?tate Qlnllegg of J^gricultuw JVt OforneU Hmueraitg 3tl(ata, W. g. Htbracg Liii Mr ..Co™*" University Library MN 1a.W6 Readings in sociai problems, 3 1924 013 731 124 The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013731124 SELECTIONS AND DOCUMENTS IN ECONOMICS EDITED BY WILLIAM Z. RIPLEY, Ph.D. Professor of Economics, Harvard University SELECTIONS AND DOCUMENTS IN ECONOMICS TRUSTS, POOLS AND CORPORATIONS {Revised Edition) , By William Z. Ripley, Ph.D., Professor of Political Economy, Harvard University TRADE UNIONISM AND LABOR PROBLEMS By John R. Commons, Professor of Political Economy, University of Wisconsin SOCIOLOGY AND SOCIAL PROGRESS By Thomas N. Carver, Ph.D., Professor of Political Economy, Harvard University SELECTED READINGS IN PUBLIC FINANCE By Charles J. Bullock, Ph.D., Professor of Economics, Harvard University RAILWAY PROBLEMS (Revised Edition) By William Z. Ripley, Ph.D., Professor of Political Economy, Harvard University SELECTED READINGS IN ECONOMICS By Charles J. Bullock, Ph.D., Professor of Economics, Harvard University ECONOMIC HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES. 176S-1860 By Guy Stevens Callender, Professor of Political Economy, Yale University SELECTED READINGS IN RURAL ECONOMICS By Thomas N. Carver, Ph.D., Professor of Political Economy, Harvard University READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS By Alfred Benedict Wolfe, Professor of Eco- nomics, University of Texas READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ALBERT BENEDICT WOLFE PROFESSOR OF ECONOMICS AND SOCIOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS GINN AND COMPANY BOSTON ■ NEW YORK • CHICAGO • LONDON ATLANTA DALLAS • COLUMBUS • SAN FRANCISCO COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY ALBERT BENEDICT WOLFE ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ai6.7 Kit atfcengmn 8rtg< GINN AND COMPANY • PRO- PRIETORS ■ BOSTON ■ U.S.A. PREFACE Some years ago, while teaching economics and sociology in Oberlin College, the editor of this book became impressed with the need of a course which should deal with the more basic and deeply rooted problems of our time in a serious and critical, but not too detailed or exhaustive, manner. Nearly every college and university was offering certain specific and detailed courses on individual, social, or economic problems, such as immigration, the family, poverty, etc. There were also many courses dealing with the abnormal side of society, the by-products of evolution, criminals and defectives, and methods of dealing with them — charities and corrections, criminology and penology, and the like. Thus there was much iiidication that many economics or sociology departments were devoting a very considerable part of their time — often the greater part of it — to a more or less super- ficial and temporizing study of what we may call for brevity the "down and out"; and this to the neglect of serious study of the underlying historical, economic, psychological, and social forces which produce in every normal society a number of problems of deepest import to the welfare of every normal individual and to the future direction of social evolution. Moreover, where only courses on specific individual problerjis or institutions are given, the student is not sure to emerge from his sociological study with anything even remotely resembling a perspective upon social and economic organization and process. Of a broad, general survey, demanding serious though not technical study of basic social problems of vital significance to-day, the editor could find few examples. During the past three or four years there has been much in- dication of changing sentiment with regard to the arrangement of economics and sociology courses. The incipient demand for a general introductory course in social science in the freshman year VI READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS will probably bear fruit in the near future. The conviction that social science courses should be definitely graded and arranged in logical series — instead of allowing the student to step from Economics i or Sociology A directly into any other course, not a graduate course, in the department — is growing apace. Akin to this conviction is the belief, upon which this book rests, that it is better for a student whose time is limited, as that of all students is, to secure, after a general introductory course in social science or after the elementary course in economics or sociology, a serious survey of a number of fundamental but concrete social problems than it is for him to attempt an intensive study of one or two, to the neglect of all the rest. Some most important socio-economic problems have been prac- tically neglected by both economics and sociology departments. Courses in one aspect of the population problem — immigration — there have been. Population as such has been considered chiefly by the economists, and by them principally as a matter of the acceptance or nonacceptance of the conclusions of Malthus, or as a subject incidental to the theory of wages. So far as sociologists have been able to take time out of the attractive business of building up social philosophies to consider practical issues, they have too often either ignored the population problem entirely or looked upon it as chiefly a matter of the declining birth rate, and usually without much apparent understanding of the underlying economic forces. The feminist movement and the woman problem (so-called for lack of a better and less invidious name) have, until very recently, either been touched upon with some hesitation or calmly ignored. In spite of the patent fact that they involve many of the most fundamental principles of ethics and eco- nomics and are freighted with profound significance for the future evolution of society and of social ethics, they have not been considered worthy the dignity of serious academic attention. It is high time this attitude were left behind in every educational institution. There have been numerous courses on the family, but they have usually treated it, mainly if not entirely, in its anthropo- logical and historical aspects. The