Jltljata, S^em lork Bought with the income of the SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND THE GIFT OF HENRY W. SAGE 1891 " ■ uut Ml^'"^ £>0N LIBRARY - CI* DATE Cornell University Library HQ 763.P32 population and Ji!l!!-offlla,S(Sffl« Jllllimiw".™ 21 g53 779 .^ The original of tliis book is in tlie Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924021853779 THE BIRTH-CONTROL LIBRARY Edited by WILLIAM J. ROBINSON. M.D. POPULATION AND BIRTH-CONTROL ^ SYMPOSIUM EDITED BY EDEN AND CEDAR PAUL J 1917 THE CRITIC AND GUIDE COMPANY 13 MiT. MORRIS PARK WEST NEW YORK '(St-Vv>W^* ,l\M^ 0^6: Copyright, 1917, by The Ckitic and Gtjide Co. ,< ,1 ,i:-iiVMi* '^ • Birth-Control and Biological Ethics, by Warner rite. ° The increasing number of women who study medicine and biology may bring valuable contributions from their special feminine experi- ence, if they have the courage to refuse the masculine mythology which has gathered round motherhood. WOMEN AND BIRTH-CONTEOL 253 have seized on the pangs of child-birth, as a divinely ap- pointed purgation for the exercise of the sex function — although the particular partner on whom the ordeal of parturition fell may have had very little definite pleasure in the act of intercourse. There has grown up a masculine mythology suppressing and distorting all the facts of women's sexual and maternal emotions. Thus we find even an expert biologist like Walter Heape assuming that sexual gratification is a matter of indifference to women and only of moment to them as an indispensable prelude to motherhood.® It is this complacent blindness and dogmatism which needs to be met by a perfectly candid and explicit state- ment of the women's point of view. In their individual attitude towards maternity as a matter of choice, women show the very wide range of diversity which is characteris- tic of them in all the functions and emotions of sex. But when the chance of refusing compulsory motherhood is offered them, women of the most diverse types of tempera- ment (so long as all intelligence and spirit has not been crushed out of them) respond with eager gratitude. Un- der proper conditions, the majority of women would prob- ably prefer to have more than one child. Even women who were not specially philoprogenitive or domestic, would probably prefer to experience maternity at their own choice of times, circumstances, and father of their child. The birth-control movement, far from being a movement for general sterilisation, is the expression of a more in- telligent and discriminative maternal love. 'Feminism 4' Sex Antagonism, by Walter Heape, P.E.S., F.Z.S., London, Constable, 1913. 254 POPULATION AND BIRTH-CONTROL And here the sentimental idolaters of motherhood may be reminded that thousands of women of a strongly ma- ternal type, who love children and would be devotedly happy with a child of their own, are condemned by the obsolescent patriarchal system and the sickly chastity tabus consecrated by religion, to remain without their deepest instinctive need. "We women are out to smash compulsory sterility, with its tragedy of bitterness and disease, just as much as compulsory maternity. Our point in regard to this claim has been wantonly obscured by the putrescent remnants of canon law, and by the carefully cultivated ignorance of women concern- ing their own physiology— an ignorance still responsible for much gratuitous suffering. The right to prevent the conception of life must logically and justly include the right to remove the life-seed which has been fertilised against the mother's will, either through accident or in- tention.^ No woman's right is more fundamental than this, and none has been more disregarded. Tet if abor- tion be procured in the first or second months of pregnancy, no sentient life is destroyed; and if the operation be ef- fected with proper skill and care, under cleanly and sani- tary conditions, it need have no injurious effects on the mother. No country, in the past or in the present, has ever succeeded in extirpating abortion by the severest legal penalties : what has been done is to create a criminal occupation, and a. largely criminal class ; to endow black- mail ; * and to ruin the health and sanity of many women. ^ This right has been vindicated by certain feminists in Scandinavia and Germany. ^ An appalling case, in which hundreds of women were blackmailed by scoundrels who advertised as pharmacists, is recorded in A Sistory of Penal Methods, by George Ives. WOMEN "AND BIRTH-CONTROL 255 To a really humane and rational age, none of our estab- lished sexual or social barbarisms will seem more hideous than this: that even when conception was the result of rape, the woman's right to abortion was denied. Con- sider the recent decisions of the French Government, con- cerning the French women and girls who were with child as a result of abuse by the invading enemy. The most cumbrous methods — change of name and residence, and state rearing of the children (unhappy children whose origin will never be forgotten against them!) — were adopted: rather than that women's right over their own bodies should be officially admitted. Note that I do not defend the destruction of the life of the unborn child at seven months. But in the early stages of gestation it should be the woman's absolute right to say whether her incipient burden shall develop or not. If her decision is in the negative, the resources of science should be at her disposal for its execution. The right of abortion is also an indispensable second line of defence, pending the invention and circulation of an absolutely reliable preventive. There is no doubt that existing methods might be greatly improved. Here is a humane field for our constructive experimental chemists. I do not doubt that in the finer social order for which some of us are working (in however insignificant and piece- meal a fashion), abortion will be very rare. But it will be recognised, and respected as an individual right. The hope of any amelioration of sexual habits and of any increase of human happiness in this direction lies in the power to differentiate between the erotic and the re- productive functions, and in bringing the exercise of the 256 POPULATION AND BIRTH-CONTROL latter completely under volitional control. This is also the only line of freedom and a more varied and active life for women. It is a sheer confusion of the issue to maintain that birth-control is synonymous with desesuali- sation. Undoubtedly the patriarchal family tends to pro- duce a profound disparity between the sexual impulse of men and women respectively. The chastity tabu on un- married women puts a premium on infanticide and enormously fosters secret self-abuse. On the other hand a group of powerful vested interests, and a whole despised and demoralised social class, live on the stimulation of sexual desire, of the crudest type, among men. These con- ditions do not seem to some of us very admirable, and if they are final and irrevocable we should, on the whole, prefer extinction. No doubt sexual anaesthesia " among a large percentage of "civilised" women presents a cruelly difficult problem to the more refined type of man, who desires an equal and actively responsive mate. The rem- edy is to make the conditions of women's sex life more dignified and congenial, to free women from that terror of undesired pregnancy which is so often a source of in- complete gratification and nervous ruin. Excessive and rapid childbearing is also sexually de- vitalising, and many women have been exhausted by ma- ternity before they were able to enjoy and benefit by sexual relations. No doubt the quality of the race is not improved when many of its most intelligent, determined, and morally "In judging this point, women 'a sexual variability is often forgot- ten. Apparent sexual anassthesia may mean constitutional anaemia — and a stupid or clumsy lover. WOMEN lAND BIRTH-CONTROL 257 elevated women refuse maternity. But these women will have love and children under conditions which do not offend against their own human dignity, conscience, and reason, or — ^not at all. Education and social readjust- ments are necessary here; and an attitude of greater sympathy and consideration for the more diffused and complex sexual requirements of women. The whole power of voluntary maternity to improve the race is intimately dependent on free sexual selection by women. It should be for them to choose whether they will have children or not: and if so, how many, at what intervals, and with whom. This will imply revolutionary changes in all depart- ments; but it 'will also imply the development of hitherto isolated human harmonies, of intense and vivid variations of faculty and type, in however remote a future. Mean- while, the birth-strike is already, and increasingly, prac- tical politics. EDITORIAL SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION EDITORIAL SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION IN the selection of contributions to this symposium on population and birth-control, it seemed needless to the editors to invite discussion on the moral bearing of the question. To those who were good enough to com- pose essays to fill special gaps in the argument, the sug- gestion was made that detailed reference to moral issues would be superfluous. For in our view it is preposterous to stigmatise birth-control as immoral, absurd to involve antiquated religious sanctions and outworn legal enact- ments against a practice almost universally adopted by self-respecting persons who can acquire the necessary knowledge. What is customary among normal human beings is moral or ethical in the narrower sense of these terms (derivatively, the words all mean the same thing) ; and those who, in order to fulminate against customary actions, borrow the lightnings of mediasval theologians, suc- ceed merely in making