remains the
+fortifying and consoling thought that they may at least help to make the
+world better for those who come after them, and the possibilities of human
+adjustment easier for others than it has been for themselves. They must
+still remain true to their own traditions. We could not wish it to be
+otherwise.
+
+The art of making love and the art of being virtuous;--two aspects of the
+great art of living that are, rightly regarded, harmonious and not at
+variance--remain, indeed, when we cease to misunderstand them, essentially
+the same in all ages and among all peoples. Yet, always and everywhere,
+little modifications become necessary, little, yet, like so many little
+things, immense in their significance and results. In this way, if we are
+really alive, we flexibly adjust ourselves to the world in which we find
+ourselves, and in so doing simultaneously adjust to ourselves that
+ever-changing world, ever-changing, though its changes are within such
+narrow limits that it yet remains substantially the same. It is with such
+modification that we are concerned in these Little Essays.
+
+H.E.
+
+_London, 1921_
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER                                 PAGE
+
+  I  Children and Parents                 13
+ II  The Meaning of Purity                37
+III  The Objects of Marriage              63
+ IV  Husbands and Wives                   75
+  V  The Love-Rights of Women            102
+ VI  The Play-Function of Sex            116
+VII  The Individual and the Race         134
+     Index                               183
+
+
+
+
+
+
+LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+CHILDREN AND PARENTS
+
+
+The twentieth century, as we know, has frequently been called "the century
+of the child." When, however, we turn to the books of Ellen Key, who has
+most largely and sympathetically taken this point of view, one asks
+oneself whether, after all, the child's century has brought much to the
+child. Ellen Key points out, with truth, that, even in our century,
+parents may for the most part be divided into two classes: those who act
+as if their children existed only for their benefit, and those who act as
+if they existed only for their children's benefit, the results, she adds
+being alike deplorable. For the first group of parents tyrannise over the
+child, seek to destroy its individuality, exercise an arbitrary discipline
+too spasmodic to have any of the good effects of discipline and would
+model him into a copy of themselves, though really, she adds, it ought to
+pain them very much to see themselves exactly copied. The second group of
+parents may wish to model their children not after themselves but after
+their ideals, yet they differ chiefly from the first class by their
+over-indulgence, by their anxiety to pamper the child by yielding to all
+his caprices and artificially protecting him from the natural results of
+those caprices, so that instead of learning freedom, he has merely
+acquired self-will. These parents do not indeed tyrannise over their
+children but they do worse; they train their children to be tyrants.
+Against these two tendencies of our century Ellen Key declares her own
+Alpha and Omega of the art of education. Try to leave the child in peace;
+live your own life beautifully, nobly, temperately, and in so living you
+will sufficiently teach your children to live.
+
+It is not my purpose here to consider how far this conception of the duty
+of parents towards children is justified, and whether or not peace is the
+best preparation for a world in which struggle dominates. All these
+questions about education are rather idle. There are endless theories of
+education but no agreement concerning the value of any of them, and the
+whole question of education remains open. I am here concerned less with
+the duty of parents in relation to their children than with the duty of
+children in relation to their parents, and that means that I am not
+concerned with young children, to whom, that duty still presents no
+serious problems, since they have not yet developed a personality with
+self-conscious individual needs. Certainly the one attitude must condition
+the other attitude. The reaction of children against their parents is the
+necessary result of the parents' action. So that we have to pay some
+attention to the character of parental action.
+
+We cannot expect to find any coherent or uniform action on the part of
+parents. But there have been at different historical periods different
+general tendencies in the attitude of parents towards their children. Thus
+if we go back four or five centuries in English social history we seem to
+find a general attitude which scarcely corresponds exactly to either of
+Ellen Key's two groups. It seems usually to have been compounded of
+severity and independence; children were first strictly compelled to go
+their parents' way and then thrust off to their own way. There seems a
+certain hardness in this method, yet it is doubtful whether it can fairly
+be regarded as more unreasonable than either of the two modern methods
+deplored by Ellen Key. On the contrary it had points for admiration. It
+was primarily a discipline, but it was regarded, as any fortifying
+discipline should be regarded, as a preparation for freedom, and it is
+precisely there that the more timid and clinging modern way seems to fail.
+
+We clearly see the old method at work in the chief source of knowledge
+concerning old English domestic life, the _Paston Letters_. Here we find
+that at an early age the sons of knights and gentlemen were sent to serve
+in the houses of other gentlemen: it was here that their education really
+took place, an education not in book knowledge, but in knowledge of life.
+Such education was considered so necessary for a youth that a father who
+kept his sons at home was regarded as negligent of his duty to his family.
+A knowledge of the world was a necessary part, indeed the chief part, of a
+youth's training for life. The remarkable thing is that this applied also
+to a large extent to the daughters. They realised in those days, what is
+only beginning to be realised in ours,[1] that, after all, women live in
+the world just as much, though differently, as men live in the world, and
+that it is quite as necessary for the girl as for the boy to be trained to
+the meaning of life. Margaret Paston, towards the end of the fifteenth
+century, sent her daughter Ann to live in the house of a gentleman who, a
+little later, found that he could not keep her as he was purposing to
+decrease the size of his household. The mother writes to her son: "I shall
+be fain to send for her and with me she shall but lose her time, and
+without she be the better occupied she shall oftentimes move me and put me
+to great unquietness. Remember what labour I had with your sister,
+therefore do your best to help her forth"; as a result it was planned to
+send her to a relative's house in London.
+
+[1] This was illustrated in England when women first began to serve on
+juries. The pretext was frequently brought forward that there are
+certain kinds of cases and of evidence that do not concern women or that
+women ought not to hear. The pretext would have been more plausible if
+it had also been argued that there are certain kinds of cases and of
+evidence that men ought not to hear. As a matter of fact, whatever
+frontier there may be in these matters is not of a sexual kind.
+Everything that concerns men ultimately concerns women, and everything
+that concerns women ultimately concerns men. Neither women nor men are
+entitled to claim dispensation.
+
+It is evident that in the fifteenth century in England there was a wide
+prevalence of this method of education, which in France, a century later,
+was still regarded as desirable by Montaigne. His reason for it is worth
+noting; children should be educated away from home, he remarks, in order
+to acquire hardness, for the parents will be too tender to them. "It is an
+opinion accepted by all that it is not right to bring up children in their
+parents' laps, for natural love softens and relaxes even the wisest."[2]
+
+[2] Montaigne, _Essais_, Bk. I., ch. 25.
+
+In old France indeed the conditions seem similar to those in England. The
+great serio-comic novel of Antoine de la Salle, _Petit Jean de Saintré_,
+shows us in detail the education and the adventures, which certainly
+involved a very early introduction to life, of a page in a great house in
+the fifteenth century. We must not take everything in this fine comedy too
+solemnly, but in the fourteenth century _Book of the Knight of the
+Tour-Landry_ we may be sure that we have at its best the then prevailing
+view of the relation of a father to his tenderly loved daughters. Of
+harshness and rigour in the relationship it is not easy to find traces in
+this lengthy and elaborate book of paternal counsels. But it is clear that
+the father takes seriously the right of a daughter to govern herself and
+to decide for herself between right and wrong. It is his object, he tells
+his girls, "to enable them to govern themselves." In this task he assumes
+that they are entitled to full knowledge, and we feel that he is not
+instructing them in the mysteries of that knowledge; he is taking for
+granted, in the advice he gives and the stories he tells them, that his
+"young and small daughters, not, poor things, overburdened with
+experience," already possess the most precise knowledge of the intimate
+facts of life, and that he may tell them, without turning a hair, the most
+outrageous incidents of debauchery. Life already lies naked before them:
+that he assumes; he is not imparting knowledge, he is giving good
+counsel.[3]
+
+[3] If the Knight went to an extreme in his assumption of his daughters'
+knowledge, modern fathers often go to the opposite and more foolish
+extreme of assuming in their daughters an ignorance that would be
+dangerous even if it really existed. In _A Young Girl's Diary_
+(translated from the German by Eden and Cedar Paul), a work that is
+highly instructive for parents, and ought to be painful for many, we
+find the diarist noting at the age of thirteen that she and a girl
+friend of about the same age overheard the father of one of them--both
+well brought up and carefully protected, one Catholic and the other
+Protestant--referring to "those innocent children." "We did laugh so, WE
+and _innocent children_!!! What our fathers really think of us; we
+innocent!!! At dinner we did not dare look at one another or we should
+have exploded." It need scarcely be added that, at the same time, they
+were more innocent than they knew.
+
+It is clear that this kind of education and this attitude towards
+children must be regarded as the outcome of the whole mediĉval method of
+life. In a state of society where roughness and violence, though not, as
+we sometimes assume, chronic, were yet always liable to be manifested, it
+was necessary for every man and woman to be able to face the crudest facts
+of the world and to be able to maintain his or her own rights against
+them. The education that best secured that strength and independence was
+the best education and it necessarily involved an element of hardness. We
+must go back earlier than Montaigne's day, when the conditions were
+becoming mitigated, to see the system working in all its vigour.
+
+The lady of the day of the early thirteenth century has been well
+described by Luchaire in his scholarly study of French Society in the time
+of Philip Augustus. She was, he tells us, as indeed she had been in the
+preceding feudal centuries, often what we should nowadays call a virago,
+of violent temperament, with vivid passions, broken in from childhood to
+all physical exercises, sharing the pleasures and dangers of the knights
+around her. Feudal life, fertile in surprises and in risks, demanded even
+in women a vigorous temper of soul and body, a masculine air, and habits
+also that were almost virile. She accompanied her father or her husband to
+the chase, while in war-time, if she became a widow or if her husband was
+away at the Crusades, she was ready, if necessary, to direct the defences
+of the lordship, and in peace time she was not afraid of the longest and
+most dangerous pilgrimages. She might even go to the Crusades on her own
+account, and, if circumstances required, conduct a war to come out
+victoriously.
+
+We may imagine the robust kind of education required to produce people of
+this quality. But as regards the precise way in which parents conducted
+that education, we have, as Luchaire admits, little precise knowledge. It
+is for the most part only indirectly, by reading between the lines, that
+we glean something as to what it was considered befitting to inculcate in
+a good household, and as what we thus learn is mostly from the writings of
+Churchmen it is doubtless a little one-sided. Thus Adam de Perseigne, an
+ecclesiastic, writes to the Countess du Perche to advise her how to live
+in a Christian manner; he counsels her to abstain from playing games of
+chance and chess, not to take pleasure in the indecent farces of actors,
+and to be moderate in dress. Then, as ever, preachers expressed their
+horror of the ruinous extravagance of women, their false hair, their
+rouge, and their dresses that were too long or too short. They also
+reprobated their love of flirtation. It was, however, in those days a
+young girl's recognised duty, when a knight arrived in the household, to
+exercise the rites of hospitality, to disarm him, give him his bath, and
+if necessary massage him to help him to go to sleep. It is not surprising
+that the young girl sometimes made love to the knight under these
+circumstances, nor is it surprising that he, engaged in an arduous life
+and trained to disdain feminine attractions, often failed to respond.
+
+It is easy to understand how this state of things gradually became
+transformed into the considerably different position of parents and child
+we have known, which doubtless attained its climax nearly a century ago.
+Feudal conditions, with the large households so well adapted to act as
+seminaries for youth, began to decay, and as education in such seminaries
+must have led to frequent mischances both for youths and maidens who
+enjoyed the opportunities of education there, the regret for their
+disappearance may often have been tempered for parents. Schools, colleges,
+and universities began to spring up and develop for one sex, while for the
+other home life grew more intimate, and domestic ties closer. Montaigne's
+warning against the undue tenderness of a narrow family life no longer
+seemed reasonable, and the family became more self-centred and more
+enclosed. Beneath this, and more profoundly influential, there was a
+general softening in social respects, and a greater expansiveness of
+affectional relationships, in reality or in seeming, within the home,
+compensating, it may be, the more diffused social feeling within a group
+which characterised the previous period.
+
+So was cultivated that undue tenderness, deplored by Montaigne, which we
+now regard as almost normal in family life, and solemnly label, if we
+happen to be psycho-analysts, the Oedipus-complex or the Electra-complex.
+Sexual love is closely related to parental love; the tender emotion, which
+is an intimate part of parental love, is also an intimate part of sexual
+love, and two emotions which are each closely related to a third emotion
+cannot fail to become often closely associated to each other. With a
+little thought we might guess beforehand, even while still in complete
+ignorance of the matter, that there could not fail to be frequently a
+sexual tinge in the affection of a father for his daughter, of a mother
+for her son, of a son for his mother, or a daughter for her father.
+Needless to say, that does not mean that there is present any physical
+desire of sex in the narrow sense; that would be a perversity, and a rare
+perversity. We are here on another plane than that of crude physical
+desire, and are moving within the sphere of the emotions. But such
+emotions are often strong, and all the stronger because conscious of
+their own absolute rectitude and often masked under the shape of Duty. Yet
+when prolonged beyond the age of childhood they tend to become a clog on
+development, and a hindrance to a wholesome life. The child who cherishes
+such emotion is likely to suffer infantile arrest of development, and the
+parent who is so selfish as to continue to expend such tenderness on a
+child who has passed the age of childhood, or to demand it, is guilty of a
+serious offence against that child.
+
+That the intimate family life which sometimes resulted--especially when,
+as frequently happened, the seeming mutual devotion was also real--might
+often be regarded as beautiful and almost ideal, it has been customary to
+repeat with an emphasis that in the end has even become nauseous. For it
+was usually overlooked that the self-centred and enclosed family, even
+when the mutual affection of its members was real enough to bear all
+examination, could scarcely be more than partially beautiful, and could
+never be ideal. For the family only represents one aspect, however
+important an aspect, of a human being's functions and activities. He
+cannot, she cannot, be divorced from the life of the social group, and a
+life is beautiful and ideal, or the reverse, only when we have taken into
+our consideration the social as well as the family relationship. When the
+family claims to prevent the free association of an adult member of it
+with the larger social organisation, it is claiming that the part is
+greater than the whole, and such a claim cannot fail to be morbid and
+mischievous.
+
+The old-world method of treating children, we know, has long ago been
+displaced as containing an element of harsh tyranny. But it was not
+perceived, and it seems indeed not even yet to be generally recognised,
+that the system which replaced it, and is only now beginning to pass away,
+involved another and more subtle tyranny, the more potent because not
+seemingly harsh. Parents no longer whipped their children even when grown
+up, or put them in seclusion, or exercised physical force upon them after
+they had passed childhood. They felt that that would not be in harmony
+with the social customs of a world in which ancient feudal notions were
+dead. But they merely replaced the external compulsion by an internal
+compulsion which was much more effective. It was based on the moral
+assumption of claims and duties which were rarely formulated because
+parents found it quite easy and pleasant to avoid formulating them, and
+children, on the rare occasions when they formulated them, usually felt a
+sense of guilt in challenging their validity. It was in the nineteenth
+century that this state of things reached its full development. The sons
+of the family were usually able, as they grew up, to escape and elude it,
+although they thereby often created an undesirable divorce from the home,
+and often suffered, as well as inflicted, much pain in tearing themselves
+loose from the spiritual bonds--especially perhaps in matters of
+religion--woven by long tradition to bind them to their parents. It was on
+the daughters that the chief stress fell. For the working class, indeed,
+there was often the possibility of escape into hard labour, if only that
+of marriage. But such escape was not possible, immediately or at all, for
+a large number. During the nineteenth century many had been so carefully
+enclosed in invisible cages, they had been so well drilled in the
+reticences and the duties and the subserviences that their parents
+silently demanded of them, that we can never know all the tragedies that
+took place. In exceptional cases, indeed, they gave a sign. When they
+possessed unusual power of intellect, or unusual power of character and
+will, they succeeded in breaking loose from their cages, or at least in
+giving expression to themselves. This is seen in the stories of nearly all
+the women eminent in life and literature during the nineteenth century,
+from the days of Mary Wollstonecraft onwards. The Brontës, almost, yet not
+quite, strangled by the fetters placed upon them by their stern and
+narrow-minded father, and enabled to attain the full stature of their
+genius only by that brief sojourn in Brussels, are representative.
+Elizabeth Barrett, chained to a couch of invalidism under the eyes of an
+imperiously affectionate father until with Robert Browning's aid she
+secretly eloped into the open air of freedom and health, and so attained
+complete literary expression, is a typical figure. It is only because we
+recognise that she is a typical figure among the women who attained
+distinction that we are able to guess at the vast number of mute
+inglorious Elizabeth Barretts who were never able to escape by their own
+efforts and never found a Browning to aid them to escape.
+
+It is sometimes said that those days are long past and that young women,
+in all the countries which we are pleased to called civilised, are now
+emancipated, indeed, rather too much emancipated. Critics come forward to
+complain of their undue freedom, of their irreverent familiarity to their
+parents, of their language, of their habits. But there were critics who
+said the very same things, in almost the same words, of the grandmothers
+of these girls! These incompetent critics are as ignorant of the social
+history of the past as they are of the social significance of the history
+of the present. We read in _Once a Week_ of sixty years ago (10th August,
+1861), the very period when the domestic conditions of girls were the most
+oppressive in the sense here understood, that these same critics were
+about at that time, and as shocked as they are now at "the young ladies
+who talk of 'awful swells' and 'deuced bores,' who smoke and venture upon
+free discourse, and try to be like men." The writer of this anonymous
+article, who was really (I judge from internal evidence) so distinguished
+and so serious a woman as Harriet Martineau, duly snubs these critics,
+pointing out that such accusations are at least as old as Addison and
+Horace Walpole; she remarks that there have no doubt been so-called "fast
+young ladies" in every age, "varying their doings and sayings according to
+the fopperies of the time." The question, as she pertinently concludes is,
+as indeed it still remains to-day: "Have we more than the average
+proportion? I do not know." Nor to-day do we know.
+
+But while to-day, as ever before, we have a certain proportion of these
+emancipated girls, and while to-day, as perhaps never before, we are able
+to understand that they have an element of reason on their side, it would
+be a mistake to suppose that they are more than exceptions. The majority
+are unable, and not even anxious, to attain this light-hearted social
+emancipation. For the majority, even though they are workers, the
+anciently subtle ties of the home are still, as they should be, an element
+of natural piety, and, also, as they should not be, clinging fetters which
+impede individuality and destroy personal initiative.
+
+We all know so many happy homes beneath whose calm surface this process
+is working out. The parents are deeply attached to their children, who
+still remain children to them even when they are grown up. They wish to
+guide them and mould them and cherish them, to protect them from the
+world, to enjoy their society and their aid, and they expect that their
+children shall continue indefinitely to remain children. The children, on
+their side, remain and always will remain, tenderly attached to their
+parents, and it would really pain them to feel that they are harbouring
+any unwillingness to stay in the home even after they have grown up, so
+long as their parents need their attention. It is, of course, the
+daughters who are thus expected to remain in the home and who feel this
+compunction about leaving it. It seems to us--although, as we have seen,
+so unlike the attitude of former days--a natural, beautiful, and rightful
+feeling on both sides.
+
+Yet, in the result, all sorts of evils tend to ensue. The parents often
+take as their moral right the services which should only be accepted, if
+accepted at all, as the offering of love and gratitude, and even reach a
+degree of domineering selfishness in which they refuse to believe that
+their children have any adult rights of their own, absorbing and drying up
+that physical and spiritual life-blood of their offspring which it is the
+parents' part in Nature to feed. If the children are willing there is
+nothing to mitigate this process; if they are unwilling the result is
+often a disastrous conflict. Their time and energy are not their own;
+their tastes are criticised and so far as possible crushed; their
+political ideas, if they have any, are treated as pernicious; and--which
+is often on both sides the most painful of all--differences in religious
+belief lead to bitter controversy and humiliating recrimination. Such
+differences in outlook between youth and age are natural and inevitable
+and right. The parents themselves, though they may have forgotten it,
+often in youth similarly revolted against the cherished doctrines of their
+own parents; it has ever been so, the only difference being that to-day,
+probably, the opportunities for variation are greater. So it comes about
+that what James Hinton said half a century ago is often true to-day: "Our
+happy Christian homes are the real dark places of the earth."
+
+It is evident that the problem of the relation of the child to the parent
+is still incompletely solved even in what we consider our highest
+civilisation. There is here needed an art in which those who have to
+exercise it can scarcely possess all the necessary skill and experience.
+Among trees and birds and beasts the art is surer because it is exercised
+unconsciously, on the foundation of a large tradition in which failure
+meant death. In the common procreative profusion of those forms of life
+the frequent death of the young was a matter of little concern, but
+biologically there was never any sacrifice of the offspring to the
+well-being of the parents. Whenever sacrifice is called for it is the
+parents who are sacrificed to their offspring. In our superior human
+civilisation, in which quantity ever tends to give place to quality, the
+higher value of the individual involves an effort to avoid sacrifice which
+sometimes proves worse than abortive. An avian philosopher would be
+unlikely to feel called upon to denounce nests as the dark places of the
+earth, and in laying down our human moral laws we have always to be aware
+of forgetting the fundamental biological relationship of parent and child
+to which all such moral laws must conform. To some would-be parents that
+necessity may seem hard. In such a case it is well for them to remember
+that there is no need to become parents and that we live in an age when it
+is not difficult to avoid becoming a parent. The world is not dying for
+lack of parents. On the contrary we have far too many of them--ignorant
+parents, silly parents, unwilling parents, undesirable parents--and those
+who aspire to the high dignity of creating the future race, let them be as
+few as they will--and perhaps at the present time the fewer the
+better--must not refuse the responsibilities of that position, its pains
+as well as its joys.
+
+In our human world, as we know, the moral duties laid upon us--the duties
+in which, if we fail, we become outcasts in our own eyes or in those of
+others or in both--are of three kinds: the duties to oneself, the duties
+to the small circle of those we love, and the duties to the larger circle
+of mankind to which ultimately we belong, since out of it we proceed, and
+to it we owe all that we are. There are no maxims, there is only an art
+and a difficult art, to harmonise duties which must often conflict. We
+have to be true to all the motives that sanctify our lives. To that extent
+George Eliot's Maggie Tulliver was undoubtedly right. But the renunciation
+of the Self is not the routine solution of every conflict, any more than
+is the absolute failure to renounce. In a certain sense the duty towards
+the self comes before all others, because it is the condition on which
+duties towards others possess any significance and worth. In that sense,
+it is true according to the familiar saying of Shakespeare,--though it was
+only Polonius, the man of maxims, who voiced it,--that one cannot be true
+to others unless one is first true to oneself, and that one can know
+nothing of giving aught that is worthy to give unless one also knows how
+to take.
+
+We see that the problem of the place of parents in life, after their
+function of parenthood has been adequately fulfilled, a problem which
+offers no difficulties among most forms of life, has been found hard to
+solve by Man. At some places and periods it has been considered most
+merciful to put them, to death; at others they have been almost or quite
+deified and allowed to regulate the whole lives of their descendants. Thus
+in New Caledonia aged parents, it is said by Mrs. Hadfield, were formerly
+taken up to a high mountain and left with enough food to last a few days;
+there was at the same time great regard for the aged, as also among the
+Hottentots who asked: "Can you see a parent or a relative shaking and
+freezing under a cold, dreary, heavy, useless old age, and not think, in
+pity of them, of putting an end to their misery?" It was generally the
+opinion of the parents themselves, but in some countries the parents have
+dominated and overawed their children to the time of their natural death
+and even beyond, up to the point of ancestor worship, as in China, where
+no man of any age can act for himself in the chief matters of life during
+his parents' life-time, and to some extent in ancient Rome, whence an
+influence in this direction which still exists in the laws and customs of
+France.[4] Both extremes have proved compatible with a beautifully human
+life. To steer midway between them seems to-day, however, the wisest
+course. There ought to be no reason, and under happy conditions there is
+no reason, why the relationship between parent and child, as one of mutual
+affection and care, should ever cease to exist. But that the relationship
+should continue to exist as a tie is unnatural and tends to be harmful. At
+a certain stage in the development of the child the physical tie with the
+parent is severed, and the umbilical cord cut. At a later stage in
+development, when puberty is attained and adolescence is feeling its way
+towards a complete adult maturity, the spiritual tie must be severed. It
+is absolutely essential that the young spirit should begin to essay its
+own wings. If its energy is not equal to this adventure, then it is the
+part of a truly loving parent to push it over the edge of the nest. Of
+course there are dangers and risks. But the worst dangers and risks come
+of the failure to adventure, of the refusal to face the tasks of the world
+and to assume the full function of life. All that Freud has told of the
+paralysing and maiming influence of infantile arrest or regression is here
+profitable to consider. In order, moreover, that the relationship between
+parents and children may retain its early beauty and love, it is essential
+that it shall adapt itself to adult conditions and the absence of ties so
+rendered necessary. Otherwise there is little likelihood of anything but
+friction and pain on one side or the other, and perhaps on both sides.
+
+[4] The varying customs of different peoples in this matter are set
+forth by Westermarck, _The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas_,
+Ch. XXV.
+
+The parents have not only to train their children: it is of at least equal
+importance that they should train themselves. It is desirable that
+children, as they grow up, should be alive to this necessity, and
+consciously assist in the process, since they are in closer touch with a
+new world of activities to which their more lethargic parents are often
+blind and deaf. For every fresh stage in our lives we need a fresh
+education, and there is no stage for which so little educational
+preparation is made as that which follows the reproductive period. Yet at
+no time--especially in women, who present all the various stages of the
+sexual life in so emphatic a form--would education be more valuable. The
+great burden of reproduction, with all its absorbing responsibilities, has
+suddenly been lifted; at the same time the perpetually recurring rhythm of
+physical sex manifestations, so often disturbing in its effect, finally
+ceases; with that cessation, very often, after a brief period of
+perturbation, there is an increase both in physical and mental energy.
+Yet, too often, all that one can see is that a vacuum has been created,
+and that there is nothing to fill it. The result is that the mother--for
+it is most often of the mother that complaint is made--devotes her own new
+found energies to the never-ending task of hampering and crushing her
+children's developing energies. How many mothers there are who bring to
+our minds that ancient and almost inspired statement concerning those for
+whom "Satan finds some mischief still"! They are wasting, worse than
+wasting, energies that might be profitably applied to all sorts of social
+service in the world. There is nothing that is so much needed as the
+"maternal in politics," or in all sorts of non-political channels of
+social service, and none can be better fitted for such service than those
+who have had an actual experience of motherhood and acquired the varied
+knowledge that such experience should give. There are numberless other
+ways, besides social service, in which mothers who have passed the age of
+forty, providing they possess the necessary aptitudes, can more profitably
+apply themselves than in hampering, or pampering, their adult children. It
+is by wisely cultivating their activities in a larger sphere that women
+whose chief duties in the narrower domestic sphere are over may better
+ensure their own happiness and the welfare of others than either by
+fretting and obstructing, or by worrying over, their own children who are
+no longer children. It is quite true that the children may go astray even
+when they have ceased to be children. But the time to implant the seeds of
+virtue, the time to convey a knowledge of life, was when they were small.
+If it was done well, it only remains to exercise faith and trust. If it
+was done ill, nothing done later will compensate, for it is merely foolish
+for a mother who could not educate her children when they were small to
+imagine that she is able to educate them when they are big.
+
+So it is that the problem of the attitude of the child to its parents
+circles round again to that of the parents to the child. The wise parent
+realises that childhood is simply a preparation for the free activities of
+later life, that the parents exist in order to equip children for life and
+not to shelter and protect them from the world into which they must be
+cast. Education, whatever else it should or should not be, must be an
+inoculation against the poisons of life and an adequate equipment in
+knowledge and skill for meeting the chances of life. Beyond that, and no
+doubt in the largest part, it is a natural growth and takes place of
+itself.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE MEANING OF PURITY
+
+I
+
+
+We live in a world in which, as we nowadays begin to realise, we find two
+antagonistic streams of traditional platitude concerning the question of
+sexual purity, both flowing from the far past.
+
+The people who embody one of these streams of tradition, basing themselves
+on old-fashioned physiology, assume, though they may not always assert,
+that the sexual products are excretions, to be dealt with summarily like
+other excretions. That is an ancient view and it was accepted by such wise
+philosophers of old times as Montaigne and Sir Thomas More. It had,
+moreover, the hearty support of so eminent a theological authority as
+Luther, who on this ground preached early marriage to men and women alike.
+It is still a popular view, sometimes expressed in the crudest terms, and
+often by people who, not following Luther's example, use it to defend
+prostitution, though they generally exclude women from its operation, as a
+sex to whom it fails to apply and by whom it is not required.
+
+But on the other hand we have another stream of platitude. On this side
+there is usually little attempt either to deny or to affirm the theory of
+the opposing party, though they would contradict its conclusions. Their
+theory, if they have one, would usually seem to be that sexual activity is
+a response to stimulation from without or from within, so that if there is
+no stimulation there will be no sexual manifestation. They would preach,
+they tell us, a strenuous ideal; they would set up a wholesome dictate of
+hygiene. The formula put forward on this basis usually runs: Continence is
+not only harmless but beneficial. It is a formula which, in one form or
+another, has received apparently enthusiastic approval in many quarters,
+even from distinguished physicians. We need not be surprised. A
+proposition so large and general is not easy to deny, and is still more
+difficult to reverse; therefore it proves welcome to the
+people--especially the people occupying public and professional
+positions--who wish to find the path of least resistance, under pressure
+of a vigorous section of public opinion. Yet in its vagueness the
+proposition is a little disingenuous; it condescends to no definitions and
+no qualifications; it fails even to make clear how it is to be reconciled
+with any enthusiastic approval of marriage, for if continence is beautiful
+how can marriage make it cease to be so?
+
+Both these streams of feeling, it may be noted, sprang from a common
+source far back in the primitive human world. All the emanations of the
+human body, all the spontaneous manifestations of its activities, were
+mysterious and ominous to early man, pregnant with terror unless met with
+immense precautions and surrounded by careful ritual. The manifestations
+of sex were the least intelligible and the most spontaneous. Therefore the
+things of sex were those that most lent themselves to feelings of horror
+and awe, of impurity and of purity. They seemed so highly charged with
+magic potency that there were no things that men more sought to avoid, yet
+none to which they were impelled to give more thought. The manifold echoes
+of that primitive conception of sex, and all the violent reactions that
+were thus evolved and eventually bound up with the original impulse,
+compose the streams of tradition that feed our modern world in this matter
+and determine the ideas of purity that surround us.
+
+At the present day the crude theory of the sexual impulse held on one
+side, and the ignorant rejection of theory altogether on the other side,
+are beginning to be seen as both alike unjustified. We begin to find the
+grounds for a sounder theory. Not indeed that the problems of sex, which
+go so deeply into the whole personal and social life, can ever be settled
+exclusively upon physiological grounds. But we have done much to prepare
+even the loftiest Building of Love when we have attained a clear view of
+its biological basis.
+
+The progress of chemico-physiological research during recent years has now
+brought us to new ground for our building. Indeed the image might well be
+changed altogether, and it might be said that science has entirely
+transferred the drama of reproduction to a new stage with new actors.
+Therewith the immense emphasis placed on excretion, and the inevitable
+reaction that emphasis aroused, both alike disappear. The sexual
+protagonists are no longer at the surface but within the most secret
+recesses of the organism, and they appear to science under the name of
+Hormones or Internal Secretions, always at work within and never
+themselves condescending to appear at all. Those products of the sexual
+glands which in both sexes are cast out of the body, and at an immature
+stage of knowledge appeared to be excretions, are of primary reproductive
+importance, but, as regards the sexual constitution of the individual,
+they are of far less importance than the internal secretions of these very
+same glands. It is, however, by no means only the specifically sexual
+glands which thus exert a sexual influence within the organism. Other
+glands in the brain, the throat, and the abdomen,--such as the thyroid and
+the adrenals,--are also elaborating fermentative secretions to throw into
+the system. Their mutual play is so elaborate that it is only beginning
+to be understood. Some internal secretions stimulate, others inhibit, and
+the same secretions may under different conditions do either. This fact is
+the source of many degrees and varieties of energy and formative power in
+the organism. Taken altogether, the internal secretions are the forces
+which build up the man's and woman's distinctively sexual constitution:
+the special disposition and growth of hair, the relative development of
+breasts and pelvis, the characteristic differences in motor activity, the
+varying emotional desires and needs. It is in the complex play of these
+secretions that we now seek the explanation of all the peculiarities of
+sexual constitution, imperfect or one-sided physical and psychic
+development, the various approximations of the male to female bodily and
+emotional disposition, of the female to the male, all the numerous
+gradations that occur, naturally as we now see, between the complete man
+and the complete woman.
+
+When we turn the light of this new conception on to our old ideas of
+purity,--to the virtue or the vice, accordingly as we may have been
+pleased to consider it, of sexual abstinence,--we begin to see that those
+ideas need radical revision. They appear in a new light, their whole
+meaning is changed. No doubt it may be said they never had the validity
+they appeared to possess, even when we judge them by the crudest
+criterion, that of practice. Thus, while it is the rule for physicians to
+proclaim the advantages of sexual continence, there is no good reason to
+believe that they have themselves practised it in any eminent degree. A
+few years ago an inquiry among thirty-five distinguished physicians,
+chiefly German and Russian, showed that they were nearly all of opinion
+that continence is harmless, if not beneficial. But Meirowsky found by
+inquiry of eighty-six physicians, of much the same nationalities, that
+only one had himself been sexually abstinent before marriage. There seem
+to be no similar statistics for the English-speaking countries, where
+there exists a greater modesty--though not perhaps notably less need for
+it--in the making of such confessions. But if we turn to the allied
+profession which is strongly on the side of sexual abstinence, we find
+that among theological students, as has been shown in the United States,
+while prostitution may be infrequent, no temptation is so frequent or so
+potent, and in most cases so irresistible, as that to solitary sexual
+indulgence. Such is the actual attitude towards the two least ideal forms
+of sexual practice--as distinguished from mere theory--on the part of the
+two professions which most definitely pronounce in favour of continence.
+
+It is necessary, however, as will now be clearer, to set our net more
+widely. We must take into consideration every form and degree of sexual
+manifestation, normal and abnormal, gross and ethereal. When we do this,
+even cautiously and without going far afield, sexual abstinence is found
+to be singularly elusive. Rohleder, a careful and conscientious
+investigator, has asserted that such abstinence, in the true and complete
+sense, is absolutely non-existent, the genuine cases in which sexual
+phenomena of some kind or other fail to manifest themselves being simply
+cases of inborn lack of sexual sensibility. He met, indeed, a few people
+who seemed exceptions to the general rule, but, on better knowledge, he
+found that he was mistaken, and that so far from being absent in these
+people the sexual instinct was present even in its crudest shapes. The
+activity of sex is an activity that on the physical side is generated by
+the complex mechanism of the ductless glands and displayed in the whole
+organism, physical and psychic, of the individual, who cannot abolish that
+activity, although to some extent able to regulate the forms in which it
+is manifested, so that purity cannot be the abolition or even the
+indefinite suspension of sexual manifestations; it must be the wise and
+beautiful control of them.
+
+It is becoming clear that the old platitudes can no longer be maintained,
+and that if we wish to improve our morals we must first improve our
+knowledge.
+
+
+II
+
+We have seen that various popular beliefs and conventional assumptions
+concerning the sexual impulse can no longer be maintained. The sexual
+activities of the organism are not mere responses to stimulation, absent
+if we choose to apply no stimulus, never troubling us if we run away from
+them, harmless if we enclose them within a high wall. Nor do they
+constitute a mere excretion, or a mere appetite, which we can control by a
+crude system of hygiene and dietetics. We better understand the
+psycho-sexual constitution if we regard the motive power behind it as a
+dynamic energy, produced and maintained by a complex mechanism at certain
+inner foci of the body, and realise that whatever periodic explosive
+manifestations may take place at the surface, the primary motive source
+lies in the intimate recesses of the organism, while the outcome is the
+whole physical and spiritual energy of our being under those aspects which
+are most forcible and most aspiring and even most ethereal.
+
+This conception, we find, is now receiving an admirable and beautifully
+adequate physical basis in the researches of distinguished physiologists
+in various lands concerning the parts played by the ductless glands of the
+body, in sensitive equilibrium with each other, pouring out into the
+system stimulating and inhibiting hormones, which not only confer on the
+man's or woman's body those specific sexual characters which we admire but
+at the same time impart the special tone and fibre and polarity of
+masculinity or femininity to the psychic disposition. Yet, even before
+Brown-Séquard's first epoch-making suggestion had set physiologists to
+search for internal secretions, the insight of certain physicians on the
+medico-psychological side was independently leading towards the same
+dynamic conception. In the middle of the last century Anstie, an acute
+London physician, more or less vaguely realised the transformations of
+sexual energy into nervous disease and into artistic energy. James Hinton,
+whose genius rendered him the precursor of many modern ideas, had
+definitely grasped the dynamic nature of sexual activity, and daringly
+proposed to utilise it, not only as a solution of the difficulties of the
+personal life but for the revolutionary transformation of morality.[5] It
+was the wish to group together all the far-flung manifestations of the
+inner irresistible process of sexual activity that underlay my own
+conception of _auto-erotism_, or the spontaneous erotic impulse which
+arises from the organism apart from all definite external stimulation, to
+be manifested, or it may be transformed, in mere solitary physical sex
+activity, in dreams of the night, in day-dreams, in shapes of literature
+and art, in symptoms of nervous disorder such as some forms of hysteria,
+and even in the most exalted phases of mystical devotion. Since then, a
+more elaborate attempt to develop a similar dynamic conception of sexual
+activity has been made by Freud; and the psycho-analysts who have followed
+him, or sometimes diverged, have with endless subtlety, and courageous
+thoroughness, traced the long and sinuous paths of sexual energy in
+personality and in life, indeed in all the main manifestations of human
+activity.
+
+[5] "The man who separated the thought of chastity from Service and made
+it revolve round Self," wrote Hinton half a century ago in his
+unpublished MSS., "betrayed the human race." "The rule of Self," he
+wrote again, "has two forms: Self-indulgence and Self-virtue; and Nature
+has two weapons against it: pain and pleasure.... A restraint must
+always be put away when another's need can be served by putting it away;
+for so is restored to us the force by which Life is made.... How curious
+it seems! the true evil things are our _good_ things. Our thoughts of
+duty and goodness and chastity, those are the things that need to be
+altered and put aside; these are the barriers to true goodness.... I
+foresee the positive denial of _all_ positive morals, the removal of
+_all_ restrictions. I feel I do not know what 'license,' as we should
+term it, may not truly belong to the perfect state of Man. When there is
+no self surely there is no restriction; as we see there is none in
+Nature.... May we not say of marriage as St. Augustine said of God:
+'Rather would I, not finding, find Thee, than finding, not find
+Thee'?... 'Because we like' is the sole legitimate and perfect motive of
+human action.... If this is what Nature affirms then it will be what I
+believe." This dynamic conception of the sexual impulse, as a force
+that, under natural conditions, may be trusted to build up a new
+morality, obviously belongs to an indefinitely remote future. It is a
+force whose blade is two-edged, for while it strikes at unselfishness it
+also strikes at selfishness, and at present we cannot easily conceive a
+time when "there is no self"; we should be more disposed to regard it as
+a time when there is much humbug. Yet for the individual this conception
+of the constructive power of love retains much enlightenment and
+inspiration.
+
+It is important for us to note about this dynamic sexual energy in the
+constitution that while it is very firmly and organically rooted, and
+quite indestructible, it assumes very various shapes. On the physical side
+all the characters of sexual distinction and all the beauties of sexual
+adornment are wrought by the power furnished by the co-operating furnaces
+of the glands, and so also, on the psychic side, are emotions and impulses
+which range from the simplest longings for sensual contact to the most
+exalted rapture of union with the Infinite. Moreover, there is a certain
+degree of correlation between the physical and the psychic manifestation
+of sexual energy, and, to some extent, transformation is possible in the
+embodiment of that energy.
+
+A vague belief in the transformation of sexual energy has long been
+widespread. It is apparently shown in the idea that continence, as an
+economy in the expenditure of sexual force, may be practised to aid the
+physical and mental development, while folklore reveals various sayings in
+regard to the supposed influence of sexual abstinence in the causation of
+insanity. There is a certain underlying basis of reason in such beliefs,
+though in an unqualified form they cannot be accepted, for they take no
+account of the complexity of the factors involved, of the difficulty and
+often impossibility of effecting any complete transformation, either in a
+desirable or undesirable direction, and of the serious conflict which the
+process often involves. The psycho-analysts have helped us here. Whether
+or not we accept their elaborate and often shifting conceptions, they have
+emphasised and developed a psychological conception of sexual energy and
+its transformations, before only vaguely apprehended, which is now seen to
+harmonise with the modern physiological view.
+
+The old notion that sexual activity is merely a matter of the voluntary
+exercise, or abstinence from exercise, of the reproductive functions of
+adult persons has too long obstructed any clear vision of the fact that
+sexuality, in the wide and deep sense, is independent of the developments
+of puberty. This has long been accepted as an occasional and therefore
+abnormal fact, but we have to recognise that it is true, almost or quite
+normally, even of early childhood. No doubt we must here extend the word
+"sexuality"[6]--in what may well be considered an illegitimate way--to
+cover manifestations which in the usual sense are not sexual or are at
+most called "sexual perversions." But this extension has a certain
+justification in view of the fact that these manifestations can be seen to
+be definitely related to the ordinary adult forms of sexuality. However
+we define it, we have to recognise that the child takes the same kind of
+pleasure in those functions which are natural to his age as the adult is
+capable of taking in localised sexual functions, that he may weave ideas
+around such functions, sometimes cultivate their exercise from love of
+luxury, make them the basis of day-dreams which at puberty, when the
+ideals of adult life are ready to capture his sexual energy, he begins to
+grow ashamed of.
+
+[6] Perhaps, as applied to the period below puberty, it would be more
+exact to say "pseudo-sexuality." Matsumato has lately pointed out the
+significance of the fact that the interstitial testicular tissue,
+essential to the hormonic function of the testes, only becomes active at
+puberty.
+
+At this stage, indeed, we reach a crucial point, though it has usually
+been overlooked, in the lives of boys and girls, more especially those
+whose heredity may have been a little tainted or their upbringing a little
+twisted. For it is here that the transformation of energy and the
+resulting possibilities of conflict are wont to enter. In the harmoniously
+developing organism, one may say, there is at this period a gradual and
+easy transmutation of the childish pleasurable activities into adult
+activities, accompanied perhaps by a feeling of shame for the earlier
+feelings, though this quickly passes into a forgetfulness which often
+leads the adult far astray when he attempts to understand the psychic life
+of the child. The childish manifestations, it must be remarked, are not
+necessarily unwholesome; they probably perform a valuable function and
+develop budding sexual emotions, just as the petals of flowers are
+developed in pale and contorted shapes beneath the enveloping sheaths.
+
+But in our human life the transmutation is often not so easy as in
+flowers. Normally, indeed, the adolescent transformations of sex are so
+urgent and so manifold--now definite sensual desire, now muscular impulses
+of adventure, now emotional aspirations in the sphere of art or
+religion--that they easily overwhelm and absorb all its vaguer and more
+twisted manifestations in childhood. Yet it may happen that by some
+aberration of internal development or of external influence this
+conversion of energy may at one point or another fail to be completely
+effected. Then some fragment of infantile sexuality survives, in rare
+cases to turn all the adult faculties to its service and become reckless
+and triumphant, in minor and more frequent cases to be subordinated and
+more or less repressed into the subconscious sphere by voluntary or even
+involuntary and unconscious effort. Then we may have conflict, which, when
+it works happily, exerts a fortifying and ennobling influence on
+character, when more unhappily a disturbing influence which may even lead
+to conditions of definite nervous disorder.
+
+The process by which this fundamental sexual energy is elevated from
+elementary and primitive forms into complex and developed forms is termed
+sublimation, a term, originally used for the process of raising by heat a
+solid substance to the state of vapour, which was applied even by such
+early writers as Drayton and Davies in a metaphorical and spiritual
+sense.[7] In the sexual sphere sublimation is of vital importance because
+it comes into question throughout the whole of life, and our relation to
+it must intimately affect our conception of morality. The element of
+athletic asceticism which is a part of all virility, and is found
+even--indeed often in a high degree--among savages, has its main moral
+justification as one aid to sublimation. Throughout life sublimation acts
+by transforming some part at all events of the creative sexual energy from
+its elementary animal manifestations into more highly individual and
+social manifestations, or at all events into finer forms of sexual
+activity, forms that seem to us more beautiful and satisfy us more widely.
+Purity, we thus come to see is, in one aspect, the action of sublimation,
+not abolishing sexual activity, but lifting it into forms of which our
+best judgment may approve.
+
+[7] We may gather the history of the term from the _Oxford Dictionary_.
+Bodies, said Davies, are transformed to spirit "by sublimation strange,"
+and Ben Jonson in _Cynthia's Revels_ spoke of a being "sublimated and
+refined"; Purchas and Jackson, early in the same seventeenth century,
+referred to religion as "sublimating" human nature, and Jeremy Taylor, a
+little later, to "subliming" marriage into a sacrament; Shaftesbury,
+early in the eighteenth century, spoke of human nature being "sublimated
+by a sort of spiritual chemists" and Welton, a little later, of "a love
+sublimate and refined," while, finally, and altogether in our modern
+sense, Peacock in 1816 in his _Headlong Hall_ referred to "that
+enthusiastic sublimation which is the source of greatness and energy."
+
+We must not suppose--as is too often assumed--that sublimation can be
+carried out easily, completely, or even with unmixed advantage. If it were
+so, certainly the old-fashioned moralist would be confronted by few
+difficulties, but we have ample reason to believe that it is not so. It is
+with sexual energy, well observes Freud, who yet attaches great importance
+to sublimation, as it is with heat in our machines: only a certain
+proportion can be transformed into work. Or, as it is put by Löwenfeld,
+who is not a constructive philosopher but a careful and cautious medical
+investigator, the advantages of sublimation are not received in specially
+high degree by those who permanently deny to their sexual impulse every
+natural direct relief. The celibate Catholic clergy, notwithstanding their
+heroic achievements in individual cases, can scarcely be said to display a
+conspicuous excess of intellectual energy, on the whole, over the
+non-celibate Protestant clergy; or, if we compare the English clergy
+before and after the Protestant Reformation, though the earlier period may
+reveal more daring and brilliant personages, the whole intellectual output
+of the later Church may claim comparison with that of the earlier Church.
+There are clearly other factors at work besides sublimation, and even
+sublimation may act most potently, not when the sexual activities sink or
+are driven into a tame and monotonous subordination, but rather when they
+assume a splendid energy which surges into many channels. Yet sublimation
+is a very real influence, not only in its more unconscious and profound
+operations, but in its more immediate and temporary applications, as part
+of an athletic discipline, acting best perhaps when it acts most
+automatically, to utilise the motor energy of the organism in the
+attainment of any high physical or psychic achievement.
+
+We have to realise, however, that these transmutations do not only take
+place by way of a sublimation of sexual energy, but also by way of a
+degradation of that energy. The new form of energy produced, that is to
+say, may not be of a beneficial kind; it may be of a mischievous kind, a
+form of perversion or disease. Sexual self-denial, instead of leading to
+sublimation, may lead to nervous disorder when the erotic tension, failing
+to find a natural outlet and not sublimated to higher erotic or non-erotic
+ends in the real world, is transmuted into an unreal dreamland, thus
+undergoing what Jung terms introversion; while there are also the people
+already referred to, in whom immature childish sexuality persists into an
+adult stage of development it is no longer altogether in accord with, so
+that conflict, with various possible trains of nervous symptoms, may
+result. Disturbances and conflicts in the emotional sexual field may, we
+know, in these and similar ways become transformed into physical symptoms
+of disorder which can be seen to have a precise symbolic relationship to
+definite events in the patient's emotional history, while fits of nervous
+terror, or anxiety-neurosis, may frequently be regarded as a degradation
+of thwarted or disturbed sexual energy, manifesting its origin by
+presenting a picture of sexual excitation transposed into a non-sexual
+shape of an entirely useless or mischievous character.
+
+Thus, to sum up, we may say that the sexual energy of the organism is a
+mighty force, automatically generated throughout life. Under healthy
+conditions that force is transmuted in more or less degree, but never
+entirely, into forms that further the development of the individual and
+the general ends of life. These transformations are to some extent
+automatic, to some extent within the control of personal guidance. But
+there are limits to such guidance, for the primitive human personality can
+never be altogether rendered an artificial creature of civilisation. When
+these limits are reached the transmutation of sexual energy may become
+useless or even dangerous, and we fail to attain the exquisite flower of
+Purity.
+
+
+III
+
+It may seem that in setting forth the nature of the sexual impulse in the
+light of modern biology and psychology, I have said but little of purity
+and less of morality. Yet that is as it should be. We must first be
+content to see how the machine works and watch the wheels go round. We
+must understand before we can pretend to control; in the natural world, as
+Bacon long ago said, we can only command by obeying. Moreover, in this
+field Nature's order is far older and more firmly established than our
+civilised human morality. In our arrogance we often assume that Morality
+is the master of Nature. Yet except when it is so elementary or
+fundamental as to be part of Nature, it is but a guide, and a guide that
+is only a child, so young, so capricious, that in every age its wayward
+hand has sought to pull Nature in a different direction. Even only in
+order to guide we must first see and know.
+
+We realise that never more than when we observe the distinction which
+conventional sex-morals so often makes between men and women. Failing to
+find in women exactly the same kind of sexual emotions, as they find in
+themselves, men have concluded that there are none there at all. So man
+has regarded himself as the sexual animal, and woman as either the passive
+object of his adoring love or the helpless victim of his degrading lust,
+in either case as a being who, unlike man, possessed an innocent "purity"
+by nature, without any need for the trouble of acquiring it. Of woman as a
+real human being, with sexual needs and sexual responsibilities, morality
+has often known nothing. It has been content to preach restraint to man,
+an abstract and meaningless restraint even if it were possible. But when
+we have regard to the actual facts of life, we can no longer place virtue
+in a vacuum. Women are just as apt as men to be afflicted by the petty
+jealousies and narrownesses of the crude sexual impulse; women just as
+much as men need the perpetual sublimation of erotic desire into forms of
+more sincere purity, of larger harmony, in gaining which ends all the
+essential ends of morality are alone gained. The delicate adjustment of
+the needs of each sex to the needs of the other sex to the end of what
+Chaucer called fine loving, the adjustment of the needs of both sexes to
+the larger ends of fine living, may well furnish a perpetual moral
+discipline which extends its fortifying influence to men and women alike.
+
+It is this universality of sexual emotion, blending in its own mighty
+stream, as is now realised, many other currents of emotion, even the
+parental and the filial, and traceable even in childhood,--the wide
+efflorescence of an energy constantly generated by a vital internal
+mechanism,--which renders vain all attempts either to suppress or to
+ignore the problem of sex, however immensely urgent we might foolishly
+imagine such attempts to be. Even the history of the early Christian
+ascetics in Egypt, as recorded in the contemporary _Paradise_ of
+Palladius, illustrates the futility of seeking to quench the unquenchable,
+the flame of fire which is life itself. These "athletes of the Lord" were
+under the best possible conditions for the conquest of lust; they had been
+driven into the solitude of the desert by a genuine deeply-felt impulse,
+they could regulate their lives as they would, and they possessed an
+almost inconceivable energy of resolution. They were prepared to live on
+herbs, even to eat grass, and to undertake any labour of self-denial. They
+were so scrupulous that we hear of a holy man who would even efface a
+woman's footprints in the sand lest a brother might thereby be led into
+thoughts of evil. Yet they were perpetually tempted to seductive visions
+and desires, even after a monastic life of forty years, and the women seem
+to have been not less liable to yield to temptation than the men.
+
+It may be noted that in the most perfect saints there has not always been
+a complete suppression of the sexual impulse even on the normal plane, nor
+even, in some cases, the attempt at such complete suppression. In the
+early days of Christianity the exercise of chastity was frequently
+combined with a close and romantic intimacy of affection between the
+sexes which shocked austere moralists. Even in the eleventh century we
+find that the charming and saintly Robert of Arbrissel, founder of the
+order of Fontevrault, would often sleep with his nuns, notwithstanding the
+remonstrances of pious friends who thought he was displaying too heroic a
+manifestation of continence, failing to understand that he was effecting a
+sweet compromise with continence. If, moreover, we consider the rarest and
+finest of the saints we usually find that in their early lives there was a
+period of full expansion of the organic activities in which all the
+natural impulses had full play. This was the case with the two greatest
+and most influential saints of the Christian Church, St. Augustine and St.
+Francis of Assisi, absolutely unlike as they were in most other respects.
+Sublimation, we see again and again, is limited, and the best developments
+of the spiritual life are not likely to come about by the rigid attempt to
+obtain a complete transmutation of sexual energy.
+
+The old notion that any strict attempt to adhere to sexual abstinence is
+beset by terrible risks, insanity and so forth, has no foundation, at all
+events where we are concerned with reasonably sound and healthy people.
+But it is a very serious error to suppose that the effort to achieve
+complete and prolonged sexual abstinence is without any bad results at
+all, physical or psychic, either in men or women who are normal and
+healthy. This is now generally recognised everywhere, except in the
+English-speaking countries, where the supposed interests of a prudish
+morality often lead to a refusal to look facts in the face. As Professor
+Näcke, a careful and cautious physician, stated shortly before his death,
+a few years ago, the opinion that sexual abstinence has no bad effects is
+not to-day held by a single authority on questions of sex; the fight is
+only concerned with the nature and degree of the bad effects which, in
+Näcke's belief--and he was doubtless right--are never of a gravely serious
+character.
+
+Yet we have also to remember that not only, as we have seen, is the effort
+to achieve complete abstinence--which we ignorantly term "purity"--futile,
+since we are concerned with a force which is being constantly generated
+within the organism, but in the effort to achieve it we are abusing a
+great source of beneficent energy. We lose more than half of what we might
+gain when we cover it up, and try to push it back, to produce, it may be,
+not harmonious activity in the world, but merely internal confusion and
+distortion, and perhaps the paralysis of half the soul's energy. The
+sexual activities of the organism, we cannot too often repeat, constitute
+a mighty source of energy which we can never altogether repress though by
+wise guidance we may render it an aid not only to personal development
+and well-being but to the moral betterment of the world. The attraction of
+sex, according to a superstition which reaches far back into antiquity, is
+a baleful comet pointing to destruction, rather than a mighty star to
+which we may harness our chariot. It may certainly be either, and which it
+is likely to become depends largely on our knowledge and our power of
+self-guidance.
+
+In old days when, as we have seen, tradition, aided by the most fantastic
+superstitions, insisted on the baleful aspects of sex, the whole emphasis
+was placed against passion. Since knowledge and self-guidance, without
+which passion is likely to be in fact pernicious, were then usually
+absent, the emphasis was needed, and when Böhme, the old mystic, declared
+that the art of living is to "harness our fiery energies to the service of
+the light," it has recently been even maintained that he was the solitary
+pioneer of our modern doctrines. But the ages in which ill-regulated
+passion exceeded--ages at least full of vitality and energy--gave place to
+a more anĉmic society. To-day the conditions are changed, even reversed.
+Moral maxims that were wholesome in feudal days are deadly now. We are in
+no danger of suffering from too much vitality, from too much energy in the
+explosive splendour of our social life. We possess, moreover, knowledge
+in plenty and self-restraint in plenty, even in excess, however wrongly
+they may sometimes be applied. It is passion, more passion and fuller,
+that we need. The moralist who bans passion is not of our time; his place
+these many years is with the dead. For we know what happens in a world
+when those who ban passion have triumphed. When Love is suppressed Hate
+takes its place. The least regulated orgies of Love grow innocent beside
+the orgies of Hate. When nations that might well worship one another cut
+one another's throats, when Cruelty and Self-righteousness and Lying and
+Injustice and all the Powers of Destruction rule the human heart, the
+world is devastated, the fibre of the whole organism, of society grows
+flaccid, and all the ideals of civilisation are debased. If the world is
+not now sick of Hate we may be sure it never will be; so whatever may
+happen to the world let us remember that the individual is still left, to
+carry on the tasks of Love, to do good even in an evil world.
+
+It is more passion and ever more that we need if we are to undo the work
+of Hate, if we are to add to the gaiety and splendour of life, to the sum
+of human achievement, to the aspiration of human ecstasy. The things that
+fill men and women with beauty and exhilaration, and spur them to actions
+beyond themselves, are the things that are now needed. The entire
+intrinsic purification of the soul, it was held by the great Spanish
+Jesuit theologian, Suarez, takes place at the moment when, provided the
+soul is of good disposition, it sees God; he meant after death, but for us
+the saying is symbolic of the living truth. It is only in the passion of
+facing the naked beauty of the world and its naked truth that we can win
+intrinsic purity. Not all, indeed, who look upon the face of God can live.
+It is not well that they should live. It is only the metals that can be
+welded in the fire of passion to finer services that the world needs. It
+would be well that the rest should be lost in those flames. That indeed
+were a world fit to perish, wherein the moralist had set up the ignoble
+maxim: Safety first.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE OBJECTS OF MARRIAGE
+
+
+What are the legitimate objects of marriage? We know that many people seek
+to marry for ends that can scarcely be called legitimate, that men may
+marry to obtain a cheap domestic drudge or nurse, and that women may marry
+to be kept when they are tired of keeping themselves. These objects in
+marriage may or may not be moral, but in any case they are scarcely its
+legitimate ends. We are here concerned to ascertain those ends of marriage
+which are legitimate when we take the highest ground as moral and
+civilised men and women living in an advanced state of society and
+seeking, if we can, to advance that state of society still further.
+
+The primary end of marriage is to beget and bear offspring, and to rear
+them until they are able to take care of themselves. On that basis Man is
+at one with all the mammals and most of the birds. If, indeed, we
+disregard the originally less essential part of this end--that is to say,
+the care and tending of the young--this end of marriage is not only the
+primary but usually the sole end of sexual intercourse in the whole
+mammal world. As a natural instinct, its achievement involves
+gratification and well-being, but this bait of gratification is merely a
+device of Nature's and not in itself an end having any useful function at
+the periods when conception is not possible. This is clearly indicated by
+the fact that among animals the female only experiences sexual desire at
+the season of impregnation, and that desire ceases as soon as impregnation
+takes place, though this is only in a few species true of the male,
+obviously because, if his sexual desire and aptitude were confined to so
+brief a period, the chances of the female meeting the right male at the
+right moment would be too seriously diminished; so that the attentive and
+inquisitive attitude towards the female by the male animal--which we may
+often think we see still traceable in the human species--is not the
+outcome of lustfulness for personal gratification ("wantonly to satisfy
+carnal lusts and appetites like brute beasts," as the Anglican Prayer Book
+incorrectly puts it) but implanted by Nature for the benefit of the female
+and the attainment of the primary object of procreation. This primary
+object we may term the animal end of marriage.
+
+This object remains not only the primary but even the sole end of marriage
+among the lower races of mankind generally. The erotic idea, in its deeper
+sense, that is to say the element of love, arose very slowly in mankind.
+It is found, it is true, among some lower races, and it appears that some
+tribes possess a word for the joy of love in a purely psychic sense. But
+even among European races the evolution was late. The Greek poets, except
+the latest, showed little recognition of love as an element of marriage.
+Theognis compared marriage with cattle-breeding. The Romans of the
+Republic took much the same view. Greeks and Romans alike regarded
+breeding as the one recognisable object of marriage; any other object was
+mere wantonness and had better, they thought, be carried on outside
+marriage. Religion, which preserves so many ancient and primitive
+conceptions of life, has consecrated this conception also, and
+Christianity--though, as I will point out later, it has tended to enlarge
+the conception--at the outset only offered the choice between celibacy on
+the one hand and on the other marriage for the production of offspring.
+
+Yet, from, an early period in human history, a secondary function of
+sexual intercourse had been slowly growing up to become one of the great
+objects of marriage. Among animals, it may be said, and even sometimes in
+man, the sexual impulse, when once aroused, makes but a short and swift
+circuit through the brain to reach its consummation. But as the brain and
+its faculties develop, powerfully aided indeed by the very difficulties
+of the sexual life, the impulse for sexual union has to traverse ever
+longer, slower, more painful paths, before it reaches--and sometimes it
+never reaches--its ultimate object. This means that sex gradually becomes
+intertwined with all the highest and subtlest human emotions and
+activities, with the refinements of social intercourse, with high
+adventure in every sphere, with art, with religion. The primitive animal
+instinct, having the sole end of procreation, becomes on its way to that
+end the inspiring stimulus to all those psychic energies which in
+civilisation we count most precious. This function is thus, we see, a
+by-product. But, as we know, even in our human factories, the by-product
+is sometimes more valuable than the product. That is so as regards the
+functional products of human evolution. The hand was produced out of the
+animal forelimb with the primary end of grasping the things we materially
+need, but as a by-product the hand has developed the function of making
+and playing the piano and the violin, and that secondary functional
+by-product of the hand we account, even as measured by the rough test of
+money, more precious, however less materially necessary, than its primary
+function. It is, however, only in rare and gifted natures that transformed
+sexual energy becomes of supreme value for its own sake without ever
+attaining the normal physical outlet. For the most part the by-product
+accompanies the product, throughout, thus adding a secondary, yet
+peculiarly sacred and specially human, object of marriage to its primary
+animal object. This may be termed the spiritual object of marriage.
+
+By the term "spiritual" we are not to understand any mysterious and
+supernatural qualities. It is simply a convenient name, in distinction
+from animal, to cover all those higher mental and emotional processes
+which in human evolution are ever gaining greater power. It is needless to
+enumerate the constituents of this spiritual end of sexual intercourse,
+for everyone is entitled to enumerate them differently and in different
+order. They include not only all that makes love a gracious and beautiful
+erotic art, but the whole element of pleasure in so far as pleasure is
+more than a mere animal gratification. Our ancient ascetic traditions
+often make us blind to the meaning of pleasure. We see only its
+possibilities of evil and not its mightiness for good. We forget that, as
+Romain Rolland says, "Joy is as holy as Pain." No one has insisted so much
+on the supreme importance of the element of pleasure in the spiritual ends
+of sex as James Hinton. Rightly used, he declares, Pleasure is "the Child
+of God," to be recognised as a "mighty storehouse of force," and he
+pointed out the significant fact that in the course of human progress its
+importance increases rather than diminishes.[8] While it is perfectly true
+that sexual energy may be in large degree arrested, and transformed into
+intellectual and moral forms, yet it is also true that pleasure itself,
+and above all, sexual pleasure, wisely used and not abused, may prove the
+stimulus and liberator of our finest and most exalted activities. It is
+largely this remarkable function of sexual pleasure which is decisive in
+settling the argument of those who claim that continence is the only
+alternative to the animal end of marriage. That argument ignores the
+liberating and harmonising influences, giving wholesome balance and sanity
+to the whole organism, imparted by a sexual union which is the outcome of
+the psychic as well as physical needs. There is, further, in the
+attainment of the spiritual end of marriage, much more than the benefit of
+each individual separately. There is, that is to say, the effect on the
+union itself. For through harmonious sex relationships a deeper spiritual
+unity is reached than can possibly be derived from continence in or out of
+marriage, and the marriage association becomes an apter instrument in the
+service of the world. Apart from any sexual craving, the complete
+spiritual contact of two persons who love each other can only be attained
+through some act of rare intimacy. No act can be quite so intimate as the
+sexual embrace. In its accomplishment, for all who have reached a
+reasonably human degree of development, the communion of bodies becomes
+the communion of souls. The outward and visible sign has been the
+consummation of an inward and spiritual grace. "I would base all my sex
+teaching to children and young people on the beauty and sacredness of
+sex," wrote a distinguished woman; "sex intercourse is the great sacrament
+of life, he that eateth and drinketh unworthily eateth and drinketh his
+own damnation; but it may be the most beautiful sacrament between two
+souls who have no thought of children."[9] To many the idea of a sacrament
+seems merely ecclesiastical, but that is a misunderstanding. The word
+"sacrament" is the ancient Roman name of a soldier's oath of military
+allegiance, and the idea, in the deeper sense, existed long before
+Christianity, and has ever been regarded as the physical sign of the
+closest possible union with some great spiritual reality. From our modern
+standpoint we may say, with James Hinton, that the sexual embrace,
+worthily understood, can only be compared with music and with prayer.
+"Every true lover," it has been well said by a woman, "knows this, and the
+worth of any and every relationship can be judged by its success in
+reaching, or failing to reach, this standpoint."[10]
+
+[8] Mrs. Havelock Ellis, _James Hinton: A Sketch_, Ch. IV.
+
+[9] Olive Schreiner in a personal letter.
+
+[10] Mrs. Havelock Ellis, _James Hinton_, p. 180.
+
+I have mentioned how the Church--in part influenced by that clinging to
+primitive conceptions which always marks religions and in part by its
+ancient traditions of asceticism--tended to insist mainly, if not
+exclusively, on the animal object of marriage. It sought to reduce sex to
+a minimum because the pagans magnified sex; it banned pleasure because the
+Christian's path on earth was the way of the Cross; and even if
+theologians accepted the idea of a "Sacrament of Nature" they could only
+allow it to operate when the active interference of the priest was
+impossible, though it must in justice be said that, before the Council of
+Trent, the Western Church recognised that the sacrament of marriage was
+effected entirely by the act of the two celebrants themselves and not by
+the priest. Gradually, however, a more reasonable and humane opinion crept
+into the Church. Intercourse outside the animal end of marriage was indeed
+a sin, but it became merely a venial sin. The great influence of St.
+Augustine was on the side of allowing much freedom to intercourse outside
+the aim of procreation. At the Reformation, John à Lasco, a Catholic
+Bishop who became a Protestant and settled in England, laid it down,
+following various earlier theologians, that the object of marriage,
+besides offspring, was to serve as a "sacrament of consolation" to the
+united couple, and that view was more or less accepted by the founders of
+the Protestant churches. It is the generally accepted Protestant view
+to-day.[11] The importance of the spiritual end of intercourse in
+marriage, alike for the higher development of each member of the couple
+and for the intimacy and stability of their union, is still more
+emphatically set forth by the more advanced thinkers of to-day.
+
+[11] It is well set forth by the Rev. H. Northcote in his excellent
+book, _Christianity and Sex Problems_.
+
+There is something pathetic in the spectacle of those among us who are
+still only able to recognise the animal end of marriage, and who point to
+the example of the lower animals--among whom the biological conditions are
+entirely different--as worthy of our imitation. It has taken God--or
+Nature, if we will--unknown millions of years of painful struggle to
+evolve Man, and to raise the human species above that helpless bondage to
+reproduction which marks the lower animals. But on these people it has all
+been wasted. They are at the animal stage still. They have yet to learn
+the A.B.C. of love. A representative of these people in the person of an
+Anglican bishop, the Bishop of Southwark, appeared as a witness before the
+National Birth-Rate Commission which, a few years ago, met in London to
+investigate the decline of the birth-rate. He declared that procreation is
+the sole legitimate object of marriage and that intercourse for any other
+end was a degrading act of mere "self-gratification." This declaration
+had the interesting result of evoking the comments of many members of the
+Commission, formed of representative men and women with various
+stand-points--Protestant, Catholic, and other--and it is notable that
+while not one identified himself with the Bishop's opinion, several
+decisively opposed that opinion, as contrary to the best beliefs of both
+ancient and modern times, as representing a low and not a high moral
+standpoint, and as involving the notion that the whole sexual activity of
+an individual should be reduced to perhaps two or three effective acts of
+intercourse in a lifetime. Such a notion obviously cannot be carried into
+general practice, putting aside the question as to whether it would be
+desirable, and it may be added that it would have the further result of
+shutting out from the life of love altogether all those persons who, for
+whatever reason, feel that it is their duty to refrain from having
+children at all. It is the attitude of a handful of Pharisees seeking to
+thrust the bulk of mankind into Hell. All this confusion and evil comes of
+the blindness which cannot know that, beyond the primary animal end of
+propagation in marriage, there is a secondary but more exalted spiritual
+end.
+
+It is needless to insist how intimately that secondary end of marriage is
+bound up with the practice of birth-control. Without birth-control,
+indeed, it could frequently have no existence at all, and even at the
+best seldom be free from disconcerting possibilities fatal to its very
+essence. Against these disconcerting possibilities is often placed, on the
+other side, the un-ĉsthetic nature of the contraceptives associated with
+birth-control. Yet, it must be remembered, they are of a part with the
+whole of our civilised human life. We at no point enter the spiritual save
+through the material. Forel has in this connection compared the use of
+contraceptives to the use of eye-glasses. Eye-glasses are equally
+un-ĉsthetic, yet they are devices, based on Nature, wherewith to
+supplement the deficiencies of Nature. However in themselves un-ĉsthetic,
+for those who need them they make the ĉsthetic possible. Eye-glasses and
+contraceptives alike are a portal to the spiritual world for many who,
+without them, would find that world largely a closed book.
+
+Birth-control is effecting, and promising to effect, many functions in our
+social life. By furnishing the means to limit the size of families, which
+would otherwise be excessive, it confers the greatest benefit on the
+family and especially on the mother. By rendering easily possible a
+selection in parentage and the choice of the right time and circumstances
+for conception it is, again, the chief key to the eugenic improvement of
+the race. There are many other benefits, as is now generally becoming
+clear, which will be derived from the rightly applied practice of
+birth-control. To many of us it is not the least of these that
+birth-control effects finally the complete liberation of the spiritual
+object of marriage.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+HUSBANDS AND WIVES
+
+
+It has always been common to discuss the psychology of women. The
+psychology of men has usually been passed over, whether because it is too
+simple or too complicated. But the marriage question to-day is much less
+the wife-problem than the husband-problem. Women in their personal and
+social activities have been slowly expanding along lines which are now
+generally accepted. But there has been no marked change of responsive
+character in the activities of men. Hence a defective adjustment of men
+and women, felt in all sorts of subtle as well as grosser ways, most felt
+when they are husband and wife, and sometimes becoming acute.
+
+It is necessary to make clear that, as is here assumed at the outset,
+"man" and "husband" are not quite the same thing, even when they refer to
+the same person. No doubt that is also true of "woman" and "wife." A woman
+in her quality as woman may be a different kind of person from what she is
+in her function as wife. But in the case of a man the distinction is more
+marked. One may know a man well in the world as a man and not know him at
+all in his home as a husband; not necessarily that he is unfavourably
+revealed in the latter capacity. It is simply that he is different.
+
+The explanation is not really far to seek. A man in the world is in vital
+response to the influences around him. But a husband in the home is
+playing a part which was created for him long centuries before he was
+born. He is falling into a convention, which, indeed, was moulded to fit
+many masculine human needs but has become rigidly traditionalised. Thus
+the part no longer corresponds accurately to the player's nature nor to
+the circumstances under which it has to be played.
+
+In the marriage system which has prevailed in our world for several
+thousand years, a certain hierarchy, or sacred order in authority, has
+throughout been recognised. The family has been regarded as a small State
+of which the husband and father is head. Classic paganism and Christianity
+differed on many points, but they were completely at one on this. The
+Roman system was on a patriarchal basis and continued to be so
+theoretically even when in practise it came to allow great independence to
+the wife. Christianity, although it allowed complete spiritual freedom to
+the individual, introduced no fundamentally new theory of the family, and,
+indeed, re-inforced the old theory by regarding the family as a little
+church of which the husband was the head. Just as Christ is the head of
+the Church, St. Paul repeatedly asserted, so the husband is the head of
+the wife; therefore, as it was constantly argued during the Middle Ages, a
+man is bound to rule his wife. St. Augustine, the most influential of
+Christian Fathers, even said that a wife should be proud to consider
+herself as the servant of her husband, his _ancilla_, a word that had in
+it the suggestion of slave. That was the underlying assumption throughout
+the Middle Ages, for the Northern Germanic peoples, having always been
+accustomed to wife-purchase before their conversion, had found it quite
+easy to assimilate the Christian view. Protestantism, even Puritanism with
+its associations of spiritual revolt, so far from modifying the accepted
+attitude, strengthened it, for they found authority for all social
+organisation in the Bible, and the Bible revealed an emphatic predominance
+of the Jewish husband, who possessed essential rights to which the wife
+had no claim. Milton, who had the poet's sensitiveness to the loveliness
+of woman, and the lonely man's feeling for the solace of her society, was
+yet firmly assured of the husband's superiority over his wife. He has
+indeed furnished the classical picture of it in Adam and Eve,
+
+    "He for God only, she for God in him,"
+
+and to that God she owed "subjection," even though she might qualify it
+by "sweet reluctant amorous delay." This was completely in harmony with
+the legal position of the wife. As a subject she was naturally in
+subjection; she owed her husband the same loyalty as a subject owes the
+sovereign; her disloyalty to him was termed a minor form of treason; if
+she murdered him the crime was legally worse than murder and she rendered
+herself liable to be burnt.
+
+We see that all the influences on our civilisation, religious and secular,
+southern and northern, have combined to mould the underlying bony
+structure of our family system in such a way that, however it may appear
+softened and disguised on the surface, the husband is the head and the
+wife subject to him. We must not be supposed hereby to deny that the wife
+has had much authority, many privileges, considerable freedom, and in
+individual cases much opportunity to domineer, whatever superiority custom
+or brute strength may have given the husband. There are henpecked
+husbands, it has been remarked, even in aboriginal Australia. It is
+necessary to avoid the error of those enthusiasts for the emancipation of
+women who, out of their eager faith in the future of women, used to
+describe her past as one of scarcely mitigated servitude and hardship. If
+women had not constantly succeeded in overcoming or eluding the
+difficulties that beset them in the past, it would be foolish to cherish
+any faith in their future. It must, moreover, be remembered that the very
+constitution of that ecclesiastico-feudal hierarchy which made the husband
+supreme over the wife, also made the wife jointly with her husband supreme
+over their children and over their servants. The Middle Ages, alike in
+England and in France, as doubtless in Christendom generally, accepted the
+rule laid down in Gratian's _Decretum_, the great mediĉval text-book of
+Canon Law, that "the husband may chastise his wife temperately, for she is
+of his household," but the wife might chastise her daughters and her
+servants, and she sometimes exercised that right in ways that we should
+nowadays think scarcely temperate.
+
+If we seek to observe how the system worked some five hundred years ago
+when it had not yet become, as it is to-day, both weakened and disguised,
+we cannot do better than turn to the _Paston Letters_, the most
+instructive documents we possess concerning the domestic life of excellent
+yet fairly average people of the upper middle class in England in the
+fifteenth century. Marriage was still frankly and fundamentally (as it was
+in the following century and less frankly later) a commercial transaction.
+The wooer, when he had a wife in view, stated as a matter of course that
+he proposed to "deal" in the matter; it was quite recognised on both sides
+that love and courtship must depend on whether the "deal" came off
+satisfactorily. John Paston approached Sir Thomas Brews, through a third
+person, with a view to negotiate a marriage with his daughter Margery. She
+was willing, even eager, and while the matter was still uncertain she
+wrote him a letter on Valentine's Day, addressing him as "Right reverent
+and worshipful and my right well-beloved Valentine," to tell him that it
+was impossible for her father to offer a larger dowry than he had already
+promised. "If that you could be content with that good, and my poor
+person, I would be the merriest maiden on ground." In his first
+letter--boldly written, he says, without her knowledge or license--he
+addresses her simply as "Mistress," and assures her that "I am and will be
+yours and at your commandment in every wise during my life." A few weeks
+later, addressing him as "Right worshipful master," she calls him "mine
+own sweetheart," and ends up, as she frequently does, "your servant and
+bedeswoman." Some months later, a few weeks after marriage, she addresses
+her husband in the correct manner of the time as "Right reverent and
+worshipful husband," asking him to buy her a gown as she is weary of
+wearing her present one, it is so cumbrous. Five years later she refers to
+"all" the babies, and writes in haste: "Right reverent and worshipful Sir,
+in my most humble wise I recommend me unto you as lowly as I can," etc.,
+though she adds in a postscript: "Please you to send for me for I think
+long since I lay in your arms." If we turn to another wife of the Paston
+family, a little earlier in the century, Margaret Paston, whose husband's
+name also was John, we find the same attitude even more distinctly
+expressed. She always addressed him in her most familiar letters, showing
+affectionate concern for his welfare, as "Right reverent and worshipful
+husband" or "Right worshipful master." It is seldom that he writes to her
+at all, but when he writes the superscription is simply "To my mistress
+Paston," or "my cousin," with little greeting at either beginning or end.
+Once only, with unexampled effusion, he writes to her as "My own dear
+sovereign lady" and signs himself "Your true and trusting husband."[12]
+
+[12] We see just the same formulas in the fifteenth century letters of
+the Stonor family (_Stonor Letters and Papers_, Camden Society), though
+in these letters we seem often to find a lighter and more playful touch
+than was common among the Pastons. I may refer here to Dr. Powell's
+learned and well written book (with which I was not acquainted when I
+wrote this chapter), _English Domestic Relations 1487-1653_ (Columbia
+University Press).
+
+If we turn to France the relation of the wife to her husband was the same,
+or even more definitely dependent, for he occupied the place of father to
+her as well as of husband and sovereign, in this respect carrying on a
+tradition of Roman Law. She was her husband's "wife and subject"; she
+signed herself "Vostre humble obéissante fille et amye." If also we turn
+to the _Book of the Chevalier de la Tour-Landry_ in Anjou, written at the
+end of the fourteenth century, we find a picture of the relations of women
+to men in marriage comparable to that presented in the _Paston Letters_,
+though of a different order. This book was, as we know, written for the
+instruction of his daughters by a Knight who seems to have been a fairly
+average man of his time in his beliefs, and in character, as he has been
+described, probably above it, "a man of the world, a Christian, a parent,
+and a gentleman." His book is full of interesting light on the customs and
+manners of his day, though it is mainly a picture of what the writer
+thought ought to be rather than what always was. Herein the Knight is
+sagacious and moderate, much of his advice is admirably sound for every
+age. He is less concerned with affirming the authority of husbands than
+with assuring the happiness and well-being of his dearly loved daughters.
+But he clearly finds this bound up with the recognition of the authority
+of the husband, and the demands he makes are fairly concordant with the
+relationships we see established among the Pastons. The Knight abounds in
+illustrations, from Lot's daughters down to his own time, for the example
+or the warning of his daughters. The ideal he holds up to them is strictly
+domestic and in a sense conventional. He puts the matter on practical
+rather than religious or legal grounds, and his fundamental assumption is
+"that no woman ought ever to thwart or refuse to obey the ordinance of her
+lord; that is, if she is either desirous to be mistress of his affections
+or to have peace and understanding in the house. For very evident reasons
+submission should begin on her part." One would like to know what duties
+the Knight inculcated on husbands, but the corresponding book he wrote for
+the guidance of his sons appears no longer to be extant.