very important questions in- volved in matrimonial ideals and practice, and in divorce, with PREFACE vii their attendant present social unrest, were, until a comparatively recent time, left largely to the attention of those reformers who, rightly or wrongly, wish to see the amount of divorce reduced, at all costs. Race problems, where not approached in a highly biased and totally unscientific spirit, have been treated chiefly from the standpoint of anthropology. Moreover, there have been practically no books, either for the student or the general reader, giving under one cover a serious introduction to these fundamental problems of social ethics and constructive sociology. The literature in each one of these specific fields has been increasing with gratifying, not to say embarrassing, rapidity in the past few years ; but there is still a dearth of usable texts treating not one specific problem but a number. These considerations, more particularly that it was regrettable that so many promising and supposedly educated young women and young men should go out from college with Httle or no ordered and scientific study of these matters, led to the develop- ment of a full-year course in social problems. The present book is an outgrowth of this course. It is the editor's hope that these readings will not only be found valuable in some courses in general sociology and in courses devoted entirely to individual problems but that they may to some degree stimulate the offering of more survey courses of the sort here suggested. The selections will be found to reflect to some degree a his- torical method of attack. But for the limitations of space this would have been still more apparent. It is not always necessary to go back to the remotest anthropological or even historical beginnings of things, but some knowledge of historical develop- ment is essential to the proper understanding of any great social problem or movement. The historical attack, moreover, proves usually more interesting to the student than a purely statistical and critical method. Effort has been made in the selections to present diverse points of view. It is, however, not possible in limited space to present examples of all the shades of opinion, nor is it necessary. The main objects are to stimulate the student to further reading, to furnish well-chosen material for classroom discussion — no Viii READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS Other method of instruction begins to be as effective — and above all to encourage the student to do his own thinking. Occasionally diametrically opposing views are placed together, but no effort has been made to construct a debaters' handbook. This has rather been avoided. The debater's habit of mind is not conducive to the formation of balanced judgments. Where so many con- flicting views are given, it goes without saying, of course, that the editor does not hold himself responsible for any of them. The references at the end of each Book will suggest additional reading. More stimulus from alert minds, more pure pleasure in teach- ing, than he has reaped from the course in social problems, the editor does not expect to experience. He desires to express his appreciation to students, past and present, for the very essential part they have played in the development of the ideas upon which this book rests. It is planned to publish, as soon as may be, a fairly comprehensive text on these problems, which will be designed as a companion book to the Readings. Kindest acknowledgments are due to the various authors and publishers who have in every case cordially granted permission for the use of their work. The editor is further indebted to Professor W. Z. Ripley for kindly and acute criticism, and especially to Mrs. Clara Snell Wolfe for constant helpful criticism and advice. A. B. W. Austin, Texas CONTENTS PAGE INTRODUCTION ...... I BOOK I. PROBLEMS OF POPULATION CHAPTER I' I. The Malthusian Theory Introduction 17 1. Statement of the Subject; Ratios of the Increase of Popula- tion and Food ; Checks to Population, by T. R. Malthus 20 2. General Deductions from the Preceding View of Society, by T. R. Malthus 35 3. Of our Future Prospects respecting the Removal or Mitiga- tion of the Evils arising from the Principle of Popula- tion, by T. R. Malthus 44 'II. The Declining Birth Rate Introduction . . 79 4. The Decline of Human Fertility in the United Kingdom and Other Countries as shown by Corrected Birth Rates, by Arthur Newsholme and T. H. C. Stevenson . . 80 5. The Natural Increase of Population 94 6. The Significance of the Effective Desire for Offspring, by ^^,,J Many questions here arise — questions as to the type of edu- cation best fitted to the negro in his present circumstances, what educational ideals he should hold before himself, whether he should be called upon to furnish the funds for his own educa- tion, whether the South is doing its duty in negro education, considering its resources, whether federal aid should be forth- coming, and finally what effect education, of whatever type, will have on the thrift and efficiency of the negro and upon the economic welfare of the South as a whole. Underneath all these questions lies the fundamental problem of race-psychology — whether there are naturally inferior races which no amount of education can ever bring to the level of the 14 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS higher races, whether the negro has potential mental capacity to profit by anything more than the veriest rudiments of industrial training. These are disputed points upon which there is the bit- terest diiference of opinion, North and South, but they must largely remain matters of opinion for a long time to come, for it is difficult to see how any really scientific certitude can be arrived at one way or the other, inasmuch as it is impossible to isolate the hereditary factor from the powerful influences of tra- dition, custom, home training (and the lack of it), in short from the suggestive and molding influences of social environment which no individual can escape, which are not the same for any two persons, and which certainly are widely different in