themselves somewhat ridiculous. But there is a wider sense in which the moral objection deserves serious consideration, the objection of those who, like Halford (supra, p. 238), consider that "to be truly moral, conduct must be regulated by its effect upon the community as a whole." We may agree that the civilised human being will not ignore communal reactions, but this is not to say, as Halford seems to imply, that it is the duty of men, and still more the duty of women, to proere- 261 262 POPULATION AND BIRTH-CONTROL ate undesired children for the sake of an abstract entity, the race, the community, or the state. We need not echo Hilda Wangel's impatient exclamation against "that ugly, horrid word ' duty, ' " but we can at least say of duty, as was so finely said of liberty, "How many crimes are committed in thy name!" To prove this, it is unneces- sary to go back to the times when the holy inquisition flourished in Europe; we need merely look around us to- day. To ask a woman to bear an undesired child for the sake of "stern duty, daughter of the voice of the state," is to commit a crime, and to make of the state or of the race what Stimer aptly termed a spook. "Thou shalt not exploit" is not merely the premier commandment, but the essence of the entire decalogue; and to exploit a woman's faculty for maternity, to do this for the sake of the community, present or to come, is, in our view, an immoral action. It is customary, of course, but it is re- pugnant to the higher civilised sentiment of the day, and will therefore be neither customary nor ethical in the com- monwealth of to-morrow. This is the aspect of the matter that is so spiritedly voiced by Stella Browne. None the less we agree with Halford that those who favour the practice of birth-control (the advisability of which, under conditions, he himself frankly recognises in the second paragraph of his essay) would err should they fail to take into consideration the possibly unfavourable reactions of the measures they advocate, and should they fail to point out how these contingent social disadvantages may best be obviated. To this matter we shall return. It will be profitable to discuss here, in the light of Achille Loria's luminous exposition, the bearing of EDITORIAL SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 263 Malthus' theory of population upon the problem of birth- control. In all the writings of this distinguished Italian economist, the pressure of increasing population is treated as a prime factor of social evolution. But iu the essay translated for the present volume he shows that while Malthus elucidated a profoundly important truth, the author of the Essay on Population erred in respect of many of its applications. In existing conditions, at any rate (i. e., under capitalism), there is no general excess of population over food supply, but merely, in certain countries, an excess of people in relation to the privately owned capital which is able to secure profitable investment — a very different matter. Hence, as a result, not of over- population, but simply of capitalist conditions, we have, in addition to the mass of the workers who obtain sub- sistence, on the one hand the owning class with a super- fluity, and on the other a parasitic class of dependents, paupers, semi-criminals, and criminals. Loria contends, further, that Malthus' theory is invalidated by the ascer- tained fact that, as far as human beings are concerned, an excess of food over population does not necessarily lead to an increasing birth-rate, that a rising standard of life is nowadays apt to be characterised by diminished procrea- tion. Elsewhere than in the Malthus essay, apropos of the risk of over-population, he writes of certain post- malthusian applications of Malthus' theory: "Some also suggest various physiological expedients — ^the obscene abominations of the so-called Neo-Malthusians — to limit population. Do they not see that there is no excess of *i mouths to be fed, and that procreation will of itself dimin- ish with the amelioration of the condition of the working 264 POPULATION AND BIRTH-CONTROL classes, without recourse to loathsome and unnatural prac- tices."^ Terms of abuse, such as "obscene abominations" and "loathsome practices," may be ignored by the scien- tific controversialist, and the significance of the accusation that birth-control is "unnatural" will be reserved for sub- sequent consideration. Suffice it to point out that in the passage quoted, and repeatedly in the Malthus, Loria fails oddly, for so acute a mind, in his analysis of operating causes. As a result of a rising standard of life — conse- quent upon improved economic conditions among the proletariat — the labourers, vee are told, "become less pro- lific. ' ' ^ Thus the -growth of population is ' ' automatically ' ' regulated by economic means, and it is needless to have recourse to "physiological expedients" to limit popula- tion. Yet nowhere does Loria attempt to elucidate the working of this economic factor, or to show how it can possibly operate unless precisely in virtue of what he is so strangely and so inconsistently moved to condemn, namely the deliberate application of physiological knowledge, by individual couples, in order to regulate the size of their faimilies. In a word, by birth-control. Bernstein's error is analogous to that of Loria when the German socialist declares (supra, p. 166) that the labour movement "exer- cises an influence in favour of the restriction of births . . . quite independently of any direct aid from the Mal- thusians." Doubtless knowledge of the possibilities of birth-control will, in favourable circumstances, spread slowly from individual to individual, even among the more * Loria, Contemporary Social Frollems, Swan Sonnenschein, LoEdon, 1911, p. 79. "Op. cit., p. 80, EDITORIAL SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 265 ignorant strata of the community, as happened presumably in eighteenth century rural France. But information as to the most approved methods is rarely thus acquired, and it seems to us preposterous to deny that the existence of a group of enthusiasts, well-educated, inspired with the zeal of the propagandist, and even with that of the martyr, has had a potent direct influence upon the natality sta- tistics of the last forty years. This leads us to examine Manschke's contention that the observed decline in the birth-rate, beginning in France in the middle of the eighteenth century (for, as a reference to Quessel will show, Dunlop is mistaken in dating it from the Revolution), manifesting itself a century later in Eng- land, and subsequently spreading, as if by contagion, to Germany and the other countries of western Europe, is not due to the adoption of deliberate measures, but is de- pendent upon a spontaneous physiological decline in fer- tility. Manschke's figures are interesting, but they fail to prove his ease. Admitting the increase in stillbirths, op- erative deliveries, etc., and ignoring the possibility that (as in the analogous case of the alleged increase in the prevalence of insanity) this increase may in large part be apparent merely, due to a progressive improvement in statistical records, we must dispute the contention that there is any manifestation here of a spontaneous decline in the capacity for child-bearing. As far as the female partner in the sexual act is concerned, the capacity for child-bearing depends upon three factors — the capacity for conception, the capacity for successful gestation and parturition, and the capacity for rearing the offspring. Manschke's figures have no bearing whatever upon the 266 POPULATION AND BIRTH-CONTROL first-named element, and this is the one with which we are mainly concerned, for the decline he shows to exist in the capacity for successful gestation and parturition, and the decline in the capacity for the successful rearing of infant life, are utterly incompetent quantitatively to account for the observed decline in the birth-rate and for the circum- stances in which that decline has become apparent. His assumption of a decline in woman's capacity for concep- tion is far more baseless than the assumption to which he takes exception, that the observed failure to conceive is the outcome of deliberate interference. The phenomenon to which he draws attention deserves careful study. It is important that we should ascertain why increased urban life, why capitalist civilisation, should have these dis- astrous accompaniments, and some of us may have a shrewd idea where to look for the root of the mischief — but the matter has little bearing, either positive or nega- tive, upon the question of birth-control. Manschke lays much stress upon the absence of direct statistical evidence that the fall in the birth-rate is due to the use of con- traceptives. He might as reasonably complain that, in the absence of direct evidence, hundreds of men are exe- cuted every year for murder. People do not (except in war time) make a point of killing one another coram publico, and if circumstantial evidence were to be ruled out of court a great many murderers would escape judicial punishment. Similarly as regards birth-control. In this respect we live in an age of transition, and the majority of those who use contraceptives do not trumpet their do- ings from the housetops. They are not ashamed of their actions ; they pass on information quietly to their friends ; EDITORIAL SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 267 but, in view of the eontinued prevalence of widespread prejudice, they avoid undue publicity. When we have out- grown certain musty conventions regarding sex, direct sta- tistical data will doubtless be available. Meanwhile, many of us use cbntraeeptives, and are perfectly frank about the matter; many of us have advised friends and patients where to get contraceptives and how