+
+On the whole, the fundamental traditions of our western world concerning
+the duties of husbands and wives are well summed up in what Pollock and
+Maitland term "that curious cabinet of antiquities, the marriage ritual of
+the English Church." Here we find that the husband promises to love and
+cherish the wife, but she promises not only to love and cherish but also
+to obey him, though, it may be noted, this point was not introduced into
+English marriage rites until the fourteenth century, when the wife
+promised to be "buxom" (which then meant submissive) and "bonair"
+(courteous and kind), while in some French and Spanish rites it has never
+been introduced at all. But we may take it to be generally implied. In the
+final address to the married couple the priest admonishes the bride that
+the husband is the head of the wife, and that her part is submission. In
+some more ancient and local rituals this point was further driven home,
+and on the delivery of the ring the bride knelt and kissed the
+bridegroom's right foot. In course of time this was modified, at all
+events in France, and she simply dropped the ring, so that her motion of
+stooping was regarded as for the purpose of picking it up. I note that
+change for it is significant of the ways in which we modify the traditions
+of the past, not quite abandoning them but pretending that they have other
+than the fundamental original motives. We see just the same thing in the
+use of the ring, which was in the first place a part of the bride-price,
+frequently accompanied by money, proof that the wife had been duly
+purchased. It was thus made easy to regard the ring as really a golden
+fetter. That idea soon became offensive, and the new idea was originated
+that the ring was a pledge of affection; thus, quite early in some
+countries, the husband, also wore a wedding ring.
+
+The marriage order illustrated by the _Paston Letters_ and the _Book of
+the Chevalier de la Tour-Landry_ before the Reformation, and the Anglican
+Book of Common Prayer afterwards, has never been definitely broken; it is
+a part of our living tradition to-day. But during recent centuries it has
+been overlaid by the growth of new fashions and sentiments which have
+softened its hard outlines to the view. It has been disguised, notably
+during the eighteenth century, by the development of a new feeling of
+social equality, chiefly initiated in France, which, in an atmosphere of
+public intercourse largely regulated by women, made the ostentatious
+assertion of the husband's headship over his wife displeasing and even
+ridiculous. Then, especially in the nineteenth century, there began
+another movement, chiefly initiated in England and carried further in
+America, which affected the foundations of the husband's position from
+beneath. This movement consisted in a great number of legislative measures
+and judicial pronouncements and administrative orders--each small in
+itself and never co-ordinated--which taken altogether have had a
+cumulative effect in immensely increasing the rights of the wife
+independently of her husband or even in opposition to him. Thus at the
+present time the husband's authority has been overlaid by new social
+conventions from above and undermined by new legal regulations from below.
+
+Yet, it is important to realise, although the husband's domestic throne
+has been in appearance elegantly re-covered and in substance has become
+worm-eaten, it still stands and still retains its ancient shape and
+structure. There has never been a French Revolution in the home, and that
+Revolution itself, which modified society so extensively, scarcely
+modified the legal supremacy of the husband at all, even in France under
+the Code Napoléon and still less anywhere else. Interwoven with all the
+new developments, and however less obtrusive it may have become, the old
+tradition still continues among us. Since, also, the husband is,
+conventionally and in large measure really, the economic support of the
+home,--the work of the wife and even actual financial contributions
+brought by her not being supposed to affect that convention,--this state
+of things is held to be justified.
+
+Thus when a man enters the home as a husband, to seat himself on the
+antique domestic throne and to play the part assigned to him of old, he is
+involuntarily, even unconsciously, following an ancient tradition and
+taking his place in a procession of husbands which began long ages before
+he was born. It thus comes about that a man, even after he is married, and
+a husband are two different persons, so that his wife who mainly knows him
+as a husband may be unable to form any just idea of what he is like as a
+man. As a husband he has stepped out of the path that belongs to him in
+the world, and taken on another part which has called out altogether
+different reactions, so he is sometimes a much more admirable person in
+one of these spheres--whichever it may be--than in the other.
+
+We must not be surprised if the husband's position has sometimes developed
+those qualities which from the modern point of view are the less
+admirable. In this respect the sovereign husband resembles the Sovereign
+State. The Sovereign State, as it has survived from Renaissance days in
+our modern world, may be made up of admirable people, yet as a State they
+are forced into an attitude of helpless egoism which nowadays fails to
+commend itself to the outside world, and the tendency of scientific
+jurists to-day is to deal very critically with the old conception of the
+Sovereign State. It is so with the husband in the home. He was thrust by
+ancient tradition into a position of sovereignty which impelled him to
+play a part of helpless egoism. He was a celestial body in the home around
+which all the other inmates were revolving satellites. The hours of rising
+and retiring, the times of meals and their nature and substance, all the
+activities of the household--in which he himself takes little or no
+part--are still arranged primarily to suit his work, his play, and his
+tastes. This is an accepted matter of course, and not the result of any
+violent self-assertion on his part. It is equally an accepted matter of
+course that the wife should be constantly occupied in keeping this little
+solar system in easy harmonious movement, evolving from it, if she has the
+skill, the music of the spheres. She has no recognised independent
+personality of her own, nor even any right to go away by herself for a
+little change and recreation. Any work of her own, play of her own,
+tastes of her own, must be strictly subordinated, if not suppressed
+altogether.
+
+In the old days, from which our domestic traditions proceed, little
+hardship was thus inflicted on the wife. Her rights and privileges were,
+indeed, far less than those of the modern woman, but for that very reason
+the home offered her a larger field; beneath the shelter of her husband
+the irresponsible wife might exert a maximum of influential activity with
+a minimum of rights and privileges of her own. To many men, even to-day,
+that state of things seems the realisation of an ideal.
+
+Yet to women it seems increasingly less so, and of necessity since the
+cleavage between the position of woman in society and law, and the
+position of the wife in the sacramental bonds of wedlock, is daily
+becoming greater. To-day a woman, who possibly for ten years has been
+leading her own life of independent work, earning her own living, choosing
+her own conditions in accordance with her own needs, and selecting her own
+periods of recreation in accordance with her own tastes, whether or not
+this may have included the society of a man-friend--such a woman suddenly
+finds on marriage, and without any assertion of authority on her husband's
+part, that all the outward circumstances of her life are reversed and all
+her inner spontaneous movements arrested. There may be no signs of this
+on the surface of her conduct. She loves her husband too much to wish to
+hurt his feelings by explaining the situation, and she values domestic
+peace too much to risk friction by making unexpected claims. But beneath
+the surface there is often a profound discontent, and even in women who
+thought they had gained an insight into life, a sense of disillusion.
+Everyone knows this who is privileged to catch a glimpse into the hearts
+of women--often women of most distinguished intelligence as well as women
+of quite ordinary nature--who leave a life of spontaneous activity in the
+world to enter the home.[13]
+
+[13] While this condition of things is sometimes to be found in the more
+distinguished minority and in well-to-do families, it is, of course,
+among the great labouring majority that it is most conspicuous. Mrs.
+Will Crooks, of Poplar, speaking to a newspaper reporter (_Daily
+Chronicle_, 17 Feb., 1919), truly remarked: "At present the average
+married woman's working day is a flagrant contradiction of all
+trade-union ideals. The poor thing is slaving all the time! What she
+needs--what she longs for--is just a little break or change now and
+again, an opportunity to get her mind off her work and its worries. If
+her husband's hours are reduced to eight, well that gives her a chance,
+doesn't it? The home and the children are, after all, as much his as
+hers. With his enlarged leisure he will now be able to take a fair share
+in home duties. I suggest that they take it turn and turn about--one
+night he goes out and she looks after the house and the children; the
+next night she goes out and he takes charge of things at home. She can
+sometimes go to the cinema, sometimes call on friends. Then, say once a
+week, they can both go out together, taking the children with them. That
+will be a little change and treat for everybody."
+
+It is not to be supposed that in this presentation of the situation in the
+home, as it is to-day visible to those who are privileged to see beneath
+the surface, any accusation is brought against the husband. He is no more
+guilty of an unreasonable conservatism than the wife is guilty of an
+unreasonable radicalism. Each of them is the outcome of a tradition. The
+point is that the events of the past hundred years have produced a
+discrepancy in the two lines of tradition, with a resultant lack of
+harmony, independent of the goodwill of either husband or wife.
+
+Olive Schreiner, in her _Woman and Labour_, has eloquently set forth the
+tendency to parasitism which civilisation produces in women; they no
+longer exercise the arts and industries which were theirs in former ages,
+and so they become economically dependent on men, losing their energies
+and aptitudes, and becoming like those dull parasitic animals which live
+as blood-suckers of their host. That picture, which was of course never
+true of all women, is now ceasing to be true of any but a negligible
+minority; it presents, moreover, a parasitism limited to the economic side
+of life. For if the wife has often been a lazy gold-sucking parasite on
+her husband in the world, the husband has yet oftener been a helpless
+service-absorbing parasite on his wife in the home. There is, that is to
+say, not only an economic parasitism, with no adequate return for
+financial support, but a still more prevalent domestic parasitism, with an
+absorption of services for which no return would be adequate. There are
+many helpful husbands in the home, but there are a larger number who are
+helpless and have never been trained to be anything else but helpless,
+even by their wives, who would often detest a rival in household work and
+management. The average husband enjoys the total effect of his home but is
+usually unable to contribute any of the details of work and organisation
+that make it enjoyable. He cannot keep it in order and cleanliness and
+regulated movement, he seldom knows how to buy the things that are needed
+for its upkeep, nor how to prepare and cook and present a decent meal; he
+cannot even attend to his own domestic needs. It is the wife's consolation
+that most husbands are not always at home.
+
+"In ministering to the wants of the family, the woman has reduced man to a
+state of considerable dependency on her in all domestic affairs, just as
+she is dependent on him for bodily protection. In the course of ages this
+has gone so far as to foster a peculiar helplessness on the part of the
+man, which manifests itself in a somewhat childlike reliance of the
+husband on the wife. In fact it may be said that the husband is, to all
+intents and purposes, incapable of maintaining himself without the aid of
+a woman." This passage will probably seem to many readers to apply quite
+fairly well to men as they exist to-day in most of those lands which we
+consider at the summit of our civilisation. Yet it was not written of
+civilisation, or of white men, but of the Bantu tribes of East
+Africa,[14] complete Negroes who, while far from being among the lowest
+savages, belong to a culture which is only just emerging from cannibalism,
+witchcraft, and customary bloodshed. So close a resemblance between the
+European husband and the Negro husband significantly suggests how
+remarkable has been the arrest of development in the husband's customary
+status during a vast period of the world's history.
+
+[14] Hon. C. Dundas, _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, Vol.
+45, 1915, p. 302.
+
+It is in the considerable group of couples where the husband's work
+separates him but little from the home that the pressure on the wife is
+most severe, and without the relief and variety secured by his frequent
+absence. She has perhaps led a life of her own before marriage, she knows
+how to be economically independent; now they occupy a small dwelling, they
+have, maybe, one or two small children, they can only afford one helper in
+the work or none at all, and in this busy little hive the husband and wife
+are constantly tumbling over each other. It is small wonder if the wife
+feels a deep discontent beneath her willing ministrations and misses the
+devotion of the lover in the perpetual claims of the husband.
+
+But the difficulty is not settled if she persuades him to take a room
+outside. He is devoted to his wife and his home, with good reason, for the
+wife makes the home and he is incapable of making a home. His new
+domestic arrangements sink into careless and sordid disorder, and he is
+conscious of profound discomfort. His wife soon realises that it is a
+choice between his return to the home and complete separation. Most wives
+never get even as far as this attempt at solution of the difficulty and
+hide their secret discontent.
+
+This is the situation which to-day is becoming intensified and extended on
+a vast scale. The habit and the taste for freedom, adventure, and economic
+independence is becoming generated among millions of women who once meekly
+trod the ancient beaten paths, and we must not be so foolish as to suppose
+that they can suddenly renounce those habits and tastes at the threshold
+of marriage. Moreover, it is becoming clear to men and to women alike, and
+for the first time, that the world can be remoulded, and that the claims
+for better conditions of work, for a higher standard of life, and for the
+attainment of leisure, which previously had only feebly been put forward,
+may now be asserted drastically. We see therefore to-day a great
+revolutionary movement, mainly on the part of men in the world of Labour,
+and we see a corresponding movement, however less ostentatious, mainly on
+the part of women, in the world of the Home.
+
+It may seem to some that this new movement of upheaval in the sphere of
+the Home is merely destructive. Timid souls have felt the like in every
+period of transition, and with as little reason. Just as we realise that
+the movement now in progress in the world of Labour for a higher standard
+of life and for, as it has been termed, a larger "leisure-ration,"
+represents a wholesome revolt against the crushing conditions of prolonged
+monotonous work--the most deadening of all work--and a real advance
+towards those ideals of democracy which are still so remote, so it is with
+the movement in the Home. That also is the claim for a new and fairer
+allotment of responsibility, of larger opportunities for freedom and
+leisure. If in the home the husband is still to be regarded as the
+capitalist and the wife as the labourer, then at all events it has to be
+recognised that he owes her not only the satisfaction of her physical
+needs of food and shelter and clothing, but the opportunity to satisfy the
+personal spontaneous claims of her own individual nature. Just as the
+readjustment of Labour is really only an approach to the long recognised
+ideals of Democracy, so the readjustment of the Home, far from being
+subversive or revolutionary, is merely an approximation to the long
+recognised ideals of marriage.
+
+How in practice, one may finally ask, is this readjustment of the home
+likely to be carried out?
+
+In the first place we are justified in believing that in the future home
+men will no longer be so helpless, so domestically parasitic, as in the
+past. This change is indeed already coming about. It is an inestimable
+benefit throughout life for a man to have been forcibly lifted out of the
+routine comforts and feminine services of the old-fashioned home and to be
+thrown into an alien and solitary environment, face to face with Nature
+and the essential domestic human needs (in my own case I owe an
+inestimable debt to the chance that thus flung me into the Australian bush
+in early life), and one may note that the Great War has had, directly and
+indirectly, a remarkable influence in this direction, for it not only
+compelled women to exercise many enlarging and fortifying functions
+commonly counted as pertaining to men, it also compelled men, deprived of
+accustomed feminine services, to develop a new independent ability for
+organising domesticity, and that ability, even though it is not
+permanently exercised in rendering domestic services, must yet always make
+clear the nature of domestic problems and tend to prevent the demand for
+unnecessary domestic services.
+
+But there is another quite different and more general line along which we
+may expect this problem to be largely solved. That is by the
+simplification and organisation of domestic life. If that process were
+carried to the full extent that is now becoming possible a large part of
+the problem before us would be at once solved. A great promise for the
+future of domestic life is held out by the growing adoption of
+birth-control, by which the wife and mother is relieved from that burden
+of unduly frequent and unwanted maternity which in the past so often
+crushed her vitality and destroyed her freshness. But many minor agencies
+are helpful. To supply heat, light, and motive power even to small
+households, to replace the wasteful, extravagant, and often inefficient
+home-cookery by meals cooked outside, as well as to facilitate the growing
+social habit of taking meals in spacious public restaurants, under more
+attractive, economical, and wholesome conditions than can usually be
+secured within the narrow confines of the home, to contract with specially
+trained workers from outside for all those routines of domestic drudgery
+which are often so inefficiently and laboriously carried on by the
+household-worker, whether mistress or servant, and to seek perpetually by
+new devices to simplify, which often means to beautify, all the everyday
+processes of life--to effect this in any comprehensive degree is to
+transform the home from the intolerable burden it is sometimes felt to be
+into a possible haven of peace and joy.[15] The trouble in the past, and
+even to-day, has been, not in any difficulty in providing the facilities
+but in prevailing people to adopt them. Thus in England, even under the
+stress of the Great War, there was among the working population a
+considerable disinclination--founded on stupid conservatism and a
+meaningless pride--to take advantage of National Kitchens and National
+Restaurants, notwithstanding the superiority of the meals in quality,
+cheapness, and convenience, to the workers' home meals, so that many of
+these establishments, even while still fostered by the Government, had
+speedily to close their doors. Ancient traditions, that have now become
+not only empty but mischievous, in these matters still fetter the wife
+even more than the husband. We cannot regulate even the material side of
+life without cultivating that intelligence in the development of which
+civilisation so largely consists.
+
+[15] This aspect of the future of domesticity was often set forth by
+Mrs. Havelock Ellis, _The New Horizon in Love and Life_, 1921.
+
+Intelligence, and even something more than intelligence, is needed along
+the third line of progress towards the modernised home. Simplification and
+organisation can effect nothing in the desired transformation if they
+merely end in themselves. They are only helpful in so far as they
+economise energy, offer a more ample leisure, and extend the opportunities
+for that play of the intellect, that liberation of the emotions with
+accompanying discipline of the primitive instincts, which are needed not
+only for the development of civilisation in general, but in particular of
+the home. Domineering egotism, the assertion of greedy possessive rights,
+are out of place in the modern home. They are just as mischievous when
+exhibited by the wife as by the husband. We have seen, as we look back,
+the futility in the end of the ancient structure of the home, however
+reasonable it was at the beginning, under our different modern social
+conditions, and for women to attempt nowadays to reintroduce the same
+structure, merely reversed would be not only mischievous but silly. That
+spirit of narrow exclusiveness and self centred egoism--even if it were
+sometimes an _égoisme à deux_--evoked, half a century ago, the scathing
+sarcasm of James Hinton, who never wearied of denouncing the "virtuous and
+happy homes" which he saw as "floating blotches of verdure on a sea of
+filth." Such outbursts seem extravagant, but they were the extravagance of
+an idealist at the vision which, as a physician in touch with realities,
+he had, seen beneath the surface of the home.
+
+It is well to insist on the organisation of the mechanical and material
+side of life. Some leaders of women movements feel this so strongly that
+they insist on nothing else. In old days it was conventionally supposed
+that women's sphere was that of the feelings; the result has been that
+women now often take ostentatious pleasure in washing their hands of
+feelings and accusing men of "sentiment." But that wrongly debased word
+stands for the whole superstructure of life on the basis of material
+organisation, for all the finer and higher parts of our nature, for the
+greater part of civilisation.[16] The elaboration of the mechanical side
+of life by itself may merely serve to speed up the pace of life instead of
+expanding leisure, to pile up the weary burden of luxury, and still
+further to dissipate the energy of life in petty or frivolous
+channels.[17] To bring order into the region of soulless machinery running
+at random, to raise the super-structure of a genuinely human civilisation,
+is not a task which either men or women can afford to fling contemptuously
+to the opposite sex. It concerns them both equally and can only be carried
+out by both equally, working side by side in the most intimate spirit of
+mutual comprehension, confiding trust, and the goodwill to conquer the
+demon of jealousy, that dragon which slays love under the pretence of
+keeping it alive.
+
+[16] "The growth of the sentiments," remarks an influential psychologist
+of our own time (W. McDougall, _Social Psychology_, p. 160), "is of the
+utmost importance for the character and conduct of individuals and of
+societies; it is the organisation of the affective and conative life. In
+the absence of sentiments our emotional life would be a mere chaos,
+without order, consistency, or continuity of any kind; and all our
+social relations and conduct, being based on the emotions and their
+impulses would be correspondingly chaotic, unpredictable, and
+unstable.... Again, our judgments of value and of merit are rooted in
+our sentiments; and our moral principles have the same source, for they
+are formed by our judgments of moral value."
+
+[17] The destructive effects of the mechanisation of modern life have
+lately been admirably set forth, and with much precise illustration, by
+Dr. Austin Freeman, _Social Decay and Regeneration_.
+
+This task, it may finally be added, is always an adventure. However well
+organised the foundations of life may be, life must always be full of
+risks. We may smile, therefore, when it is remarked that the future
+developments of the home are risky. Birds in the air and fishes in the
+sea, quite as much as our own ancestors on the earth, have always found
+life full of risks. It was the greatest risk of all when they insisted on
+continuing on the old outworn ways and so became extinct. If the home is
+an experiment and a risky experiment, one can only say that life is always
+like that. We have to see to it that in this central experiment, on which
+our happiness so largely depends, all our finest qualities are mobilised.
+Even the smallest homes under the new conditions cannot be built to last
+with small minds and small hearts. Indeed the discipline of the home
+demands not only the best intellectual qualities that are available, but
+often involves--and in men as well as in women--a spiritual training fit
+to make sweeter and more generous saints than any cloister. The greater
+the freedom, the more complete the equality of husband and wife, the
+greater the possibilities of discipline and development. In view of the
+rigidities and injustices of the law, many couples nowadays dispense with
+legal marriage, and form their own private contract; that method has
+sometimes proved more favourable to the fidelity and permanence of love
+than external compulsion; it assists the husband to remain the lover, and
+it is often the lover more than the husband that the modern woman needs;
+but it has always to be remembered that in the present condition of law
+and social opinion a slur is cast on the children of such unions. No
+doubt, however, marriage and the home will undergo modifications, which
+will tend to make these ancient institutions a little more flexible and to
+permit a greater degree of variation to meet special circumstances. We can
+occupy ourselves with no more essential task, whether as regards ourselves
+or the race, than to make more beautiful the House of Life for the
+dwelling of Love.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE LOVE-RIGHTS OF WOMEN
+
+
+What is the part of woman, one is sometimes asked, in the sex act? Must it
+be the wife's concern in the marital embrace to sacrifice her own wishes
+from a sense of love and duty towards her husband? Or is the wife entitled
+to an equal mutual interest and joy in this act with her husband? It seems
+a simple problem. In so fundamental a relationship, which goes back to the
+beginning of sex in the dawn of life, it might appear that we could leave
+Nature to decide. Yet it is not so. Throughout the history of
+civilisation, wherever we can trace the feelings and ideas which have
+prevailed on this matter and the resultant conduct, the problem has
+existed, often to produce discord, conflict, and misery. The problem still
+exists to-day and with as important results as in the past.
+
+In Nature, before the arrival of Man, it can scarcely be said indeed that
+any difficulty existed. It was taken for granted at that time that the
+female had both the right to her own body, and the right to a certain
+amount of enjoyment in the use of it. It often cost the male a serious
+amount of trouble--though he never failed to find it worth while--to
+explain to her the point where he may be allowed to come in, and to
+persuade her that he can contribute to her enjoyment. So it generally is
+throughout Nature, before we reach Man, and, though it is not invariably
+obvious, we often find it even among the unlikeliest animals. As is well
+known, it is most pronounced among the birds, who have in some species
+carried the erotic art,--and the faithful devotion which properly
+accompanied the erotic art as being an essential part of it,--to the
+highest point. We have here the great natural fact of courtship.
+Throughout Nature, wherever we meet with animals of a high type, often
+indeed when they are of a lowly type--provided they have not been rendered
+unnatural by domestication--every act of sexual union is preceded by a
+process of courtship. There is a sound physiological reason for this
+courtship, for in the act of wooing and being wooed the psychic excitement
+gradually generated in the brains of the two partners acts as a stimulant
+to arouse into full activity the mechanism which ensures sexual union and
+aids ultimate impregnation. Such courtship is thus a fundamental natural
+fact.
+
+It is as a natural fact that we still find it in full development among a
+large number of peoples of the lower races whom we are accustomed to
+regard as more primitive than ourselves. New conditions, it is true, soon
+enter to complicate the picture presented by savage courtship. The
+economic element of bargaining, destined to prove so important, comes in
+at an early stage. And among peoples leading a violent life, and
+constantly fighting, it has sometimes happened, though not always, that
+courtship also has been violent. This is not so frequent as was once
+supposed. With better knowledge it was found that the seeming brutality
+once thought to take the place of courtship among various peoples in a low
+state of culture was really itself courtship, a rough kind of play
+agreeable to both parties and not depriving the feminine partner of her
+own freedom of choice. This was notably the case as regards so-called
+"marriage by capture." While this is sometimes a real capture, it is more
+often a mock capture; the lover perhaps pursues the beloved on horseback,
+but she is as fleet and as skilful as he is, cannot be captured unless she
+wishes to be captured, and in addition, as among the Kirghiz, she may be
+armed with a formidable whip; so that "marriage by capture," far from
+being a hardship imposed on women is largely a concession to their modesty
+and a gratification of their erotic impulses. Even when the chief part of
+the decision rests with masculine force courtship is still not necessarily
+or usually excluded, for the exhibition of force by a lover,--and this is
+true for civilised as well as for savage women,--is itself a source of
+pleasurable stimulation, and when that is so the essence of courtship may
+be attained even more successfully by the forceful than by the humble
+lover.
+
+The evolution of society, however, tended to overlay and sometimes even to
+suppress those fundamental natural tendencies. The position of the man as
+the sole and uncontested head of the family, the insistence on paternity
+and male descent, the accompanying economic developments, and the tendency
+to view a woman less as a self-disposing individual than as an object of
+barter belonging to her father, the consequent rigidity of the marriage
+bond and the stern insistence on wifely fidelity--all these conditions of
+developing civilisation, while still leaving courtship possible,
+diminished its significance and even abolished its necessity. Moreover, on
+the basis of the social, economic, and legal developments thus
+established, new moral, spiritual, and religious forces were slowly
+generated, which worked on these rules of merely exterior order, and
+interiorised them, thus giving them power over the souls as well as over
+the bodies of women.
+
+The result was that, directly and indirectly, the legal, economic, and
+erotic rights of women were all diminished. It is with the erotic rights
+only that we are here concerned.
+
+No doubt in its erotic aspects, as well as in its legal and economic
+aspects, the social order thus established was described, and in good
+faith, as beneficial to women, and even as maintained in their interests.
+Monogamy and the home, it was claimed, alike existed for the benefit and
+protection of women. It was not so often explained that they greatly
+benefited and protected men, with, moreover, this additional advantage
+that while women were absolutely confined to the home, men were free to
+exercise their activities outside the home, even, with tacit general
+consent, on the erotic side.
+
+Whatever the real benefits, and there is no occasion for questioning them,
+of the sexual order thus established, it becomes clear that in certain
+important respects it had an unnatural and repressive influence on the
+erotic aspect of woman's sexual life. It fostered the reproductive side of
+woman's sexual life, but it rendered difficult for her the satisfaction of
+the instinct for that courtship which is the natural preliminary of
+reproductive activity, an instinct even more highly developed in the
+female than in the male, and the more insistent because in the order of
+Nature the burden of maternity is preceded by the reward of pleasure. But
+the marriage order which had become established led to the indirect
+result of banning pleasure in women, or at all events in wives. It was
+regarded as too dangerous, and even as degrading. The women who wanted
+pleasure were not considered fit for the home, but more suited to be
+devoted to an exclusive "life of pleasure," which soon turned out to be
+not their own pleasure but men's. A "life of pleasure," in that sense or
+in any other sense, was not what more than a small minority of women ever
+desired. The desire of women for courtship is not a thing by itself, and
+was not implanted for gratification by itself. It is naturally
+intertwined--and to a much greater degree than the corresponding desire in
+men--with her deepest personal, family, and social instincts, so that if
+these are desecrated and lost its charm soon fades.
+
+The practices and the ideals of this established morality were both due to
+men, and both were so thoroughly fashioned that they subjugated alike the
+actions and the feelings of women. There is no sphere which we regard as
+so peculiarly women's sphere as that of love. Yet there is no sphere which
+in civilisation women have so far had so small a part in regulating. Their
+deepest impulses--their modesty, their maternity, their devotion, their
+emotional receptivity--were used, with no conscious and deliberate
+Machiavellism, against themselves, to mould a moral world for their
+habitation which they would not themselves have moulded. It is not of
+modern creation, nor by any means due, as some have supposed, to the
+asceticism of Christianity, however much Christianity may have reinforced
+it. Indeed one may say that in course of time Christianity had an
+influence in weakening it, for Christianity discovered a new reservoir of
+tender emotion, and such emotion may be transferred, and, as a matter of
+fact, was transferred, from its first religious channel into erotic
+channels which were thereby deepened and extended, and without reference
+to any design of Christianity. For the ends we achieve are often by no
+means those which we set out to accomplish. In ancient classic days this
+moral order was even more severely established than in the Middle Ages.
+Montaigne, in the sixteenth century, declared that "marriage is a devout
+and religious relationship, the pleasures derived from it should be
+restrained and serious, mixed with some severity." But in this matter he
+was not merely expressing the Christian standpoint but even more that of
+paganism, and he thoroughly agreed with the old Greek moralist that a man
+should approach his wife "prudently and severely" for fear of inciting her
+to lasciviousness; he thought that marriage was best arranged by a third
+party, and was inclined to think, with the ancients, that women are not
+fitted to make friends of. Montaigne has elsewhere spoken with insight of
+women's instinctive knowledge of the art and discipline of love and has
+pointed out how men have imposed their own ideals and rules of action on
+women from whom they have demanded opposite and contradictory virtues;
+yet, we see, he approves of this state of things and never suggests that
+women have any right to opinions of their own or feelings of their own
+when the sacred institution of marriage is in question.
+
+Montaigne represents the more exalted aspects of the Pagan-Christian
+conception of morality in marriage which still largely prevails. But that
+conception lent itself to deductions, frankly accepted even by Montaigne
+himself, which were by no means exalted. "I find," said Montaigne, "that
+Venus, after all, is nothing more than the pleasure of discharging our
+vessels, just as nature renders pleasurable the discharges from other
+parts." Sir Thomas More among Catholics, and Luther among Protestants,
+said exactly the same thing in other and even clearer words, while untold
+millions of husbands in Christendom down to to-day, whether or not they
+have had the wit to put their theory into a phrase, have regularly put it
+into practice, at all events within the consecrated pale of marriage, and
+treated their wives, "severely and prudently," as convenient utensils for
+the reception of a natural excretion.
+
+Obviously, in this view of marriage, sexual activity was regarded as an
+exclusively masculine function, in the exercise of which women had merely
+a passive part to play. Any active participation on her side thus seemed
+unnecessary, and even unbefitting, finally, though only in comparatively
+modern times, disgusting and actually degrading. Thus Acton, who was
+regarded half a century ago as the chief English authority on sexual
+matters, declared that, "happily for society," the supposition that women
+possess sexual feelings could be put aside as "a vile aspersion," while
+another medical authority of the same period stated in regard to the most
+simple physical sign of healthy sexual emotion that it "only happens in
+lascivious women." This final triumph of the masculine ideals and rule of
+life was, however, only achieved slowly. It was the culmination of an
+elaborate process of training. At the outset men had found it impossible
+to speak too strongly of the "wantonness" of women. This attitude was
+pronounced among the ancient Greeks and prominent in their dramatists.
+Christianity again, which ended by making women into the chief pillars of
+the Church, began by regarding them as the "Gate of Hell." Again, later,
+when in the Middle Ages this masculine moral order approached the task of
+subjugating the barbarians of Northern Europe, men were horrified at the
+licentiousness of those northern women at whose coldness they are now
+shocked.
+
+That, indeed, was, as Montaigne had seen, the central core of conflict in
+the rule of life imposed by men on woman. Men were perpetually striving,
+by ways the most methodical, the most subtle, the most far-reaching, to
+achieve a result in women, which, when achieved, men themselves viewed
+with dismay. They may be said to be moved in this sphere by two passions,
+the passion for virtue and the passion for vice. But it so happens that
+both these streams of passion have to be directed at the same fascinating
+object: Woman. No doubt nothing is more admirable than the skill with
+which women have acquired the duplicity necessary to play the two
+contradictory parts thus imposed upon them. But in that requirement the
+play of their natural reactions tended to become paralysed, and the
+delicate mechanism of their instincts often disturbed. They were
+forbidden, except in a few carefully etiquetted forms, the free play of
+courtship, without which they could not perform their part in the erotic
+life with full satisfaction either to themselves or their partners. They
+were reduced to an artificial simulation of coldness or of warmth,
+according to the particular stage of the dominating masculine ideal of
+woman which their partner chanced to have reached. But that is an attitude
+equally unsatisfactory to themselves and to their lovers, even when the
+latter have not sufficient insight to see through its unreality. It is an
+attitude so unnatural and artificial that it inevitably tends to produce a
+real coldness which nothing can disguise. It is true that women whose
+instincts are not perverted at the roots do not desire to be cold. Far
+from it. But to dispel that coldness the right atmosphere is needed, and
+the insight and skill of the right man. In the erotic sphere a woman asks
+nothing better of a man than to be lifted above her coldness, to the
+higher plane where there is reciprocal interest and mutual joy in the act
+of love. Therein her silent demand is one with Nature's. For the
+biological order of the world involves those claims which, in the human
+range, are the erotic rights of women.
+
+The social claims of women, their economic claims, their political claims,
+have long been before the world. Women themselves have actively asserted
+them, and they are all in process of realisation. The erotic claims of
+women, which are at least as fundamental, are not publicly voiced, and
+women themselves would be the last to assert them. It is easy to
+understand why that should be so. The natural and acquired qualities of
+women, even the qualities developed in the art of courtship, have all been
+utilised in building up the masculine ideal of sexual morality; it is on
+feminine characteristics that this masculine ideal has been based, so
+that women have been helpless to protest against it. Moreover, even if
+that were not so, to formulate such rights is to raise the question
+whether there so much as exists anything that can be called "erotic
+rights." The right to joy cannot be claimed in the same way as one claims
+the right to put a voting paper in a ballot box. A human being's erotic
+aptitudes can only be developed where the right atmosphere for them
+exists, and where the attitudes of both persons concerned are in
+harmonious sympathy. That is why the erotic rights of women have been the
+last of all to be attained.
+
+Yet to-day we see a change here. The change required is, it has been said,
+a change of attitude and a resultant change in the atmosphere in which the
+sexual impulses are manifested. It involves no necessary change in the
+external order of our marriage system, for, as has already been pointed
+out, it was a coincident and not designed part of that order. Various
+recent lines of tendency have converged to produce this change of attitude
+and of atmosphere. In part the men of to-day are far more ready than the
+men of former days to look upon women as their comrades in the every day
+work of the world, instead of as beings who were ideally on a level above
+themselves and practically on a level considerably below themselves. In
+part there is the growing recognition that women have conquered many
+elementary human rights of which before they were deprived, and are more
+and more taking the position of citizens, with the same kinds of duties,
+privileges, and responsibilities as men. In part, also, it may be added,
+there is a growing diffusion among educated people of a knowledge of the
+primary facts of life in the two sexes, slowly dissipating and dissolving
+many foolish and often mischievous superstitions. The result is that, as
+many competent observers have noted, the young men of to-day show a new
+attitude towards women and towards marriage, an attitude of simplicity and
+frankness, a desire for mutual confidence, a readiness to discuss
+difficulties, an appeal to understand and to be understood. Such an
+attitude, which had hitherto been hard to attain, at once creates the
+atmosphere in which alone the free spontaneous erotic activities of women
+can breathe and live.
+
+This consummation, we have seen, may be regarded as the attainment of
+certain rights, the corollary of other rights in the social field which
+women are slowly achieving as human beings on the same human level as men.
+It opens to women, on whom is always laid the chief burden of sex, the
+right to the joy and exaltation of sex, to the uplifting of the soul
+which, when the right conditions are fulfilled, is the outcome of the
+intimate approach and union of two human beings. Yet while we may find
+convenient so to formulate it, we need to remember that that is only a
+fashion of speech, for there are no rights in Nature. If we take a broader
+sweep, what we may choose to call an erotic right is simply the perfect
+poise of the conflicting forces of life, the rhythmic harmony in which
+generation is achieved with the highest degree of perfection compatible
+with the make of the world. It is our part to transform Nature's large
+conception into our own smaller organic mould, not otherwise than the
+plants, to whom we are far back akin, who dig their flexible roots deep
+into the moist and fruitful earth, and so are able to lift up glorious
+heads toward the sky.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE PLAY-FUNCTION OF SEX
+
+
+When we hear the sexual functions spoken of we commonly understand the
+performance of an act which normally tends to the propagation of the race.
+When we see the question of sexual abstinence discussed, when the
+desirability of sexual gratification is asserted or denied, when the idea
+arises of the erotic rights and needs of woman, it is always the same act
+with its physical results that is chiefly in mind. Such a conception is
+quite adequate for practical working purposes in the social world. It
+enables us to deal with all our established human institutions in the
+sphere of sex, as the arbitrary assumptions of Euclid enable us to
+traverse the field of elementary geometry. But beyond these useful
+purposes it is inadequate and even inexact. The functions of sex on the
+psychic and erotic side are of far greater extension than any act of
+procreation, they may even exclude it altogether, and when we are
+concerned with the welfare of the individual human being we must enlarge
+our outlook and deepen our insight.
+
+There are, we know, two main functions in the sexual relationship, or
+what in the biological sense we term "marriage," among civilised human
+beings, the primary physiological function of begetting and bearing
+offspring and the secondary spiritual function of furthering the higher
+mental and emotional processes. These are the main functions of the sexual
+impulse, and in order to understand any further object of the sexual
+relationship--or even in order to understand all that is involved in the
+secondary object of marriage--we must go beyond conscious motives and
+consider the nature of the sexual impulse, physical and psychic, as rooted
+in the human organism.
+
+The human organism, as we know, is a machine on which excitations from
+without, streaming through the nerves and brain, effect internal work,
+and, notably, stimulate the glandular system. In recent years the
+glandular system, and especially that of the ductless glands, has taken on
+an altogether new significance. These ductless glands, as we know,
+liberate into the blood what are termed "hormones," or chemical
+messengers, which have a complex but precise action in exciting and
+developing all those physical and psychic activities which make up a full
+life alike on the general side and the reproductive side, so that their
+balanced functions are essential to wholesome and complete existence. In
+a rudimentary form these functions may be traced back to our earliest
+ancestors who possessed brains. In those times the predominant sense for
+arousing the internal mental and emotional faculties was that of smell,
+the other senses being gradually evolved subsequently, and it is
+significant that the pituitary, one of the chief ductless glands active in
+ourselves to-day, was developed out of the nervous centre for smell in
+conjunction with the membrane of the mouth. The energies of the whole
+organism were set in action through stimuli arising from the outside world
+by way of the sense of smell. In process of time the mechanism has become
+immensely elaborated, yet its healthy activity is ultimately dependent on
+a rich and varied action and reaction with the external world. It is
+becoming recognised that the tendency to pluri-glandular insufficiency,
+with its resulting lack of organic harmony and equilibrium, can be
+counteracted by the physical and psychic stimuli of intimate contacts with
+the external world. In this action and reaction, moreover, we cannot
+distinguish between sexual ends and general ends. The activities of the
+ductless glands and their hormones equally serve both ends in ways that
+cannot be distinguished. "The individual metabolism," as a distinguished
+authority in this field has expressed it, "is the reproductive
+metabolism."[18] Thus the establishment of our complete activities as
+human beings in the world is aided by, if not indeed ultimately dependent
+upon, a perpetual and many-sided play with our environment.
+
+[18] W. Blair Bell, _The Sex-Complex,_ 1920, p. 108. This book is a
+cautious and precise statement of the present state of knowledge on this
+subject, although some of the author's psychological deductions must be
+treated with circumspection.
+
+It is thus that we arrive at the importance of the play-function, and
+thus, also, we realise that while it extends beyond the sexual sphere it
+yet definitely includes that sphere. There are at least three different
+ways of understanding the biological function of play. There is the
+conception of play, on which Groos has elaborately insisted, as
+education: the cat "plays" with the mouse and is thereby educating
+itself in the skill necessary to catch mice; all our human games are a
+training in qualities that are required in life, and that is why in
+England we continue to attribute to the Duke of Wellington the saying
+that "the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton."
+Then there is the conception of play as the utilisation in art of the
+superfluous energies left unemployed in the practical work of life; this
+enlarging and harmonising function of play, while in the lower ranges it
+may be spent trivially, leads in the higher ranges to the production of
+the most magnificent human achievements. But there is yet a third
+conception of play, according to which it exerts a direct internal
+influence--health-giving, developmental, and balancing--on the whole
+organism of the player himself. This conception is related to the other
+two, and yet distinct, for it is not primarily a definite education in
+specific kinds of life-conserving skill, although it may involve the
+acquisition of such skill, and it is not concerned with the construction
+of objective works of art, although--by means of contact in human
+relationship--it attains the wholesome organic effects which may be
+indirectly achieved by artistic activities. It is in this sense that we
+are here concerned with what we may perhaps best call the play-function
+of sex.[19]
+
+[19] The term seems to have been devised by Professor Maurice Parmelee,
+_Personality and Conduct_, 1918, pp. 104, 107, 113. But it is understood
+by Parmelee in a much vaguer and more extended sense than I have used
+it.
+
+As thus understood, the play-function of sex is at once in an inseparable
+way both physical and psychic. It stimulates to wholesome activity all the
+complex and inter-related systems of the organism. At the same time it
+satisfies the most profound emotional impulses, controlling in harmonious
+poise the various mental instincts. Along these lines it necessarily tends
+in the end to go beyond its own sphere and to embrace and introduce into
+the sphere of sex the other two more objective fields of play, that of
+play as education, and that of play as artistic creation. It may not be
+true, as was said of old time, "most of our arts and sciences were
+invented for love's sake." But it is certainly true that, in proportion as
+we truly and wisely exercise the play-function of sex, we are at the same
+time training our personality on the erotic side and acquiring a mastery
+of the art of love.
+
+The longer I live the more I realise the immense importance for the
+individual of the development through the play-function of erotic
+personality, and for human society of the acquirement of the art of love.
+At the same time I am ever more astonished at the rarity of erotic
+personality and the ignorance of the art of love even among those men and
+women, experienced in the exercise of procreation, in whom we might most
+confidently expect to find such development and such art. At times one
+feels hopeless at the thought that civilisation in this supremely intimate
+field of life has yet achieved so little. For until it is generally
+possible to acquire erotic personality and to master the art of loving,
+the development of the individual man or woman is marred, the acquirement
+of human happiness and harmony remains impossible.
+
+In entering this field, indeed, we not only have to gain true knowledge
+but to cast off false knowledge, and, above all, to purify our hearts from
+superstitions which have no connection with any kind of existing
+knowledge. We have to cease to regard as admirable the man who regards
+the accomplishment of the procreative act, with the pleasurable relief it
+affords to himself, as the whole code of love. We have to treat with
+contempt the woman who abjectly accepts the act, and her own passivity
+therein, as the whole duty of love. We have to understand that the art of
+love has nothing to do with vice, and the acquirement of erotic
+personality nothing to do with sensuality. But we have also to realise
+that the art of love is far from being the attainment of a refined and
+luxurious self-indulgence, and the acquirement of erotic personality of
+little worth unless it fortifies and enlarges the whole personality in all
+its aspects. Now all this is difficult, and for some people even painful;
+to root up is a more serious matter than to sow; it cannot all be done in
+a day.
+
+It is not easy to form a clear picture of the erotic life of the average
+man in our society. To the best informed among us knowledge in this field
+only comes slowly. Even when we have decided what may or may not be termed
+"average" the sources of approach to this intimate sphere remain few and
+misleading; at the best the women a man loves remain far more illuminating
+sources of information than the man himself. The more one knows about him,
+however, the more one is convinced that, quite independently of the place
+we may feel inclined to afford to him in the scale of virtue, his
+conception of erotic personality, his ideas on the art of love, if they
+have any existence at all, are of a humble character. As to the notion of
+play in the sphere of sex, even if he makes blundering attempts to
+practice it, that is for him something quite low down, something to be
+ashamed of, and he would not dream of associating it with anything he has
+been taught to regard as belonging to the spiritual sphere. The conception
+of "divine play" is meaningless to him. His fundamental ideas, his
+cherished ideals, in the erotic sphere, seem to be reducible to two: (1)
+He wishes to prove that he is "a man," and he experiences what seems to
+him the pride of virility in the successful attainment of that proof; (2)
+he finds in the same act the most satisfactory method of removing sexual
+tension and in the ensuing relief one of the chief pleasures of life. It
+cannot be said that either of these ideals is absolutely unsound; each is
+part of the truth; it is only as a complete statement of the truth that
+they become pathetically inadequate. It is to be noted that both of them
+are based solely on the physical act of sexual conjunction, and that they
+are both exclusively self-regarding. So that they are, after all, although
+the nearest approach to the erotic sphere he may be able to find, yet
+still not really erotic. For love is not primarily self-regarding. It is
+the intimate, harmonious, combined play--the play in the wide as well as
+in the more narrow sense we are here concerned with--of two personalities.
+It would not be love if it were primarily self-regarding, and the act of
+intercourse, however essential to secure the propagation of the race, is
+only an incident, and not an essential in love.
+
+Let us turn to the average woman. Here the picture must usually be still
+more unsatisfactory. The man at least, crude as we may find his two
+fundamental notions to be, has at all events attained mental pride and
+physical satisfaction. The woman often attains neither, and since the man,
+by instinct or tradition, has maintained a self-regarding attitude, that
+is not surprising. The husband--by primitive instinct partly, certainly by
+ancient tradition--regards himself as the active partner in matters of
+love and his own pleasure as legitimately the prime motive for activity.
+His wife consequently falls into the complementary position, and regards
+herself as the passive partner and her pleasure as negligible, if not
+indeed as a thing to be rather ashamed of, should she by chance experience
+it. So that, while the husband is content with a mere simulacrum and
+pretence of the erotic life, the wife has often had none at all.
+
+Few people realise--few indeed have the knowledge or the opportunity to
+realise--how much women thus lose, alike in the means to fulfill their
+own lives and in the power to help others. A woman has a husband, she has
+marital relationships, she has children, she has all the usual domestic
+troubles--it seems to the casual observer that she has everything that
+constitutes a fully developed matron fit to play her proper part in the
+home and in the world. Yet with all these experiences, which undoubtedly
+are an important part of life, she may yet remain on the emotional
+side--and, as a matter of fact, frequently remains--quite virginal, as
+immature as a school-girl. She has not acquired an erotic personality, she
+has not mastered the art of love, with the result that her whole nature
+remains ill-developed and unharmonised, and that she is incapable of
+bringing her personality--having indeed no achieved personality to
+bring--to bear effectively on the problems of society and the world around
+her.
+
+That alone is a great misfortune, all the more tragic since under
+favourable conditions, which it should have been natural to attain, it
+might so easily be avoided. But there is this further result, full of the
+possibilities of domestic tragedy, that the wife so situated, however
+innocent, however virtuous, may at any time find her virginally sensitive
+emotional nature fertilised by the touch of some other man than her
+husband.
+
+It happens so often. A girl who has been carefully guarded in the home,
+preserved from evil companions, preserved also from what her friends
+regarded as the contamination of sexual knowledge, a girl of high ideals,
+yet healthy and robust, is married to a man of whom she probably has
+little more than a conventional knowledge. Yet he may by good chance be
+the masculine counterpart of herself, well brought up, without sexual
+experience and ignorant of all but the elementary facts of sex, loyal and
+honourable, prepared to be, fitted to be, a devoted husband. The union
+seems to be of the happiest kind; no one detects that anything is lacking
+to this perfect marriage; in course of time one or more children are born.
+But during all this time the husband has never really made love to his
+wife; he has not even understood what courtship in the intimate sense
+means; love as an art has no existence for him; he has loved his wife
+according to his imperfect knowledge, but he has never so much as realised
+that his knowledge was imperfect. She on her side loves her husband; she
+comes in time indeed to have a sort of tender maternal feeling for him.
+Possibly she feels a little pleasure in intercourse with him. But she has
+never once been profoundly aroused, and she has never once been utterly
+satisfied. The deep fountains of her nature have never been unsealed; she
+has never been fertilised throughout her whole nature by their liberating
+influence; her erotic personality has never been developed. Then
+something happens. Perhaps the husband is called away, it may have been to
+take part in the Great War. The wife, whatever her tender solicitude for
+her absent partner, feels her solitude and is drawn nearer to friends,
+perhaps her husband's friends. Some man among them becomes congenial to
+her. There need be no conscious or overt love-making on either side, and
+if there were the wife's loyalty might be aroused and the friendship
+brought to an end. Love-making is not indeed necessary. The wife's latent
+erotic needs, while still remaining unconscious, have come nearer to the
+surface; now that she has grown mature and that they have been stimulated
+yet unsatisfied for so long, they have, unknown to herself, become
+insistent and sensitive to a sympathetic touch. The friends may indeed
+grow into lovers, and then some sort of solution, by divorce or
+intrigue--scarcely however a desirable kind of solution--becomes possible.
+But we are here taking the highest ground and assuming that honourable
+feeling, domestic affection, or a stern sense of moral duty, renders such
+solution unacceptable. In due course the husband returns, and then, to her
+utter dismay, the wife discovers, if she has not discovered it before,
+that during his absence, and for the first time in her life, she has
+fallen in love. She loyally confesses the situation to her husband, for
+whom her affection and attachment remain the same as before, for what has
+happened to her is the coming of a totally new kind of love and not any
+change in her old love. The situation which arises is one of torturing
+anxiety for all concerned, and it is not less so when all concerned are
+animated by noble and self-sacrificing impulses. The husband in his
+devotion to his wife may even be willing that her new impulses should be
+gratified. She, on her side, will not think of yielding to desires which
+seem both unfair to her husband and opposed to all her moral traditions.
+We are not here concerned to consider the most likely, or the most
+desirable, exit from this unfortunate situation. The points to note are
+that it is a situation which to-day actually occurs; that it causes acute
+unhappiness to at least two people who may be of the finest physical and
+intellectual type and the noblest character, and that it might be avoided
+if there were at the outset a proper understanding of the married state
+and of the part which the art of love plays in married happiness and the
+development of personality.
+
+A woman may have been married once, she may have been married twice, she
+may have had children by both husbands, and yet it may not be until she is
+past the age of thirty and is united to a third man that she attains the
+development of erotic personality and all that it involves in the full
+flowering of her whole nature. Up to then she had to all appearance had
+all the essential experiences of life. Yet she had remained spiritually
+virginal, with conventionally prim ideas of life, narrow in her
+sympathies, with the finest and noblest functions of her soul helpless and
+bound, at heart unhappy even if not clearly realising that she was
+unhappy. Now she has become another person. The new liberated forces from
+within have not only enabled her to become sensitive to the rich
+complexities of intimate personal relationship, they have enlarged and
+harmonised her realisation of all relationships. Her new erotic experience
+has not only stimulated all her energies, but her new knowledge has
+quickened all her sympathies. She feels, at the same time, more mentally
+alert, and she finds that she is more alive than before to the influences
+of nature and of art. Moreover, as others observe, however they may
+explain it, a new beauty has come into her face, a new radiancy into her
+expression, a new force into all her activities. Such is the exquisite
+flowering of love which some of us who may penetrate beneath the surface
+of life are now and then privileged to see. The sad part of it is that we
+see it so seldom and then often so late.
+
+It must not be supposed that there is any direct or speedy way of
+introducing into life a wider and deeper conception of the erotic
+play-function, and all that it means for the development of the
+individual, the enrichment of the marriage relationship, and the moral
+harmony of society. Such a supposition would merely be to vulgarise and to
+stultify the divine and elusive mystery. It is only slowly and indirectly
+that we can bring about the revolution which in this direction would renew
+life. We may prepare the way for it by undermining and destroying those
+degrading traditional conceptions which have persisted so long that they
+are instilled into us almost from birth, to work like a virus in the
+heart, and to become almost a disease of the soul. To make way for the
+true and beautiful revelation, we can at least seek to cast out those
+ancient growths, which may once have been true and beautiful, but now are
+false and poisonous. By casting out from us the conception of love as vile
+and unclean we shall purify the chambers of our hearts for the reception
+of love as something unspeakably holy.
+
+In this matter we may learn a lesson from the psycho-analysts of to-day
+without any implication that psycho-analysis is necessarily a desirable or
+even possible way of attaining the revelation of love. The wiser
+psycho-analysts insist that the process of liberating the individual from
+outer and inner influences that repress or deform his energies and
+impulses is effected by removing the inhibitions on the free-play of his
+nature. It is a process of education in the true sense, not of the
+suppression of natural impulses nor even of the instillation of sound
+rules and maxims for their control, not of the pressing in but of the
+leading out of the individual's special tendencies.[20] It removes
+inhibitions, even inhibitions that were placed upon the individual, or
+that he consciously or unconsciously placed upon himself, with the best
+moral intentions, and by so doing it allows a larger and freer and more
+natively spontaneous morality to come into play. It has this influence
+above all in the sphere of sex, where such inhibitions have been most
+powerfully laid on the native impulses, where the natural tendencies have
+been most surrounded by taboos and terrors, most tinged with artificial
+stains of impurity and degradation derived from alien and antiquated
+traditions. Thus the therapeutical experience of the psycho-analysts
+reinforces the lessons we learn from physiology and psychology and the
+intimate experiences of life.
+
+[20] See, for instance, H.W. Frink, _Morbid Fears and Compulsions_,
+1918, Ch. X.
+
+Sexual activity, we see, is not merely a bald propagative act, nor, when
+propagation is put aside, is it merely the relief of distended vessels. It
+is something more even than the foundation of great social institutions.
+It is the function by which all the finer activities of the organism,
+physical and psychic, may be developed and satisfied. Nothing, it has
+been said, is so serious as lust--to use the beautiful term which has been
+degraded into the expression of the lowest forms of sensual pleasure--and
+we have now to add that nothing is so full of play as love. Play is
+primarily the instinctive work of the brain, but it is brain activity
+united in the subtlest way to bodily activity. In the play-function of sex
+two forms of activity, physical and psychic, are most exquisitely and
+variously and harmoniously blended. We here understand best how it is that
+the brain organs and the sexual organs are, from the physiological
+standpoint, of equal importance and equal dignity. Thus the adrenal
+glands, among the most influential of all the ductless glands, are
+specially and intimately associated alike with the brain and the sex
+organs. As we rise in the animal series, brain and adrenal glands march
+side by side in developmental increase of size, and at the same time,
+sexual activity and adrenal activity equally correspond.
+
+Lovers in their play--when they have been liberated from the traditions
+which bound them to the trivial or the gross conception of play in
+love--are thus moving amongst the highest human activities, alike of the
+body and of the soul. They are passing to each other the sacramental
+chalice of that wine which imparts the deepest joy that men and women can
+know. They are subtly weaving the invisible cords that bind husband and
+wife together more truly and more firmly than the priest of any church.
+And if in the end--as may or may not be--they attain the climax of free
+and complete union, then their human play has become one with that divine
+play of creation in which old poets fabled that, out of the dust of the
+ground and in his own image, some God of Chaos once created Man.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE RACE
+
+I
+
+
+The relation of the individual person to the species he belongs to is the
+most intimate of all relations. It is a relation which almost amounts to
+identity. Yet it somehow seems so vague, so abstract, as scarcely to
+concern us at all. It is only lately indeed that there has been formulated
+even so much as a science to discuss this relationship, and the duties
+which, when properly understood, it throws upon the individual. Even yet
+the word "Eugenics," the name of this science, and this art, sometimes
+arouses a smile. It seems to stand for a modern fad, which the superior
+person, or even the ordinary plebeian democrat, may pass by on the other
+side with his nose raised towards the sky. Modern the science and art of
+Eugenics certainly seem, though the term is ancient, and the Greeks of
+classic days, as well as their successors to-day, used the word Eugeneia
+for nobility or good birth. It was chosen by Francis Galton, less than
+fifty years ago, to express "the effort of Man to improve his own breed."
+But the thing the term stands for is, in reality, also far from modern. It
+is indeed ancient and may even be nearly as old as Man himself.
+Consciously or unconsciously, sometimes under pretexts that have disguised
+his motives even from himself, Man has always been attempting to improve
+his own quality or at least to maintain it. When he slackens that effort,
+when he allows his attention to be too exclusively drawn to other ends, he
+suffers, he becomes decadent, he even tends to die out.
+
+Primitive eugenics had seldom anything to do with what we call
+"birth-control." One must not say that it never had. Even the mysterious
+mika operation of so primitive a race as the Australians has been supposed
+to be a method of controlling conception. But the usual method, even of
+people highly advanced in culture, has been simpler. They preferred to see
+the new-born infant before deciding whether it was likely to prove a
+credit to its parents or to the human race generally, and if it seemed not
+up to the standard they dealt with it accordingly. At one time that was
+regarded as a cruel and even inhuman method. To-day, when the most
+civilised nations of the world have devoted all their best energies to
+competitive slaughter, we may have learnt to view the matter differently.
+If we can tolerate the wholesale murder and mutilation of the finest
+specimens of our race in the adult possession of all their aptitudes we
+cannot easily find anything to disapprove in the merciful disposal of the
+poorest specimens before they have even attained conscious possession of
+their senses. But in any case, and whatever we may ourselves be pleased to
+think or not to think, it is certain that some of the most highly
+developed peoples of the world have practised infanticide. It is equally
+certain that the practise has not proved destructive to the emotions of
+humanity and affection. Even some of the lowest human races,--as we
+commonly estimate them,--while finding it necessary to put aside a certain
+proportion of their new-born infants, expend a degree of love and even
+indulgence on the children they bring up which is rarely found among
+so-called civilised nations.
+
+There is no need, however, to consider whether or not infanticide is
+humane. We are all agreed that it is altogether unnecessary, and that it
+is seldom that even that incipient form of infanticide called abortion,
+still so popular among us, need be resorted to. Our aim now--so far at all
+events as mere ideals go--is not to destroy life but to preserve it; we
+seek to improve the conditions of life and to render unnecessary the
+premature death of any human creature that has once drawn breath.
+
+It is indeed just here that we find a certain clash between the modern
+view of life and the view of earlier civilisations. The ancients were
+less careful than we claim to be of the individual, but they were more
+careful of the race. They cultivated eugenics after their manner, though
+it was a manner which we reprobate.[21] We pride ourselves, rightly or
+wrongly, on our care for the individual; during all the past century we
+claim to have been strenuously working for an amelioration of the
+environment which will make life healthier and pleasanter for the
+individual. But in the concentration of our attention on this altogether
+desirable end, which we are still far from having adequately attained, we
+have lost sight of that larger end, the well-being of the race and the
+amelioration of life itself, not merely of the conditions of life. The
+most we hope is that somehow the improvement of the conditions of the
+individual will incidentally improve the stock. These our practical
+ideals, which have flourished for a century past, arose out of the great
+French Revolution and were inspired by the maxim of that Revolution, as
+formulated by Rousseau, that "All men are born equal." That maxim, was
+overthrown half a century ago; the great biological movement of science,
+initiated by Darwin, showed that it was untenable. All men are not born
+equal. Everyone agrees about that now, but nevertheless the momentum of
+the earlier movement was so powerful that we still go on acting as though
+all men are, and always will be, born equal, and that we need not trouble
+ourselves about heredity but only about the environment.
+
+[21] But this statement must not be left without important
+qualification. Thus the ancient Greeks (as Moïssidès has shown in
+_Janus_, 1913), not only their philosophers and statesmen, but also
+their women, often took the most enlightened interest in eugenics, and,
+moreover, showed it in practice. They were in many respects far in
+advance of us. They clearly realised, for instance, the need of a proper
+interval between conceptions, not only to ensure the health of women,
+but also the vigour of the offspring. It is natural that among every
+fine race eugenics should be almost an instinct or they would cease to
+be a fine race. It is equally natural that among our modern degenerates
+eugenics is an unspeakable horror, however much, as the psycho-analysts
+would put it, they rationalise that horror.
+
+The way out of this clash of ideals--which has compelled us to hope
+impossibilities from the environment because we dreaded what seemed the
+only alternative--is, as we know, furnished by birth-control. An
+unqualified reliance on the environment, making it ever easier and easier
+for the feeblest and most defective to be born and survive, could only, in
+the long run, lead to the degeneration of the whole race. The knowledge of
+the practice of birth-control gives us the mastery of all that the
+ancients gained by infanticide, while yet enabling us to cherish that
+ideal of the sacredness of human life which we profess to honour so
+highly. The main difficulty is that it demands a degree of scientific
+precision which the ancients could not possess and might dispense with, so
+long as they were able to decide the eugenic claims of the infant by
+actual inspection. We have to be content to determine not what the infant
+is but when it be likely to be, and that involves a knowledge of the laws
+of heredity which we are only learning slowly to acquire. We may all in
+our humble ways help to increase that knowledge by giving it greater
+extension and more precision through the observations we are able to make
+on our own families. To such observations Galton attached great importance
+and strove in various ways to further them. Detailed records, physical and
+mental, beginning from birth, are still far from being as common as is
+desirable, although it is obvious that they possess a permanent personal
+and family private interest in addition to their more public scientific
+value. We do not need, and it would indeed be undesirable, to emulate in
+human breeding the achievements of a Luther Burbank. We have no right to
+attempt to impose on any human creature an exaggerated and one-sided
+development. But it is not only our right, it is our duty, or rather one
+may say, the natural impulse of every rational and humane person, to seek
+that only such children may be born as will be able to go through life
+with a reasonable prospect that they will not be heavily handicapped by
+inborn defect or special liability to some incapacitating disease. What is
+called "positive" eugenics--the attempt, that is, to breed special
+qualities--may well be viewed with hesitation. But so-called "negative"
+eugenics--the effort to clear all inborn obstacles out of the path of the
+coming generation--demands our heartiest sympathy and our best
+co-operation, for as Galton, the founder of modern Eugenics, wrote towards
+the end of his life of this new science: "Its first object is to check the
+birth-rate of the unfit, instead of allowing them to come into being,
+though doomed in large numbers to perish prematurely." We can seldom be
+absolutely sure what stocks should not propagate, and what two stocks
+should on no account be blended, but we can attain reasonable probability,
+and it is on such probabilities in every department of life that we are
+always called upon to act.
+
+It is often said--I have said it myself--that birth-control when practised
+merely as a limitation of the family, scarcely suffices to further the
+eugenic progress of the race. If it is not deliberately directed towards
+the elimination of the worst stocks or the worst possibilities in the
+blending of stocks, it may even tend to diminish the better stocks since
+it is the better stocks that are least likely to propagate at random. This
+is true if other conditions remain equal. It is evident, however, that the
+other conditions will not remain equal, for no evidence has yet been
+brought forward to show that birth-control, even when practised without
+regard to eugenic considerations--doubtless the usual rule up to the
+present--has produced any degeneration of the race. On the contrary, the
+evidence seems to show that it has improved the race. The example of
+Holland is often brought forward as evidence in favour of such a tendency
+of birth-control, since in that country the wide-spread practise of
+birth-control has been accompanied by an increase in the health and
+stature of the people, as well as an increase in their numbers to a
+remarkable degree, for the fall in the birth-rate has been far more than
+compensated by the fall in the death-rate, while it is said that the
+average height of the population has increased by four inches. It is,
+indeed, quite possible to see why, although theoretically a random
+application of birth-control cannot affect the germinal possibilities of a
+community, in practise it may improve the somatic conditions under which
+the germinal elements develop. There will probably be a longer interval
+between the births of the children, which has been demonstrated by Ewart
+and others to be an important factor not only in preserving the health of
+the mother but in increasing the health and size of the child. The
+diminution in the number of the children renders it possible to bestow a
+greater amount of care on each child. Moreover, the better economic
+position of the father, due to the smaller number of individuals he has to
+support, makes it possible for the family to live under improved
+conditions as regards nourishment, hygiene, and comfort. The observance of
+birth-control is thus a far more effective lever for raising the state of
+the social environment and improving the conditions of breeding, than is
+direct action on the part of the community in its collective capacity to
+attain the same end. For however energetic such collective action may be
+in striving to improve general social conditions by municipalising or
+State-supporting public utilities, it can never adequately counter-balance
+the excessive burden and wasteful expenditure of force placed on a family
+by undue child-production. It can only palliate them.
+
+When, however, we have found reason to believe that, even if practised
+without regard to eugenic considerations, birth-control may yet act
+beneficially to promote good breeding, we begin to realise how great a
+power it may possess when consciously and deliberately directed towards
+that end. In eugenics, as already pointed out, there are two objects that
+may be aimed at: one called positive eugenics, that seeks to promote the
+increase of the best stocks amongst us; the other, called negative
+eugenics, which seeks to promote the decrease of the worst stocks. Our
+knowledge is still too imperfect to enable us to pursue either of these
+objects with complete certainty. This is especially so as regards positive
+eugenics, and since it seems highly undesirable to attempt to breed human
+beings, as we do animals, for points, when we are in the presence of what
+seem to us our finest human stocks, physically, morally, and
+intellectually, it is our wisest course just to leave them alone as much
+as we can. The best stocks will probably be also those best able to help
+themselves and in so doing to help others. But that is obviously not so as
+regards the worst stocks. It is, therefore, fortunate that the aim here
+seems a little clearer. There are still many abnormal conditions of which
+we cannot say positively that they are injurious to the race and that we
+should therefore seek to breed them out. But there are other conditions so
+obviously of evil import alike to the subjects themselves and to their
+descendants that we cannot have any reasonable doubt about them. There is,
+for instance, epilepsy, which is known to be transformed by heredity into
+various abnormalities dangerous alike to their possessors and to society.
+There are also the pronounced degrees of feeble-mindedness, which are
+definitely heritable and not only condemn those who reveal them to a
+permanent inaptitude for full life, but constitute a subtle poison working
+through the social atmosphere in all directions and lowering the level of
+civilisation in the community. Nowhere has this been so thoroughly studied
+and so clearly proved as in the United States. It is only necessary to
+mention Dr. C.B. Davenport of the Department of Experimental Evolution at
+Cold Spring Harbor (New York) who has carried on so much research in
+regard to the heredity of epilepsy and other inheritable abnormal
+conditions, and Dr. Goddard of Vineland (New Jersey) whose work has
+illustrated so fully the hereditary relationships of feeble-mindedness.
+The United States, moreover, has seen the development of the system of
+social field-work which has rendered possible a more complete knowledge of
+family heredity than has ever before been possible on a large scale.
+
+It is along such lines as these that our knowledge of the eugenic
+conditions of life will grow adequate and precise enough to form an
+effective guide to social conduct. Nature, and a due attention to laws of
+heredity in life, will then rank in equal honour to our eyes with nurture
+or that attention to the environmental conditions of life which we already
+regard as so important. A regard to nurture has led us to spend the
+greatest care on the preservation not only of the fit but the unfit, while
+meantime it has wisely suggested to us the desirability of segregating or
+even of sterilising the unfit. But the study of Nature leads us further
+and, as Galton said, "Eugenics rests on bringing no more individuals into
+the world than can be properly cared for, and these only of the best
+stocks." That is to say that the only instrument by which eugenics can be
+made practically effective in the modern world is birth-control.
+
+It is not scientific research alone, nor even the wide popular diffusion
+of knowledge, that will suffice to bring eugenics and birth-control,
+singly or in their due combination, into the course of our daily lives.
+They need to be embodied in our instinctive impulses. Galton considered
+that eugenics must become a factor of religion and be regarded as a sacred
+and virile creed, while Ellen Key holds that the religions of the past
+must be superseded by a new religion which will be the awakening of the
+whole of humanity to a consciousness of the "holiness of generation." For
+my own part, I scarcely consider that either eugenics or birth-control can
+be regarded as properly a part of religion. Being of virtue and not of
+grace they belong more naturally to the sphere of morals. But here they
+certainly need to go far deeper than the mere intelligence of the mind can
+take them. They cannot become guides to conduct until their injunctions
+have been printed on the fleshy tablets of our hearts. The demands of the
+race must speak from within us, in the voice of conscience which we
+disobey at our peril. When that happens with regard to ascertained laws of
+racial well-being we may know that we are truly following, even though not
+in the letter, those great spirits, like Galton with his intellectual
+vision and Ellen Key with her inspired enthusiasm, who have pointed out
+new roads for the ennoblement of the race.
+
+
+II
+
+It may be well, before we go further, to look a little more closely into
+the suspicion and dislike which eugenics still arouses in many worthy
+old-fashioned people. To some extent that attitude is excused, not only by
+the mistakes which in a new and complex science must inevitably be made
+even by painstaking students, but also by the rash and extravagant
+proposals of irresponsible and eccentric persons claiming without warrant
+to speak in the name of eugenics. Two thousand years ago the wild excesses
+of some early Christians furnished an excuse for the ancient world to view
+Christianity with contempt, although the extreme absence of such excesses
+has furnished still better ground for the modern world to maintain the
+same view. To-day such a work as _Le Haras Humain_ ("The Human Stud-farm")
+of Dr. Binet-Sanglé, putting forward proposals which, whether beneficial
+or not, will certainly find no one to carry them out, similarly furnishes
+an excuse to those who would reject eugenics altogether. Utopian schemes
+have their value; we should be able to find inspiration in the most modern
+of them, just as we still do in Plato's immortal _Republic_. But in this,
+as in other matters, we must exercise a little intelligence. We must not
+confuse the brilliant excursion of some solitary thinker with the
+well-grounded proposals of those who are concerned with the sober
+possibilities of actual life in our own time. People who are incapable of
+exercising a little shrewd commonsense in the affairs of life, and are in
+the habit of emptying out the baby with the bath, had better avoid
+touching the delicate problems connected with practical eugenics.
+
+There is one prejudice already mentioned, due to lack of clear thinking,
+which deserves more special consideration because it is widespread among
+the socialistic democracy of several countries as well as among social
+reformers, and is directed alike against eugenics and birth-control. This
+prejudice is based on the ground that bad economic conditions and an
+unwholesome environment are the source of all social evils, and that a
+better distribution of wealth, or a vast scheme of social welfare, is the
+one thing necessary, when that is achieved all other things being added
+unto us, without any further trouble on our part. It is certainly
+impossible to over-rate the importance of the economic factor in society,
+or of a good environment. And it is true that eugenics alone, like
+birth-control alone, can effect little if the economic basis of society is
+unsound. But it is equally certain that the economic factor can never in
+itself suffice for fine living or even as a cure-all of social and racial
+diseases. Its value is not that it can effect these things but that it
+furnishes the favourable conditions for effecting them. He would be
+foolish indeed who went to the rich to find the example of good breeding
+and, as is well known, it is not with the rich that the future of the race
+lies. The fact is that under any economic system the responsible personal
+direction of the individual and the family remain equally necessary, and
+no progress is possible so long as the individual casts all responsibility
+away from himself on to the social group he forms part of. The social
+group, after all, is merely himself and the likes of himself. He is merely
+shifting the burden from his individual self to his collective self, and
+in so doing he loses more than he gains.
+
+Thus there is always a sound core in that Individualism which has been
+preached so long and practised so energetically, especially in
+English-speaking lands, however great the abuse involved in its excesses.
+It is still in the name of Individualism that the most brilliant
+antagonists of eugenics and of birth-control are wont to direct their
+attacks. The counsel of self-control and foresight in procreation, the
+restriction necessary to purify and raise the standard of the race, seem
+to the narrow and short-sighted advocates of a great principle an
+unwarrantable violation of the sacred rights of their individual liberty.
+They have not yet grasped the elementary fact that the rights of the
+individual are the rights of all individuals, and that Individualism
+itself calls for a limitation of the freedom of the individual.
+
+That is why even the most uncompromising Individualist must recognise an
+element of altruism, call it whatever name you will, Collectivism,
+Socialism, Communism, or merely the vague and long-suffering term,
+Democracy. One cannot assume Individualism for oneself unless one assumes
+it for the many. That is a great truth which goes to the heart of the
+whole complex problem of eugenics and birth-control. As Perrycoste has
+well argued,[22] biology is altogether against the narrow Individualism
+which seeks to oppose Collective Individualism. For if, in accordance with
+the most careful modern investigations, we recognise that heredity is
+supreme, that the qualities we have inherited from our ancestors count for
+more in our lives than anything we have acquired by our own personal
+efforts, then we have to admit that the capable man's wealth is more the
+community's property than his own, and, similarly, the incapable man's
+poverty is more the community's concern than his own. So that neither the
+capable nor the incapable are entitled to an unqualified power of freedom,
+and neither, likewise, are justly liable to be burdened by an unqualified
+responsibility. It is the duty of the community to draw on the powers of
+the fit and equally its duty to care for the unfit. In this way,
+Perrycoste, whose attitude is that of the Rationalist, is led by science
+to a conclusion which is that of the Christian. We are all members each of
+the other, and still more are we members of those who went before us. The
+generations preceding us have not died to themselves but live in us, and
+we, whom they produced, live in each other and in those who will come
+after us. The problems of eugenics and of birth-control affect us all. In
+the face of these problems it is the voice of Man that speaks: "Inasmuch
+as ye did it not unto the least of these my brethren, ye did it not unto
+me." However firmly we base ourselves on the principles of Individualism
+we are inevitably brought to the fundamental facts of eugenics which, if
+we fail to recognise, our Individualism becomes of no effect.
+
+[22] F.H. Perrycoste, "Politics and Science," _Science Progress_, Jan.,
+1920.
+
+But it is the same with Socialism, or by whatever name we chose to call
+the Collectivist activities of the community in social reform. Socialism
+also brings us up against the hard rock of eugenic fact which, if we
+neglect it, will dash our most beautiful social construction to fragments.
+It is the more necessary to point this out since it is on the Socialist
+and Democratic side, much more frequently than on the Individualist side,
+that we find an indifferent or positively hostile attitude towards eugenic
+considerations. Put social conditions on a sound basis, the people on
+this side often say, let all receive an adequate economic return for their
+work and be recognised as having a claim for an adequate share in the
+products of society, and there is no need to worry about the race or about
+the need for birth-control, all will go well of itself. There is not the
+slightest ground for any such comfortable belief.
+
+This has been well shown by Dr. Eden Paul, himself a Socialist and even in
+sympathy with the extreme Left.[23] After setting forth the present
+conditions, with our excessive elimination of higher types, and undue
+multiplication of lower types, the racial degeneration caused by the
+faulty and anti-selective working of the marriage system in modern
+capitalist society, so that in our existing civilisation unconscious
+natural selection has largely ceased to work towards the improvement of
+the human breed, he proceeds to consider the possible remedies. The
+frequent impatience of the Socialist, and Social Reformers generally, with
+eugenic proposals has a certain degree of justification in the fact that
+many evils thoughtlessly attributed to inferiority of stock are really due
+to bad environment. But when the environment has been so far improved that
+all defects due to its badness are removed, we shall be face to face,
+without possibility of doubt, with bad inheritance as the sole remaining
+factor in the production of inefficient and anti-social members of the
+community. A socialist community must recognise the right to work and to
+maintenance of all its members, Eden Paul points out, but, he adds, a
+community which allowed this right to all defectives without imposing any
+restrictions in their perpetuation of themselves would deserve all the
+evils that would fall upon it. It is quite clear how intolerable the
+burden of these evils would be. A State that provided an adequate
+subsistence for all alike, the inefficient as well as the efficient, would
+encourage a racial degeneration, from excessive multiplication of the
+unfit, far more dangerous even than that of to-day.[24] Ability to earn
+the minimum wage, Eden Paul argues in agreement with H.G. Wells, must be
+the condition of the right to become a parent. "Unless the socialist is a
+eugenist as well, the socialist state will speedily perish from racial
+degradation."
+
+
+[23] In an essay on "Eugenics, Birth Control, and Socialism" in
+_Population and Birth-Control: A Symposium_, edited by Eden and Cedar
+Paul.
+
+[24] This is here and there beginning to be recognised. Thus, not long
+ago, the Hereford War Pensions Committee resolved not to issue a
+maternal grant for children born during a prolonged period of treatment
+allowance. Such a measure of course fails to meet the situation, for it
+is obvious that, when born, the children must be cared for. But it shows
+a glimmering recognition of the facts, and the people capable of such a
+recognition will, in time, come to see that the right way of meeting the
+situation is, not to neglect the children, but to prevent their
+conception. Mothers' Clinics for instruction in such prevention are now
+being established in England, through the advocacy of Mrs. Margaret
+Sanger and the actual initiative of Dr. Marie Stopes.
+
+Thus it is essential that the eugenist, dealing with the hereditary
+factor of life, and the social reformer or socialist, dealing with the
+environmental factor, should supplement each other's work. Neither can
+attain his end without the other's help, for the eugenist alone cannot
+overcome the environmental factor, even perhaps increases it if he is an
+individualist in the narrow sense, and the socialist alone cannot overcome
+the bad hereditary factor, and will even increase it if he is no more than
+a socialist. The more socialist our State becomes the more essential
+becomes at the same time the adoption of eugenic practices as a working
+part of the State. "Socialism and eugenics must go hand in hand."
+
+Perrycoste from his own point of view has independently reached the same
+conclusions. He is not, indeed, concerned with any "Socialist" community
+of the future but with the dangerous results which must inevitably follow
+the already established methods of social reform in our modern civilised
+States unless they are speedily checked by effective action based on
+eugenic knowledge. "If," he observes, "the community is to shoulder half
+or three-quarters of the burden of sustaining those degenerates who,
+through no fault of their own, are congenitally incompetent to maintain
+themselves in decent comfort, and is to render the life-pilgrimage of
+these unfortunates tolerable instead of a dreary nightmare, if it is to
+assume paternal charge of all the tens or hundreds of thousands of
+children whose parents cannot or will not provide adequately for them and
+is to guarantee to all such children as much education as they are capable
+of receiving, and a really fair start in life: then in sheer
+self-preservation the community must insist on, and rigidly enforce, its
+absolute claim to secure that no degeneracy or inheritable congenital
+defects shall persist beyond the present generation of degenerates, and
+that the community of fifty or seventy years hence shall have no incubus
+of mentally, or morally, or even physically, degenerate members--none but
+a few occasional sporadic morbid 'sports' from the normal, which it, in
+turn, may effectively prevent from handing on their like." Unless the
+problem is squarely faced, Perrycoste concludes, national deterioration
+must increase and a permanently successful collectivist society is
+inherently impossible.
+
+We are not now concerned with the details of any policy of eugenics and of
+birth-control, which I couple together because although a random
+birth-control by no means involves much, if any, eugenic progress, it is
+not easy under modern conditions to conceive any practical or effective
+policy of eugenics except through the instrumentation of birth-control. We
+here take it for granted that in this field the slow progress of
+scientific knowledge must be our guide. Premature legislation, rash and
+uninstructed action, will not lead to progress but are more likely to
+delay it. Yet even with imperfect knowledge, it is already of the first
+importance to evoke interest in the great issue here at stake and to do
+all that we can to arouse the individual conscience of every man and woman
+to his or her personal responsibility in this matter. That is here all
+taken for granted.
+
+It seems necessary to consider the political aspect of eugenics because
+that aspect is frequently invoked, and a man's attitude towards this
+question is frequently determined beforehand by what he considers that
+Individualism or Socialism demands. We see that when the question is
+driven home our political attitude makes no difference. It is only a
+shallow Individualism, it is only a still more shallow Socialism, which
+imagines that under modern social conditions the fundamental racial
+questions can be left to answer themselves.