the case of two races as sharply separated in culture and culture history as are the negroes and the whites. The much-mooted questions of segregation run athwart all the phases of the problem. What the real facts and motives of segregation are. North and South, should be known, and as clear a notion as possible arrived at as to the real causes and motives underlying it. It should be emphasized always that praise or blame is not the object of the true student of the race situation. His motive should be before everything else to understand. Any other approach to the race question — or any other social problem — is unscientific. It gets nowhere, for instance, to attribute segre-, galion and its attendant discriminations to " race prejudice." For what are the causes of race prejudice ; indeed, what is race prejudice ? If the white South is practically united and unani- mous on the question of segregation — the drawing of the color line — and if, as many believe is really the case, the North is only less so, the causes must lie deeper than the memories of Reconstruction. The South is undoubtedly influenced by its eco- nomic interests — as is every other country. It undoubtedly fears dominance by a mass of low, ignorant, and emotional population — as does many another region. It views with some disquietude, perhaps, the lowering of the bars of opportunity — educational, economic, political — to the negro for fear that social equality will be the next demand, followed by racial intermixture and a mon- grelization of the pure white stock. It is no answer to these fears INTRODUCTION IS to point to the mulatto and to miscegenation. Not every mulatto by any means has a white father. The ethics of the race problem — of prejudice, segregation, discrimination, disfranchisement, curtailment of economic and educational opportunity, denial of social recognition, conflict of belief as to the existence or nonexistence of naturally, inher- ently, superior and inferior races — the ethics of all these mat- ters cannot be found by any rule of mathematics or on the basis of any a priori principle. Some of the maladjustments and causes of friction can be reduced with comparative ease, if the enlight- ened better element of the people will go about it in a reasonable. Christian spirit. Others will have to await the fullness of time. Some of the questions are essentially unsolvable, as for instance that of the negro's innate capacity, under absolutely equal oppor- tunities with the white. It seems highly probable that with the advance of the negro in literacy, in possession of property, in development of home life, in industrial education, and in ambi- tion, the tension of the race problem will become greater before it is less. In the long run of development and evolution great changes of some sort are bound to take place, very gradually, probably, but none the less real and significant. What they will be, how brought about, what the readjustment by which two peo- ples can live together in peace and with the cooperation and full utilization of human capacity, under which alone can a community be economical and efficient, it is impossible to say, and rather idle to speculate upon. Such real " solution " of the great problem as is possible probably must lie in the very slow outworking of forces but feebly responsive to conscious social control or direction. Where there is so much diametrical opposition of views, where feeling is likely to run so high, where there is oversensitiveness to discussion, where differences of tradition, economic interest, and point of view are so great as between the average North and the average South, or between the advocates of equality (however it be defined) and those of caste, perhaps the best thing to do with the race question is to avoid talking about it. But inasmuch as it will be discussed and is being discussed, as the literature of the problem keeps piling up, as men and women 1 6 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS will form opinions, take standpoints, be guided by sentiment pro or con, and as opinions will be formed in a biased or unbiased manner, dogmatically or open-mindedly, it seems the best course to acquaint oneself with as many viewpoints as possible, do what one can to sift fact from prejudice, recognize the stubbornness of facts, and form one's own judgments as to social expediency and social justice accordingly. Ultimately we can aiford to pin our faith to what in the long run seems most likely to substitute truth for error, joy qf living for fear of living, peace for suspicion and strife, reason for preconception and passion, and " beauty for ashes." Whether the race that finally inherits the earth shall be black or white, yellow or mongrel, can be left to destiny. The biologist and the economist will rest assured in the faith that it will be the strongest, if not the best, race. BOOK I PROBLEMS OF POPULATION CHAPTER I THE MALTHUSIAN THEORY The theory of Malthus, i8. — The fundamental principles, 20. — The checks to population, 26.— Moral restraint, 44. — The effects of moral restraint, 51. — Improvement of the condition of the poor through moral restraint, 59. Objections considered, 65. — The responsibility of government, 69. — Rational expectations of the future improvement of society, 72. [A population theory is a body of reasoned thought, based so far as the state of knowledge permits, upon known facts, with regard to the motives and causes which, in the absence of con- scious individual direction or social control, govern the perpetu- ation and the increase of the human species. Such a theory may give primary emphasis to biological, to economic, to psychic, or to social forces, but it will not be a theory which approaches the truth nearly unless it recognizes and tries to give due weight to all these factors. A population theory, moreover, will be a mere academic exercise unless it attempts to show the ethical implications and results of the outworking of unguided natural forces and tendencies, and offers some practical suggestion for obviating undesirable and detrimental results, either through en- couraging in the individual an intelligent and informed sense of social responsibility, or through the development of a more or less authoritative social control over population growth. When the need to regulate population — either to stimulate or to retard growth — becomes consciously recognized by a people or by their leaders, the measures adopted or recommended for the accom- plishment of this practical end constitute a population policy. 