to employ them ; there will be few readers of this book who will not number among their personal aequaiatanees many young married couples, childless or with very few children, whose use of con- traceptives may be considered a moral (or immoral) cer- tainty. The opponents of birth-control have no doubt where the enemy lurks: they clamour for repressive legis- lation. Need those who favour conscious procreation seri- ously doubt that the general adoption of the practice is the main cause of the decline in the birth-rate? When we find that so cautious a sociologist as Haveloek Ellis assures us that "the whole tendency of civilisation is to reduce the birth-rate";^ when, with EUis and in defiance of Manschke and of Loria, we believe that the fall in the birth-rate is mainly due to deliberate birth- control; when we refuse to condemn on abstract moral grounds a practice thus universally characteristic of ad- vancing civilisation, and (as Halford, to give but one in- stance, conclusively shows) predominantly adopted by the more intelligent and therefore presumably the more "moral" members of these advanced communities — ^what remains but to look upon the problem as one of pure ex- pediency, and to ask ourselves what are the comparative advantages and disadvantages, respectively individual and ' Haveloek Ellis, Essays in War-Time, 268 POPULATION AND BIRTH-CONTROL social, of this new phenomenon of conscious procreation? The most comprehensive claim on behalf of birth-control is that put forward many years ago by George Drysdale in his Elemenis of So'dal Science (first published in Lon- don in the year 1854), and ably voiced in the present volume by his nephew, Charles V. Drysdale, to the effect that birth-control will per se suffice to solve the problem of poverty. These writers are anti-socialist, but the same contention is urged by certain socialist and syndicalist advocates of la greve des ventres. It is hard to allow the claim in its entirety. The cause of poverty to-day is not so much pressure of population upon the means of sub- sistence, as a defective distribution of those means owing to the nature of the economic system now dominant. The matter is so brilliantly elucidated by Loria that it is need- less to recapitulate his arguments. So long as the means of production are privately owned and used primarily for the furnishing of private profit, it is difficult to under- stand how any restriction of proletarian births could com- pletely solve the social problem, though it might well prove a powerful adjuvant. Birth-control would here act like abstinence from alcohol. This latter, in a society in which a tendency to the abuse of alcohol is prevalent greatly favours the economic welfare of the abstainer, and re- dounds to the advantage of his family; but directly the society as a whole becomes abstinent, the preponderant advantage to the individual abstainer is cancelled. One whom the French Malthusians term a pere lapin is worse off than his fellow workmen who adopt the two-children system; but the total disappearance of pere-lapinisme would not lead to the cessation of economic competition EDITORIAL SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 269 between individual workers, nor would it put an end to the class struggle between workers and capitalists; it would merely deprive the father of a restricted family of his present comparative advantage. In France, restriction of births is now so general as practically to furnish a test case. As far as urban districts are concerned, large fam- ilies are exceedingly rare. In a land where the housing standard is set by childless, one-child, and two-children households, the indiscriminate procreator and his family have to suffer almost intolerable hardships, and their woes bulk largely in the newspapers during the "general post" which takes place among Parisian tenants on each suc- ceeding quarter day. At these times, the farmlles nom- hreuses have to be housed by the municipalities until land- lords willing to accommodate can at length be discovered. But the number of such exceptions is in actual fact so small that something closely approximating to the birth- strike is a reality among town operatives. Now the present writers are not relying on hearsay evidence, but upon personal observation as residents in working-class quarters of Paris, when they assert that, in accordance with the iron law of wages, the subsistence level i^that of a small fam- ily. The French working man and woman, vrith average families of one to three, are no better off than their Eng- lish compeers with average families of three to five. In Paris a far larger proportion of these small families live in one room tenements than is customary in London, and they pay the same rent for a single room that a similar but larger London family pays for two rooms or three. In other respects the standard of life is much the same in the two countries. Special advantages, where they exist, 270 POPULATION AND BIRTH-CONTEOL are due to effective trade union action and to other causes which operate in France as they do in England in prac- tical independence of the question of birth-control. Fur- ther, wherever birth-control is so effective as to limit the supply of labour demanded by productive capital, the re- sults are those ably sketched by Quessel in the present book. To supply the deficiency, foreign labour is im- ported from more prolific lands, and the national in- tegrity is threatened. "We may be told that the remedy is, as in Australia, to prohibit such import, but this meas- ure has not eliminated poverty in Australia, nor has it hitherto. "Labour governments" notwithstanding, threat- ened there to effect the final overthrow of capitalist domi- nation. Possibly if there were no "more prolific lands" to furnish an unlimited supply of proletarians, the eco- nomic power of the birth-strike would be more effective. Since this is but one among several instances in which the deficiencies and dangers of birth-control might be over- come if its practice could but be universalised, the further consideration of the matter may be deferred. Meanwhile, let those who find Drysdale's arguments, so ably marshalled, thoroughly convincing, turn back to pages 35 to 38 in Loria's essay, and reconsider these. Loria does not contend that insufficiency of food may not be a cause of poverty, but he provides ample ground for the conclusion that such insufficiency is not the main cause of poverty under capitalism, and he supplies cogent reason for believing that birth-control would not alone suffice to render poverty unknown. He shows that even Malthus confusedly recognised this truth. Another important advantage claimed for birth-restric- EDITORIAL SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 271 tion is that it will prevent war. Dunlop urges this view in a brief contribution to our symposium, illustrated by a striking map. His contention is endorsed by the high authority of Havelock Ellis, who writes (op. cit., p. 65) : "If we survey the belligerent nations in the war we may say that those which took the initiative in drawing it on, or at all events were most prepared to welcome it, were Russia, Austria, Germany, and Serbia. "We may also ■note that these include nearly all the nations, in Europe with a high birth-rate. We may further note that they are all nations which — putting aside their cultural sum- mits and taking them in the mass — are among the most backward in Europe; the fall in the birth-rate has not yet had time to permeate them. On the other hand, of the belligerent peoples of to-day, all indications point to the French as the people most intolerant, silently but deeply, of the war they are so ably and heroically waging. Yet the France of the present, with the lowest birth-rate and the highest civilisation, was a century ago the France of a birth-rate higher than that of Germany to-day, the most militarist and aggressive of nations, a perpetual men- ace to Europe. For all those among 'us who have faith in civilisation and humanity, and are unable to believe that war can ever be a civilising or humanising method of progress, it must be a daily prayer that the fall of the birth-rate may be hastened." In the report of the so-caUed National Birth-Rate Com- mission recently held in this country under the auspices of the National Council for Public Morals, we read: "A pressure of population in any country brings as a chief historic consequence overflows and migrations into neigh- 272 POPULATION AND BIRTH-CONTROL bouring or other accessible countries, not only for peace- ful settlement but also for conquest and for the subjugation and exploitation of weaker peoples. This always remains a chief cause of international disputes and wars." * Mrs. Billington-Greig writes still more uncompromisingly: "This present inferno of destruction in Europe is due to the pressure of population. The rate of increase of the German people is rapid. The Kaiser's claim for a place in the sun is merely the claim for food and drink for the flood of German babies. The German people have been brought to welcome and rejoice in a warfare of aggres- sion, not so much by militarist propaganda as by the ever- increasing pressure of their numbers. On their east fron- tier they had also the menace of a Russia increasing even more rapidly than themselves, and all history went to as- sure them that an outlet would be found for the Russian millions across their borders within another generation, unless they first took the initiative. This is a very rough presentment economically and internationally of what the lack of restriction of births means for us, of what it has meant all down the ages." ^ A distinguished German sociologist, likewise writing since the outbreak of the war, declares that Europe should fortify the peoples of the east against their domestic op- pressors, thus