+
+
+III
+
+Many years before the Great War, in all the most civilised countries of
+the World, there were those who raised the cry of "Race-Suicide!" In
+America this cry was more especially popularised by the powerful voice of
+Theodore Roosevelt, but in European countries there were similar voices
+raised in tones of virtuous indignation to denounce the same crime. Since
+the war other voices have been raised in even more high-pitched and
+feverish tones, but now they are less weighty and responsible voices,
+since to those who realise that at present there is not food enough to
+keep the population of the world from starvation it seems hardly
+compatible with sanity to advocate an increased rate of human production.
+
+Now, though it is easy to do so, we must not belittle this cry of
+"Race-Suicide!" It is not usually accompanied by definite argument, but it
+assumes that birth-control is the method of such suicide, and that the
+first and most immediately dangerous result is that one's own nation,
+whichever that may be, is placed in a position of alarming military
+inferiority to other nations, as a step towards the final extinction. It
+is useless to deny that it really is a serious matter if there is danger
+of the speedy disappearance of the human race from the earth by its own
+voluntary and deliberate action, and that within a measurable period of
+time--for if it were an immeasurable period there would be no occasion for
+any acute anxiety--the last man will perish from the world. This is what
+"Race-Suicide" means, and we must face the fact squarely.
+
+It can scarcely be said, however, that the meaning of "Race-Suicide" has
+actually been squarely faced by those who have most vehemently raised
+that cry. Translated into more definite and precise terms this cry means,
+and is intended to mean: "We want more births." That is what it definitely
+means, and sometimes in the minds of those who make this demand it seems
+also to imply nothing more. Yet it implies a great number of other things.
+It implies certain strain and probable ill-health on the mothers, it
+implies distress and disorder in the family, it implies, even if the
+additional child survives, a more acute industrial struggle, and it
+further involves in this case, by the stimulus it gives to
+over-population, the perpetual menace of militarism and war. What,
+however, even at the outset, more births most distinctly and most
+unquestionably imply is more deaths. It is nowadays so well known that a
+high birth-rate is accompanied by a high death-rate--the exceptions are
+too few to need attention--that it is unnecessary to adduce further
+evidence. It is only the intoxicated enthusiasts of the "Race-Suicide" cry
+who are able to overlook a fact of which they can hardly be ignorant. The
+model which they hold up for the public's inspiration has on the obverse
+"More Births!" But on the reverse it bears "More Deaths!" It would be
+helpful to the public, and might even be wholesome for our enthusiasts'
+own enlightenment, if they would occasionally turn the medal round and
+slightly vary the monotony of their propaganda by changing its form and
+crying out for "More Deaths!" "It is a hard thing," said Johnny Dunn, "for
+a man that has a house full of children to be left to the mercy of
+Almighty God."
+
+If, however, we wish to consider the real significance of the facts,
+without regard for the wild cries of ignorant cranks, it is scarcely
+necessary to point out here that neither the birth-rate taken by itself,
+nor the death-rate taken by itself, will suffice to give us any measure
+even of the growth of the population, to say nothing of the progress of
+civilisation or the happiness of humanity. It is obvious that we must
+consider both gains and losses, and put one against the other, if we wish
+to ascertain the net result. We may roughly get a notion of what that
+result is by deducting the death-rate from the birth-rate and calling the
+remainder the survival-rate. If we are really concerned with the question
+of the alleged suicide of the race, and do not wish to be befooled, we
+must pay little attention to the birth-rate, for that by itself means
+nothing: we must concentrate on the survival-rate. Then we may soon
+convince ourselves, not only that the human race is not committing
+suicide, but that not even a single one of the so-called civilised nations
+of which it is mainly composed is committing suicide. Quite the contrary!
+Every one of them, even France, where this peculiar "suicide" is supposed
+to be most actively at work, is yearly increasing in numbers.
+
+It is interesting to note, moreover, that the French have been increasing
+faster, that is to say the survival-rate has been higher in recent years
+just before the war, when the birth-rate was at its lowest, than they were
+twenty years earlier, with a higher birth-rate. And if we take a wider
+sweep and consider the growth of the French population towards the end of
+the eighteenth century, we find the birth-rate estimated at the very high
+figure of 40. But the death-rate was nearly as high, the average duration
+of life was only half what it is now. So that the survival-rate in France
+at that time, with widely different rates of birth and death, was not much
+unlike it is now. The recent French birth-rate of 19 and less, which
+automatically causes the "Race-Suicide" marionette to dance with rage, is
+producing not far from the same result in growth of the population--we are
+not here concerned with the enormous difference in well being and
+happiness--as the extremely high rate of 40 which sends our marionettes
+leaping to the sky with joy. In war-time England, in 1917, the birth-rate
+sank to 17.8, yet the death-rate was at 14 and the increase of the
+population continued. The more the human race commits this kind of
+suicide, one is tempted to exclaim, the faster it grows!
+
+It is, however, in the New World--as in Canada, Australia, and New
+Zealand--that we find the most impressive evidence of the real criteria of
+the growth in population set up for judgment on the racial suicide cranks.
+Canadian statistics bring out many points instructive even in their
+variation. Here we see not only unusual curves of rise and fall, but also
+pronounced differences, due to the special peculiarities of the French
+population, most clearly in the Province of Quebec but also in some parts
+of the Province of Ontario. In Quebec the birth-rate some years ago was
+35, and the death-rate 21, both rates high, and the survival-rate high at
+14; recently the birth-rate has risen to 37 and the death-rate fallen to
+17, with the result that the survival-rate of 20 is the highest in the
+world, though it must be noted that the high birth-rate is not likely to
+last long, since in Quebec, as elsewhere in the world, increasing
+urbanisation causes a decreasing birth-rate. In mainly English-speaking
+Ontario the birth-rate is much lower, about 24, but the death-rate is also
+lower, about 14, so that the fairly considerable survival-rate of 10 is
+obtained. But we note the highly significant fact that some thirty years
+or more ago the birth-rate was much lower, about 19, and yet the
+survival-rate was almost 9, nearly as high as to-day! The death-rate was
+then at 10, and nothing could be more instructive as to the real
+relationship that holds in this matter. There has been a great rise in
+the birth-rate and the only result, as someone has remarked, is a great
+increase in the population of the grave-yards. Equally instructive is it
+to compare various cities in this same Province, living under the same
+laws, and fairly similar social conditions. In the report of the
+Registrar-General of Ontario for 1916 I find that highest in birth-rate of
+cities in the Province stands Ottawa with a very considerable French
+population. But first also stands the same city for infant mortality,
+which is three times greater than in some other cities in the Province
+with a low birth-rate. Sault Ste. Marie, again with an enormous
+birth-rate, stands third for infant mortality. Canada shows us that, even
+if we regard the crude desire for a large growth of population as
+reasonable--and that is a considerable assumption--a high birth-rate is an
+uncertain prop to rest on.
+
+Canada is an instructive example because we have some ground for believing
+that the difference between the English-speaking and French-speaking
+populations--the greater care of the former in procreation and the more
+recklessly destructive methods of the latter in attaining the same
+ends--are due to their different attitudes towards the use of methods of
+birth-control. What the result of a general use of such methods is we know
+from the example already mentioned of Holland, where they are taught,
+officially recognised, and in general use, not only among the rich but
+among the poor. The result is that the birth-rate has been falling slowly
+and steadily for forty years. But the death-rate has also been falling and
+at a greater rate. So that the more the birth-rate has fallen the higher
+has been the rate of increase among the population.
+
+It is perhaps in Australia and New Zealand that we find the most
+satisfactory proofs of the benefits of a falling birth-rate in relation to
+"Race-Suicide." The evidence may well appeal to us the more since it is
+precisely here that the race-suicide fanatic finds freest scope for his
+wrath. He looks gleefully at China with its prolific women, at Russia with
+its magnificent birth-rate before the War of nearly 50, at Roumania with
+its birth-rate of 42, at Chile and Jamaica with nearly 40. No nonsense
+about birth-control there! No shirking by women of the sacred duties of
+perpetual maternity! No immoral notions about claims to happiness and
+desires for culture. And then he turns from, those great centres of
+prosperity and civilisation to Australia, to New Zealand, and his voice is
+choked and tears fill his eyes as he sees the goal of "Race-Suicide"
+nearly in sight and the spectre of the Last Man rising before him. For
+there is no doubt about it, Australia and New Zealand contain a population
+which is gradually reaching the highest point yet known of democratic
+organisation and general social well-being, and the birth-rate has been
+falling with terrific speed. Sixty-years ago in the Australian
+Commonwealth it was nearly 44, only forty years ago in New Zealand it was
+42. Now it is only about 26 in both lands. Yet the survival-rate, the
+actual growth of the population, is not so very much less with this low
+birth-rate than it was with the high birth-rate. For the death-rate has
+also fallen in both lands to about 10 (in New Zealand to 9) which is lower
+than any other country in the world. The result is that Australia and New
+Zealand, where (so it is claimed) preventives of conception are hawked
+from door to door, instead of being awful examples of "Race-Suicide,"
+actually present the highest rate of race-increase in the world (only
+excepting Canada, where it is less firmly and less healthily based),
+nearly twice that of Great Britain and able at the present rate to double
+itself every 44 years. So much for "Race-Suicide."
+
+The outcry about "Race-Suicide" is so far away from the real facts of life
+that it is not easy to take it seriously, however solemn one's natural
+temperament may be. We are concerned with people who arrogantly claim to
+direct the moral affairs of the world, even in the most intimately private
+matters, and who are yet ignorant of the most elementary facts of the
+world, unable to think, not even able to count! We can only greet them
+with a smile. But this question has, nevertheless, a genuinely serious
+aspect, and I should be sorry even to touch on the question of
+birth-control in relation to "Race-Suicide" without making that serious
+aspect clear.
+
+"Race-Suicide," we know, has no existence. Not only is the race as a whole
+increasing in number, especially its White branches, but even among the
+separate national groups there is not even one civilised people anywhere
+in the world that is decreasing in number. On the contrary they are all,
+even France, increasing at a more or less rapid rate. In England and
+Wales, for example, where the birth-rate has steadily fallen during the
+last forty years from 36 to 23 (I disregard the abnormal rates of
+War-time) the population is still increasing, and even if the present
+falls in birth-rate and death-rate continue, it will for years still go on
+increasing by an excess of over 1,000 births a day. When we realise that
+this is merely what goes on in one corner of the world and must be
+multiplied enormously to represent the whole, we shall find it impossible
+even to conceive the prodigious flow of excess babies which is being
+constantly poured over the earth. If we are capable of realising all the
+problems which thereby arise we must be forced to ask ourselves: _Is this
+state of things desirable_?
+
+"Be ye fruitful and multiply." That command was, according to the old
+story, delivered to a world inhabited by eight people. It has been handed
+down to a world in which it has long been ridiculously out of place, and
+has become merely the excuse for criminal recklessness among a race which
+has chosen to forget that the command was qualified by a solemn
+admonition: "At the hand of man, even at the hand of every man's brother,
+will I require the life of man." The high birth-rate has meant a vast
+slaughter of infants, it has meant, moreover, a perpetual oppression of
+the workers, disease, starvation, and death among the adult population; it
+has meant, further, a blood-thirsty economic competition, militarism,
+warfare. It has meant that all civilisation has from time to time become a
+thin crust over a volcano of revolution, and the human race has gone on
+lightly dancing there, striving to forget that ancient warning from a soul
+of things even deeper than the voice of Jehovah: "At the hand of man will
+I require the life of man." Men have recklessly followed the Will o' the
+Wisp which represented mere multiplication of their inefficient selves as
+the ideal of progress, quantity before quality, the notion that in an orgy
+of universal procreation could consist the highest good of humanity.
+
+The Great War, that is scarcely yet merged into an only less war-like
+Peace, has brought at least the small compensation that it has led men to
+look in the face this insane ideal of human progress. We see to-day what
+has come of it, and the further evils yet to come of it are being embodied
+beneath our eyes. So that at last the voice of Jehovah has here and there
+been faintly heard, even where nowadays we had grown least accustomed to
+hear it, in the Churches. It is Dr. Inge, the Dean of London's Cathedral
+of St. Paul's, a distinguished Churchman and at the same time a foremost
+champion of eugenics, who lately expressed the hope that the world,
+especially the European world, would one day realise the advantages of a
+stationary population.[25] Such a recognition, such an aspiration,
+indicates that a new hope is dawning on the world's horizon, and a higher
+ideal growing within the human soul. The mad competition of the industrial
+world during the past century, with the sordid gloom and wretchedness of
+it for all who were able to see beneath the surface, has shown for ever
+what comes of the effort to produce a growing population by high
+birth-rates in peace-time. The Great War of a later day has shown, let us
+hope in an equally decisive manner, what comes to a world where men have
+been for long generations produced so copiously and so cheaply that it is
+natural to regard them as only fit to sweep off the earth with machine
+guns. And the whole world of to-day--with its starving millions struggling
+in vain to feed themselves, with most of its natural beauty swept away by
+the ravages of man, and many of its most exquisite animals finally
+exterminated--is likely to become merely the monument to an ideal that
+failed. It was time, however late in the day, for a return to
+common-sense. It was time to realise that the ideal of mere propagation
+could lead us nowhere but to destruction. On that level we cannot compete
+even with the lowest of organised things, not even with the bacteria,
+which in number and in rapidity of multiplication are inconceivable to us.
+"All hope abandon, ye that enter here" is written over the portal of this
+path of "Progress."
+
+[25] This has long been recognised by men of science. Even anyone with
+the slightest knowledge of biology, Professor Bateson remarked in a
+British Association Presidential address in 1914, is aware that a
+population need not be declining because it is not increasing; "in
+normal stable conditions population is stationary." Major Leonard
+Darwin, the thoughtful and cautious President of the Eugenics Education
+Society, has lately stated his considered belief ("Population and
+Civilisation," _Economic Journal_, June, 1921) that increase in numbers
+means, ultimately, relative reduction of wealth per head, with
+consequent lowering of the standard of civilisation; that it also, under
+existing conditions, involves the production of a smaller proportion of
+men of ability; and, further, a depreciation of our traditions; he
+concludes that, whatever element in civilisation we regard--wealth, or
+stock, or traditions--"any increase in the population _such as that now
+taking place_ will be accompanied by a lowering in the standard of our
+civilisation."
+
+There are definite reasons why real progress in the supreme tasks of
+civilisation can best be made by a more or less stationary population,
+whether the population is large or small, and it need scarcely be added
+that, so far as the history of mankind is yet legible, the great advances
+in civilisation have been made by small, even very small populations.
+Where the population is rapidly growing, even if it is growing under the
+favourable conditions that hardly ever accompany such growth, all its
+energy is absorbed in adjusting its perpetually shifting equilibrium. It
+cannot succeed in securing the right conditions of growth, because its
+growth is never ceasing to demand new conditions. The structure of its
+civilisation never rises above the foundations because these foundations
+have perpetually to be laid afresh, and there is never time to get
+further. It is a process, moreover, accompanied by unending friction and
+disorder, by strains and stresses of all kinds, which are fatal to any
+full, harmonious, and democratic civilisation. The "population question,"
+with the endlessly mischievous readjustment it demands, must be eliminated
+before the great House of Life can be built up on a strong solid human
+foundation, to lift its soaring pinnacles towards the skies. That is what
+many bitter experiences are beginning to teach us. In the future we are
+likely to be much less concerned about "race-suicide," though we can never
+be too concerned about race-murder.
+
+When we think, however, of the desirability of a more or less stationary
+population, in order to insure real social progress, as distinct from that
+vain struggle of meaningless movement to and fro which the history of the
+past reveals, we have to be clear in our minds that it may be far from
+desirable that the present overgrown population of the world should be
+stationary. That might indeed be better than further increase in numbers,
+it would arrest the growth of our present evils; it might open the way to
+methods by which they would be diminished or eliminated. But the process
+would be infinitely difficult, and almost infinitely slow, as we may
+easily realise when we consider that, with a population even smaller than
+at present, the human race has not only ravished the world's beauty almost
+out of existence, but so ravaged its own vital spirit that, as was found
+with some consternation during the Great War, a large proportion of the
+male population of every country is unfit for military service.
+
+So often we hear it assumed, or even asserted, that greatness means
+quantity, so that to look forward to the replacement of the present
+teeming insignificant human myriads by a rarer and more truly greater race
+is to be a pessimist! Oh, these "optimists"! To revel in a world which
+more and more closely resembles all that the poets ever imagined of Hell,
+is to be an "optimist"! One wonders how it is that in no brief moment of
+lucidity it occurs to these people that the lower we descend in the scale
+of life the greater the quantity in a species and the poorer the quality,
+so that to reach what such people should really regard as the world's
+period of supreme greatness in life we must go back to the days, before
+animal life appeared, when the earth was merely a teeming mass of
+bacteria.[26]
+
+[26] See, for instance, H.F. Osborn, _The Origin and Evolution of Life_,
+1918, Chapter III.
+
+To-day, we are often told, the majority of human beings belong either to
+the Undesired Class or the Undesirable Class. To realise that this is so,
+we are bidden to read the newspapers or to walk along the streets of the
+cities--whichever they may be--wherein dwell the highest products of our
+civilisation. In the better class quarters it is indeed the Undesirable
+Class that seems to predominate, and in the poor quarters, the Undesired.
+Yet, viewing our species as a whole, the two classes may be seen to walk
+hand in hand along the same road, and in proportion as our nobler
+instincts germinate and develop, we must doubtless admit that it ought to
+be our active aim to make that road for both of them--socially though not
+individually--the Road to Destruction.
+
+To stem the devastating tide of human procreativeness, however, easy as it
+may seem in theory, is by no means so easy as some think, especially as
+those think who believe that the human race stands on the brink of
+suicide. For there is this about it that we must never forget: the
+majority of those born to-day die before their time, so that by
+diminishing the production of the unfit, as well as by the progressive
+improvement of the environment that automatically accompanies such
+diminution, we may make an imposing difference in the appearance of the
+birth-rate, whilst yet the population goes on increasing rapidly, probably
+even more rapidly than before. It needs a most radical and thorough attack
+on the birth-rate before we can make any real impression on the rate of
+increase of the population, to say nothing of its real reduction. There is
+still an arduous road before us.
+
+True it is that we have two opposing schools of thought which both say
+that we need not, or that we cannot, make any difference by our efforts to
+regulate the earth's human population. According to one view the
+development of population, together with the necessity for war which is
+inextricably mixed up with a developing population, cannot be effected
+without, as one champion of the doctrine is pleased to put it, "shattering
+both the structure of Euclidean space and the psychological laws upon
+which the existence of self-consciousness and human society are
+conditional."[27] In simpler words, populations tend to become too large
+for their territories, so that war ensues, and birth-control can do
+nothing because "it is doubtful whether a group in the plenitude of vigour
+and self-consciousness can deliberately stop its own growth." The other
+school proclaims human impotence on exactly opposite grounds. There is not
+the slightest reason, it declares, to believe that birth-control has had
+any but a completely negligible influence on population. This is a natural
+process and fertility is automatically adjusted to the death-rate.
+Whenever a population reaches a certain stage of civilisation and nervous
+development its procreativeness, quite apart from any effort of the will,
+tends to diminish. The seeming effect of birth-control is illusory. It is
+Nature, not human effort, which is at work.[28]
+
+[27] B.A.G. Fuller, "The Mechanical Basis of War," _Hibbert Journal_,
+1921.
+
+[28] Sir Shirley Murphy some years ago (_Lancet_, 10 Aug. 1912) argued
+that the fall of the birth-rate, as also that of the death-rate, has
+been largely effected by natural causes, independent of man's action.
+Mr. G. Udney Yule (_The Fall in the Birth-rate_, 1920) also believes
+that birth-control counts for little, the chief factor being natural
+fluctuations, probably of economic nature. Recently Mr. C.E. Pell, in
+his book, _The Law of Births and Deaths_ (1921), has made a more
+elaborate and systematic attempt to show that the rise and fall of the
+birth-rate has hitherto been independent of human effort.
+
+These two opposing councils of despair, each proclaiming, though in a
+contrary sense, the vanity of human wishes in the matter of procreation,
+might well, some may think, be left to neutralise each other and evaporate
+in air. But it seems worth while to point out that, with proper
+limitations and qualifications, there is an element of truth in each of
+them, while, without such limitations and qualifications, both are alike
+obviously absurd and wrong-headed. Undoubtedly, as the one school holds,
+in certain stages of civilisation, even at a fairly advanced stage,
+nations tend to break out over their frontiers with resulting war; but the
+period when they reach "the plenitude of vigour and self-consciousness" is
+exactly the period when the birth-rate begins to decline, and the
+population, deliberately or instinctively, controls its own increase. That
+has, for instance, been the history of France since the great expansion of
+population, roughly associated with the Napoleonic epopee,--which
+doubtless covered a web of causes, sanitary, political, industrial,
+favourable to a real numerical increase of the nation--had died down
+slowly to the level we witness to-day.[29] Similarly, with regard to the
+opposing school, we must undoubtedly accept a natural fall in the
+birth-rate with a rising civilisation; that has always been visible in
+highly civilised individual couples, and it is an easily ascertainable
+zoological fact that throughout the evolution of life procreativeness has
+decreased with the increased development of species. We may agree that a
+natural factor comes into the recent fall in the human birth-rate. But to
+argue that because a natural decline in birth-rate is the essential factor
+in the slowing down of procreative activity with all higher evolution,
+therefore deliberate birth-control counts for nothing, since exactly the
+same result follows when voluntary prevention is adopted and when it is
+not, seems highly absurd. We must at least admit that voluntary
+birth-control is an important contributory cause, in some sense indeed, of
+supreme importance, because it is within man's own power and because man
+is thus enabled to guide and mould processes of Nature which might
+otherwise work disastrously. How disastrously is shown by the history of
+Europe, and in a notable degree France, during the four or five centuries
+preceding the end of the eighteenth century when various new influences
+began to operate. During all these centuries there was undoubtedly a very
+high birth-rate, yet infant mortality, war, famine, insanitation,
+contagious diseases of many and virulent kinds, tended, as far as we can
+see, to keep the population almost or quite stationary,[30] and so ruinous
+a method of maintaining a stationary population necessarily used up most
+of the energy which might otherwise have been available for social
+progress, although the stationary population, even thus maintained, still
+placed France at the head of European civilisation. The more firmly we
+believe that the diminution of the population is a natural process, the
+more strenuously, surely, we ought to guide it, so that it shall work
+without friction, and, so far as possible, tend to eliminate the
+undesirable stocks of man and preserve the desirable. Clearly, the theory
+itself calls for much effort, since it is obvious that along natural lines
+the decline, if it is the result of high evolution, will affect the fit
+more easily than the unfit.
+
+[29] The reader may point to the renewal of Militarism and Imperialism
+in France since the Great War. That, however, has been an artificial
+product (in so far as it exists among the people themselves) directly
+fostered from outside by the policy of England and the United States,
+just as the same spirit in Germany before the war, in the face of a
+falling birth-rate, was artificially fostered from above by a military
+and Imperialistic caste.
+
+[30] See especially Mathorez, _Histoire de la Formation de la Population
+Française_, Vol. I, 1920, _Les Étrangers en France_. The fecundity of
+French families, even among the aristocracy, till towards the end of the
+eighteenth century, was fabulous; in the third quarter of the
+seventeenth century the average number of children was five in Paris.
+But the mortality was extremely high; under the age of sixteen, Mathorez
+estimates, it was 51 per cent., and infant mortality was terrible in all
+classes, small-pox being specially fatal. Then there were the various
+diseases termed plagues, with famine sometimes added, while war,
+emigration, and religious celibacy all counteracted the excessive
+fecundity, so that from the thirteenth century to the third quarter of
+the eighteenth the population seems to have been stationary, about
+twenty-two millions. Then the size of the family fell in Paris to 3.9
+and in France generally to 4.3, while also there were fewer marriages.
+Therewith there was an increase of prosperity.
+
+Thus there seems, on a wide survey of the matter, no reason whatever to
+quarrel with that conviction, which is gradually over-spreading all
+classes of human society in all parts of the world, and ever more widely
+leading to practical action, that the welfare of the individual, the
+family, the community, and the race is bound up with the purposive and
+deliberate practice of birth-control, whether we advocate that policy on
+the ground that we are thereby furthering Nature, or on the opposite, and
+no doubt equally excellent, ground that we are thereby correcting Nature.
+
+Along this road, as along any other road, we shall not reach Utopia; and
+since the Utopia of every person who possesses one is unique that perhaps
+need not be regretted. We shall not even, within any measurable period of
+time, reach a sanely free and human life fit to satisfy quite moderate
+aspirations. The wise birth-controller will not (like the deliciously
+absurd suffragette of old-time) imagine that birth-control for all means a
+New Heaven and a New Earth, but will, rather, appreciate the delightful
+irony of the Biblical legend which represented a world with only four
+people in it, yet one of them a murderer. Still, it may be pointed out,
+that was a state of things much better than we can show now. The world
+would count itself happier if, during the Great War, only twenty-five per
+cent of the population of belligerent lands had been murderers, virtually
+or in fact. There is something to be gained, and that something is well
+worth while.
+
+Still, whether we like it or not, the task of speeding up the decrease of
+the human population becomes increasingly urgent.[31] To many of our
+Undesirables it may seem, mere sentiment to trouble about the ravishing of
+the world's beauty or the ravaging of the world's humanity. But certain
+hard facts, even to-day, have to be faced. The process of mechanical
+invention continues every day on an ever increasing scale of magnitude.
+Now that process, however necessary, however beneficial, involves some of
+the chief evils of our present phase of what we call civilisation, partly
+because it has deteriorated the quality of all human products and partly
+because it has enslaved mankind, and in so doing deteriorated also his
+quality.[32] Now we cannot abolish machinery, because machinery lies in
+the very essence of life and we ourselves are machines. But, as the
+largest part of history shows, there is no need whatever for man to become
+the slave of machinery, or even for machinery to injure the quality of his
+own work; rightly used it may improve it. The greatest task before
+civilisation at present is to make machines what they ought to be, the
+slaves, instead of the masters of men; and if civilisation fails at the
+task, then without doubt it and its makers will go down to a common
+destruction. It is a task inextricably bound up with the task of moulding
+the human race for which birth-control is the elected instrument. Indeed
+they are but two aspects of the same task. We have to accept the rugged
+fact that every step to render more nearly perfect the mechanical side of
+life correspondingly abolishes the need for men. Thus it is calculated
+to-day that whenever, in accordance with a growing tendency, coal is
+superseded by oil in industry two men are enabled to do the work of
+twelve. That is merely typical of what is taking place generally in our
+modern system of civilisation. Everywhere a small number of men are being
+enabled to replace a large number of men. Not to avoid looking ahead, we
+may say that of every twelve millions of our population, ten millions will
+be unwanted. Let them do something else! we cheerfully exclaim. But what?
+No doubt there are always art and science, infinite in their possibilities
+for joy and enlightenment, infinite also, as we know, in their
+possibilities of mischief and shallowness and boredom. Let it only be true
+science and great art, and one man is better than ten millions. To say
+that is only to echo unconsciously the ancient saying of Heraclitus, "One
+is ten thousand if he be the best."
+
+[31] Professor E.M. East, a distinguished biologist and lately President
+of the American Society of Naturalists (_Nature_, 23 Sept., 1920), has
+estimated that, for all the fall in the birth-rate, the present rate of
+increase in the population of the world, chiefly of whites, who are
+increasing most rapidly, will, in the lives of our grandchildren, lead
+to a struggle for existence more terrible than imagination can conceive.
+
+[32] This has been set forth with admirable lucidity and wealth of
+illustration by Dr. Austin Freeman in his _Social Decay and
+Regeneration_ (1921), already mentioned.
+
+The vistas that are opened up when we realise the direction in which the
+human race is travelling may seem to be endless; and so in a sense they
+are. Man has replaced the gods he once dreamed of; he has found that he is
+himself a god, who, however realistic he seeks to make his philosophy,
+himself created the world as he sees it and now has even acquired the
+power of creating himself, or, rather, of re-creating himself. For he
+recognises that, at present, he is rather a poor sort of god, so much an
+inferior god that he is hardly, if at all, to be distinguished from the
+Lords of Hell.
+
+The divine creative task of man extends into the future far beyond the
+present, and we cannot too often meditate on the words of the wisest and
+noblest forerunner of that future: "The whole world still lies before us
+like a quarry before the master-builder, who is only then worthy of the
+name when out of this casual mass of natural material he has embodied with
+all his best economy, adaptability to the end, and firmness, the image
+which has arisen in his mind. Everything outside us is only the means for
+this constructing process, yes, I would even dare to say, also everything
+inside us; deep within lies the creative force which is able to form what
+it will, and gives us no rest until, without us or within us, in one or
+the other way, we have finally given it representation." The future, with
+all its possibilities, is still a future infinitely far away, however well
+it may be to fix our eyes on the constellation towards which our solar
+system may seem to be moving across the sky.
+
+Meanwhile, every well-directed step, while it brings us but ever so little
+nearer to the far goal around which our dreams may play, is at once a
+beautiful process and an invigorating effort, and thereby becomes in
+itself a desirable end. It is the little things of life which give us most
+satisfaction and the smallest things in our path that may seem most worth
+while.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+Abstinence, sexual, 59.
+Acton, 110.
+Adrenal glands, 132.
+Anstie, 45.
+Art of love, 121.
+Asceticism and sexuality, 57.
+Augustine, St., 58, 77.
+Australian birth-rate, 162.
+Auto-erotism, 46.
+
+Bantu, marriage among the, 92.
+Bateson, 166.
+Bell, W. Blair, 119.
+Binet-Sanglé, 146.
+Birth-control, 72, 138 _et seq._
+Birth-rate, in France, 159, 174.
+  in Australia, 162.
+  in Canada, 160.
+  in England, 159, 164.
+Book of the Knight of the Tour-Landry, 18, 82.
+Brontës, the, 25.
+Browning, Mrs., 26.
+Brown-Séquard, 45.
+Burbank, Luther, 139.
+
+Canada, birth-rate in, 160.
+Chastity, 57.
+Chaucer, 56.
+Children, to parents, relation of, 13 _et seq._
+  in modern life, 24 _et seq._
+  sex in, 48.
+China, parents in, 32.
+Christianity, 57, 65, 70, 76, 108, 110.
+Continence, the value of, 38, 42.
+Courtship in Nature, 103.
+Crooks, Mrs. Will, 89.
+
+Davenport, C.B., 143.
+Darwin, Major Leonard, 166.
+Davies, 51.
+Drayton, 51.
+Dundas, C, 92.
+
+East, E.M., 176.
+Education, 14.
+  in Old England, 16.
+  in Old France, 17, 19.
+Electra-complex, 22.
+Eliot, George, 31.
+Ellis, Mrs. Havelock, 68, 69, 96.
+English social history, 15, 16, 79, 159, 164.
+Erotic claims of women, 112.
+Erotic personality, 121.
+Eugenics, 134 _et seq._
+Ewart, 141.
+
+Family, sex in life of, 22 _et seq._, 78.
+Feeblemindedness, 143.
+Feudal education, 19.
+Francis of Assisi, St., 58.
+Freeman, Austin, 99, 177.
+French social history, 17, 19, 81, 159, 173.
+Freud, 33, 46, 52.
+Frink, H.W., 131.
+Fuller, B.A.G., 171.
+
+Galton, Sir Francis, 134, 139, 140, 144, 145.
+Girls, emancipated, 27.
+Goddard, 143.
+Goethe, 179.
+Gratian, 79.
+Greeks, eugenics amongst ancient, 137.
+Groos, 119.
+
+Hadfield, Mrs., 32.
+Heraclitus, 178.
+Hinton, James, 29, 45, 67, 68, 69, 98.
+Home, revolution in the, 93.
+Hormones, 40, 117.
+Husbands, 75 _et seq._
+
+Individualism and eugenics, 148.
+Infanticide, ancient, 135.
+Infantile arrest, 33.
+Inge, Dr., 166.
+Internal secretions, 40, 117.
+
+Jonson, Ben, 51.
+Juries, women on, 16.
+
+Key, Ellen, 13, 14, 15, 145.
+Lasco, John à, 70.
+Löwenfeld, 52.
+Luchaire, 19.
+Luther, 109.
+
+Machinery and civilisation, 177.
+Magic and sex, 39.
+Marriage, 63 _et seq._, 76 _et seq._, 108 _et seq._, 117 _et seq._
+Martineau, Harriet, 27.
+Mathorez, 174.
+Matsumato, 48.
+McDougall, W., 99.
+Meirowsky, 42.
+Milton, 77.
+Moïssidès, 137.
+Monogamy, 106.
+Montaigne, 17, 21, 37, 108, 109.
+Morality, and nature, 55.
+  in marriage, 109.
+More, Sir Thomas, 37, 109.
+Murphy, Sir Shirley, 172.
+
+Näcke, 59.
+Nature and morality, 55.
+New Caledonia, treatment of parents in, 32.
+Northcote, H., 71.
+
+Oedipus-complex, 22.
+Osborn, H.F., 170.
+
+Palladius, 57.
+Parasitism in the home, 90.
+Parents, merciful destruction of, 32.
+  relation of children to, 13 _et seq._, 24.
+  training of, 34.
+  veneration of, 32.
+Parmelee, 120.
+Paston Letters, 16, 79.
+Paul, Eden & Cedar, 18, 151.
+Paul, St., 77.
+Peacock, 51.
+Pell, C.E., 172.
+Perrycoste, F.H., 149, 153.
+Perseigne, Adam de, 20.
+Pituitary gland, 118.
+Play-function of sex, 116 _et seq._
+Pleasure, the function of, 67.
+Polonius, 31.
+Powell, Dr., 81.
+Protestantism and marriage, 77.
+Psycho-analysis, 22, 130.
+Purity, 37 _et seq._
+
+Race-suicide, 155 _et seq._
+Ring in marriage, 84.
+Rite, the marriage, 83.
+Robert of Arbrissel, 58.
+Rohleder, 43.
+Rolland, Romain, 67.
+
+Sacrament, sex as a, 69.
+Salle, Antoine de la, 17.
+Sanger, Margaret, 152.
+Schreiner, Olive, 69, 90.
+  and asceticism, 57.
+Sex, and magic, 39.
+  as a sacrament, 69.
+  evolution in, 66.
+  nature of impulse of, 44.
+  play-function of, 116 _et seq._
+  spiritual element in, 66.
+  sublimation of, 47, 50.
+Shaftesbury, 51.
+Socialism and eugenics, 150.
+_Stonor Letters_, 81.
+Stopes, Marie, 152.
+Suarez, 62.
+Sublimation, 47, 50.
+
+Theognis, 65.
+
+Wells, H.G., 152.
+Westermarck, 32.
+Wives, 75 _et seq._
+  love rights of, 102 _et seq._
+Wollstonecraft, Mary, 25.
+Women, erotic claims of, 112.
+  erotic ideas of average, 124,
+  in Crusades, 20.
+  in marriage, 75, 78.
+  in old France, 19 _et seq._
+  in subjection to men, 111.
+  love rights of, 102 _et seq._
+  on juries, 16.
+
+Yule, G. Udney, 172.
+
+
+PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY BILLING AND SONS, LTD., GUILDFORD AND ESHER.
+
+
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Transcriber's Notes:
+
+in the index, Wollstonecroft was changed to Wollstonecraft
+also in the index, á was changed to à in: Lasco, John à
+some punctuation normalized
+everything else was left as found in the original
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+[ADVERTISEMENTS]
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+Mrs. Havelock Ellis:
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+THE NEW HORIZON IN LOVE AND LIFE. With a Preface by Edward Carpenter.
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+
+S. Herbert, M.D., M.R.C.S.:
+
+AN INTRODUCTION TO THE PHYSIOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY OF SEX.
+
+THE FIRST PRINCIPLES OF HEREDITY. (Second Edition.)
+
+THE FIRST PRINCIPLES OF EVOLUTION. (Second Edition.)
+
+FUNDAMENTALS IN SEXUAL ETHICS.
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+Mrs. S. Herbert:
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+SEX LORE: A PRIMER, ON COURTSHIP, MARRIAGE AND PARENTHOOD.
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+
+THE NEW HORIZON
+IN LOVE AND LIFE
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+By MRS. HAVELOCK ELLIS
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+WITH A PREFACE BY EDWARD CARPENTER AND
+AN INTRODUCTION BY MARGUERITE TRACY
+
+_Demy 8vo_    PRICE 10/6 NET    (_By Post, 11s._)
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+Questions of Marriage and Divorce, of sex variation, of love in the past
+and in the future all come up for subtle consideration. The items of our
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+conception of life that lay behind Mrs. Havelock Ellis's brilliant novels.
+We are arrested and spell-bound by the same understanding, the same
+directness of touch, the same beauty.
+
+CONTENTS:
+
+Preface, by Edward Carpenter. Introduction, by Marguerite Tracy. Note, by
+Havelock Ellis.
+
+PART I.--LOVE AND MARRIAGE. The Love of To-Morrow. A Noviciate for
+Marriage. Semi-Detached Marriage. Marriage and Divorce. Eugenics and the
+Mystical Outlook. Eugenics and Spiritual Parenthood. Blossoming Time. Love
+as a Fine Art.
+
+PART II.--THE NEW CIVILIZATION. Democracy in the Kitchen. The Masses and
+the Classes. The Maternal in Domestic and Political Life. Political
+Militancy: Its Cause and Cure. War. The New Civilization. The Philosophy
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+       *       *       *       *       *
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+THE FIRST PRINCIPLES OF HEREDITY
+
+75 Diagrams and Illustrations. Large Crown 8vo. Cloth.
+7s. 6d. net (by post, 2s. 3d.).        _Revised Edition._
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+
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+
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+
+       *       *       *       *       *
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+THE FIRST PRINCIPLES OF EVOLUTION
+
+90 Illustrations. Large Crown 8vo. Cloth, 12s. 6d. net (by
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+
+"The author attempts to examine and test the principles of the theory of
+evolution as applied to the known phenomena of the cosmos. To do this at
+all satisfactorily in little more than 300 pages, and at the same time
+bring under review all that is most valuable in recent scientific
+research, is no easy task. We may say at once that, in our opinion Dr.
+Herbert has succeeded wonderfully well."--_Athenĉum._
+
+"Contains not a single dry page--far and away the most compact and
+complete account of evolution in all its aspects."--_Globe._
+
+"We congratulate Dr. Herbert on his masterly arrangement.... It will serve
+as an admirable introduction to a difficult subject."--_Dundee
+Advertiser._
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+AN INTRODUCTION TO THE
+PHYSIOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY OF SEX
+
+49 Illustrations. Large Crown 8vo. Cloth. 7s.6d. net (by post, 8s. 1d.).
+
+    This fills a gap in the literature of sex. It gathers together for the
+    general reader a vast array of facts about sex, mating and
+    reproduction which have never before been so clearly and directly
+    stated.
+
+"For a simple statement, expressed in language as far as possible free
+from technicalities, of the principal phenomena of generation, Dr.
+Herbert's book is the best that we have seen."--_Cambridge Review._
+
+"It is therefore a real satisfaction to find a sex manual which may be
+placed with confidence in the hands of any educated person.... He has
+certainly produced the best little manual which we yet possess in this
+field."--HAVELOCK ELLIS in _Eugenics Review._
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+BY MRS. HERBERT.
+
+SEX LORE. A Primer on Courtship, Marriage and Parenthood.
+55 Illustrations. Crown 8vo. Cloth, 7s. 6d. net (by post, 8s. 1d.).
+
+"The author in simple, non-technical language expounds the main facts of
+sex, especially with regard to biology and physiology, and she treats this
+delicate subject in a tactful manner. A special feature of the book is the
+large number of illustrations. The volume is intended for the 'younger
+generation,' but parents and teachers would be well advised to peruse the
+book, which should prove invaluable for educative purposes. '--_Medical
+Times._
+
+"... may be left with confidence in the hands of any educated person who
+is attaining to manhood or womanhood."--_Aberdeen Daily Journal._
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+PUBLISHED BY
+A. & C. BLACK, LTD., 4, 5 & 6 SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W. 1
+
+
+
+
+THE HERBERT BOOKS
+
+SEXUAL LIFE
+OF PRIMITIVE PEOPLE
+
+BY HANS FEHLINGER
+
+Translated by DR. S. HERBERT AND MRS. HERBERT
+
+Large Crown 8vo. Cloth, 6s. net (by post, 6s. 6d.).
+
+"A concise survey of the beliefs and customs of primitive peoples in such
+matters as modesty, conjugal fidelity, courtship, marriage, birth and
+feticide."--_The Times._
+
+"If anyone doubts that the world is progressing, we commend to his
+attention this book of Mr. Fehlinger."--_Dublin Evening Mail._
+
+"In this translation Dr. and Mrs. Herbert present clearly and fairly all
+the more important facts which recent research has brought to
+light."--_Times of India._
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+FUNDAMENTALS IN
+SEXUAL ETHICS
+AN ENQUIRY INTO MODERN TENDENCIES
+
+BY S. HERBERT, M.D., M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P.
+
+Large Crown 8vo. Cloth. Price 12s. 6d. net (by post, 13s. 3d.).
+
+CONTENTS:
+
+Part I.--THE BASIC CHARACTERISTICS OF SEX.
+Part II.--SEX RELATIONSHIPS: Sex Morality. Sex Vice and Disease.
+  Sex Aberration and Abnormality. Auto Eroticism. Sexual Inversion.
+Part III.--MARITAL RELATIONSHIP: Factors; Moral, Biotic, Eugenic,
+  Economic, Social.
+Part IV.--SEX AND EDUCATION: Sex Education. Co-Education.
+
+OPINIONS:
+
+"He treats with knowledge all the urgent sexual questions and sexual
+phenomena, normal and abnormal."--_The Times._
+
+"A very valuable book dealing with a vastly important
+subject."--_Justice._
+
+"What we want is the best that is known and thought in the world on a
+matter that vitally concerns us. We need also intelligent, sympathetic
+common-sense guidance amid the opposing extremes of a narrow materialism
+and a narrow spiritualism. Dr. Herbert supplies both these needs ... and
+we could not well ask more of him."--HAVELOCK ELLIS in _Daily Herald_.
+
+"We may congratulate him on the success of his undertaking."--_Manchester
+Guardian._
+
+"Wide knowledge, conscientious thoroughness, sincere conviction,
+sympathetic understanding and, even more, spiritual aspirations.... A
+splendid feminist."
+
+EDITH BETHUNE BAKER in _Woman's Leader_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+PUBLISHED BY
+A. & C. BLACK, LTD., 4, 5 & 6 SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W. 1
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Little Essays of Love and Virtue, by Havelock Ellis
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+<pre>
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+Project Gutenberg's Little Essays of Love and Virtue, by Havelock Ellis
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
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+
+
+Title: Little Essays of Love and Virtue
+
+Author: Havelock Ellis
+
+Release Date: April 23, 2005 [EBook #15687]
+
+Language: English
+
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+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE ***
+
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+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net.
+
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+
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+</pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<p><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1"></a><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2"></a></p>
+<h1> LITTLE ESSAYS</h1>
+<h3>OF</h3>
+<h1>LOVE AND VIRTUE</h1>
+<div><br /></div>
+<h3>BY</h3>
+<h2>HAVELOCK ELLIS</h2>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+
+
+
+
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" summary="Bibliography">
+<tr><td align='left'><b>BY THE SAME AUTHOR</b></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>&nbsp;<i>&nbsp;</i></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>STUDIES IN THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SEX</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Six Volumes</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Philadelphia:<i>&nbsp;F.A. Davis Company</i></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>&nbsp;<i>&nbsp;</i></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>MAN AND WOMAN</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>London:<i>&nbsp;Walter Scott</i></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>New York:<i>&nbsp;Charles Scribners' Sons</i></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>&nbsp;<i>&nbsp;</i></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>THE TASK OF SOCIAL HYGIENE</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>London:<i>&nbsp;Constable and Company</i></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Boston:<i>&nbsp;Houghton Mifflin Company</i></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>&nbsp;<i>&nbsp;</i></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>First and Second Series</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>London:<i>&nbsp;Constable and Company</i></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Boston:<i>&nbsp;Houghton Mifflin Company</i></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>&nbsp;<i>&nbsp;</i></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>BY MRS. HAVELOCK ELLIS</b></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>&nbsp;<i>&nbsp;</i></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>THE NEW HORIZON IN LOVE AND LIFE</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>With a Preface by EDWARD CARPENTER</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>and an Introduction by MARGUERITE TRACY</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>London:<i>&nbsp;A. and C. Black, Ltd.</i></td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h1><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4"></a>LITTLE ESSAYS</h1>
+<h3>OF</h3>
+<h1>LOVE AND VIRTUE</h1>
+<div><br /></div>
+<h3>BY</h3>
+<h2>HAVELOCK ELLIS</h2>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p class="center">A. &amp; C. BLACK, LTD. <br />
+4, 5 &amp; 6 SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W. 1 <br />
+1922</p>
+
+
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+<p class="center"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5"></a>COPYRIGHT 1922<br />
+<i>In Great Britain by A. and G. Black, Ltd., London</i><br />
+<i>In America by George H. Doran Co., New York</i>
+</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6"></a><a name="PREFACE" id="PREFACE"></a>PREFACE</h2>
+
+<div style="margin-left: 25%; margin-right: 25%;">
+<p>In these Essays&mdash;little, indeed, as I know them to be, compared to the
+magnitude of their subjects&mdash;I have tried to set forth, as clearly as I
+can, certain fundamental principles, together with their practical
+application to the life of our time. Some of these principles were stated,
+more briefly and technically, in my larger <i>Studies</i> of sex; others were
+therein implied but only to be read between the lines. Here I have
+expressed them in simple language and with some detail. It is my hope that
+in this way they may more surely come into the hands of young people,
+youths and girls at the period of adolescence, who have been present to my
+thoughts in all the studies I have written of sex because I was myself of
+that age when I first vaguely planned them. I would prefer to leave to
+their judgment the question as to whether this book is suitable to be
+placed in the hands of older people. It might only give them pain. It is
+in youth that the questions of mature age can alone be settled, if they
+ever are to be settled, and unless we begin to think about <a name="Page_7" id="Page_7"></a>adult problems
+when we are young all our thinking is likely to be in vain. There are but
+few people who are able when youth is over either on the one hand to
+re-mould themselves nearer to those facts of Nature and of Society they
+failed to perceive, or had not the courage to accept, when they were
+young, or, on the other hand, to mould the facts of the exterior world
+nearer to those of their own true interior world. One hesitates to bring
+home to them too keenly what they have missed in life. Yet, let us
+remember, even for those who have missed most, there always remains the
+fortifying and consoling thought that they may at least help to make the
+world better for those who come after them, and the possibilities of human
+adjustment easier for others than it has been for themselves. They must
+still remain true to their own traditions. We could not wish it to be
+otherwise.</p>
+
+<p>The art of making love and the art of being virtuous;&mdash;two aspects of the
+great art of living that are, rightly regarded, harmonious and not at
+variance&mdash;remain, indeed, when we cease to misunderstand them, essentially
+the same in all ages and among all peoples. Yet, always and everywhere,
+little modifications become necessary, little, yet, like so many little
+things, im<a name="Page_8" id="Page_8"></a>mense in their significance and results. In this way, if we are
+really alive, we flexibly adjust ourselves to the world in which we find
+ourselves, and in so doing simultaneously adjust to ourselves that
+ever-changing world, ever-changing, though its changes are within such
+narrow limits that it yet remains substantially the same. It is with such
+modification that we are concerned in these Little Essays.</p>
+
+<p>H.E.</p>
+
+<p><i>London, 1921</i></p>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9"></a><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10"></a>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+
+
+
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" summary="Table of Contents">
+<tr><td align='right'>CHAPTER</td><td align='left'></td><td align='right'>PAGE</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'></td><td align='left'><a href="#PREFACE">Preface</a></td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>I</td><td align='left'><a href="#CHAPTER_I">Children and Parents</a></td><td align='right'>13</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>II</td><td align='left'><a href="#CHAPTER_II">The Meaning of Purity</a></td><td align='right'>37</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>III</td><td align='left'><a href="#CHAPTER_III">The Objects of Marriage</a></td><td align='right'>63</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>IV</td><td align='left'><a href="#CHAPTER_IV">Husbands and Wives</a></td><td align='right'>75</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>V</td><td align='left'><a href="#CHAPTER_V">The Love-Rights of Women</a></td><td align='right'>102</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>VI</td><td align='left'><a href="#CHAPTER_VI">The Play-Function of Sex</a></td><td align='right'>116</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>VII</td><td align='left'><a href="#CHAPTER_VII">The Individual and the Race</a></td><td align='right'>134</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'></td><td align='left'><a href="#INDEX">Index</a></td><td align='right'>183</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+<p><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11"></a></p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12"></a><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13"></a>LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE</h2>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I</h2>
+
+<h2>CHILDREN AND PARENTS</h2>
+
+
+<p>The twentieth century, as we know, has frequently been called "the century
+of the child." When, however, we turn to the books of Ellen Key, who has
+most largely and sympathetically taken this point of view, one asks
+oneself whether, after all, the child's century has brought much to the
+child. Ellen Key points out, with truth, that, even in our century,
+parents may for the most part be divided into two classes: those who act
+as if their children existed only for their benefit, and those who act as
+if they existed only for their children's benefit, the results, she adds
+being alike deplorable. For the first group of parents tyrannise over the
+child, seek to destroy its individuality, exercise an arbitrary discipline
+too spasmodic to have any of the good effects of discipline and would
+model him into a copy of themselves, though really, she adds, it ought to
+<a name="Page_14" id="Page_14"></a>pain them very much to see themselves exactly copied. The second group of
+parents may wish to model their children not after themselves but after
+their ideals, yet they differ chiefly from the first class by their
+over-indulgence, by their anxiety to pamper the child by yielding to all
+his caprices and artificially protecting him from the natural results of
+those caprices, so that instead of learning freedom, he has merely
+acquired self-will. These parents do not indeed tyrannise over their
+children but they do worse; they train their children to be tyrants.
+Against these two tendencies of our century Ellen Key declares her own
+Alpha and Omega of the art of education. Try to leave the child in peace;
+live your own life beautifully, nobly, temperately, and in so living you
+will sufficiently teach your children to live.</p>
+
+<p>It is not my purpose here to consider how far this conception of the duty
+of parents towards children is justified, and whether or not peace is the
+best preparation for a world in which struggle dominates. All these
+questions about education are rather idle. There are endless theories of
+education but no agreement concerning the value of any of them, and the
+whole question of education remains open. I am here concerned less with
+the duty of parents in relation to their children than with the duty of
+children in relation to their parents, and that means that I am not
+concerned with young chil<a name="Page_15" id="Page_15"></a>dren, to whom, that duty still presents no
+serious problems, since they have not yet developed a personality with
+self-conscious individual needs. Certainly the one attitude must condition
+the other attitude. The reaction of children against their parents is the
+necessary result of the parents' action. So that we have to pay some
+attention to the character of parental action.</p>
+
+<p>We cannot expect to find any coherent or uniform action on the part of
+parents. But there have been at different historical periods different
+general tendencies in the attitude of parents towards their children. Thus
+if we go back four or five centuries in English social history we seem to
+find a general attitude which scarcely corresponds exactly to either of
+Ellen Key's two groups. It seems usually to have been compounded of
+severity and independence; children were first strictly compelled to go
+their parents' way and then thrust off to their own way. There seems a
+certain hardness in this method, yet it is doubtful whether it can fairly
+be regarded as more unreasonable than either of the two modern methods
+deplored by Ellen Key. On the contrary it had points for admiration. It
+was primarily a discipline, but it was regarded, as any fortifying
+discipline should be regarded, as a preparation for freedom, and it is
+precisely there that the more timid and clinging modern way seems to fail.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16"></a>We clearly see the old method at work in the chief source of knowledge
+concerning old English domestic life, the <i>Paston Letters</i>. Here we find
+that at an early age the sons of knights and gentlemen were sent to serve
+in the houses of other gentlemen: it was here that their education really
+took place, an education not in book knowledge, but in knowledge of life.
+Such education was considered so necessary for a youth that a father who
+kept his sons at home was regarded as negligent of his duty to his family.
+A knowledge of the world was a necessary part, indeed the chief part, of a
+youth's training for life. The remarkable thing is that this applied also
+to a large extent to the daughters. They realised in those days, what is
+only beginning to be realised in ours,<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> that, after all, women live in
+the world just as much, though differently, as men live in the world, and
+that it is quite as necessary for the girl as for the boy to be trained to
+the meaning of life. Margaret Paston, towards the end of the fifteenth
+century, sent her daughter Ann to live in the house of a gentleman who, a
+little later, <a name="Page_17" id="Page_17"></a>found that he could not keep her as he was purposing to
+decrease the size of his household. The mother writes to her son: "I shall
+be fain to send for her and with me she shall but lose her time, and
+without she be the better occupied she shall oftentimes move me and put me
+to great unquietness. Remember what labour I had with your sister,
+therefore do your best to help her forth"; as a result it was planned to
+send her to a relative's house in London.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> This was illustrated in England when women first began to
+serve on juries. The pretext was frequently brought forward that there are
+certain kinds of cases and of evidence that do not concern women or that
+women ought not to hear. The pretext would have been more plausible if it
+had also been argued that there are certain kinds of cases and of evidence
+that men ought not to hear. As a matter of fact, whatever frontier there
+may be in these matters is not of a sexual kind. Everything that concerns
+men ultimately concerns women, and everything that concerns women
+ultimately concerns men. Neither women nor men are entitled to claim
+dispensation.</p></div>
+
+<p>It is evident that in the fifteenth century in England there was a wide
+prevalence of this method of education, which in France, a century later,
+was still regarded as desirable by Montaigne. His reason for it is worth
+noting; children should be educated away from home, he remarks, in order
+to acquire hardness, for the parents will be too tender to them. "It is an
+opinion accepted by all that it is not right to bring up children in their
+parents' laps, for natural love softens and relaxes even the wisest."<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> Montaigne, <i>Essais</i>, Bk. I., ch. 25.</p></div>
+
+<p>In old France indeed the conditions seem similar to those in England. The
+great serio-comic novel of Antoine de la Salle, <i>Petit Jean de Saintr&eacute;</i>,
+shows us in detail the education and the adventures, which certainly
+involved a very early introduction to life, of a page in a great house in
+the fifteenth century. We must not take everything in this fine comedy too
+solemnly, <a name="Page_18" id="Page_18"></a>but in the fourteenth century <i>Book of the Knight of the
+Tour-Landry</i> we may be sure that we have at its best the then prevailing
+view of the relation of a father to his tenderly loved daughters. Of
+harshness and rigour in the relationship it is not easy to find traces in
+this lengthy and elaborate book of paternal counsels. But it is clear that
+the father takes seriously the right of a daughter to govern herself and
+to decide for herself between right and wrong. It is his object, he tells
+his girls, "to enable them to govern themselves." In this task he assumes
+that they are entitled to full knowledge, and we feel that he is not
+instructing them in the mysteries of that knowledge; he is taking for
+granted, in the advice he gives and the stories he tells them, that his
+"young and small daughters, not, poor things, overburdened with
+experience," already possess the most precise knowledge of the intimate
+facts of life, and that he may tell them, without turning a hair, the most
+outrageous incidents of debauchery. Life already lies naked before them:
+that he assumes; he is not imparting knowledge, he is giving good
+counsel.<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> If the Knight went to an extreme in his assumption of his
+daughters' knowledge, modern fathers often go to the opposite and more
+foolish extreme of assuming in their daughters an ignorance that would be
+dangerous even if it really existed. In <i>A Young Girl's Diary</i> (translated
+from the German by Eden and Cedar Paul), a work that is highly instructive
+for parents, and ought to be painful for many, we find the diarist noting
+at the age of thirteen that she and a girl friend of about the same age
+overheard the father of one of them&mdash;both well brought up and carefully
+protected, one Catholic and the other Protestant&mdash;referring to "those
+innocent children." "We did laugh so, WE and <i>innocent children</i>!!! What
+our fathers really think of us; we innocent!!! At dinner we did not dare
+look at one another or we should have exploded." It need scarcely be added
+that, at the same time, they were more innocent than they knew.</p></div>
+
+<p><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19"></a>It is clear that this kind of education and this attitude towards
+children must be regarded as the outcome of the whole medi&aelig;val method of
+life. In a state of society where roughness and violence, though not, as
+we sometimes assume, chronic, were yet always liable to be manifested, it
+was necessary for every man and woman to be able to face the crudest facts
+of the world and to be able to maintain his or her own rights against
+them. The education that best secured that strength and independence was
+the best education and it necessarily involved an element of hardness. We
+must go back earlier than Montaigne's day, when the conditions were
+becoming mitigated, to see the system working in all its vigour.</p>
+
+<p>The lady of the day of the early thirteenth century has been well
+described by Luchaire in his scholarly study of French Society in the time
+of Philip Augustus. She was, he tells us, as indeed she had been in the
+preceding feudal centuries, often what we should nowadays call a virago,
+of violent temperament, with vivid passions, broken in from childhood to
+all physical exercises, sharing the pleasures and dangers of the knights
+around her. Feudal life, fertile in surprises and in risks, demanded even
+in women <a name="Page_20" id="Page_20"></a>a vigorous temper of soul and body, a masculine air, and habits
+also that were almost virile. She accompanied her father or her husband to
+the chase, while in war-time, if she became a widow or if her husband was
+away at the Crusades, she was ready, if necessary, to direct the defences
+of the lordship, and in peace time she was not afraid of the longest and
+most dangerous pilgrimages. She might even go to the Crusades on her own
+account, and, if circumstances required, conduct a war to come out
+victoriously.</p>
+
+<p>We may imagine the robust kind of education required to produce people of
+this quality. But as regards the precise way in which parents conducted
+that education, we have, as Luchaire admits, little precise knowledge. It
+is for the most part only indirectly, by reading between the lines, that
+we glean something as to what it was considered befitting to inculcate in
+a good household, and as what we thus learn is mostly from the writings of
+Churchmen it is doubtless a little one-sided. Thus Adam de Perseigne, an
+ecclesiastic, writes to the Countess du Perche to advise her how to live
+in a Christian manner; he counsels her to abstain from playing games of
+chance and chess, not to take pleasure in the indecent farces of actors,
+and to be moderate in dress. Then, as ever, preachers expressed their
+horror of the ruinous extravagance of women, their false hair, their
+rouge, and their dresses that <a name="Page_21" id="Page_21"></a>were too long or too short. They also
+reprobated their love of flirtation. It was, however, in those days a
+young girl's recognised duty, when a knight arrived in the household, to
+exercise the rites of hospitality, to disarm him, give him his bath, and
+if necessary massage him to help him to go to sleep. It is not surprising
+that the young girl sometimes made love to the knight under these
+circumstances, nor is it surprising that he, engaged in an arduous life
+and trained to disdain feminine attractions, often failed to respond.</p>
+
+<p>It is easy to understand how this state of things gradually became
+transformed into the considerably different position of parents and child
+we have known, which doubtless attained its climax nearly a century ago.
+Feudal conditions, with the large households so well adapted to act as
+seminaries for youth, began to decay, and as education in such seminaries
+must have led to frequent mischances both for youths and maidens who
+enjoyed the opportunities of education there, the regret for their
+disappearance may often have been tempered for parents. Schools, colleges,
+and universities began to spring up and develop for one sex, while for the
+other home life grew more intimate, and domestic ties closer. Montaigne's
+warning against the undue tenderness of a narrow family life no longer
+seemed reasonable, and the family became more self-centred and more
+enclosed. Beneath this, <a name="Page_22" id="Page_22"></a>and more profoundly influential, there was a
+general softening in social respects, and a greater expansiveness of
+affectional relationships, in reality or in seeming, within the home,
+compensating, it may be, the more diffused social feeling within a group
+which characterised the previous period.</p>
+
+<p>So was cultivated that undue tenderness, deplored by Montaigne, which we
+now regard as almost normal in family life, and solemnly label, if we
+happen to be psycho-analysts, the Oedipus-complex or the Electra-complex.
+Sexual love is closely related to parental love; the tender emotion, which
+is an intimate part of parental love, is also an intimate part of sexual
+love, and two emotions which are each closely related to a third emotion
+cannot fail to become often closely associated to each other. With a
+little thought we might guess beforehand, even while still in complete
+ignorance of the matter, that there could not fail to be frequently a
+sexual tinge in the affection of a father for his daughter, of a mother
+for her son, of a son for his mother, or a daughter for her father.
+Needless to say, that does not mean that there is present any physical
+desire of sex in the narrow sense; that would be a perversity, and a rare
+perversity. We are here on another plane than that of crude physical
+desire, and are moving within the sphere of the emotions. But such
+emotions are often strong, <a name="Page_23" id="Page_23"></a>and all the stronger because conscious of
+their own absolute rectitude and often masked under the shape of Duty. Yet
+when prolonged beyond the age of childhood they tend to become a clog on
+development, and a hindrance to a wholesome life. The child who cherishes
+such emotion is likely to suffer infantile arrest of development, and the
+parent who is so selfish as to continue to expend such tenderness on a
+child who has passed the age of childhood, or to demand it, is guilty of a
+serious offence against that child.</p>
+
+<p>That the intimate family life which sometimes resulted&mdash;especially when,
+as frequently happened, the seeming mutual devotion was also real&mdash;might
+often be regarded as beautiful and almost ideal, it has been customary to
+repeat with an emphasis that in the end has even become nauseous. For it
+was usually overlooked that the self-centred and enclosed family, even
+when the mutual affection of its members was real enough to bear all
+examination, could scarcely be more than partially beautiful, and could
+never be ideal. For the family only represents one aspect, however
+important an aspect, of a human being's functions and activities. He
+cannot, she cannot, be divorced from the life of the social group, and a
+life is beautiful and ideal, or the reverse, only when we have taken into
+our consideration the social as well as the family relationship. When the
+family claims to prevent <a name="Page_24" id="Page_24"></a>the free association of an adult member of it
+with the larger social organisation, it is claiming that the part is
+greater than the whole, and such a claim cannot fail to be morbid and
+mischievous.</p>
+
+<p>The old-world method of treating children, we know, has long ago been
+displaced as containing an element of harsh tyranny. But it was not
+perceived, and it seems indeed not even yet to be generally recognised,
+that the system which replaced it, and is only now beginning to pass away,
+involved another and more subtle tyranny, the more potent because not
+seemingly harsh. Parents no longer whipped their children even when grown
+up, or put them in seclusion, or exercised physical force upon them after
+they had passed childhood. They felt that that would not be in harmony
+with the social customs of a world in which ancient feudal notions were
+dead. But they merely replaced the external compulsion by an internal
+compulsion which was much more effective. It was based on the moral
+assumption of claims and duties which were rarely formulated because
+parents found it quite easy and pleasant to avoid formulating them, and
+children, on the rare occasions when they formulated them, usually felt a
+sense of guilt in challenging their validity. It was in the nineteenth
+century that this state of things reached its full development. The sons
+of the family were usually able, as they grew up, to escape and elude it,
+although <a name="Page_25" id="Page_25"></a>they thereby often created an undesirable divorce from the home,
+and often suffered, as well as inflicted, much pain in tearing themselves
+loose from the spiritual bonds&mdash;especially perhaps in matters of
+religion&mdash;woven by long tradition to bind them to their parents. It was on
+the daughters that the chief stress fell. For the working class, indeed,
+there was often the possibility of escape into hard labour, if only that
+of marriage. But such escape was not possible, immediately or at all, for
+a large number. During the nineteenth century many had been so carefully
+enclosed in invisible cages, they had been so well drilled in the
+reticences and the duties and the subserviences that their parents
+silently demanded of them, that we can never know all the tragedies that
+took place. In exceptional cases, indeed, they gave a sign. When they
+possessed unusual power of intellect, or unusual power of character and
+will, they succeeded in breaking loose from their cages, or at least in
+giving expression to themselves. This is seen in the stories of nearly all
+the women eminent in life and literature during the nineteenth century,
+from the days of Mary Wollstonecraft onwards. The Bront&euml;s, almost, yet not
+quite, strangled by the fetters placed upon them by their stern and
+narrow-minded father, and enabled to attain the full stature of their
+genius only by that brief sojourn in Brussels, are <a name="Page_26" id="Page_26"></a>representative.
+Elizabeth Barrett, chained to a couch of invalidism under the eyes of an
+imperiously affectionate father until with Robert Browning's aid she
+secretly eloped into the open air of freedom and health, and so attained
+complete literary expression, is a typical figure. It is only because we
+recognise that she is a typical figure among the women who attained
+distinction that we are able to guess at the vast number of mute
+inglorious Elizabeth Barretts who were never able to escape by their own
+efforts and never found a Browning to aid them to escape.</p>
+
+<p>It is sometimes said that those days are long past and that young women,
+in all the countries which we are pleased to called civilised, are now
+emancipated, indeed, rather too much emancipated. Critics come forward to
+complain of their undue freedom, of their irreverent familiarity to their
+parents, of their language, of their habits. But there were critics who
+said the very same things, in almost the same words, of the grandmothers
+of these girls! These incompetent critics are as ignorant of the social
+history of the past as they are of the social significance of the history
+of the present. We read in <i>Once a Week</i> of sixty years ago (10th August,
+1861), the very period when the domestic conditions of girls were the most
+oppressive in the sense here understood, that these same critics were
+about at that time, and as shocked as they are now at "the young <a name="Page_27" id="Page_27"></a>ladies
+who talk of 'awful swells' and 'deuced bores,' who smoke and venture upon
+free discourse, and try to be like men." The writer of this anonymous
+article, who was really (I judge from internal evidence) so distinguished
+and so serious a woman as Harriet Martineau, duly snubs these critics,
+pointing out that such accusations are at least as old as Addison and
+Horace Walpole; she remarks that there have no doubt been so-called "fast
+young ladies" in every age, "varying their doings and sayings according to
+the fopperies of the time." The question, as she pertinently concludes is,
+as indeed it still remains to-day: "Have we more than the average
+proportion? I do not know." Nor to-day do we know.</p>
+
+<p>But while to-day, as ever before, we have a certain proportion of these
+emancipated girls, and while to-day, as perhaps never before, we are able
+to understand that they have an element of reason on their side, it would
+be a mistake to suppose that they are more than exceptions. The majority
+are unable, and not even anxious, to attain this light-hearted social
+emancipation. For the majority, even though they are workers, the
+anciently subtle ties of the home are still, as they should be, an element
+of natural piety, and, also, as they should not be, clinging fetters which
+impede individuality and destroy personal initiative.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28"></a>We all know so many happy homes beneath whose calm surface this process
+is working out. The parents are deeply attached to their children, who
+still remain children to them even when they are grown up. They wish to
+guide them and mould them and cherish them, to protect them from the
+world, to enjoy their society and their aid, and they expect that their
+children shall continue indefinitely to remain children. The children, on
+their side, remain and always will remain, tenderly attached to their
+parents, and it would really pain them to feel that they are harbouring
+any unwillingness to stay in the home even after they have grown up, so
+long as their parents need their attention. It is, of course, the
+daughters who are thus expected to remain in the home and who feel this
+compunction about leaving it. It seems to us&mdash;although, as we have seen,
+so unlike the attitude of former days&mdash;a natural, beautiful, and rightful
+feeling on both sides.</p>
+
+<p>Yet, in the result, all sorts of evils tend to ensue. The parents often
+take as their moral right the services which should only be accepted, if
+accepted at all, as the offering of love and gratitude, and even reach a
+degree of domineering selfishness in which they refuse to believe that
+their children have any adult rights of their own, absorbing and drying up
+that physical and spiritual life-blood of their offspring which <a name="Page_29" id="Page_29"></a>it is the
+parents' part in Nature to feed. If the children are willing there is
+nothing to mitigate this process; if they are unwilling the result is
+often a disastrous conflict. Their time and energy are not their own;
+their tastes are criticised and so far as possible crushed; their
+political ideas, if they have any, are treated as pernicious; and&mdash;which
+is often on both sides the most painful of all&mdash;differences in religious
+belief lead to bitter controversy and humiliating recrimination. Such
+differences in outlook between youth and age are natural and inevitable
+and right. The parents themselves, though they may have forgotten it,
+often in youth similarly revolted against the cherished doctrines of their
+own parents; it has ever been so, the only difference being that to-day,
+probably, the opportunities for variation are greater. So it comes about
+that what James Hinton said half a century ago is often true to-day: "Our
+happy Christian homes are the real dark places of the earth."</p>
+
+<p>It is evident that the problem of the relation of the child to the parent
+is still incompletely solved even in what we consider our highest
+civilisation. There is here needed an art in which those who have to
+exercise it can scarcely possess all the necessary skill and experience.
+Among trees and birds and beasts the art is surer because it is exercised
+unconsciously, on the foundation of a large tradition in which failure
+meant death.<a name="Page_30" id="Page_30"></a> In the common procreative profusion of those forms of life
+the frequent death of the young was a matter of little concern, but
+biologically there was never any sacrifice of the offspring to the
+well-being of the parents. Whenever sacrifice is called for it is the
+parents who are sacrificed to their offspring. In our superior human
+civilisation, in which quantity ever tends to give place to quality, the
+higher value of the individual involves an effort to avoid sacrifice which
+sometimes proves worse than abortive. An avian philosopher would be
+unlikely to feel called upon to denounce nests as the dark places of the
+earth, and in laying down our human moral laws we have always to be aware
+of forgetting the fundamental biological relationship of parent and child
+to which all such moral laws must conform. To some would-be parents that
+necessity may seem hard. In such a case it is well for them to remember
+that there is no need to become parents and that we live in an age when it
+is not difficult to avoid becoming a parent. The world is not dying for
+lack of parents. On the contrary we have far too many of them&mdash;ignorant
+parents, silly parents, unwilling parents, undesirable parents&mdash;and those
+who aspire to the high dignity of creating the future race, let them be as
+few as they will&mdash;and perhaps at the present time the fewer the
+better&mdash;must not refuse the <a name="Page_31" id="Page_31"></a>responsibilities of that position, its pains
+as well as its joys.</p>
+
+<p>In our human world, as we know, the moral duties laid upon us&mdash;the duties
+in which, if we fail, we become outcasts in our own eyes or in those of
+others or in both&mdash;are of three kinds: the duties to oneself, the duties
+to the small circle of those we love, and the duties to the larger circle
+of mankind to which ultimately we belong, since out of it we proceed, and
+to it we owe all that we are. There are no maxims, there is only an art
+and a difficult art, to harmonise duties which must often conflict. We
+have to be true to all the motives that sanctify our lives. To that extent
+George Eliot's Maggie Tulliver was undoubtedly right. But the renunciation
+of the Self is not the routine solution of every conflict, any more than
+is the absolute failure to renounce. In a certain sense the duty towards
+the self comes before all others, because it is the condition on which
+duties towards others possess any significance and worth. In that sense,
+it is true according to the familiar saying of Shakespeare,&mdash;though it was
+only Polonius, the man of maxims, who voiced it,&mdash;that one cannot be true
+to others unless one is first true to oneself, and that one can know
+nothing of giving aught that is worthy to give unless one also knows how
+to take.</p>
+
+<p>We see that the problem of the place of parents in life, after their
+function of parenthood <a name="Page_32" id="Page_32"></a>has been adequately fulfilled, a problem which
+offers no difficulties among most forms of life, has been found hard to
+solve by Man. At some places and periods it has been considered most
+merciful to put them, to death; at others they have been almost or quite
+deified and allowed to regulate the whole lives of their descendants. Thus
+in New Caledonia aged parents, it is said by Mrs. Hadfield, were formerly
+taken up to a high mountain and left with enough food to last a few days;
+there was at the same time great regard for the aged, as also among the
+Hottentots who asked: "Can you see a parent or a relative shaking and
+freezing under a cold, dreary, heavy, useless old age, and not think, in
+pity of them, of putting an end to their misery?" It was generally the
+opinion of the parents themselves, but in some countries the parents have
+dominated and overawed their children to the time of their natural death
+and even beyond, up to the point of ancestor worship, as in China, where
+no man of any age can act for himself in the chief matters of life during
+his parents' life-time, and to some extent in ancient Rome, whence an
+influence in this direction which still exists in the laws and customs of
+France.<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> Both extremes have proved compatible with a beautifully human
+life. To steer midway between them seems to-day, how<a name="Page_33" id="Page_33"></a>ever, the wisest
+course. There ought to be no reason, and under happy conditions there is
+no reason, why the relationship between parent and child, as one of mutual
+affection and care, should ever cease to exist. But that the relationship
+should continue to exist as a tie is unnatural and tends to be harmful. At
+a certain stage in the development of the child the physical tie with the
+parent is severed, and the umbilical cord cut. At a later stage in
+development, when puberty is attained and adolescence is feeling its way
+towards a complete adult maturity, the spiritual tie must be severed. It
+is absolutely essential that the young spirit should begin to essay its
+own wings. If its energy is not equal to this adventure, then it is the
+part of a truly loving parent to push it over the edge of the nest. Of
+course there are dangers and risks. But the worst dangers and risks come
+of the failure to adventure, of the refusal to face the tasks of the world
+and to assume the full function of life. All that Freud has told of the
+paralysing and maiming influence of infantile arrest or regression is here
+profitable to consider. In order, moreover, that the relationship between
+parents and children may retain its early beauty and love, it is essential
+that it shall adapt itself to adult conditions and the absence of ties so
+rendered necessary. Otherwise there is little likelihood of anything but
+friction and <a name="Page_34" id="Page_34"></a>pain on one side or the other, and perhaps on both sides.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> The varying customs of different peoples in this matter are
+set forth by Westermarck, <i>The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas</i>,
+Ch. XXV.</p></div>
+
+<p>The parents have not only to train their children: it is of at least equal
+importance that they should train themselves. It is desirable that
+children, as they grow up, should be alive to this necessity, and
+consciously assist in the process, since they are in closer touch with a
+new world of activities to which their more lethargic parents are often
+blind and deaf. For every fresh stage in our lives we need a fresh
+education, and there is no stage for which so little educational
+preparation is made as that which follows the reproductive period. Yet at
+no time&mdash;especially in women, who present all the various stages of the
+sexual life in so emphatic a form&mdash;would education be more valuable. The
+great burden of reproduction, with all its absorbing responsibilities, has
+suddenly been lifted; at the same time the perpetually recurring rhythm of
+physical sex manifestations, so often disturbing in its effect, finally
+ceases; with that cessation, very often, after a brief period of
+perturbation, there is an increase both in physical and mental energy.
+Yet, too often, all that one can see is that a vacuum has been created,
+and that there is nothing to fill it. The result is that the mother&mdash;for
+it is most often of the mother that complaint is made&mdash;devotes her own new
+found energies to the never-ending task of hampering and crush<a name="Page_35" id="Page_35"></a>ing her
+children's developing energies. How many mothers there are who bring to
+our minds that ancient and almost inspired statement concerning those for
+whom "Satan finds some mischief still"! They are wasting, worse than
+wasting, energies that might be profitably applied to all sorts of social
+service in the world. There is nothing that is so much needed as the
+"maternal in politics," or in all sorts of non-political channels of
+social service, and none can be better fitted for such service than those
+who have had an actual experience of motherhood and acquired the varied
+knowledge that such experience should give. There are numberless other
+ways, besides social service, in which mothers who have passed the age of
+forty, providing they possess the necessary aptitudes, can more profitably
+apply themselves than in hampering, or pampering, their adult children. It
+is by wisely cultivating their activities in a larger sphere that women
+whose chief duties in the narrower domestic sphere are over may better
+ensure their own happiness and the welfare of others than either by
+fretting and obstructing, or by worrying over, their own children who are
+no longer children. It is quite true that the children may go astray even
+when they have ceased to be children. But the time to implant the seeds of
+virtue, the time to convey a knowledge of life, was when they were small.
+If it was done well, it only <a name="Page_36" id="Page_36"></a>remains to exercise faith and trust. If it
+was done ill, nothing done later will compensate, for it is merely foolish
+for a mother who could not educate her children when they were small to
+imagine that she is able to educate them when they are big.</p>
+
+<p>So it is that the problem of the attitude of the child to its parents
+circles round again to that of the parents to the child. The wise parent
+realises that childhood is simply a preparation for the free activities of
+later life, that the parents exist in order to equip children for life and
+not to shelter and protect them from the world into which they must be
+cast. Education, whatever else it should or should not be, must be an
+inoculation against the poisons of life and an adequate equipment in
+knowledge and skill for meeting the chances of life. Beyond that, and no
+doubt in the largest part, it is a natural growth and takes place of
+itself.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37"></a>CHAPTER II</h2>
+
+<h2>THE MEANING OF PURITY</h2>
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+
+<p>We live in a world in which, as we nowadays begin to realise, we find two
+antagonistic streams of traditional platitude concerning the question of
+sexual purity, both flowing from the far past.</p>
+
+<p>The people who embody one of these streams of tradition, basing themselves
+on old-fashioned physiology, assume, though they may not always assert,
+that the sexual products are excretions, to be dealt with summarily like
+other excretions. That is an ancient view and it was accepted by such wise
+philosophers of old times as Montaigne and Sir Thomas More. It had,
+moreover, the hearty support of so eminent a theological authority as
+Luther, who on this ground preached early marriage to men and women alike.
+It is still a popular view, sometimes expressed in the crudest terms, and
+often by people who, not following Luther's example, use it to defend
+prostitution, though they generally exclude women from its operation, as a
+sex to whom it fails to apply and by whom it is not required.</p>
+
+<p>But on the other hand we have another stream of platitude. On this side
+there is usually little <a name="Page_38" id="Page_38"></a>attempt either to deny or to affirm the theory of
+the opposing party, though they would contradict its conclusions. Their
+theory, if they have one, would usually seem to be that sexual activity is
+a response to stimulation from without or from within, so that if there is
+no stimulation there will be no sexual manifestation. They would preach,
+they tell us, a strenuous ideal; they would set up a wholesome dictate of
+hygiene. The formula put forward on this basis usually runs: Continence is
+not only harmless but beneficial. It is a formula which, in one form or
+another, has received apparently enthusiastic approval in many quarters,
+even from distinguished physicians. We need not be surprised. A
+proposition so large and general is not easy to deny, and is still more
+difficult to reverse; therefore it proves welcome to the
+people&mdash;especially the people occupying public and professional
+positions&mdash;who wish to find the path of least resistance, under pressure
+of a vigorous section of public opinion. Yet in its vagueness the
+proposition is a little disingenuous; it condescends to no definitions and
+no qualifications; it fails even to make clear how it is to be reconciled
+with any enthusiastic approval of marriage, for if continence is beautiful
+how can marriage make it cease to be so?</p>
+
+<p>Both these streams of feeling, it may be noted, sprang from a common
+source far back in the <a name="Page_39" id="Page_39"></a>primitive human world. All the emanations of the
+human body, all the spontaneous manifestations of its activities, were
+mysterious and ominous to early man, pregnant with terror unless met with
+immense precautions and surrounded by careful ritual. The manifestations
+of sex were the least intelligible and the most spontaneous. Therefore the
+things of sex were those that most lent themselves to feelings of horror
+and awe, of impurity and of purity. They seemed so highly charged with
+magic potency that there were no things that men more sought to avoid, yet
+none to which they were impelled to give more thought. The manifold echoes
+of that primitive conception of sex, and all the violent reactions that
+were thus evolved and eventually bound up with the original impulse,
+compose the streams of tradition that feed our modern world in this matter
+and determine the ideas of purity that surround us.</p>
+
+<p>At the present day the crude theory of the sexual impulse held on one
+side, and the ignorant rejection of theory altogether on the other side,
+are beginning to be seen as both alike unjustified. We begin to find the
+grounds for a sounder theory. Not indeed that the problems of sex, which
+go so deeply into the whole personal and social life, can ever be settled
+exclusively upon physiological grounds. But we have done much to prepare
+even the loftiest Building of Love <a name="Page_40" id="Page_40"></a>when we have attained a clear view of
+its biological basis.</p>
+
+<p>The progress of chemico-physiological research during recent years has now
+brought us to new ground for our building. Indeed the image might well be
+changed altogether, and it might be said that science has entirely
+transferred the drama of reproduction to a new stage with new actors.