17 1 8 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS Every policy rests upon some sort of theory, however crude, superficial, or traditional. Population policies, inrooted in the traditions and mores of all peoples, based upon the early, primitive needs of the tribal group, for numerical strength, for warriors, for males to carry on the religious rites, are seemingly as old as custom itself. The biblical admonition to be fruitful and replenish the earth is an ethical injunction, a population policy, the counterpart of which is to be found in nearly every religion, primitive or historical. The constant decimation occasioned by wars and proscriptions, the greed of conquest, the desire for cheap labor, — all join with religious tradition to develop and perpetuate a policy based upon the idea that the wealth and welfare of a group or a nation de- pend primarily upon its large size and the rapidity of its growth in numbers. Through primitive times, through the checkered history of Greece and Rome, through the Protestant Reforma- tion, and through the economic and political doctrines of the Mercantilists and Cameralists, this idea has been handed down to the end of the eighteenth century, and is even the prevalent idea to-day. Some few writers before Malthus had pointed out the danger of population increase in view of the limited possi- bilities of food supply, but they made little or no impression because social and economic conditions were not ripe for the force of their views to be felt. Moreover, Malthus was the first to go at the question in a thorough and scientific manner. He published his " Essay on the Principle of Population," anonymously, in 1798. It was an outgrowth of much discussion between Malthus and his father over the communistic and per- fectionist speculations of William Godwin and Condorcet, both of whom, the one in England, the other in France, were arguing for human perfectibility. Godwin, especially, had indulged in wild speculations as to the happiness, the goodness, and even the earthly immortality of man, if only government and private property, and with them their baneful influence, could be abol- ished. We might suppose that Malthus, then a young curate, would have been in sympathy with these dreams of peace and plenty, but he was also a student of the then new science of THE MALTHUSIAN THEORY 19 political economy, and he saw at once that the communists had failed to understand or to take account of the relations between population and subsistence. The first edition of the Essay was accordingly essentially a polemic against socialism. His ideas were stated in .all the hard and rigid form of cold, deductive logic. Population always " presses upon " subsistence ; war, famine, misery, and vice are therefore inevitable, in the future as in the past, and socialist dreamings of abolishing poverty are mere moonshine. It is true that prudential restraint and stand- ards of living receive some attention in the first edition, but Malthus does not expect much from them.^ Prudential restraint itself, he thinks, leads to extramarital vice, and he holds out no particular hope that the standards of living of the working classes can be raised in such a way that the excessive birth rate will be reduced. His book met with a storm of opposition, especially from the clergy, as well as commendation from the orthodox political economists. Malthus held his peace for five years, and in 1803 published the second edition of the Essay, very much revised and enlarged. He had in the meantime gathered a large mass of data from various countries, and he had changed his views with regard to the efficacy of the prudential check, now holding that it need not involve vice, and that the condition of the laboring classes could be improved by preaching moral restraint to them, and in that way only. Malthus has always been accused, chiefly by those who have not read his work, of pessimism and of heartlessness toward the working classes. That this is an entirely unfair interpretation of his position will be apparent to any reader of his chapter on "the only effectual mode of improving the condition of the poor."] 1 On Malthus's distinction between prudential and moral checks, see footnote, p. 29. 20 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS 1. STATEMENT OF THE SUBJECT; RATIOS OF THE INCREASE OF POPULATION AND FOOD; CHECKS TO POPULATION i In an inquiry concerning the improvement of society, the mode of conducting the subject which naturally presents itself is — 1. To investigate the causes that have hitherto impeded the progress of mankind towards happiness ; and 2. To examine the probability of the total or partial removal of these causes in future. To enter fully into this question, and to enumerate all the causes that have hitherto influenced human improvement, would be much beyond the power of an individual. The principal object of the present essay is to examine the effects of one great cause intimately united with the very nature of man ; which, though it has been constantly and powerfully operating since the commence- ment of society, has been little noticed by the writers who have treated this subject. The facts which establish the existence of this cause have, indeed, been repeatedly stated and acknowledged ; but its natural and necessary effects have been almost totally overlooked ; though probably among these 'effects may be reck- oned a very considerable portion of that vice and misery, and of that unequal distribution of the bounties of nature, which it has been the unceasing object of the enlightened philanthropist in all ages to correct. The cause to which I allude is the constant tendency in all animated life to increase beyond the nourishment prepared for it. It is observed by Dr. Franklin that there is no bound to the prolific nature of plants or animals but what is made by their crowding and interfering with each other's means of subsistence. Were the face of the earth, he says, vacant of other plants, it might be gradually sowed and overspread with one kind only, as, for instance, with fennel : and were it empty of other inhabitants, it might in a few ages be replenished from one nation only, as, for instance, with Englishmen.