creating for itself allies from among these same peoples. "No longer, then, will the swarming masses of the east be a menace to the west, a menace against 'The Declining Birth-Sate: Its Causes and Effects, Chapman and HaU, London, 1916, p. 43. ^ Billington-Greig, Commonsense on the Population Question, Mal- thusian League, London, p. 10. EDITORIAL SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 273 which the west must provide by rivalry in armaments and rivalry in uncontrolled procreation. ' ' ® Finally, to quote but one more authority, William Archer, writing on The Education Problem in the Daily News of January 4, 1917, concludes his article with the words: "It is certain that if no check is ever to be placed on human fecundity, wars of conquest and extermination can never end." Imposing as is this array of opinions (and many more might be cited), the editors are by no means convinced, either that pressure of population was the main cause of the present war, or that the universalisation of birth- control would suffice to prevent war in the future. Grant that in certain stages of human evolution pressure of popu- lation upon the means of subsistence was the leading and ofttimes the sole cause of war, grant with Malthus that this was the main factor in inducing the barbarian migra- tions of the epoch that bridged the gulf between the classical and the modern world (though even as far as these movements of population are concerned few will be so bold as to deny that sheer human pugnacity and love of adventure may have been a contributory cause), there are other economic phases wherein the motive forces of war are of a very different character. What evidence is there that the aggressive wars of later republican and of imperialist Rome were the outcome of over-population; what evidence is there that the imperialist conquests of Spain during the sixteenth century or those of England during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, were con- ditioned by the pressure of population upon the means of 'Budolf Goldscheid, DeutscMands grosste Gefahr, Orell !Fussli, Zurich, 1916. p. 35. 274 POPULATION AND BIRTH-CONTROL subsistence? There is no such evidence. They were due (once more ignoring wanderlust and innate pugnacity) to economic causes of a very different kind, to the desire of dominant classes to augment their wealth and to ag- grandise their position by the exploitation of more back- ward races. We will not enter into the vexed question of the causes of the war that is now raging. Suffice it to express the belief that the dispassionate historians of a later age will decide that pressure of population was but a subsidiary factor, and that, apart from the instinctive combativeness of semi-civilised humanity, and apart from the widespread influence of misrepresentations and mis- understandings, the leading determinant was the rivalry of capitalist imperialisms. Surely the unimportance of pressure of population in Germany is sufficiently proved by Quessel's account of the regions in eastern and western Germany in which the dominance of the German type is threatened, just as the dominance of the French type is threatened in certain districts of France, by the flood of alien proletarian immigration? The same considerations apply to the future. Restric- tion of births is for many reasons eminently desirable, but we shall delude ourselves if we believe that the universali- sation of the practice will, unaided, prove competent to suppress the menace of war. Dunlop terminates his paper with the enquiry : ' ' Can you imagine war occurring if no one in the world had more than two children ? ' ' We answer: "We can imagine it very well, so long as large- scale exploitation continues. While the government of 'civilised' nations remains in the hands of profiteering classes, other causes of war will continue to operate. EDITORIAL SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 275 causes which no restriction of population, however effec- tive, could possibly put out of action." Let us turn from these social advantages of birth- control which, though realisable to a degree, are not, we think, realisable in the completeness anticipated by cer- tain enthusiasts, to consider the individual advantages likely to accrue from conscious procreation. Some of these need not be discussed at length, for they are familiar to aU. It is precisely because the individual benefits are so plain, that the practice of birth-control makes unceas- ing progress, so that the more fanatical among its op- ponents, those with an eye only for its real or fancied social dangers, are led to clamour (as fanatics invariably clamour) for repressive legislation. People would not', interfere with the natural consequences of the sexual act unless experience showed that, under present conditions, such interference promotes material wellbeing. Let us never speak slightingly of the desire for material well- being. "Whether it be or be not man's leading need, it is at any rate the first oi all his needs, and if it can be satis- fied (without exploitation, active or passive, and without excess) we may trust that the other graces will follow in their proper places. Like most other questions in our "man-made world," birth-control has until quite recently been mainly re- garded as a man's question. But of late, in England, Germany, France, and Italy, and not least in the United States, it has been brought much to the fore by women, and as a matter concerning individual women and chil- dren even more than individual men. In the case of chil- dren the benefits of birth restriction are overwhelming. 276 POPULATION AND BIRTH-CONTROL Not only is the decline in fitness among the later children '^ '^ '^ '' of a large family established beyond the possibility of dis- pute, but it is obvious on a priori grounds that a few children can be better cared for by their parents than can ' ' ' many, and that a reduction in the ratio between children and adults throughout the community will enormously facilitate the solution of educational problems, rendering it possible to have smaller classes in our schools, and in various other ways enabling the reduced numbers of chil- dren to receive more of that intelligent individual care and attention which is the central feature of sound edu- cation. As we write there comes to hand a letter from a personal friend, a skilled manual worker in a large mid- land town. Apropos of the problems of heredity and en- vironment, he says: "The smaller families now common among the artisan class are hopeful in so far as environ- ment is a factor in the child's development. Generally the children are better nourished and placed in the world with a much greater regard to the child's wishes and gen- eral aptitudes, than among the labouring classes with their much larger families." We do not deny that many large families are wonderfully well cared for, among the poor no less than among the well-to-do. But on the average, wherever lapinisme prevails we have numbers of neglected children, a fact to which the fall in the youthful death- rate that invariably follows a fall in the birth-rate bears eloquent testimony. But it is when we come to consider the individual woman that we find the advantages of birth-control overwhelming. It is not needful to discuss the matter in detail, since the possibilities are eloquently set forth in the essay on Women EDITORIAL SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 277 and Birth-Control. If a word of cautioiis editorial criti- cism be permissible, we would say that while we fully agree with Stella Browne that enforced maternity is "an outrage and a vile cruelty to both mother and child," we think that iu her observations on page 252 she is inclined to replace by a new feminine mythology the masculine mythology which she tells us (truly enough) has gathered round motherhood. The connection between the mother and the child in uter'o is not of such a character as to ren- der it likely that "an enormous percentage of physical >• degeneracy, of deficient vitality, and obscure perversions of instinct and will, are due to the unwilling and unloving conception and gestation of such life"; and we venture to express the opinion that the personal observations to which the writer appeals are likely, on close analysis, to prove no less unconvincing than those commonly adduced in support of the belief in telegony and in maternal im- pressions in general. But we pass from minor points of difference between the editors and Stella Browne to en- visage the social reactions of the change in the status of womanhood that will ensue upon the generalisation of birth-control. Many influences are co-operating in modern social life to secure the economic independence of women, but among these influences the factor we are now considering wiU prove in the end more potent than all the others combined. For not merely will birth-control render motherhood a purely voluntary profession, enable women to remain independent wage earners for as long as they please; but further, as will be shown in the sequel, it will positively compel the community to endow motherhood, and will thus S'rs POPULATION AND BIRTH-CONTEOL render all adult women, married as well as unmarried, and with or without children, completely independent of the economic caprices of the individual male. This will assuredly remove the economic pressure which is one of the potent factors in keeping up the supply of women for the modern slave market of prostitution. It will not suffice per se to abolish prostitution; but it will diminish its prevalence and will transform its characteristics in ways whose consideration lies beyond our present scope. On the one hand, while the curtailment of opportunities for casual and purchased sexual gratification will intensify the masculine need for early