+Therewith the immense emphasis placed on excretion, and the inevitable
+reaction that emphasis aroused, both alike disappear. The sexual
+protagonists are no longer at the surface but within the most secret
+recesses of the organism, and they appear to science under the name of
+Hormones or Internal Secretions, always at work within and never
+themselves condescending to appear at all. Those products of the sexual
+glands which in both sexes are cast out of the body, and at an immature
+stage of knowledge appeared to be excretions, are of primary reproductive
+importance, but, as regards the sexual constitution of the individual,
+they are of far less importance than the internal secretions of these very
+same glands. It is, however, by no means only the specifically sexual
+glands which thus exert a sexual influence within the organism. Other
+glands in the brain, the throat, and the abdomen,&mdash;such as the thyroid and
+the adrenals,&mdash;are also elaborating fermentative secretions to throw into
+the system. Their mutual <a name="Page_41" id="Page_41"></a>play is so elaborate that it is only beginning
+to be understood. Some internal secretions stimulate, others inhibit, and
+the same secretions may under different conditions do either. This fact is
+the source of many degrees and varieties of energy and formative power in
+the organism. Taken altogether, the internal secretions are the forces
+which build up the man's and woman's distinctively sexual constitution:
+the special disposition and growth of hair, the relative development of
+breasts and pelvis, the characteristic differences in motor activity, the
+varying emotional desires and needs. It is in the complex play of these
+secretions that we now seek the explanation of all the peculiarities of
+sexual constitution, imperfect or one-sided physical and psychic
+development, the various approximations of the male to female bodily and
+emotional disposition, of the female to the male, all the numerous
+gradations that occur, naturally as we now see, between the complete man
+and the complete woman.</p>
+
+<p>When we turn the light of this new conception on to our old ideas of
+purity,&mdash;to the virtue or the vice, accordingly as we may have been
+pleased to consider it, of sexual abstinence,&mdash;we begin to see that those
+ideas need radical revision. They appear in a new light, their whole
+meaning is changed. No doubt it may be said they never had the validity
+they appeared to possess, even <a name="Page_42" id="Page_42"></a>when we judge them by the crudest
+criterion, that of practice. Thus, while it is the rule for physicians to
+proclaim the advantages of sexual continence, there is no good reason to
+believe that they have themselves practised it in any eminent degree. A
+few years ago an inquiry among thirty-five distinguished physicians,
+chiefly German and Russian, showed that they were nearly all of opinion
+that continence is harmless, if not beneficial. But Meirowsky found by
+inquiry of eighty-six physicians, of much the same nationalities, that
+only one had himself been sexually abstinent before marriage. There seem
+to be no similar statistics for the English-speaking countries, where
+there exists a greater modesty&mdash;though not perhaps notably less need for
+it&mdash;in the making of such confessions. But if we turn to the allied
+profession which is strongly on the side of sexual abstinence, we find
+that among theological students, as has been shown in the United States,
+while prostitution may be infrequent, no temptation is so frequent or so
+potent, and in most cases so irresistible, as that to solitary sexual
+indulgence. Such is the actual attitude towards the two least ideal forms
+of sexual practice&mdash;as distinguished from mere theory&mdash;on the part of the
+two professions which most definitely pronounce in favour of continence.</p>
+
+<p>It is necessary, however, as will now be clearer, to set our net more
+widely. We must take into <a name="Page_43" id="Page_43"></a>consideration every form and degree of sexual
+manifestation, normal and abnormal, gross and ethereal. When we do this,
+even cautiously and without going far afield, sexual abstinence is found
+to be singularly elusive. Rohleder, a careful and conscientious
+investigator, has asserted that such abstinence, in the true and complete
+sense, is absolutely non-existent, the genuine cases in which sexual
+phenomena of some kind or other fail to manifest themselves being simply
+cases of inborn lack of sexual sensibility. He met, indeed, a few people
+who seemed exceptions to the general rule, but, on better knowledge, he
+found that he was mistaken, and that so far from being absent in these
+people the sexual instinct was present even in its crudest shapes. The
+activity of sex is an activity that on the physical side is generated by
+the complex mechanism of the ductless glands and displayed in the whole
+organism, physical and psychic, of the individual, who cannot abolish that
+activity, although to some extent able to regulate the forms in which it
+is manifested, so that purity cannot be the abolition or even the
+indefinite suspension of sexual manifestations; it must be the wise and
+beautiful control of them.</p>
+
+<p>It is becoming clear that the old platitudes can no longer be maintained,
+and that if we wish to improve our morals we must first improve our
+knowledge.<a name="Page_44" id="Page_44"></a></p>
+
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>We have seen that various popular beliefs and conventional assumptions
+concerning the sexual impulse can no longer be maintained. The sexual
+activities of the organism are not mere responses to stimulation, absent
+if we choose to apply no stimulus, never troubling us if we run away from
+them, harmless if we enclose them within a high wall. Nor do they
+constitute a mere excretion, or a mere appetite, which we can control by a
+crude system of hygiene and dietetics. We better understand the
+psycho-sexual constitution if we regard the motive power behind it as a
+dynamic energy, produced and maintained by a complex mechanism at certain
+inner foci of the body, and realise that whatever periodic explosive
+manifestations may take place at the surface, the primary motive source
+lies in the intimate recesses of the organism, while the outcome is the
+whole physical and spiritual energy of our being under those aspects which
+are most forcible and most aspiring and even most ethereal.</p>
+
+<p>This conception, we find, is now receiving an admirable and beautifully
+adequate physical basis in the researches of distinguished physiologists
+in various lands concerning the parts played by the ductless glands of the
+body, in sensitive equilibrium with each other, pouring out into the
+system stimulating and inhibiting <a name="Page_45" id="Page_45"></a>hormones, which not only confer on the
+man's or woman's body those specific sexual characters which we admire but
+at the same time impart the special tone and fibre and polarity of
+masculinity or femininity to the psychic disposition. Yet, even before
+Brown-S&eacute;quard's first epoch-making suggestion had set physiologists to
+search for internal secretions, the insight of certain physicians on the
+medico-psychological side was independently leading towards the same
+dynamic conception. In the middle of the last century Anstie, an acute
+London physician, more or less vaguely realised the transformations of
+sexual energy into nervous disease and into artistic energy. James Hinton,
+whose genius rendered him the precursor of many modern ideas, had
+definitely grasped the dynamic nature of sexual activity, and daringly
+proposed to utilise it, not only as a solution of the difficulties of the
+personal life but for the revolutionary transformation of morality.<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> It
+was the wish to <a name="Page_46" id="Page_46"></a>group together all the far-flung manifestations of the
+inner irresistible process of sexual activity that underlay my own
+conception of <i>auto-erotism</i>, or the spontaneous erotic impulse which
+arises from the organism apart from all definite external stimulation, to
+be manifested, or it may be transformed, in mere solitary physical sex
+activity, in dreams of the night, in day-dreams, in shapes of literature
+and art, in symptoms of nervous disorder such as some forms of hysteria,
+and even in the most exalted phases of mystical devotion. Since then, a
+more elaborate attempt to develop a similar dynamic conception of sexual
+activity has been made by Freud; and the psycho-analysts who have followed
+him, or sometimes diverged, have with endless subtlety, and courageous
+thoroughness, traced the long and sinuous paths of sexual energy in
+personality and in life, indeed in all the main manifestations of human
+activity.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> "The man who separated the thought of chastity from Service
+and made it revolve round Self," wrote Hinton half a century ago in his
+unpublished MSS., "betrayed the human race." "The rule of Self," he wrote
+again, "has two forms: Self-indulgence and Self-virtue; and Nature has two
+weapons against it: pain and pleasure.... A restraint must always be put
+away when another's need can be served by putting it away; for so is
+restored to us the force by which Life is made.... How curious it seems!
+the true evil things are our <i>good</i> things. Our thoughts of duty and
+goodness and chastity, those are the things that need to be altered and
+put aside; these are the barriers to true goodness.... I foresee the
+positive denial of <i>all</i> positive morals, the removal of <i>all</i>
+restrictions. I feel I do not know what 'license,' as we should term it,
+may not truly belong to the perfect state of Man. When there is no self
+surely there is no restriction; as we see there is none in Nature.... May
+we not say of marriage as St. Augustine said of God: 'Rather would I, not
+finding, find Thee, than finding, not find Thee'?... 'Because we like' is
+the sole legitimate and perfect motive of human action.... If this is what
+Nature affirms then it will be what I believe." This dynamic conception of
+the sexual impulse, as a force that, under natural conditions, may be
+trusted to build up a new morality, obviously belongs to an indefinitely
+remote future. It is a force whose blade is two-edged, for while it
+strikes at unselfishness it also strikes at selfishness, and at present we
+cannot easily conceive a time when "there is no self"; we should be more
+disposed to regard it as a time when there is much humbug. Yet for the
+individual this conception of the constructive power of love retains much
+enlightenment and inspiration.</p></div>
+
+<p>It is important for us to note about this <a name="Page_47" id="Page_47"></a>dynamic sexual energy in the
+constitution that while it is very firmly and organically rooted, and
+quite indestructible, it assumes very various shapes. On the physical side
+all the characters of sexual distinction and all the beauties of sexual
+adornment are wrought by the power furnished by the co-operating furnaces
+of the glands, and so also, on the psychic side, are emotions and impulses
+which range from the simplest longings for sensual contact to the most
+exalted rapture of union with the Infinite. Moreover, there is a certain
+degree of correlation between the physical and the psychic manifestation
+of sexual energy, and, to some extent, transformation is possible in the
+embodiment of that energy.</p>
+
+<p>A vague belief in the transformation of sexual energy has long been
+widespread. It is apparently shown in the idea that continence, as an
+economy in the expenditure of sexual force, may be practised to aid the
+physical and mental development, while folklore reveals various sayings in
+regard to the supposed influence of sexual abstinence in the causation of
+insanity. There is a certain underlying basis of reason in such beliefs,
+though in an unqualified form they cannot be accepted, for they take no
+account of the complexity of the factors involved, of the difficulty and
+often impossibility of effecting any complete transformation, either in a
+desirable <a name="Page_48" id="Page_48"></a>or undesirable direction, and of the serious conflict which the
+process often involves. The psycho-analysts have helped us here. Whether
+or not we accept their elaborate and often shifting conceptions, they have
+emphasised and developed a psychological conception of sexual energy and
+its transformations, before only vaguely apprehended, which is now seen to
+harmonise with the modern physiological view.</p>
+
+<p>The old notion that sexual activity is merely a matter of the voluntary
+exercise, or abstinence from exercise, of the reproductive functions of
+adult persons has too long obstructed any clear vision of the fact that
+sexuality, in the wide and deep sense, is independent of the developments
+of puberty. This has long been accepted as an occasional and therefore
+abnormal fact, but we have to recognise that it is true, almost or quite
+normally, even of early childhood. No doubt we must here extend the word
+"sexuality"<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a>&mdash;in what may well be considered an illegitimate way&mdash;to
+cover manifestations which in the usual sense are not sexual or are at
+most called "sexual perversions." But this extension has a certain
+justification in view of the fact that these manifestations can be seen to
+be definitely related to the ordinary adult forms of sexuality. However
+<a name="Page_49" id="Page_49"></a>we define it, we have to recognise that the child takes the same kind of
+pleasure in those functions which are natural to his age as the adult is
+capable of taking in localised sexual functions, that he may weave ideas
+around such functions, sometimes cultivate their exercise from love of
+luxury, make them the basis of day-dreams which at puberty, when the
+ideals of adult life are ready to capture his sexual energy, he begins to
+grow ashamed of.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> Perhaps, as applied to the period below puberty, it would be
+more exact to say "pseudo-sexuality." Matsumato has lately pointed out the
+significance of the fact that the interstitial testicular tissue,
+essential to the hormonic function of the testes, only becomes active at
+puberty.</p></div>
+
+<p>At this stage, indeed, we reach a crucial point, though it has usually
+been overlooked, in the lives of boys and girls, more especially those
+whose heredity may have been a little tainted or their upbringing a little
+twisted. For it is here that the transformation of energy and the
+resulting possibilities of conflict are wont to enter. In the harmoniously
+developing organism, one may say, there is at this period a gradual and
+easy transmutation of the childish pleasurable activities into adult
+activities, accompanied perhaps by a feeling of shame for the earlier
+feelings, though this quickly passes into a forgetfulness which often
+leads the adult far astray when he attempts to understand the psychic life
+of the child. The childish manifestations, it must be remarked, are not
+necessarily unwholesome; they probably perform a valuable function and
+develop budding sexual emotions, just as the petals <a name="Page_50" id="Page_50"></a>of flowers are
+developed in pale and contorted shapes beneath the enveloping sheaths.</p>
+
+<p>But in our human life the transmutation is often not so easy as in
+flowers. Normally, indeed, the adolescent transformations of sex are so
+urgent and so manifold&mdash;now definite sensual desire, now muscular impulses
+of adventure, now emotional aspirations in the sphere of art or
+religion&mdash;that they easily overwhelm and absorb all its vaguer and more
+twisted manifestations in childhood. Yet it may happen that by some
+aberration of internal development or of external influence this
+conversion of energy may at one point or another fail to be completely
+effected. Then some fragment of infantile sexuality survives, in rare
+cases to turn all the adult faculties to its service and become reckless
+and triumphant, in minor and more frequent cases to be subordinated and
+more or less repressed into the subconscious sphere by voluntary or even
+involuntary and unconscious effort. Then we may have conflict, which, when
+it works happily, exerts a fortifying and ennobling influence on
+character, when more unhappily a disturbing influence which may even lead
+to conditions of definite nervous disorder.</p>
+
+<p>The process by which this fundamental sexual energy is elevated from
+elementary and primitive forms into complex and developed forms is termed
+sublimation, a term, originally used for <a name="Page_51" id="Page_51"></a>the process of raising by heat a
+solid substance to the state of vapour, which was applied even by such
+early writers as Drayton and Davies in a metaphorical and spiritual
+sense.<a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a> In the sexual sphere sublimation is of vital importance because
+it comes into question throughout the whole of life, and our relation to
+it must intimately affect our conception of morality. The element of
+athletic asceticism which is a part of all virility, and is found
+even&mdash;indeed often in a high degree&mdash;among savages, has its main moral
+justification as one aid to sublimation. Throughout life sublimation acts
+by transforming some part at all events of the creative sexual energy from
+its elementary animal manifestations into more highly individual and
+social manifestations, or at all events into finer forms of sexual
+activity, forms that seem to us more beautiful and satisfy us more widely.
+Purity, we thus come to see is, in one aspect, the action of sublimation,
+not abolishing sexual activity, but lifting it into forms of which our
+best judgment may approve.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_7"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> We may gather the history of the term from the <i>Oxford
+Dictionary</i>. Bodies, said Davies, are transformed to spirit "by
+sublimation strange," and Ben Jonson in <i>Cynthia's Revels</i> spoke of a
+being "sublimated and refined"; Purchas and Jackson, early in the same
+seventeenth century, referred to religion as "sublimating" human nature,
+and Jeremy Taylor, a little later, to "subliming" marriage into a
+sacrament; Shaftesbury, early in the eighteenth century, spoke of human
+nature being "sublimated by a sort of spiritual chemists" and Welton, a
+little later, of "a love sublimate and refined," while, finally, and
+altogether in our modern sense, Peacock in 1816 in his <i>Headlong Hall</i>
+referred to "that enthusiastic sublimation which is the source of
+greatness and energy."</p></div>
+
+<p><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52"></a>We must not suppose&mdash;as is too often assumed&mdash;that sublimation can be
+carried out easily, completely, or even with unmixed advantage. If it were
+so, certainly the old-fashioned moralist would be confronted by few
+difficulties, but we have ample reason to believe that it is not so. It is
+with sexual energy, well observes Freud, who yet attaches great importance
+to sublimation, as it is with heat in our machines: only a certain
+proportion can be transformed into work. Or, as it is put by L&ouml;wenfeld,
+who is not a constructive philosopher but a careful and cautious medical
+investigator, the advantages of sublimation are not received in specially
+high degree by those who permanently deny to their sexual impulse every
+natural direct relief. The celibate Catholic clergy, notwithstanding their
+heroic achievements in individual cases, can scarcely be said to display a
+conspicuous excess of intellectual energy, on the whole, over the
+non-celibate Protestant clergy; or, if we compare the English clergy
+before and after the Protestant Reformation, though the earlier period may
+reveal more daring and brilliant personages, the whole intellectual output
+of the later Church may claim comparison with that of the earlier Church.
+There are clearly other factors at work besides sublimation, and even
+sublimation may act most potently, not when the sexual activities sink or
+are driven into a tame and monotonous subordi<a name="Page_53" id="Page_53"></a>nation, but rather when they
+assume a splendid energy which surges into many channels. Yet sublimation
+is a very real influence, not only in its more unconscious and profound
+operations, but in its more immediate and temporary applications, as part
+of an athletic discipline, acting best perhaps when it acts most
+automatically, to utilise the motor energy of the organism in the
+attainment of any high physical or psychic achievement.</p>
+
+<p>We have to realise, however, that these transmutations do not only take
+place by way of a sublimation of sexual energy, but also by way of a
+degradation of that energy. The new form of energy produced, that is to
+say, may not be of a beneficial kind; it may be of a mischievous kind, a
+form of perversion or disease. Sexual self-denial, instead of leading to
+sublimation, may lead to nervous disorder when the erotic tension, failing
+to find a natural outlet and not sublimated to higher erotic or non-erotic
+ends in the real world, is transmuted into an unreal dreamland, thus
+undergoing what Jung terms introversion; while there are also the people
+already referred to, in whom immature childish sexuality persists into an
+adult stage of development it is no longer altogether in accord with, so
+that conflict, with various possible trains of nervous symptoms, may
+result. Disturbances and conflicts in the emotional sexual field may, <a name="Page_54" id="Page_54"></a>we
+know, in these and similar ways become transformed into physical symptoms
+of disorder which can be seen to have a precise symbolic relationship to
+definite events in the patient's emotional history, while fits of nervous
+terror, or anxiety-neurosis, may frequently be regarded as a degradation
+of thwarted or disturbed sexual energy, manifesting its origin by
+presenting a picture of sexual excitation transposed into a non-sexual
+shape of an entirely useless or mischievous character.</p>
+
+<p>Thus, to sum up, we may say that the sexual energy of the organism is a
+mighty force, automatically generated throughout life. Under healthy
+conditions that force is transmuted in more or less degree, but never
+entirely, into forms that further the development of the individual and
+the general ends of life. These transformations are to some extent
+automatic, to some extent within the control of personal guidance. But
+there are limits to such guidance, for the primitive human personality can
+never be altogether rendered an artificial creature of civilisation. When
+these limits are reached the transmutation of sexual energy may become
+useless or even dangerous, and we fail to attain the exquisite flower of
+Purity.<a name="Page_55" id="Page_55"></a></p>
+
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>It may seem that in setting forth the nature of the sexual impulse in the
+light of modern biology and psychology, I have said but little of purity
+and less of morality. Yet that is as it should be. We must first be
+content to see how the machine works and watch the wheels go round. We
+must understand before we can pretend to control; in the natural world, as
+Bacon long ago said, we can only command by obeying. Moreover, in this
+field Nature's order is far older and more firmly established than our
+civilised human morality. In our arrogance we often assume that Morality
+is the master of Nature. Yet except when it is so elementary or
+fundamental as to be part of Nature, it is but a guide, and a guide that
+is only a child, so young, so capricious, that in every age its wayward
+hand has sought to pull Nature in a different direction. Even only in
+order to guide we must first see and know.</p>
+
+<p>We realise that never more than when we observe the distinction which
+conventional sex-morals so often makes between men and women. Failing to
+find in women exactly the same kind of sexual emotions, as they find in
+themselves, men have concluded that there are none there at all. So man
+has regarded himself as the sexual animal, and woman as either the passive
+object of his adoring love or the helpless victim of his degrading lust,
+in either case as a being who, <a name="Page_56" id="Page_56"></a>unlike man, possessed an innocent "purity"
+by nature, without any need for the trouble of acquiring it. Of woman as a
+real human being, with sexual needs and sexual responsibilities, morality
+has often known nothing. It has been content to preach restraint to man,
+an abstract and meaningless restraint even if it were possible. But when
+we have regard to the actual facts of life, we can no longer place virtue
+in a vacuum. Women are just as apt as men to be afflicted by the petty
+jealousies and narrownesses of the crude sexual impulse; women just as
+much as men need the perpetual sublimation of erotic desire into forms of
+more sincere purity, of larger harmony, in gaining which ends all the
+essential ends of morality are alone gained. The delicate adjustment of
+the needs of each sex to the needs of the other sex to the end of what
+Chaucer called fine loving, the adjustment of the needs of both sexes to
+the larger ends of fine living, may well furnish a perpetual moral
+discipline which extends its fortifying influence to men and women alike.</p>
+
+<p>It is this universality of sexual emotion, blending in its own mighty
+stream, as is now realised, many other currents of emotion, even the
+parental and the filial, and traceable even in childhood,&mdash;the wide
+efflorescence of an energy constantly generated by a vital internal
+mechanism,&mdash;which renders vain all attempts either to sup<a name="Page_57" id="Page_57"></a>press or to
+ignore the problem of sex, however immensely urgent we might foolishly
+imagine such attempts to be. Even the history of the early Christian
+ascetics in Egypt, as recorded in the contemporary <i>Paradise</i> of
+Palladius, illustrates the futility of seeking to quench the unquenchable,
+the flame of fire which is life itself. These "athletes of the Lord" were
+under the best possible conditions for the conquest of lust; they had been
+driven into the solitude of the desert by a genuine deeply-felt impulse,
+they could regulate their lives as they would, and they possessed an
+almost inconceivable energy of resolution. They were prepared to live on
+herbs, even to eat grass, and to undertake any labour of self-denial. They
+were so scrupulous that we hear of a holy man who would even efface a
+woman's footprints in the sand lest a brother might thereby be led into
+thoughts of evil. Yet they were perpetually tempted to seductive visions
+and desires, even after a monastic life of forty years, and the women seem
+to have been not less liable to yield to temptation than the men.</p>
+
+<p>It may be noted that in the most perfect saints there has not always been
+a complete suppression of the sexual impulse even on the normal plane, nor
+even, in some cases, the attempt at such complete suppression. In the
+early days of Christianity the exercise of chastity was frequently
+combined with a close and romantic in<a name="Page_58" id="Page_58"></a>timacy of affection between the
+sexes which shocked austere moralists. Even in the eleventh century we
+find that the charming and saintly Robert of Arbrissel, founder of the
+order of Fontevrault, would often sleep with his nuns, notwithstanding the
+remonstrances of pious friends who thought he was displaying too heroic a
+manifestation of continence, failing to understand that he was effecting a
+sweet compromise with continence. If, moreover, we consider the rarest and
+finest of the saints we usually find that in their early lives there was a
+period of full expansion of the organic activities in which all the
+natural impulses had full play. This was the case with the two greatest
+and most influential saints of the Christian Church, St. Augustine and St.
+Francis of Assisi, absolutely unlike as they were in most other respects.
+Sublimation, we see again and again, is limited, and the best developments
+of the spiritual life are not likely to come about by the rigid attempt to
+obtain a complete transmutation of sexual energy.</p>
+
+<p>The old notion that any strict attempt to adhere to sexual abstinence is
+beset by terrible risks, insanity and so forth, has no foundation, at all
+events where we are concerned with reasonably sound and healthy people.
+But it is a very serious error to suppose that the effort to achieve
+complete and prolonged sexual abstinence is without any bad results at
+all, physical or psychic, <a name="Page_59" id="Page_59"></a>either in men or women who are normal and
+healthy. This is now generally recognised everywhere, except in the
+English-speaking countries, where the supposed interests of a prudish
+morality often lead to a refusal to look facts in the face. As Professor
+N&auml;cke, a careful and cautious physician, stated shortly before his death,
+a few years ago, the opinion that sexual abstinence has no bad effects is
+not to-day held by a single authority on questions of sex; the fight is
+only concerned with the nature and degree of the bad effects which, in
+N&auml;cke's belief&mdash;and he was doubtless right&mdash;are never of a gravely serious
+character.</p>
+
+<p>Yet we have also to remember that not only, as we have seen, is the effort
+to achieve complete abstinence&mdash;which we ignorantly term "purity"&mdash;futile,
+since we are concerned with a force which is being constantly generated
+within the organism, but in the effort to achieve it we are abusing a
+great source of beneficent energy. We lose more than half of what we might
+gain when we cover it up, and try to push it back, to produce, it may be,
+not harmonious activity in the world, but merely internal confusion and
+distortion, and perhaps the paralysis of half the soul's energy. The
+sexual activities of the organism, we cannot too often repeat, constitute
+a mighty source of energy which we can never altogether repress though by
+wise guidance we <a name="Page_60" id="Page_60"></a>may render it an aid not only to personal development
+and well-being but to the moral betterment of the world. The attraction of
+sex, according to a superstition which reaches far back into antiquity, is
+a baleful comet pointing to destruction, rather than a mighty star to
+which we may harness our chariot. It may certainly be either, and which it
+is likely to become depends largely on our knowledge and our power of
+self-guidance.</p>
+
+<p>In old days when, as we have seen, tradition, aided by the most fantastic
+superstitions, insisted on the baleful aspects of sex, the whole emphasis
+was placed against passion. Since knowledge and self-guidance, without
+which passion is likely to be in fact pernicious, were then usually
+absent, the emphasis was needed, and when B&ouml;hme, the old mystic, declared
+that the art of living is to "harness our fiery energies to the service of
+the light," it has recently been even maintained that he was the solitary
+pioneer of our modern doctrines. But the ages in which ill-regulated
+passion exceeded&mdash;ages at least full of vitality and energy&mdash;gave place to
+a more an&aelig;mic society. To-day the conditions are changed, even reversed.
+Moral maxims that were wholesome in feudal days are deadly now. We are in
+no danger of suffering from too much vitality, from too much energy in the
+explosive splendour of our social life. We possess, more<a name="Page_61" id="Page_61"></a>over, knowledge
+in plenty and self-restraint in plenty, even in excess, however wrongly
+they may sometimes be applied. It is passion, more passion and fuller,
+that we need. The moralist who bans passion is not of our time; his place
+these many years is with the dead. For we know what happens in a world
+when those who ban passion have triumphed. When Love is suppressed Hate
+takes its place. The least regulated orgies of Love grow innocent beside
+the orgies of Hate. When nations that might well worship one another cut
+one another's throats, when Cruelty and Self-righteousness and Lying and
+Injustice and all the Powers of Destruction rule the human heart, the
+world is devastated, the fibre of the whole organism, of society grows
+flaccid, and all the ideals of civilisation are debased. If the world is
+not now sick of Hate we may be sure it never will be; so whatever may
+happen to the world let us remember that the individual is still left, to
+carry on the tasks of Love, to do good even in an evil world.</p>
+
+<p>It is more passion and ever more that we need if we are to undo the work
+of Hate, if we are to add to the gaiety and splendour of life, to the sum
+of human achievement, to the aspiration of human ecstasy. The things that
+fill men and women with beauty and exhilaration, and spur them to actions
+beyond themselves, are the things that are now needed. The entire
+intrinsic puri<a name="Page_62" id="Page_62"></a>fication of the soul, it was held by the great Spanish
+Jesuit theologian, Suarez, takes place at the moment when, provided the
+soul is of good disposition, it sees God; he meant after death, but for us
+the saying is symbolic of the living truth. It is only in the passion of
+facing the naked beauty of the world and its naked truth that we can win
+intrinsic purity. Not all, indeed, who look upon the face of God can live.
+It is not well that they should live. It is only the metals that can be
+welded in the fire of passion to finer services that the world needs. It
+would be well that the rest should be lost in those flames. That indeed
+were a world fit to perish, wherein the moralist had set up the ignoble
+maxim: Safety first.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III"></a><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63"></a>CHAPTER III</h2>
+
+<h2>THE OBJECTS OF MARRIAGE</h2>
+
+
+<p>What are the legitimate objects of marriage? We know that many people seek
+to marry for ends that can scarcely be called legitimate, that men may
+marry to obtain a cheap domestic drudge or nurse, and that women may marry
+to be kept when they are tired of keeping themselves. These objects in
+marriage may or may not be moral, but in any case they are scarcely its
+legitimate ends. We are here concerned to ascertain those ends of marriage
+which are legitimate when we take the highest ground as moral and
+civilised men and women living in an advanced state of society and
+seeking, if we can, to advance that state of society still further.</p>
+
+<p>The primary end of marriage is to beget and bear offspring, and to rear
+them until they are able to take care of themselves. On that basis Man is
+at one with all the mammals and most of the birds. If, indeed, we
+disregard the originally less essential part of this end&mdash;that is to say,
+the care and tending of the young&mdash;this end of marriage is not only the
+primary but usually <a name="Page_64" id="Page_64"></a>the sole end of sexual intercourse in the whole
+mammal world. As a natural instinct, its achievement involves
+gratification and well-being, but this bait of gratification is merely a
+device of Nature's and not in itself an end having any useful function at
+the periods when conception is not possible. This is clearly indicated by
+the fact that among animals the female only experiences sexual desire at
+the season of impregnation, and that desire ceases as soon as impregnation
+takes place, though this is only in a few species true of the male,
+obviously because, if his sexual desire and aptitude were confined to so
+brief a period, the chances of the female meeting the right male at the
+right moment would be too seriously diminished; so that the attentive and
+inquisitive attitude towards the female by the male animal&mdash;which we may
+often think we see still traceable in the human species&mdash;is not the
+outcome of lustfulness for personal gratification ("wantonly to satisfy
+carnal lusts and appetites like brute beasts," as the Anglican Prayer Book
+incorrectly puts it) but implanted by Nature for the benefit of the female
+and the attainment of the primary object of procreation. This primary
+object we may term the animal end of marriage.</p>
+
+<p>This object remains not only the primary but even the sole end of marriage
+among the lower races of mankind generally. The erotic idea, in its deeper
+sense, that is to say the element of <a name="Page_65" id="Page_65"></a>love, arose very slowly in mankind.
+It is found, it is true, among some lower races, and it appears that some
+tribes possess a word for the joy of love in a purely psychic sense. But
+even among European races the evolution was late. The Greek poets, except
+the latest, showed little recognition of love as an element of marriage.
+Theognis compared marriage with cattle-breeding. The Romans of the
+Republic took much the same view. Greeks and Romans alike regarded
+breeding as the one recognisable object of marriage; any other object was
+mere wantonness and had better, they thought, be carried on outside
+marriage. Religion, which preserves so many ancient and primitive
+conceptions of life, has consecrated this conception also, and
+Christianity&mdash;though, as I will point out later, it has tended to enlarge
+the conception&mdash;at the outset only offered the choice between celibacy on
+the one hand and on the other marriage for the production of offspring.</p>
+
+<p>Yet, from, an early period in human history, a secondary function of
+sexual intercourse had been slowly growing up to become one of the great
+objects of marriage. Among animals, it may be said, and even sometimes in
+man, the sexual impulse, when once aroused, makes but a short and swift
+circuit through the brain to reach its consummation. But as the brain and
+its faculties develop, powerfully aided indeed by the <a name="Page_66" id="Page_66"></a>very difficulties
+of the sexual life, the impulse for sexual union has to traverse ever
+longer, slower, more painful paths, before it reaches&mdash;and sometimes it
+never reaches&mdash;its ultimate object. This means that sex gradually becomes
+intertwined with all the highest and subtlest human emotions and
+activities, with the refinements of social intercourse, with high
+adventure in every sphere, with art, with religion. The primitive animal
+instinct, having the sole end of procreation, becomes on its way to that
+end the inspiring stimulus to all those psychic energies which in
+civilisation we count most precious. This function is thus, we see, a
+by-product. But, as we know, even in our human factories, the by-product
+is sometimes more valuable than the product. That is so as regards the
+functional products of human evolution. The hand was produced out of the
+animal forelimb with the primary end of grasping the things we materially
+need, but as a by-product the hand has developed the function of making
+and playing the piano and the violin, and that secondary functional
+by-product of the hand we account, even as measured by the rough test of
+money, more precious, however less materially necessary, than its primary
+function. It is, however, only in rare and gifted natures that transformed
+sexual energy becomes of supreme value for its own sake without ever
+attaining the normal physical outlet.<a name="Page_67" id="Page_67"></a> For the most part the by-product
+accompanies the product, throughout, thus adding a secondary, yet
+peculiarly sacred and specially human, object of marriage to its primary
+animal object. This may be termed the spiritual object of marriage.</p>
+
+<p>By the term "spiritual" we are not to understand any mysterious and
+supernatural qualities. It is simply a convenient name, in distinction
+from animal, to cover all those higher mental and emotional processes
+which in human evolution are ever gaining greater power. It is needless to
+enumerate the constituents of this spiritual end of sexual intercourse,
+for everyone is entitled to enumerate them differently and in different
+order. They include not only all that makes love a gracious and beautiful
+erotic art, but the whole element of pleasure in so far as pleasure is
+more than a mere animal gratification. Our ancient ascetic traditions
+often make us blind to the meaning of pleasure. We see only its
+possibilities of evil and not its mightiness for good. We forget that, as
+Romain Rolland says, "Joy is as holy as Pain." No one has insisted so much
+on the supreme importance of the element of pleasure in the spiritual ends
+of sex as James Hinton. Rightly used, he declares, Pleasure is "the Child
+of God," to be recognised as a "mighty storehouse of force," and he
+pointed out the significant fact that in the course of human progress <a name="Page_68" id="Page_68"></a>its
+importance increases rather than diminishes.<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a> While it is perfectly true
+that sexual energy may be in large degree arrested, and transformed into
+intellectual and moral forms, yet it is also true that pleasure itself,
+and above all, sexual pleasure, wisely used and not abused, may prove the
+stimulus and liberator of our finest and most exalted activities. It is
+largely this remarkable function of sexual pleasure which is decisive in
+settling the argument of those who claim that continence is the only
+alternative to the animal end of marriage. That argument ignores the
+liberating and harmonising influences, giving wholesome balance and sanity
+to the whole organism, imparted by a sexual union which is the outcome of
+the psychic as well as physical needs. There is, further, in the
+attainment of the spiritual end of marriage, much more than the benefit of
+each individual separately. There is, that is to say, the effect on the
+union itself. For through harmonious sex relationships a deeper spiritual
+unity is reached than can possibly be derived from continence in or out of
+marriage, and the marriage association becomes an apter instrument in the
+service of the world. Apart from any sexual craving, the complete
+spiritual contact of two persons who love each other can only be attained
+through some act of rare intimacy. No act can be quite so intimate as the
+sexual embrace. In <a name="Page_69" id="Page_69"></a>its accomplishment, for all who have reached a
+reasonably human degree of development, the communion of bodies becomes
+the communion of souls. The outward and visible sign has been the
+consummation of an inward and spiritual grace. "I would base all my sex
+teaching to children and young people on the beauty and sacredness of
+sex," wrote a distinguished woman; "sex intercourse is the great sacrament
+of life, he that eateth and drinketh unworthily eateth and drinketh his
+own damnation; but it may be the most beautiful sacrament between two
+souls who have no thought of children."<a name="FNanchor_9_9" id="FNanchor_9_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_9" class="fnanchor">[9]</a> To many the idea of a sacrament
+seems merely ecclesiastical, but that is a misunderstanding. The word
+"sacrament" is the ancient Roman name of a soldier's oath of military
+allegiance, and the idea, in the deeper sense, existed long before
+Christianity, and has ever been regarded as the physical sign of the
+closest possible union with some great spiritual reality. From our modern
+standpoint we may say, with James Hinton, that the sexual embrace,
+worthily understood, can only be compared with music and with prayer.
+"Every true lover," it has been well said by a woman, "knows this, and the
+worth of any and every relationship can be judged by its success in
+reaching, or failing to reach, this standpoint."<a name="FNanchor_10_10" id="FNanchor_10_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_10" class="fnanchor">[10]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_8"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> Mrs. Havelock Ellis, <i>James Hinton: A Sketch</i>, Ch. IV.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_9_9" id="Footnote_9_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_9"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> Olive Schreiner in a personal letter.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_10_10" id="Footnote_10_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_10"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> Mrs. Havelock Ellis, <i>James Hinton</i>, p. 180.</p></div>
+
+<p><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70"></a>I have mentioned how the Church&mdash;in part influenced by that clinging to
+primitive conceptions which always marks religions and in part by its
+ancient traditions of asceticism&mdash;tended to insist mainly, if not
+exclusively, on the animal object of marriage. It sought to reduce sex to
+a minimum because the pagans magnified sex; it banned pleasure because the
+Christian's path on earth was the way of the Cross; and even if
+theologians accepted the idea of a "Sacrament of Nature" they could only
+allow it to operate when the active interference of the priest was
+impossible, though it must in justice be said that, before the Council of
+Trent, the Western Church recognised that the sacrament of marriage was
+effected entirely by the act of the two celebrants themselves and not by
+the priest. Gradually, however, a more reasonable and humane opinion crept
+into the Church. Intercourse outside the animal end of marriage was indeed
+a sin, but it became merely a venial sin. The great influence of St.
+Augustine was on the side of allowing much freedom to intercourse outside
+the aim of procreation. At the Reformation, John &agrave; Lasco, a Catholic
+Bishop who became a Protestant and settled in England, laid it down,
+following various earlier theologians, that the object of marriage,
+besides offspring, was to serve as a "sacrament of consolation" to the
+united couple, and that view was more or less accepted by the founders of
+the<a name="Page_71" id="Page_71"></a> Protestant churches. It is the generally accepted Protestant view
+to-day.<a name="FNanchor_11_11" id="FNanchor_11_11"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_11" class="fnanchor">[11]</a> The importance of the spiritual end of intercourse in
+marriage, alike for the higher development of each member of the couple
+and for the intimacy and stability of their union, is still more
+emphatically set forth by the more advanced thinkers of to-day.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_11_11" id="Footnote_11_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11_11"><span class="label">[11]</span></a> It is well set forth by the Rev. H. Northcote in his
+excellent book, <i>Christianity and Sex Problems</i>.</p></div>
+
+<p>There is something pathetic in the spectacle of those among us who are
+still only able to recognise the animal end of marriage, and who point to
+the example of the lower animals&mdash;among whom the biological conditions are
+entirely different&mdash;as worthy of our imitation. It has taken God&mdash;or
+Nature, if we will&mdash;unknown millions of years of painful struggle to
+evolve Man, and to raise the human species above that helpless bondage to
+reproduction which marks the lower animals. But on these people it has all
+been wasted. They are at the animal stage still. They have yet to learn
+the A.B.C. of love. A representative of these people in the person of an
+Anglican bishop, the Bishop of Southwark, appeared as a witness before the
+National Birth-Rate Commission which, a few years ago, met in London to
+investigate the decline of the birth-rate. He declared that procreation is
+the sole legitimate object of marriage and that intercourse for any other
+end was a degrading act of <a name="Page_72" id="Page_72"></a>mere "self-gratification." This declaration
+had the interesting result of evoking the comments of many members of the
+Commission, formed of representative men and women with various
+stand-points&mdash;Protestant, Catholic, and other&mdash;and it is notable that
+while not one identified himself with the Bishop's opinion, several
+decisively opposed that opinion, as contrary to the best beliefs of both
+ancient and modern times, as representing a low and not a high moral
+standpoint, and as involving the notion that the whole sexual activity of
+an individual should be reduced to perhaps two or three effective acts of
+intercourse in a lifetime. Such a notion obviously cannot be carried into
+general practice, putting aside the question as to whether it would be
+desirable, and it may be added that it would have the further result of
+shutting out from the life of love altogether all those persons who, for
+whatever reason, feel that it is their duty to refrain from having
+children at all. It is the attitude of a handful of Pharisees seeking to
+thrust the bulk of mankind into Hell. All this confusion and evil comes of
+the blindness which cannot know that, beyond the primary animal end of
+propagation in marriage, there is a secondary but more exalted spiritual
+end.</p>
+
+<p>It is needless to insist how intimately that secondary end of marriage is
+bound up with the practice of birth-control. Without birth-control,
+<a name="Page_73" id="Page_73"></a>indeed, it could frequently have no existence at all, and even at the
+best seldom be free from disconcerting possibilities fatal to its very
+essence. Against these disconcerting possibilities is often placed, on the
+other side, the un-&aelig;sthetic nature of the contraceptives associated with
+birth-control. Yet, it must be remembered, they are of a part with the
+whole of our civilised human life. We at no point enter the spiritual save
+through the material. Forel has in this connection compared the use of
+contraceptives to the use of eye-glasses. Eye-glasses are equally
+un-&aelig;sthetic, yet they are devices, based on Nature, wherewith to
+supplement the deficiencies of Nature. However in themselves un-&aelig;sthetic,
+for those who need them they make the &aelig;sthetic possible. Eye-glasses and
+contraceptives alike are a portal to the spiritual world for many who,
+without them, would find that world largely a closed book.</p>
+
+<p>Birth-control is effecting, and promising to effect, many functions in our
+social life. By furnishing the means to limit the size of families, which
+would otherwise be excessive, it confers the greatest benefit on the
+family and especially on the mother. By rendering easily possible a
+selection in parentage and the choice of the right time and circumstances
+for conception it is, again, the chief key to the eugenic improvement of
+the race. There are many other benefits, as is now generally becoming
+clear, which will be derived <a name="Page_74" id="Page_74"></a>from the rightly applied practice of
+birth-control. To many of us it is not the least of these that
+birth-control effects finally the complete liberation of the spiritual
+object of marriage.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75"></a>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+
+<h2>HUSBANDS AND WIVES</h2>
+
+
+<p>It has always been common to discuss the psychology of women. The
+psychology of men has usually been passed over, whether because it is too
+simple or too complicated. But the marriage question to-day is much less
+the wife-problem than the husband-problem. Women in their personal and
+social activities have been slowly expanding along lines which are now
+generally accepted. But there has been no marked change of responsive
+character in the activities of men. Hence a defective adjustment of men
+and women, felt in all sorts of subtle as well as grosser ways, most felt
+when they are husband and wife, and sometimes becoming acute.</p>
+
+<p>It is necessary to make clear that, as is here assumed at the outset,
+"man" and "husband" are not quite the same thing, even when they refer to
+the same person. No doubt that is also true of "woman" and "wife." A woman
+in her quality as woman may be a different kind of person from what she is
+in her function as wife. But in the case of a man the distinction is more
+<a name="Page_76" id="Page_76"></a>marked. One may know a man well in the world as a man and not know him at
+all in his home as a husband; not necessarily that he is unfavourably
+revealed in the latter capacity. It is simply that he is different.</p>
+
+<p>The explanation is not really far to seek. A man in the world is in vital
+response to the influences around him. But a husband in the home is
+playing a part which was created for him long centuries before he was
+born. He is falling into a convention, which, indeed, was moulded to fit
+many masculine human needs but has become rigidly traditionalised. Thus
+the part no longer corresponds accurately to the player's nature nor to
+the circumstances under which it has to be played.</p>
+
+<p>In the marriage system which has prevailed in our world for several
+thousand years, a certain hierarchy, or sacred order in authority, has
+throughout been recognised. The family has been regarded as a small State
+of which the husband and father is head. Classic paganism and Christianity
+differed on many points, but they were completely at one on this. The
+Roman system was on a patriarchal basis and continued to be so
+theoretically even when in practise it came to allow great independence to
+the wife. Christianity, although it allowed complete spiritual freedom to
+the individual, introduced no fundamentally new theory of the family, and,
+indeed, <a name="Page_77" id="Page_77"></a>re-inforced the old theory by regarding the family as a little
+church of which the husband was the head. Just as Christ is the head of
+the Church, St. Paul repeatedly asserted, so the husband is the head of
+the wife; therefore, as it was constantly argued during the Middle Ages, a
+man is bound to rule his wife. St. Augustine, the most influential of
+Christian Fathers, even said that a wife should be proud to consider
+herself as the servant of her husband, his <i>ancilla</i>, a word that had in
+it the suggestion of slave. That was the underlying assumption throughout
+the Middle Ages, for the Northern Germanic peoples, having always been
+accustomed to wife-purchase before their conversion, had found it quite
+easy to assimilate the Christian view. Protestantism, even Puritanism with
+its associations of spiritual revolt, so far from modifying the accepted
+attitude, strengthened it, for they found authority for all social
+organisation in the Bible, and the Bible revealed an emphatic predominance
+of the Jewish husband, who possessed essential rights to which the wife
+had no claim. Milton, who had the poet's sensitiveness to the loveliness
+of woman, and the lonely man's feeling for the solace of her society, was
+yet firmly assured of the husband's superiority over his wife. He has
+indeed furnished the classical picture of it in Adam and Eve,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"He for God only, she for God in him,"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78"></a>and to that God she owed "subjection," even though she might qualify it
+by "sweet reluctant amorous delay." This was completely in harmony with
+the legal position of the wife. As a subject she was naturally in
+subjection; she owed her husband the same loyalty as a subject owes the
+sovereign; her disloyalty to him was termed a minor form of treason; if
+she murdered him the crime was legally worse than murder and she rendered
+herself liable to be burnt.</p>
+
+<p>We see that all the influences on our civilisation, religious and secular,
+southern and northern, have combined to mould the underlying bony
+structure of our family system in such a way that, however it may appear
+softened and disguised on the surface, the husband is the head and the
+wife subject to him. We must not be supposed hereby to deny that the wife
+has had much authority, many privileges, considerable freedom, and in
+individual cases much opportunity to domineer, whatever superiority custom
+or brute strength may have given the husband. There are henpecked
+husbands, it has been remarked, even in aboriginal Australia. It is
+necessary to avoid the error of those enthusiasts for the emancipation of
+women who, out of their eager faith in the future of women, used to
+describe her past as one of scarcely mitigated servitude and hardship. If
+women had not constantly succeeded in overcoming or eluding the
+difficulties <a name="Page_79" id="Page_79"></a>that beset them in the past, it would be foolish to cherish
+any faith in their future. It must, moreover, be remembered that the very
+constitution of that ecclesiastico-feudal hierarchy which made the husband
+supreme over the wife, also made the wife jointly with her husband supreme
+over their children and over their servants. The Middle Ages, alike in
+England and in France, as doubtless in Christendom generally, accepted the
+rule laid down in Gratian's <i>Decretum</i>, the great medi&aelig;val text-book of
+Canon Law, that "the husband may chastise his wife temperately, for she is
+of his household," but the wife might chastise her daughters and her
+servants, and she sometimes exercised that right in ways that we should
+nowadays think scarcely temperate.</p>
+
+<p>If we seek to observe how the system worked some five hundred years ago
+when it had not yet become, as it is to-day, both weakened and disguised,
+we cannot do better than turn to the <i>Paston Letters</i>, the most
+instructive documents we possess concerning the domestic life of excellent
+yet fairly average people of the upper middle class in England in the
+fifteenth century. Marriage was still frankly and fundamentally (as it was
+in the following century and less frankly later) a commercial transaction.
+The wooer, when he had a wife in view, stated as a matter of course that
+he proposed to "deal" in the matter; it was quite recognised on both sides
+<a name="Page_80" id="Page_80"></a>that love and courtship must depend on whether the "deal" came off
+satisfactorily. John Paston approached Sir Thomas Brews, through a third
+person, with a view to negotiate a marriage with his daughter Margery. She
+was willing, even eager, and while the matter was still uncertain she
+wrote him a letter on Valentine's Day, addressing him as "Right reverent
+and worshipful and my right well-beloved Valentine," to tell him that it
+was impossible for her father to offer a larger dowry than he had already
+promised. "If that you could be content with that good, and my poor
+person, I would be the merriest maiden on ground." In his first
+letter&mdash;boldly written, he says, without her knowledge or license&mdash;he
+addresses her simply as "Mistress," and assures her that "I am and will be
+yours and at your commandment in every wise during my life." A few weeks
+later, addressing him as "Right worshipful master," she calls him "mine
+own sweetheart," and ends up, as she frequently does, "your servant and
+bedeswoman." Some months later, a few weeks after marriage, she addresses
+her husband in the correct manner of the time as "Right reverent and
+worshipful husband," asking him to buy her a gown as she is weary of
+wearing her present one, it is so cumbrous. Five years later she refers to
+"all" the babies, and writes in haste: "Right reverent and worshipful Sir,
+in my most humble wise I recommend me <a name="Page_81" id="Page_81"></a>unto you as lowly as I can," etc.,
+though she adds in a postscript: "Please you to send for me for I think
+long since I lay in your arms." If we turn to another wife of the Paston
+family, a little earlier in the century, Margaret Paston, whose husband's
+name also was John, we find the same attitude even more distinctly
+expressed. She always addressed him in her most familiar letters, showing
+affectionate concern for his welfare, as "Right reverent and worshipful
+husband" or "Right worshipful master." It is seldom that he writes to her
+at all, but when he writes the superscription is simply "To my mistress
+Paston," or "my cousin," with little greeting at either beginning or end.
+Once only, with unexampled effusion, he writes to her as "My own dear
+sovereign lady" and signs himself "Your true and trusting husband."<a name="FNanchor_12_12" id="FNanchor_12_12"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_12" class="fnanchor">[12]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_12_12" id="Footnote_12_12"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12_12"><span class="label">[12]</span></a> We see just the same formulas in the fifteenth century
+letters of the Stonor family (<i>Stonor Letters and Papers</i>, Camden
+Society), though in these letters we seem often to find a lighter and more
+playful touch than was common among the Pastons. I may refer here to Dr.
+Powell's learned and well written book (with which I was not acquainted
+when I wrote this chapter), <i>English Domestic Relations 1487-1653</i>
+(Columbia University Press).</p></div>
+
+<p>If we turn to France the relation of the wife to her husband was the same,
+or even more definitely dependent, for he occupied the place of father to
+her as well as of husband and sovereign, in this respect carrying on a
+tradition of Roman Law. She was her husband's "wife and subject"; she
+signed herself "Vostre humble ob&eacute;is<a name="Page_82" id="Page_82"></a>sante fille et amye." If also we turn
+to the <i>Book of the Chevalier de la Tour-Landry</i> in Anjou, written at the
+end of the fourteenth century, we find a picture of the relations of women
+to men in marriage comparable to that presented in the <i>Paston Letters</i>,
+though of a different order. This book was, as we know, written for the
+instruction of his daughters by a Knight who seems to have been a fairly
+average man of his time in his beliefs, and in character, as he has been
+described, probably above it, "a man of the world, a Christian, a parent,
+and a gentleman." His book is full of interesting light on the customs and
+manners of his day, though it is mainly a picture of what the writer
+thought ought to be rather than what always was. Herein the Knight is
+sagacious and moderate, much of his advice is admirably sound for every
+age. He is less concerned with affirming the authority of husbands than
+with assuring the happiness and well-being of his dearly loved daughters.
+But he clearly finds this bound up with the recognition of the authority
+of the husband, and the demands he makes are fairly concordant with the
+relationships we see established among the Pastons. The Knight abounds in
+illustrations, from Lot's daughters down to his own time, for the example
+or the warning of his daughters. The ideal he holds up to them is strictly
+domestic and in a sense conventional. He puts the matter on practical
+<a name="Page_83" id="Page_83"></a>rather than religious or legal grounds, and his fundamental assumption is
+"that no woman ought ever to thwart or refuse to obey the ordinance of her
+lord; that is, if she is either desirous to be mistress of his affections
+or to have peace and understanding in the house. For very evident reasons
+submission should begin on her part." One would like to know what duties
+the Knight inculcated on husbands, but the corresponding book he wrote for
+the guidance of his sons appears no longer to be extant.</p>
+
+<p>On the whole, the fundamental traditions of our western world concerning
+the duties of husbands and wives are well summed up in what Pollock and
+Maitland term "that curious cabinet of antiquities, the marriage ritual of
+the English Church." Here we find that the husband promises to love and
+cherish the wife, but she promises not only to love and cherish but also
+to obey him, though, it may be noted, this point was not introduced into
+English marriage rites until the fourteenth century, when the wife
+promised to be "buxom" (which then meant submissive) and "bonair"
+(courteous and kind), while in some French and Spanish rites it has never
+been introduced at all. But we may take it to be generally implied. In the
+final address to the married couple the priest admonishes the bride that
+the husband is the head of the wife, and that her part is submission. In
+some more ancient and <a name="Page_84" id="Page_84"></a>local rituals this point was further driven home,
+and on the delivery of the ring the bride knelt and kissed the
+bridegroom's right foot. In course of time this was modified, at all
+events in France, and she simply dropped the ring, so that her motion of
+stooping was regarded as for the purpose of picking it up. I note that
+change for it is significant of the ways in which we modify the traditions
+of the past, not quite abandoning them but pretending that they have other
+than the fundamental original motives. We see just the same thing in the
+use of the ring, which was in the first place a part of the bride-price,
+frequently accompanied by money, proof that the wife had been duly
+purchased. It was thus made easy to regard the ring as really a golden
+fetter. That idea soon became offensive, and the new idea was originated
+that the ring was a pledge of affection; thus, quite early in some
+countries, the husband, also wore a wedding ring.</p>
+
+<p>The marriage order illustrated by the <i>Paston Letters</i> and the <i>Book of
+the Chevalier de la Tour-Landry</i> before the Reformation, and the Anglican
+Book of Common Prayer afterwards, has never been definitely broken; it is
+a part of our living tradition to-day. But during recent centuries it has
+been overlaid by the growth of new fashions and sentiments which have
+softened its hard outlines to the view. It has been disguised, notably
+during the eighteenth century, by the <a name="Page_85" id="Page_85"></a>development of a new feeling of
+social equality, chiefly initiated in France, which, in an atmosphere of
+public intercourse largely regulated by women, made the ostentatious
+assertion of the husband's headship over his wife displeasing and even
+ridiculous. Then, especially in the nineteenth century, there began
+another movement, chiefly initiated in England and carried further in
+America, which affected the foundations of the husband's position from
+beneath. This movement consisted in a great number of legislative measures
+and judicial pronouncements and administrative orders&mdash;each small in
+itself and never co-ordinated&mdash;which taken altogether have had a
+cumulative effect in immensely increasing the rights of the wife
+independently of her husband or even in opposition to him. Thus at the
+present time the husband's authority has been overlaid by new social
+conventions from above and undermined by new legal regulations from below.</p>
+
+<p>Yet, it is important to realise, although the husband's domestic throne
+has been in appearance elegantly re-covered and in substance has become
+worm-eaten, it still stands and still retains its ancient shape and
+structure. There has never been a French Revolution in the home, and that
+Revolution itself, which modified society so extensively, scarcely
+modified the legal supremacy of the husband at all, even in France under
+<a name="Page_86" id="Page_86"></a>the Code Napol&eacute;on and still less anywhere else. Interwoven with all the
+new developments, and however less obtrusive it may have become, the old
+tradition still continues among us. Since, also, the husband is,
+conventionally and in large measure really, the economic support of the
+home,&mdash;the work of the wife and even actual financial contributions
+brought by her not being supposed to affect that convention,&mdash;this state
+of things is held to be justified.</p>
+
+<p>Thus when a man enters the home as a husband, to seat himself on the
+antique domestic throne and to play the part assigned to him of old, he is
+involuntarily, even unconsciously, following an ancient tradition and
+taking his place in a procession of husbands which began long ages before
+he was born. It thus comes about that a man, even after he is married, and
+a husband are two different persons, so that his wife who mainly knows him
+as a husband may be unable to form any just idea of what he is like as a
+man. As a husband he has stepped out of the path that belongs to him in
+the world, and taken on another part which has called out altogether
+different reactions, so he is sometimes a much more admirable person in
+one of these spheres&mdash;whichever it may be&mdash;than in the other.</p>
+
+<p>We must not be surprised if the husband's position has sometimes developed
+those qualities which from the modern point of view are the less
+<a name="Page_87" id="Page_87"></a>admirable. In this respect the sovereign husband resembles the Sovereign
+State. The Sovereign State, as it has survived from Renaissance days in
+our modern world, may be made up of admirable people, yet as a State they
+are forced into an attitude of helpless egoism which nowadays fails to
+commend itself to the outside world, and the tendency of scientific
+jurists to-day is to deal very critically with the old conception of the
+Sovereign State. It is so with the husband in the home. He was thrust by
+ancient tradition into a position of sovereignty which impelled him to
+play a part of helpless egoism. He was a celestial body in the home around
+which all the other inmates were revolving satellites. The hours of rising
+and retiring, the times of meals and their nature and substance, all the
+activities of the household&mdash;in which he himself takes little or no
+part&mdash;are still arranged primarily to suit his work, his play, and his
+tastes. This is an accepted matter of course, and not the result of any
+violent self-assertion on his part. It is equally an accepted matter of
+course that the wife should be constantly occupied in keeping this little
+solar system in easy harmonious movement, evolving from it, if she has the
+skill, the music of the spheres. She has no recognised independent
+personality of her own, nor even any right to go away by herself for a
+little change and recreation. Any work of her own, <a name="Page_88" id="Page_88"></a>play of her own,
+tastes of her own, must be strictly subordinated, if not suppressed
+altogether.</p>
+
+<p>In the old days, from which our domestic traditions proceed, little
+hardship was thus inflicted on the wife. Her rights and privileges were,
+indeed, far less than those of the modern woman, but for that very reason
+the home offered her a larger field; beneath the shelter of her husband
+the irresponsible wife might exert a maximum of influential activity with
+a minimum of rights and privileges of her own. To many men, even to-day,
+that state of things seems the realisation of an ideal.</p>
+
+<p>Yet to women it seems increasingly less so, and of necessity since the
+cleavage between the position of woman in society and law, and the
+position of the wife in the sacramental bonds of wedlock, is daily
+becoming greater. To-day a woman, who possibly for ten years has been
+leading her own life of independent work, earning her own living, choosing
+her own conditions in accordance with her own needs, and selecting her own
+periods of recreation in accordance with her own tastes, whether or not
+this may have included the society of a man-friend&mdash;such a woman suddenly
+finds on marriage, and without any assertion of authority on her husband's
+part, that all the outward circumstances of her life are reversed and all
+her inner spontaneous <a name="Page_89" id="Page_89"></a>movements arrested. There may be no signs of this
+on the surface of her conduct. She loves her husband too much to wish to
+hurt his feelings by explaining the situation, and she values domestic
+peace too much to risk friction by making unexpected claims. But beneath
+the surface there is often a profound discontent, and even in women who
+thought they had gained an insight into life, a sense of disillusion.
+Everyone knows this who is privileged to catch a glimpse into the hearts
+of women&mdash;often women of most distinguished intelligence as well as women
+of quite ordinary nature&mdash;who leave a life of spontaneous activity in the
+world to enter the home.<a name="FNanchor_13_13" id="FNanchor_13_13"></a><a href="#Footnote_13_13" class="fnanchor">[13]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_13_13" id="Footnote_13_13"></a><a href="#FNanchor_13_13"><span class="label">[13]</span></a> While this condition of things is sometimes to be found in
+the more distinguished minority and in well-to-do families, it is, of
+course, among the great labouring majority that it is most conspicuous.
+Mrs. Will Crooks, of Poplar, speaking to a newspaper reporter (<i>Daily
+Chronicle</i>, 17 Feb., 1919), truly remarked: "At present the average
+married woman's working day is a flagrant contradiction of all trade-union
+ideals. The poor thing is slaving all the time! What she needs&mdash;what she
+longs for&mdash;is just a little break or change now and again, an opportunity
+to get her mind off her work and its worries. If her husband's hours are
+reduced to eight, well that gives her a chance, doesn't it? The home and
+the children are, after all, as much his as hers. With his enlarged
+leisure he will now be able to take a fair share in home duties. I suggest
+that they take it turn and turn about&mdash;one night he goes out and she looks
+after the house and the children; the next night she goes out and he takes
+charge of things at home. She can sometimes go to the cinema, sometimes
+call on friends. Then, say once a week, they can both go out together,
+taking the children with them. That will be a little change and treat for
+everybody."</p></div>
+
+<p>It is not to be supposed that in this presentation of the situation in the
+home, as it is to-day visible to those who are privileged to see beneath
+the surface, any accusation is brought against <a name="Page_90" id="Page_90"></a>the husband. He is no more
+guilty of an unreasonable conservatism than the wife is guilty of an
+unreasonable radicalism. Each of them is the outcome of a tradition. The
+point is that the events of the past hundred years have produced a
+discrepancy in the two lines of tradition, with a resultant lack of
+harmony, independent of the goodwill of either husband or wife.</p>
+
+<p>Olive Schreiner, in her <i>Woman and Labour</i>, has eloquently set forth the
+tendency to parasitism which civilisation produces in women; they no
+longer exercise the arts and industries which were theirs in former ages,
+and so they become economically dependent on men, losing their energies
+and aptitudes, and becoming like those dull parasitic animals which live
+as blood-suckers of their host. That picture, which was of course never
+true of all women, is now ceasing to be true of any but a negligible
+minority; it presents, moreover, a parasitism limited to the economic side
+of life. For if the wife has often been a lazy gold-sucking parasite on
+her husband in the world, the husband has yet oftener been a helpless
+service-absorbing parasite on his wife in the home. There is, that is to
+say, not only an economic parasitism, with no adequate return for
+financial support, but a still more prevalent domestic parasitism, with an
+absorption of services for which no return would be adequate. There are
+many helpful husbands in the home, but there <a name="Page_91" id="Page_91"></a>are a larger number who are
+helpless and have never been trained to be anything else but helpless,
+even by their wives, who would often detest a rival in household work and
+management. The average husband enjoys the total effect of his home but is
+usually unable to contribute any of the details of work and organisation
+that make it enjoyable. He cannot keep it in order and cleanliness and
+regulated movement, he seldom knows how to buy the things that are needed
+for its upkeep, nor how to prepare and cook and present a decent meal; he
+cannot even attend to his own domestic needs. It is the wife's consolation
+that most husbands are not always at home.</p>
+
+<p>"In ministering to the wants of the family, the woman has reduced man to a
+state of considerable dependency on her in all domestic affairs, just as
+she is dependent on him for bodily protection. In the course of ages this
+has gone so far as to foster a peculiar helplessness on the part of the
+man, which manifests itself in a somewhat childlike reliance of the
+husband on the wife. In fact it may be said that the husband is, to all
+intents and purposes, incapable of maintaining himself without the aid of
+a woman." This passage will probably seem to many readers to apply quite
+fairly well to men as they exist to-day in most of those lands which we
+consider at the summit of our civilisation. Yet it was not written of
+civilisation, or of white men, but of <a name="Page_92" id="Page_92"></a>the Bantu tribes of East
+Africa,<a name="FNanchor_14_14" id="FNanchor_14_14"></a><a href="#Footnote_14_14" class="fnanchor">[14]</a> complete Negroes who, while far from being among the lowest
+savages, belong to a culture which is only just emerging from cannibalism,
+witchcraft, and customary bloodshed. So close a resemblance between the
+European husband and the Negro husband significantly suggests how
+remarkable has been the arrest of development in the husband's customary
+status during a vast period of the world's history.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_14_14" id="Footnote_14_14"></a><a href="#FNanchor_14_14"><span class="label">[14]</span></a> Hon. C. Dundas, <i>Journal of the Anthropological Institute</i>,
+Vol. 45, 1915, p. 302.</p></div>
+
+<p>It is in the considerable group of couples where the husband's work
+separates him but little from the home that the pressure on the wife is
+most severe, and without the relief and variety secured by his frequent
+absence. She has perhaps led a life of her own before marriage, she knows
+how to be economically independent; now they occupy a small dwelling, they
+have, maybe, one or two small children, they can only afford one helper in
+the work or none at all, and in this busy little hive the husband and wife
+are constantly tumbling over each other. It is small wonder if the wife
+feels a deep discontent beneath her willing ministrations and misses the
+devotion of the lover in the perpetual claims of the husband.</p>
+
+<p>But the difficulty is not settled if she persuades him to take a room
+outside. He is devoted to his wife and his home, with good reason, for the
+<a name="Page_93" id="Page_93"></a>wife makes the home and he is incapable of making a home. His new
+domestic arrangements sink into careless and sordid disorder, and he is
+conscious of profound discomfort. His wife soon realises that it is a
+choice between his return to the home and complete separation. Most wives
+never get even as far as this attempt at solution of the difficulty and
+hide their secret discontent.</p>
+
+<p>This is the situation which to-day is becoming intensified and extended on
+a vast scale. The habit and the taste for freedom, adventure, and economic
+independence is becoming generated among millions of women who once meekly
+trod the ancient beaten paths, and we must not be so foolish as to suppose
+that they can suddenly renounce those habits and tastes at the threshold
+of marriage. Moreover, it is becoming clear to men and to women alike, and
+for the first time, that the world can be remoulded, and that the claims
+for better conditions of work, for a higher standard of life, and for the
+attainment of leisure, which previously had only feebly been put forward,
+may now be asserted drastically. We see therefore to-day a great
+revolutionary movement, mainly on the part of men in the world of Labour,
+and we see a corresponding movement, however less ostentatious, mainly on
+the part of women, in the world of the Home.</p>
+
+<p>It may seem to some that this new movement of upheaval in the sphere of
+the Home is merely <a name="Page_94" id="Page_94"></a>destructive. Timid souls have felt the like in every
+period of transition, and with as little reason. Just as we realise that
+the movement now in progress in the world of Labour for a higher standard
+of life and for, as it has been termed, a larger "leisure-ration,"
+represents a wholesome revolt against the crushing conditions of prolonged
+monotonous work&mdash;the most deadening of all work&mdash;and a real advance
+towards those ideals of democracy which are still so remote, so it is with
+the movement in the Home. That also is the claim for a new and fairer
+allotment of responsibility, of larger opportunities for freedom and
+leisure. If in the home the husband is still to be regarded as the
+capitalist and the wife as the labourer, then at all events it has to be
+recognised that he owes her not only the satisfaction of her physical
+needs of food and shelter and clothing, but the opportunity to satisfy the
+personal spontaneous claims of her own individual nature. Just as the
+readjustment of Labour is really only an approach to the long recognised
+ideals of Democracy, so the readjustment of the Home, far from being
+subversive or revolutionary, is merely an approximation to the long
+recognised ideals of marriage.</p>
+
+<p>How in practice, one may finally ask, is this readjustment of the home
+likely to be carried out?</p>
+
+<p>In the first place we are justified in believing <a name="Page_95" id="Page_95"></a>that in the future home
+men will no longer be so helpless, so domestically parasitic, as in the
+past. This change is indeed already coming about. It is an inestimable
+benefit throughout life for a man to have been forcibly lifted out of the
+routine comforts and feminine services of the old-fashioned home and to be
+thrown into an alien and solitary environment, face to face with Nature
+and the essential domestic human needs (in my own case I owe an
+inestimable debt to the chance that thus flung me into the Australian bush
+in early life), and one may note that the Great War has had, directly and
+indirectly, a remarkable influence in this direction, for it not only
+compelled women to exercise many enlarging and fortifying functions
+commonly counted as pertaining to men, it also compelled men, deprived of
+accustomed feminine services, to develop a new independent ability for
+organising domesticity, and that ability, even though it is not
+permanently exercised in rendering domestic services, must yet always make
+clear the nature of domestic problems and tend to prevent the demand for
+unnecessary domestic services.</p>
+
+<p>But there is another quite different and more general line along which we
+may expect this problem to be largely solved. That is by the
+simplification and organisation of domestic life. If that process were
+carried to the full extent that is now becoming possible a large part of
+the <a name="Page_96" id="Page_96"></a>problem before us would be at once solved. A great promise for the
+future of domestic life is held out by the growing adoption of
+birth-control, by which the wife and mother is relieved from that burden
+of unduly frequent and unwanted maternity which in the past so often
+crushed her vitality and destroyed her freshness. But many minor agencies
+are helpful. To supply heat, light, and motive power even to small
+households, to replace the wasteful, extravagant, and often inefficient
+home-cookery by meals cooked outside, as well as to facilitate the growing
+social habit of taking meals in spacious public restaurants, under more
+attractive, economical, and wholesome conditions than can usually be
+secured within the narrow confines of the home, to contract with specially
+trained workers from outside for all those routines of domestic drudgery
+which are often so inefficiently and laboriously carried on by the
+household-worker, whether mistress or servant, and to seek perpetually by
+new devices to simplify, which often means to beautify, all the everyday
+processes of life&mdash;to effect this in any comprehensive degree is to
+transform the home from the intolerable burden it is sometimes felt to be
+into a possible haven of peace and joy.<a name="FNanchor_15_15" id="FNanchor_15_15"></a><a href="#Footnote_15_15" class="fnanchor">[15]</a> The trouble in the past, <a name="Page_97" id="Page_97"></a>and
+even to-day, has been, not in any difficulty in providing the facilities
+but in prevailing people to adopt them. Thus in England, even under the
+stress of the Great War, there was among the working population a
+considerable disinclination&mdash;founded on stupid conservatism and a
+meaningless pride&mdash;to take advantage of National Kitchens and National
+Restaurants, notwithstanding the superiority of the meals in quality,
+cheapness, and convenience, to the workers' home meals, so that many of
+these establishments, even while still fostered by the Government, had
+speedily to close their doors. Ancient traditions, that have now become
+not only empty but mischievous, in these matters still fetter the wife
+even more than the husband. We cannot regulate even the material side of
+life without cultivating that intelligence in the development of which
+civilisation so largely consists.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_15_15" id="Footnote_15_15"></a><a href="#FNanchor_15_15"><span class="label">[15]</span></a> This aspect of the future of domesticity was often set forth
+by Mrs. Havelock Ellis, <i>The New Horizon in Love and Life</i>, 1921.</p></div>
+
+<p>Intelligence, and even something more than intelligence, is needed along
+the third line of progress towards the modernised home. Simplification and
+organisation can effect nothing in the desired transformation if they
+merely end in themselves. They are only helpful in so far as they
+economise energy, offer a more ample leisure, and extend the opportunities
+for that play of the intellect, that liberation of the emotions with
+accompanying discipline of the primitive instincts, which are needed not
+only for the <a name="Page_98" id="Page_98"></a>development of civilisation in general, but in particular of
+the home. Domineering egotism, the assertion of greedy possessive rights,
+are out of place in the modern home. They are just as mischievous when
+exhibited by the wife as by the husband. We have seen, as we look back,
+the futility in the end of the ancient structure of the home, however
+reasonable it was at the beginning, under our different modern social
+conditions, and for women to attempt nowadays to reintroduce the same
+structure, merely reversed would be not only mischievous but silly. That
+spirit of narrow exclusiveness and self centred egoism&mdash;even if it were
+sometimes an <i>&eacute;goisme &agrave; deux</i>&mdash;evoked, half a century ago, the scathing
+sarcasm of James Hinton, who never wearied of denouncing the "virtuous and
+happy homes" which he saw as "floating blotches of verdure on a sea of
+filth." Such outbursts seem extravagant, but they were the extravagance of
+an idealist at the vision which, as a physician in touch with realities,
+he had, seen beneath the surface of the home.</p>
+
+<p>It is well to insist on the organisation of the mechanical and material
+side of life. Some leaders of women movements feel this so strongly that
+they insist on nothing else. In old days it was conventionally supposed
+that women's sphere was that of the feelings; the result has been that
+women now often take ostentatious pleasure in <a name="Page_99" id="Page_99"></a>washing their hands of
+feelings and accusing men of "sentiment." But that wrongly debased word
+stands for the whole superstructure of life on the basis of material
+organisation, for all the finer and higher parts of our nature, for the
+greater part of civilisation.<a name="FNanchor_16_16" id="FNanchor_16_16"></a><a href="#Footnote_16_16" class="fnanchor">[16]</a> The elaboration of the mechanical side
+of life by itself may merely serve to speed up the pace of life instead of
+expanding leisure, to pile up the weary burden of luxury, and still
+further to dissipate the energy of life in petty or frivolous
+channels.<a name="FNanchor_17_17" id="FNanchor_17_17"></a><a href="#Footnote_17_17" class="fnanchor">[17]</a> To bring order into the region of soulless machinery running
+at random, to raise the super-structure of a genuinely human civilisation,
+is not a task which either men or women can afford to fling contemptuously
+to the opposite sex. It concerns them both equally and can only be carried
+out by both equally, working side by side in the most intimate spirit of
+mutual comprehension, confiding trust, and the goodwill to conquer the
+<a name="Page_100" id="Page_100"></a>demon of jealousy, that dragon which slays love under the pretence of
+keeping it alive.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_16_16" id="Footnote_16_16"></a><a href="#FNanchor_16_16"><span class="label">[16]</span></a> "The growth of the sentiments," remarks an influential
+psychologist of our own time (W. McDougall, <i>Social Psychology</i>, p. 160),
+"is of the utmost importance for the character and conduct of individuals
+and of societies; it is the organisation of the affective and conative
+life. In the absence of sentiments our emotional life would be a mere
+chaos, without order, consistency, or continuity of any kind; and all our
+social relations and conduct, being based on the emotions and their
+impulses would be correspondingly chaotic, unpredictable, and unstable....
+Again, our judgments of value and of merit are rooted in our sentiments;
+and our moral principles have the same source, for they are formed by our
+judgments of moral value."</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_17_17" id="Footnote_17_17"></a><a href="#FNanchor_17_17"><span class="label">[17]</span></a> The destructive effects of the mechanisation of modern life
+have lately been admirably set forth, and with much precise illustration,
+by Dr. Austin Freeman, <i>Social Decay and Regeneration</i>.</p></div>
+
+<p>This task, it may finally be added, is always an adventure. However well
+organised the foundations of life may be, life must always be full of
+risks. We may smile, therefore, when it is remarked that the future
+developments of the home are risky. Birds in the air and fishes in the
+sea, quite as much as our own ancestors on the earth, have always found
+life full of risks. It was the greatest risk of all when they insisted on
+continuing on the old outworn ways and so became extinct. If the home is
+an experiment and a risky experiment, one can only say that life is always
+like that. We have to see to it that in this central experiment, on which
+our happiness so largely depends, all our finest qualities are mobilised.
+Even the smallest homes under the new conditions cannot be built to last
+with small minds and small hearts. Indeed the discipline of the home
+demands not only the best intellectual qualities that are available, but
+often involves&mdash;and in men as well as in women&mdash;a spiritual training fit
+to make sweeter and more generous saints than any cloister. The greater
+the freedom, the more complete the equality of husband and wife, the
+greater the possibilities of discipline and development. In view of the
+rigidities and injustices of the law, many couples nowadays dispense with
+legal marriage, and form their own <a name="Page_101" id="Page_101"></a>private contract; that method has
+sometimes proved more favourable to the fidelity and permanence of love
+than external compulsion; it assists the husband to remain the lover, and
+it is often the lover more than the husband that the modern woman needs;
+but it has always to be remembered that in the present condition of law
+and social opinion a slur is cast on the children of such unions. No
+doubt, however, marriage and the home will undergo modifications, which
+will tend to make these ancient institutions a little more flexible and to
+permit a greater degree of variation to meet special circumstances. We can
+occupy ourselves with no more essential task, whether as regards ourselves
+or the race, than to make more beautiful the House of Life for the
+dwelling of Love.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V"></a><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102"></a>CHAPTER V</h2>
+
+<h2>THE LOVE-RIGHTS OF WOMEN</h2>
+
+
+<p>What is the part of woman, one is sometimes asked, in the sex act? Must it
+be the wife's concern in the marital embrace to sacrifice her own wishes
+from a sense of love and duty towards her husband? Or is the wife entitled
+to an equal mutual interest and joy in this act with her husband? It seems
+a simple problem. In so fundamental a relationship, which goes back to the
+beginning of sex in the dawn of life, it might appear that we could leave
+Nature to decide. Yet it is not so. Throughout the history of
+civilisation, wherever we can trace the feelings and ideas which have
+prevailed on this matter and the resultant conduct, the problem has
+existed, often to produce discord, conflict, and misery. The problem still
+exists to-day and with as important results as in the past.</p>
+
+<p>In Nature, before the arrival of Man, it can scarcely be said indeed that
+any difficulty existed. It was taken for granted at that time that the
+female had both the right to her own body, and the right to a certain
+amount of enjoyment in <a name="Page_103" id="Page_103"></a>the use of it. It often cost the male a serious
+amount of trouble&mdash;though he never failed to find it worth while&mdash;to
+explain to her the point where he may be allowed to come in, and to
+persuade her that he can contribute to her enjoyment. So it generally is
+throughout Nature, before we reach Man, and, though it is not invariably
+obvious, we often find it even among the unlikeliest animals. As is well
+known, it is most pronounced among the birds, who have in some species
+carried the erotic art,&mdash;and the faithful devotion which properly
+accompanied the erotic art as being an essential part of it,&mdash;to the
+highest point. We have here the great natural fact of courtship.