^ 1 By T. R. Malthus. From An Essay on the Principle of Population, gth edi- tion, pp. 1-13. London, 1888. 2 Franklin's Miscall., p. 9. THE MALTHUSIAN THEORY 21. This is incontrovertibly true. Throughout the animal and vegetable kingdoms Nature has scattered the seeds of life abroad with the most profuse and liberal hand ; but has been compara- tively sparing in the room and the nourishment necessary to rear them. The germs of existence contained in this earth, if they could freely develop themselves, would fill millions of worlds in the course of a few thousand years. Necessity, that imperious, all-pervading law of nature, restrains them within the prescribed bounds. The race of plants and the race of animals shrink under this great restrictive law; and man cannot by any efforts of reason escape from it. In plants and irrational animals, the view of the subject is simple. They are all impelled by a 'powerful instinct to the increase .of their species, and this instinct is interrupted by no doubts about providing for their offspring. Wherever, therefore, there is liberty, the power of increase is exerted, and the supers abundant effects are repressed afterwards by want of room and nourishment. The effects of this check on man are more complicated. Im^ pelled to the increase of his species by an equally powerful instinct, reason interrupts his career, and asks him whether he may not bring beings into the world for whom he cannot provide the means of support. If he attend to this natural suggestion, the restriction too frequently produces vice. If he hear it not, the human race will be constantly endeavoring to increase beyond the means of subsistence. But as, by that law of our nature which makes food necessary to the life of man, population can never actually increase beyond the lowest nourishment capable of supporting it, a strong check on population, from the difficulty of acquiring food, must be constantly in operation. This difficulty must fall somewhere, and must necessarily be severely felt iii some or other of the various forms of misery, or the fear- of misery, by a large portion of mankind. That population has this constant tendency to increase beyond the means of subsistence, and that it is kept to its necessary level by these causes, will sufficiently appear from a ireview o| the different states of society in which man has existed. But, 22 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS before we proceed to this review, the subject will perhaps be seen in a clearer light, if we endeavor to ascertain what would be the natural increase of population, if left to exert itself with perfect freedom ; and what might be expected to be the rate of increase in the productions of the earth, under the most favorable circum- stances of human industry. It will be allowed that no country has hitherto been known, where the manners were so pure and simple, and the means of subsistence so abundant, that no check whatever has existed to early marriages from the difficulty of providing for a family, and that no waste of the human species has been occasioned by vicious customs, by towns, by unhealthy occupations, or too severe labor. Consequently in no state that we have yet known, has the power of population been left to exert itself with perfect freedom. Whether the law of marriage be instituted or not, the dictate of nature and virtue seems to be an early attachment to one woman ; and where there were no impediments of any kind in the way of a union to which such an attachment would lead, and no causes of depopulation afterwards, the increase of the human species would be evidently much greater than any increase which has been hitherto known. In the northern states of America, where the means of sub- sistence have been more ample, the manners of the people more pure, and the checks to early marriages fewer, than in any of the modern states of Europe, the population has been found to double itself, for above a century and a half successively, in less than twenty-five years.^ Yet, even during these periods, in some of the towns, the deaths exceeded the births,'* a circumstance which clearly proves that, in those parts of the country which supplied this deficiency, the increase must have been much more rapid than the general average. In the back settlements, where the sole employment is agricul- ture, and vicious customs and unwholesome occupations are little I It appears, from some recent calculations and estimates, that from the first settlement of America to the year 1800 the periods of doubUng have been but very little above twenty years. » Price, Observ. on Revers. Pay., Vol. I, p. 274, 4th edition. THE MALTHUSIAN THEORY 23 known, the population has been found to double itself in fifteen years.^ Even this extraordinary rate of increase is probably short of the utmost power of population. Very severe labor is requisite to clear a fresh country; such situations are not in general con- sidered as particularly healthy ; and the inhabitants, probably, are occasionally subject to the incursions of the Indians, which may destroy some lives, or at any rate diminish the friiits of industry. According to a table of Euler, calculated on a mortality of i in 36, if the births be to the deaths in the proportion of 3 to i, the period of doubling will be only twelve years and four fifths. And this proportion is not only a possible supposition, but has actually occurred for short periods in more countries than one. Sir William Petty supposes a doubling possible in so short a time as ten years.