marriage, the practice of birth-control will, on the other, enormously facilitate this desirable consummation. (Incidentally, the decline in the prevalence of prostitution will greatly simplify the prob- lem of preventing venereal disease — another notable social gain.) But only upon one condition will the consumma- tion be thoroughly desirable. If marriage were to remain an inseparable bond, if marriage were still to be "wed- lock," it had better be entered upon late rather than soon, for the unlikelihood of securing that suitability of tem- perament upon which conjugal happiness so largely de- pends would be enormously greater if unions necessarily permanent were to be formed between comparatively im- mature and entirely inexperienced couples. (Briefer, too, would be the period of misery under an ill-fitting yoke!) Now, in the past there have been two chief reasons for maintaining the institution of coercive marriage — the pro- tection of women against being left economically defence- less with one or more children to support, and the pro- tection of the community against the liability of having EDITORIAL SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 279 to provide for such motliers and their children. But the '^ whole case for coercive marriage falls to the ground if motherhood becomes a voluntary act and if motherhood be endowed. People will marry, as of old, that is to say they will enter into publicly acknowledged sexual unions in the hope that these unions will prove enduring. But for various reasons, and not least because they will wish before rearing a family to feel reasonably secure of the permanence of their mutual affection, they will not as a rule begin parenthood until they have lived together for a considerable time. All marriages will, in fact, be trial marriages. To many contemporary minds, to not a few even among the advocates of birth-control, the idea will be alarming, if not actually repulsive. But to the present writers, not only does trial marriage seem an inevitable outcome of the diffusion of knowledge of birth-control, but, under the changed circumstances, they welcome the in- stitution as certain to have the most widely beneficial so- cial reactions. The matter cannot now be further con- sidered, and we will content ourselves with referring those interested in the outlooks thus opened to a recently pub- lished sociological study by a German writer of estab- lished repute.'^ If, however, in these directions the effects of birth-con- trol will be revolutionary, greatly improving individual status, and radically transforming the social environment for the general advantage, there are two ways in which the practice entails dangers of the gravest character. These dangers are interrelated, and both are fuUy discussed in ' Grete Meisel-Hess, Tlhe Sexual Crisis. Critic and Guide Co., New York, 1916. 280 POPULATION AND BIRTH-CONTROL our symposium, for Halford, in especial, dwells upon the tendency of injudicious and partial restriction of births within each national unit to promote the preferential sur- vival of the unfit; while Quessel, in all three of his con- tributions, shows how less prolific racial and national types, assumed by him to be superior, are threatened with ex- tinction by the preponderant procreation of inferior or at any rate less advanced national and racial stocks. In both cases the same dysgenist influence is at work, and the greater fertility of the less fit is tending to reverse the gains of biological and social evolution. "We may ap- preciate much of Bernstein's shrewd criticism of Ques- sel's nationalism; we may agree with Techet, whose ad- mirable Volker, Vaterldnder and Fursten Bernstein quotes, that every civilisation is built up by racial minglings; we may go further than either Bernstein or Techet, and consider that new ideas contribute more potently than new blood to the upbuilding of a progressive civilisation; we may be inclined to criticise Halford 's assumption (strange in a socialist, though supported by the general drift of Nieeforo's investigations concerning the anthropology of the non-possessing classes) that the dominant classes of capitalist civilisation and those who make their way into these classes from beneath are of superior biologic type — and we may yet feel that we cannot contemplate with perfect equanimity the lesson of Halford 's figures, the menace of race suicide in the United States, or the possi- bility mooted by Quessel that the German type is destined to submergence beneath the flood of Slav alien immigra- tion. When (p. 170) Bernstein, speaking of race suicide, cheerfully declares, "we are so far from such a pos- EDITORIAL SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 281 sibility that no ground exists for speaking of a problem," he reminds us of those Gallios who, if we ^sk what is going to happen to our civilisation and to the industrial system upon which it is at present based when, within a few brief centuries, the coal measures will be exhausted, reply without concern, "Take short views! The coal will last our time; and when the problem presses the men of science will find out how to tap some new source of energy." The sociologist is one whose business it is to take long views, and when Quessel lays stress upon certain tendencies which, if not counteracted, will before long produce undesirable social results, he shows himself a more thoughtful sociologist than Bernstein. As regards the United States it is not necessary to add much to the facts and figures adduced by Quessel. Im- migration from eastern Europe has been suspended by the war, and it is by no means certain that the suspen- sion will be brief. But there are other sources of supply, and the problem will persist even though its form be changed. Apart from the outcries of those whose na- tional emotions are genuinely stirred but whose outlook is unquestionably narrow, there are many thoughtful ob- servers to whom this American problem presents itself as a matter for grave anxiety. E. A. Ross, for example, in his book. The Old World and the New, expresses the opinion that Slav immigration is bringing the middle ages into America, and is profoundly concerned lest what he calls the "pioneer breed" should be squeezed out by what he regards as refugees from inferior civilisations. Robert J. Sprague, again, a man free from spread-eagleism and far from unfriendly to the idea of birth-control, spoke 282 POPULATION AND BIRTH-CONTROL as follows in a lecture he recently delivered at the Massa- chusetts Agricultural College: "If the insufficient birth- rate of the upper classes were to continue, and we were obliged to get our increase in numbers either from the overflowing poverty-stricken families of foreign countries, or from the poor classes of our own population, I should say let us draw the increase from our own people, reared under our own flag, language, and customs, even though in poverty. The adoption of birth-control by poor fam- ilies to the extent that it is practised by the economically higher classes will condemn this continent forever to be not only the mixing bowl of the world but the scrap heap of the races." America, however, is not yet a unified na- tion, though the great area of the United States has long been under unified rule. The question of national sur- vival threatened by birth-control presents itself in its simplest form in the case of France, a national unit now for many centuries, and a land in which, though racial ad- mixture is plentiful enough, a comparatively unified na- tional type is unmistakable. Nor is the danger merely one of foreign immigration, for from the militarist point of view the risk involved in the more rapid multiplication of the German neighbours had attracted serious attention long before the present war, and had led to the foundation of the Alliance Nationale pour I'Accroissement de la Popu- lation Frangaise. It is usually preferable to let enthusiasts state their own case. With this end in view the editors procured a num- ber of the publications of the Alliance, respectively en- titled (we translate) : The Country is in Danger; How to Save France; Birth-Control and National Defence; We'll EDITORIAL SUMMAEY AND CONCLUSION 283 do for them — But afterwards? (This by a military man, the reproduction of a lecture delivered to soldiers at the front in July, 1916) ; The Decline in the Birth-Bate and the Future of France. The two first-named are mere pictorial squibs, of the familiar type of election literature, like those of the "big loaf campaign" in England or of the "honest dollar campaign" in the United States, and every picture could easily be countered by a similar ex parte reply. Num- bers three and four, likewise, have little scientific value. But the last enumerated is a weU-written pamphlet by Paul Gemahling, and had we been able to obtain permission to translate it we would gladly have incorporated it as a chapter in the present volume. The Alliance, however, re- fuses to countenance the reproduction in extcTiso abroad of the arguments which it thinks good enough for home eon- sumption (justifying its refusal on the same patriotic grounds to which it appeals in its domestic propaganda), and we must therefore content ourselves with a summary. Nations, contends Gemahling, must either increase or dis- appear; but while the population of France is stationary and even threatens to diminish, the population of neigh- bouring lands is increasing with alarming rapidity. In the year 1911 the births in France numbered 742,000, the deaths 776,000. During the years 1906-1910, per ten thou- sand inhabitants, the excess of births over deaths was, in Germany 141, in Great Britain 115, in Italy and in Aus- tria-Hungary 113, in Belgium 87, and in France 5. In 1871, just after the Franco-German war, the population of France (36,000,000) was nearly equal to