+Throughout Nature, wherever we meet with animals of a high type, often
+indeed when they are of a lowly type&mdash;provided they have not been rendered
+unnatural by domestication&mdash;every act of sexual union is preceded by a
+process of courtship. There is a sound physiological reason for this
+courtship, for in the act of wooing and being wooed the psychic excitement
+gradually generated in the brains of the two partners acts as a stimulant
+to arouse into full activity the mechanism which ensures sexual union and
+aids ultimate impregnation. Such courtship is thus a fundamental natural
+fact.</p>
+
+<p>It is as a natural fact that we still find it in full development among a
+large number of peo<a name="Page_104" id="Page_104"></a>ples of the lower races whom we are accustomed to
+regard as more primitive than ourselves. New conditions, it is true, soon
+enter to complicate the picture presented by savage courtship. The
+economic element of bargaining, destined to prove so important, comes in
+at an early stage. And among peoples leading a violent life, and
+constantly fighting, it has sometimes happened, though not always, that
+courtship also has been violent. This is not so frequent as was once
+supposed. With better knowledge it was found that the seeming brutality
+once thought to take the place of courtship among various peoples in a low
+state of culture was really itself courtship, a rough kind of play
+agreeable to both parties and not depriving the feminine partner of her
+own freedom of choice. This was notably the case as regards so-called
+"marriage by capture." While this is sometimes a real capture, it is more
+often a mock capture; the lover perhaps pursues the beloved on horseback,
+but she is as fleet and as skilful as he is, cannot be captured unless she
+wishes to be captured, and in addition, as among the Kirghiz, she may be
+armed with a formidable whip; so that "marriage by capture," far from
+being a hardship imposed on women is largely a concession to their modesty
+and a gratification of their erotic impulses. Even when the chief part of
+the decision rests with masculine force courtship is still not necessarily
+or usually <a name="Page_105" id="Page_105"></a>excluded, for the exhibition of force by a lover,&mdash;and this is
+true for civilised as well as for savage women,&mdash;is itself a source of
+pleasurable stimulation, and when that is so the essence of courtship may
+be attained even more successfully by the forceful than by the humble
+lover.</p>
+
+<p>The evolution of society, however, tended to overlay and sometimes even to
+suppress those fundamental natural tendencies. The position of the man as
+the sole and uncontested head of the family, the insistence on paternity
+and male descent, the accompanying economic developments, and the tendency
+to view a woman less as a self-disposing individual than as an object of
+barter belonging to her father, the consequent rigidity of the marriage
+bond and the stern insistence on wifely fidelity&mdash;all these conditions of
+developing civilisation, while still leaving courtship possible,
+diminished its significance and even abolished its necessity. Moreover, on
+the basis of the social, economic, and legal developments thus
+established, new moral, spiritual, and religious forces were slowly
+generated, which worked on these rules of merely exterior order, and
+interiorised them, thus giving them power over the souls as well as over
+the bodies of women.</p>
+
+<p>The result was that, directly and indirectly, the legal, economic, and
+erotic rights of women <a name="Page_106" id="Page_106"></a>were all diminished. It is with the erotic rights
+only that we are here concerned.</p>
+
+<p>No doubt in its erotic aspects, as well as in its legal and economic
+aspects, the social order thus established was described, and in good
+faith, as beneficial to women, and even as maintained in their interests.
+Monogamy and the home, it was claimed, alike existed for the benefit and
+protection of women. It was not so often explained that they greatly
+benefited and protected men, with, moreover, this additional advantage
+that while women were absolutely confined to the home, men were free to
+exercise their activities outside the home, even, with tacit general
+consent, on the erotic side.</p>
+
+<p>Whatever the real benefits, and there is no occasion for questioning them,
+of the sexual order thus established, it becomes clear that in certain
+important respects it had an unnatural and repressive influence on the
+erotic aspect of woman's sexual life. It fostered the reproductive side of
+woman's sexual life, but it rendered difficult for her the satisfaction of
+the instinct for that courtship which is the natural preliminary of
+reproductive activity, an instinct even more highly developed in the
+female than in the male, and the more insistent because in the order of
+Nature the burden of maternity is preceded by the reward of pleasure. But
+the marriage order which had become established led to the <a name="Page_107" id="Page_107"></a>indirect
+result of banning pleasure in women, or at all events in wives. It was
+regarded as too dangerous, and even as degrading. The women who wanted
+pleasure were not considered fit for the home, but more suited to be
+devoted to an exclusive "life of pleasure," which soon turned out to be
+not their own pleasure but men's. A "life of pleasure," in that sense or
+in any other sense, was not what more than a small minority of women ever
+desired. The desire of women for courtship is not a thing by itself, and
+was not implanted for gratification by itself. It is naturally
+intertwined&mdash;and to a much greater degree than the corresponding desire in
+men&mdash;with her deepest personal, family, and social instincts, so that if
+these are desecrated and lost its charm soon fades.</p>
+
+<p>The practices and the ideals of this established morality were both due to
+men, and both were so thoroughly fashioned that they subjugated alike the
+actions and the feelings of women. There is no sphere which we regard as
+so peculiarly women's sphere as that of love. Yet there is no sphere which
+in civilisation women have so far had so small a part in regulating. Their
+deepest impulses&mdash;their modesty, their maternity, their devotion, their
+emotional receptivity&mdash;were used, with no conscious and deliberate
+Machiavellism, against themselves, to mould a moral world for their
+habitation which they would not themselves <a name="Page_108" id="Page_108"></a>have moulded. It is not of
+modern creation, nor by any means due, as some have supposed, to the
+asceticism of Christianity, however much Christianity may have reinforced
+it. Indeed one may say that in course of time Christianity had an
+influence in weakening it, for Christianity discovered a new reservoir of
+tender emotion, and such emotion may be transferred, and, as a matter of
+fact, was transferred, from its first religious channel into erotic
+channels which were thereby deepened and extended, and without reference
+to any design of Christianity. For the ends we achieve are often by no
+means those which we set out to accomplish. In ancient classic days this
+moral order was even more severely established than in the Middle Ages.
+Montaigne, in the sixteenth century, declared that "marriage is a devout
+and religious relationship, the pleasures derived from it should be
+restrained and serious, mixed with some severity." But in this matter he
+was not merely expressing the Christian standpoint but even more that of
+paganism, and he thoroughly agreed with the old Greek moralist that a man
+should approach his wife "prudently and severely" for fear of inciting her
+to lasciviousness; he thought that marriage was best arranged by a third
+party, and was inclined to think, with the ancients, that women are not
+fitted to make friends of. Montaigne has elsewhere spoken with insight of
+<a name="Page_109" id="Page_109"></a>women's instinctive knowledge of the art and discipline of love and has
+pointed out how men have imposed their own ideals and rules of action on
+women from whom they have demanded opposite and contradictory virtues;
+yet, we see, he approves of this state of things and never suggests that
+women have any right to opinions of their own or feelings of their own
+when the sacred institution of marriage is in question.</p>
+
+<p>Montaigne represents the more exalted aspects of the Pagan-Christian
+conception of morality in marriage which still largely prevails. But that
+conception lent itself to deductions, frankly accepted even by Montaigne
+himself, which were by no means exalted. "I find," said Montaigne, "that
+Venus, after all, is nothing more than the pleasure of discharging our
+vessels, just as nature renders pleasurable the discharges from other
+parts." Sir Thomas More among Catholics, and Luther among Protestants,
+said exactly the same thing in other and even clearer words, while untold
+millions of husbands in Christendom down to to-day, whether or not they
+have had the wit to put their theory into a phrase, have regularly put it
+into practice, at all events within the consecrated pale of marriage, and
+treated their wives, "severely and prudently," as convenient utensils for
+the reception of a natural excretion.</p>
+
+<p>Obviously, in this view of marriage, sexual <a name="Page_110" id="Page_110"></a>activity was regarded as an
+exclusively masculine function, in the exercise of which women had merely
+a passive part to play. Any active participation on her side thus seemed
+unnecessary, and even unbefitting, finally, though only in comparatively
+modern times, disgusting and actually degrading. Thus Acton, who was
+regarded half a century ago as the chief English authority on sexual
+matters, declared that, "happily for society," the supposition that women
+possess sexual feelings could be put aside as "a vile aspersion," while
+another medical authority of the same period stated in regard to the most
+simple physical sign of healthy sexual emotion that it "only happens in
+lascivious women." This final triumph of the masculine ideals and rule of
+life was, however, only achieved slowly. It was the culmination of an
+elaborate process of training. At the outset men had found it impossible
+to speak too strongly of the "wantonness" of women. This attitude was
+pronounced among the ancient Greeks and prominent in their dramatists.
+Christianity again, which ended by making women into the chief pillars of
+the Church, began by regarding them as the "Gate of Hell." Again, later,
+when in the Middle Ages this masculine moral order approached the task of
+subjugating the barbarians of Northern Europe, men were horrified at the
+licentiousness of those <a name="Page_111" id="Page_111"></a>northern women at whose coldness they are now
+shocked.</p>
+
+<p>That, indeed, was, as Montaigne had seen, the central core of conflict in
+the rule of life imposed by men on woman. Men were perpetually striving,
+by ways the most methodical, the most subtle, the most far-reaching, to
+achieve a result in women, which, when achieved, men themselves viewed
+with dismay. They may be said to be moved in this sphere by two passions,
+the passion for virtue and the passion for vice. But it so happens that
+both these streams of passion have to be directed at the same fascinating
+object: Woman. No doubt nothing is more admirable than the skill with
+which women have acquired the duplicity necessary to play the two
+contradictory parts thus imposed upon them. But in that requirement the
+play of their natural reactions tended to become paralysed, and the
+delicate mechanism of their instincts often disturbed. They were
+forbidden, except in a few carefully etiquetted forms, the free play of
+courtship, without which they could not perform their part in the erotic
+life with full satisfaction either to themselves or their partners. They
+were reduced to an artificial simulation of coldness or of warmth,
+according to the particular stage of the dominating masculine ideal of
+woman which their partner chanced to have reached. But that is an attitude
+equally unsatisfactory to <a name="Page_112" id="Page_112"></a>themselves and to their lovers, even when the
+latter have not sufficient insight to see through its unreality. It is an
+attitude so unnatural and artificial that it inevitably tends to produce a
+real coldness which nothing can disguise. It is true that women whose
+instincts are not perverted at the roots do not desire to be cold. Far
+from it. But to dispel that coldness the right atmosphere is needed, and
+the insight and skill of the right man. In the erotic sphere a woman asks
+nothing better of a man than to be lifted above her coldness, to the
+higher plane where there is reciprocal interest and mutual joy in the act
+of love. Therein her silent demand is one with Nature's. For the
+biological order of the world involves those claims which, in the human
+range, are the erotic rights of women.</p>
+
+<p>The social claims of women, their economic claims, their political claims,
+have long been before the world. Women themselves have actively asserted
+them, and they are all in process of realisation. The erotic claims of
+women, which are at least as fundamental, are not publicly voiced, and
+women themselves would be the last to assert them. It is easy to
+understand why that should be so. The natural and acquired qualities of
+women, even the qualities developed in the art of courtship, have all been
+utilised in building up the masculine ideal of sexual morality; it is on
+feminine characteristics that this masculine ideal <a name="Page_113" id="Page_113"></a>has been based, so
+that women have been helpless to protest against it. Moreover, even if
+that were not so, to formulate such rights is to raise the question
+whether there so much as exists anything that can be called "erotic
+rights." The right to joy cannot be claimed in the same way as one claims
+the right to put a voting paper in a ballot box. A human being's erotic
+aptitudes can only be developed where the right atmosphere for them
+exists, and where the attitudes of both persons concerned are in
+harmonious sympathy. That is why the erotic rights of women have been the
+last of all to be attained.</p>
+
+<p>Yet to-day we see a change here. The change required is, it has been said,
+a change of attitude and a resultant change in the atmosphere in which the
+sexual impulses are manifested. It involves no necessary change in the
+external order of our marriage system, for, as has already been pointed
+out, it was a coincident and not designed part of that order. Various
+recent lines of tendency have converged to produce this change of attitude
+and of atmosphere. In part the men of to-day are far more ready than the
+men of former days to look upon women as their comrades in the every day
+work of the world, instead of as beings who were ideally on a level above
+themselves and practically on a level considerably below themselves. In
+part there is the growing recognition that women have conquered <a name="Page_114" id="Page_114"></a>many
+elementary human rights of which before they were deprived, and are more
+and more taking the position of citizens, with the same kinds of duties,
+privileges, and responsibilities as men. In part, also, it may be added,
+there is a growing diffusion among educated people of a knowledge of the
+primary facts of life in the two sexes, slowly dissipating and dissolving
+many foolish and often mischievous superstitions. The result is that, as
+many competent observers have noted, the young men of to-day show a new
+attitude towards women and towards marriage, an attitude of simplicity and
+frankness, a desire for mutual confidence, a readiness to discuss
+difficulties, an appeal to understand and to be understood. Such an
+attitude, which had hitherto been hard to attain, at once creates the
+atmosphere in which alone the free spontaneous erotic activities of women
+can breathe and live.</p>
+
+<p>This consummation, we have seen, may be regarded as the attainment of
+certain rights, the corollary of other rights in the social field which
+women are slowly achieving as human beings on the same human level as men.
+It opens to women, on whom is always laid the chief burden of sex, the
+right to the joy and exaltation of sex, to the uplifting of the soul
+which, when the right conditions are fulfilled, is the outcome of the
+intimate approach and union of two human beings. Yet while we may find
+convenient so to <a name="Page_115" id="Page_115"></a>formulate it, we need to remember that that is only a
+fashion of speech, for there are no rights in Nature. If we take a broader
+sweep, what we may choose to call an erotic right is simply the perfect
+poise of the conflicting forces of life, the rhythmic harmony in which
+generation is achieved with the highest degree of perfection compatible
+with the make of the world. It is our part to transform Nature's large
+conception into our own smaller organic mould, not otherwise than the
+plants, to whom we are far back akin, who dig their flexible roots deep
+into the moist and fruitful earth, and so are able to lift up glorious
+heads toward the sky.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI"></a><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116"></a>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+
+<h2>THE PLAY-FUNCTION OF SEX</h2>
+
+
+<p>When we hear the sexual functions spoken of we commonly understand the
+performance of an act which normally tends to the propagation of the race.
+When we see the question of sexual abstinence discussed, when the
+desirability of sexual gratification is asserted or denied, when the idea
+arises of the erotic rights and needs of woman, it is always the same act
+with its physical results that is chiefly in mind. Such a conception is
+quite adequate for practical working purposes in the social world. It
+enables us to deal with all our established human institutions in the
+sphere of sex, as the arbitrary assumptions of Euclid enable us to
+traverse the field of elementary geometry. But beyond these useful
+purposes it is inadequate and even inexact. The functions of sex on the
+psychic and erotic side are of far greater extension than any act of
+procreation, they may even exclude it altogether, and when we are
+concerned with the welfare of the individual human being we must enlarge
+our outlook and deepen our insight.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117"></a>There are, we know, two main functions in the sexual relationship, or
+what in the biological sense we term "marriage," among civilised human
+beings, the primary physiological function of begetting and bearing
+offspring and the secondary spiritual function of furthering the higher
+mental and emotional processes. These are the main functions of the sexual
+impulse, and in order to understand any further object of the sexual
+relationship&mdash;or even in order to understand all that is involved in the
+secondary object of marriage&mdash;we must go beyond conscious motives and
+consider the nature of the sexual impulse, physical and psychic, as rooted
+in the human organism.</p>
+
+<p>The human organism, as we know, is a machine on which excitations from
+without, streaming through the nerves and brain, effect internal work,
+and, notably, stimulate the glandular system. In recent years the
+glandular system, and especially that of the ductless glands, has taken on
+an altogether new significance. These ductless glands, as we know,
+liberate into the blood what are termed "hormones," or chemical
+messengers, which have a complex but precise action in exciting and
+developing all those physical and psychic activities which make up a full
+life alike on the general side and the reproductive side, so that their
+balanced functions are essential to <a name="Page_118" id="Page_118"></a>wholesome and complete existence. In
+a rudimentary form these functions may be traced back to our earliest
+ancestors who possessed brains. In those times the predominant sense for
+arousing the internal mental and emotional faculties was that of smell,
+the other senses being gradually evolved subsequently, and it is
+significant that the pituitary, one of the chief ductless glands active in
+ourselves to-day, was developed out of the nervous centre for smell in
+conjunction with the membrane of the mouth. The energies of the whole
+organism were set in action through stimuli arising from the outside world
+by way of the sense of smell. In process of time the mechanism has become
+immensely elaborated, yet its healthy activity is ultimately dependent on
+a rich and varied action and reaction with the external world. It is
+becoming recognised that the tendency to pluri-glandular insufficiency,
+with its resulting lack of organic harmony and equilibrium, can be
+counteracted by the physical and psychic stimuli of intimate contacts with
+the external world. In this action and reaction, moreover, we cannot
+distinguish between sexual ends and general ends. The activities of the
+ductless glands and their hormones equally serve both ends in ways that
+cannot be distinguished. "The individual metabolism," as a distinguished
+authority in this field has expressed it, "is the <a name="Page_119" id="Page_119"></a>reproductive
+metabolism."<a name="FNanchor_18_18" id="FNanchor_18_18"></a><a href="#Footnote_18_18" class="fnanchor">[18]</a> Thus the establishment of our complete activities as
+human beings in the world is aided by, if not indeed ultimately dependent
+upon, a perpetual and many-sided play with our environment.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_18_18" id="Footnote_18_18"></a><a href="#FNanchor_18_18"><span class="label">[18]</span></a> W. Blair Bell, <i>The Sex-Complex,</i> 1920, p. 108. This book is
+a cautious and precise statement of the present state of knowledge on this
+subject, although some of the author's psychological deductions must be
+treated with circumspection.</p></div>
+
+<p>It is thus that we arrive at the importance of the play-function, and
+thus, also, we realise that while it extends beyond the sexual sphere it
+yet definitely includes that sphere. There are at least three different
+ways of understanding the biological function of play. There is the
+conception of play, on which Groos has elaborately insisted, as education:
+the cat "plays" with the mouse and is thereby educating itself in the
+skill necessary to catch mice; all our human games are a training in
+qualities that are required in life, and that is why in England we
+continue to attribute to the Duke of Wellington the saying that "the
+battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton." Then there is
+the conception of play as the utilisation in art of the superfluous
+energies left unemployed in the practical work of life; this enlarging and
+harmonising function of play, while in the lower ranges it may be spent
+trivially, leads in the higher ranges to the production of the most
+magnificent human achievements. But there is yet a third conception of
+play, <a name="Page_120" id="Page_120"></a>according to which it exerts a direct internal
+influence&mdash;health-giving, developmental, and balancing&mdash;on the whole
+organism of the player himself. This conception is related to the other
+two, and yet distinct, for it is not primarily a definite education in
+specific kinds of life-conserving skill, although it may involve the
+acquisition of such skill, and it is not concerned with the construction
+of objective works of art, although&mdash;by means of contact in human
+relationship&mdash;it attains the wholesome organic effects which may be
+indirectly achieved by artistic activities. It is in this sense that we
+are here concerned with what we may perhaps best call the play-function of
+sex.<a name="FNanchor_19_19" id="FNanchor_19_19"></a><a href="#Footnote_19_19" class="fnanchor">[19]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_19_19" id="Footnote_19_19"></a><a href="#FNanchor_19_19"><span class="label">[19]</span></a> The term seems to have been devised by Professor Maurice
+Parmelee, <i>Personality and Conduct</i>, 1918, pp. 104, 107, 113. But it is
+understood by Parmelee in a much vaguer and more extended sense than I
+have used it.</p></div>
+
+<p>As thus understood, the play-function of sex is at once in an inseparable
+way both physical and psychic. It stimulates to wholesome activity all the
+complex and inter-related systems of the organism. At the same time it
+satisfies the most profound emotional impulses, controlling in harmonious
+poise the various mental instincts. Along these lines it necessarily tends
+in the end to go beyond its own sphere and to embrace and introduce into
+the sphere of sex the other two more objective fields of play, that of
+play as education, and that of play as artistic creation.<a name="Page_121" id="Page_121"></a> It may not be
+true, as was said of old time, "most of our arts and sciences were
+invented for love's sake." But it is certainly true that, in proportion as
+we truly and wisely exercise the play-function of sex, we are at the same
+time training our personality on the erotic side and acquiring a mastery
+of the art of love.</p>
+
+<p>The longer I live the more I realise the immense importance for the
+individual of the development through the play-function of erotic
+personality, and for human society of the acquirement of the art of love.
+At the same time I am ever more astonished at the rarity of erotic
+personality and the ignorance of the art of love even among those men and
+women, experienced in the exercise of procreation, in whom we might most
+confidently expect to find such development and such art. At times one
+feels hopeless at the thought that civilisation in this supremely intimate
+field of life has yet achieved so little. For until it is generally
+possible to acquire erotic personality and to master the art of loving,
+the development of the individual man or woman is marred, the acquirement
+of human happiness and harmony remains impossible.</p>
+
+<p>In entering this field, indeed, we not only have to gain true knowledge
+but to cast off false knowledge, and, above all, to purify our hearts from
+superstitions which have no connection with any kind of existing
+knowledge. We have <a name="Page_122" id="Page_122"></a>to cease to regard as admirable the man who regards
+the accomplishment of the procreative act, with the pleasurable relief it
+affords to himself, as the whole code of love. We have to treat with
+contempt the woman who abjectly accepts the act, and her own passivity
+therein, as the whole duty of love. We have to understand that the art of
+love has nothing to do with vice, and the acquirement of erotic
+personality nothing to do with sensuality. But we have also to realise
+that the art of love is far from being the attainment of a refined and
+luxurious self-indulgence, and the acquirement of erotic personality of
+little worth unless it fortifies and enlarges the whole personality in all
+its aspects. Now all this is difficult, and for some people even painful;
+to root up is a more serious matter than to sow; it cannot all be done in
+a day.</p>
+
+<p>It is not easy to form a clear picture of the erotic life of the average
+man in our society. To the best informed among us knowledge in this field
+only comes slowly. Even when we have decided what may or may not be termed
+"average" the sources of approach to this intimate sphere remain few and
+misleading; at the best the women a man loves remain far more illuminating
+sources of information than the man himself. The more one knows about him,
+however, the more one is convinced that, quite independently of the place
+we may feel inclined to <a name="Page_123" id="Page_123"></a>afford to him in the scale of virtue, his
+conception of erotic personality, his ideas on the art of love, if they
+have any existence at all, are of a humble character. As to the notion of
+play in the sphere of sex, even if he makes blundering attempts to
+practice it, that is for him something quite low down, something to be
+ashamed of, and he would not dream of associating it with anything he has
+been taught to regard as belonging to the spiritual sphere. The conception
+of "divine play" is meaningless to him. His fundamental ideas, his
+cherished ideals, in the erotic sphere, seem to be reducible to two: (1)
+He wishes to prove that he is "a man," and he experiences what seems to
+him the pride of virility in the successful attainment of that proof; (2)
+he finds in the same act the most satisfactory method of removing sexual
+tension and in the ensuing relief one of the chief pleasures of life. It
+cannot be said that either of these ideals is absolutely unsound; each is
+part of the truth; it is only as a complete statement of the truth that
+they become pathetically inadequate. It is to be noted that both of them
+are based solely on the physical act of sexual conjunction, and that they
+are both exclusively self-regarding. So that they are, after all, although
+the nearest approach to the erotic sphere he may be able to find, yet
+still not really erotic. For love is not primarily self-regarding. It is
+the intimate, harmonious, combined play&mdash;the play <a name="Page_124" id="Page_124"></a>in the wide as well as
+in the more narrow sense we are here concerned with&mdash;of two personalities.
+It would not be love if it were primarily self-regarding, and the act of
+intercourse, however essential to secure the propagation of the race, is
+only an incident, and not an essential in love.</p>
+
+<p>Let us turn to the average woman. Here the picture must usually be still
+more unsatisfactory. The man at least, crude as we may find his two
+fundamental notions to be, has at all events attained mental pride and
+physical satisfaction. The woman often attains neither, and since the man,
+by instinct or tradition, has maintained a self-regarding attitude, that
+is not surprising. The husband&mdash;by primitive instinct partly, certainly by
+ancient tradition&mdash;regards himself as the active partner in matters of
+love and his own pleasure as legitimately the prime motive for activity.
+His wife consequently falls into the complementary position, and regards
+herself as the passive partner and her pleasure as negligible, if not
+indeed as a thing to be rather ashamed of, should she by chance experience
+it. So that, while the husband is content with a mere simulacrum and
+pretence of the erotic life, the wife has often had none at all.</p>
+
+<p>Few people realise&mdash;few indeed have the knowledge or the opportunity to
+realise&mdash;how much women thus lose, alike in the means to <a name="Page_125" id="Page_125"></a>fulfill their
+own lives and in the power to help others. A woman has a husband, she has
+marital relationships, she has children, she has all the usual domestic
+troubles&mdash;it seems to the casual observer that she has everything that
+constitutes a fully developed matron fit to play her proper part in the
+home and in the world. Yet with all these experiences, which undoubtedly
+are an important part of life, she may yet remain on the emotional
+side&mdash;and, as a matter of fact, frequently remains&mdash;quite virginal, as
+immature as a school-girl. She has not acquired an erotic personality, she
+has not mastered the art of love, with the result that her whole nature
+remains ill-developed and unharmonised, and that she is incapable of
+bringing her personality&mdash;having indeed no achieved personality to
+bring&mdash;to bear effectively on the problems of society and the world around
+her.</p>
+
+<p>That alone is a great misfortune, all the more tragic since under
+favourable conditions, which it should have been natural to attain, it
+might so easily be avoided. But there is this further result, full of the
+possibilities of domestic tragedy, that the wife so situated, however
+innocent, however virtuous, may at any time find her virginally sensitive
+emotional nature fertilised by the touch of some other man than her
+husband.</p>
+
+<p>It happens so often. A girl who has been carefully guarded in the home,
+preserved from evil <a name="Page_126" id="Page_126"></a>companions, preserved also from what her friends
+regarded as the contamination of sexual knowledge, a girl of high ideals,
+yet healthy and robust, is married to a man of whom she probably has
+little more than a conventional knowledge. Yet he may by good chance be
+the masculine counterpart of herself, well brought up, without sexual
+experience and ignorant of all but the elementary facts of sex, loyal and
+honourable, prepared to be, fitted to be, a devoted husband. The union
+seems to be of the happiest kind; no one detects that anything is lacking
+to this perfect marriage; in course of time one or more children are born.
+But during all this time the husband has never really made love to his
+wife; he has not even understood what courtship in the intimate sense
+means; love as an art has no existence for him; he has loved his wife
+according to his imperfect knowledge, but he has never so much as realised
+that his knowledge was imperfect. She on her side loves her husband; she
+comes in time indeed to have a sort of tender maternal feeling for him.
+Possibly she feels a little pleasure in intercourse with him. But she has
+never once been profoundly aroused, and she has never once been utterly
+satisfied. The deep fountains of her nature have never been unsealed; she
+has never been fertilised throughout her whole nature by their liberating
+influence; her erotic personality has never been developed.<a name="Page_127" id="Page_127"></a> Then
+something happens. Perhaps the husband is called away, it may have been to
+take part in the Great War. The wife, whatever her tender solicitude for
+her absent partner, feels her solitude and is drawn nearer to friends,
+perhaps her husband's friends. Some man among them becomes congenial to
+her. There need be no conscious or overt love-making on either side, and
+if there were the wife's loyalty might be aroused and the friendship
+brought to an end. Love-making is not indeed necessary. The wife's latent
+erotic needs, while still remaining unconscious, have come nearer to the
+surface; now that she has grown mature and that they have been stimulated
+yet unsatisfied for so long, they have, unknown to herself, become
+insistent and sensitive to a sympathetic touch. The friends may indeed
+grow into lovers, and then some sort of solution, by divorce or
+intrigue&mdash;scarcely however a desirable kind of solution&mdash;becomes possible.
+But we are here taking the highest ground and assuming that honourable
+feeling, domestic affection, or a stern sense of moral duty, renders such
+solution unacceptable. In due course the husband returns, and then, to her
+utter dismay, the wife discovers, if she has not discovered it before,
+that during his absence, and for the first time in her life, she has
+fallen in love. She loyally confesses the situation to her husband, for
+whom her affection and attachment remain <a name="Page_128" id="Page_128"></a>the same as before, for what has
+happened to her is the coming of a totally new kind of love and not any
+change in her old love. The situation which arises is one of torturing
+anxiety for all concerned, and it is not less so when all concerned are
+animated by noble and self-sacrificing impulses. The husband in his
+devotion to his wife may even be willing that her new impulses should be
+gratified. She, on her side, will not think of yielding to desires which
+seem both unfair to her husband and opposed to all her moral traditions.
+We are not here concerned to consider the most likely, or the most
+desirable, exit from this unfortunate situation. The points to note are
+that it is a situation which to-day actually occurs; that it causes acute
+unhappiness to at least two people who may be of the finest physical and
+intellectual type and the noblest character, and that it might be avoided
+if there were at the outset a proper understanding of the married state
+and of the part which the art of love plays in married happiness and the
+development of personality.</p>
+
+<p>A woman may have been married once, she may have been married twice, she
+may have had children by both husbands, and yet it may not be until she is
+past the age of thirty and is united to a third man that she attains the
+development of erotic personality and all that it involves in the full
+flowering of her whole nature. Up to <a name="Page_129" id="Page_129"></a>then she had to all appearance had
+all the essential experiences of life. Yet she had remained spiritually
+virginal, with conventionally prim ideas of life, narrow in her
+sympathies, with the finest and noblest functions of her soul helpless and
+bound, at heart unhappy even if not clearly realising that she was
+unhappy. Now she has become another person. The new liberated forces from
+within have not only enabled her to become sensitive to the rich
+complexities of intimate personal relationship, they have enlarged and
+harmonised her realisation of all relationships. Her new erotic experience
+has not only stimulated all her energies, but her new knowledge has
+quickened all her sympathies. She feels, at the same time, more mentally
+alert, and she finds that she is more alive than before to the influences
+of nature and of art. Moreover, as others observe, however they may
+explain it, a new beauty has come into her face, a new radiancy into her
+expression, a new force into all her activities. Such is the exquisite
+flowering of love which some of us who may penetrate beneath the surface
+of life are now and then privileged to see. The sad part of it is that we
+see it so seldom and then often so late.</p>
+
+<p>It must not be supposed that there is any direct or speedy way of
+introducing into life a wider and deeper conception of the erotic
+play-function, and all that it means for the development of the
+<a name="Page_130" id="Page_130"></a>individual, the enrichment of the marriage relationship, and the moral
+harmony of society. Such a supposition would merely be to vulgarise and to
+stultify the divine and elusive mystery. It is only slowly and indirectly
+that we can bring about the revolution which in this direction would renew
+life. We may prepare the way for it by undermining and destroying those
+degrading traditional conceptions which have persisted so long that they
+are instilled into us almost from birth, to work like a virus in the
+heart, and to become almost a disease of the soul. To make way for the
+true and beautiful revelation, we can at least seek to cast out those
+ancient growths, which may once have been true and beautiful, but now are
+false and poisonous. By casting out from us the conception of love as vile
+and unclean we shall purify the chambers of our hearts for the reception
+of love as something unspeakably holy.</p>
+
+<p>In this matter we may learn a lesson from the psycho-analysts of to-day
+without any implication that psycho-analysis is necessarily a desirable or
+even possible way of attaining the revelation of love. The wiser
+psycho-analysts insist that the process of liberating the individual from
+outer and inner influences that repress or deform his energies and
+impulses is effected by removing the inhibitions on the free-play of his
+nature. It is a process of education in the true <a name="Page_131" id="Page_131"></a>sense, not of the
+suppression of natural impulses nor even of the instillation of sound
+rules and maxims for their control, not of the pressing in but of the
+leading out of the individual's special tendencies.<a name="FNanchor_20_20" id="FNanchor_20_20"></a><a href="#Footnote_20_20" class="fnanchor">[20]</a> It removes
+inhibitions, even inhibitions that were placed upon the individual, or
+that he consciously or unconsciously placed upon himself, with the best
+moral intentions, and by so doing it allows a larger and freer and more
+natively spontaneous morality to come into play. It has this influence
+above all in the sphere of sex, where such inhibitions have been most
+powerfully laid on the native impulses, where the natural tendencies have
+been most surrounded by taboos and terrors, most tinged with artificial
+stains of impurity and degradation derived from alien and antiquated
+traditions. Thus the therapeutical experience of the psycho-analysts
+reinforces the lessons we learn from physiology and psychology and the
+intimate experiences of life.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_20_20" id="Footnote_20_20"></a><a href="#FNanchor_20_20"><span class="label">[20]</span></a> See, for instance, H.W. Frink, <i>Morbid Fears and
+Compulsions</i>, 1918, Ch. X.</p></div>
+
+<p>Sexual activity, we see, is not merely a bald propagative act, nor, when
+propagation is put aside, is it merely the relief of distended vessels. It
+is something more even than the foundation of great social institutions.
+It is the function by which all the finer activities of the organism,
+physical and psychic, may be developed and satis<a name="Page_132" id="Page_132"></a>fied. Nothing, it has
+been said, is so serious as lust&mdash;to use the beautiful term which has been
+degraded into the expression of the lowest forms of sensual pleasure&mdash;and
+we have now to add that nothing is so full of play as love. Play is
+primarily the instinctive work of the brain, but it is brain activity
+united in the subtlest way to bodily activity. In the play-function of sex
+two forms of activity, physical and psychic, are most exquisitely and
+variously and harmoniously blended. We here understand best how it is that
+the brain organs and the sexual organs are, from the physiological
+standpoint, of equal importance and equal dignity. Thus the adrenal
+glands, among the most influential of all the ductless glands, are
+specially and intimately associated alike with the brain and the sex
+organs. As we rise in the animal series, brain and adrenal glands march
+side by side in developmental increase of size, and at the same time,
+sexual activity and adrenal activity equally correspond.</p>
+
+<p>Lovers in their play&mdash;when they have been liberated from the traditions
+which bound them to the trivial or the gross conception of play in
+love&mdash;are thus moving amongst the highest human activities, alike of the
+body and of the soul. They are passing to each other the sacramental
+chalice of that wine which imparts the deepest joy that men and women can
+know. They are subtly weaving the invisible cords that bind <a name="Page_133" id="Page_133"></a>husband and
+wife together more truly and more firmly than the priest of any church.
+And if in the end&mdash;as may or may not be&mdash;they attain the climax of free
+and complete union, then their human play has become one with that divine
+play of creation in which old poets fabled that, out of the dust of the
+ground and in his own image, some God of Chaos once created Man.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII"></a><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134"></a>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+
+<h2>THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE RACE</h2>
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+
+<p>The relation of the individual person to the species he belongs to is the
+most intimate of all relations. It is a relation which almost amounts to
+identity. Yet it somehow seems so vague, so abstract, as scarcely to
+concern us at all. It is only lately indeed that there has been formulated
+even so much as a science to discuss this relationship, and the duties
+which, when properly understood, it throws upon the individual. Even yet
+the word "Eugenics," the name of this science, and this art, sometimes
+arouses a smile. It seems to stand for a modern fad, which the superior
+person, or even the ordinary plebeian democrat, may pass by on the other
+side with his nose raised towards the sky. Modern the science and art of
+Eugenics certainly seem, though the term is ancient, and the Greeks of
+classic days, as well as their successors to-day, used the word Eugeneia
+for nobility or good birth. It was chosen by Francis Galton, less than
+fifty years ago, to express "the effort of Man to improve his own <a name="Page_135" id="Page_135"></a>breed."
+But the thing the term stands for is, in reality, also far from modern. It
+is indeed ancient and may even be nearly as old as Man himself.
+Consciously or unconsciously, sometimes under pretexts that have disguised
+his motives even from himself, Man has always been attempting to improve
+his own quality or at least to maintain it. When he slackens that effort,
+when he allows his attention to be too exclusively drawn to other ends, he
+suffers, he becomes decadent, he even tends to die out.</p>
+
+<p>Primitive eugenics had seldom anything to do with what we call
+"birth-control." One must not say that it never had. Even the mysterious
+mika operation of so primitive a race as the Australians has been supposed
+to be a method of controlling conception. But the usual method, even of
+people highly advanced in culture, has been simpler. They preferred to see
+the new-born infant before deciding whether it was likely to prove a
+credit to its parents or to the human race generally, and if it seemed not
+up to the standard they dealt with it accordingly. At one time that was
+regarded as a cruel and even inhuman method. To-day, when the most
+civilised nations of the world have devoted all their best energies to
+competitive slaughter, we may have learnt to view the matter differently.
+If we can tolerate the wholesale murder and mutilation of the finest
+specimens of our race in the adult possession of <a name="Page_136" id="Page_136"></a>all their aptitudes we
+cannot easily find anything to disapprove in the merciful disposal of the
+poorest specimens before they have even attained conscious possession of
+their senses. But in any case, and whatever we may ourselves be pleased to
+think or not to think, it is certain that some of the most highly
+developed peoples of the world have practised infanticide. It is equally
+certain that the practise has not proved destructive to the emotions of
+humanity and affection. Even some of the lowest human races,&mdash;as we
+commonly estimate them,&mdash;while finding it necessary to put aside a certain
+proportion of their new-born infants, expend a degree of love and even
+indulgence on the children they bring up which is rarely found among
+so-called civilised nations.</p>
+
+<p>There is no need, however, to consider whether or not infanticide is
+humane. We are all agreed that it is altogether unnecessary, and that it
+is seldom that even that incipient form of infanticide called abortion,
+still so popular among us, need be resorted to. Our aim now&mdash;so far at all
+events as mere ideals go&mdash;is not to destroy life but to preserve it; we
+seek to improve the conditions of life and to render unnecessary the
+premature death of any human creature that has once drawn breath.</p>
+
+<p>It is indeed just here that we find a certain clash between the modern
+view of life and the view of earlier civilisations. The ancients were
+<a name="Page_137" id="Page_137"></a>less careful than we claim to be of the individual, but they were more
+careful of the race. They cultivated eugenics after their manner, though
+it was a manner which we reprobate.<a name="FNanchor_21_21" id="FNanchor_21_21"></a><a href="#Footnote_21_21" class="fnanchor">[21]</a> We pride ourselves, rightly or
+wrongly, on our care for the individual; during all the past century we
+claim to have been strenuously working for an amelioration of the
+environment which will make life healthier and pleasanter for the
+individual. But in the concentration of our attention on this altogether
+desirable end, which we are still far from having adequately attained, we
+have lost sight of that larger end, the well-being of the race and the
+amelioration of life itself, not merely of the conditions of life. The
+most we hope is that somehow the improvement of the conditions of the
+individual will incidentally improve the stock. These our practical
+ideals, which have flourished for a century past, arose out of the great
+French Revolution and were inspired by the maxim of that Revolution, as
+formulated by Rousseau, that "All men are born equal." That <a name="Page_138" id="Page_138"></a>maxim, was
+overthrown half a century ago; the great biological movement of science,
+initiated by Darwin, showed that it was untenable. All men are not born
+equal. Everyone agrees about that now, but nevertheless the momentum of
+the earlier movement was so powerful that we still go on acting as though
+all men are, and always will be, born equal, and that we need not trouble
+ourselves about heredity but only about the environment.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_21_21" id="Footnote_21_21"></a><a href="#FNanchor_21_21"><span class="label">[21]</span></a> But this statement must not be left without important
+qualification. Thus the ancient Greeks (as Mo&iuml;ssid&egrave;s has shown in <i>Janus</i>,
+1913), not only their philosophers and statesmen, but also their women,
+often took the most enlightened interest in eugenics, and, moreover,
+showed it in practice. They were in many respects far in advance of us.
+They clearly realised, for instance, the need of a proper interval between
+conceptions, not only to ensure the health of women, but also the vigour
+of the offspring. It is natural that among every fine race eugenics should
+be almost an instinct or they would cease to be a fine race. It is equally
+natural that among our modern degenerates eugenics is an unspeakable
+horror, however much, as the psycho-analysts would put it, they
+rationalise that horror.</p></div>
+
+<p>The way out of this clash of ideals&mdash;which has compelled us to hope
+impossibilities from the environment because we dreaded what seemed the
+only alternative&mdash;is, as we know, furnished by birth-control. An
+unqualified reliance on the environment, making it ever easier and easier
+for the feeblest and most defective to be born and survive, could only, in
+the long run, lead to the degeneration of the whole race. The knowledge of
+the practice of birth-control gives us the mastery of all that the
+ancients gained by infanticide, while yet enabling us to cherish that
+ideal of the sacredness of human life which we profess to honour so
+highly. The main difficulty is that it demands a degree of scientific
+precision which the ancients could not possess and might dispense with, so
+long as they were able to decide the eugenic claims of the infant by
+actual inspection. We have to be content to determine not what the infant
+is but when it be likely to be, and <a name="Page_139" id="Page_139"></a>that involves a knowledge of the laws
+of heredity which we are only learning slowly to acquire. We may all in
+our humble ways help to increase that knowledge by giving it greater
+extension and more precision through the observations we are able to make
+on our own families. To such observations Galton attached great importance
+and strove in various ways to further them. Detailed records, physical and
+mental, beginning from birth, are still far from being as common as is
+desirable, although it is obvious that they possess a permanent personal
+and family private interest in addition to their more public scientific
+value. We do not need, and it would indeed be undesirable, to emulate in
+human breeding the achievements of a Luther Burbank. We have no right to
+attempt to impose on any human creature an exaggerated and one-sided
+development. But it is not only our right, it is our duty, or rather one
+may say, the natural impulse of every rational and humane person, to seek
+that only such children may be born as will be able to go through life
+with a reasonable prospect that they will not be heavily handicapped by
+inborn defect or special liability to some incapacitating disease. What is
+called "positive" eugenics&mdash;the attempt, that is, to breed special
+qualities&mdash;may well be viewed with hesitation. But so-called "negative"
+eugenics&mdash;the effort to clear all inborn obstacles out of the path of the
+<a name="Page_140" id="Page_140"></a>coming generation&mdash;demands our heartiest sympathy and our best
+co-operation, for as Galton, the founder of modern Eugenics, wrote towards
+the end of his life of this new science: "Its first object is to check the
+birth-rate of the unfit, instead of allowing them to come into being,
+though doomed in large numbers to perish prematurely." We can seldom be
+absolutely sure what stocks should not propagate, and what two stocks
+should on no account be blended, but we can attain reasonable probability,
+and it is on such probabilities in every department of life that we are
+always called upon to act.</p>
+
+<p>It is often said&mdash;I have said it myself&mdash;that birth-control when practised
+merely as a limitation of the family, scarcely suffices to further the
+eugenic progress of the race. If it is not deliberately directed towards
+the elimination of the worst stocks or the worst possibilities in the
+blending of stocks, it may even tend to diminish the better stocks since
+it is the better stocks that are least likely to propagate at random. This
+is true if other conditions remain equal. It is evident, however, that the
+other conditions will not remain equal, for no evidence has yet been
+brought forward to show that birth-control, even when practised without
+regard to eugenic considerations&mdash;doubtless the usual rule up to the
+present&mdash;has produced any degeneration of the race. On the contrary, the
+evidence seems to <a name="Page_141" id="Page_141"></a>show that it has improved the race. The example of
+Holland is often brought forward as evidence in favour of such a tendency
+of birth-control, since in that country the wide-spread practise of
+birth-control has been accompanied by an increase in the health and
+stature of the people, as well as an increase in their numbers to a
+remarkable degree, for the fall in the birth-rate has been far more than
+compensated by the fall in the death-rate, while it is said that the
+average height of the population has increased by four inches. It is,
+indeed, quite possible to see why, although theoretically a random
+application of birth-control cannot affect the germinal possibilities of a
+community, in practise it may improve the somatic conditions under which
+the germinal elements develop. There will probably be a longer interval
+between the births of the children, which has been demonstrated by Ewart
+and others to be an important factor not only in preserving the health of
+the mother but in increasing the health and size of the child. The
+diminution in the number of the children renders it possible to bestow a
+greater amount of care on each child. Moreover, the better economic
+position of the father, due to the smaller number of individuals he has to
+support, makes it possible for the family to live under improved
+conditions as regards nourishment, hygiene, and comfort. The observance of
+birth-control is thus a far <a name="Page_142" id="Page_142"></a>more effective lever for raising the state of
+the social environment and improving the conditions of breeding, than is
+direct action on the part of the community in its collective capacity to
+attain the same end. For however energetic such collective action may be
+in striving to improve general social conditions by municipalising or
+State-supporting public utilities, it can never adequately counter-balance
+the excessive burden and wasteful expenditure of force placed on a family
+by undue child-production. It can only palliate them.</p>
+
+<p>When, however, we have found reason to believe that, even if practised
+without regard to eugenic considerations, birth-control may yet act
+beneficially to promote good breeding, we begin to realise how great a
+power it may possess when consciously and deliberately directed towards
+that end. In eugenics, as already pointed out, there are two objects that
+may be aimed at: one called positive eugenics, that seeks to promote the
+increase of the best stocks amongst us; the other, called negative
+eugenics, which seeks to promote the decrease of the worst stocks. Our
+knowledge is still too imperfect to enable us to pursue either of these
+objects with complete certainty. This is especially so as regards positive
+eugenics, and since it seems highly undesirable to attempt to breed human
+beings, as we do animals, for points, when we are in the presence of what
+<a name="Page_143" id="Page_143"></a>seem to us our finest human stocks, physically, morally, and
+intellectually, it is our wisest course just to leave them alone as much
+as we can. The best stocks will probably be also those best able to help
+themselves and in so doing to help others. But that is obviously not so as
+regards the worst stocks. It is, therefore, fortunate that the aim here
+seems a little clearer. There are still many abnormal conditions of which
+we cannot say positively that they are injurious to the race and that we
+should therefore seek to breed them out. But there are other conditions so
+obviously of evil import alike to the subjects themselves and to their
+descendants that we cannot have any reasonable doubt about them. There is,
+for instance, epilepsy, which is known to be transformed by heredity into
+various abnormalities dangerous alike to their possessors and to society.
+There are also the pronounced degrees of feeble-mindedness, which are
+definitely heritable and not only condemn those who reveal them to a
+permanent inaptitude for full life, but constitute a subtle poison working
+through the social atmosphere in all directions and lowering the level of
+civilisation in the community. Nowhere has this been so thoroughly studied
+and so clearly proved as in the United States. It is only necessary to
+mention Dr. C.B. Davenport of the Department of Experimental Evolution at
+Cold Spring Harbor (New York) who has carried on <a name="Page_144" id="Page_144"></a>so much research in
+regard to the heredity of epilepsy and other inheritable abnormal
+conditions, and Dr. Goddard of Vineland (New Jersey) whose work has
+illustrated so fully the hereditary relationships of feeble-mindedness.
+The United States, moreover, has seen the development of the system of
+social field-work which has rendered possible a more complete knowledge of
+family heredity than has ever before been possible on a large scale.</p>
+
+<p>It is along such lines as these that our knowledge of the eugenic
+conditions of life will grow adequate and precise enough to form an
+effective guide to social conduct. Nature, and a due attention to laws of
+heredity in life, will then rank in equal honour to our eyes with nurture
+or that attention to the environmental conditions of life which we already
+regard as so important. A regard to nurture has led us to spend the
+greatest care on the preservation not only of the fit but the unfit, while
+meantime it has wisely suggested to us the desirability of segregating or
+even of sterilising the unfit. But the study of Nature leads us further
+and, as Galton said, "Eugenics rests on bringing no more individuals into
+the world than can be properly cared for, and these only of the best
+stocks." That is to say that the only instrument by which eugenics can be
+made practically effective in the modern world is birth-control.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145"></a>It is not scientific research alone, nor even the wide popular diffusion
+of knowledge, that will suffice to bring eugenics and birth-control,
+singly or in their due combination, into the course of our daily lives.
+They need to be embodied in our instinctive impulses. Galton considered
+that eugenics must become a factor of religion and be regarded as a sacred
+and virile creed, while Ellen Key holds that the religions of the past
+must be superseded by a new religion which will be the awakening of the
+whole of humanity to a consciousness of the "holiness of generation." For
+my own part, I scarcely consider that either eugenics or birth-control can
+be regarded as properly a part of religion. Being of virtue and not of
+grace they belong more naturally to the sphere of morals. But here they
+certainly need to go far deeper than the mere intelligence of the mind can
+take them. They cannot become guides to conduct until their injunctions
+have been printed on the fleshy tablets of our hearts. The demands of the
+race must speak from within us, in the voice of conscience which we
+disobey at our peril. When that happens with regard to ascertained laws of
+racial well-being we may know that we are truly following, even though not
+in the letter, those great spirits, like Galton with his intellectual
+vision and Ellen Key with her inspired enthusiasm, who have pointed out
+new roads for the ennoblement of the race.<a name="Page_146" id="Page_146"></a></p>
+
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>It may be well, before we go further, to look a little more closely into
+the suspicion and dislike which eugenics still arouses in many worthy
+old-fashioned people. To some extent that attitude is excused, not only by
+the mistakes which in a new and complex science must inevitably be made
+even by painstaking students, but also by the rash and extravagant
+proposals of irresponsible and eccentric persons claiming without warrant
+to speak in the name of eugenics. Two thousand years ago the wild excesses
+of some early Christians furnished an excuse for the ancient world to view
+Christianity with contempt, although the extreme absence of such excesses
+has furnished still better ground for the modern world to maintain the
+same view. To-day such a work as <i>Le Haras Humain</i> ("The Human Stud-farm")
+of Dr. Binet-Sangl&eacute;, putting forward proposals which, whether beneficial
+or not, will certainly find no one to carry them out, similarly furnishes
+an excuse to those who would reject eugenics altogether. Utopian schemes
+have their value; we should be able to find inspiration in the most modern
+of them, just as we still do in Plato's immortal <i>Republic</i>. But in this,
+as in other matters, we must exercise a little intelligence. We must not
+confuse the brilliant excursion of some solitary thinker with the
+well-<a name="Page_147" id="Page_147"></a>grounded proposals of those who are concerned with the sober
+possibilities of actual life in our own time. People who are incapable of
+exercising a little shrewd commonsense in the affairs of life, and are in
+the habit of emptying out the baby with the bath, had better avoid
+touching the delicate problems connected with practical eugenics.</p>
+
+<p>There is one prejudice already mentioned, due to lack of clear thinking,
+which deserves more special consideration because it is widespread among
+the socialistic democracy of several countries as well as among social
+reformers, and is directed alike against eugenics and birth-control. This
+prejudice is based on the ground that bad economic conditions and an
+unwholesome environment are the source of all social evils, and that a
+better distribution of wealth, or a vast scheme of social welfare, is the
+one thing necessary, when that is achieved all other things being added
+unto us, without any further trouble on our part. It is certainly
+impossible to over-rate the importance of the economic factor in society,
+or of a good environment. And it is true that eugenics alone, like
+birth-control alone, can effect little if the economic basis of society is
+unsound. But it is equally certain that the economic factor can never in
+itself suffice for fine living or even as a cure-all of social and racial
+diseases. Its value is not that it can effect these things but that <a name="Page_148" id="Page_148"></a>it
+furnishes the favourable conditions for effecting them. He would be
+foolish indeed who went to the rich to find the example of good breeding
+and, as is well known, it is not with the rich that the future of the race
+lies. The fact is that under any economic system the responsible personal
+direction of the individual and the family remain equally necessary, and
+no progress is possible so long as the individual casts all responsibility
+away from himself on to the social group he forms part of. The social
+group, after all, is merely himself and the likes of himself. He is merely
+shifting the burden from his individual self to his collective self, and
+in so doing he loses more than he gains.</p>
+
+<p>Thus there is always a sound core in that Individualism which has been
+preached so long and practised so energetically, especially in
+English-speaking lands, however great the abuse involved in its excesses.
+It is still in the name of Individualism that the most brilliant
+antagonists of eugenics and of birth-control are wont to direct their
+attacks. The counsel of self-control and foresight in procreation, the
+restriction necessary to purify and raise the standard of the race, seem
+to the narrow and short-sighted advocates of a great principle an
+unwarrantable violation of the sacred rights of their individual liberty.
+They have not yet grasped the elementary fact that the rights of the
+individual are the rights of all <a name="Page_149" id="Page_149"></a>individuals, and that Individualism
+itself calls for a limitation of the freedom of the individual.</p>
+
+<p>That is why even the most uncompromising Individualist must recognise an
+element of altruism, call it whatever name you will, Collectivism,
+Socialism, Communism, or merely the vague and long-suffering term,
+Democracy. One cannot assume Individualism for oneself unless one assumes
+it for the many. That is a great truth which goes to the heart of the
+whole complex problem of eugenics and birth-control. As Perrycoste has
+well argued,<a name="FNanchor_22_22" id="FNanchor_22_22"></a><a href="#Footnote_22_22" class="fnanchor">[22]</a> biology is altogether against the narrow Individualism
+which seeks to oppose Collective Individualism. For if, in accordance with
+the most careful modern investigations, we recognise that heredity is
+supreme, that the qualities we have inherited from our ancestors count for
+more in our lives than anything we have acquired by our own personal
+efforts, then we have to admit that the capable man's wealth is more the
+community's property than his own, and, similarly, the incapable man's
+poverty is more the community's concern than his own. So that neither the
+capable nor the incapable are entitled to an unqualified power of freedom,
+and neither, likewise, are justly liable to be burdened by an unqualified
+responsibility. It is the duty of the community to <a name="Page_150" id="Page_150"></a>draw on the powers of
+the fit and equally its duty to care for the unfit. In this way,
+Perrycoste, whose attitude is that of the Rationalist, is led by science
+to a conclusion which is that of the Christian. We are all members each of
+the other, and still more are we members of those who went before us. The
+generations preceding us have not died to themselves but live in us, and
+we, whom they produced, live in each other and in those who will come
+after us. The problems of eugenics and of birth-control affect us all. In
+the face of these problems it is the voice of Man that speaks: "Inasmuch
+as ye did it not unto the least of these my brethren, ye did it not unto
+me." However firmly we base ourselves on the principles of Individualism
+we are inevitably brought to the fundamental facts of eugenics which, if
+we fail to recognise, our Individualism becomes of no effect.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_22_22" id="Footnote_22_22"></a><a href="#FNanchor_22_22"><span class="label">[22]</span></a> F.H. Perrycoste, "Politics and Science," <i>Science Progress</i>,
+Jan., 1920.</p></div>
+
+<p>But it is the same with Socialism, or by whatever name we chose to call
+the Collectivist activities of the community in social reform. Socialism
+also brings us up against the hard rock of eugenic fact which, if we
+neglect it, will dash our most beautiful social construction to fragments.
+It is the more necessary to point this out since it is on the Socialist
+and Democratic side, much more frequently than on the Individualist side,
+that we find an indifferent or positively hostile attitude towards eugenic
+considerations. Put <a name="Page_151" id="Page_151"></a>social conditions on a sound basis, the people on
+this side often say, let all receive an adequate economic return for their
+work and be recognised as having a claim for an adequate share in the
+products of society, and there is no need to worry about the race or about
+the need for birth-control, all will go well of itself. There is not the
+slightest ground for any such comfortable belief.</p>
+
+<p>This has been well shown by Dr. Eden Paul, himself a Socialist and even in
+sympathy with the extreme Left.<a name="FNanchor_23_23" id="FNanchor_23_23"></a><a href="#Footnote_23_23" class="fnanchor">[23]</a> After setting forth the present
+conditions, with our excessive elimination of higher types, and undue
+multiplication of lower types, the racial degeneration caused by the
+faulty and anti-selective working of the marriage system in modern
+capitalist society, so that in our existing civilisation unconscious
+natural selection has largely ceased to work towards the improvement of
+the human breed, he proceeds to consider the possible remedies. The
+frequent impatience of the Socialist, and Social Reformers generally, with
+eugenic proposals has a certain degree of justification in the fact that
+many evils thoughtlessly attributed to inferiority of stock are really due
+to bad environment. But when the environment has been so far improved that
+all defects due to its badness are removed, <a name="Page_152" id="Page_152"></a>we shall be face to face,
+without possibility of doubt, with bad inheritance as the sole remaining
+factor in the production of inefficient and anti-social members of the
+community. A socialist community must recognise the right to work and to
+maintenance of all its members, Eden Paul points out, but, he adds, a
+community which allowed this right to all defectives without imposing any
+restrictions in their perpetuation of themselves would deserve all the
+evils that would fall upon it. It is quite clear how intolerable the
+burden of these evils would be. A State that provided an adequate
+subsistence for all alike, the inefficient as well as the efficient, would
+encourage a racial degeneration, from excessive multiplication of the
+unfit, far more dangerous even than that of to-day.<a name="FNanchor_24_24" id="FNanchor_24_24"></a><a href="#Footnote_24_24" class="fnanchor">[24]</a> Ability to earn
+the minimum wage, Eden Paul argues in agreement with H.G. Wells, must be
+the condition of the right to become a parent. "Unless the socialist is a
+eugenist as well, the socialist state will speedily perish from racial
+degradation."</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_23_23" id="Footnote_23_23"></a><a href="#FNanchor_23_23"><span class="label">[23]</span></a> In an essay on "Eugenics, Birth Control, and Socialism" in
+<i>Population and Birth-Control: A Symposium</i>, edited by Eden and Cedar
+Paul.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_24_24" id="Footnote_24_24"></a><a href="#FNanchor_24_24"><span class="label">[24]</span></a> This is here and there beginning to be recognised. Thus, not
+long ago, the Hereford War Pensions Committee resolved not to issue a
+maternal grant for children born during a prolonged period of treatment
+allowance. Such a measure of course fails to meet the situation, for it is
+obvious that, when born, the children must be cared for. But it shows a
+glimmering recognition of the facts, and the people capable of such a
+recognition will, in time, come to see that the right way of meeting the
+situation is, not to neglect the children, but to prevent their
+conception. Mothers' Clinics for instruction in such prevention are now
+being established in England, through the advocacy of Mrs. Margaret Sanger
+and the actual initiative of Dr. Marie Stopes.</p></div>
+
+<p><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153"></a>Thus it is essential that the eugenist, dealing with the hereditary
+factor of life, and the social reformer or socialist, dealing with the
+environmental factor, should supplement each other's work. Neither can
+attain his end without the other's help, for the eugenist alone cannot
+overcome the environmental factor, even perhaps increases it if he is an
+individualist in the narrow sense, and the socialist alone cannot overcome
+the bad hereditary factor, and will even increase it if he is no more than
+a socialist. The more socialist our State becomes the more essential
+becomes at the same time the adoption of eugenic practices as a working
+part of the State. "Socialism and eugenics must go hand in hand."</p>
+
+<p>Perrycoste from his own point of view has independently reached the same
+conclusions. He is not, indeed, concerned with any "Socialist" community
+of the future but with the dangerous results which must inevitably follow
+the already established methods of social reform in our modern civilised
+States unless they are speedily checked by effective action based on
+eugenic knowledge. "If," he observes, "the community is to shoulder half
+or three-quarters of the burden of sustaining those degenerates who,
+through no fault of their own, are congenitally incompetent to maintain
+themselves in decent comfort, and is to render the life-pilgrimage of
+these unfortunates tolerable instead of a dreary <a name="Page_154" id="Page_154"></a>nightmare, if it is to
+assume paternal charge of all the tens or hundreds of thousands of
+children whose parents cannot or will not provide adequately for them and
+is to guarantee to all such children as much education as they are capable
+of receiving, and a really fair start in life: then in sheer
+self-preservation the community must insist on, and rigidly enforce, its
+absolute claim to secure that no degeneracy or inheritable congenital
+defects shall persist beyond the present generation of degenerates, and
+that the community of fifty or seventy years hence shall have no incubus
+of mentally, or morally, or even physically, degenerate members&mdash;none but
+a few occasional sporadic morbid 'sports' from the normal, which it, in
+turn, may effectively prevent from handing on their like." Unless the
+problem is squarely faced, Perrycoste concludes, national deterioration
+must increase and a permanently successful collectivist society is
+inherently impossible.</p>
+
+<p>We are not now concerned with the details of any policy of eugenics and of
+birth-control, which I couple together because although a random
+birth-control by no means involves much, if any, eugenic progress, it is
+not easy under modern conditions to conceive any practical or effective
+policy of eugenics except through the instrumentation of birth-control. We
+here take it for granted that in this field the slow progress of
+<a name="Page_155" id="Page_155"></a>scientific knowledge must be our guide. Premature legislation, rash and
+uninstructed action, will not lead to progress but are more likely to
+delay it. Yet even with imperfect knowledge, it is already of the first
+importance to evoke interest in the great issue here at stake and to do
+all that we can to arouse the individual conscience of every man and woman
+to his or her personal responsibility in this matter. That is here all
+taken for granted.</p>
+
+<p>It seems necessary to consider the political aspect of eugenics because
+that aspect is frequently invoked, and a man's attitude towards this
+question is frequently determined beforehand by what he considers that
+Individualism or Socialism demands. We see that when the question is
+driven home our political attitude makes no difference. It is only a
+shallow Individualism, it is only a still more shallow Socialism, which
+imagines that under modern social conditions the fundamental racial
+questions can be left to answer themselves.</p>
+
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>Many years before the Great War, in all the most civilised countries of
+the World, there were those who raised the cry of "Race-Suicide!" In
+America this cry was more especially popularised by the powerful voice of
+Theodore Roosevelt, but in European countries there were similar voices
+<a name="Page_156" id="Page_156"></a>raised in tones of virtuous indignation to denounce the same crime. Since
+the war other voices have been raised in even more high-pitched and
+feverish tones, but now they are less weighty and responsible voices,
+since to those who realise that at present there is not food enough to
+keep the population of the world from starvation it seems hardly
+compatible with sanity to advocate an increased rate of human production.</p>
+
+<p>Now, though it is easy to do so, we must not belittle this cry of
+"Race-Suicide!" It is not usually accompanied by definite argument, but it
+assumes that birth-control is the method of such suicide, and that the
+first and most immediately dangerous result is that one's own nation,
+whichever that may be, is placed in a position of alarming military
+inferiority to other nations, as a step towards the final extinction. It
+is useless to deny that it really is a serious matter if there is danger
+of the speedy disappearance of the human race from the earth by its own
+voluntary and deliberate action, and that within a measurable period of
+time&mdash;for if it were an immeasurable period there would be no occasion for
+any acute anxiety&mdash;the last man will perish from the world. This is what
+"Race-Suicide" means, and we must face the fact squarely.</p>
+
+<p>It can scarcely be said, however, that the meaning of "Race-Suicide" has
+actually been squarely <a name="Page_157" id="Page_157"></a>faced by those who have most vehemently raised
+that cry. Translated into more definite and precise terms this cry means,
+and is intended to mean: "We want more births." That is what it definitely
+means, and sometimes in the minds of those who make this demand it seems
+also to imply nothing more. Yet it implies a great number of other things.
+It implies certain strain and probable ill-health on the mothers, it
+implies distress and disorder in the family, it implies, even if the
+additional child survives, a more acute industrial struggle, and it
+further involves in this case, by the stimulus it gives to
+over-population, the perpetual menace of militarism and war. What,
+however, even at the outset, more births most distinctly and most
+unquestionably imply is more deaths. It is nowadays so well known that a
+high birth-rate is accompanied by a high death-rate&mdash;the exceptions are
+too few to need attention&mdash;that it is unnecessary to adduce further
+evidence. It is only the intoxicated enthusiasts of the "Race-Suicide" cry
+who are able to overlook a fact of which they can hardly be ignorant. The
+model which they hold up for the public's inspiration has on the obverse
+"More Births!" But on the reverse it bears "More Deaths!" It would be
+helpful to the public, and might even be wholesome for our enthusiasts'
+own enlightenment, if they would occasionally turn the medal round and
+slightly vary the <a name="Page_158" id="Page_158"></a>monotony of their propaganda by changing its form and
+crying out for "More Deaths!" "It is a hard thing," said Johnny Dunn, "for
+a man that has a house full of children to be left to the mercy of
+Almighty God."</p>
+
+<p>If, however, we wish to consider the real significance of the facts,
+without regard for the wild cries of ignorant cranks, it is scarcely
+necessary to point out here that neither the birth-rate taken by itself,
+nor the death-rate taken by itself, will suffice to give us any measure
+even of the growth of the population, to say nothing of the progress of
+civilisation or the happiness of humanity. It is obvious that we must
+consider both gains and losses, and put one against the other, if we wish
+to ascertain the net result. We may roughly get a notion of what that
+result is by deducting the death-rate from the birth-rate and calling the
+remainder the survival-rate. If we are really concerned with the question
+of the alleged suicide of the race, and do not wish to be befooled, we
+must pay little attention to the birth-rate, for that by itself means
+nothing: we must concentrate on the survival-rate. Then we may soon
+convince ourselves, not only that the human race is not committing
+suicide, but that not even a single one of the so-called civilised nations
+of which it is mainly composed is committing suicide. Quite the contrary!
+Every one of them, even France, where this peculiar "sui<a name="Page_159" id="Page_159"></a>cide" is supposed
+to be most actively at work, is yearly increasing in numbers.</p>
+
+<p>It is interesting to note, moreover, that the French have been increasing
+faster, that is to say the survival-rate has been higher in recent years
+just before the war, when the birth-rate was at its lowest, than they were
+twenty years earlier, with a higher birth-rate. And if we take a wider
+sweep and consider the growth of the French population towards the end of
+the eighteenth century, we find the birth-rate estimated at the very high
+figure of 40. But the death-rate was nearly as high, the average duration
+of life was only half what it is now. So that the survival-rate in France
+at that time, with widely different rates of birth and death, was not much
+unlike it is now. The recent French birth-rate of 19 and less, which
+automatically causes the "Race-Suicide" marionette to dance with rage, is
+producing not far from the same result in growth of the population&mdash;we are
+not here concerned with the enormous difference in well being and
+happiness&mdash;as the extremely high rate of 40 which sends our marionettes
+leaping to the sky with joy. In war-time England, in 1917, the birth-rate
+sank to 17.8, yet the death-rate was at 14 and the increase of the
+population continued. The more the human race commits this kind of
+suicide, one is tempted to exclaim, the faster it grows!</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160"></a>It is, however, in the New World&mdash;as in Canada, Australia, and New
+Zealand&mdash;that we find the most impressive evidence of the real criteria of
+the growth in population set up for judgment on the racial suicide cranks.
+Canadian statistics bring out many points instructive even in their
+variation. Here we see not only unusual curves of rise and fall, but also
+pronounced differences, due to the special peculiarities of the French
+population, most clearly in the Province of Quebec but also in some parts
+of the Province of Ontario. In Quebec the birth-rate some years ago was
+35, and the death-rate 21, both rates high, and the survival-rate high at
+14; recently the birth-rate has risen to 37 and the death-rate fallen to
+17, with the result that the survival-rate of 20 is the highest in the
+world, though it must be noted that the high birth-rate is not likely to
+last long, since in Quebec, as elsewhere in the world, increasing
+urbanisation causes a decreasing birth-rate. In mainly English-speaking
+Ontario the birth-rate is much lower, about 24, but the death-rate is also
+lower, about 14, so that the fairly considerable survival-rate of 10 is
+obtained. But we note the highly significant fact that some thirty years
+or more ago the birth-rate was much lower, about 19, and yet the
+survival-rate was almost 9, nearly as high as to-day! The death-rate was
+then at 10, and nothing could be more instructive as to the real
+relationship <a name="Page_161" id="Page_161"></a>that holds in this matter. There has been a great rise in
+the birth-rate and the only result, as someone has remarked, is a great
+increase in the population of the grave-yards. Equally instructive is it
+to compare various cities in this same Province, living under the same
+laws, and fairly similar social conditions. In the report of the
+Registrar-General of Ontario for 1916 I find that highest in birth-rate of
+cities in the Province stands Ottawa with a very considerable French
+population. But first also stands the same city for infant mortality,
+which is three times greater than in some other cities in the Province
+with a low birth-rate. Sault Ste. Marie, again with an enormous
+birth-rate, stands third for infant mortality. Canada shows us that, even
+if we regard the crude desire for a large growth of population as
+reasonable&mdash;and that is a considerable assumption&mdash;a high birth-rate is an
+uncertain prop to rest on.</p>
+
+<p>Canada is an instructive example because we have some ground for believing
+that the difference between the English-speaking and French-speaking
+populations&mdash;the greater care of the former in procreation and the more
+recklessly destructive methods of the latter in attaining the same
+ends&mdash;are due to their different attitudes towards the use of methods of
+birth-control. What the result of a general use of such methods is we know
+from the example already mentioned <a name="Page_162" id="Page_162"></a>of Holland, where they are taught,
+officially recognised, and in general use, not only among the rich but
+among the poor. The result is that the birth-rate has been falling slowly
+and steadily for forty years. But the death-rate has also been falling and
+at a greater rate. So that the more the birth-rate has fallen the higher
+has been the rate of increase among the population.</p>
+
+<p>It is perhaps in Australia and New Zealand that we find the most
+satisfactory proofs of the benefits of a falling birth-rate in relation to
+"Race-Suicide." The evidence may well appeal to us the more since it is
+precisely here that the race-suicide fanatic finds freest scope for his
+wrath. He looks gleefully at China with its prolific women, at Russia with
+its magnificent birth-rate before the War of nearly 50, at Roumania with
+its birth-rate of 42, at Chile and Jamaica with nearly 40. No nonsense
+about birth-control there! No shirking by women of the sacred duties of
+perpetual maternity! No immoral notions about claims to happiness and
+desires for culture. And then he turns from, those great centres of
+prosperity and civilisation to Australia, to New Zealand, and his voice is
+choked and tears fill his eyes as he sees the goal of "Race-Suicide"
+nearly in sight and the spectre of the Last Man rising before him. For
+there is no doubt about it, Australia and New Zealand contain a population
+which is gradually reaching the <a name="Page_163" id="Page_163"></a>highest point yet known of democratic
+organisation and general social well-being, and the birth-rate has been
+falling with terrific speed. Sixty-years ago in the Australian
+Commonwealth it was nearly 44, only forty years ago in New Zealand it was
+42. Now it is only about 26 in both lands. Yet the survival-rate, the
+actual growth of the population, is not so very much less with this low
+birth-rate than it was with the high birth-rate. For the death-rate has
+also fallen in both lands to about 10 (in New Zealand to 9) which is lower
+than any other country in the world. The result is that Australia and New
+Zealand, where (so it is claimed) preventives of conception are hawked
+from door to door, instead of being awful examples of "Race-Suicide,"
+actually present the highest rate of race-increase in the world (only
+excepting Canada, where it is less firmly and less healthily based),
+nearly twice that of Great Britain and able at the present rate to double
+itself every 44 years. So much for "Race-Suicide."</p>
+
+<p>The outcry about "Race-Suicide" is so far away from the real facts of life
+that it is not easy to take it seriously, however solemn one's natural
+temperament may be. We are concerned with people who arrogantly claim to
+direct the moral affairs of the world, even in the most intimately private
+matters, and who are yet ignorant of the most elementary facts of the
+world, unable to <a name="Page_164" id="Page_164"></a>think, not even able to count! We can only greet them
+with a smile. But this question has, nevertheless, a genuinely serious
+aspect, and I should be sorry even to touch on the question of
+birth-control in relation to "Race-Suicide" without making that serious
+aspect clear.</p>
+
+<p>"Race-Suicide," we know, has no existence. Not only is the race as a whole
+increasing in number, especially its White branches, but even among the
+separate national groups there is not even one civilised people anywhere
+in the world that is decreasing in number. On the contrary they are all,
+even France, increasing at a more or less rapid rate. In England and
+Wales, for example, where the birth-rate has steadily fallen during the
+last forty years from 36 to 23 (I disregard the abnormal rates of
+War-time) the population is still increasing, and even if the present
+falls in birth-rate and death-rate continue, it will for years still go on
+increasing by an excess of over 1,000 births a day. When we realise that
+this is merely what goes on in one corner of the world and must be
+multiplied enormously to represent the whole, we shall find it impossible
+even to conceive the prodigious flow of excess babies which is being
+constantly poured over the earth. If we are capable of realising all the
+problems which thereby arise we must be forced to ask ourselves: <i>Is this
+state of things desirable</i>?</p>
+
+<p>"Be ye fruitful and multiply." That command <a name="Page_165" id="Page_165"></a>was, according to the old
+story, delivered to a world inhabited by eight people. It has been handed
+down to a world in which it has long been ridiculously out of place, and
+has become merely the excuse for criminal recklessness among a race which
+has chosen to forget that the command was qualified by a solemn
+admonition: "At the hand of man, even at the hand of every man's brother,
+will I require the life of man." The high birth-rate has meant a vast
+slaughter of infants, it has meant, moreover, a perpetual oppression of
+the workers, disease, starvation, and death among the adult population; it
+has meant, further, a blood-thirsty economic competition, militarism,
+warfare. It has meant that all civilisation has from time to time become a
+thin crust over a volcano of revolution, and the human race has gone on
+lightly dancing there, striving to forget that ancient warning from a soul
+of things even deeper than the voice of Jehovah: "At the hand of man will
+I require the life of man." Men have recklessly followed the Will o' the
+Wisp which represented mere multiplication of their inefficient selves as
+the ideal of progress, quantity before quality, the notion that in an orgy
+of universal procreation could consist the highest good of humanity.</p>
+
+<p>The Great War, that is scarcely yet merged into an only less war-like
+Peace, has brought at least the small compensation that it has led men <a name="Page_166" id="Page_166"></a>to
+look in the face this insane ideal of human progress. We see to-day what
+has come of it, and the further evils yet to come of it are being embodied
+beneath our eyes. So that at last the voice of Jehovah has here and there
+been faintly heard, even where nowadays we had grown least accustomed to
+hear it, in the Churches. It is Dr. Inge, the Dean of London's Cathedral
+of St. Paul's, a distinguished Churchman and at the same time a foremost
+champion of eugenics, who lately expressed the hope that the world,
+especially the European world, would one day realise the advantages of a
+stationary population.<a name="FNanchor_25_25" id="FNanchor_25_25"></a><a href="#Footnote_25_25" class="fnanchor">[25]</a> Such a recognition, such an aspiration,
+indicates that a new hope is dawning on the world's horizon, and a higher
+ideal growing within the human soul. The mad competition of the industrial
+world during the past century, with the sordid gloom and wretchedness of
+it for all who were able to see beneath the surface, has shown for <a name="Page_167" id="Page_167"></a>ever
+what comes of the effort to produce a growing population by high
+birth-rates in peace-time. The Great War of a later day has shown, let us
+hope in an equally decisive manner, what comes to a world where men have
+been for long generations produced so copiously and so cheaply that it is
+natural to regard them as only fit to sweep off the earth with machine
+guns. And the whole world of to-day&mdash;with its starving millions struggling
+in vain to feed themselves, with most of its natural beauty swept away by
+the ravages of man, and many of its most exquisite animals finally
+exterminated&mdash;is likely to become merely the monument to an ideal that
+failed. It was time, however late in the day, for a return to
+common-sense. It was time to realise that the ideal of mere propagation
+could lead us nowhere but to destruction. On that level we cannot compete
+even with the lowest of organised things, not even with the bacteria,
+which in number and in rapidity of multiplication are inconceivable to us.
+"All hope abandon, ye that enter here" is written over the portal of this
+path of "Progress."</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_25_25" id="Footnote_25_25"></a><a href="#FNanchor_25_25"><span class="label">[25]</span></a> This has long been recognised by men of science. Even anyone
+with the slightest knowledge of biology, Professor Bateson remarked in a
+British Association Presidential address in 1914, is aware that a
+population need not be declining because it is not increasing; "in normal
+stable conditions population is stationary." Major Leonard Darwin, the
+thoughtful and cautious President of the Eugenics Education Society, has
+lately stated his considered belief ("Population and Civilisation,"
+<i>Economic Journal</i>, June, 1921) that increase in numbers means,
+ultimately, relative reduction of wealth per head, with consequent
+lowering of the standard of civilisation; that it also, under existing
+conditions, involves the production of a smaller proportion of men of
+ability; and, further, a depreciation of our traditions; he concludes
+that, whatever element in civilisation we regard&mdash;wealth, or stock, or
+traditions&mdash;"any increase in the population <i>such as that now taking
+place</i> will be accompanied by a lowering in the standard of our
+civilisation."</p></div>
+
+<p>There are definite reasons why real progress in the supreme tasks of
+civilisation can best be made by a more or less stationary population,
+whether the population is large or small, and it need scarcely be added
+that, so far as the history of mankind is yet legible, the great advances
+in <a name="Page_168" id="Page_168"></a>civilisation have been made by small, even very small populations.
+Where the population is rapidly growing, even if it is growing under the
+favourable conditions that hardly ever accompany such growth, all its
+energy is absorbed in adjusting its perpetually shifting equilibrium. It
+cannot succeed in securing the right conditions of growth, because its
+growth is never ceasing to demand new conditions. The structure of its
+civilisation never rises above the foundations because these foundations
+have perpetually to be laid afresh, and there is never time to get
+further. It is a process, moreover, accompanied by unending friction and
+disorder, by strains and stresses of all kinds, which are fatal to any
+full, harmonious, and democratic civilisation. The "population question,"
+with the endlessly mischievous readjustment it demands, must be eliminated
+before the great House of Life can be built up on a strong solid human
+foundation, to lift its soaring pinnacles towards the skies. That is what
+many bitter experiences are beginning to teach us. In the future we are
+likely to be much less concerned about "race-suicide," though we can never
+be too concerned about race-murder.</p>
+
+<p>When we think, however, of the desirability of a more or less stationary
+population, in order to insure real social progress, as distinct from that
+vain struggle of meaningless movement to and fro which the history of the
+past reveals, we <a name="Page_169" id="Page_169"></a>have to be clear in our minds that it may be far from
+desirable that the present overgrown population of the world should be
+stationary. That might indeed be better than further increase in numbers,
+it would arrest the growth of our present evils; it might open the way to
+methods by which they would be diminished or eliminated. But the process
+would be infinitely difficult, and almost infinitely slow, as we may
+easily realise when we consider that, with a population even smaller than
+at present, the human race has not only ravished the world's beauty almost
+out of existence, but so ravaged its own vital spirit that, as was found
+with some consternation during the Great War, a large proportion of the
+male population of every country is unfit for military service.</p>
+
+<p>So often we hear it assumed, or even asserted, that greatness means
+quantity, so that to look forward to the replacement of the present
+teeming insignificant human myriads by a rarer and more truly greater race
+is to be a pessimist! Oh, these "optimists"! To revel in a world which
+more and more closely resembles all that the poets ever imagined of Hell,
+is to be an "optimist"! One wonders how it is that in no brief moment of
+lucidity it occurs to these people that the lower we descend in the scale
+of life the greater the quantity in a species and the poorer the quality,
+so that to reach what such people should really regard as the world's
+period of supreme great<a name="Page_170" id="Page_170"></a>ness in life we must go back to the days, before
+animal life appeared, when the earth was merely a teeming mass of
+bacteria.<a name="FNanchor_26_26" id="FNanchor_26_26"></a><a href="#Footnote_26_26" class="fnanchor">[26]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_26_26" id="Footnote_26_26"></a><a href="#FNanchor_26_26"><span class="label">[26]</span></a> See, for instance, H.F. Osborn, <i>The Origin and Evolution of
+Life</i>, 1918, Chapter III.</p></div>
+
+<p>To-day, we are often told, the majority of human beings belong either to
+the Undesired Class or the Undesirable Class. To realise that this is so,
+we are bidden to read the newspapers or to walk along the streets of the
+cities&mdash;whichever they may be&mdash;wherein dwell the highest products of our
+civilisation. In the better class quarters it is indeed the Undesirable
+Class that seems to predominate, and in the poor quarters, the Undesired.