*^ But, to be perfectly sure that we are far within the truth, we will take the slowest of these rates of increase, a rate in which all concurring testimonies agree, and which has been repeatedly ascertained to be from procreation only. It may safely be pronounced, therefore, that population, when unchecked, goes on doubling itself every twenty-five years, or increases in a geometrical ratio. The rate according to which the productions of the earth may be supposed to increase, will not be so easy to determine. Of this, however, we may be perfectly certain, that the ratio of their increase in a limited territory must be of a totally different nature from the ratio of the increase of population. A thousand millions are just as easily doubled every twenty-five years by the power of population as a thousand. But the food to support the increase from the greater number will by lio means be obtained with the same facility. Man is necessarily confined in room. When acre has been added to acre till all the fertile land is occupied, the yearly increase of food must depend upon the melioration of the land already in possession. This is a fund, which, from the nature' of all soils, instead of increasing, must be gradually diminishing. But population, could it be supplied with food, would go on with 1 Price, Observ. on Revers. Pay., Vol. I, p. 282, ^th edition. 2 Polit. Arith., p. 14. 24 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS unexhausted vigor ; and the increase of one period would furnish the -power of a greater increase the next, and this without any Umit. From the accounts we have of China and Japan, it may be fairly doubted, whether the best directed efforts of human industry could double the produce of these countries even once in any number of years. There are many parts of the globe, indeed, hitherto uncultivated and almost unoccupied ; but the right of exterminating, or driving into a corner where they must starve, even the inhabitants of these thinly peopled regions, will be questioned in a moral view. >The process of improving their minds and directing their industry would necessarily be slow ; and during this time, as population would regularly keep pace with the increasing produce, it would rarely happen that a great degree of knowledge and industry would have to operate at once upon rich unappropriated soil. Even where this might take place, as it does sometimes in new colonies, a geometrical ratio increases with such extraordinary rapidity, that the advantage could not last long. If the United States of America continue increasing, which they certainly will do, though not with the same rapidity as formerly, the Indians will be driven farther and farther back into the country, till the whole race is ultimately exterminated, and the territory is incapable of further extension. These observations are, in a degree, applicable to all the parts of the earth where the soil is imperfectly cultivated. To exter- minate the inhabitants of the greatest part of Asia and Africa is a thought that could not be admitted for a moment. To civilize and direct the industry of the various tribes of Tartars and Negroes would certainly be a work of considerable time, and of variable and uncertain success. Europe is by no means so fully peopled as it might be. In Europe there is the fairest chance that human industry may receive its best direction. The science of agriculture has been much studied in England and Scotland ; and there is still a great portion of uncultivated land in these countries. Let us consider at what rate the produce of this island (Great Britain) might be supposed to increase under circumstances the most favorable to improvement. THE MALTHUSIAN THEORY 25 If it be allowed that by the best possible policy, and great en- couragements to agriculture, the average produce of the island could be doubled in the first twenty-five years, it will be allowing, probably, a greater increase than could with reason be expected. In the next twenty-five years, it is impossible to suppose that the produce could be quadrupled. It would be contrary to all our knowledge of the properties of land. The improvement of the barren parts would be a work of time and labor ; and it must be evident to those who have the slightest acquaintance with agri- cultural subjects, that in proportion as cultivation extended, the additions that could yearly be made to the former average produce must be gradually and regularly diminishing. That we may be the better able to compare the increase of population and food, let us make a supposition, which, without pretending to accuracy, is clearly more favorable to the power of production in the earth than any experience we have had of its qualities will warrant. Let us suppose that the yearly additions which might be made to the former average produce, instead of decreasing, which they certainly would do, were to remain the same ; and that the produce of this island might be increased every twenty-five years, by a quantity equal to what it at present produces. The most enthusiastic speculator cannot suppose a greater increase than this. In a few centuries it would make every acre of land in the island like a garden. If this supposition be applied to the whole earth, and if it be allowed that the subsistence for man which the earth affords might be increased every twenty-five years by a quantity equal to what it at present produces, this will be supposing a rate of increase much greater than we can imagine that any possible exertions of mankind could make it. It may be fairly pronounced, therefore, that considering the present average state of the earth, the means of subsistence, under circumstances the most favorable to human ' industry, could not possibly be made to increase faster than in an arithmetical ratio. The necessary effects of these two different rates of increase, when brought together, will be very striking. Let us call the population of this island eleven millions ; and suppose the present 26 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS produce equal to the easy support of such a number. In the first twenty-five years the population would be twenty-tWo millions, and the food being also doubled, the means of subsistence would be equal to this increase. In the next twenty-five