that of Ger- many (40,000,000), and was greater than that of Great Britain (31,000,000). "What has been the subsequent 284 POPULATION AND BIETH-CONTKOL growth of population in Europe? For every 100 Rus- sians living in 1871 there were 177 living in 1911. The corresponding increase in the other leading coun- tries during the same period was: Germany, from 100 to 161; Great Britain, from 100 to 146; Austria-Hun- gary, from 100 to 137; Italy, from 100 to 129; France, from 100 to 109. Regarding Germany as the most danger- ous neighbour, the following comparison is instructive. In 1850, there were 97 Germans for every 100 Frenchmen. In 1872, the ratio was 116:100. In 1911, it was 168:100. In 1926, if the movement of population in the respective countries is continued, if the Germans go on propagating at the present rate and if there is no further diminution in the French birth-rate, the ratio will be 200:100. In fifteen years (Gemahling was writing in 1911) the popula- tion of Germany will be double that of France. The decline in the birth-rate, continues the writer, lies at the root of all the problems that press for solution in France. It is owing to this decline that France tends to fall out of the ranks of the great powers. Judged by population, in 1856 France was the second of the Eu- ropean states, Russia alone being more populous; but in 1910 France came sixth on the list — or seventh if Japan be counted among the great powers, for in the period named the population of Japan increased from 20,000,000 to 53, 000,000. For the same reason, the influence of the French language and of French civilisation has been lessened throughout the world. The country's powers for defence are gravely compromised, for with fewer children she has fewer soldiers at her disposal. Her colonial expansion is hindered; she herself tends to be colonised by strangers. EDITORIAL SUMMAET AND CONCLUSION 285 She is under-populated, for she has but 74 iuhabitants per square kilometre, whereas Germany has 120. Her eco- nomic development is enfeebled. Nor, contends Gemahling, are these evils compensated by either material or spiritual benefits. There is an actual diminution in material wellbeing. Under modern condi- tions, the financial charges which the great nation has to meet are continually increasing, and in default of a pro- portional increase in population there is per head a heav- ier burden of taxation. Nor does the fall in birth-rate improve the condition, of the working class, for when the economic life of society languishes in consequence of an arrest in the growth of population it is impossible that the workers should fail to suffer. Even if a reduction in their numbers should render it possible here or there for them to enforce the payment of better wages, the im- provement is but temporary, for capital soon breaks the opposition by the import of foreign labour or by the multi- plication of machines. As regards spiritual losses, to re- strict the family would greatly limit possibilities for the production of genius. The writer quotes Henri Joly to the following effect: "If no one had ever had more than two children the world would have known neither Montaigne, nor Descartes, nor Richelieu. Had the family never ex- ceeded three, there would have been no Michelangelo in Italy, no Cromwell in England, no Napoleon in France. Had the limit been four, Mozart and Mirabeau would never have seen the light. Benjamin Franklin was a fourteenth child. " Another evil attendant on family limitation is that it increases the preponderance of elderly people in human society. Where the mature and the elderly are dispro- 28& POPULATION AJSTO BIRTH-CONTROL portionately numerous, thrift and routinism are in favour, misoneism is rife, and the revolutionary and venturesome tendencies needful for great enterprises are discouraged. Legislation is likely to concern itself more with the in- terests of maturity and age than with those that concern youth and the future of the race. Of all Gemahling's arguments, the two last seem to the editors to be of most enduring weight. But because in the past certain great geniuses would never have let their light shine into the world had their parents adopted the two-children-system, we need not therefore assume that the universal and rigid adoption of this system (a highly im- probable event) would completely deprive us of geniuses. Even if we restrict our possibilities by limiting the field of production, it is the contention of the advocates of birth-control that we shall be enabled in the future, by improved nurture, to make a much better use of this re- stricted field. Of some of the geniuses mentioned by Joly it may be contended (no names need be named, and read- ers may make their own selection) that the world could have got on very well without them. Besides, our present tendency is to lay less stress on breeding giants than on elevating the race. A high average of faculty with thor- ough and judicious cultivation of that faculty is what the world needs for happiness and continued progress, and the means for securing this end are sketched in the essay on Eugenics, Birth-Control, and SociaUsm. In the future commonwealth, where the average of intelligence will be much higher than at present, genius will not be lacking, but it will necessarily be less conspicuous: EDITORIAL SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 287 Ah, though the times, when some new thought can bud, Are but as poet's seasons when they flower. Yet seas, that daily gain upon the shore. Have ebb and flow conditioning their march, And slow and sure comes up the golden year. When wealth no more shall rest in mounded heaps, But smit with freer light shall slowly melt In many streams to fatten lower lands. And light shall spread, and man be liker man Through all the season of the golden year. Shall eagles not be eagles, wrens be wrens? If aU the world were falcons, what of that? The wonder of the eagle were the less. But he not less the eagle. Happy days EoU onward, leading up the golden year. More serious is the danger attributable to the preponder- ance of maturity and old age. Yet in a world in which young people were rarer, and in which their birth was a matter of choice not chance, they would certainly be bet- ter educated, and would perhaps be better valued. Age, too, is not simply a question of years. Largely it is a question of cares, and those who become parents in the early twenties of life, and bring up a numerous family, tend to age early. Premature elderliness and an excessive re- spect for the aged have ever been characteristic of excep- tionally prolific races like the Japanese and the Jews. May not the admitted tendency of people to remain young longer than they did in our grand-parents' times be in large part due to the limitation of families and to the deferred paTenthood characteristic of our own epoch? The possi- bility at any rate, is not one to be lightly dismissed. The counsels of youth and the counsels of maturity have always been essential to the good ordering of the world. The coun- 288 POPULATION AND BIRTH-CONTROL sels of senility have ever been disastrous. Two remedies suggest themselves as likely to counteract the prevalence of senile influences. The first is that as the world grows wiser we cease to revere age, qua age, having of late made much healthy progress in this respect. The second remedy is perhaps novel, and is considerably more radical. It wiU be lightly indicated in bruiging this essay to a close. Turning for the nonce to examine Gemahling's proposals for meeting an undeniable danger, we cannot but pro- nounce them disastrously absurd. "Increase or disappear" is to be the motto. Because Germany increases more rapidly than France, because Russia increases still more rapidly than Germany, the French are to hearken to the gospel expounded by Zola in FeconditS; they are to resusci- tate la/pimsme; they are to breed, breed, breed. At this rate, within a few generations, there will be positively no standing room left in Europe — and the slaughter of the war begun in 1914 will be as nothing to that which is to come. For the whole propaganda is conducted with an eye to the future military struggle. "Rivalry in arma- ments and rivalry in uncontrolled procreation!" It is no wonder that those Frenchmen who can contemplate the problems of civilisation only through the blood-tinted spec- tacles of the soldier should assure us, as Captain de Blic (author of We'll do for them — But afterwards?) gravely assures us, that neo-malthusian propaganda in France is encouraged and subsidised by Germany. If we refuse to accept this nightmare vision of an in- creasingly prolific and increasingly militarised world, what is the alternative ? There is but one, the universalisa- tion of birth-control. Hardy, editor of Le Neo-Malthusien, BDITOEIAL SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 289 round whose name birth-control propaganda centres in France, as it centres in England round that of Drysdale, in Holland round that of Rutgers, and in America round that of Dr. Robinson, is unquestionably right when (arous- ing, doubtless, the virtuous and patriotic indignation of all the Captain de Blics of Germany) he declares in a letter addressed on October 19, 1916, to the French government of national defence: "The only way of avoiding a new catacylsm is to reduce the deplorable fertility of the more prolific races. Far from asking Frenchmen to imitate their enemies, we must, on the contrary, teach them our own wisdom. Peace and general disarmament will never be- come possible until, in every nation, births are regulated in accordance with the national resources. After the war, and even from this very hour, we must circulate by the hundred thousand in Germany pamphlets popularising the methods of birth-control. — To make a beginning, I beg permission