+Yet, viewing our species as a whole, the two classes may be seen to walk
+hand in hand along the same road, and in proportion as our nobler
+instincts germinate and develop, we must doubtless admit that it ought to
+be our active aim to make that road for both of them&mdash;socially though not
+individually&mdash;the Road to Destruction.</p>
+
+<p>To stem the devastating tide of human procreativeness, however, easy as it
+may seem in theory, is by no means so easy as some think, especially as
+those think who believe that the human race stands on the brink of
+suicide. For there is this about it that we must never forget: the
+majority of those born to-day die before their time, so that by
+diminishing the production of <a name="Page_171" id="Page_171"></a>the unfit, as well as by the progressive
+improvement of the environment that automatically accompanies such
+diminution, we may make an imposing difference in the appearance of the
+birth-rate, whilst yet the population goes on increasing rapidly, probably
+even more rapidly than before. It needs a most radical and thorough attack
+on the birth-rate before we can make any real impression on the rate of
+increase of the population, to say nothing of its real reduction. There is
+still an arduous road before us.</p>
+
+<p>True it is that we have two opposing schools of thought which both say
+that we need not, or that we cannot, make any difference by our efforts to
+regulate the earth's human population. According to one view the
+development of population, together with the necessity for war which is
+inextricably mixed up with a developing population, cannot be effected
+without, as one champion of the doctrine is pleased to put it, "shattering
+both the structure of Euclidean space and the psychological laws upon
+which the existence of self-consciousness and human society are
+conditional."<a name="FNanchor_27_27" id="FNanchor_27_27"></a><a href="#Footnote_27_27" class="fnanchor">[27]</a> In simpler words, populations tend to become too large
+for their territories, so that war ensues, and birth-control can do
+nothing because "it is doubtful whether a group in the plenitude of vigour
+and self-consciousness can <a name="Page_172" id="Page_172"></a>deliberately stop its own growth." The other
+school proclaims human impotence on exactly opposite grounds. There is not
+the slightest reason, it declares, to believe that birth-control has had
+any but a completely negligible influence on population. This is a natural
+process and fertility is automatically adjusted to the death-rate.
+Whenever a population reaches a certain stage of civilisation and nervous
+development its procreativeness, quite apart from any effort of the will,
+tends to diminish. The seeming effect of birth-control is illusory. It is
+Nature, not human effort, which is at work.<a name="FNanchor_28_28" id="FNanchor_28_28"></a><a href="#Footnote_28_28" class="fnanchor">[28]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_27_27" id="Footnote_27_27"></a><a href="#FNanchor_27_27"><span class="label">[27]</span></a> B.A.G. Fuller, "The Mechanical Basis of War," <i>Hibbert
+Journal</i>, 1921.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_28_28" id="Footnote_28_28"></a><a href="#FNanchor_28_28"><span class="label">[28]</span></a> Sir Shirley Murphy some years ago (<i>Lancet</i>, 10 Aug. 1912)
+argued that the fall of the birth-rate, as also that of the death-rate,
+has been largely effected by natural causes, independent of man's action.
+Mr. G. Udney Yule (<i>The Fall in the Birth-rate</i>, 1920) also believes that
+birth-control counts for little, the chief factor being natural
+fluctuations, probably of economic nature. Recently Mr. C.E. Pell, in his
+book, <i>The Law of Births and Deaths</i> (1921), has made a more elaborate and
+systematic attempt to show that the rise and fall of the birth-rate has
+hitherto been independent of human effort.</p></div>
+
+<p>These two opposing councils of despair, each proclaiming, though in a
+contrary sense, the vanity of human wishes in the matter of procreation,
+might well, some may think, be left to neutralise each other and evaporate
+in air. But it seems worth while to point out that, with proper
+limitations and qualifications, there is an element of truth in each of
+them, while, without such limitations and qualifications, both are alike
+obviously absurd and wrong-headed. Undoubtedly, as the one school holds,
+in certain stages of civilisa<a name="Page_173" id="Page_173"></a>tion, even at a fairly advanced stage,
+nations tend to break out over their frontiers with resulting war; but the
+period when they reach "the plenitude of vigour and self-consciousness" is
+exactly the period when the birth-rate begins to decline, and the
+population, deliberately or instinctively, controls its own increase. That
+has, for instance, been the history of France since the great expansion of
+population, roughly associated with the Napoleonic epopee,&mdash;which
+doubtless covered a web of causes, sanitary, political, industrial,
+favourable to a real numerical increase of the nation&mdash;had died down
+slowly to the level we witness to-day.<a name="FNanchor_29_29" id="FNanchor_29_29"></a><a href="#Footnote_29_29" class="fnanchor">[29]</a> Similarly, with regard to the
+opposing school, we must undoubtedly accept a natural fall in the
+birth-rate with a rising civilisation; that has always been visible in
+highly civilised individual couples, and it is an easily ascertainable
+zoological fact that throughout the evolution of life procreativeness has
+decreased with the increased development of species. We may agree that a
+natural factor comes into the recent fall in the human birth-rate. But to
+argue that because a natural decline in birth-rate is the essential factor
+in the slowing down of procreative <a name="Page_174" id="Page_174"></a>activity with all higher evolution,
+therefore deliberate birth-control counts for nothing, since exactly the
+same result follows when voluntary prevention is adopted and when it is
+not, seems highly absurd. We must at least admit that voluntary
+birth-control is an important contributory cause, in some sense indeed, of
+supreme importance, because it is within man's own power and because man
+is thus enabled to guide and mould processes of Nature which might
+otherwise work disastrously. How disastrously is shown by the history of
+Europe, and in a notable degree France, during the four or five centuries
+preceding the end of the eighteenth century when various new influences
+began to operate. During all these centuries there was undoubtedly a very
+high birth-rate, yet infant mortality, war, famine, insanitation,
+contagious diseases of many and virulent kinds, tended, as far as we can
+see, to keep the population almost or quite stationary,<a name="FNanchor_30_30" id="FNanchor_30_30"></a><a href="#Footnote_30_30" class="fnanchor">[30]</a> and so ruinous
+a method of maintaining a stationary population necessarily used up most
+of the energy which might otherwise have been available for <a name="Page_175" id="Page_175"></a>social
+progress, although the stationary population, even thus maintained, still
+placed France at the head of European civilisation. The more firmly we
+believe that the diminution of the population is a natural process, the
+more strenuously, surely, we ought to guide it, so that it shall work
+without friction, and, so far as possible, tend to eliminate the
+undesirable stocks of man and preserve the desirable. Clearly, the theory
+itself calls for much effort, since it is obvious that along natural lines
+the decline, if it is the result of high evolution, will affect the fit
+more easily than the unfit.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_29_29" id="Footnote_29_29"></a><a href="#FNanchor_29_29"><span class="label">[29]</span></a> The reader may point to the renewal of Militarism and
+Imperialism in France since the Great War. That, however, has been an
+artificial product (in so far as it exists among the people themselves)
+directly fostered from outside by the policy of England and the United
+States, just as the same spirit in Germany before the war, in the face of
+a falling birth-rate, was artificially fostered from above by a military
+and Imperialistic caste.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_30_30" id="Footnote_30_30"></a><a href="#FNanchor_30_30"><span class="label">[30]</span></a> See especially Mathorez, <i>Histoire de la Formation de la
+Population Fran&ccedil;aise</i>, Vol. I, 1920, <i>Les &Eacute;trangers en France</i>. The
+fecundity of French families, even among the aristocracy, till towards the
+end of the eighteenth century, was fabulous; in the third quarter of the
+seventeenth century the average number of children was five in Paris. But
+the mortality was extremely high; under the age of sixteen, Mathorez
+estimates, it was 51 per cent., and infant mortality was terrible in all
+classes, small-pox being specially fatal. Then there were the various
+diseases termed plagues, with famine sometimes added, while war,
+emigration, and religious celibacy all counteracted the excessive
+fecundity, so that from the thirteenth century to the third quarter of the
+eighteenth the population seems to have been stationary, about twenty-two
+millions. Then the size of the family fell in Paris to 3.9 and in France
+generally to 4.3, while also there were fewer marriages. Therewith there
+was an increase of prosperity.</p></div>
+
+<p>Thus there seems, on a wide survey of the matter, no reason whatever to
+quarrel with that conviction, which is gradually over-spreading all
+classes of human society in all parts of the world, and ever more widely
+leading to practical action, that the welfare of the individual, the
+family, the community, and the race is bound up with the purposive and
+deliberate practice of birth-control, whether we advocate that policy on
+the ground that we are thereby furthering Nature, or on the opposite, and
+no doubt equally excellent, ground that we are thereby correcting Nature.</p>
+
+<p>Along this road, as along any other road, we <a name="Page_176" id="Page_176"></a>shall not reach Utopia; and
+since the Utopia of every person who possesses one is unique that perhaps
+need not be regretted. We shall not even, within any measurable period of
+time, reach a sanely free and human life fit to satisfy quite moderate
+aspirations. The wise birth-controller will not (like the deliciously
+absurd suffragette of old-time) imagine that birth-control for all means a
+New Heaven and a New Earth, but will, rather, appreciate the delightful
+irony of the Biblical legend which represented a world with only four
+people in it, yet one of them a murderer. Still, it may be pointed out,
+that was a state of things much better than we can show now. The world
+would count itself happier if, during the Great War, only twenty-five per
+cent of the population of belligerent lands had been murderers, virtually
+or in fact. There is something to be gained, and that something is well
+worth while.</p>
+
+<p>Still, whether we like it or not, the task of speeding up the decrease of
+the human population becomes increasingly urgent.<a name="FNanchor_31_31" id="FNanchor_31_31"></a><a href="#Footnote_31_31" class="fnanchor">[31]</a> To many of our
+Undesirables it may seem, mere sentiment to trouble about the ravishing of
+the <a name="Page_177" id="Page_177"></a>world's beauty or the ravaging of the world's humanity. But certain
+hard facts, even to-day, have to be faced. The process of mechanical
+invention continues every day on an ever increasing scale of magnitude.
+Now that process, however necessary, however beneficial, involves some of
+the chief evils of our present phase of what we call civilisation, partly
+because it has deteriorated the quality of all human products and partly
+because it has enslaved mankind, and in so doing deteriorated also his
+quality.<a name="FNanchor_32_32" id="FNanchor_32_32"></a><a href="#Footnote_32_32" class="fnanchor">[32]</a> Now we cannot abolish machinery, because machinery lies in
+the very essence of life and we ourselves are machines. But, as the
+largest part of history shows, there is no need whatever for man to become
+the slave of machinery, or even for machinery to injure the quality of his
+own work; rightly used it may improve it. The greatest task before
+civilisation at present is to make machines what they ought to be, the
+slaves, instead of the masters of men; and if civilisation fails at the
+task, then without doubt it and its makers will go down to a common
+destruction. It is a task inextricably bound up with the task of moulding
+the human race for which birth-control is the elected instrument. Indeed
+they are but two aspects of the same task. We have to accept the rugged
+fact that every step to render more <a name="Page_178" id="Page_178"></a>nearly perfect the mechanical side of
+life correspondingly abolishes the need for men. Thus it is calculated
+to-day that whenever, in accordance with a growing tendency, coal is
+superseded by oil in industry two men are enabled to do the work of
+twelve. That is merely typical of what is taking place generally in our
+modern system of civilisation. Everywhere a small number of men are being
+enabled to replace a large number of men. Not to avoid looking ahead, we
+may say that of every twelve millions of our population, ten millions will
+be unwanted. Let them do something else! we cheerfully exclaim. But what?
+No doubt there are always art and science, infinite in their possibilities
+for joy and enlightenment, infinite also, as we know, in their
+possibilities of mischief and shallowness and boredom. Let it only be true
+science and great art, and one man is better than ten millions. To say
+that is only to echo unconsciously the ancient saying of Heraclitus, "One
+is ten thousand if he be the best."</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_31_31" id="Footnote_31_31"></a><a href="#FNanchor_31_31"><span class="label">[31]</span></a> Professor E.M. East, a distinguished biologist and lately
+President of the American Society of Naturalists (<i>Nature</i>, 23 Sept.,
+1920), has estimated that, for all the fall in the birth-rate, the present
+rate of increase in the population of the world, chiefly of whites, who
+are increasing most rapidly, will, in the lives of our grandchildren, lead
+to a struggle for existence more terrible than imagination can conceive.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_32_32" id="Footnote_32_32"></a><a href="#FNanchor_32_32"><span class="label">[32]</span></a> This has been set forth with admirable lucidity and wealth
+of illustration by Dr. Austin Freeman in his <i>Social Decay and
+Regeneration</i> (1921), already mentioned.</p></div>
+
+<p>The vistas that are opened up when we realise the direction in which the
+human race is travelling may seem to be endless; and so in a sense they
+are. Man has replaced the gods he once dreamed of; he has found that he is
+himself a god, who, however realistic he seeks to make his philosophy,
+himself created the world as he sees it and now has even acquired the
+power of creat<a name="Page_179" id="Page_179"></a>ing himself, or, rather, of re-creating himself. For he
+recognises that, at present, he is rather a poor sort of god, so much an
+inferior god that he is hardly, if at all, to be distinguished from the
+Lords of Hell.</p>
+
+<p>The divine creative task of man extends into the future far beyond the
+present, and we cannot too often meditate on the words of the wisest and
+noblest forerunner of that future: "The whole world still lies before us
+like a quarry before the master-builder, who is only then worthy of the
+name when out of this casual mass of natural material he has embodied with
+all his best economy, adaptability to the end, and firmness, the image
+which has arisen in his mind. Everything outside us is only the means for
+this constructing process, yes, I would even dare to say, also everything
+inside us; deep within lies the creative force which is able to form what
+it will, and gives us no rest until, without us or within us, in one or
+the other way, we have finally given it representation." The future, with
+all its possibilities, is still a future infinitely far away, however well
+it may be to fix our eyes on the constellation towards which our solar
+system may seem to be moving across the sky.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, every well-directed step, while it brings us but ever so little
+nearer to the far goal around which our dreams may play, is at once a
+beautiful process and an invigorating effort, and <a name="Page_180" id="Page_180"></a>thereby becomes in
+itself a desirable end. It is the little things of life which give us most
+satisfaction and the smallest things in our path that may seem most worth
+while.</p>
+
+
+
+<p><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181"></a></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="INDEX" id="INDEX"></a><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182"></a><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183"></a>INDEX</h2>
+
+<p>
+Abstinence, sexual, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>.<br />
+Acton, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>.<br />
+Adrenal glands, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>.<br />
+Anstie, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>.<br />
+Art of love, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>.<br />
+Asceticism and sexuality, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>.<br />
+Augustine, St., <a href="#Page_58">58</a>, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>.<br />
+Australian birth-rate, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>.<br />
+Auto-erotism, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Bantu, marriage among the, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>.<br />
+Bateson, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>.<br />
+Bell, W. Blair, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>.<br />
+Binet-Sangl&eacute;, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>.<br />
+Birth-control, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>, <a href="#Page_138">138</a> <i>et seq.</i><br />
+Birth-rate, in France, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in Australia, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in Canada, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in England, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>.</span><br />
+Book of the Knight of the Tour-Landry, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>.<br />
+Bront&euml;s, the, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>.<br />
+Browning, Mrs., <a href="#Page_26">26</a>.<br />
+Brown-S&eacute;quard, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>.<br />
+Burbank, Luther, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Canada, birth-rate in, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>.<br />
+Chastity, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>.<br />
+Chaucer, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>.<br />
+Children, to parents, relation of, <a href="#Page_13">13</a> <i>et seq.</i><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in modern life, <a href="#Page_24">24</a> <i>et seq.</i></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">sex in, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>.</span><br />
+China, parents in, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>.<br />
+Christianity, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>.<br />
+Continence, the value of, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>.<br /><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184"></a>
+Courtship in Nature, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>.<br />
+Crooks, Mrs. Will, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Davenport, C.B., <a href="#Page_143">143</a>.<br />
+Darwin, Major Leonard, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>.<br />
+Davies, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.<br />
+Drayton, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.<br />
+Dundas, C, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>.<br />
+<br />
+East, E.M., <a href="#Page_176">176</a>.<br />
+Education, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in Old England, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in Old France, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>.</span><br />
+Electra-complex, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>.<br />
+Eliot, George, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>.<br />
+Ellis, Mrs. Havelock, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>, <a href="#Page_96">96</a>.<br />
+English social history, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>.<br />
+Erotic claims of women, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>.<br />
+Erotic personality, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>.<br />
+Eugenics, <a href="#Page_134">134</a> <i>et seq.</i><br />
+Ewart, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Family, sex in life of, <a href="#Page_22">22</a> <i>et seq.</i>, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>.<br />
+Feeblemindedness, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>.<br />
+Feudal education, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>.<br />
+Francis of Assisi, St., <a href="#Page_58">58</a>.<br />
+Freeman, Austin, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>.<br />
+French social history, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>.<br />
+Freud, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>.<br />
+Frink, H.W., <a href="#Page_131">131</a>.<br />
+Fuller, B.A.G., <a href="#Page_171">171</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Galton, Sir Francis, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>.<br />
+Girls, emancipated, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>.<br />
+Goddard, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>.<br />
+Goethe, <a href="#Page_179">179</a>.<br />
+Gratian, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>.<br />
+Greeks, eugenics amongst ancient, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>.<br />
+Groos, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Hadfield, Mrs., <a href="#Page_32">32</a>.<br />
+Heraclitus, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>.<br /><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185"></a>
+Hinton, James, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>.<br />
+Home, revolution in the, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>.<br />
+Hormones, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>.<br />
+Husbands, <a href="#Page_75">75</a> <i>et seq.</i><br />
+<br />
+Individualism and eugenics, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>.<br />
+Infanticide, ancient, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>.<br />
+Infantile arrest, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>.<br />
+Inge, Dr., <a href="#Page_166">166</a>.<br />
+Internal secretions, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Jonson, Ben, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.<br />
+Juries, women on, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Key, Ellen, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>.<br />
+Lasco, John &agrave;, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>.<br />
+L&ouml;wenfeld, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>.<br />
+Luchaire, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>.<br />
+Luther, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Machinery and civilisation, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>.<br />
+Magic and sex, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>.<br />
+Marriage, <a href="#Page_63">63</a> <i>et seq.</i>, <a href="#Page_76">76</a> <i>et seq.</i>, <a href="#Page_108">108</a> <i>et seq.</i>, <a href="#Page_117">117</a> <i>et seq.</i><br />
+Martineau, Harriet, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>.<br />
+Mathorez, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>.<br />
+Matsumato, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>.<br />
+McDougall, W., <a href="#Page_99">99</a>.<br />
+Meirowsky, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>.<br />
+Milton, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>.<br />
+Mo&iuml;ssid&egrave;s, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>.<br />
+Monogamy, <a href="#Page_106">106</a>.<br />
+Montaigne, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>.<br />
+Morality, and nature, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in marriage, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>.</span><br />
+More, Sir Thomas, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>.<br />
+Murphy, Sir Shirley, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>.<br />
+<br />
+N&auml;cke, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>.<br />
+Nature and morality, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>.<br />
+New Caledonia, treatment of parents in, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>.<br />
+Northcote, H., <a href="#Page_71">71</a>.<br /><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186"></a>
+<br />
+Oedipus-complex, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>.<br />
+Osborn, H.F., <a href="#Page_170">170</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Palladius, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>.<br />
+Parasitism in the home, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>.<br />
+Parents, merciful destruction of, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">relation of children to, <a href="#Page_13">13</a> <i>et seq.</i>, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">training of, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">veneration of, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>.</span><br />
+Parmelee, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>.<br />
+Paston Letters, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>.<br />
+Paul, Eden &amp; Cedar, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>, <a href="#Page_151">151</a>.<br />
+Paul, St., <a href="#Page_77">77</a>.<br />
+Peacock, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.<br />
+Pell, C.E., <a href="#Page_172">172</a>.<br />
+Perrycoste, F.H., <a href="#Page_149">149</a>, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>.<br />
+Perseigne, Adam de, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>.<br />
+Pituitary gland, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>.<br />
+Play-function of sex, <a href="#Page_116">116</a> <i>et seq.</i><br />
+Pleasure, the function of, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>.<br />
+Polonius, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>.<br />
+Powell, Dr., <a href="#Page_81">81</a>.<br />
+Protestantism and marriage, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>.<br />
+Psycho-analysis, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>.<br />
+Purity, <a href="#Page_37">37</a> <i>et seq.</i><br />
+<br />
+Race-suicide, <a href="#Page_155">155</a> <i>et seq.</i><br />
+Ring in marriage, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>.<br />
+Rite, the marriage, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>.<br />
+Robert of Arbrissel, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>.<br />
+Rohleder, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>.<br />
+Rolland, Romain, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Sacrament, sex as a, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>.<br />
+Salle, Antoine de la, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>.<br />
+Sanger, Margaret, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>.<br />
+Schreiner, Olive, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and asceticism, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>.</span><br />
+Sex, and magic, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">as a sacrament, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">evolution in, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">nature of impulse of, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>.</span><br /><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187"></a>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">play-function of, <a href="#Page_116">116</a> <i>et seq.</i></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">spiritual element in, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">sublimation of, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>.</span><br />
+Shaftesbury, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.<br />
+Socialism and eugenics, <a href="#Page_150">150</a>.<br />
+<i>Stonor Letters</i>, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>.<br />
+Stopes, Marie, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>.<br />
+Suarez, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>.<br />
+Sublimation, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Theognis, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Wells, H.G., <a href="#Page_152">152</a>.<br />
+Westermarck, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>.<br />
+Wives, <a href="#Page_75">75</a> <i>et seq.</i><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">love rights of, <a href="#Page_102">102</a> <i>et seq.</i></span><br />
+Wollstonecraft, Mary, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>.<br />
+Women, erotic claims of, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">erotic ideas of average, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in Crusades, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in marriage, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in old France, <a href="#Page_19">19</a> <i>et seq.</i></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in subjection to men, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">love rights of, <a href="#Page_102">102</a> <i>et seq.</i></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">on juries, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Yule, G. Udney, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>.<br />
+</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY BILLING AND SONS, LTD., GUILDFORD AND ESHER.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="Transcribers_Notes" id="Transcribers_Notes"></a>Transcriber's Notes:</h2>
+
+
+<ul><li>in the index, Wollstonecroft was changed to Wollstonecraft</li>
+<li>also in the index, &aacute; was changed to &agrave; in: Lasco, John &agrave;</li>
+<li>some punctuation normalized</li>
+<li>everything else was left as found in the original</li>
+</ul>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<div style="margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%;">
+<h2>[ADVERTISEMENTS]</h2>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p class="center"><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189"></a><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188"></a>
+PARTICULARS OF<br />
+<big><b>OTHER WORKS ON</b></big><br />
+<big><b>SEX, SEX PSYCHOLOGY,</b></big><br />
+<big><b>HEREDITY &amp; EVOLUTION</b></big><br />
+WILL BE FOUND ON THE THREE FOLLOWING PAGES<br />
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/189.png"
+alt="mark" title="mark" />
+</div>
+
+<p><b>Mrs. Havelock Ellis:</b></p>
+
+<p>THE NEW HORIZON IN LOVE AND LIFE. With a Preface by Edward Carpenter.</p>
+
+
+<p><b>S. Herbert, M.D., M.R.C.S.:</b></p>
+
+<p>AN INTRODUCTION TO THE PHYSIOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY OF SEX.</p>
+
+<p>THE FIRST PRINCIPLES OF HEREDITY. (Second Edition.)</p>
+
+<p>THE FIRST PRINCIPLES OF EVOLUTION. (Second Edition.)</p>
+
+<p>FUNDAMENTALS IN SEXUAL ETHICS.</p>
+
+
+<p><b>Mrs. S. Herbert:</b></p>
+
+<p>SEX LORE: A PRIMER, ON COURTSHIP, MARRIAGE AND PARENTHOOD.</p>
+
+
+<p><b>Dr. &amp; Mrs. Herbert:</b></p>
+
+<p>SEXUAL LIFE OF PRIMITIVE PEOPLE. Authorized Translation of Hans
+Fehlinger's volume.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">PUBLISHED BY<br />
+A. &amp; C. BLACK, LTD., 4, 5 &amp; 6 SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W. 1
+</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p class="center"><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190"></a>
+<big><b>THE NEW HORIZON</b></big><br />
+<big><b>IN LOVE AND LIFE</b></big><br />
+<big>By MRS. HAVELOCK ELLIS</big><br />
+
+WITH A PREFACE BY EDWARD CARPENTER AND<br />
+AN INTRODUCTION BY MARGUERITE TRACY<br />
+<br />
+<i>Demy 8vo</i>    PRICE <b><big>10/6</big></b> NET    (<i>By Post, 11s.</i>)<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Questions of Marriage and Divorce, of sex variation, of love in the past
+and in the future all come up for subtle consideration. The items of our
+common knowledge are regrouped. Here we see clearly revealed the personal
+conception of life that lay behind Mrs. Havelock Ellis's brilliant novels.
+We are arrested and spell-bound by the same understanding, the same
+directness of touch, the same beauty.</p>
+
+<p>CONTENTS:</p>
+
+<p>Preface, by Edward Carpenter. Introduction, by Marguerite Tracy. Note, by
+Havelock Ellis.</p>
+
+<p>PART I.&mdash;LOVE AND MARRIAGE. The Love of To-Morrow. A Noviciate for
+Marriage. Semi-Detached Marriage. Marriage and Divorce. Eugenics and the
+Mystical Outlook. Eugenics and Spiritual Parenthood. Blossoming Time. Love
+as a Fine Art.</p>
+
+<p>PART II.&mdash;THE NEW CIVILIZATION. Democracy in the Kitchen. The Masses and
+the Classes. The Maternal in Domestic and Political Life. Political
+Militancy: Its Cause and Cure. War. The New Civilization. The Philosophy
+of Happiness. Bibliography. Index.</p>
+
+<p>OPINIONS:</p>
+
+<p>"Bold in pursuit of honesty."&mdash;<i>Observer.</i></p>
+
+<p>"The charm of style, the frankness and courage, the delicacy and idealism
+which marked her life's work are here in full measure."&mdash;<i>Challenge.</i></p>
+
+<p>"A wholly sincere, clear-headed woman, Mrs. Ellis was often misunderstood
+because she was sane."&mdash;<i>W.L. George.</i></p>
+
+<p>"Stimulates thought, arouses controversy, may shock the timidly
+conventional."&mdash;<i>Sunday Times.</i></p>
+
+<p class="center">PUBLISHED BY<br />
+A. &amp; C. BLACK, LTD., 4, 5 &amp; 6 SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W. 1
+</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p class="center"><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191"></a>
+<b>THE HERBERT BOOKS</b><br />
+BY S. HERBERT, M.D., M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<b>THE FIRST PRINCIPLES OF HEREDITY</b><br />
+<br />
+75 Diagrams and Illustrations. Large Crown 8vo. Cloth.<br />
+<b>7s. 6d.</b> net (by post, 2s. 3d.).        <i>Revised Edition.</i><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>"Dr. Herbert's hook can be recommended as a trustworthy 'first aid' in the
+study of a difficult subject. His style is lucid and concise, and he has
+provided a glossary which will be of service to many."&mdash;<i>Athen&aelig;um.</i></p>
+
+<p>"We have only praise for the result."&mdash;<i>Eugenics Review.</i></p>
+
+<p>"Dr. Herbert will be found a safe guide. He writes as clearly and as
+simply as may be upon a subject in which it is practically impossible to
+avoid technical language.... The book may be cordially recommended as
+admirably adapted for the class for whom it is intended." <i>Westminster
+Gazette.</i></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p class="center">
+<b>THE FIRST PRINCIPLES OF EVOLUTION</b><br />
+<br />
+90 Illustrations. Large Crown 8vo. Cloth, <b>12s. 6d.</b> net (by<br />
+post, 13s. 6d.). <i>Revised Edition.</i><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>"The author attempts to examine and test the principles of the theory of
+evolution as applied to the known phenomena of the cosmos. To do this at
+all satisfactorily in little more than 300 pages, and at the same time
+bring under review all that is most valuable in recent scientific
+research, is no easy task. We may say at once that, in our opinion Dr.
+Herbert has succeeded wonderfully well."&mdash;<i>Athen&aelig;um.</i></p>
+
+<p>"Contains not a single dry page&mdash;far and away the most compact and
+complete account of evolution in all its aspects."&mdash;<i>Globe.</i></p>
+
+<p>"We congratulate Dr. Herbert on his masterly arrangement.... It will serve
+as an admirable introduction to a difficult subject."&mdash;<i>Dundee
+Advertiser.</i></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p class="center">
+<b>AN INTRODUCTION TO THE</b><br />
+<b>PHYSIOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY OF SEX</b><br />
+<br />
+49 Illustrations. Large Crown 8vo. Cloth. <b>7s.6d.</b> net (by post, 8s. 1d.).<br />
+</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>This fills a gap in the literature of sex. It gathers together for the
+    general reader a vast array of facts about sex, mating and
+    reproduction which have never before been so clearly and directly
+    stated.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>"For a simple statement, expressed in language as far as possible free
+from technicalities, of the principal phenomena of generation, Dr.
+Herbert's book is the best that we have seen."&mdash;<i>Cambridge Review.</i></p>
+
+<p>"It is therefore a real satisfaction to find a sex manual which may be
+placed with confidence in the hands of any educated person.... He has
+certainly produced the best little manual which we yet possess in this
+field."&mdash;HAVELOCK ELLIS in <i>Eugenics Review.</i></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p class="center">
+<b>BY MRS. HERBERT.</b><br />
+<br />
+<b>SEX LORE.</b> A Primer on Courtship, Marriage and Parenthood.<br />
+55 Illustrations. Crown 8vo. Cloth, <b>7s. 6d.</b> net (by post, 8s. 1d.).<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>"The author in simple, non-technical language expounds the main facts of
+sex, especially with regard to biology and physiology, and she treats this
+delicate subject in a tactful manner. A special feature of the book is the
+large number of illustrations. The volume is intended for the 'younger
+generation,' but parents and teachers would be well advised to peruse the
+book, which should prove invaluable for educative purposes. '&mdash;<i>Medical
+Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>"... may be left with confidence in the hands of any educated person who
+is attaining to manhood or womanhood."&mdash;<i>Aberdeen Daily Journal.</i></p>
+
+
+<p class="center">PUBLISHED BY<br />
+A. &amp; C. BLACK, LTD., 4, 5 &amp; 6 SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W. 1
+</p>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+<p class="center"><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192"></a>
+THE HERBERT BOOKS<br />
+<br /><br /><br />
+<b><big>SEXUAL LIFE</big></b><br />
+OF PRIMITIVE PEOPLE<br />
+<br />
+BY HANS FEHLINGER<br />
+<br />
+Translated by DR. S. HERBERT AND MRS. HERBERT<br />
+<br />
+Large Crown 8vo. Cloth, <b>6s.</b> net (by post, 6s. 6d.).<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>"A concise survey of the beliefs and customs of primitive peoples in such
+matters as modesty, conjugal fidelity, courtship, marriage, birth and
+feticide."&mdash;<i>The Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>"If anyone doubts that the world is progressing, we commend to his
+attention this book of Mr. Fehlinger."&mdash;<i>Dublin Evening Mail.</i></p>
+
+<p>"In this translation Dr. and Mrs. Herbert present clearly and fairly all
+the more important facts which recent research has brought to
+light."&mdash;<i>Times of India.</i></p>
+
+<p class="center">
+<br /><br /><br />
+FUNDAMENTALS IN<br />
+<b><big>SEXUAL ETHICS</big></b><br />
+AN ENQUIRY INTO MODERN TENDENCIES<br />
+<br />
+BY S. HERBERT, M.D., M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P.<br />
+<br />
+Large Crown 8vo. Cloth. Price <b>12s. 6d.</b> net (by post, 13s. 3d.).<br />
+<br />
+CONTENTS:<br /></p>
+<p><br />
+Part I.&mdash;THE BASIC CHARACTERISTICS OF SEX.<br />
+Part II.&mdash;SEX RELATIONSHIPS: Sex Morality. Sex Vice and Disease. Sex Aberration and Abnormality. Auto Eroticism. Sexual Inversion.<br />
+Part III.&mdash;MARITAL RELATIONSHIP: Factors; Moral, Biotic, Eugenic, Economic, Social.<br />
+Part IV.&mdash;SEX AND EDUCATION: Sex Education. Co-Education.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">OPINIONS:</p>
+
+<p>"He treats with knowledge all the urgent sexual questions and sexual
+phenomena, normal and abnormal."&mdash;<i>The Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>"A very valuable book dealing with a vastly important
+subject."&mdash;<i>Justice.</i></p>
+
+<p>"What we want is the best that is known and thought in the world on a
+matter that vitally concerns us. We need also intelligent, sympathetic
+common-sense guidance amid the opposing extremes of a narrow materialism
+and a narrow spiritualism. Dr. Herbert supplies both these needs ... and
+we could not well ask more of him."&mdash;HAVELOCK ELLIS in <i>Daily Herald</i>.</p>
+
+<p>"We may congratulate him on the success of his undertaking."&mdash;<i>Manchester
+Guardian.</i></p>
+
+<p>"Wide knowledge, conscientious thoroughness, sincere conviction,
+sympathetic understanding and, even more, spiritual aspirations.... A
+splendid feminist."</p>
+
+<p>EDITH BETHUNE BAKER in <i>Woman's Leader</i>.</p>
+
+
+
+<p class="center">PUBLISHED BY<br />
+A. &amp; C. BLACK, LTD., 4, 5 &amp; 6 SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W. 1
+<a name="Page_193" id="Page_193"></a></p>
+</div>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Little Essays of Love and Virtue, by Havelock Ellis
+
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+</body>
+</html>
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+Project Gutenberg's Little Essays of Love and Virtue, by Havelock Ellis
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Little Essays of Love and Virtue
+
+Author: Havelock Ellis
+
+Release Date: April 23, 2005 [EBook #15687]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Michael Ciesielski, Melissa Er-Raqabi and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+LITTLE ESSAYS
+OF
+LOVE AND VIRTUE
+BY
+HAVELOCK ELLIS
+
+
+
+
+BY THE SAME AUTHOR
+
+STUDIES IN THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SEX
+Six Volumes
+Philadelphia: _F.A. Davis Company_
+
+MAN AND WOMAN
+London: _Walter Scott_
+New York: _Charles Scribners' Sons_
+
+THE TASK OF SOCIAL HYGIENE
+London: _Constable and Company_
+Boston: _Houghton Mifflin Company_
+
+IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS
+First and Second Series
+London: _Constable and Company_
+Boston: _Houghton Mifflin Company_
+
+
+BY MRS. HAVELOCK ELLIS
+
+THE NEW HORIZON IN LOVE AND LIFE
+With a Preface by EDWARD CARPENTER
+and an Introduction by MARGUERITE TRACY
+London: _A. and C. Black, Ltd._
+
+
+
+
+LITTLE ESSAYS
+OF
+LOVE AND VIRTUE
+BY
+HAVELOCK ELLIS
+
+
+
+
+
+A. & C. BLACK, LTD. 4, 5 & 6 SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W. 1 1922
+
+
+
+
+COPYRIGHT 1922
+_In Great Britain by A. and G. Black, Ltd., London_
+_In America by George H. Doran Co., New York_
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+In these Essays--little, indeed, as I know them to be, compared to the
+magnitude of their subjects--I have tried to set forth, as clearly as I
+can, certain fundamental principles, together with their practical
+application to the life of our time. Some of these principles were stated,
+more briefly and technically, in my larger _Studies_ of sex; others were
+therein implied but only to be read between the lines. Here I have
+expressed them in simple language and with some detail. It is my hope that
+in this way they may more surely come into the hands of young people,
+youths and girls at the period of adolescence, who have been present to my
+thoughts in all the studies I have written of sex because I was myself of
+that age when I first vaguely planned them. I would prefer to leave to
+their judgment the question as to whether this book is suitable to be
+placed in the hands of older people. It might only give them pain. It is
+in youth that the questions of mature age can alone be settled, if they
+ever are to be settled, and unless we begin to think about adult problems
+when we are young all our thinking is likely to be in vain. There are but
+few people who are able when youth is over either on the one hand to
+re-mould themselves nearer to those facts of Nature and of Society they
+failed to perceive, or had not the courage to accept, when they were
+young, or, on the other hand, to mould the facts of the exterior world
+nearer to those of their own true interior world. One hesitates to bring
+home to them too keenly what they have missed in life. Yet, let us
+remember, even for those who have missed most, there always remains the
+fortifying and consoling thought that they may at least help to make the
+world better for those who come after them, and the possibilities of human
+adjustment easier for others than it has been for themselves. They must
+still remain true to their own traditions. We could not wish it to be
+otherwise.
+
+The art of making love and the art of being virtuous;--two aspects of the
+great art of living that are, rightly regarded, harmonious and not at
+variance--remain, indeed, when we cease to misunderstand them, essentially
+the same in all ages and among all peoples. Yet, always and everywhere,
+little modifications become necessary, little, yet, like so many little
+things, immense in their significance and results. In this way, if we are
+really alive, we flexibly adjust ourselves to the world in which we find
+ourselves, and in so doing simultaneously adjust to ourselves that
+ever-changing world, ever-changing, though its changes are within such
+narrow limits that it yet remains substantially the same. It is with such
+modification that we are concerned in these Little Essays.
+
+H.E.
+
+_London, 1921_
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER                                 PAGE
+
+  I  Children and Parents                 13
+ II  The Meaning of Purity                37
+III  The Objects of Marriage              63
+ IV  Husbands and Wives                   75
+  V  The Love-Rights of Women            102
+ VI  The Play-Function of Sex            116
+VII  The Individual and the Race         134
+     Index                               183
+
+
+
+
+
+
+LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+CHILDREN AND PARENTS
+
+
+The twentieth century, as we know, has frequently been called "the century
+of the child." When, however, we turn to the books of Ellen Key, who has
+most largely and sympathetically taken this point of view, one asks
+oneself whether, after all, the child's century has brought much to the
+child. Ellen Key points out, with truth, that, even in our century,
+parents may for the most part be divided into two classes: those who act
+as if their children existed only for their benefit, and those who act as
+if they existed only for their children's benefit, the results, she adds
+being alike deplorable. For the first group of parents tyrannise over the
+child, seek to destroy its individuality, exercise an arbitrary discipline
+too spasmodic to have any of the good effects of discipline and would
+model him into a copy of themselves, though really, she adds, it ought to
+pain them very much to see themselves exactly copied. The second group of
+parents may wish to model their children not after themselves but after
+their ideals, yet they differ chiefly from the first class by their
+over-indulgence, by their anxiety to pamper the child by yielding to all
+his caprices and artificially protecting him from the natural results of
+those caprices, so that instead of learning freedom, he has merely
+acquired self-will. These parents do not indeed tyrannise over their
+children but they do worse; they train their children to be tyrants.
+Against these two tendencies of our century Ellen Key declares her own
+Alpha and Omega of the art of education. Try to leave the child in peace;
+live your own life beautifully, nobly, temperately, and in so living you
+will sufficiently teach your children to live.
+
+It is not my purpose here to consider how far this conception of the duty
+of parents towards children is justified, and whether or not peace is the
+best preparation for a world in which struggle dominates. All these
+questions about education are rather idle. There are endless theories of
+education but no agreement concerning the value of any of them, and the
+whole question of education remains open. I am here concerned less with
+the duty of parents in relation to their children than with the duty of
+children in relation to their parents, and that means that I am not
+concerned with young children, to whom, that duty still presents no
+serious problems, since they have not yet developed a personality with
+self-conscious individual needs. Certainly the one attitude must condition
+the other attitude. The reaction of children against their parents is the
+necessary result of the parents' action. So that we have to pay some
+attention to the character of parental action.
+
+We cannot expect to find any coherent or uniform action on the part of
+parents. But there have been at different historical periods different
+general tendencies in the attitude of parents towards their children. Thus
+if we go back four or five centuries in English social history we seem to
+find a general attitude which scarcely corresponds exactly to either of
+Ellen Key's two groups. It seems usually to have been compounded of
+severity and independence; children were first strictly compelled to go
+their parents' way and then thrust off to their own way. There seems a
+certain hardness in this method, yet it is doubtful whether it can fairly
+be regarded as more unreasonable than either of the two modern methods
+deplored by Ellen Key. On the contrary it had points for admiration. It
+was primarily a discipline, but it was regarded, as any fortifying
+discipline should be regarded, as a preparation for freedom, and it is
+precisely there that the more timid and clinging modern way seems to fail.
+
+We clearly see the old method at work in the chief source of knowledge
+concerning old English domestic life, the _Paston Letters_. Here we find
+that at an early age the sons of knights and gentlemen were sent to serve
+in the houses of other gentlemen: it was here that their education really
+took place, an education not in book knowledge, but in knowledge of life.
+Such education was considered so necessary for a youth that a father who
+kept his sons at home was regarded as negligent of his duty to his family.
+A knowledge of the world was a necessary part, indeed the chief part, of a
+youth's training for life. The remarkable thing is that this applied also
+to a large extent to the daughters. They realised in those days, what is
+only beginning to be realised in ours,[1] that, after all, women live in
+the world just as much, though differently, as men live in the world, and
+that it is quite as necessary for the girl as for the boy to be trained to
+the meaning of life. Margaret Paston, towards the end of the fifteenth
+century, sent her daughter Ann to live in the house of a gentleman who, a
+little later, found that he could not keep her as he was purposing to
+decrease the size of his household. The mother writes to her son: "I shall
+be fain to send for her and with me she shall but lose her time, and
+without she be the better occupied she shall oftentimes move me and put me
+to great unquietness. Remember what labour I had with your sister,
+therefore do your best to help her forth"; as a result it was planned to
+send her to a relative's house in London.
+
+[1] This was illustrated in England when women first began to serve on
+juries. The pretext was frequently brought forward that there are
+certain kinds of cases and of evidence that do not concern women or that
+women ought not to hear. The pretext would have been more plausible if
+it had also been argued that there are certain kinds of cases and of
+evidence that men ought not to hear. As a matter of fact, whatever
+frontier there may be in these matters is not of a sexual kind.
+Everything that concerns men ultimately concerns women, and everything
+that concerns women ultimately concerns men. Neither women nor men are
+entitled to claim dispensation.
+
+It is evident that in the fifteenth century in England there was a wide
+prevalence of this method of education, which in France, a century later,
+was still regarded as desirable by Montaigne. His reason for it is worth
+noting; children should be educated away from home, he remarks, in order
+to acquire hardness, for the parents will be too tender to them. "It is an
+opinion accepted by all that it is not right to bring up children in their
+parents' laps, for natural love softens and relaxes even the wisest."[2]
+
+[2] Montaigne, _Essais_, Bk. I., ch. 25.
+
+In old France indeed the conditions seem similar to those in England. The
+great serio-comic novel of Antoine de la Salle, _Petit Jean de Saintre_,
+shows us in detail the education and the adventures, which certainly
+involved a very early introduction to life, of a page in a great house in
+the fifteenth century. We must not take everything in this fine comedy too
+solemnly, but in the fourteenth century _Book of the Knight of the
+Tour-Landry_ we may be sure that we have at its best the then prevailing
+view of the relation of a father to his tenderly loved daughters. Of
+harshness and rigour in the relationship it is not easy to find traces in
+this lengthy and elaborate book of paternal counsels. But it is clear that
+the father takes seriously the right of a daughter to govern herself and
+to decide for herself between right and wrong. It is his object, he tells
+his girls, "to enable them to govern themselves." In this task he assumes
+that they are entitled to full knowledge, and we feel that he is not
+instructing them in the mysteries of that knowledge; he is taking for
+granted, in the advice he gives and the stories he tells them, that his
+"young and small daughters, not, poor things, overburdened with
+experience," already possess the most precise knowledge of the intimate
+facts of life, and that he may tell them, without turning a hair, the most
+outrageous incidents of debauchery. Life already lies naked before them:
+that he assumes; he is not imparting knowledge, he is giving good
+counsel.[3]
+
+[3] If the Knight went to an extreme in his assumption of his daughters'
+knowledge, modern fathers often go to the opposite and more foolish
+extreme of assuming in their daughters an ignorance that would be
+dangerous even if it really existed. In _A Young Girl's Diary_
+(translated from the German by Eden and Cedar Paul), a work that is
+highly instructive for parents, and ought to be painful for many, we
+find the diarist noting at the age of thirteen that she and a girl
+friend of about the same age overheard the father of one of them--both
+well brought up and carefully protected, one Catholic and the other
+Protestant--referring to "those innocent children." "We did laugh so, WE
+and _innocent children_!!! What our fathers really think of us; we
+innocent!!! At dinner we did not dare look at one another or we should
+have exploded." It need scarcely be added that, at the same time, they
+were more innocent than they knew.
+
+It is clear that this kind of education and this attitude towards
+children must be regarded as the outcome of the whole mediaeval method of
+life. In a state of society where roughness and violence, though not, as
+we sometimes assume, chronic, were yet always liable to be manifested, it
+was necessary for every man and woman to be able to face the crudest facts
+of the world and to be able to maintain his or her own rights against
+them. The education that best secured that strength and independence was
+the best education and it necessarily involved an element of hardness. We
+must go back earlier than Montaigne's day, when the conditions were
+becoming mitigated, to see the system working in all its vigour.
+
+The lady of the day of the early thirteenth century has been well
+described by Luchaire in his scholarly study of French Society in the time
+of Philip Augustus. She was, he tells us, as indeed she had been in the
+preceding feudal centuries, often what we should nowadays call a virago,
+of violent temperament, with vivid passions, broken in from childhood to
+all physical exercises, sharing the pleasures and dangers of the knights
+around her. Feudal life, fertile in surprises and in risks, demanded even
+in women a vigorous temper of soul and body, a masculine air, and habits
+also that were almost virile. She accompanied her father or her husband to
+the chase, while in war-time, if she became a widow or if her husband was
+away at the Crusades, she was ready, if necessary, to direct the defences
+of the lordship, and in peace time she was not afraid of the longest and
+most dangerous pilgrimages. She might even go to the Crusades on her own
+account, and, if circumstances required, conduct a war to come out
+victoriously.
+
+We may imagine the robust kind of education required to produce people of
+this quality. But as regards the precise way in which parents conducted
+that education, we have, as Luchaire admits, little precise knowledge. It
+is for the most part only indirectly, by reading between the lines, that
+we glean something as to what it was considered befitting to inculcate in
+a good household, and as what we thus learn is mostly from the writings of
+Churchmen it is doubtless a little one-sided. Thus Adam de Perseigne, an
+ecclesiastic, writes to the Countess du Perche to advise her how to live
+in a Christian manner; he counsels her to abstain from playing games of
+chance and chess, not to take pleasure in the indecent farces of actors,
+and to be moderate in dress. Then, as ever, preachers expressed their
+horror of the ruinous extravagance of women, their false hair, their
+rouge, and their dresses that were too long or too short. They also
+reprobated their love of flirtation. It was, however, in those days a
+young girl's recognised duty, when a knight arrived in the household, to
+exercise the rites of hospitality, to disarm him, give him his bath, and
+if necessary massage him to help him to go to sleep. It is not surprising
+that the young girl sometimes made love to the knight under these
+circumstances, nor is it surprising that he, engaged in an arduous life
+and trained to disdain feminine attractions, often failed to respond.
+
+It is easy to understand how this state of things gradually became
+transformed into the considerably different position of parents and child
+we have known, which doubtless attained its climax nearly a century ago.
+Feudal conditions, with the large households so well adapted to act as
+seminaries for youth, began to decay, and as education in such seminaries
+must have led to frequent mischances both for youths and maidens who
+enjoyed the opportunities of education there, the regret for their
+disappearance may often have been tempered for parents. Schools, colleges,
+and universities began to spring up and develop for one sex, while for the
+other home life grew more intimate, and domestic ties closer. Montaigne's
+warning against the undue tenderness of a narrow family life no longer
+seemed reasonable, and the family became more self-centred and more
+enclosed. Beneath this, and more profoundly influential, there was a
+general softening in social respects, and a greater expansiveness of
+affectional relationships, in reality or in seeming, within the home,
+compensating, it may be, the more diffused social feeling within a group
+which characterised the previous period.
+
+So was cultivated that undue tenderness, deplored by Montaigne, which we
+now regard as almost normal in family life, and solemnly label, if we
+happen to be psycho-analysts, the Oedipus-complex or the Electra-complex.
+Sexual love is closely related to parental love; the tender emotion, which
+is an intimate part of parental love, is also an intimate part of sexual
+love, and two emotions which are each closely related to a third emotion
+cannot fail to become often closely associated to each other. With a
+little thought we might guess beforehand, even while still in complete
+ignorance of the matter, that there could not fail to be frequently a
+sexual tinge in the affection of a father for his daughter, of a mother
+for her son, of a son for his mother, or a daughter for her father.
+Needless to say, that does not mean that there is present any physical
+desire of sex in the narrow sense; that would be a perversity, and a rare
+perversity. We are here on another plane than that of crude physical
+desire, and are moving within the sphere of the emotions. But such
+emotions are often strong, and all the stronger because conscious of
+their own absolute rectitude and often masked under the shape of Duty. Yet
+when prolonged beyond the age of childhood they tend to become a clog on
+development, and a hindrance to a wholesome life. The child who cherishes
+such emotion is likely to suffer infantile arrest of development, and the
+parent who is so selfish as to continue to expend such tenderness on a
+child who has passed the age of childhood, or to demand it, is guilty of a
+serious offence against that child.
+
+That the intimate family life which sometimes resulted--especially when,
+as frequently happened, the seeming mutual devotion was also real--might
+often be regarded as beautiful and almost ideal, it has been customary to
+repeat with an emphasis that in the end has even become nauseous. For it
+was usually overlooked that the self-centred and enclosed family, even
+when the mutual affection of its members was real enough to bear all
+examination, could scarcely be more than partially beautiful, and could
+never be ideal. For the family only represents one aspect, however
+important an aspect, of a human being's functions and activities. He
+cannot, she cannot, be divorced from the life of the social group, and a
+life is beautiful and ideal, or the reverse, only when we have taken into
+our consideration the social as well as the family relationship. When the
+family claims to prevent the free association of an adult member of it
+with the larger social organisation, it is claiming that the part is
+greater than the whole, and such a claim cannot fail to be morbid and
+mischievous.
+
+The old-world method of treating children, we know, has long ago been
+displaced as containing an element of harsh tyranny. But it was not
+perceived, and it seems indeed not even yet to be generally recognised,
+that the system which replaced it, and is only now beginning to pass away,
+involved another and more subtle tyranny, the more potent because not
+seemingly harsh. Parents no longer whipped their children even when grown
+up, or put them in seclusion, or exercised physical force upon them after
+they had passed childhood. They felt that that would not be in harmony
+with the social customs of a world in which ancient feudal notions were
+dead. But they merely replaced the external compulsion by an internal
+compulsion which was much more effective. It was based on the moral
+assumption of claims and duties which were rarely formulated because
+parents found it quite easy and pleasant to avoid formulating them, and
+children, on the rare occasions when they formulated them, usually felt a
+sense of guilt in challenging their validity. It was in the nineteenth
+century that this state of things reached its full development. The sons
+of the family were usually able, as they grew up, to escape and elude it,
+although they thereby often created an undesirable divorce from the home,
+and often suffered, as well as inflicted, much pain in tearing themselves
+loose from the spiritual bonds--especially perhaps in matters of
+religion--woven by long tradition to bind them to their parents. It was on
+the daughters that the chief stress fell. For the working class, indeed,
+there was often the possibility of escape into hard labour, if only that
+of marriage. But such escape was not possible, immediately or at all, for
+a large number. During the nineteenth century many had been so carefully
+enclosed in invisible cages, they had been so well drilled in the
+reticences and the duties and the subserviences that their parents
+silently demanded of them, that we can never know all the tragedies that
+took place. In exceptional cases, indeed, they gave a sign. When they
+possessed unusual power of intellect, or unusual power of character and
+will, they succeeded in breaking loose from their cages, or at least in
+giving expression to themselves. This is seen in the stories of nearly all
+the women eminent in life and literature during the nineteenth century,
+from the days of Mary Wollstonecraft onwards. The Brontes, almost, yet not
+quite, strangled by the fetters placed upon them by their stern and
+narrow-minded father, and enabled to attain the full stature of their
+genius only by that brief sojourn in Brussels, are representative.
+Elizabeth Barrett, chained to a couch of invalidism under the eyes of an
+imperiously affectionate father until with Robert Browning's aid she
+secretly eloped into the open air of freedom and health, and so attained
+complete literary expression, is a typical figure. It is only because we
+recognise that she is a typical figure among the women who attained
+distinction that we are able to guess at the vast number of mute
+inglorious Elizabeth Barretts who were never able to escape by their own
+efforts and never found a Browning to aid them to escape.
+
+It is sometimes said that those days are long past and that young women,
+in all the countries which we are pleased to called civilised, are now
+emancipated, indeed, rather too much emancipated. Critics come forward to
+complain of their undue freedom, of their irreverent familiarity to their
+parents, of their language, of their habits. But there were critics who
+said the very same things, in almost the same words, of the grandmothers
+of these girls! These incompetent critics are as ignorant of the social
+history of the past as they are of the social significance of the history
+of the present. We read in _Once a Week_ of sixty years ago (10th August,
+1861), the very period when the domestic conditions of girls were the most
+oppressive in the sense here understood, that these same critics were
+about at that time, and as shocked as they are now at "the young ladies
+who talk of 'awful swells' and 'deuced bores,' who smoke and venture upon
+free discourse, and try to be like men." The writer of this anonymous
+article, who was really (I judge from internal evidence) so distinguished
+and so serious a woman as Harriet Martineau, duly snubs these critics,
+pointing out that such accusations are at least as old as Addison and
+Horace Walpole; she remarks that there have no doubt been so-called "fast
+young ladies" in every age, "varying their doings and sayings according to
+the fopperies of the time." The question, as she pertinently concludes is,
+as indeed it still remains to-day: "Have we more than the average
+proportion? I do not know." Nor to-day do we know.
+
+But while to-day, as ever before, we have a certain proportion of these
+emancipated girls, and while to-day, as perhaps never before, we are able
+to understand that they have an element of reason on their side, it would
+be a mistake to suppose that they are more than exceptions. The majority
+are unable, and not even anxious, to attain this light-hearted social
+emancipation. For the majority, even though they are workers, the
+anciently subtle ties of the home are still, as they should be, an element
+of natural piety, and, also, as they should not be, clinging fetters which
+impede individuality and destroy personal initiative.
+
+We all know so many happy homes beneath whose calm surface this process
+is working out. The parents are deeply attached to their children, who
+still remain children to them even when they are grown up. They wish to
+guide them and mould them and cherish them, to protect them from the
+world, to enjoy their society and their aid, and they expect that their
+children shall continue indefinitely to remain children. The children, on
+their side, remain and always will remain, tenderly attached to their
+parents, and it would really pain them to feel that they are harbouring
+any unwillingness to stay in the home even after they have grown up, so
+long as their parents need their attention. It is, of course, the
+daughters who are thus expected to remain in the home and who feel this
+compunction about leaving it. It seems to us--although, as we have seen,
+so unlike the attitude of former days--a natural, beautiful, and rightful
+feeling on both sides.
+
+Yet, in the result, all sorts of evils tend to ensue. The parents often
+take as their moral right the services which should only be accepted, if
+accepted at all, as the offering of love and gratitude, and even reach a
+degree of domineering selfishness in which they refuse to believe that
+their children have any adult rights of their own, absorbing and drying up
+that physical and spiritual life-blood of their offspring which it is the
+parents' part in Nature to feed. If the children are willing there is
+nothing to mitigate this process; if they are unwilling the result is
+often a disastrous conflict. Their time and energy are not their own;
+their tastes are criticised and so far as possible crushed; their
+political ideas, if they have any, are treated as pernicious; and--which
+is often on both sides the most painful of all--differences in religious
+belief lead to bitter controversy and humiliating recrimination. Such
+differences in outlook between youth and age are natural and inevitable
+and right. The parents themselves, though they may have forgotten it,
+often in youth similarly revolted against the cherished doctrines of their
+own parents; it has ever been so, the only difference being that to-day,
+probably, the opportunities for variation are greater. So it comes about
+that what James Hinton said half a century ago is often true to-day: "Our
+happy Christian homes are the real dark places of the earth."
+
+It is evident that the problem of the relation of the child to the parent
+is still incompletely solved even in what we consider our highest
+civilisation. There is here needed an art in which those who have to
+exercise it can scarcely possess all the necessary skill and experience.
+Among trees and birds and beasts the art is surer because it is exercised
+unconsciously, on the foundation of a large tradition in which failure
+meant death. In the common procreative profusion of those forms of life
+the frequent death of the young was a matter of little concern, but
+biologically there was never any sacrifice of the offspring to the
+well-being of the parents. Whenever sacrifice is called for it is the
+parents who are sacrificed to their offspring. In our superior human
+civilisation, in which quantity ever tends to give place to quality, the
+higher value of the individual involves an effort to avoid sacrifice which
+sometimes proves worse than abortive. An avian philosopher would be
+unlikely to feel called upon to denounce nests as the dark places of the
+earth, and in laying down our human moral laws we have always to be aware
+of forgetting the fundamental biological relationship of parent and child
+to which all such moral laws must conform. To some would-be parents that
+necessity may seem hard. In such a case it is well for them to remember
+that there is no need to become parents and that we live in an age when it
+is not difficult to avoid becoming a parent. The world is not dying for
+lack of parents. On the contrary we have far too many of them--ignorant
+parents, silly parents, unwilling parents, undesirable parents--and those
+who aspire to the high dignity of creating the future race, let them be as
+few as they will--and perhaps at the present time the fewer the
+better--must not refuse the responsibilities of that position, its pains
+as well as its joys.
+
+In our human world, as we know, the moral duties laid upon us--the duties
+in which, if we fail, we become outcasts in our own eyes or in those of
+others or in both--are of three kinds: the duties to oneself, the duties
+to the small circle of those we love, and the duties to the larger circle
+of mankind to which ultimately we belong, since out of it we proceed, and
+to it we owe all that we are. There are no maxims, there is only an art
+and a difficult art, to harmonise duties which must often conflict. We
+have to be true to all the motives that sanctify our lives. To that extent
+George Eliot's Maggie Tulliver was undoubtedly right. But the renunciation
+of the Self is not the routine solution of every conflict, any more than
+is the absolute failure to renounce. In a certain sense the duty towards
+the self comes before all others, because it is the condition on which
+duties towards others possess any significance and worth. In that sense,
+it is true according to the familiar saying of Shakespeare,--though it was
+only Polonius, the man of maxims, who voiced it,--that one cannot be true
+to others unless one is first true to oneself, and that one can know
+nothing of giving aught that is worthy to give unless one also knows how
+to take.
+
+We see that the problem of the place of parents in life, after their
+function of parenthood has been adequately fulfilled, a problem which
+offers no difficulties among most forms of life, has been found hard to
+solve by Man. At some places and periods it has been considered most
+merciful to put them, to death; at others they have been almost or quite
+deified and allowed to regulate the whole lives of their descendants. Thus
+in New Caledonia aged parents, it is said by Mrs. Hadfield, were formerly
+taken up to a high mountain and left with enough food to last a few days;
+there was at the same time great regard for the aged, as also among the
+Hottentots who asked: "Can you see a parent or a relative shaking and
+freezing under a cold, dreary, heavy, useless old age, and not think, in
+pity of them, of putting an end to their misery?" It was generally the
+opinion of the parents themselves, but in some countries the parents have
+dominated and overawed their children to the time of their natural death
+and even beyond, up to the point of ancestor worship, as in China, where
+no man of any age can act for himself in the chief matters of life during
+his parents' life-time, and to some extent in ancient Rome, whence an
+influence in this direction which still exists in the laws and customs of
+France.[4] Both extremes have proved compatible with a beautifully human
+life. To steer midway between them seems to-day, however, the wisest
+course. There ought to be no reason, and under happy conditions there is
+no reason, why the relationship between parent and child, as one of mutual
+affection and care, should ever cease to exist. But that the relationship
+should continue to exist as a tie is unnatural and tends to be harmful. At
+a certain stage in the development of the child the physical tie with the
+parent is severed, and the umbilical cord cut. At a later stage in
+development, when puberty is attained and adolescence is feeling its way
+towards a complete adult maturity, the spiritual tie must be severed. It
+is absolutely essential that the young spirit should begin to essay its
+own wings. If its energy is not equal to this adventure, then it is the
+part of a truly loving parent to push it over the edge of the nest. Of
+course there are dangers and risks. But the worst dangers and risks come
+of the failure to adventure, of the refusal to face the tasks of the world
+and to assume the full function of life. All that Freud has told of the
+paralysing and maiming influence of infantile arrest or regression is here
+profitable to consider. In order, moreover, that the relationship between
+parents and children may retain its early beauty and love, it is essential
+that it shall adapt itself to adult conditions and the absence of ties so
+rendered necessary. Otherwise there is little likelihood of anything but
+friction and pain on one side or the other, and perhaps on both sides.
+
+[4] The varying customs of different peoples in this matter are set
+forth by Westermarck, _The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas_,
+Ch. XXV.
+
+The parents have not only to train their children: it is of at least equal
+importance that they should train themselves. It is desirable that
+children, as they grow up, should be alive to this necessity, and
+consciously assist in the process, since they are in closer touch with a
+new world of activities to which their more lethargic parents are often
+blind and deaf. For every fresh stage in our lives we need a fresh
+education, and there is no stage for which so little educational
+preparation is made as that which follows the reproductive period. Yet at
+no time--especially in women, who present all the various stages of the
+sexual life in so emphatic a form--would education be more valuable. The
+great burden of reproduction, with all its absorbing responsibilities, has
+suddenly been lifted; at the same time the perpetually recurring rhythm of
+physical sex manifestations, so often disturbing in its effect, finally
+ceases; with that cessation, very often, after a brief period of
+perturbation, there is an increase both in physical and mental energy.
+Yet, too often, all that one can see is that a vacuum has been created,
+and that there is nothing to fill it. The result is that the mother--for
+it is most often of the mother that complaint is made--devotes her own new
+found energies to the never-ending task of hampering and crushing her
+children's developing energies. How many mothers there are who bring to
+our minds that ancient and almost inspired statement concerning those for
+whom "Satan finds some mischief still"! They are wasting, worse than
+wasting, energies that might be profitably applied to all sorts of social
+service in the world. There is nothing that is so much needed as the
+"maternal in politics," or in all sorts of non-political channels of
+social service, and none can be better fitted for such service than those
+who have had an actual experience of motherhood and acquired the varied
+knowledge that such experience should give. There are numberless other
+ways, besides social service, in which mothers who have passed the age of
+forty, providing they possess the necessary aptitudes, can more profitably
+apply themselves than in hampering, or pampering, their adult children. It
+is by wisely cultivating their activities in a larger sphere that women
+whose chief duties in the narrower domestic sphere are over may better
+ensure their own happiness and the welfare of others than either by
+fretting and obstructing, or by worrying over, their own children who are
+no longer children. It is quite true that the children may go astray even
+when they have ceased to be children. But the time to implant the seeds of
+virtue, the time to convey a knowledge of life, was when they were small.
+If it was done well, it only remains to exercise faith and trust. If it
+was done ill, nothing done later will compensate, for it is merely foolish
+for a mother who could not educate her children when they were small to
+imagine that she is able to educate them when they are big.
+
+So it is that the problem of the attitude of the child to its parents
+circles round again to that of the parents to the child. The wise parent
+realises that childhood is simply a preparation for the free activities of
+later life, that the parents exist in order to equip children for life and
+not to shelter and protect them from the world into which they must be
+cast. Education, whatever else it should or should not be, must be an
+inoculation against the poisons of life and an adequate equipment in
+knowledge and skill for meeting the chances of life. Beyond that, and no
+doubt in the largest part, it is a natural growth and takes place of
+itself.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE MEANING OF PURITY
+
+I
+
+
+We live in a world in which, as we nowadays begin to realise, we find two
+antagonistic streams of traditional platitude concerning the question of
+sexual purity, both flowing from the far past.
+
+The people who embody one of these streams of tradition, basing themselves
+on old-fashioned physiology, assume, though they may not always assert,
+that the sexual products are excretions, to be dealt with summarily like
+other excretions. That is an ancient view and it was accepted by such wise
+philosophers of old times as Montaigne and Sir Thomas More. It had,
+moreover, the hearty support of so eminent a theological authority as
+Luther, who on this ground preached early marriage to men and women alike.
+It is still a popular view, sometimes expressed in the crudest terms, and
+often by people who, not following Luther's example, use it to defend
+prostitution, though they generally exclude women from its operation, as a
+sex to whom it fails to apply and by whom it is not required.
+
+But on the other hand we have another stream of platitude. On this side
+there is usually little attempt either to deny or to affirm the theory of
+the opposing party, though they would contradict its conclusions. Their
+theory, if they have one, would usually seem to be that sexual activity is
+a response to stimulation from without or from within, so that if there is
+no stimulation there will be no sexual manifestation. They would preach,
+they tell us, a strenuous ideal; they would set up a wholesome dictate of
+hygiene. The formula put forward on this basis usually runs: Continence is
+not only harmless but beneficial. It is a formula which, in one form or
+another, has received apparently enthusiastic approval in many quarters,
+even from distinguished physicians. We need not be surprised. A
+proposition so large and general is not easy to deny, and is still more
+difficult to reverse; therefore it proves welcome to the
+people--especially the people occupying public and professional
+positions--who wish to find the path of least resistance, under pressure
+of a vigorous section of public opinion. Yet in its vagueness the
+proposition is a little disingenuous; it condescends to no definitions and
+no qualifications; it fails even to make clear how it is to be reconciled
+with any enthusiastic approval of marriage, for if continence is beautiful
+how can marriage make it cease to be so?
+
+Both these streams of feeling, it may be noted, sprang from a common
+source far back in the primitive human world. All the emanations of the
+human body, all the spontaneous manifestations of its activities, were
+mysterious and ominous to early man, pregnant with terror unless met with
+immense precautions and surrounded by careful ritual. The manifestations
+of sex were the least intelligible and the most spontaneous. Therefore the
+things of sex were those that most lent themselves to feelings of horror
+and awe, of impurity and of purity. They seemed so highly charged with
+magic potency that there were no things that men more sought to avoid, yet
+none to which they were impelled to give more thought. The manifold echoes
+of that primitive conception of sex, and all the violent reactions that
+were thus evolved and eventually bound up with the original impulse,
+compose the streams of tradition that feed our modern world in this matter
+and determine the ideas of purity that surround us.
+
+At the present day the crude theory of the sexual impulse held on one
+side, and the ignorant rejection of theory altogether on the other side,
+are beginning to be seen as both alike unjustified. We begin to find the
+grounds for a sounder theory. Not indeed that the problems of sex, which
+go so deeply into the whole personal and social life, can ever be settled
+exclusively upon physiological grounds. But we have done much to prepare
+even the loftiest Building of Love when we have attained a clear view of
+its biological basis.
+
+The progress of chemico-physiological research during recent years has now
+brought us to new ground for our building. Indeed the image might well be
+changed altogether, and it might be said that science has entirely
+transferred the drama of reproduction to a new stage with new actors.
+Therewith the immense emphasis placed on excretion, and the inevitable
+reaction that emphasis aroused, both alike disappear. The sexual
+protagonists are no longer at the surface but within the most secret
+recesses of the organism, and they appear to science under the name of
+Hormones or Internal Secretions, always at work within and never
+themselves condescending to appear at all. Those products of the sexual
+glands which in both sexes are cast out of the body, and at an immature
+stage of knowledge appeared to be excretions, are of primary reproductive
+importance, but, as regards the sexual constitution of the individual,
+they are of far less importance than the internal secretions of these very
+same glands. It is, however, by no means only the specifically sexual
+glands which thus exert a sexual influence within the organism. Other
+glands in the brain, the throat, and the abdomen,--such as the thyroid and
+the adrenals,--are also elaborating fermentative secretions to throw into
+the system. Their mutual play is so elaborate that it is only beginning
+to be understood. Some internal secretions stimulate, others inhibit, and
+the same secretions may under different conditions do either. This fact is
+the source of many degrees and varieties of energy and formative power in
+the organism. Taken altogether, the internal secretions are the forces
+which build up the man's and woman's distinctively sexual constitution:
+the special disposition and growth of hair, the relative development of
+breasts and pelvis, the characteristic differences in motor activity, the
+varying emotional desires and needs. It is in the complex play of these
+secretions that we now seek the explanation of all the peculiarities of
+sexual constitution, imperfect or one-sided physical and psychic
+development, the various approximations of the male to female bodily and
+emotional disposition, of the female to the male, all the numerous
+gradations that occur, naturally as we now see, between the complete man
+and the complete woman.
+
+When we turn the light of this new conception on to our old ideas of
+purity,--to the virtue or the vice, accordingly as we may have been
+pleased to consider it, of sexual abstinence,--we begin to see that those
+ideas need radical revision. They appear in a new light, their whole
+meaning is changed. No doubt it may be said they never had the validity
+they appeared to possess, even when we judge them by the crudest
+criterion, that of practice. Thus, while it is the rule for physicians to
+proclaim the advantages of sexual continence, there is no good reason to
+believe that they have themselves practised it in any eminent degree. A
+few years ago an inquiry among thirty-five distinguished physicians,
+chiefly German and Russian, showed that they were nearly all of opinion
+that continence is harmless, if not beneficial. But Meirowsky found by
+inquiry of eighty-six physicians, of much the same nationalities, that
+only one had himself been sexually abstinent before marriage. There seem
+to be no similar statistics for the English-speaking countries, where
+there exists a greater modesty--though not perhaps notably less need for
+it--in the making of such confessions. But if we turn to the allied
+profession which is strongly on the side of sexual abstinence, we find
+that among theological students, as has been shown in the United States,
+while prostitution may be infrequent, no temptation is so frequent or so
+potent, and in most cases so irresistible, as that to solitary sexual
+indulgence. Such is the actual attitude towards the two least ideal forms
+of sexual practice--as distinguished from mere theory--on the part of the
+two professions which most definitely pronounce in favour of continence.
+
+It is necessary, however, as will now be clearer, to set our net more
+widely. We must take into consideration every form and degree of sexual
+manifestation, normal and abnormal, gross and ethereal. When we do this,
+even cautiously and without going far afield, sexual abstinence is found
+to be singularly elusive. Rohleder, a careful and conscientious
+investigator, has asserted that such abstinence, in the true and complete
+sense, is absolutely non-existent, the genuine cases in which sexual
+phenomena of some kind or other fail to manifest themselves being simply
+cases of inborn lack of sexual sensibility. He met, indeed, a few people
+who seemed exceptions to the general rule, but, on better knowledge, he
+found that he was mistaken, and that so far from being absent in these
+people the sexual instinct was present even in its crudest shapes. The
+activity of sex is an activity that on the physical side is generated by
+the complex mechanism of the ductless glands and displayed in the whole
+organism, physical and psychic, of the individual, who cannot abolish that
+activity, although to some extent able to regulate the forms in which it
+is manifested, so that purity cannot be the abolition or even the
+indefinite suspension of sexual manifestations; it must be the wise and
+beautiful control of them.
+
+It is becoming clear that the old platitudes can no longer be maintained,
+and that if we wish to improve our morals we must first improve our
+knowledge.
+
+
+II
+
+We have seen that various popular beliefs and conventional assumptions
+concerning the sexual impulse can no longer be maintained. The sexual
+activities of the organism are not mere responses to stimulation, absent
+if we choose to apply no stimulus, never troubling us if we run away from
+them, harmless if we enclose them within a high wall. Nor do they
+constitute a mere excretion, or a mere appetite, which we can control by a
+crude system of hygiene and dietetics. We better understand the
+psycho-sexual constitution if we regard the motive power behind it as a
+dynamic energy, produced and maintained by a complex mechanism at certain
+inner foci of the body, and realise that whatever periodic explosive
+manifestations may take place at the surface, the primary motive source
+lies in the intimate recesses of the organism, while the outcome is the
+whole physical and spiritual energy of our being under those aspects which
+are most forcible and most aspiring and even most ethereal.
+
+This conception, we find, is now receiving an admirable and beautifully
+adequate physical basis in the researches of distinguished physiologists
+in various lands concerning the parts played by the ductless glands of the
+body, in sensitive equilibrium with each other, pouring out into the
+system stimulating and inhibiting hormones, which not only confer on the
+man's or woman's body those specific sexual characters which we admire but
+at the same time impart the special tone and fibre and polarity of
+masculinity or femininity to the psychic disposition. Yet, even before
+Brown-Sequard's first epoch-making suggestion had set physiologists to
+search for internal secretions, the insight of certain physicians on the
+medico-psychological side was independently leading towards the same
+dynamic conception. In the middle of the last century Anstie, an acute
+London physician, more or less vaguely realised the transformations of
+sexual energy into nervous disease and into artistic energy. James Hinton,
+whose genius rendered him the precursor of many modern ideas, had
+definitely grasped the dynamic nature of sexual activity, and daringly
+proposed to utilise it, not only as a solution of the difficulties of the
+personal life but for the revolutionary transformation of morality.[5] It
+was the wish to group together all the far-flung manifestations of the
+inner irresistible process of sexual activity that underlay my own
+conception of _auto-erotism_, or the spontaneous erotic impulse which
+arises from the organism apart from all definite external stimulation, to
+be manifested, or it may be transformed, in mere solitary physical sex
+activity, in dreams of the night, in day-dreams, in shapes of literature
+and art, in symptoms of nervous disorder such as some forms of hysteria,
+and even in the most exalted phases of mystical devotion. Since then, a
+more elaborate attempt to develop a similar dynamic conception of sexual
+activity has been made by Freud; and the psycho-analysts who have followed
+him, or sometimes diverged, have with endless subtlety, and courageous
+thoroughness, traced the long and sinuous paths of sexual energy in
+personality and in life, indeed in all the main manifestations of human
+activity.
+
+[5] "The man who separated the thought of chastity from Service and made
+it revolve round Self," wrote Hinton half a century ago in his
+unpublished MSS., "betrayed the human race." "The rule of Self," he
+wrote again, "has two forms: Self-indulgence and Self-virtue; and Nature
+has two weapons against it: pain and pleasure.... A restraint must
+always be put away when another's need can be served by putting it away;
+for so is restored to us the force by which Life is made.... How curious
+it seems! the true evil things are our _good_ things. Our thoughts of
+duty and goodness and chastity, those are the things that need to be
+altered and put aside; these are the barriers to true goodness.... I
+foresee the positive denial of _all_ positive morals, the removal of
+_all_ restrictions. I feel I do not know what 'license,' as we should
+term it, may not truly belong to the perfect state of Man. When there is
+no self surely there is no restriction; as we see there is none in
+Nature.... May we not say of marriage as St. Augustine said of God:
+'Rather would I, not finding, find Thee, than finding, not find
+Thee'?... 'Because we like' is the sole legitimate and perfect motive of
+human action.... If this is what Nature affirms then it will be what I
+believe." This dynamic conception of the sexual impulse, as a force
+that, under natural conditions, may be trusted to build up a new
+morality, obviously belongs to an indefinitely remote future. It is a
+force whose blade is two-edged, for while it strikes at unselfishness it
+also strikes at selfishness, and at present we cannot easily conceive a
+time when "there is no self"; we should be more disposed to regard it as
+a time when there is much humbug. Yet for the individual this conception
+of the constructive power of love retains much enlightenment and
+inspiration.
+
+It is important for us to note about this dynamic sexual energy in the
+constitution that while it is very firmly and organically rooted, and
+quite indestructible, it assumes very various shapes. On the physical side
+all the characters of sexual distinction and all the beauties of sexual
+adornment are wrought by the power furnished by the co-operating furnaces
+of the glands, and so also, on the psychic side, are emotions and impulses
+which range from the simplest longings for sensual contact to the most
+exalted rapture of union with the Infinite. Moreover, there is a certain
+degree of correlation between the physical and the psychic manifestation
+of sexual energy, and, to some extent, transformation is possible in the
+embodiment of that energy.
+
+A vague belief in the transformation of sexual energy has long been
+widespread. It is apparently shown in the idea that continence, as an
+economy in the expenditure of sexual force, may be practised to aid the
+physical and mental development, while folklore reveals various sayings in
+regard to the supposed influence of sexual abstinence in the causation of
+insanity. There is a certain underlying basis of reason in such beliefs,
+though in an unqualified form they cannot be accepted, for they take no
+account of the complexity of the factors involved, of the difficulty and
+often impossibility of effecting any complete transformation, either in a
+desirable or undesirable direction, and of the serious conflict which the
+process often involves. The psycho-analysts have helped us here. Whether
+or not we accept their elaborate and often shifting conceptions, they have
+emphasised and developed a psychological conception of sexual energy and
+its transformations, before only vaguely apprehended, which is now seen to
+harmonise with the modern physiological view.
+
+The old notion that sexual activity is merely a matter of the voluntary
+exercise, or abstinence from exercise, of the reproductive functions of
+adult persons has too long obstructed any clear vision of the fact that
+sexuality, in the wide and deep sense, is independent of the developments
+of puberty. This has long been accepted as an occasional and therefore
+abnormal fact, but we have to recognise that it is true, almost or quite
+normally, even of early childhood. No doubt we must here extend the word
+"sexuality"[6]--in what may well be considered an illegitimate way--to
+cover manifestations which in the usual sense are not sexual or are at
+most called "sexual perversions." But this extension has a certain
+justification in view of the fact that these manifestations can be seen to
+be definitely related to the ordinary adult forms of sexuality. However
+we define it, we have to recognise that the child takes the same kind of
+pleasure in those functions which are natural to his age as the adult is
+capable of taking in localised sexual functions, that he may weave ideas
+around such functions, sometimes cultivate their exercise from love of
+luxury, make them the basis of day-dreams which at puberty, when the
+ideals of adult life are ready to capture his sexual energy, he begins to
+grow ashamed of.
+
+[6] Perhaps, as applied to the period below puberty, it would be more
+exact to say "pseudo-sexuality." Matsumato has lately pointed out the
+significance of the fact that the interstitial testicular tissue,
+essential to the hormonic function of the testes, only becomes active at
+puberty.