years, the popula- tion would be forty-four millions, and the means of subsistence only equal to the support of thirty-three millions. In the next period the population would be eighty-eight millions, and the means of subsistence just equal to the support of half that number. And, at the conclusion of the first century, the population would be a hundred and seventy-six millions, and the means of' subsistence only equal to the support of fifty-five millions, leaving population of a hundred and twenty-one millions totally unprovided for. Taking the whole earth, instead of this island, emigration would of course be excluded ; and, supposing the present population equal to a thousand millions, the human species would increase as the numbers, i, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256; and subsist- ence as, I, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. In two centuries the popula- tion would be to the means of subsistence as 256 to 9 ; in three centuries as 4096 to 13, and in two thousand years the difference would be almost incalculable. In this supposition no limits whatever are placed to the produce of the earth. It may increase forever, and be greater than any assignable quantity ; yet still the power of population being in every period so much superior, the increase of the human species can only be kept down to the level of the means of subsistence by the constant operation of the strong law of necessity acting as a check upon the greater power. Of the General Checks to Population, and the Mode OF THEIR Operation The ultimate check to population appears then to be a want of food, arising necessarily from the different ratios according to jwhich population and food increase. But this ultimate check is ever the immediate check, except in cases of actual famine. The immediate check may be stated to consist in all those customs, and all those diseases, which seem to be generated by a scarcity of the means of subsistence; and all those causes, lp THE MALTHUSIAN THEORY 27 independent of this scarcity, whether of a moral or physical nature, which tend prematurely to weaken and destroy the human frame. These checks to population, which are constantly operating witH more or less force in every society, and keep down the number to the level of the means of subsistence, may be classed under two general heads — the preventive and the positive checks. The preventive check, as far as it is voluntary, is peculiar to man, and arises from that distinctive superiority in his reasoning faculties which enables him to calculate distant consequences. The checks to the indefinite increase of plants and irrational animals are alli-either positive or, if preventive, involuntary. But man cannot look around him, and see the distress which fre- quently presses upon those who have large families ; he cannot contemplate his present possessions or earnings, which he now nearly consumes himself, and calculate the amount of each share, when with very little addition they must be divided, perhaps, among seven or eight, without feeling a doiibt whether, if he follow the bent of his inclinations, he may be able to support the offspring which he will probably bring into the world. In a state of equality, if such can exist, this would be the simple question. In the present state of society other considerations occur. Will he not lower his rank in life, and be obliged to give up in great measure his former habits ? Does any mode of employment present itself by which he may reasonably hope to maintain a family ? Will he not at any rate subject himself to greater diffi- culties, and more severe labor than in his single state .? Will he not be unable to transmit to his children the same advantages of education and improvement that he had himself possessed ? Does he even feel secure that, should he have a large family, his utmost exertions can save them from rags and squalid poverty, and their consequent degradation in the community ? And may he not be reduced to the grating necessity of forfeiting his independence, and of being obliged to the sparing hand of charity for support ? These considerations are calculated to prevent, and certainly do prevent, a great number of persons in all civilized nations from pursuing the dictate of nature in an early attachment to one woman. 28 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS If this restraint do not produce vice, it is undoubtedly the least evil that can arise from the principle of population. Considered as a restraint on a strong natural inclination, it must be allowed to produce a certain degree of temporary unhappiness ; but evi- dently slight, compared with the evils which result from any of the other checks to population ; and merely of the same nature as many other sacrifices of temporary to permanent gratification, which it is the business of a moral agent continually to make. When this restraint produces vice, the evils which follow are but too conspicuous. A promiscuous intercourse to such a degree as to prevent the birth of children, seems to lower, in the most marked manner, the dignity -of human nature. It cannot be without its effect on men, and nothing can be more obvious than its tendency to degrade the female character, and to destroy all its most amiable and distinguishing characteristics. Add to which, that among those unfortunate females with which all great towns abound, more real distress and aggravated misery are, perhaps, to be found, than in any other department of human life. When a general corruption of morals, with regard to the sex, pervades all the classes of society, its effects must necessarily be to' poison the springs of domestic happiness, to weaken conjugal and parental affection, and to lessen the united exertions and ardor of parents in the care and education of their children ; — effects which cannot take place without a decided diminution of the general happiness and virtue of society ; particularly as the necessity of art in the accomplishment and conduct of intrigues, and in the concealment of their consequences, necessarily leads to many other vices. The positive checks to population are extremely various, and include every cause, whether arising from vice or misery, which in any degree contributes to shorten the natural duration of human life. Under this head, therefore, may be enumerated all unwhole- some occupations, severe labor and exposure to the seasons, ex- treme poverty, bad nursing of children, large towns, excesses of all kinds, the whole train of common diseases and epidemics, wars, plague, and famine. THE MALTHUSIAN THEORY 29 On examining these obstacles to the increase of population which are classed under the heads of preventive and positive checks, it will appear that they are all resolvable into moral restraint, vice, and misery. Of the preventive checks, the restraint from marriage which is not followed by irregular gratifications may properly be termed moral restraint.