to distribute among the German prisoners of war in this country a pamphlet on the subject which I published in Paris in the German language a few months before the outbreak of war. The pamphlet is entitled Mittel zur Schwangerschaftsverhutung (Means for the Prevention of Pregnancy), and will, I doubt not, secure among the prisoners a success comparable with that which attended its circulation in Germany at the time of its first publication. — ^Who can doubt that when the war is over the prisoners will pass on the information to their fellow countrymen ? This pamphlet, or similar pamphlets, should be translated into all other languages, and above all into the Slav tongues, for the coming peril is the Slav peril. All governments desiring national security and 290 POPULATION AND BIRTH-CONTROL world peace should see to it that the necessary literature is circulated in enormous quantities." These rival arguments, Gemahling's and Hardy's, may be illustrated by analogy. Let us suppose that among the nations of the world, four, A, B, C, and D, occupy leading positions, and th^ these four are neighbours. In one matter A is greatly behind the others, in respect of habits of personal cleanliness. The trouble is not merely aesthet- ic, for the A's are infested with body-lice, and typhus is consequently rife. Intercourse between these advanced nations is free, and the inhabitants of B, C, and D are seriously endangered by the dirt-engendered disease. Are they to join forces and exterminate their good friends of A? Apart from the other losses that would be involved, it is unquestionable that under the conditions of camp- life B, C, and D would also be ravaged by typhus. Are they to enclose A within a ring fence, and rigidly avoid all communications? In the modern world the suggestion is impracticable; and were it practicable B, C, and D would lose more than they would gain. Some vociferate that the only salvation for the peoples of B, C, and D is to return to the simple and uncleanly habits of their less artificial- ised forefathers, and to accept lice and typhus, with resig- nation and even with gratitude, as divinely ordained insti- tutions. Others, more revolutionary, contend that the in- habitants of A should be taught to rid themselves of lice. To drop the parable, the remedy for the national perils at- tendant upon the partial application of birth-control is simple. The practice must be universalised. Similiar considerations apply to the very real danger pointed out by Halford, and the same method must be EDITOEIAL SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 291 utilised to counteract the dysgenist tendencies of imper- fectly adopted birth-control. For birth-control has come, and it has come to stay. The Alliance Nationale, like similar groups in other lands, demands the prohibition of neo-malthusian propaganda and desires to penalise the sale of contraceptives. The result of course, would be to stimulate the employment of comparatively undesirable expedients for birth-control, and to accentuate the dysgen- ist tendencies of the practice. In America, for instance, the coloured sections of the community and the most igno- rant among the immigrants would continue to indulge in indiscriminate procreation, while the limitation of the An- glo-American stock would persist. In every community, racial questions apart, the better informed would still make use of the new knowledge, while the ignorant, kept ignorant by a reactionary law, would increase and multi- ply. "Worst of all, there would be no legal means, no repu- table means, no practical means of any kind, for realising the eugenist advantages of birth-control, for restricting the multiplication of the biologically unfit. Dysgenist tenden- cies would be reinforced, and eugenist tendencies would be counteracted. In these conditions, the gloomy vaticina- tions of Halford would to a large extent be fulfilled and racial degeneration would be inevitable. It is above all among the masses, and among the inferior stocks, that the knowledge of birth-control must be diffused with the utmost speed and by all possible means ; hence the absurd- ity of repressive legislation; hereia the supreme value of the work of such enthusiasts as Margaret Sanger. Our analysis has shown that the benefits of birth-control are predominantly individual (with, it need hardly be re- 292 POPULATION AND BIRTH-CONTROL peated, important social reactions of a most advantageous character) ; and that the drawbacks and the dangers are predominantly social. Thus there is a justification and a need for social action in this matter; but, as we have seen, merely repressive measures could not fail to be disastrous. The community desiring to improve the qual- ity of the population, and the community in which the need for a larger population is felt, will have to take appropriate means to cheek the multiplication of less desirable types, to promote the procreation of the biologi- cally and socially fit, and, in case of need, to stimulate the growth of a more abundant population. Halford, indeed, assures us (supra, p. 236) that the goal of morality is the production of more life. Surely it is not more life but ietter life that is the supreme need? This is the answer to the injunctions of the militarists who tell us to multiply and to replenish the earth in order that there may be more soldiers, more munitioners, and ever more breeders of fu- ture soldiers and munitioners. "That way madness lies, and many of us, while content to live out our own lives even in a militarised world, would certainly refuse to in- troduce "more life" into a world wherein military effi- ciency is to be the supreme test of civilisation. In Sylvia Pankhurst's recent pamphlet on The Birth-Bate we read: "Dr. Saleeby urged that the birth-rate must be increased in order to provide more soldiers. But women have no desire to produce mere cannon-food, and the determina- tion is undoubtedly beginning to mature in the minds of many thoughtful women not to bear any more soldiers while conscription is able to claim their sons and war re- mains a menace." These sentiments are not confined to BDITOEIAL SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 293 women. For example, in a pamphlet published before the war, and entitled Socialisme et Population, Leon Marinont writes of the fall in the German birth-rate, and goes on to say: "The Germans, we see, are as little inclined to make children simply to be a mark for our lebels as we French- men are inclined to make children who may be used to test the penetrative power of the German mausers."' We have a sufficiently robust faith in the human mind to believe, not merely that this war will come to an end, but that its lessons will perchance be so impressive as to relieve us before long of. the worst aspects of militarism. In that case we shall not be forced to waste our energies, in a war after the war, upon a struggle which will find its extremest expressions in the birth strike against militarism on the one hand and in repressive measures against birth- control on the other. We shall have sane communities, willing to accept birth-control as they have accepted other advances in man's control over nature, willing, while wisely counteracting its disadvantages, to utilise its advantages to the full. The first thing, clearly, is to universalise the practice, to diffuse the new knowledge among all races and through all classes of the community. This alone will suf- fice to minimise the dangers indicated by Halford and by Quessel; and even if it will not inaugurate the social mil- lennium (as suggested by Drysdale) nor put an end to war (as hoped by Dunlop) it will at any rate greatly ameliorate social conditions and wUl furnish powerful as- sistance in the war against war. If the universalisation of birth-control should lead, in certain countries, to an actual decline in population, need this prospect alarm us ? Is not density of population, like 294 POPULATION AND BIRTH-CONTROL capitalism and like modem industrialism, no more than a necessary but in many ways extremely disagreeable stage in human evolution? We quite agree with what Loria (supra, pp. 38-41) writes of the stimulus to progress afforded by pressure of population, but there is no reason why hu- manity, grown self-conscious, should continue for all time to require such a goad. The Alliance Nationale complains that France is under-populated as compared with Germany. To a large extent the figures are fictitious, for, as in all advanced industrial communities, the growth of German population is predominantly urban, while in the rural dis- tricts of Germany, people are by no means thick on the ground. As regards the countryside, the writers, who have tramped several thousand kilometres on French byways, are convinced that France is grossly over-populated; and the same is true, though perhaps to a less extent, of many regions in rural England. Turning to the industrial and urban areas, and fixing our minds on the ideal, not of more life but of better life, not of quantity but of quality, can- not we look forward with joy rather than with mere equanimity to a future in which such abominations as the English black country, such spreading cancers as Paris, London, and Chicago, will be the almost forgotten night- mares of a remote past? And whatever our individual tastes may be, the time will assuredly come in which the exhaustion of the coal measures will enforce upon the world a more reasonable standard of population. But even if we do not look so far as this into the future, we can at least recognise that the communities of a morrow that is already dawning will attempt to formulate some idea of what population is most desirable for the areas they re- EDITORIAL SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 295 spectively occupy, and will seek reasonable means of