+
+At this stage, indeed, we reach a crucial point, though it has usually
+been overlooked, in the lives of boys and girls, more especially those
+whose heredity may have been a little tainted or their upbringing a little
+twisted. For it is here that the transformation of energy and the
+resulting possibilities of conflict are wont to enter. In the harmoniously
+developing organism, one may say, there is at this period a gradual and
+easy transmutation of the childish pleasurable activities into adult
+activities, accompanied perhaps by a feeling of shame for the earlier
+feelings, though this quickly passes into a forgetfulness which often
+leads the adult far astray when he attempts to understand the psychic life
+of the child. The childish manifestations, it must be remarked, are not
+necessarily unwholesome; they probably perform a valuable function and
+develop budding sexual emotions, just as the petals of flowers are
+developed in pale and contorted shapes beneath the enveloping sheaths.
+
+But in our human life the transmutation is often not so easy as in
+flowers. Normally, indeed, the adolescent transformations of sex are so
+urgent and so manifold--now definite sensual desire, now muscular impulses
+of adventure, now emotional aspirations in the sphere of art or
+religion--that they easily overwhelm and absorb all its vaguer and more
+twisted manifestations in childhood. Yet it may happen that by some
+aberration of internal development or of external influence this
+conversion of energy may at one point or another fail to be completely
+effected. Then some fragment of infantile sexuality survives, in rare
+cases to turn all the adult faculties to its service and become reckless
+and triumphant, in minor and more frequent cases to be subordinated and
+more or less repressed into the subconscious sphere by voluntary or even
+involuntary and unconscious effort. Then we may have conflict, which, when
+it works happily, exerts a fortifying and ennobling influence on
+character, when more unhappily a disturbing influence which may even lead
+to conditions of definite nervous disorder.
+
+The process by which this fundamental sexual energy is elevated from
+elementary and primitive forms into complex and developed forms is termed
+sublimation, a term, originally used for the process of raising by heat a
+solid substance to the state of vapour, which was applied even by such
+early writers as Drayton and Davies in a metaphorical and spiritual
+sense.[7] In the sexual sphere sublimation is of vital importance because
+it comes into question throughout the whole of life, and our relation to
+it must intimately affect our conception of morality. The element of
+athletic asceticism which is a part of all virility, and is found
+even--indeed often in a high degree--among savages, has its main moral
+justification as one aid to sublimation. Throughout life sublimation acts
+by transforming some part at all events of the creative sexual energy from
+its elementary animal manifestations into more highly individual and
+social manifestations, or at all events into finer forms of sexual
+activity, forms that seem to us more beautiful and satisfy us more widely.
+Purity, we thus come to see is, in one aspect, the action of sublimation,
+not abolishing sexual activity, but lifting it into forms of which our
+best judgment may approve.
+
+[7] We may gather the history of the term from the _Oxford Dictionary_.
+Bodies, said Davies, are transformed to spirit "by sublimation strange,"
+and Ben Jonson in _Cynthia's Revels_ spoke of a being "sublimated and
+refined"; Purchas and Jackson, early in the same seventeenth century,
+referred to religion as "sublimating" human nature, and Jeremy Taylor, a
+little later, to "subliming" marriage into a sacrament; Shaftesbury,
+early in the eighteenth century, spoke of human nature being "sublimated
+by a sort of spiritual chemists" and Welton, a little later, of "a love
+sublimate and refined," while, finally, and altogether in our modern
+sense, Peacock in 1816 in his _Headlong Hall_ referred to "that
+enthusiastic sublimation which is the source of greatness and energy."
+
+We must not suppose--as is too often assumed--that sublimation can be
+carried out easily, completely, or even with unmixed advantage. If it were
+so, certainly the old-fashioned moralist would be confronted by few
+difficulties, but we have ample reason to believe that it is not so. It is
+with sexual energy, well observes Freud, who yet attaches great importance
+to sublimation, as it is with heat in our machines: only a certain
+proportion can be transformed into work. Or, as it is put by Loewenfeld,
+who is not a constructive philosopher but a careful and cautious medical
+investigator, the advantages of sublimation are not received in specially
+high degree by those who permanently deny to their sexual impulse every
+natural direct relief. The celibate Catholic clergy, notwithstanding their
+heroic achievements in individual cases, can scarcely be said to display a
+conspicuous excess of intellectual energy, on the whole, over the
+non-celibate Protestant clergy; or, if we compare the English clergy
+before and after the Protestant Reformation, though the earlier period may
+reveal more daring and brilliant personages, the whole intellectual output
+of the later Church may claim comparison with that of the earlier Church.
+There are clearly other factors at work besides sublimation, and even
+sublimation may act most potently, not when the sexual activities sink or
+are driven into a tame and monotonous subordination, but rather when they
+assume a splendid energy which surges into many channels. Yet sublimation
+is a very real influence, not only in its more unconscious and profound
+operations, but in its more immediate and temporary applications, as part
+of an athletic discipline, acting best perhaps when it acts most
+automatically, to utilise the motor energy of the organism in the
+attainment of any high physical or psychic achievement.
+
+We have to realise, however, that these transmutations do not only take
+place by way of a sublimation of sexual energy, but also by way of a
+degradation of that energy. The new form of energy produced, that is to
+say, may not be of a beneficial kind; it may be of a mischievous kind, a
+form of perversion or disease. Sexual self-denial, instead of leading to
+sublimation, may lead to nervous disorder when the erotic tension, failing
+to find a natural outlet and not sublimated to higher erotic or non-erotic
+ends in the real world, is transmuted into an unreal dreamland, thus
+undergoing what Jung terms introversion; while there are also the people
+already referred to, in whom immature childish sexuality persists into an
+adult stage of development it is no longer altogether in accord with, so
+that conflict, with various possible trains of nervous symptoms, may
+result. Disturbances and conflicts in the emotional sexual field may, we
+know, in these and similar ways become transformed into physical symptoms
+of disorder which can be seen to have a precise symbolic relationship to
+definite events in the patient's emotional history, while fits of nervous
+terror, or anxiety-neurosis, may frequently be regarded as a degradation
+of thwarted or disturbed sexual energy, manifesting its origin by
+presenting a picture of sexual excitation transposed into a non-sexual
+shape of an entirely useless or mischievous character.
+
+Thus, to sum up, we may say that the sexual energy of the organism is a
+mighty force, automatically generated throughout life. Under healthy
+conditions that force is transmuted in more or less degree, but never
+entirely, into forms that further the development of the individual and
+the general ends of life. These transformations are to some extent
+automatic, to some extent within the control of personal guidance. But
+there are limits to such guidance, for the primitive human personality can
+never be altogether rendered an artificial creature of civilisation. When
+these limits are reached the transmutation of sexual energy may become
+useless or even dangerous, and we fail to attain the exquisite flower of
+Purity.
+
+
+III
+
+It may seem that in setting forth the nature of the sexual impulse in the
+light of modern biology and psychology, I have said but little of purity
+and less of morality. Yet that is as it should be. We must first be
+content to see how the machine works and watch the wheels go round. We
+must understand before we can pretend to control; in the natural world, as
+Bacon long ago said, we can only command by obeying. Moreover, in this
+field Nature's order is far older and more firmly established than our
+civilised human morality. In our arrogance we often assume that Morality
+is the master of Nature. Yet except when it is so elementary or
+fundamental as to be part of Nature, it is but a guide, and a guide that
+is only a child, so young, so capricious, that in every age its wayward
+hand has sought to pull Nature in a different direction. Even only in
+order to guide we must first see and know.
+
+We realise that never more than when we observe the distinction which
+conventional sex-morals so often makes between men and women. Failing to
+find in women exactly the same kind of sexual emotions, as they find in
+themselves, men have concluded that there are none there at all. So man
+has regarded himself as the sexual animal, and woman as either the passive
+object of his adoring love or the helpless victim of his degrading lust,
+in either case as a being who, unlike man, possessed an innocent "purity"
+by nature, without any need for the trouble of acquiring it. Of woman as a
+real human being, with sexual needs and sexual responsibilities, morality
+has often known nothing. It has been content to preach restraint to man,
+an abstract and meaningless restraint even if it were possible. But when
+we have regard to the actual facts of life, we can no longer place virtue
+in a vacuum. Women are just as apt as men to be afflicted by the petty
+jealousies and narrownesses of the crude sexual impulse; women just as
+much as men need the perpetual sublimation of erotic desire into forms of
+more sincere purity, of larger harmony, in gaining which ends all the
+essential ends of morality are alone gained. The delicate adjustment of
+the needs of each sex to the needs of the other sex to the end of what
+Chaucer called fine loving, the adjustment of the needs of both sexes to
+the larger ends of fine living, may well furnish a perpetual moral
+discipline which extends its fortifying influence to men and women alike.
+
+It is this universality of sexual emotion, blending in its own mighty
+stream, as is now realised, many other currents of emotion, even the
+parental and the filial, and traceable even in childhood,--the wide
+efflorescence of an energy constantly generated by a vital internal
+mechanism,--which renders vain all attempts either to suppress or to
+ignore the problem of sex, however immensely urgent we might foolishly
+imagine such attempts to be. Even the history of the early Christian
+ascetics in Egypt, as recorded in the contemporary _Paradise_ of
+Palladius, illustrates the futility of seeking to quench the unquenchable,
+the flame of fire which is life itself. These "athletes of the Lord" were
+under the best possible conditions for the conquest of lust; they had been
+driven into the solitude of the desert by a genuine deeply-felt impulse,
+they could regulate their lives as they would, and they possessed an
+almost inconceivable energy of resolution. They were prepared to live on
+herbs, even to eat grass, and to undertake any labour of self-denial. They
+were so scrupulous that we hear of a holy man who would even efface a
+woman's footprints in the sand lest a brother might thereby be led into
+thoughts of evil. Yet they were perpetually tempted to seductive visions
+and desires, even after a monastic life of forty years, and the women seem
+to have been not less liable to yield to temptation than the men.
+
+It may be noted that in the most perfect saints there has not always been
+a complete suppression of the sexual impulse even on the normal plane, nor
+even, in some cases, the attempt at such complete suppression. In the
+early days of Christianity the exercise of chastity was frequently
+combined with a close and romantic intimacy of affection between the
+sexes which shocked austere moralists. Even in the eleventh century we
+find that the charming and saintly Robert of Arbrissel, founder of the
+order of Fontevrault, would often sleep with his nuns, notwithstanding the
+remonstrances of pious friends who thought he was displaying too heroic a
+manifestation of continence, failing to understand that he was effecting a
+sweet compromise with continence. If, moreover, we consider the rarest and
+finest of the saints we usually find that in their early lives there was a
+period of full expansion of the organic activities in which all the
+natural impulses had full play. This was the case with the two greatest
+and most influential saints of the Christian Church, St. Augustine and St.
+Francis of Assisi, absolutely unlike as they were in most other respects.
+Sublimation, we see again and again, is limited, and the best developments
+of the spiritual life are not likely to come about by the rigid attempt to
+obtain a complete transmutation of sexual energy.
+
+The old notion that any strict attempt to adhere to sexual abstinence is
+beset by terrible risks, insanity and so forth, has no foundation, at all
+events where we are concerned with reasonably sound and healthy people.
+But it is a very serious error to suppose that the effort to achieve
+complete and prolonged sexual abstinence is without any bad results at
+all, physical or psychic, either in men or women who are normal and
+healthy. This is now generally recognised everywhere, except in the
+English-speaking countries, where the supposed interests of a prudish
+morality often lead to a refusal to look facts in the face. As Professor
+Naecke, a careful and cautious physician, stated shortly before his death,
+a few years ago, the opinion that sexual abstinence has no bad effects is
+not to-day held by a single authority on questions of sex; the fight is
+only concerned with the nature and degree of the bad effects which, in
+Naecke's belief--and he was doubtless right--are never of a gravely serious
+character.
+
+Yet we have also to remember that not only, as we have seen, is the effort
+to achieve complete abstinence--which we ignorantly term "purity"--futile,
+since we are concerned with a force which is being constantly generated
+within the organism, but in the effort to achieve it we are abusing a
+great source of beneficent energy. We lose more than half of what we might
+gain when we cover it up, and try to push it back, to produce, it may be,
+not harmonious activity in the world, but merely internal confusion and
+distortion, and perhaps the paralysis of half the soul's energy. The
+sexual activities of the organism, we cannot too often repeat, constitute
+a mighty source of energy which we can never altogether repress though by
+wise guidance we may render it an aid not only to personal development
+and well-being but to the moral betterment of the world. The attraction of
+sex, according to a superstition which reaches far back into antiquity, is
+a baleful comet pointing to destruction, rather than a mighty star to
+which we may harness our chariot. It may certainly be either, and which it
+is likely to become depends largely on our knowledge and our power of
+self-guidance.
+
+In old days when, as we have seen, tradition, aided by the most fantastic
+superstitions, insisted on the baleful aspects of sex, the whole emphasis
+was placed against passion. Since knowledge and self-guidance, without
+which passion is likely to be in fact pernicious, were then usually
+absent, the emphasis was needed, and when Boehme, the old mystic, declared
+that the art of living is to "harness our fiery energies to the service of
+the light," it has recently been even maintained that he was the solitary
+pioneer of our modern doctrines. But the ages in which ill-regulated
+passion exceeded--ages at least full of vitality and energy--gave place to
+a more anaemic society. To-day the conditions are changed, even reversed.
+Moral maxims that were wholesome in feudal days are deadly now. We are in
+no danger of suffering from too much vitality, from too much energy in the
+explosive splendour of our social life. We possess, moreover, knowledge
+in plenty and self-restraint in plenty, even in excess, however wrongly
+they may sometimes be applied. It is passion, more passion and fuller,
+that we need. The moralist who bans passion is not of our time; his place
+these many years is with the dead. For we know what happens in a world
+when those who ban passion have triumphed. When Love is suppressed Hate
+takes its place. The least regulated orgies of Love grow innocent beside
+the orgies of Hate. When nations that might well worship one another cut
+one another's throats, when Cruelty and Self-righteousness and Lying and
+Injustice and all the Powers of Destruction rule the human heart, the
+world is devastated, the fibre of the whole organism, of society grows
+flaccid, and all the ideals of civilisation are debased. If the world is
+not now sick of Hate we may be sure it never will be; so whatever may
+happen to the world let us remember that the individual is still left, to
+carry on the tasks of Love, to do good even in an evil world.
+
+It is more passion and ever more that we need if we are to undo the work
+of Hate, if we are to add to the gaiety and splendour of life, to the sum
+of human achievement, to the aspiration of human ecstasy. The things that
+fill men and women with beauty and exhilaration, and spur them to actions
+beyond themselves, are the things that are now needed. The entire
+intrinsic purification of the soul, it was held by the great Spanish
+Jesuit theologian, Suarez, takes place at the moment when, provided the
+soul is of good disposition, it sees God; he meant after death, but for us
+the saying is symbolic of the living truth. It is only in the passion of
+facing the naked beauty of the world and its naked truth that we can win
+intrinsic purity. Not all, indeed, who look upon the face of God can live.
+It is not well that they should live. It is only the metals that can be
+welded in the fire of passion to finer services that the world needs. It
+would be well that the rest should be lost in those flames. That indeed
+were a world fit to perish, wherein the moralist had set up the ignoble
+maxim: Safety first.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE OBJECTS OF MARRIAGE
+
+
+What are the legitimate objects of marriage? We know that many people seek
+to marry for ends that can scarcely be called legitimate, that men may
+marry to obtain a cheap domestic drudge or nurse, and that women may marry
+to be kept when they are tired of keeping themselves. These objects in
+marriage may or may not be moral, but in any case they are scarcely its
+legitimate ends. We are here concerned to ascertain those ends of marriage
+which are legitimate when we take the highest ground as moral and
+civilised men and women living in an advanced state of society and
+seeking, if we can, to advance that state of society still further.
+
+The primary end of marriage is to beget and bear offspring, and to rear
+them until they are able to take care of themselves. On that basis Man is
+at one with all the mammals and most of the birds. If, indeed, we
+disregard the originally less essential part of this end--that is to say,
+the care and tending of the young--this end of marriage is not only the
+primary but usually the sole end of sexual intercourse in the whole
+mammal world. As a natural instinct, its achievement involves
+gratification and well-being, but this bait of gratification is merely a
+device of Nature's and not in itself an end having any useful function at
+the periods when conception is not possible. This is clearly indicated by
+the fact that among animals the female only experiences sexual desire at
+the season of impregnation, and that desire ceases as soon as impregnation
+takes place, though this is only in a few species true of the male,
+obviously because, if his sexual desire and aptitude were confined to so
+brief a period, the chances of the female meeting the right male at the
+right moment would be too seriously diminished; so that the attentive and
+inquisitive attitude towards the female by the male animal--which we may
+often think we see still traceable in the human species--is not the
+outcome of lustfulness for personal gratification ("wantonly to satisfy
+carnal lusts and appetites like brute beasts," as the Anglican Prayer Book
+incorrectly puts it) but implanted by Nature for the benefit of the female
+and the attainment of the primary object of procreation. This primary
+object we may term the animal end of marriage.
+
+This object remains not only the primary but even the sole end of marriage
+among the lower races of mankind generally. The erotic idea, in its deeper
+sense, that is to say the element of love, arose very slowly in mankind.
+It is found, it is true, among some lower races, and it appears that some
+tribes possess a word for the joy of love in a purely psychic sense. But
+even among European races the evolution was late. The Greek poets, except
+the latest, showed little recognition of love as an element of marriage.
+Theognis compared marriage with cattle-breeding. The Romans of the
+Republic took much the same view. Greeks and Romans alike regarded
+breeding as the one recognisable object of marriage; any other object was
+mere wantonness and had better, they thought, be carried on outside
+marriage. Religion, which preserves so many ancient and primitive
+conceptions of life, has consecrated this conception also, and
+Christianity--though, as I will point out later, it has tended to enlarge
+the conception--at the outset only offered the choice between celibacy on
+the one hand and on the other marriage for the production of offspring.
+
+Yet, from, an early period in human history, a secondary function of
+sexual intercourse had been slowly growing up to become one of the great
+objects of marriage. Among animals, it may be said, and even sometimes in
+man, the sexual impulse, when once aroused, makes but a short and swift
+circuit through the brain to reach its consummation. But as the brain and
+its faculties develop, powerfully aided indeed by the very difficulties
+of the sexual life, the impulse for sexual union has to traverse ever
+longer, slower, more painful paths, before it reaches--and sometimes it
+never reaches--its ultimate object. This means that sex gradually becomes
+intertwined with all the highest and subtlest human emotions and
+activities, with the refinements of social intercourse, with high
+adventure in every sphere, with art, with religion. The primitive animal
+instinct, having the sole end of procreation, becomes on its way to that
+end the inspiring stimulus to all those psychic energies which in
+civilisation we count most precious. This function is thus, we see, a
+by-product. But, as we know, even in our human factories, the by-product
+is sometimes more valuable than the product. That is so as regards the
+functional products of human evolution. The hand was produced out of the
+animal forelimb with the primary end of grasping the things we materially
+need, but as a by-product the hand has developed the function of making
+and playing the piano and the violin, and that secondary functional
+by-product of the hand we account, even as measured by the rough test of
+money, more precious, however less materially necessary, than its primary
+function. It is, however, only in rare and gifted natures that transformed
+sexual energy becomes of supreme value for its own sake without ever
+attaining the normal physical outlet. For the most part the by-product
+accompanies the product, throughout, thus adding a secondary, yet
+peculiarly sacred and specially human, object of marriage to its primary
+animal object. This may be termed the spiritual object of marriage.
+
+By the term "spiritual" we are not to understand any mysterious and
+supernatural qualities. It is simply a convenient name, in distinction
+from animal, to cover all those higher mental and emotional processes
+which in human evolution are ever gaining greater power. It is needless to
+enumerate the constituents of this spiritual end of sexual intercourse,
+for everyone is entitled to enumerate them differently and in different
+order. They include not only all that makes love a gracious and beautiful
+erotic art, but the whole element of pleasure in so far as pleasure is
+more than a mere animal gratification. Our ancient ascetic traditions
+often make us blind to the meaning of pleasure. We see only its
+possibilities of evil and not its mightiness for good. We forget that, as
+Romain Rolland says, "Joy is as holy as Pain." No one has insisted so much
+on the supreme importance of the element of pleasure in the spiritual ends
+of sex as James Hinton. Rightly used, he declares, Pleasure is "the Child
+of God," to be recognised as a "mighty storehouse of force," and he
+pointed out the significant fact that in the course of human progress its
+importance increases rather than diminishes.[8] While it is perfectly true
+that sexual energy may be in large degree arrested, and transformed into
+intellectual and moral forms, yet it is also true that pleasure itself,
+and above all, sexual pleasure, wisely used and not abused, may prove the
+stimulus and liberator of our finest and most exalted activities. It is
+largely this remarkable function of sexual pleasure which is decisive in
+settling the argument of those who claim that continence is the only
+alternative to the animal end of marriage. That argument ignores the
+liberating and harmonising influences, giving wholesome balance and sanity
+to the whole organism, imparted by a sexual union which is the outcome of
+the psychic as well as physical needs. There is, further, in the
+attainment of the spiritual end of marriage, much more than the benefit of
+each individual separately. There is, that is to say, the effect on the
+union itself. For through harmonious sex relationships a deeper spiritual
+unity is reached than can possibly be derived from continence in or out of
+marriage, and the marriage association becomes an apter instrument in the
+service of the world. Apart from any sexual craving, the complete
+spiritual contact of two persons who love each other can only be attained
+through some act of rare intimacy. No act can be quite so intimate as the
+sexual embrace. In its accomplishment, for all who have reached a
+reasonably human degree of development, the communion of bodies becomes
+the communion of souls. The outward and visible sign has been the
+consummation of an inward and spiritual grace. "I would base all my sex
+teaching to children and young people on the beauty and sacredness of
+sex," wrote a distinguished woman; "sex intercourse is the great sacrament
+of life, he that eateth and drinketh unworthily eateth and drinketh his
+own damnation; but it may be the most beautiful sacrament between two
+souls who have no thought of children."[9] To many the idea of a sacrament
+seems merely ecclesiastical, but that is a misunderstanding. The word
+"sacrament" is the ancient Roman name of a soldier's oath of military
+allegiance, and the idea, in the deeper sense, existed long before
+Christianity, and has ever been regarded as the physical sign of the
+closest possible union with some great spiritual reality. From our modern
+standpoint we may say, with James Hinton, that the sexual embrace,
+worthily understood, can only be compared with music and with prayer.
+"Every true lover," it has been well said by a woman, "knows this, and the
+worth of any and every relationship can be judged by its success in
+reaching, or failing to reach, this standpoint."[10]
+
+[8] Mrs. Havelock Ellis, _James Hinton: A Sketch_, Ch. IV.
+
+[9] Olive Schreiner in a personal letter.
+
+[10] Mrs. Havelock Ellis, _James Hinton_, p. 180.
+
+I have mentioned how the Church--in part influenced by that clinging to
+primitive conceptions which always marks religions and in part by its
+ancient traditions of asceticism--tended to insist mainly, if not
+exclusively, on the animal object of marriage. It sought to reduce sex to
+a minimum because the pagans magnified sex; it banned pleasure because the
+Christian's path on earth was the way of the Cross; and even if
+theologians accepted the idea of a "Sacrament of Nature" they could only
+allow it to operate when the active interference of the priest was
+impossible, though it must in justice be said that, before the Council of
+Trent, the Western Church recognised that the sacrament of marriage was
+effected entirely by the act of the two celebrants themselves and not by
+the priest. Gradually, however, a more reasonable and humane opinion crept
+into the Church. Intercourse outside the animal end of marriage was indeed
+a sin, but it became merely a venial sin. The great influence of St.
+Augustine was on the side of allowing much freedom to intercourse outside
+the aim of procreation. At the Reformation, John a Lasco, a Catholic
+Bishop who became a Protestant and settled in England, laid it down,
+following various earlier theologians, that the object of marriage,
+besides offspring, was to serve as a "sacrament of consolation" to the
+united couple, and that view was more or less accepted by the founders of
+the Protestant churches. It is the generally accepted Protestant view
+to-day.[11] The importance of the spiritual end of intercourse in
+marriage, alike for the higher development of each member of the couple
+and for the intimacy and stability of their union, is still more
+emphatically set forth by the more advanced thinkers of to-day.
+
+[11] It is well set forth by the Rev. H. Northcote in his excellent
+book, _Christianity and Sex Problems_.
+
+There is something pathetic in the spectacle of those among us who are
+still only able to recognise the animal end of marriage, and who point to
+the example of the lower animals--among whom the biological conditions are
+entirely different--as worthy of our imitation. It has taken God--or
+Nature, if we will--unknown millions of years of painful struggle to
+evolve Man, and to raise the human species above that helpless bondage to
+reproduction which marks the lower animals. But on these people it has all
+been wasted. They are at the animal stage still. They have yet to learn
+the A.B.C. of love. A representative of these people in the person of an
+Anglican bishop, the Bishop of Southwark, appeared as a witness before the
+National Birth-Rate Commission which, a few years ago, met in London to
+investigate the decline of the birth-rate. He declared that procreation is
+the sole legitimate object of marriage and that intercourse for any other
+end was a degrading act of mere "self-gratification." This declaration
+had the interesting result of evoking the comments of many members of the
+Commission, formed of representative men and women with various
+stand-points--Protestant, Catholic, and other--and it is notable that
+while not one identified himself with the Bishop's opinion, several
+decisively opposed that opinion, as contrary to the best beliefs of both
+ancient and modern times, as representing a low and not a high moral
+standpoint, and as involving the notion that the whole sexual activity of
+an individual should be reduced to perhaps two or three effective acts of
+intercourse in a lifetime. Such a notion obviously cannot be carried into
+general practice, putting aside the question as to whether it would be
+desirable, and it may be added that it would have the further result of
+shutting out from the life of love altogether all those persons who, for
+whatever reason, feel that it is their duty to refrain from having
+children at all. It is the attitude of a handful of Pharisees seeking to
+thrust the bulk of mankind into Hell. All this confusion and evil comes of
+the blindness which cannot know that, beyond the primary animal end of
+propagation in marriage, there is a secondary but more exalted spiritual
+end.
+
+It is needless to insist how intimately that secondary end of marriage is
+bound up with the practice of birth-control. Without birth-control,
+indeed, it could frequently have no existence at all, and even at the
+best seldom be free from disconcerting possibilities fatal to its very
+essence. Against these disconcerting possibilities is often placed, on the
+other side, the un-aesthetic nature of the contraceptives associated with
+birth-control. Yet, it must be remembered, they are of a part with the
+whole of our civilised human life. We at no point enter the spiritual save
+through the material. Forel has in this connection compared the use of
+contraceptives to the use of eye-glasses. Eye-glasses are equally
+un-aesthetic, yet they are devices, based on Nature, wherewith to
+supplement the deficiencies of Nature. However in themselves un-aesthetic,
+for those who need them they make the aesthetic possible. Eye-glasses and
+contraceptives alike are a portal to the spiritual world for many who,
+without them, would find that world largely a closed book.
+
+Birth-control is effecting, and promising to effect, many functions in our
+social life. By furnishing the means to limit the size of families, which
+would otherwise be excessive, it confers the greatest benefit on the
+family and especially on the mother. By rendering easily possible a
+selection in parentage and the choice of the right time and circumstances
+for conception it is, again, the chief key to the eugenic improvement of
+the race. There are many other benefits, as is now generally becoming
+clear, which will be derived from the rightly applied practice of
+birth-control. To many of us it is not the least of these that
+birth-control effects finally the complete liberation of the spiritual
+object of marriage.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+HUSBANDS AND WIVES
+
+
+It has always been common to discuss the psychology of women. The
+psychology of men has usually been passed over, whether because it is too
+simple or too complicated. But the marriage question to-day is much less
+the wife-problem than the husband-problem. Women in their personal and
+social activities have been slowly expanding along lines which are now
+generally accepted. But there has been no marked change of responsive
+character in the activities of men. Hence a defective adjustment of men
+and women, felt in all sorts of subtle as well as grosser ways, most felt
+when they are husband and wife, and sometimes becoming acute.
+
+It is necessary to make clear that, as is here assumed at the outset,
+"man" and "husband" are not quite the same thing, even when they refer to
+the same person. No doubt that is also true of "woman" and "wife." A woman
+in her quality as woman may be a different kind of person from what she is
+in her function as wife. But in the case of a man the distinction is more
+marked. One may know a man well in the world as a man and not know him at
+all in his home as a husband; not necessarily that he is unfavourably
+revealed in the latter capacity. It is simply that he is different.
+
+The explanation is not really far to seek. A man in the world is in vital
+response to the influences around him. But a husband in the home is
+playing a part which was created for him long centuries before he was
+born. He is falling into a convention, which, indeed, was moulded to fit
+many masculine human needs but has become rigidly traditionalised. Thus
+the part no longer corresponds accurately to the player's nature nor to
+the circumstances under which it has to be played.
+
+In the marriage system which has prevailed in our world for several
+thousand years, a certain hierarchy, or sacred order in authority, has
+throughout been recognised. The family has been regarded as a small State
+of which the husband and father is head. Classic paganism and Christianity
+differed on many points, but they were completely at one on this. The
+Roman system was on a patriarchal basis and continued to be so
+theoretically even when in practise it came to allow great independence to
+the wife. Christianity, although it allowed complete spiritual freedom to
+the individual, introduced no fundamentally new theory of the family, and,
+indeed, re-inforced the old theory by regarding the family as a little
+church of which the husband was the head. Just as Christ is the head of
+the Church, St. Paul repeatedly asserted, so the husband is the head of
+the wife; therefore, as it was constantly argued during the Middle Ages, a
+man is bound to rule his wife. St. Augustine, the most influential of
+Christian Fathers, even said that a wife should be proud to consider
+herself as the servant of her husband, his _ancilla_, a word that had in
+it the suggestion of slave. That was the underlying assumption throughout
+the Middle Ages, for the Northern Germanic peoples, having always been
+accustomed to wife-purchase before their conversion, had found it quite
+easy to assimilate the Christian view. Protestantism, even Puritanism with
+its associations of spiritual revolt, so far from modifying the accepted
+attitude, strengthened it, for they found authority for all social
+organisation in the Bible, and the Bible revealed an emphatic predominance
+of the Jewish husband, who possessed essential rights to which the wife
+had no claim. Milton, who had the poet's sensitiveness to the loveliness
+of woman, and the lonely man's feeling for the solace of her society, was
+yet firmly assured of the husband's superiority over his wife. He has
+indeed furnished the classical picture of it in Adam and Eve,
+
+    "He for God only, she for God in him,"
+
+and to that God she owed "subjection," even though she might qualify it
+by "sweet reluctant amorous delay." This was completely in harmony with
+the legal position of the wife. As a subject she was naturally in
+subjection; she owed her husband the same loyalty as a subject owes the
+sovereign; her disloyalty to him was termed a minor form of treason; if
+she murdered him the crime was legally worse than murder and she rendered
+herself liable to be burnt.
+
+We see that all the influences on our civilisation, religious and secular,
+southern and northern, have combined to mould the underlying bony
+structure of our family system in such a way that, however it may appear
+softened and disguised on the surface, the husband is the head and the
+wife subject to him. We must not be supposed hereby to deny that the wife
+has had much authority, many privileges, considerable freedom, and in
+individual cases much opportunity to domineer, whatever superiority custom
+or brute strength may have given the husband. There are henpecked
+husbands, it has been remarked, even in aboriginal Australia. It is
+necessary to avoid the error of those enthusiasts for the emancipation of
+women who, out of their eager faith in the future of women, used to
+describe her past as one of scarcely mitigated servitude and hardship. If
+women had not constantly succeeded in overcoming or eluding the
+difficulties that beset them in the past, it would be foolish to cherish
+any faith in their future. It must, moreover, be remembered that the very
+constitution of that ecclesiastico-feudal hierarchy which made the husband
+supreme over the wife, also made the wife jointly with her husband supreme
+over their children and over their servants. The Middle Ages, alike in
+England and in France, as doubtless in Christendom generally, accepted the
+rule laid down in Gratian's _Decretum_, the great mediaeval text-book of
+Canon Law, that "the husband may chastise his wife temperately, for she is
+of his household," but the wife might chastise her daughters and her
+servants, and she sometimes exercised that right in ways that we should
+nowadays think scarcely temperate.
+
+If we seek to observe how the system worked some five hundred years ago
+when it had not yet become, as it is to-day, both weakened and disguised,
+we cannot do better than turn to the _Paston Letters_, the most
+instructive documents we possess concerning the domestic life of excellent
+yet fairly average people of the upper middle class in England in the
+fifteenth century. Marriage was still frankly and fundamentally (as it was
+in the following century and less frankly later) a commercial transaction.
+The wooer, when he had a wife in view, stated as a matter of course that
+he proposed to "deal" in the matter; it was quite recognised on both sides
+that love and courtship must depend on whether the "deal" came off
+satisfactorily. John Paston approached Sir Thomas Brews, through a third
+person, with a view to negotiate a marriage with his daughter Margery. She
+was willing, even eager, and while the matter was still uncertain she
+wrote him a letter on Valentine's Day, addressing him as "Right reverent
+and worshipful and my right well-beloved Valentine," to tell him that it
+was impossible for her father to offer a larger dowry than he had already
+promised. "If that you could be content with that good, and my poor
+person, I would be the merriest maiden on ground." In his first
+letter--boldly written, he says, without her knowledge or license--he
+addresses her simply as "Mistress," and assures her that "I am and will be
+yours and at your commandment in every wise during my life." A few weeks
+later, addressing him as "Right worshipful master," she calls him "mine
+own sweetheart," and ends up, as she frequently does, "your servant and
+bedeswoman." Some months later, a few weeks after marriage, she addresses
+her husband in the correct manner of the time as "Right reverent and
+worshipful husband," asking him to buy her a gown as she is weary of
+wearing her present one, it is so cumbrous. Five years later she refers to
+"all" the babies, and writes in haste: "Right reverent and worshipful Sir,
+in my most humble wise I recommend me unto you as lowly as I can," etc.,
+though she adds in a postscript: "Please you to send for me for I think
+long since I lay in your arms." If we turn to another wife of the Paston
+family, a little earlier in the century, Margaret Paston, whose husband's
+name also was John, we find the same attitude even more distinctly
+expressed. She always addressed him in her most familiar letters, showing
+affectionate concern for his welfare, as "Right reverent and worshipful
+husband" or "Right worshipful master." It is seldom that he writes to her
+at all, but when he writes the superscription is simply "To my mistress
+Paston," or "my cousin," with little greeting at either beginning or end.
+Once only, with unexampled effusion, he writes to her as "My own dear
+sovereign lady" and signs himself "Your true and trusting husband."[12]
+
+[12] We see just the same formulas in the fifteenth century letters of
+the Stonor family (_Stonor Letters and Papers_, Camden Society), though
+in these letters we seem often to find a lighter and more playful touch
+than was common among the Pastons. I may refer here to Dr. Powell's
+learned and well written book (with which I was not acquainted when I
+wrote this chapter), _English Domestic Relations 1487-1653_ (Columbia
+University Press).
+
+If we turn to France the relation of the wife to her husband was the same,
+or even more definitely dependent, for he occupied the place of father to
+her as well as of husband and sovereign, in this respect carrying on a
+tradition of Roman Law. She was her husband's "wife and subject"; she
+signed herself "Vostre humble obeissante fille et amye." If also we turn
+to the _Book of the Chevalier de la Tour-Landry_ in Anjou, written at the
+end of the fourteenth century, we find a picture of the relations of women
+to men in marriage comparable to that presented in the _Paston Letters_,
+though of a different order. This book was, as we know, written for the
+instruction of his daughters by a Knight who seems to have been a fairly
+average man of his time in his beliefs, and in character, as he has been
+described, probably above it, "a man of the world, a Christian, a parent,
+and a gentleman." His book is full of interesting light on the customs and
+manners of his day, though it is mainly a picture of what the writer
+thought ought to be rather than what always was. Herein the Knight is
+sagacious and moderate, much of his advice is admirably sound for every
+age. He is less concerned with affirming the authority of husbands than
+with assuring the happiness and well-being of his dearly loved daughters.
+But he clearly finds this bound up with the recognition of the authority
+of the husband, and the demands he makes are fairly concordant with the
+relationships we see established among the Pastons. The Knight abounds in
+illustrations, from Lot's daughters down to his own time, for the example
+or the warning of his daughters. The ideal he holds up to them is strictly
+domestic and in a sense conventional. He puts the matter on practical
+rather than religious or legal grounds, and his fundamental assumption is
+"that no woman ought ever to thwart or refuse to obey the ordinance of her
+lord; that is, if she is either desirous to be mistress of his affections
+or to have peace and understanding in the house. For very evident reasons
+submission should begin on her part." One would like to know what duties
+the Knight inculcated on husbands, but the corresponding book he wrote for
+the guidance of his sons appears no longer to be extant.
+
+On the whole, the fundamental traditions of our western world concerning
+the duties of husbands and wives are well summed up in what Pollock and
+Maitland term "that curious cabinet of antiquities, the marriage ritual of
+the English Church." Here we find that the husband promises to love and
+cherish the wife, but she promises not only to love and cherish but also
+to obey him, though, it may be noted, this point was not introduced into
+English marriage rites until the fourteenth century, when the wife
+promised to be "buxom" (which then meant submissive) and "bonair"
+(courteous and kind), while in some French and Spanish rites it has never
+been introduced at all. But we may take it to be generally implied. In the
+final address to the married couple the priest admonishes the bride that
+the husband is the head of the wife, and that her part is submission. In
+some more ancient and local rituals this point was further driven home,
+and on the delivery of the ring the bride knelt and kissed the
+bridegroom's right foot. In course of time this was modified, at all
+events in France, and she simply dropped the ring, so that her motion of
+stooping was regarded as for the purpose of picking it up. I note that
+change for it is significant of the ways in which we modify the traditions
+of the past, not quite abandoning them but pretending that they have other
+than the fundamental original motives. We see just the same thing in the
+use of the ring, which was in the first place a part of the bride-price,
+frequently accompanied by money, proof that the wife had been duly
+purchased. It was thus made easy to regard the ring as really a golden
+fetter. That idea soon became offensive, and the new idea was originated
+that the ring was a pledge of affection; thus, quite early in some
+countries, the husband, also wore a wedding ring.
+
+The marriage order illustrated by the _Paston Letters_ and the _Book of
+the Chevalier de la Tour-Landry_ before the Reformation, and the Anglican
+Book of Common Prayer afterwards, has never been definitely broken; it is
+a part of our living tradition to-day. But during recent centuries it has
+been overlaid by the growth of new fashions and sentiments which have
+softened its hard outlines to the view. It has been disguised, notably
+during the eighteenth century, by the development of a new feeling of
+social equality, chiefly initiated in France, which, in an atmosphere of
+public intercourse largely regulated by women, made the ostentatious
+assertion of the husband's headship over his wife displeasing and even
+ridiculous. Then, especially in the nineteenth century, there began
+another movement, chiefly initiated in England and carried further in
+America, which affected the foundations of the husband's position from
+beneath. This movement consisted in a great number of legislative measures
+and judicial pronouncements and administrative orders--each small in
+itself and never co-ordinated--which taken altogether have had a
+cumulative effect in immensely increasing the rights of the wife
+independently of her husband or even in opposition to him. Thus at the
+present time the husband's authority has been overlaid by new social
+conventions from above and undermined by new legal regulations from below.
+
+Yet, it is important to realise, although the husband's domestic throne
+has been in appearance elegantly re-covered and in substance has become
+worm-eaten, it still stands and still retains its ancient shape and
+structure. There has never been a French Revolution in the home, and that
+Revolution itself, which modified society so extensively, scarcely
+modified the legal supremacy of the husband at all, even in France under
+the Code Napoleon and still less anywhere else. Interwoven with all the
+new developments, and however less obtrusive it may have become, the old
+tradition still continues among us. Since, also, the husband is,
+conventionally and in large measure really, the economic support of the
+home,--the work of the wife and even actual financial contributions
+brought by her not being supposed to affect that convention,--this state
+of things is held to be justified.
+
+Thus when a man enters the home as a husband, to seat himself on the
+antique domestic throne and to play the part assigned to him of old, he is
+involuntarily, even unconsciously, following an ancient tradition and
+taking his place in a procession of husbands which began long ages before
+he was born. It thus comes about that a man, even after he is married, and
+a husband are two different persons, so that his wife who mainly knows him
+as a husband may be unable to form any just idea of what he is like as a
+man. As a husband he has stepped out of the path that belongs to him in
+the world, and taken on another part which has called out altogether
+different reactions, so he is sometimes a much more admirable person in
+one of these spheres--whichever it may be--than in the other.
+
+We must not be surprised if the husband's position has sometimes developed
+those qualities which from the modern point of view are the less
+admirable. In this respect the sovereign husband resembles the Sovereign
+State. The Sovereign State, as it has survived from Renaissance days in
+our modern world, may be made up of admirable people, yet as a State they
+are forced into an attitude of helpless egoism which nowadays fails to
+commend itself to the outside world, and the tendency of scientific
+jurists to-day is to deal very critically with the old conception of the
+Sovereign State. It is so with the husband in the home. He was thrust by
+ancient tradition into a position of sovereignty which impelled him to
+play a part of helpless egoism. He was a celestial body in the home around
+which all the other inmates were revolving satellites. The hours of rising
+and retiring, the times of meals and their nature and substance, all the
+activities of the household--in which he himself takes little or no
+part--are still arranged primarily to suit his work, his play, and his
+tastes. This is an accepted matter of course, and not the result of any
+violent self-assertion on his part. It is equally an accepted matter of
+course that the wife should be constantly occupied in keeping this little
+solar system in easy harmonious movement, evolving from it, if she has the
+skill, the music of the spheres. She has no recognised independent
+personality of her own, nor even any right to go away by herself for a
+little change and recreation. Any work of her own, play of her own,
+tastes of her own, must be strictly subordinated, if not suppressed
+altogether.
+
+In the old days, from which our domestic traditions proceed, little
+hardship was thus inflicted on the wife. Her rights and privileges were,
+indeed, far less than those of the modern woman, but for that very reason
+the home offered her a larger field; beneath the shelter of her husband
+the irresponsible wife might exert a maximum of influential activity with
+a minimum of rights and privileges of her own. To many men, even to-day,
+that state of things seems the realisation of an ideal.
+
+Yet to women it seems increasingly less so, and of necessity since the
+cleavage between the position of woman in society and law, and the
+position of the wife in the sacramental bonds of wedlock, is daily
+becoming greater. To-day a woman, who possibly for ten years has been
+leading her own life of independent work, earning her own living, choosing
+her own conditions in accordance with her own needs, and selecting her own
+periods of recreation in accordance with her own tastes, whether or not
+this may have included the society of a man-friend--such a woman suddenly
+finds on marriage, and without any assertion of authority on her husband's
+part, that all the outward circumstances of her life are reversed and all
+her inner spontaneous movements arrested. There may be no signs of this
+on the surface of her conduct. She loves her husband too much to wish to
+hurt his feelings by explaining the situation, and she values domestic
+peace too much to risk friction by making unexpected claims. But beneath
+the surface there is often a profound discontent, and even in women who
+thought they had gained an insight into life, a sense of disillusion.
+Everyone knows this who is privileged to catch a glimpse into the hearts
+of women--often women of most distinguished intelligence as well as women
+of quite ordinary nature--who leave a life of spontaneous activity in the
+world to enter the home.[13]
+
+[13] While this condition of things is sometimes to be found in the more
+distinguished minority and in well-to-do families, it is, of course,
+among the great labouring majority that it is most conspicuous. Mrs.
+Will Crooks, of Poplar, speaking to a newspaper reporter (_Daily
+Chronicle_, 17 Feb., 1919), truly remarked: "At present the average
+married woman's working day is a flagrant contradiction of all
+trade-union ideals. The poor thing is slaving all the time! What she
+needs--what she longs for--is just a little break or change now and
+again, an opportunity to get her mind off her work and its worries. If
+her husband's hours are reduced to eight, well that gives her a chance,
+doesn't it? The home and the children are, after all, as much his as
+hers. With his enlarged leisure he will now be able to take a fair share
+in home duties. I suggest that they take it turn and turn about--one
+night he goes out and she looks after the house and the children; the
+next night she goes out and he takes charge of things at home. She can
+sometimes go to the cinema, sometimes call on friends. Then, say once a
+week, they can both go out together, taking the children with them. That
+will be a little change and treat for everybody."
+
+It is not to be supposed that in this presentation of the situation in the
+home, as it is to-day visible to those who are privileged to see beneath
+the surface, any accusation is brought against the husband. He is no more
+guilty of an unreasonable conservatism than the wife is guilty of an
+unreasonable radicalism. Each of them is the outcome of a tradition. The
+point is that the events of the past hundred years have produced a
+discrepancy in the two lines of tradition, with a resultant lack of
+harmony, independent of the goodwill of either husband or wife.
+
+Olive Schreiner, in her _Woman and Labour_, has eloquently set forth the
+tendency to parasitism which civilisation produces in women; they no
+longer exercise the arts and industries which were theirs in former ages,
+and so they become economically dependent on men, losing their energies
+and aptitudes, and becoming like those dull parasitic animals which live
+as blood-suckers of their host. That picture, which was of course never
+true of all women, is now ceasing to be true of any but a negligible
+minority; it presents, moreover, a parasitism limited to the economic side
+of life. For if the wife has often been a lazy gold-sucking parasite on
+her husband in the world, the husband has yet oftener been a helpless
+service-absorbing parasite on his wife in the home. There is, that is to
+say, not only an economic parasitism, with no adequate return for
+financial support, but a still more prevalent domestic parasitism, with an
+absorption of services for which no return would be adequate. There are
+many helpful husbands in the home, but there are a larger number who are
+helpless and have never been trained to be anything else but helpless,
+even by their wives, who would often detest a rival in household work and
+management. The average husband enjoys the total effect of his home but is
+usually unable to contribute any of the details of work and organisation
+that make it enjoyable. He cannot keep it in order and cleanliness and
+regulated movement, he seldom knows how to buy the things that are needed
+for its upkeep, nor how to prepare and cook and present a decent meal; he
+cannot even attend to his own domestic needs. It is the wife's consolation
+that most husbands are not always at home.
+
+"In ministering to the wants of the family, the woman has reduced man to a
+state of considerable dependency on her in all domestic affairs, just as
+she is dependent on him for bodily protection. In the course of ages this
+has gone so far as to foster a peculiar helplessness on the part of the
+man, which manifests itself in a somewhat childlike reliance of the
+husband on the wife. In fact it may be said that the husband is, to all
+intents and purposes, incapable of maintaining himself without the aid of
+a woman." This passage will probably seem to many readers to apply quite
+fairly well to men as they exist to-day in most of those lands which we
+consider at the summit of our civilisation. Yet it was not written of
+civilisation, or of white men, but of the Bantu tribes of East
+Africa,[14] complete Negroes who, while far from being among the lowest
+savages, belong to a culture which is only just emerging from cannibalism,
+witchcraft, and customary bloodshed. So close a resemblance between the
+European husband and the Negro husband significantly suggests how
+remarkable has been the arrest of development in the husband's customary
+status during a vast period of the world's history.
+
+[14] Hon. C. Dundas, _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, Vol.
+45, 1915, p. 302.
+
+It is in the considerable group of couples where the husband's work
+separates him but little from the home that the pressure on the wife is
+most severe, and without the relief and variety secured by his frequent
+absence. She has perhaps led a life of her own before marriage, she knows
+how to be economically independent; now they occupy a small dwelling, they
+have, maybe, one or two small children, they can only afford one helper in
+the work or none at all, and in this busy little hive the husband and wife
+are constantly tumbling over each other. It is small wonder if the wife
+feels a deep discontent beneath her willing ministrations and misses the
+devotion of the lover in the perpetual claims of the husband.
+
+But the difficulty is not settled if she persuades him to take a room
+outside. He is devoted to his wife and his home, with good reason, for the
+wife makes the home and he is incapable of making a home. His new
+domestic arrangements sink into careless and sordid disorder, and he is
+conscious of profound discomfort. His wife soon realises that it is a
+choice between his return to the home and complete separation. Most wives
+never get even as far as this attempt at solution of the difficulty and
+hide their secret discontent.
+
+This is the situation which to-day is becoming intensified and extended on
+a vast scale. The habit and the taste for freedom, adventure, and economic
+independence is becoming generated among millions of women who once meekly
+trod the ancient beaten paths, and we must not be so foolish as to suppose
+that they can suddenly renounce those habits and tastes at the threshold
+of marriage. Moreover, it is becoming clear to men and to women alike, and
+for the first time, that the world can be remoulded, and that the claims
+for better conditions of work, for a higher standard of life, and for the
+attainment of leisure, which previously had only feebly been put forward,
+may now be asserted drastically. We see therefore to-day a great
+revolutionary movement, mainly on the part of men in the world of Labour,
+and we see a corresponding movement, however less ostentatious, mainly on
+the part of women, in the world of the Home.
+
+It may seem to some that this new movement of upheaval in the sphere of
+the Home is merely destructive. Timid souls have felt the like in every
+period of transition, and with as little reason. Just as we realise that
+the movement now in progress in the world of Labour for a higher standard
+of life and for, as it has been termed, a larger "leisure-ration,"
+represents a wholesome revolt against the crushing conditions of prolonged
+monotonous work--the most deadening of all work--and a real advance
+towards those ideals of democracy which are still so remote, so it is with
+the movement in the Home. That also is the claim for a new and fairer
+allotment of responsibility, of larger opportunities for freedom and
+leisure. If in the home the husband is still to be regarded as the
+capitalist and the wife as the labourer, then at all events it has to be
+recognised that he owes her not only the satisfaction of her physical
+needs of food and shelter and clothing, but the opportunity to satisfy the
+personal spontaneous claims of her own individual nature. Just as the
+readjustment of Labour is really only an approach to the long recognised
+ideals of Democracy, so the readjustment of the Home, far from being
+subversive or revolutionary, is merely an approximation to the long
+recognised ideals of marriage.
+
+How in practice, one may finally ask, is this readjustment of the home
+likely to be carried out?
+
+In the first place we are justified in believing that in the future home
+men will no longer be so helpless, so domestically parasitic, as in the
+past. This change is indeed already coming about. It is an inestimable
+benefit throughout life for a man to have been forcibly lifted out of the
+routine comforts and feminine services of the old-fashioned home and to be
+thrown into an alien and solitary environment, face to face with Nature
+and the essential domestic human needs (in my own case I owe an
+inestimable debt to the chance that thus flung me into the Australian bush
+in early life), and one may note that the Great War has had, directly and
+indirectly, a remarkable influence in this direction, for it not only
+compelled women to exercise many enlarging and fortifying functions
+commonly counted as pertaining to men, it also compelled men, deprived of
+accustomed feminine services, to develop a new independent ability for
+organising domesticity, and that ability, even though it is not
+permanently exercised in rendering domestic services, must yet always make
+clear the nature of domestic problems and tend to prevent the demand for
+unnecessary domestic services.
+
+But there is another quite different and more general line along which we
+may expect this problem to be largely solved. That is by the
+simplification and organisation of domestic life. If that process were
+carried to the full extent that is now becoming possible a large part of
+the problem before us would be at once solved. A great promise for the
+future of domestic life is held out by the growing adoption of
+birth-control, by which the wife and mother is relieved from that burden
+of unduly frequent and unwanted maternity which in the past so often
+crushed her vitality and destroyed her freshness. But many minor agencies
+are helpful. To supply heat, light, and motive power even to small
+households, to replace the wasteful, extravagant, and often inefficient
+home-cookery by meals cooked outside, as well as to facilitate the growing
+social habit of taking meals in spacious public restaurants, under more
+attractive, economical, and wholesome conditions than can usually be
+secured within the narrow confines of the home, to contract with specially
+trained workers from outside for all those routines of domestic drudgery
+which are often so inefficiently and laboriously carried on by the
+household-worker, whether mistress or servant, and to seek perpetually by
+new devices to simplify, which often means to beautify, all the everyday
+processes of life--to effect this in any comprehensive degree is to
+transform the home from the intolerable burden it is sometimes felt to be
+into a possible haven of peace and joy.[15] The trouble in the past, and
+even to-day, has been, not in any difficulty in providing the facilities
+but in prevailing people to adopt them. Thus in England, even under the
+stress of the Great War, there was among the working population a
+considerable disinclination--founded on stupid conservatism and a
+meaningless pride--to take advantage of National Kitchens and National
+Restaurants, notwithstanding the superiority of the meals in quality,
+cheapness, and convenience, to the workers' home meals, so that many of
+these establishments, even while still fostered by the Government, had
+speedily to close their doors. Ancient traditions, that have now become
+not only empty but mischievous, in these matters still fetter the wife
+even more than the husband. We cannot regulate even the material side of
+life without cultivating that intelligence in the development of which
+civilisation so largely consists.
+
+[15] This aspect of the future of domesticity was often set forth by
+Mrs. Havelock Ellis, _The New Horizon in Love and Life_, 1921.
+
+Intelligence, and even something more than intelligence, is needed along
+the third line of progress towards the modernised home. Simplification and
+organisation can effect nothing in the desired transformation if they
+merely end in themselves. They are only helpful in so far as they
+economise energy, offer a more ample leisure, and extend the opportunities
+for that play of the intellect, that liberation of the emotions with
+accompanying discipline of the primitive instincts, which are needed not
+only for the development of civilisation in general, but in particular of
+the home. Domineering egotism, the assertion of greedy possessive rights,
+are out of place in the modern home. They are just as mischievous when
+exhibited by the wife as by the husband. We have seen, as we look back,
+the futility in the end of the ancient structure of the home, however
+reasonable it was at the beginning, under our different modern social
+conditions, and for women to attempt nowadays to reintroduce the same
+structure, merely reversed would be not only mischievous but silly. That
+spirit of narrow exclusiveness and self centred egoism--even if it were
+sometimes an _egoisme a deux_--evoked, half a century ago, the scathing
+sarcasm of James Hinton, who never wearied of denouncing the "virtuous and
+happy homes" which he saw as "floating blotches of verdure on a sea of
+filth." Such outbursts seem extravagant, but they were the extravagance of
+an idealist at the vision which, as a physician in touch with realities,
+he had, seen beneath the surface of the home.
+
+It is well to insist on the organisation of the mechanical and material
+side of life. Some leaders of women movements feel this so strongly that
+they insist on nothing else. In old days it was conventionally supposed
+that women's sphere was that of the feelings; the result has been that
+women now often take ostentatious pleasure in washing their hands of
+feelings and accusing men of "sentiment." But that wrongly debased word
+stands for the whole superstructure of life on the basis of material
+organisation, for all the finer and higher parts of our nature, for the
+greater part of civilisation.[16] The elaboration of the mechanical side
+of life by itself may merely serve to speed up the pace of life instead of
+expanding leisure, to pile up the weary burden of luxury, and still
+further to dissipate the energy of life in petty or frivolous
+channels.[17] To bring order into the region of soulless machinery running
+at random, to raise the super-structure of a genuinely human civilisation,
+is not a task which either men or women can afford to fling contemptuously
+to the opposite sex. It concerns them both equally and can only be carried
+out by both equally, working side by side in the most intimate spirit of
+mutual comprehension, confiding trust, and the goodwill to conquer the
+demon of jealousy, that dragon which slays love under the pretence of
+keeping it alive.
+
+[16] "The growth of the sentiments," remarks an influential psychologist
+of our own time (W. McDougall, _Social Psychology_, p. 160), "is of the
+utmost importance for the character and conduct of individuals and of
+societies; it is the organisation of the affective and conative life. In
+the absence of sentiments our emotional life would be a mere chaos,
+without order, consistency, or continuity of any kind; and all our
+social relations and conduct, being based on the emotions and their
+impulses would be correspondingly chaotic, unpredictable, and
+unstable.... Again, our judgments of value and of merit are rooted in
+our sentiments; and our moral principles have the same source, for they
+are formed by our judgments of moral value."
+
+[17] The destructive effects of the mechanisation of modern life have
+lately been admirably set forth, and with much precise illustration, by
+Dr. Austin Freeman, _Social Decay and Regeneration_.
+
+This task, it may finally be added, is always an adventure. However well
+organised the foundations of life may be, life must always be full of
+risks. We may smile, therefore, when it is remarked that the future
+developments of the home are risky. Birds in the air and fishes in the
+sea, quite as much as our own ancestors on the earth, have always found
+life full of risks. It was the greatest risk of all when they insisted on
+continuing on the old outworn ways and so became extinct. If the home is
+an experiment and a risky experiment, one can only say that life is always
+like that. We have to see to it that in this central experiment, on which
+our happiness so largely depends, all our finest qualities are mobilised.
+Even the smallest homes under the new conditions cannot be built to last
+with small minds and small hearts. Indeed the discipline of the home
+demands not only the best intellectual qualities that are available, but
+often involves--and in men as well as in women--a spiritual training fit
+to make sweeter and more generous saints than any cloister. The greater
+the freedom, the more complete the equality of husband and wife, the
+greater the possibilities of discipline and development. In view of the
+rigidities and injustices of the law, many couples nowadays dispense with
+legal marriage, and form their own private contract; that method has
+sometimes proved more favourable to the fidelity and permanence of love
+than external compulsion; it assists the husband to remain the lover, and
+it is often the lover more than the husband that the modern woman needs;
+but it has always to be remembered that in the present condition of law
+and social opinion a slur is cast on the children of such unions. No
+doubt, however, marriage and the home will undergo modifications, which
+will tend to make these ancient institutions a little more flexible and to
+permit a greater degree of variation to meet special circumstances. We can
+occupy ourselves with no more essential task, whether as regards ourselves
+or the race, than to make more beautiful the House of Life for the
+dwelling of Love.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE LOVE-RIGHTS OF WOMEN
+
+
+What is the part of woman, one is sometimes asked, in the sex act? Must it
+be the wife's concern in the marital embrace to sacrifice her own wishes
+from a sense of love and duty towards her husband? Or is the wife entitled
+to an equal mutual interest and joy in this act with her husband? It seems
+a simple problem. In so fundamental a relationship, which goes back to the
+beginning of sex in the dawn of life, it might appear that we could leave
+Nature to decide. Yet it is not so. Throughout the history of
+civilisation, wherever we can trace the feelings and ideas which have
+prevailed on this matter and the resultant conduct, the problem has
+existed, often to produce discord, conflict, and misery. The problem still
+exists to-day and with as important results as in the past.
+
+In Nature, before the arrival of Man, it can scarcely be said indeed that
+any difficulty existed. It was taken for granted at that time that the
+female had both the right to her own body, and the right to a certain
+amount of enjoyment in the use of it. It often cost the male a serious
+amount of trouble--though he never failed to find it worth while--to
+explain to her the point where he may be allowed to come in, and to
+persuade her that he can contribute to her enjoyment. So it generally is
+throughout Nature, before we reach Man, and, though it is not invariably
+obvious, we often find it even among the unlikeliest animals. As is well
+known, it is most pronounced among the birds, who have in some species
+carried the erotic art,--and the faithful devotion which properly
+accompanied the erotic art as being an essential part of it,--to the
+highest point. We have here the great natural fact of courtship.
+Throughout Nature, wherever we meet with animals of a high type, often
+indeed when they are of a lowly type--provided they have not been rendered
+unnatural by domestication--every act of sexual union is preceded by a
+process of courtship. There is a sound physiological reason for this
+courtship, for in the act of wooing and being wooed the psychic excitement
+gradually generated in the brains of the two partners acts as a stimulant
+to arouse into full activity the mechanism which ensures sexual union and
+aids ultimate impregnation. Such courtship is thus a fundamental natural
+fact.
+
+It is as a natural fact that we still find it in full development among a
+large number of peoples of the lower races whom we are accustomed to
+regard as more primitive than ourselves. New conditions, it is true, soon
+enter to complicate the picture presented by savage courtship. The
+economic element of bargaining, destined to prove so important, comes in
+at an early stage. And among peoples leading a violent life, and
+constantly fighting, it has sometimes happened, though not always, that
+courtship also has been violent. This is not so frequent as was once
+supposed. With better knowledge it was found that the seeming brutality
+once thought to take the place of courtship among various peoples in a low
+state of culture was really itself courtship, a rough kind of play
+agreeable to both parties and not depriving the feminine partner of her
+own freedom of choice. This was notably the case as regards so-called
+"marriage by capture." While this is sometimes a real capture, it is more
+often a mock capture; the lover perhaps pursues the beloved on horseback,
+but she is as fleet and as skilful as he is, cannot be captured unless she
+wishes to be captured, and in addition, as among the Kirghiz, she may be
+armed with a formidable whip; so that "marriage by capture," far from
+being a hardship imposed on women is largely a concession to their modesty
+and a gratification of their erotic impulses. Even when the chief part of
+the decision rests with masculine force courtship is still not necessarily
+or usually excluded, for the exhibition of force by a lover,--and this is
+true for civilised as well as for savage women,--is itself a source of
+pleasurable stimulation, and when that is so the essence of courtship may
+be attained even more successfully by the forceful than by the humble
+lover.
+
+The evolution of society, however, tended to overlay and sometimes even to
+suppress those fundamental natural tendencies. The position of the man as
+the sole and uncontested head of the family, the insistence on paternity
+and male descent, the accompanying economic developments, and the tendency
+to view a woman less as a self-disposing individual than as an object of
+barter belonging to her father, the consequent rigidity of the marriage
+bond and the stern insistence on wifely fidelity--all these conditions of
+developing civilisation, while still leaving courtship possible,
+diminished its significance and even abolished its necessity. Moreover, on
+the basis of the social, economic, and legal developments thus
+established, new moral, spiritual, and religious forces were slowly
+generated, which worked on these rules of merely exterior order, and
+interiorised them, thus giving them power over the souls as well as over
+the bodies of women.
+
+The result was that, directly and indirectly, the legal, economic, and
+erotic rights of women were all diminished. It is with the erotic rights
+only that we are here concerned.
+
+No doubt in its erotic aspects, as well as in its legal and economic
+aspects, the social order thus established was described, and in good
+faith, as beneficial to women, and even as maintained in their interests.
+Monogamy and the home, it was claimed, alike existed for the benefit and
+protection of women. It was not so often explained that they greatly
+benefited and protected men, with, moreover, this additional advantage
+that while women were absolutely confined to the home, men were free to
+exercise their activities outside the home, even, with tacit general
+consent, on the erotic side.
+
+Whatever the real benefits, and there is no occasion for questioning them,
+of the sexual order thus established, it becomes clear that in certain
+important respects it had an unnatural and repressive influence on the
+erotic aspect of woman's sexual life. It fostered the reproductive side of
+woman's sexual life, but it rendered difficult for her the satisfaction of
+the instinct for that courtship which is the natural preliminary of
+reproductive activity, an instinct even more highly developed in the
+female than in the male, and the more insistent because in the order of
+Nature the burden of maternity is preceded by the reward of pleasure. But
+the marriage order which had become established led to the indirect
+result of banning pleasure in women, or at all events in wives. It was
+regarded as too dangerous, and even as degrading. The women who wanted
+pleasure were not considered fit for the home, but more suited to be
+devoted to an exclusive "life of pleasure," which soon turned out to be
+not their own pleasure but men's. A "life of pleasure," in that sense or
+in any other sense, was not what more than a small minority of women ever
+desired. The desire of women for courtship is not a thing by itself, and
+was not implanted for gratification by itself. It is naturally
+intertwined--and to a much greater degree than the corresponding desire in
+men--with her deepest personal, family, and social instincts, so that if
+these are desecrated and lost its charm soon fades.
+
+The practices and the ideals of this established morality were both due to
+men, and both were so thoroughly fashioned that they subjugated alike the
+actions and the feelings of women. There is no sphere which we regard as
+so peculiarly women's sphere as that of love. Yet there is no sphere which
+in civilisation women have so far had so small a part in regulating. Their
+deepest impulses--their modesty, their maternity, their devotion, their
+emotional receptivity--were used, with no conscious and deliberate
+Machiavellism, against themselves, to mould a moral world for their
+habitation which they would not themselves have moulded. It is not of
+modern creation, nor by any means due, as some have supposed, to the
+asceticism of Christianity, however much Christianity may have reinforced
+it. Indeed one may say that in course of time Christianity had an
+influence in weakening it, for Christianity discovered a new reservoir of
+tender emotion, and such emotion may be transferred, and, as a matter of
+fact, was transferred, from its first religious channel into erotic
+channels which were thereby deepened and extended, and without reference
+to any design of Christianity. For the ends we achieve are often by no
+means those which we set out to accomplish. In ancient classic days this
+moral order was even more severely established than in the Middle Ages.
+Montaigne, in the sixteenth century, declared that "marriage is a devout
+and religious relationship, the pleasures derived from it should be
+restrained and serious, mixed with some severity." But in this matter he
+was not merely expressing the Christian standpoint but even more that of
+paganism, and he thoroughly agreed with the old Greek moralist that a man
+should approach his wife "prudently and severely" for fear of inciting her
+to lasciviousness; he thought that marriage was best arranged by a third
+party, and was inclined to think, with the ancients, that women are not
+fitted to make friends of. Montaigne has elsewhere spoken with insight of
+women's instinctive knowledge of the art and discipline of love and has
+pointed out how men have imposed their own ideals and rules of action on
+women from whom they have demanded opposite and contradictory virtues;
+yet, we see, he approves of this state of things and never suggests that
+women have any right to opinions of their own or feelings of their own
+when the sacred institution of marriage is in question.
+
+Montaigne represents the more exalted aspects of the Pagan-Christian
+conception of morality in marriage which still largely prevails. But that
+conception lent itself to deductions, frankly accepted even by Montaigne
+himself, which were by no means exalted. "I find," said Montaigne, "that
+Venus, after all, is nothing more than the pleasure of discharging our
+vessels, just as nature renders pleasurable the discharges from other
+parts." Sir Thomas More among Catholics, and Luther among Protestants,
+said exactly the same thing in other and even clearer words, while untold
+millions of husbands in Christendom down to to-day, whether or not they
+have had the wit to put their theory into a phrase, have regularly put it
+into practice, at all events within the consecrated pale of marriage, and
+treated their wives, "severely and prudently," as convenient utensils for
+the reception of a natural excretion.
+
+Obviously, in this view of marriage, sexual activity was regarded as an
+exclusively masculine function, in the exercise of which women had merely
+a passive part to play. Any active participation on her side thus seemed
+unnecessary, and even unbefitting, finally, though only in comparatively
+modern times, disgusting and actually degrading. Thus Acton, who was
+regarded half a century ago as the chief English authority on sexual
+matters, declared that, "happily for society," the supposition that women
+possess sexual feelings could be put aside as "a vile aspersion," while
+another medical authority of the same period stated in regard to the most
+simple physical sign of healthy sexual emotion that it "only happens in
+lascivious women." This final triumph of the masculine ideals and rule of
+life was, however, only achieved slowly. It was the culmination of an
+elaborate process of training. At the outset men had found it impossible
+to speak too strongly of the "wantonness" of women. This attitude was
+pronounced among the ancient Greeks and prominent in their dramatists.
+Christianity again, which ended by making women into the chief pillars of
+the Church, began by regarding them as the "Gate of Hell." Again, later,
+when in the Middle Ages this masculine moral order approached the task of
+subjugating the barbarians of Northern Europe, men were horrified at the
+licentiousness of those northern women at whose coldness they are now
+shocked.
+
+That, indeed, was, as Montaigne had seen, the central core of conflict in
+the rule of life imposed by men on woman. Men were perpetually striving,
+by ways the most methodical, the most subtle, the most far-reaching, to
+achieve a result in women, which, when achieved, men themselves viewed
+with dismay. They may be said to be moved in this sphere by two passions,
+the passion for virtue and the passion for vice. But it so happens that
+both these streams of passion have to be directed at the same fascinating
+object: Woman. No doubt nothing is more admirable than the skill with
+which women have acquired the duplicity necessary to play the two
+contradictory parts thus imposed upon them. But in that requirement the
+play of their natural reactions tended to become paralysed, and the
+delicate mechanism of their instincts often disturbed. They were
+forbidden, except in a few carefully etiquetted forms, the free play of
+courtship, without which they could not perform their part in the erotic
+life with full satisfaction either to themselves or their partners. They
+were reduced to an artificial simulation of coldness or of warmth,
+according to the particular stage of the dominating masculine ideal of
+woman which their partner chanced to have reached. But that is an attitude
+equally unsatisfactory to themselves and to their lovers, even when the
+latter have not sufficient insight to see through its unreality. It is an
+attitude so unnatural and artificial that it inevitably tends to produce a
+real coldness which nothing can disguise. It is true that women whose
+instincts are not perverted at the roots do not desire to be cold. Far
+from it. But to dispel that coldness the right atmosphere is needed, and
+the insight and skill of the right man. In the erotic sphere a woman asks
+nothing better of a man than to be lifted above her coldness, to the
+higher plane where there is reciprocal interest and mutual joy in the act
+of love. Therein her silent demand is one with Nature's. For the
+biological order of the world involves those claims which, in the human
+range, are the erotic rights of women.
+
+The social claims of women, their economic claims, their political claims,
+have long been before the world. Women themselves have actively asserted
+them, and they are all in process of realisation. The erotic claims of
+women, which are at least as fundamental, are not publicly voiced, and
+women themselves would be the last to assert them. It is easy to
+understand why that should be so. The natural and acquired qualities of
+women, even the qualities developed in the art of courtship, have all been
+utilised in building up the masculine ideal of sexual morality; it is on
+feminine characteristics that this masculine ideal has been based, so
+that women have been helpless to protest against it. Moreover, even if
+that were not so, to formulate such rights is to raise the question
+whether there so much as exists anything that can be called "erotic
+rights." The right to joy cannot be claimed in the same way as one claims
+the right to put a voting paper in a ballot box. A human being's erotic
+aptitudes can only be developed where the right atmosphere for them
+exists, and where the attitudes of both persons concerned are in
+harmonious sympathy. That is why the erotic rights of women have been the
+last of all to be attained.
+
+Yet to-day we see a change here. The change required is, it has been said,
+a change of attitude and a resultant change in the atmosphere in which the
+sexual impulses are manifested. It involves no necessary change in the
+external order of our marriage system, for, as has already been pointed
+out, it was a coincident and not designed part of that order. Various
+recent lines of tendency have converged to produce this change of attitude
+and of atmosphere. In part the men of to-day are far more ready than the
+men of former days to look upon women as their comrades in the every day
+work of the world, instead of as beings who were ideally on a level above
+themselves and practically on a level considerably below themselves. In
+part there is the growing recognition that women have conquered many
+elementary human rights of which before they were deprived, and are more
+and more taking the position of citizens, with the same kinds of duties,
+privileges, and responsibilities as men. In part, also, it may be added,
+there is a growing diffusion among educated people of a knowledge of the
+primary facts of life in the two sexes, slowly dissipating and dissolving
+many foolish and often mischievous superstitions. The result is that, as
+many competent observers have noted, the young men of to-day show a new
+attitude towards women and towards marriage, an attitude of simplicity and
+frankness, a desire for mutual confidence, a readiness to discuss
+difficulties, an appeal to understand and to be understood. Such an
+attitude, which had hitherto been hard to attain, at once creates the
+atmosphere in which alone the free spontaneous erotic activities of women
+can breathe and live.
+
+This consummation, we have seen, may be regarded as the attainment of
+certain rights, the corollary of other rights in the social field which
+women are slowly achieving as human beings on the same human level as men.
+It opens to women, on whom is always laid the chief burden of sex, the
+right to the joy and exaltation of sex, to the uplifting of the soul
+which, when the right conditions are fulfilled, is the outcome of the
+intimate approach and union of two human beings. Yet while we may find
+convenient so to formulate it, we need to remember that that is only a
+fashion of speech, for there are no rights in Nature. If we take a broader
+sweep, what we may choose to call an erotic right is simply the perfect
+poise of the conflicting forces of life, the rhythmic harmony in which
+generation is achieved with the highest degree of perfection compatible
+with the make of the world. It is our part to transform Nature's large
+conception into our own smaller organic mould, not otherwise than the
+plants, to whom we are far back akin, who dig their flexible roots deep
+into the moist and fruitful earth, and so are able to lift up glorious
+heads toward the sky.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE PLAY-FUNCTION OF SEX
+
+
+When we hear the sexual functions spoken of we commonly understand the
+performance of an act which normally tends to the propagation of the race.
+When we see the question of sexual abstinence discussed, when the
+desirability of sexual gratification is asserted or denied, when the idea
+arises of the erotic rights and needs of woman, it is always the same act
+with its physical results that is chiefly in mind. Such a conception is
+quite adequate for practical working purposes in the social world. It
+enables us to deal with all our established human institutions in the
+sphere of sex, as the arbitrary assumptions of Euclid enable us to
+traverse the field of elementary geometry. But beyond these useful
+purposes it is inadequate and even inexact. The functions of sex on the
+psychic and erotic side are of far greater extension than any act of
+procreation, they may even exclude it altogether, and when we are
+concerned with the welfare of the individual human being we must enlarge
+our outlook and deepen our insight.
+
+There are, we know, two main functions in the sexual relationship, or
+what in the biological sense we term "marriage," among civilised human
+beings, the primary physiological function of begetting and bearing
+offspring and the secondary spiritual function of furthering the higher
+mental and emotional processes. These are the main functions of the sexual
+impulse, and in order to understand any further object of the sexual
+relationship--or even in order to understand all that is involved in the
+secondary object of marriage--we must go beyond conscious motives and
+consider the nature of the sexual impulse, physical and psychic, as rooted
+in the human organism.
+
+The human organism, as we know, is a machine on which excitations from
+without, streaming through the nerves and brain, effect internal work,
+and, notably, stimulate the glandular system. In recent years the
+glandular system, and especially that of the ductless glands, has taken on
+an altogether new significance. These ductless glands, as we know,
+liberate into the blood what are termed "hormones," or chemical
+messengers, which have a complex but precise action in exciting and
+developing all those physical and psychic activities which make up a full
+life alike on the general side and the reproductive side, so that their
+balanced functions are essential to wholesome and complete existence. In
+a rudimentary form these functions may be traced back to our earliest
+ancestors who possessed brains. In those times the predominant sense for
+arousing the internal mental and emotional faculties was that of smell,
+the other senses being gradually evolved subsequently, and it is
+significant that the pituitary, one of the chief ductless glands active in
+ourselves to-day, was developed out of the nervous centre for smell in
+conjunction with the membrane of the mouth. The energies of the whole
+organism were set in action through stimuli arising from the outside world
+by way of the sense of smell. In process of time the mechanism has become
+immensely elaborated, yet its healthy activity is ultimately dependent on
+a rich and varied action and reaction with the external world. It is
+becoming recognised that the tendency to pluri-glandular insufficiency,
+with its resulting lack of organic harmony and equilibrium, can be
+counteracted by the physical and psychic stimuli of intimate contacts with
+the external world. In this action and reaction, moreover, we cannot
+distinguish between sexual ends and general ends. The activities of the
+ductless glands and their hormones equally serve both ends in ways that
+cannot be distinguished. "The individual metabolism," as a distinguished
+authority in this field has expressed it, "is the reproductive
+metabolism."[18] Thus the establishment of our complete activities as
+human beings in the world is aided by, if not indeed ultimately dependent
+upon, a perpetual and many-sided play with our environment.
+
+[18] W. Blair Bell, _The Sex-Complex,_ 1920, p. 108. This book is a
+cautious and precise statement of the present state of knowledge on this
+subject, although some of the author's psychological deductions must be
+treated with circumspection.
+
+It is thus that we arrive at the importance of the play-function, and
+thus, also, we realise that while it extends beyond the sexual sphere it
+yet definitely includes that sphere. There are at least three different
+ways of understanding the biological function of play. There is the
+conception of play, on which Groos has elaborately insisted, as
+education: the cat "plays" with the mouse and is thereby educating
+itself in the skill necessary to catch mice; all our human games are a
+training in qualities that are required in life, and that is why in
+England we continue to attribute to the Duke of Wellington the saying
+that "the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton."
+Then there is the conception of play as the utilisation in art of the
+superfluous energies left unemployed in the practical work of life; this
+enlarging and harmonising function of play, while in the lower ranges it
+may be spent trivially, leads in the higher ranges to the production of
+the most magnificent human achievements. But there is yet a third
+conception of play, according to which it exerts a direct internal
+influence--health-giving, developmental, and balancing--on the whole
+organism of the player himself. This conception is related to the other
+two, and yet distinct, for it is not primarily a definite education in
+specific kinds of life-conserving skill, although it may involve the
+acquisition of such skill, and it is not concerned with the construction
+of objective works of art, although--by means of contact in human
+relationship--it attains the wholesome organic effects which may be
+indirectly achieved by artistic activities. It is in this sense that we
+are here concerned with what we may perhaps best call the play-function
+of sex.[19]
+
+[19] The term seems to have been devised by Professor Maurice Parmelee,
+_Personality and Conduct_, 1918, pp. 104, 107, 113. But it is understood
+by Parmelee in a much vaguer and more extended sense than I have used
+it.
+
+As thus understood, the play-function of sex is at once in an inseparable
+way both physical and psychic. It stimulates to wholesome activity all the
+complex and inter-related systems of the organism. At the same time it
+satisfies the most profound emotional impulses, controlling in harmonious
+poise the various mental instincts. Along these lines it necessarily tends
+in the end to go beyond its own sphere and to embrace and introduce into
+the sphere of sex the other two more objective fields of play, that of
+play as education, and that of play as artistic creation. It may not be
+true, as was said of old time, "most of our arts and sciences were
+invented for love's sake." But it is certainly true that, in proportion as
+we truly and wisely exercise the play-function of sex, we are at the same
+time training our personality on the erotic side and acquiring a mastery
+of the art of love.
+
+The longer I live the more I realise the immense importance for the
+individual of the development through the play-function of erotic
+personality, and for human society of the acquirement of the art of love.
+At the same time I am ever more astonished at the rarity of erotic
+personality and the ignorance of the art of love even among those men and
+women, experienced in the exercise of procreation, in whom we might most
+confidently expect to find such development and such art. At times one
+feels hopeless at the thought that civilisation in this supremely intimate
+field of life has yet achieved so little. For until it is generally
+possible to acquire erotic personality and to master the art of loving,
+the development of the individual man or woman is marred, the acquirement
+of human happiness and harmony remains impossible.