se- curing that population. They will not leave the matter to all the desperate hazards of fortuitous immigration and promiscuous breeding, but will encourage the growth or the restriction of population as circumstances may dictate. Now so long as social conditions remain of the present, in many ways extremely undesirable, type, it is probable that the universalisation of birth-control (inevitable if hu- manity is to be saved from racial degeneration and if civilisation is to be preserved from destruction by mili- tarism) will be followed by a notable tendency to the dwindling of population. Personal and family egoism — commendable egoism — can hardly fail to lead to this re- sult. The community, desiring to maintain population, will be forced to react from motives of self-preservation. Since, ex hypothesi, it cannot react by repressive measures, it must react in the only other way possible, by the pro- vision of advantages to the parents of a certain number of children. The sole practicable method is the endowment of motherhood, and this reform, essential on other grounds besides the one now under consideration, will have social reactions of the most revolutionary and far-reaching char- acter. The extent of the endowment, the number of chil- dren to which it applies, the conditions under which it is given, and numerous other details, will vary in accordance with the good sense and experience of the community, in accordance with the increase in our understanding of eu- genics, and in accordance with the degree to which it is desirable to stimulate or to repress the growth of popula- tion. The essential point is that (like eugenics and social- 296 POPULATION AND BIRTH-CONTROL ism) birth-control and the endowment of motherhood are reciprocal necessities. Birth-control, eugenics, socialism, and the endowment of motherhood, are but fresh extensions of the principle of man's control over nature, that nature of which man him- self, and man's social environment, are parts. The con- trol of inanimate nature is of very old date. It began as soon as man became man; it marked his emergence from the status of merely instinctive animality. But the appli- cation of conscious purpose and deliberate will to man's own nature, and to the social milieu wherein "hiunan na- ture" is so largely fashioned, are of comparatively recent growth, and are full of hope for the future. This is the answer to those who tell us that birth-control is "un- natural." So is clothing, so is fire, so is articulate speech. AU these are essentially human characteristics, by which man is distinguished from his brute forbears; all these are "artificial," but we do not propose to abandon them on that account. Having discovered them, we endeavour to use them wisely, to make them our servants instead of our masters, as with nature in general. Birth-control? Why not? And why not, too, death-control? Loria tells us (supra, p. 14) that Godwin and the elder Mal- thus "looked forward to the coming of a social system founded upon equality and anarchy, which was to bring universal wellbeing and even physical immortality." Death-control in that sense is perhaps undesirable, and is certainly beyond our grasp. But the death-control that will enable us to choose our own time for leaving the world is just as much within our power as the birth-control that enables us to determine when we shall bring new Hf e into EDITORIAL SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 297 the world. Not by a "fixed period" like that of Britan- nula in Trollope 's novel, imposed upon reluctant elders by an authoritative state, but by the free choice of those who, having enjoyed to the utmost the splendours and the de- lights of life and of love, are ready to depart when the time is ripe, unwilling to lag superfluous on the stage, loath to spoil the record of a fine existence by degenerating into exploiters, and reluctant to lose the savour of independent struggle amid the parasitic miseries of decrepitude. Vol- untary death-control is the remedy for the curse of senility in a world that exists for the young and for the mature. A free spirit wUl not create undesired life, nor continue a life desirable neither to self nor to others. The following pages contain announce- ments of some of The Critic and Guide Co.'s publications BIRTH CONTROL OR === The Limitation of Offspring by the Prevention of Conception BY WILLIAM J. ROBINSON, M.D. With an Introduction by A. JACOBI, M.D., LL.D. Bx-President of The American Medical Association All the arguments for and against the voluntary limitation of offspring or birth . control concentrated in one book of 250 pages. The Limitation of Offspring is now the burning question of the day. It has been made so by Dr. William J. Robinson, who was a pioneer in this country to demand that people be permitted to obtain the knowledge how to limit the number of their children, how to prevent con- ception when necessary. For many years he fought practically alone; his propaganda has made hundreds of thousands of converts — ^now the ground is prepared and the people are ready to listen. Written in plain popular language. A book which everybody interested in his own welfare and the welfare of the race should read. PRICE ONE DOLLAR THE CRITIC AND GUIDE CO. 12 MT. MORRIS PARK W., NEW YORK SEXUAL PROBLEMS OF TODAY By WILLIAM J. ROBINSON, M.D. Dr. Robinson's work deals with many phases of the sex question, both in their individual and social as- pects. , In this book the scientific knowledge of a physician, eminent as a specialist in everything per- taining to the physiological and medical side of these topics, is combined with the [vigorous social views of a thinker who has radical ideas and is not afraid to give them outspoken expression. A few of the subjects which the author discusses In trenchant fashion are: The Relations Between the Sexes and Man's Inhumanity to Woman. — The Influence of Abstinence on Man's Sexual Health and Sexual Power. — The Double Standard of MoraUty and the Effect of Continence on Each Sex. — The Limitation of Offspring: the Most Important Immediate Step for the Better- ment of the Human Bace, from an Economic and Eugenic Standpoint. — What To Do With the Prostitute and How To Abolish Venereal Disease. — The Question of Abortion Considered In Its Ethical and Social Aspects. — Torturing the Wife When the Husband Is At Fault. — Influence of the Prostate on Man's Mental Condition. — ^The Most Efficient Venereal Prophylactics, etc* CtCa "SEXUAL PROBLEMS OF TO-DAY" will give most of its readers information they never possessed before and ideas they never had before — or if they had, never heard them publicly expressed before. Cloth-bound, 320 Pages, $2 Postpaid THE CRITIC AND GUIDE CO. \Z MT- MORRIS PARK W. NEW YORK WOMAN: HER SEX AND LOVE LIFE FOR MEN AND WOMEN By WILLIAM J. ROBINSON, M.D. Profusely Illustrated The best book of its kind in any language. Contains nothing superfluous, but does contain everything that is essential. It is the book intelligent men and women have been waiting for. V / tm-A TREASURY OF REAL INFORMATION-®K Price, Cloth Bound, $3.00 CRITIC AND GUIDE COMPANY 12 MT. MORRIS PARK WEST :: NEW YORK CITY Ready for delivery October 15th AN EPOCH-MAKING BOOK Never-Told Tales GRAPHIC STORIES OF THE DISASTROUS RESULTS OF SEXUAL IGNORANCE By WILLIAM J. ROBINSON, M.D. Editor of the American Journal of Urology and of The Critic and Guide Every doctor, every young man and woman, every newly-married touple, every parent who has grown-up children, should read this 6ook. Every one of the tales teaches a distinct lesson, a lesson of vital importance to the human race. _ , We knew that we were getting out a useful, a NECESSARY book, and we expected it would meet with a favorable reception, but we never expected the reception would be so extravagantly and so unanimously enthusiastic. There seems to have been a long-felt but dormant want for just such a book. One reader, who has a fortune running into the millions, writes: "I would have given a good part of my fortune if the knowledge I obtained from one of _your stories to-day had been imparted to me ten years ago." Another one writes: "I agree with you that your plain, unvarnished tales from real life should have been told long ago. But better late than never. Your name will be among the benefactors of the human race for I laving brought out so forcibly those important, life-saving truths. 1! know that I personally have already been benefited by them." Fine Cloth Binding. One Dollar per Copy NINTH EDITION THE CRITIC AND GUIDE COMPANY J? MT. MORRIS PARK. WEST NEW YORE / consider myself extremely fortunate in having been instru- mental in making this remarkable book accessible to the English reading public. It is a great book well worth a careful perusal. ^ From D r-jWilliam J. Robinson's Introduction. The Sexual Crisis A CRITIQUE OF OUR SEX LIFE A Psychologic and Sociologic Study By CRETE MEISEL-HESS ¥¥¥ AUTHORIZED TRANSLATION BY EDEN AND CEDAR PAUL EDITED, WITH AN INTRODUCTION By WILLrAM J. ROBINSON, M. D. One of the greatest of all books on the sex question that have appeared in the Twentieth Century. It is a book that no educated man or woman, lay or professional, interested in sexual ethics, in otu: marriage system, in free motherhood, in trial marriages, in the question of sexual abstinence, etc., etc., can afford to leave tmread. Nobody who discusses, writes or lectvires on any phases of the sex question, has a right to overlook this remarkable volume. Written with a wonderfully keen analysis of the conditions which are bringing about a sexual crisis, the book abounds in gems of thought and in pearls of style on every page. It must be read to be appreciated. A Complete Synopsis of Contents Will Be Sent on Request 360 PAGES. PRICE S3.00 THE CRITIC AND GUIDE CO. 12 MT. MORRIS PARK. WEST : :: NEW YORK CITY <.v