+
+In entering this field, indeed, we not only have to gain true knowledge
+but to cast off false knowledge, and, above all, to purify our hearts from
+superstitions which have no connection with any kind of existing
+knowledge. We have to cease to regard as admirable the man who regards
+the accomplishment of the procreative act, with the pleasurable relief it
+affords to himself, as the whole code of love. We have to treat with
+contempt the woman who abjectly accepts the act, and her own passivity
+therein, as the whole duty of love. We have to understand that the art of
+love has nothing to do with vice, and the acquirement of erotic
+personality nothing to do with sensuality. But we have also to realise
+that the art of love is far from being the attainment of a refined and
+luxurious self-indulgence, and the acquirement of erotic personality of
+little worth unless it fortifies and enlarges the whole personality in all
+its aspects. Now all this is difficult, and for some people even painful;
+to root up is a more serious matter than to sow; it cannot all be done in
+a day.
+
+It is not easy to form a clear picture of the erotic life of the average
+man in our society. To the best informed among us knowledge in this field
+only comes slowly. Even when we have decided what may or may not be termed
+"average" the sources of approach to this intimate sphere remain few and
+misleading; at the best the women a man loves remain far more illuminating
+sources of information than the man himself. The more one knows about him,
+however, the more one is convinced that, quite independently of the place
+we may feel inclined to afford to him in the scale of virtue, his
+conception of erotic personality, his ideas on the art of love, if they
+have any existence at all, are of a humble character. As to the notion of
+play in the sphere of sex, even if he makes blundering attempts to
+practice it, that is for him something quite low down, something to be
+ashamed of, and he would not dream of associating it with anything he has
+been taught to regard as belonging to the spiritual sphere. The conception
+of "divine play" is meaningless to him. His fundamental ideas, his
+cherished ideals, in the erotic sphere, seem to be reducible to two: (1)
+He wishes to prove that he is "a man," and he experiences what seems to
+him the pride of virility in the successful attainment of that proof; (2)
+he finds in the same act the most satisfactory method of removing sexual
+tension and in the ensuing relief one of the chief pleasures of life. It
+cannot be said that either of these ideals is absolutely unsound; each is
+part of the truth; it is only as a complete statement of the truth that
+they become pathetically inadequate. It is to be noted that both of them
+are based solely on the physical act of sexual conjunction, and that they
+are both exclusively self-regarding. So that they are, after all, although
+the nearest approach to the erotic sphere he may be able to find, yet
+still not really erotic. For love is not primarily self-regarding. It is
+the intimate, harmonious, combined play--the play in the wide as well as
+in the more narrow sense we are here concerned with--of two personalities.
+It would not be love if it were primarily self-regarding, and the act of
+intercourse, however essential to secure the propagation of the race, is
+only an incident, and not an essential in love.
+
+Let us turn to the average woman. Here the picture must usually be still
+more unsatisfactory. The man at least, crude as we may find his two
+fundamental notions to be, has at all events attained mental pride and
+physical satisfaction. The woman often attains neither, and since the man,
+by instinct or tradition, has maintained a self-regarding attitude, that
+is not surprising. The husband--by primitive instinct partly, certainly by
+ancient tradition--regards himself as the active partner in matters of
+love and his own pleasure as legitimately the prime motive for activity.
+His wife consequently falls into the complementary position, and regards
+herself as the passive partner and her pleasure as negligible, if not
+indeed as a thing to be rather ashamed of, should she by chance experience
+it. So that, while the husband is content with a mere simulacrum and
+pretence of the erotic life, the wife has often had none at all.
+
+Few people realise--few indeed have the knowledge or the opportunity to
+realise--how much women thus lose, alike in the means to fulfill their
+own lives and in the power to help others. A woman has a husband, she has
+marital relationships, she has children, she has all the usual domestic
+troubles--it seems to the casual observer that she has everything that
+constitutes a fully developed matron fit to play her proper part in the
+home and in the world. Yet with all these experiences, which undoubtedly
+are an important part of life, she may yet remain on the emotional
+side--and, as a matter of fact, frequently remains--quite virginal, as
+immature as a school-girl. She has not acquired an erotic personality, she
+has not mastered the art of love, with the result that her whole nature
+remains ill-developed and unharmonised, and that she is incapable of
+bringing her personality--having indeed no achieved personality to
+bring--to bear effectively on the problems of society and the world around
+her.
+
+That alone is a great misfortune, all the more tragic since under
+favourable conditions, which it should have been natural to attain, it
+might so easily be avoided. But there is this further result, full of the
+possibilities of domestic tragedy, that the wife so situated, however
+innocent, however virtuous, may at any time find her virginally sensitive
+emotional nature fertilised by the touch of some other man than her
+husband.
+
+It happens so often. A girl who has been carefully guarded in the home,
+preserved from evil companions, preserved also from what her friends
+regarded as the contamination of sexual knowledge, a girl of high ideals,
+yet healthy and robust, is married to a man of whom she probably has
+little more than a conventional knowledge. Yet he may by good chance be
+the masculine counterpart of herself, well brought up, without sexual
+experience and ignorant of all but the elementary facts of sex, loyal and
+honourable, prepared to be, fitted to be, a devoted husband. The union
+seems to be of the happiest kind; no one detects that anything is lacking
+to this perfect marriage; in course of time one or more children are born.
+But during all this time the husband has never really made love to his
+wife; he has not even understood what courtship in the intimate sense
+means; love as an art has no existence for him; he has loved his wife
+according to his imperfect knowledge, but he has never so much as realised
+that his knowledge was imperfect. She on her side loves her husband; she
+comes in time indeed to have a sort of tender maternal feeling for him.
+Possibly she feels a little pleasure in intercourse with him. But she has
+never once been profoundly aroused, and she has never once been utterly
+satisfied. The deep fountains of her nature have never been unsealed; she
+has never been fertilised throughout her whole nature by their liberating
+influence; her erotic personality has never been developed. Then
+something happens. Perhaps the husband is called away, it may have been to
+take part in the Great War. The wife, whatever her tender solicitude for
+her absent partner, feels her solitude and is drawn nearer to friends,
+perhaps her husband's friends. Some man among them becomes congenial to
+her. There need be no conscious or overt love-making on either side, and
+if there were the wife's loyalty might be aroused and the friendship
+brought to an end. Love-making is not indeed necessary. The wife's latent
+erotic needs, while still remaining unconscious, have come nearer to the
+surface; now that she has grown mature and that they have been stimulated
+yet unsatisfied for so long, they have, unknown to herself, become
+insistent and sensitive to a sympathetic touch. The friends may indeed
+grow into lovers, and then some sort of solution, by divorce or
+intrigue--scarcely however a desirable kind of solution--becomes possible.
+But we are here taking the highest ground and assuming that honourable
+feeling, domestic affection, or a stern sense of moral duty, renders such
+solution unacceptable. In due course the husband returns, and then, to her
+utter dismay, the wife discovers, if she has not discovered it before,
+that during his absence, and for the first time in her life, she has
+fallen in love. She loyally confesses the situation to her husband, for
+whom her affection and attachment remain the same as before, for what has
+happened to her is the coming of a totally new kind of love and not any
+change in her old love. The situation which arises is one of torturing
+anxiety for all concerned, and it is not less so when all concerned are
+animated by noble and self-sacrificing impulses. The husband in his
+devotion to his wife may even be willing that her new impulses should be
+gratified. She, on her side, will not think of yielding to desires which
+seem both unfair to her husband and opposed to all her moral traditions.
+We are not here concerned to consider the most likely, or the most
+desirable, exit from this unfortunate situation. The points to note are
+that it is a situation which to-day actually occurs; that it causes acute
+unhappiness to at least two people who may be of the finest physical and
+intellectual type and the noblest character, and that it might be avoided
+if there were at the outset a proper understanding of the married state
+and of the part which the art of love plays in married happiness and the
+development of personality.
+
+A woman may have been married once, she may have been married twice, she
+may have had children by both husbands, and yet it may not be until she is
+past the age of thirty and is united to a third man that she attains the
+development of erotic personality and all that it involves in the full
+flowering of her whole nature. Up to then she had to all appearance had
+all the essential experiences of life. Yet she had remained spiritually
+virginal, with conventionally prim ideas of life, narrow in her
+sympathies, with the finest and noblest functions of her soul helpless and
+bound, at heart unhappy even if not clearly realising that she was
+unhappy. Now she has become another person. The new liberated forces from
+within have not only enabled her to become sensitive to the rich
+complexities of intimate personal relationship, they have enlarged and
+harmonised her realisation of all relationships. Her new erotic experience
+has not only stimulated all her energies, but her new knowledge has
+quickened all her sympathies. She feels, at the same time, more mentally
+alert, and she finds that she is more alive than before to the influences
+of nature and of art. Moreover, as others observe, however they may
+explain it, a new beauty has come into her face, a new radiancy into her
+expression, a new force into all her activities. Such is the exquisite
+flowering of love which some of us who may penetrate beneath the surface
+of life are now and then privileged to see. The sad part of it is that we
+see it so seldom and then often so late.
+
+It must not be supposed that there is any direct or speedy way of
+introducing into life a wider and deeper conception of the erotic
+play-function, and all that it means for the development of the
+individual, the enrichment of the marriage relationship, and the moral
+harmony of society. Such a supposition would merely be to vulgarise and to
+stultify the divine and elusive mystery. It is only slowly and indirectly
+that we can bring about the revolution which in this direction would renew
+life. We may prepare the way for it by undermining and destroying those
+degrading traditional conceptions which have persisted so long that they
+are instilled into us almost from birth, to work like a virus in the
+heart, and to become almost a disease of the soul. To make way for the
+true and beautiful revelation, we can at least seek to cast out those
+ancient growths, which may once have been true and beautiful, but now are
+false and poisonous. By casting out from us the conception of love as vile
+and unclean we shall purify the chambers of our hearts for the reception
+of love as something unspeakably holy.
+
+In this matter we may learn a lesson from the psycho-analysts of to-day
+without any implication that psycho-analysis is necessarily a desirable or
+even possible way of attaining the revelation of love. The wiser
+psycho-analysts insist that the process of liberating the individual from
+outer and inner influences that repress or deform his energies and
+impulses is effected by removing the inhibitions on the free-play of his
+nature. It is a process of education in the true sense, not of the
+suppression of natural impulses nor even of the instillation of sound
+rules and maxims for their control, not of the pressing in but of the
+leading out of the individual's special tendencies.[20] It removes
+inhibitions, even inhibitions that were placed upon the individual, or
+that he consciously or unconsciously placed upon himself, with the best
+moral intentions, and by so doing it allows a larger and freer and more
+natively spontaneous morality to come into play. It has this influence
+above all in the sphere of sex, where such inhibitions have been most
+powerfully laid on the native impulses, where the natural tendencies have
+been most surrounded by taboos and terrors, most tinged with artificial
+stains of impurity and degradation derived from alien and antiquated
+traditions. Thus the therapeutical experience of the psycho-analysts
+reinforces the lessons we learn from physiology and psychology and the
+intimate experiences of life.
+
+[20] See, for instance, H.W. Frink, _Morbid Fears and Compulsions_,
+1918, Ch. X.
+
+Sexual activity, we see, is not merely a bald propagative act, nor, when
+propagation is put aside, is it merely the relief of distended vessels. It
+is something more even than the foundation of great social institutions.
+It is the function by which all the finer activities of the organism,
+physical and psychic, may be developed and satisfied. Nothing, it has
+been said, is so serious as lust--to use the beautiful term which has been
+degraded into the expression of the lowest forms of sensual pleasure--and
+we have now to add that nothing is so full of play as love. Play is
+primarily the instinctive work of the brain, but it is brain activity
+united in the subtlest way to bodily activity. In the play-function of sex
+two forms of activity, physical and psychic, are most exquisitely and
+variously and harmoniously blended. We here understand best how it is that
+the brain organs and the sexual organs are, from the physiological
+standpoint, of equal importance and equal dignity. Thus the adrenal
+glands, among the most influential of all the ductless glands, are
+specially and intimately associated alike with the brain and the sex
+organs. As we rise in the animal series, brain and adrenal glands march
+side by side in developmental increase of size, and at the same time,
+sexual activity and adrenal activity equally correspond.
+
+Lovers in their play--when they have been liberated from the traditions
+which bound them to the trivial or the gross conception of play in
+love--are thus moving amongst the highest human activities, alike of the
+body and of the soul. They are passing to each other the sacramental
+chalice of that wine which imparts the deepest joy that men and women can
+know. They are subtly weaving the invisible cords that bind husband and
+wife together more truly and more firmly than the priest of any church.
+And if in the end--as may or may not be--they attain the climax of free
+and complete union, then their human play has become one with that divine
+play of creation in which old poets fabled that, out of the dust of the
+ground and in his own image, some God of Chaos once created Man.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE RACE
+
+I
+
+
+The relation of the individual person to the species he belongs to is the
+most intimate of all relations. It is a relation which almost amounts to
+identity. Yet it somehow seems so vague, so abstract, as scarcely to
+concern us at all. It is only lately indeed that there has been formulated
+even so much as a science to discuss this relationship, and the duties
+which, when properly understood, it throws upon the individual. Even yet
+the word "Eugenics," the name of this science, and this art, sometimes
+arouses a smile. It seems to stand for a modern fad, which the superior
+person, or even the ordinary plebeian democrat, may pass by on the other
+side with his nose raised towards the sky. Modern the science and art of
+Eugenics certainly seem, though the term is ancient, and the Greeks of
+classic days, as well as their successors to-day, used the word Eugeneia
+for nobility or good birth. It was chosen by Francis Galton, less than
+fifty years ago, to express "the effort of Man to improve his own breed."
+But the thing the term stands for is, in reality, also far from modern. It
+is indeed ancient and may even be nearly as old as Man himself.
+Consciously or unconsciously, sometimes under pretexts that have disguised
+his motives even from himself, Man has always been attempting to improve
+his own quality or at least to maintain it. When he slackens that effort,
+when he allows his attention to be too exclusively drawn to other ends, he
+suffers, he becomes decadent, he even tends to die out.
+
+Primitive eugenics had seldom anything to do with what we call
+"birth-control." One must not say that it never had. Even the mysterious
+mika operation of so primitive a race as the Australians has been supposed
+to be a method of controlling conception. But the usual method, even of
+people highly advanced in culture, has been simpler. They preferred to see
+the new-born infant before deciding whether it was likely to prove a
+credit to its parents or to the human race generally, and if it seemed not
+up to the standard they dealt with it accordingly. At one time that was
+regarded as a cruel and even inhuman method. To-day, when the most
+civilised nations of the world have devoted all their best energies to
+competitive slaughter, we may have learnt to view the matter differently.
+If we can tolerate the wholesale murder and mutilation of the finest
+specimens of our race in the adult possession of all their aptitudes we
+cannot easily find anything to disapprove in the merciful disposal of the
+poorest specimens before they have even attained conscious possession of
+their senses. But in any case, and whatever we may ourselves be pleased to
+think or not to think, it is certain that some of the most highly
+developed peoples of the world have practised infanticide. It is equally
+certain that the practise has not proved destructive to the emotions of
+humanity and affection. Even some of the lowest human races,--as we
+commonly estimate them,--while finding it necessary to put aside a certain
+proportion of their new-born infants, expend a degree of love and even
+indulgence on the children they bring up which is rarely found among
+so-called civilised nations.
+
+There is no need, however, to consider whether or not infanticide is
+humane. We are all agreed that it is altogether unnecessary, and that it
+is seldom that even that incipient form of infanticide called abortion,
+still so popular among us, need be resorted to. Our aim now--so far at all
+events as mere ideals go--is not to destroy life but to preserve it; we
+seek to improve the conditions of life and to render unnecessary the
+premature death of any human creature that has once drawn breath.
+
+It is indeed just here that we find a certain clash between the modern
+view of life and the view of earlier civilisations. The ancients were
+less careful than we claim to be of the individual, but they were more
+careful of the race. They cultivated eugenics after their manner, though
+it was a manner which we reprobate.[21] We pride ourselves, rightly or
+wrongly, on our care for the individual; during all the past century we
+claim to have been strenuously working for an amelioration of the
+environment which will make life healthier and pleasanter for the
+individual. But in the concentration of our attention on this altogether
+desirable end, which we are still far from having adequately attained, we
+have lost sight of that larger end, the well-being of the race and the
+amelioration of life itself, not merely of the conditions of life. The
+most we hope is that somehow the improvement of the conditions of the
+individual will incidentally improve the stock. These our practical
+ideals, which have flourished for a century past, arose out of the great
+French Revolution and were inspired by the maxim of that Revolution, as
+formulated by Rousseau, that "All men are born equal." That maxim, was
+overthrown half a century ago; the great biological movement of science,
+initiated by Darwin, showed that it was untenable. All men are not born
+equal. Everyone agrees about that now, but nevertheless the momentum of
+the earlier movement was so powerful that we still go on acting as though
+all men are, and always will be, born equal, and that we need not trouble
+ourselves about heredity but only about the environment.
+
+[21] But this statement must not be left without important
+qualification. Thus the ancient Greeks (as Moissides has shown in
+_Janus_, 1913), not only their philosophers and statesmen, but also
+their women, often took the most enlightened interest in eugenics, and,
+moreover, showed it in practice. They were in many respects far in
+advance of us. They clearly realised, for instance, the need of a proper
+interval between conceptions, not only to ensure the health of women,
+but also the vigour of the offspring. It is natural that among every
+fine race eugenics should be almost an instinct or they would cease to
+be a fine race. It is equally natural that among our modern degenerates
+eugenics is an unspeakable horror, however much, as the psycho-analysts
+would put it, they rationalise that horror.
+
+The way out of this clash of ideals--which has compelled us to hope
+impossibilities from the environment because we dreaded what seemed the
+only alternative--is, as we know, furnished by birth-control. An
+unqualified reliance on the environment, making it ever easier and easier
+for the feeblest and most defective to be born and survive, could only, in
+the long run, lead to the degeneration of the whole race. The knowledge of
+the practice of birth-control gives us the mastery of all that the
+ancients gained by infanticide, while yet enabling us to cherish that
+ideal of the sacredness of human life which we profess to honour so
+highly. The main difficulty is that it demands a degree of scientific
+precision which the ancients could not possess and might dispense with, so
+long as they were able to decide the eugenic claims of the infant by
+actual inspection. We have to be content to determine not what the infant
+is but when it be likely to be, and that involves a knowledge of the laws
+of heredity which we are only learning slowly to acquire. We may all in
+our humble ways help to increase that knowledge by giving it greater
+extension and more precision through the observations we are able to make
+on our own families. To such observations Galton attached great importance
+and strove in various ways to further them. Detailed records, physical and
+mental, beginning from birth, are still far from being as common as is
+desirable, although it is obvious that they possess a permanent personal
+and family private interest in addition to their more public scientific
+value. We do not need, and it would indeed be undesirable, to emulate in
+human breeding the achievements of a Luther Burbank. We have no right to
+attempt to impose on any human creature an exaggerated and one-sided
+development. But it is not only our right, it is our duty, or rather one
+may say, the natural impulse of every rational and humane person, to seek
+that only such children may be born as will be able to go through life
+with a reasonable prospect that they will not be heavily handicapped by
+inborn defect or special liability to some incapacitating disease. What is
+called "positive" eugenics--the attempt, that is, to breed special
+qualities--may well be viewed with hesitation. But so-called "negative"
+eugenics--the effort to clear all inborn obstacles out of the path of the
+coming generation--demands our heartiest sympathy and our best
+co-operation, for as Galton, the founder of modern Eugenics, wrote towards
+the end of his life of this new science: "Its first object is to check the
+birth-rate of the unfit, instead of allowing them to come into being,
+though doomed in large numbers to perish prematurely." We can seldom be
+absolutely sure what stocks should not propagate, and what two stocks
+should on no account be blended, but we can attain reasonable probability,
+and it is on such probabilities in every department of life that we are
+always called upon to act.
+
+It is often said--I have said it myself--that birth-control when practised
+merely as a limitation of the family, scarcely suffices to further the
+eugenic progress of the race. If it is not deliberately directed towards
+the elimination of the worst stocks or the worst possibilities in the
+blending of stocks, it may even tend to diminish the better stocks since
+it is the better stocks that are least likely to propagate at random. This
+is true if other conditions remain equal. It is evident, however, that the
+other conditions will not remain equal, for no evidence has yet been
+brought forward to show that birth-control, even when practised without
+regard to eugenic considerations--doubtless the usual rule up to the
+present--has produced any degeneration of the race. On the contrary, the
+evidence seems to show that it has improved the race. The example of
+Holland is often brought forward as evidence in favour of such a tendency
+of birth-control, since in that country the wide-spread practise of
+birth-control has been accompanied by an increase in the health and
+stature of the people, as well as an increase in their numbers to a
+remarkable degree, for the fall in the birth-rate has been far more than
+compensated by the fall in the death-rate, while it is said that the
+average height of the population has increased by four inches. It is,
+indeed, quite possible to see why, although theoretically a random
+application of birth-control cannot affect the germinal possibilities of a
+community, in practise it may improve the somatic conditions under which
+the germinal elements develop. There will probably be a longer interval
+between the births of the children, which has been demonstrated by Ewart
+and others to be an important factor not only in preserving the health of
+the mother but in increasing the health and size of the child. The
+diminution in the number of the children renders it possible to bestow a
+greater amount of care on each child. Moreover, the better economic
+position of the father, due to the smaller number of individuals he has to
+support, makes it possible for the family to live under improved
+conditions as regards nourishment, hygiene, and comfort. The observance of
+birth-control is thus a far more effective lever for raising the state of
+the social environment and improving the conditions of breeding, than is
+direct action on the part of the community in its collective capacity to
+attain the same end. For however energetic such collective action may be
+in striving to improve general social conditions by municipalising or
+State-supporting public utilities, it can never adequately counter-balance
+the excessive burden and wasteful expenditure of force placed on a family
+by undue child-production. It can only palliate them.
+
+When, however, we have found reason to believe that, even if practised
+without regard to eugenic considerations, birth-control may yet act
+beneficially to promote good breeding, we begin to realise how great a
+power it may possess when consciously and deliberately directed towards
+that end. In eugenics, as already pointed out, there are two objects that
+may be aimed at: one called positive eugenics, that seeks to promote the
+increase of the best stocks amongst us; the other, called negative
+eugenics, which seeks to promote the decrease of the worst stocks. Our
+knowledge is still too imperfect to enable us to pursue either of these
+objects with complete certainty. This is especially so as regards positive
+eugenics, and since it seems highly undesirable to attempt to breed human
+beings, as we do animals, for points, when we are in the presence of what
+seem to us our finest human stocks, physically, morally, and
+intellectually, it is our wisest course just to leave them alone as much
+as we can. The best stocks will probably be also those best able to help
+themselves and in so doing to help others. But that is obviously not so as
+regards the worst stocks. It is, therefore, fortunate that the aim here
+seems a little clearer. There are still many abnormal conditions of which
+we cannot say positively that they are injurious to the race and that we
+should therefore seek to breed them out. But there are other conditions so
+obviously of evil import alike to the subjects themselves and to their
+descendants that we cannot have any reasonable doubt about them. There is,
+for instance, epilepsy, which is known to be transformed by heredity into
+various abnormalities dangerous alike to their possessors and to society.
+There are also the pronounced degrees of feeble-mindedness, which are
+definitely heritable and not only condemn those who reveal them to a
+permanent inaptitude for full life, but constitute a subtle poison working
+through the social atmosphere in all directions and lowering the level of
+civilisation in the community. Nowhere has this been so thoroughly studied
+and so clearly proved as in the United States. It is only necessary to
+mention Dr. C.B. Davenport of the Department of Experimental Evolution at
+Cold Spring Harbor (New York) who has carried on so much research in
+regard to the heredity of epilepsy and other inheritable abnormal
+conditions, and Dr. Goddard of Vineland (New Jersey) whose work has
+illustrated so fully the hereditary relationships of feeble-mindedness.
+The United States, moreover, has seen the development of the system of
+social field-work which has rendered possible a more complete knowledge of
+family heredity than has ever before been possible on a large scale.
+
+It is along such lines as these that our knowledge of the eugenic
+conditions of life will grow adequate and precise enough to form an
+effective guide to social conduct. Nature, and a due attention to laws of
+heredity in life, will then rank in equal honour to our eyes with nurture
+or that attention to the environmental conditions of life which we already
+regard as so important. A regard to nurture has led us to spend the
+greatest care on the preservation not only of the fit but the unfit, while
+meantime it has wisely suggested to us the desirability of segregating or
+even of sterilising the unfit. But the study of Nature leads us further
+and, as Galton said, "Eugenics rests on bringing no more individuals into
+the world than can be properly cared for, and these only of the best
+stocks." That is to say that the only instrument by which eugenics can be
+made practically effective in the modern world is birth-control.
+
+It is not scientific research alone, nor even the wide popular diffusion
+of knowledge, that will suffice to bring eugenics and birth-control,
+singly or in their due combination, into the course of our daily lives.
+They need to be embodied in our instinctive impulses. Galton considered
+that eugenics must become a factor of religion and be regarded as a sacred
+and virile creed, while Ellen Key holds that the religions of the past
+must be superseded by a new religion which will be the awakening of the
+whole of humanity to a consciousness of the "holiness of generation." For
+my own part, I scarcely consider that either eugenics or birth-control can
+be regarded as properly a part of religion. Being of virtue and not of
+grace they belong more naturally to the sphere of morals. But here they
+certainly need to go far deeper than the mere intelligence of the mind can
+take them. They cannot become guides to conduct until their injunctions
+have been printed on the fleshy tablets of our hearts. The demands of the
+race must speak from within us, in the voice of conscience which we
+disobey at our peril. When that happens with regard to ascertained laws of
+racial well-being we may know that we are truly following, even though not
+in the letter, those great spirits, like Galton with his intellectual
+vision and Ellen Key with her inspired enthusiasm, who have pointed out
+new roads for the ennoblement of the race.
+
+
+II
+
+It may be well, before we go further, to look a little more closely into
+the suspicion and dislike which eugenics still arouses in many worthy
+old-fashioned people. To some extent that attitude is excused, not only by
+the mistakes which in a new and complex science must inevitably be made
+even by painstaking students, but also by the rash and extravagant
+proposals of irresponsible and eccentric persons claiming without warrant
+to speak in the name of eugenics. Two thousand years ago the wild excesses
+of some early Christians furnished an excuse for the ancient world to view
+Christianity with contempt, although the extreme absence of such excesses
+has furnished still better ground for the modern world to maintain the
+same view. To-day such a work as _Le Haras Humain_ ("The Human Stud-farm")
+of Dr. Binet-Sangle, putting forward proposals which, whether beneficial
+or not, will certainly find no one to carry them out, similarly furnishes
+an excuse to those who would reject eugenics altogether. Utopian schemes
+have their value; we should be able to find inspiration in the most modern
+of them, just as we still do in Plato's immortal _Republic_. But in this,
+as in other matters, we must exercise a little intelligence. We must not
+confuse the brilliant excursion of some solitary thinker with the
+well-grounded proposals of those who are concerned with the sober
+possibilities of actual life in our own time. People who are incapable of
+exercising a little shrewd commonsense in the affairs of life, and are in
+the habit of emptying out the baby with the bath, had better avoid
+touching the delicate problems connected with practical eugenics.
+
+There is one prejudice already mentioned, due to lack of clear thinking,
+which deserves more special consideration because it is widespread among
+the socialistic democracy of several countries as well as among social
+reformers, and is directed alike against eugenics and birth-control. This
+prejudice is based on the ground that bad economic conditions and an
+unwholesome environment are the source of all social evils, and that a
+better distribution of wealth, or a vast scheme of social welfare, is the
+one thing necessary, when that is achieved all other things being added
+unto us, without any further trouble on our part. It is certainly
+impossible to over-rate the importance of the economic factor in society,
+or of a good environment. And it is true that eugenics alone, like
+birth-control alone, can effect little if the economic basis of society is
+unsound. But it is equally certain that the economic factor can never in
+itself suffice for fine living or even as a cure-all of social and racial
+diseases. Its value is not that it can effect these things but that it
+furnishes the favourable conditions for effecting them. He would be
+foolish indeed who went to the rich to find the example of good breeding
+and, as is well known, it is not with the rich that the future of the race
+lies. The fact is that under any economic system the responsible personal
+direction of the individual and the family remain equally necessary, and
+no progress is possible so long as the individual casts all responsibility
+away from himself on to the social group he forms part of. The social
+group, after all, is merely himself and the likes of himself. He is merely
+shifting the burden from his individual self to his collective self, and
+in so doing he loses more than he gains.
+
+Thus there is always a sound core in that Individualism which has been
+preached so long and practised so energetically, especially in
+English-speaking lands, however great the abuse involved in its excesses.
+It is still in the name of Individualism that the most brilliant
+antagonists of eugenics and of birth-control are wont to direct their
+attacks. The counsel of self-control and foresight in procreation, the
+restriction necessary to purify and raise the standard of the race, seem
+to the narrow and short-sighted advocates of a great principle an
+unwarrantable violation of the sacred rights of their individual liberty.
+They have not yet grasped the elementary fact that the rights of the
+individual are the rights of all individuals, and that Individualism
+itself calls for a limitation of the freedom of the individual.
+
+That is why even the most uncompromising Individualist must recognise an
+element of altruism, call it whatever name you will, Collectivism,
+Socialism, Communism, or merely the vague and long-suffering term,
+Democracy. One cannot assume Individualism for oneself unless one assumes
+it for the many. That is a great truth which goes to the heart of the
+whole complex problem of eugenics and birth-control. As Perrycoste has
+well argued,[22] biology is altogether against the narrow Individualism
+which seeks to oppose Collective Individualism. For if, in accordance with
+the most careful modern investigations, we recognise that heredity is
+supreme, that the qualities we have inherited from our ancestors count for
+more in our lives than anything we have acquired by our own personal
+efforts, then we have to admit that the capable man's wealth is more the
+community's property than his own, and, similarly, the incapable man's
+poverty is more the community's concern than his own. So that neither the
+capable nor the incapable are entitled to an unqualified power of freedom,
+and neither, likewise, are justly liable to be burdened by an unqualified
+responsibility. It is the duty of the community to draw on the powers of
+the fit and equally its duty to care for the unfit. In this way,
+Perrycoste, whose attitude is that of the Rationalist, is led by science
+to a conclusion which is that of the Christian. We are all members each of
+the other, and still more are we members of those who went before us. The
+generations preceding us have not died to themselves but live in us, and
+we, whom they produced, live in each other and in those who will come
+after us. The problems of eugenics and of birth-control affect us all. In
+the face of these problems it is the voice of Man that speaks: "Inasmuch
+as ye did it not unto the least of these my brethren, ye did it not unto
+me." However firmly we base ourselves on the principles of Individualism
+we are inevitably brought to the fundamental facts of eugenics which, if
+we fail to recognise, our Individualism becomes of no effect.
+
+[22] F.H. Perrycoste, "Politics and Science," _Science Progress_, Jan.,
+1920.
+
+But it is the same with Socialism, or by whatever name we chose to call
+the Collectivist activities of the community in social reform. Socialism
+also brings us up against the hard rock of eugenic fact which, if we
+neglect it, will dash our most beautiful social construction to fragments.
+It is the more necessary to point this out since it is on the Socialist
+and Democratic side, much more frequently than on the Individualist side,
+that we find an indifferent or positively hostile attitude towards eugenic
+considerations. Put social conditions on a sound basis, the people on
+this side often say, let all receive an adequate economic return for their
+work and be recognised as having a claim for an adequate share in the
+products of society, and there is no need to worry about the race or about
+the need for birth-control, all will go well of itself. There is not the
+slightest ground for any such comfortable belief.
+
+This has been well shown by Dr. Eden Paul, himself a Socialist and even in
+sympathy with the extreme Left.[23] After setting forth the present
+conditions, with our excessive elimination of higher types, and undue
+multiplication of lower types, the racial degeneration caused by the
+faulty and anti-selective working of the marriage system in modern
+capitalist society, so that in our existing civilisation unconscious
+natural selection has largely ceased to work towards the improvement of
+the human breed, he proceeds to consider the possible remedies. The
+frequent impatience of the Socialist, and Social Reformers generally, with
+eugenic proposals has a certain degree of justification in the fact that
+many evils thoughtlessly attributed to inferiority of stock are really due
+to bad environment. But when the environment has been so far improved that
+all defects due to its badness are removed, we shall be face to face,
+without possibility of doubt, with bad inheritance as the sole remaining
+factor in the production of inefficient and anti-social members of the
+community. A socialist community must recognise the right to work and to
+maintenance of all its members, Eden Paul points out, but, he adds, a
+community which allowed this right to all defectives without imposing any
+restrictions in their perpetuation of themselves would deserve all the
+evils that would fall upon it. It is quite clear how intolerable the
+burden of these evils would be. A State that provided an adequate
+subsistence for all alike, the inefficient as well as the efficient, would
+encourage a racial degeneration, from excessive multiplication of the
+unfit, far more dangerous even than that of to-day.[24] Ability to earn
+the minimum wage, Eden Paul argues in agreement with H.G. Wells, must be
+the condition of the right to become a parent. "Unless the socialist is a
+eugenist as well, the socialist state will speedily perish from racial
+degradation."
+
+
+[23] In an essay on "Eugenics, Birth Control, and Socialism" in
+_Population and Birth-Control: A Symposium_, edited by Eden and Cedar
+Paul.
+
+[24] This is here and there beginning to be recognised. Thus, not long
+ago, the Hereford War Pensions Committee resolved not to issue a
+maternal grant for children born during a prolonged period of treatment
+allowance. Such a measure of course fails to meet the situation, for it
+is obvious that, when born, the children must be cared for. But it shows
+a glimmering recognition of the facts, and the people capable of such a
+recognition will, in time, come to see that the right way of meeting the
+situation is, not to neglect the children, but to prevent their
+conception. Mothers' Clinics for instruction in such prevention are now
+being established in England, through the advocacy of Mrs. Margaret
+Sanger and the actual initiative of Dr. Marie Stopes.
+
+Thus it is essential that the eugenist, dealing with the hereditary
+factor of life, and the social reformer or socialist, dealing with the
+environmental factor, should supplement each other's work. Neither can
+attain his end without the other's help, for the eugenist alone cannot
+overcome the environmental factor, even perhaps increases it if he is an
+individualist in the narrow sense, and the socialist alone cannot overcome
+the bad hereditary factor, and will even increase it if he is no more than
+a socialist. The more socialist our State becomes the more essential
+becomes at the same time the adoption of eugenic practices as a working
+part of the State. "Socialism and eugenics must go hand in hand."
+
+Perrycoste from his own point of view has independently reached the same
+conclusions. He is not, indeed, concerned with any "Socialist" community
+of the future but with the dangerous results which must inevitably follow
+the already established methods of social reform in our modern civilised
+States unless they are speedily checked by effective action based on
+eugenic knowledge. "If," he observes, "the community is to shoulder half
+or three-quarters of the burden of sustaining those degenerates who,
+through no fault of their own, are congenitally incompetent to maintain
+themselves in decent comfort, and is to render the life-pilgrimage of
+these unfortunates tolerable instead of a dreary nightmare, if it is to
+assume paternal charge of all the tens or hundreds of thousands of
+children whose parents cannot or will not provide adequately for them and
+is to guarantee to all such children as much education as they are capable
+of receiving, and a really fair start in life: then in sheer
+self-preservation the community must insist on, and rigidly enforce, its
+absolute claim to secure that no degeneracy or inheritable congenital
+defects shall persist beyond the present generation of degenerates, and
+that the community of fifty or seventy years hence shall have no incubus
+of mentally, or morally, or even physically, degenerate members--none but
+a few occasional sporadic morbid 'sports' from the normal, which it, in
+turn, may effectively prevent from handing on their like." Unless the
+problem is squarely faced, Perrycoste concludes, national deterioration
+must increase and a permanently successful collectivist society is
+inherently impossible.
+
+We are not now concerned with the details of any policy of eugenics and of
+birth-control, which I couple together because although a random
+birth-control by no means involves much, if any, eugenic progress, it is
+not easy under modern conditions to conceive any practical or effective
+policy of eugenics except through the instrumentation of birth-control. We
+here take it for granted that in this field the slow progress of
+scientific knowledge must be our guide. Premature legislation, rash and
+uninstructed action, will not lead to progress but are more likely to
+delay it. Yet even with imperfect knowledge, it is already of the first
+importance to evoke interest in the great issue here at stake and to do
+all that we can to arouse the individual conscience of every man and woman
+to his or her personal responsibility in this matter. That is here all
+taken for granted.
+
+It seems necessary to consider the political aspect of eugenics because
+that aspect is frequently invoked, and a man's attitude towards this
+question is frequently determined beforehand by what he considers that
+Individualism or Socialism demands. We see that when the question is
+driven home our political attitude makes no difference. It is only a
+shallow Individualism, it is only a still more shallow Socialism, which
+imagines that under modern social conditions the fundamental racial
+questions can be left to answer themselves.
+
+
+III
+
+Many years before the Great War, in all the most civilised countries of
+the World, there were those who raised the cry of "Race-Suicide!" In
+America this cry was more especially popularised by the powerful voice of
+Theodore Roosevelt, but in European countries there were similar voices
+raised in tones of virtuous indignation to denounce the same crime. Since
+the war other voices have been raised in even more high-pitched and
+feverish tones, but now they are less weighty and responsible voices,
+since to those who realise that at present there is not food enough to
+keep the population of the world from starvation it seems hardly
+compatible with sanity to advocate an increased rate of human production.
+
+Now, though it is easy to do so, we must not belittle this cry of
+"Race-Suicide!" It is not usually accompanied by definite argument, but it
+assumes that birth-control is the method of such suicide, and that the
+first and most immediately dangerous result is that one's own nation,
+whichever that may be, is placed in a position of alarming military
+inferiority to other nations, as a step towards the final extinction. It
+is useless to deny that it really is a serious matter if there is danger
+of the speedy disappearance of the human race from the earth by its own
+voluntary and deliberate action, and that within a measurable period of
+time--for if it were an immeasurable period there would be no occasion for
+any acute anxiety--the last man will perish from the world. This is what
+"Race-Suicide" means, and we must face the fact squarely.
+
+It can scarcely be said, however, that the meaning of "Race-Suicide" has
+actually been squarely faced by those who have most vehemently raised
+that cry. Translated into more definite and precise terms this cry means,
+and is intended to mean: "We want more births." That is what it definitely
+means, and sometimes in the minds of those who make this demand it seems
+also to imply nothing more. Yet it implies a great number of other things.
+It implies certain strain and probable ill-health on the mothers, it
+implies distress and disorder in the family, it implies, even if the
+additional child survives, a more acute industrial struggle, and it
+further involves in this case, by the stimulus it gives to
+over-population, the perpetual menace of militarism and war. What,
+however, even at the outset, more births most distinctly and most
+unquestionably imply is more deaths. It is nowadays so well known that a
+high birth-rate is accompanied by a high death-rate--the exceptions are
+too few to need attention--that it is unnecessary to adduce further
+evidence. It is only the intoxicated enthusiasts of the "Race-Suicide" cry
+who are able to overlook a fact of which they can hardly be ignorant. The
+model which they hold up for the public's inspiration has on the obverse
+"More Births!" But on the reverse it bears "More Deaths!" It would be
+helpful to the public, and might even be wholesome for our enthusiasts'
+own enlightenment, if they would occasionally turn the medal round and
+slightly vary the monotony of their propaganda by changing its form and
+crying out for "More Deaths!" "It is a hard thing," said Johnny Dunn, "for
+a man that has a house full of children to be left to the mercy of
+Almighty God."
+
+If, however, we wish to consider the real significance of the facts,
+without regard for the wild cries of ignorant cranks, it is scarcely
+necessary to point out here that neither the birth-rate taken by itself,
+nor the death-rate taken by itself, will suffice to give us any measure
+even of the growth of the population, to say nothing of the progress of
+civilisation or the happiness of humanity. It is obvious that we must
+consider both gains and losses, and put one against the other, if we wish
+to ascertain the net result. We may roughly get a notion of what that
+result is by deducting the death-rate from the birth-rate and calling the
+remainder the survival-rate. If we are really concerned with the question
+of the alleged suicide of the race, and do not wish to be befooled, we
+must pay little attention to the birth-rate, for that by itself means
+nothing: we must concentrate on the survival-rate. Then we may soon
+convince ourselves, not only that the human race is not committing
+suicide, but that not even a single one of the so-called civilised nations
+of which it is mainly composed is committing suicide. Quite the contrary!
+Every one of them, even France, where this peculiar "suicide" is supposed
+to be most actively at work, is yearly increasing in numbers.
+
+It is interesting to note, moreover, that the French have been increasing
+faster, that is to say the survival-rate has been higher in recent years
+just before the war, when the birth-rate was at its lowest, than they were
+twenty years earlier, with a higher birth-rate. And if we take a wider
+sweep and consider the growth of the French population towards the end of
+the eighteenth century, we find the birth-rate estimated at the very high
+figure of 40. But the death-rate was nearly as high, the average duration
+of life was only half what it is now. So that the survival-rate in France
+at that time, with widely different rates of birth and death, was not much
+unlike it is now. The recent French birth-rate of 19 and less, which
+automatically causes the "Race-Suicide" marionette to dance with rage, is
+producing not far from the same result in growth of the population--we are
+not here concerned with the enormous difference in well being and
+happiness--as the extremely high rate of 40 which sends our marionettes
+leaping to the sky with joy. In war-time England, in 1917, the birth-rate
+sank to 17.8, yet the death-rate was at 14 and the increase of the
+population continued. The more the human race commits this kind of
+suicide, one is tempted to exclaim, the faster it grows!
+
+It is, however, in the New World--as in Canada, Australia, and New
+Zealand--that we find the most impressive evidence of the real criteria of
+the growth in population set up for judgment on the racial suicide cranks.
+Canadian statistics bring out many points instructive even in their
+variation. Here we see not only unusual curves of rise and fall, but also
+pronounced differences, due to the special peculiarities of the French
+population, most clearly in the Province of Quebec but also in some parts
+of the Province of Ontario. In Quebec the birth-rate some years ago was
+35, and the death-rate 21, both rates high, and the survival-rate high at
+14; recently the birth-rate has risen to 37 and the death-rate fallen to
+17, with the result that the survival-rate of 20 is the highest in the
+world, though it must be noted that the high birth-rate is not likely to
+last long, since in Quebec, as elsewhere in the world, increasing
+urbanisation causes a decreasing birth-rate. In mainly English-speaking
+Ontario the birth-rate is much lower, about 24, but the death-rate is also
+lower, about 14, so that the fairly considerable survival-rate of 10 is
+obtained. But we note the highly significant fact that some thirty years
+or more ago the birth-rate was much lower, about 19, and yet the
+survival-rate was almost 9, nearly as high as to-day! The death-rate was
+then at 10, and nothing could be more instructive as to the real
+relationship that holds in this matter. There has been a great rise in
+the birth-rate and the only result, as someone has remarked, is a great
+increase in the population of the grave-yards. Equally instructive is it
+to compare various cities in this same Province, living under the same
+laws, and fairly similar social conditions. In the report of the
+Registrar-General of Ontario for 1916 I find that highest in birth-rate of
+cities in the Province stands Ottawa with a very considerable French
+population. But first also stands the same city for infant mortality,
+which is three times greater than in some other cities in the Province
+with a low birth-rate. Sault Ste. Marie, again with an enormous
+birth-rate, stands third for infant mortality. Canada shows us that, even
+if we regard the crude desire for a large growth of population as
+reasonable--and that is a considerable assumption--a high birth-rate is an
+uncertain prop to rest on.
+
+Canada is an instructive example because we have some ground for believing
+that the difference between the English-speaking and French-speaking
+populations--the greater care of the former in procreation and the more
+recklessly destructive methods of the latter in attaining the same
+ends--are due to their different attitudes towards the use of methods of
+birth-control. What the result of a general use of such methods is we know
+from the example already mentioned of Holland, where they are taught,
+officially recognised, and in general use, not only among the rich but
+among the poor. The result is that the birth-rate has been falling slowly
+and steadily for forty years. But the death-rate has also been falling and
+at a greater rate. So that the more the birth-rate has fallen the higher
+has been the rate of increase among the population.
+
+It is perhaps in Australia and New Zealand that we find the most
+satisfactory proofs of the benefits of a falling birth-rate in relation to
+"Race-Suicide." The evidence may well appeal to us the more since it is
+precisely here that the race-suicide fanatic finds freest scope for his
+wrath. He looks gleefully at China with its prolific women, at Russia with
+its magnificent birth-rate before the War of nearly 50, at Roumania with
+its birth-rate of 42, at Chile and Jamaica with nearly 40. No nonsense
+about birth-control there! No shirking by women of the sacred duties of
+perpetual maternity! No immoral notions about claims to happiness and
+desires for culture. And then he turns from, those great centres of
+prosperity and civilisation to Australia, to New Zealand, and his voice is
+choked and tears fill his eyes as he sees the goal of "Race-Suicide"
+nearly in sight and the spectre of the Last Man rising before him. For
+there is no doubt about it, Australia and New Zealand contain a population
+which is gradually reaching the highest point yet known of democratic
+organisation and general social well-being, and the birth-rate has been
+falling with terrific speed. Sixty-years ago in the Australian
+Commonwealth it was nearly 44, only forty years ago in New Zealand it was
+42. Now it is only about 26 in both lands. Yet the survival-rate, the
+actual growth of the population, is not so very much less with this low
+birth-rate than it was with the high birth-rate. For the death-rate has
+also fallen in both lands to about 10 (in New Zealand to 9) which is lower
+than any other country in the world. The result is that Australia and New
+Zealand, where (so it is claimed) preventives of conception are hawked
+from door to door, instead of being awful examples of "Race-Suicide,"
+actually present the highest rate of race-increase in the world (only
+excepting Canada, where it is less firmly and less healthily based),
+nearly twice that of Great Britain and able at the present rate to double
+itself every 44 years. So much for "Race-Suicide."
+
+The outcry about "Race-Suicide" is so far away from the real facts of life
+that it is not easy to take it seriously, however solemn one's natural
+temperament may be. We are concerned with people who arrogantly claim to
+direct the moral affairs of the world, even in the most intimately private
+matters, and who are yet ignorant of the most elementary facts of the
+world, unable to think, not even able to count! We can only greet them
+with a smile. But this question has, nevertheless, a genuinely serious
+aspect, and I should be sorry even to touch on the question of
+birth-control in relation to "Race-Suicide" without making that serious
+aspect clear.
+
+"Race-Suicide," we know, has no existence. Not only is the race as a whole
+increasing in number, especially its White branches, but even among the
+separate national groups there is not even one civilised people anywhere
+in the world that is decreasing in number. On the contrary they are all,
+even France, increasing at a more or less rapid rate. In England and
+Wales, for example, where the birth-rate has steadily fallen during the
+last forty years from 36 to 23 (I disregard the abnormal rates of
+War-time) the population is still increasing, and even if the present
+falls in birth-rate and death-rate continue, it will for years still go on
+increasing by an excess of over 1,000 births a day. When we realise that
+this is merely what goes on in one corner of the world and must be
+multiplied enormously to represent the whole, we shall find it impossible
+even to conceive the prodigious flow of excess babies which is being
+constantly poured over the earth. If we are capable of realising all the
+problems which thereby arise we must be forced to ask ourselves: _Is this
+state of things desirable_?
+
+"Be ye fruitful and multiply." That command was, according to the old
+story, delivered to a world inhabited by eight people. It has been handed
+down to a world in which it has long been ridiculously out of place, and
+has become merely the excuse for criminal recklessness among a race which
+has chosen to forget that the command was qualified by a solemn
+admonition: "At the hand of man, even at the hand of every man's brother,
+will I require the life of man." The high birth-rate has meant a vast
+slaughter of infants, it has meant, moreover, a perpetual oppression of
+the workers, disease, starvation, and death among the adult population; it
+has meant, further, a blood-thirsty economic competition, militarism,
+warfare. It has meant that all civilisation has from time to time become a
+thin crust over a volcano of revolution, and the human race has gone on
+lightly dancing there, striving to forget that ancient warning from a soul
+of things even deeper than the voice of Jehovah: "At the hand of man will
+I require the life of man." Men have recklessly followed the Will o' the
+Wisp which represented mere multiplication of their inefficient selves as
+the ideal of progress, quantity before quality, the notion that in an orgy
+of universal procreation could consist the highest good of humanity.
+
+The Great War, that is scarcely yet merged into an only less war-like
+Peace, has brought at least the small compensation that it has led men to
+look in the face this insane ideal of human progress. We see to-day what
+has come of it, and the further evils yet to come of it are being embodied
+beneath our eyes. So that at last the voice of Jehovah has here and there
+been faintly heard, even where nowadays we had grown least accustomed to
+hear it, in the Churches. It is Dr. Inge, the Dean of London's Cathedral
+of St. Paul's, a distinguished Churchman and at the same time a foremost
+champion of eugenics, who lately expressed the hope that the world,
+especially the European world, would one day realise the advantages of a
+stationary population.[25] Such a recognition, such an aspiration,
+indicates that a new hope is dawning on the world's horizon, and a higher
+ideal growing within the human soul. The mad competition of the industrial
+world during the past century, with the sordid gloom and wretchedness of
+it for all who were able to see beneath the surface, has shown for ever
+what comes of the effort to produce a growing population by high
+birth-rates in peace-time. The Great War of a later day has shown, let us
+hope in an equally decisive manner, what comes to a world where men have
+been for long generations produced so copiously and so cheaply that it is
+natural to regard them as only fit to sweep off the earth with machine
+guns. And the whole world of to-day--with its starving millions struggling
+in vain to feed themselves, with most of its natural beauty swept away by
+the ravages of man, and many of its most exquisite animals finally
+exterminated--is likely to become merely the monument to an ideal that
+failed. It was time, however late in the day, for a return to
+common-sense. It was time to realise that the ideal of mere propagation
+could lead us nowhere but to destruction. On that level we cannot compete
+even with the lowest of organised things, not even with the bacteria,
+which in number and in rapidity of multiplication are inconceivable to us.
+"All hope abandon, ye that enter here" is written over the portal of this
+path of "Progress."
+
+[25] This has long been recognised by men of science. Even anyone with
+the slightest knowledge of biology, Professor Bateson remarked in a
+British Association Presidential address in 1914, is aware that a
+population need not be declining because it is not increasing; "in
+normal stable conditions population is stationary." Major Leonard
+Darwin, the thoughtful and cautious President of the Eugenics Education
+Society, has lately stated his considered belief ("Population and
+Civilisation," _Economic Journal_, June, 1921) that increase in numbers
+means, ultimately, relative reduction of wealth per head, with
+consequent lowering of the standard of civilisation; that it also, under
+existing conditions, involves the production of a smaller proportion of
+men of ability; and, further, a depreciation of our traditions; he
+concludes that, whatever element in civilisation we regard--wealth, or
+stock, or traditions--"any increase in the population _such as that now
+taking place_ will be accompanied by a lowering in the standard of our
+civilisation."
+
+There are definite reasons why real progress in the supreme tasks of
+civilisation can best be made by a more or less stationary population,
+whether the population is large or small, and it need scarcely be added
+that, so far as the history of mankind is yet legible, the great advances
+in civilisation have been made by small, even very small populations.
+Where the population is rapidly growing, even if it is growing under the
+favourable conditions that hardly ever accompany such growth, all its
+energy is absorbed in adjusting its perpetually shifting equilibrium. It
+cannot succeed in securing the right conditions of growth, because its
+growth is never ceasing to demand new conditions. The structure of its
+civilisation never rises above the foundations because these foundations
+have perpetually to be laid afresh, and there is never time to get
+further. It is a process, moreover, accompanied by unending friction and
+disorder, by strains and stresses of all kinds, which are fatal to any
+full, harmonious, and democratic civilisation. The "population question,"
+with the endlessly mischievous readjustment it demands, must be eliminated
+before the great House of Life can be built up on a strong solid human
+foundation, to lift its soaring pinnacles towards the skies. That is what
+many bitter experiences are beginning to teach us. In the future we are
+likely to be much less concerned about "race-suicide," though we can never
+be too concerned about race-murder.
+
+When we think, however, of the desirability of a more or less stationary
+population, in order to insure real social progress, as distinct from that
+vain struggle of meaningless movement to and fro which the history of the
+past reveals, we have to be clear in our minds that it may be far from
+desirable that the present overgrown population of the world should be
+stationary. That might indeed be better than further increase in numbers,
+it would arrest the growth of our present evils; it might open the way to
+methods by which they would be diminished or eliminated. But the process
+would be infinitely difficult, and almost infinitely slow, as we may
+easily realise when we consider that, with a population even smaller than
+at present, the human race has not only ravished the world's beauty almost
+out of existence, but so ravaged its own vital spirit that, as was found
+with some consternation during the Great War, a large proportion of the
+male population of every country is unfit for military service.
+
+So often we hear it assumed, or even asserted, that greatness means
+quantity, so that to look forward to the replacement of the present
+teeming insignificant human myriads by a rarer and more truly greater race
+is to be a pessimist! Oh, these "optimists"! To revel in a world which
+more and more closely resembles all that the poets ever imagined of Hell,
+is to be an "optimist"! One wonders how it is that in no brief moment of
+lucidity it occurs to these people that the lower we descend in the scale
+of life the greater the quantity in a species and the poorer the quality,
+so that to reach what such people should really regard as the world's
+period of supreme greatness in life we must go back to the days, before
+animal life appeared, when the earth was merely a teeming mass of
+bacteria.[26]
+
+[26] See, for instance, H.F. Osborn, _The Origin and Evolution of Life_,
+1918, Chapter III.
+
+To-day, we are often told, the majority of human beings belong either to
+the Undesired Class or the Undesirable Class. To realise that this is so,
+we are bidden to read the newspapers or to walk along the streets of the
+cities--whichever they may be--wherein dwell the highest products of our
+civilisation. In the better class quarters it is indeed the Undesirable
+Class that seems to predominate, and in the poor quarters, the Undesired.
+Yet, viewing our species as a whole, the two classes may be seen to walk
+hand in hand along the same road, and in proportion as our nobler
+instincts germinate and develop, we must doubtless admit that it ought to
+be our active aim to make that road for both of them--socially though not
+individually--the Road to Destruction.
+
+To stem the devastating tide of human procreativeness, however, easy as it
+may seem in theory, is by no means so easy as some think, especially as
+those think who believe that the human race stands on the brink of
+suicide. For there is this about it that we must never forget: the
+majority of those born to-day die before their time, so that by
+diminishing the production of the unfit, as well as by the progressive
+improvement of the environment that automatically accompanies such
+diminution, we may make an imposing difference in the appearance of the
+birth-rate, whilst yet the population goes on increasing rapidly, probably
+even more rapidly than before. It needs a most radical and thorough attack
+on the birth-rate before we can make any real impression on the rate of
+increase of the population, to say nothing of its real reduction. There is
+still an arduous road before us.
+
+True it is that we have two opposing schools of thought which both say
+that we need not, or that we cannot, make any difference by our efforts to
+regulate the earth's human population. According to one view the
+development of population, together with the necessity for war which is
+inextricably mixed up with a developing population, cannot be effected
+without, as one champion of the doctrine is pleased to put it, "shattering
+both the structure of Euclidean space and the psychological laws upon
+which the existence of self-consciousness and human society are
+conditional."[27] In simpler words, populations tend to become too large
+for their territories, so that war ensues, and birth-control can do
+nothing because "it is doubtful whether a group in the plenitude of vigour
+and self-consciousness can deliberately stop its own growth." The other
+school proclaims human impotence on exactly opposite grounds. There is not
+the slightest reason, it declares, to believe that birth-control has had
+any but a completely negligible influence on population. This is a natural
+process and fertility is automatically adjusted to the death-rate.
+Whenever a population reaches a certain stage of civilisation and nervous
+development its procreativeness, quite apart from any effort of the will,
+tends to diminish. The seeming effect of birth-control is illusory. It is
+Nature, not human effort, which is at work.[28]
+
+[27] B.A.G. Fuller, "The Mechanical Basis of War," _Hibbert Journal_,
+1921.
+
+[28] Sir Shirley Murphy some years ago (_Lancet_, 10 Aug. 1912) argued
+that the fall of the birth-rate, as also that of the death-rate, has
+been largely effected by natural causes, independent of man's action.
+Mr. G. Udney Yule (_The Fall in the Birth-rate_, 1920) also believes
+that birth-control counts for little, the chief factor being natural
+fluctuations, probably of economic nature. Recently Mr. C.E. Pell, in
+his book, _The Law of Births and Deaths_ (1921), has made a more
+elaborate and systematic attempt to show that the rise and fall of the
+birth-rate has hitherto been independent of human effort.
+
+These two opposing councils of despair, each proclaiming, though in a
+contrary sense, the vanity of human wishes in the matter of procreation,
+might well, some may think, be left to neutralise each other and evaporate
+in air. But it seems worth while to point out that, with proper
+limitations and qualifications, there is an element of truth in each of
+them, while, without such limitations and qualifications, both are alike
+obviously absurd and wrong-headed. Undoubtedly, as the one school holds,
+in certain stages of civilisation, even at a fairly advanced stage,
+nations tend to break out over their frontiers with resulting war; but the
+period when they reach "the plenitude of vigour and self-consciousness" is
+exactly the period when the birth-rate begins to decline, and the
+population, deliberately or instinctively, controls its own increase. That
+has, for instance, been the history of France since the great expansion of
+population, roughly associated with the Napoleonic epopee,--which
+doubtless covered a web of causes, sanitary, political, industrial,
+favourable to a real numerical increase of the nation--had died down
+slowly to the level we witness to-day.[29] Similarly, with regard to the
+opposing school, we must undoubtedly accept a natural fall in the
+birth-rate with a rising civilisation; that has always been visible in
+highly civilised individual couples, and it is an easily ascertainable
+zoological fact that throughout the evolution of life procreativeness has
+decreased with the increased development of species. We may agree that a
+natural factor comes into the recent fall in the human birth-rate. But to
+argue that because a natural decline in birth-rate is the essential factor
+in the slowing down of procreative activity with all higher evolution,
+therefore deliberate birth-control counts for nothing, since exactly the
+same result follows when voluntary prevention is adopted and when it is
+not, seems highly absurd. We must at least admit that voluntary
+birth-control is an important contributory cause, in some sense indeed, of
+supreme importance, because it is within man's own power and because man
+is thus enabled to guide and mould processes of Nature which might
+otherwise work disastrously. How disastrously is shown by the history of
+Europe, and in a notable degree France, during the four or five centuries
+preceding the end of the eighteenth century when various new influences
+began to operate. During all these centuries there was undoubtedly a very
+high birth-rate, yet infant mortality, war, famine, insanitation,
+contagious diseases of many and virulent kinds, tended, as far as we can
+see, to keep the population almost or quite stationary,[30] and so ruinous
+a method of maintaining a stationary population necessarily used up most
+of the energy which might otherwise have been available for social
+progress, although the stationary population, even thus maintained, still
+placed France at the head of European civilisation. The more firmly we
+believe that the diminution of the population is a natural process, the
+more strenuously, surely, we ought to guide it, so that it shall work
+without friction, and, so far as possible, tend to eliminate the
+undesirable stocks of man and preserve the desirable. Clearly, the theory
+itself calls for much effort, since it is obvious that along natural lines
+the decline, if it is the result of high evolution, will affect the fit
+more easily than the unfit.
+
+[29] The reader may point to the renewal of Militarism and Imperialism
+in France since the Great War. That, however, has been an artificial
+product (in so far as it exists among the people themselves) directly
+fostered from outside by the policy of England and the United States,
+just as the same spirit in Germany before the war, in the face of a
+falling birth-rate, was artificially fostered from above by a military
+and Imperialistic caste.
+
+[30] See especially Mathorez, _Histoire de la Formation de la Population
+Francaise_, Vol. I, 1920, _Les Etrangers en France_. The fecundity of
+French families, even among the aristocracy, till towards the end of the
+eighteenth century, was fabulous; in the third quarter of the
+seventeenth century the average number of children was five in Paris.
+But the mortality was extremely high; under the age of sixteen, Mathorez
+estimates, it was 51 per cent., and infant mortality was terrible in all
+classes, small-pox being specially fatal. Then there were the various
+diseases termed plagues, with famine sometimes added, while war,
+emigration, and religious celibacy all counteracted the excessive
+fecundity, so that from the thirteenth century to the third quarter of
+the eighteenth the population seems to have been stationary, about
+twenty-two millions. Then the size of the family fell in Paris to 3.9
+and in France generally to 4.3, while also there were fewer marriages.
+Therewith there was an increase of prosperity.
+
+Thus there seems, on a wide survey of the matter, no reason whatever to
+quarrel with that conviction, which is gradually over-spreading all
+classes of human society in all parts of the world, and ever more widely
+leading to practical action, that the welfare of the individual, the
+family, the community, and the race is bound up with the purposive and
+deliberate practice of birth-control, whether we advocate that policy on
+the ground that we are thereby furthering Nature, or on the opposite, and
+no doubt equally excellent, ground that we are thereby correcting Nature.
+
+Along this road, as along any other road, we shall not reach Utopia; and
+since the Utopia of every person who possesses one is unique that perhaps
+need not be regretted. We shall not even, within any measurable period of
+time, reach a sanely free and human life fit to satisfy quite moderate
+aspirations. The wise birth-controller will not (like the deliciously
+absurd suffragette of old-time) imagine that birth-control for all means a
+New Heaven and a New Earth, but will, rather, appreciate the delightful
+irony of the Biblical legend which represented a world with only four
+people in it, yet one of them a murderer. Still, it may be pointed out,
+that was a state of things much better than we can show now. The world
+would count itself happier if, during the Great War, only twenty-five per
+cent of the population of belligerent lands had been murderers, virtually
+or in fact. There is something to be gained, and that something is well
+worth while.
+
+Still, whether we like it or not, the task of speeding up the decrease of
+the human population becomes increasingly urgent.[31] To many of our
+Undesirables it may seem, mere sentiment to trouble about the ravishing of
+the world's beauty or the ravaging of the world's humanity. But certain
+hard facts, even to-day, have to be faced. The process of mechanical
+invention continues every day on an ever increasing scale of magnitude.
+Now that process, however necessary, however beneficial, involves some of
+the chief evils of our present phase of what we call civilisation, partly
+because it has deteriorated the quality of all human products and partly
+because it has enslaved mankind, and in so doing deteriorated also his
+quality.[32] Now we cannot abolish machinery, because machinery lies in
+the very essence of life and we ourselves are machines. But, as the
+largest part of history shows, there is no need whatever for man to become
+the slave of machinery, or even for machinery to injure the quality of his
+own work; rightly used it may improve it. The greatest task before
+civilisation at present is to make machines what they ought to be, the
+slaves, instead of the masters of men; and if civilisation fails at the
+task, then without doubt it and its makers will go down to a common
+destruction. It is a task inextricably bound up with the task of moulding
+the human race for which birth-control is the elected instrument. Indeed
+they are but two aspects of the same task. We have to accept the rugged
+fact that every step to render more nearly perfect the mechanical side of
+life correspondingly abolishes the need for men. Thus it is calculated
+to-day that whenever, in accordance with a growing tendency, coal is
+superseded by oil in industry two men are enabled to do the work of
+twelve. That is merely typical of what is taking place generally in our
+modern system of civilisation. Everywhere a small number of men are being
+enabled to replace a large number of men. Not to avoid looking ahead, we
+may say that of every twelve millions of our population, ten millions will
+be unwanted. Let them do something else! we cheerfully exclaim. But what?
+No doubt there are always art and science, infinite in their possibilities
+for joy and enlightenment, infinite also, as we know, in their
+possibilities of mischief and shallowness and boredom. Let it only be true
+science and great art, and one man is better than ten millions. To say
+that is only to echo unconsciously the ancient saying of Heraclitus, "One
+is ten thousand if he be the best."
+
+[31] Professor E.M. East, a distinguished biologist and lately President
+of the American Society of Naturalists (_Nature_, 23 Sept., 1920), has
+estimated that, for all the fall in the birth-rate, the present rate of
+increase in the population of the world, chiefly of whites, who are
+increasing most rapidly, will, in the lives of our grandchildren, lead
+to a struggle for existence more terrible than imagination can conceive.
+
+[32] This has been set forth with admirable lucidity and wealth of
+illustration by Dr. Austin Freeman in his _Social Decay and
+Regeneration_ (1921), already mentioned.
+
+The vistas that are opened up when we realise the direction in which the
+human race is travelling may seem to be endless; and so in a sense they
+are. Man has replaced the gods he once dreamed of; he has found that he is
+himself a god, who, however realistic he seeks to make his philosophy,
+himself created the world as he sees it and now has even acquired the
+power of creating himself, or, rather, of re-creating himself. For he
+recognises that, at present, he is rather a poor sort of god, so much an
+inferior god that he is hardly, if at all, to be distinguished from the
+Lords of Hell.
+
+The divine creative task of man extends into the future far beyond the
+present, and we cannot too often meditate on the words of the wisest and
+noblest forerunner of that future: "The whole world still lies before us
+like a quarry before the master-builder, who is only then worthy of the
+name when out of this casual mass of natural material he has embodied with
+all his best economy, adaptability to the end, and firmness, the image
+which has arisen in his mind. Everything outside us is only the means for
+this constructing process, yes, I would even dare to say, also everything
+inside us; deep within lies the creative force which is able to form what
+it will, and gives us no rest until, without us or within us, in one or
+the other way, we have finally given it representation." The future, with
+all its possibilities, is still a future infinitely far away, however well
+it may be to fix our eyes on the constellation towards which our solar
+system may seem to be moving across the sky.
+
+Meanwhile, every well-directed step, while it brings us but ever so little
+nearer to the far goal around which our dreams may play, is at once a
+beautiful process and an invigorating effort, and thereby becomes in
+itself a desirable end. It is the little things of life which give us most
+satisfaction and the smallest things in our path that may seem most worth
+while.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+Abstinence, sexual, 59.
+Acton, 110.
+Adrenal glands, 132.
+Anstie, 45.
+Art of love, 121.
+Asceticism and sexuality, 57.
+Augustine, St., 58, 77.
+Australian birth-rate, 162.
+Auto-erotism, 46.
+
+Bantu, marriage among the, 92.
+Bateson, 166.
+Bell, W. Blair, 119.
+Binet-Sangle, 146.
+Birth-control, 72, 138 _et seq._
+Birth-rate, in France, 159, 174.
+  in Australia, 162.
+  in Canada, 160.
+  in England, 159, 164.
+Book of the Knight of the Tour-Landry, 18, 82.
+Brontes, the, 25.
+Browning, Mrs., 26.
+Brown-Sequard, 45.
+Burbank, Luther, 139.
+
+Canada, birth-rate in, 160.
+Chastity, 57.
+Chaucer, 56.
+Children, to parents, relation of, 13 _et seq._
+  in modern life, 24 _et seq._
+  sex in, 48.
+China, parents in, 32.
+Christianity, 57, 65, 70, 76, 108, 110.
+Continence, the value of, 38, 42.
+Courtship in Nature, 103.
+Crooks, Mrs. Will, 89.
+
+Davenport, C.B., 143.
+Darwin, Major Leonard, 166.
+Davies, 51.
+Drayton, 51.
+Dundas, C, 92.
+
+East, E.M., 176.
+Education, 14.
+  in Old England, 16.
+  in Old France, 17, 19.
+Electra-complex, 22.
+Eliot, George, 31.
+Ellis, Mrs. Havelock, 68, 69, 96.
+English social history, 15, 16, 79, 159, 164.
+Erotic claims of women, 112.
+Erotic personality, 121.
+Eugenics, 134 _et seq._
+Ewart, 141.
+
+Family, sex in life of, 22 _et seq._, 78.
+Feeblemindedness, 143.
+Feudal education, 19.
+Francis of Assisi, St., 58.
+Freeman, Austin, 99, 177.
+French social history, 17, 19, 81, 159, 173.
+Freud, 33, 46, 52.
+Frink, H.W., 131.
+Fuller, B.A.G., 171.
+
+Galton, Sir Francis, 134, 139, 140, 144, 145.
+Girls, emancipated, 27.
+Goddard, 143.
+Goethe, 179.
+Gratian, 79.
+Greeks, eugenics amongst ancient, 137.
+Groos, 119.
+
+Hadfield, Mrs., 32.
+Heraclitus, 178.
+Hinton, James, 29, 45, 67, 68, 69, 98.
+Home, revolution in the, 93.
+Hormones, 40, 117.
+Husbands, 75 _et seq._
+
+Individualism and eugenics, 148.
+Infanticide, ancient, 135.
+Infantile arrest, 33.
+Inge, Dr., 166.
+Internal secretions, 40, 117.
+
+Jonson, Ben, 51.
+Juries, women on, 16.
+
+Key, Ellen, 13, 14, 15, 145.
+Lasco, John a, 70.
+Loewenfeld, 52.
+Luchaire, 19.
+Luther, 109.
+
+Machinery and civilisation, 177.
+Magic and sex, 39.
+Marriage, 63 _et seq._, 76 _et seq._, 108 _et seq._, 117 _et seq._
+Martineau, Harriet, 27.
+Mathorez, 174.
+Matsumato, 48.
+McDougall, W., 99.
+Meirowsky, 42.
+Milton, 77.
+Moissides, 137.
+Monogamy, 106.
+Montaigne, 17, 21, 37, 108, 109.
+Morality, and nature, 55.
+  in marriage, 109.
+More, Sir Thomas, 37, 109.
+Murphy, Sir Shirley, 172.
+
+Naecke, 59.
+Nature and morality, 55.
+New Caledonia, treatment of parents in, 32.
+Northcote, H., 71.
+
+Oedipus-complex, 22.
+Osborn, H.F., 170.
+
+Palladius, 57.
+Parasitism in the home, 90.
+Parents, merciful destruction of, 32.
+  relation of children to, 13 _et seq._, 24.
+  training of, 34.
+  veneration of, 32.
+Parmelee, 120.
+Paston Letters, 16, 79.
+Paul, Eden & Cedar, 18, 151.
+Paul, St., 77.
+Peacock, 51.
+Pell, C.E., 172.
+Perrycoste, F.H., 149, 153.
+Perseigne, Adam de, 20.
+Pituitary gland, 118.
+Play-function of sex, 116 _et seq._
+Pleasure, the function of, 67.
+Polonius, 31.
+Powell, Dr., 81.
+Protestantism and marriage, 77.
+Psycho-analysis, 22, 130.
+Purity, 37 _et seq._
+
+Race-suicide, 155 _et seq._
+Ring in marriage, 84.
+Rite, the marriage, 83.
+Robert of Arbrissel, 58.
+Rohleder, 43.
+Rolland, Romain, 67.
+
+Sacrament, sex as a, 69.
+Salle, Antoine de la, 17.
+Sanger, Margaret, 152.
+Schreiner, Olive, 69, 90.
+  and asceticism, 57.
+Sex, and magic, 39.
+  as a sacrament, 69.
+  evolution in, 66.
+  nature of impulse of, 44.
+  play-function of, 116 _et seq._
+  spiritual element in, 66.
+  sublimation of, 47, 50.
+Shaftesbury, 51.
+Socialism and eugenics, 150.
+_Stonor Letters_, 81.
+Stopes, Marie, 152.
+Suarez, 62.
+Sublimation, 47, 50.
+
+Theognis, 65.
+
+Wells, H.G., 152.
+Westermarck, 32.
+Wives, 75 _et seq._
+  love rights of, 102 _et seq._
+Wollstonecraft, Mary, 25.
+Women, erotic claims of, 112.
+  erotic ideas of average, 124,
+  in Crusades, 20.
+  in marriage, 75, 78.
+  in old France, 19 _et seq._
+  in subjection to men, 111.
+  love rights of, 102 _et seq._
+  on juries, 16.
+
+Yule, G. Udney, 172.
+
+
+PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY BILLING AND SONS, LTD., GUILDFORD AND ESHER.
+
+
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Transcriber's Notes:
+
+in the index, Wollstonecroft was changed to Wollstonecraft
+also in the index, a was changed to a in: Lasco, John a
+some punctuation normalized
+everything else was left as found in the original
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+[ADVERTISEMENTS]
+
+
+PARTICULARS OF
+OTHER WORKS ON
+SEX, SEX PSYCHOLOGY,
+HEREDITY & EVOLUTION
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+S. Herbert, M.D., M.R.C.S.:
+
+AN INTRODUCTION TO THE PHYSIOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY OF SEX.
+
+THE FIRST PRINCIPLES OF HEREDITY. (Second Edition.)
+
+THE FIRST PRINCIPLES OF EVOLUTION. (Second Edition.)
+
+FUNDAMENTALS IN SEXUAL ETHICS.
+
+
+Mrs. S. Herbert:
+
+SEX LORE: A PRIMER, ON COURTSHIP, MARRIAGE AND PARENTHOOD.
+
+
+Dr. & Mrs. Herbert:
+
+SEXUAL LIFE OF PRIMITIVE PEOPLE. Authorized Translation of Hans
+Fehlinger's volume.
+
+
+PUBLISHED BY
+A. & C. BLACK, LTD., 4, 5 & 6 SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W. 1
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+
+
+
+THE NEW HORIZON
+IN LOVE AND LIFE
+
+By MRS. HAVELOCK ELLIS
+
+WITH A PREFACE BY EDWARD CARPENTER AND
+AN INTRODUCTION BY MARGUERITE TRACY
+
+_Demy 8vo_    PRICE 10/6 NET    (_By Post, 11s._)
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+We are arrested and spell-bound by the same understanding, the same
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+
+CONTENTS:
+
+Preface, by Edward Carpenter. Introduction, by Marguerite Tracy. Note, by
+Havelock Ellis.
+
+PART I.--LOVE AND MARRIAGE. The Love of To-Morrow. A Noviciate for
+Marriage. Semi-Detached Marriage. Marriage and Divorce. Eugenics and the
+Mystical Outlook. Eugenics and Spiritual Parenthood. Blossoming Time. Love
+as a Fine Art.
+
+PART II.--THE NEW CIVILIZATION. Democracy in the Kitchen. The Masses and
+the Classes. The Maternal in Domestic and Political Life. Political
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+
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+
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+
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+
+PUBLISHED BY
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+
+
+
+THE HERBERT BOOKS
+BY S. HERBERT, M.D., M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+THE FIRST PRINCIPLES OF HEREDITY
+
+75 Diagrams and Illustrations. Large Crown 8vo. Cloth.
+7s. 6d. net (by post, 2s. 3d.).        _Revised Edition._
+
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+
+"We have only praise for the result."--_Eugenics Review._
+
+"Dr. Herbert will be found a safe guide. He writes as clearly and as
+simply as may be upon a subject in which it is practically impossible to
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+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+THE FIRST PRINCIPLES OF EVOLUTION
+
+90 Illustrations. Large Crown 8vo. Cloth, 12s. 6d. net (by
+post, 13s. 6d.). _Revised Edition._
+
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+bring under review all that is most valuable in recent scientific
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+Herbert has succeeded wonderfully well."--_Athenaeum._
+
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+complete account of evolution in all its aspects."--_Globe._
+
+"We congratulate Dr. Herbert on his masterly arrangement.... It will serve
+as an admirable introduction to a difficult subject."--_Dundee
+Advertiser._
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+AN INTRODUCTION TO THE
+PHYSIOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY OF SEX
+
+49 Illustrations. Large Crown 8vo. Cloth. 7s.6d. net (by post, 8s. 1d.).
+
+    This fills a gap in the literature of sex. It gathers together for the
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+
+"For a simple statement, expressed in language as far as possible free
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+
+"It is therefore a real satisfaction to find a sex manual which may be
+placed with confidence in the hands of any educated person.... He has
+certainly produced the best little manual which we yet possess in this
+field."--HAVELOCK ELLIS in _Eugenics Review._
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+BY MRS. HERBERT.
+
+SEX LORE. A Primer on Courtship, Marriage and Parenthood.
+55 Illustrations. Crown 8vo. Cloth, 7s. 6d. net (by post, 8s. 1d.).
+
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+generation,' but parents and teachers would be well advised to peruse the
+book, which should prove invaluable for educative purposes. '--_Medical
+Times._
+
+"... may be left with confidence in the hands of any educated person who
+is attaining to manhood or womanhood."--_Aberdeen Daily Journal._
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+PUBLISHED BY
+A. & C. BLACK, LTD., 4, 5 & 6 SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W. 1
+
+
+
+
+THE HERBERT BOOKS
+
+SEXUAL LIFE
+OF PRIMITIVE PEOPLE
+
+BY HANS FEHLINGER
+
+Translated by DR. S. HERBERT AND MRS. HERBERT
+
+Large Crown 8vo. Cloth, 6s. net (by post, 6s. 6d.).
+
+"A concise survey of the beliefs and customs of primitive peoples in such
+matters as modesty, conjugal fidelity, courtship, marriage, birth and
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+
+"If anyone doubts that the world is progressing, we commend to his
+attention this book of Mr. Fehlinger."--_Dublin Evening Mail._
+
+"In this translation Dr. and Mrs. Herbert present clearly and fairly all
+the more important facts which recent research has brought to
+light."--_Times of India._
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+FUNDAMENTALS IN
+SEXUAL ETHICS
+AN ENQUIRY INTO MODERN TENDENCIES
+
+BY S. HERBERT, M.D., M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P.
+
+Large Crown 8vo. Cloth. Price 12s. 6d. net (by post, 13s. 3d.).
+
+CONTENTS:
+
+Part I.--THE BASIC CHARACTERISTICS OF SEX.
+Part II.--SEX RELATIONSHIPS: Sex Morality. Sex Vice and Disease.
+  Sex Aberration and Abnormality. Auto Eroticism. Sexual Inversion.
+Part III.--MARITAL RELATIONSHIP: Factors; Moral, Biotic, Eugenic,
+  Economic, Social.
+Part IV.--SEX AND EDUCATION: Sex Education. Co-Education.
+
+OPINIONS:
+
+"He treats with knowledge all the urgent sexual questions and sexual
+phenomena, normal and abnormal."--_The Times._
+
+"A very valuable book dealing with a vastly important
+subject."--_Justice._
+
+"What we want is the best that is known and thought in the world on a
+matter that vitally concerns us. We need also intelligent, sympathetic
+common-sense guidance amid the opposing extremes of a narrow materialism
+and a narrow spiritualism. Dr. Herbert supplies both these needs ... and
+we could not well ask more of him."--HAVELOCK ELLIS in _Daily Herald_.
+
+"We may congratulate him on the success of his undertaking."--_Manchester
+Guardian._
+
+"Wide knowledge, conscientious thoroughness, sincere conviction,
+sympathetic understanding and, even more, spiritual aspirations.... A
+splendid feminist."
+
+EDITH BETHUNE BAKER in _Woman's Leader_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+PUBLISHED BY
+A. & C. BLACK, LTD., 4, 5 & 6 SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W. 1
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