^ Promiscuous intercourse, unnatural passions, violations of the marriage bed, and improper arts to conceal the consequences of irregular connections, are preventive checks that clearly come under the head of vice. Of the positive checks, those which appear to arise unavoidably from the laws of nature, may be called exclusively misery ; and those which we obviously bring upon ourselves, such as wars, excesses, and many others which it would be in our power to avoid, are of a mixed nature. They are brought upon us by vice, and their consequences are misery.^ 1 It will be observed that I here use the term moral in its most confined sense. By moral restraint I would be understood to mean a restraint from marriage from prudential motives, with a conduct strictly moral during the period of this restraint; and I have never intentionally deviated from this sense. When I have wished to consider the restraint from marriage unconnected with its conse- quences, I have either dalled it prudential restraint or a part of the preventive check, of which indeed it forms the principal branch. In my review of the different stages of society I have been accused of not allowing sufficient weight in the prevention of population to moral restraint ; but when the confined sense of the term, which I have here explained, is adverted to, I am fearful that I shall not be found to have erred much in this respect. I should be very glad to believe myself mistaken. ^ As the general consequence of vice is misery, and as this consequence is the precise reason why an action is termed vicious, it may appear that the term misery alone would be here sufficient, and that it is superfluous to use both. But the rejection of the term vice would introduce a considerable confusion into our language and ideas. V\^e want it particularly to distinguish those actions the general tendency of which is to produce misery, and which are therefore pro- hibited by the commands of the Creator and the precepts of the moralist, although, in their immediate or individual effects, they may produce perhaps exactly the contrary. The gratification of all our passions in its immediate effect is happiness, not misery ; and, in individual instances, even the remote conse- quences (at least in this life) may possibly come under the same denomination. There may have been some irregular connections with women which have added 30 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS The sum of all these preventive and positive checks, taken together, forms the immediate check to population ; and it is evident that, in every country where the whole of the procreative power cannot be called into action, the preventive and the positive checks must vary inversely as each other ; that is, in countries either naturall y unhealt hy, or subject to a great mortality, from whatever cause it may arise, the preventive check wllk prevail very little. In those countries, on the contrary, which are natur- ally healthy, and where the preventive check is found to prevail with considerable force, the positive check will prevail very little, or the mortality be very small. In every country some of these checks are, with more or less force, in constant operation ; yet, notwithstanding their general prevalence, there are few states in which there is not a constant effort in the population to increase beyond the means of subsist- ence. This constant effort as constantly tends to subject the lower classes of society to distress, and to prevent any great permanent melioration of their condition. These effects, in the present state of society, seem to be pro- duced in the following manner. We will suppose the means of subsistence in any country just equal to the easy support of its inhabitants. The constant effort towards population, which is found to act even in the most vicious societies, increases the number of people before the means of subsistence are increased. The food, therefore, which before supported eleven milUons, must now be divided among eleven millions and a half. The poor con- sequently must live much worse, and many of them be reduced to severe distress. The number of laborers also being above the proportion of work in the market, the price of labor must tend to fall, while the price of provisions would at the same time tend to rise. The laborer, therefore, must do more work to earn the same to the happiness of both parties and have injured no one. These individual actions, therefore, cannot come under the head of misery. But they are still evidently vicious, because an action is so denominated which violates an express precept, founded upon its general tendency to produce misery, whatever may be its individual effect ; and no person can doubt the general tendency of an illicit intercourse between the sexes to injure the happiness of society. THE MALTHUSIAN THEORY 31 as he did before. During this season of distress, the discourage- ments to marriage and the difficulty of rearing a family are so great, that the progress of population is retarded. In the mean- time, the cheapness of labor, the plenty of laborers, and the necessity of an increased industry among them, encourage culti- vators to employ more labor upon their land, to turn up fresh soil, and to manure and improve more completely what is already in tillage, till ultimately the means of subsistence may become in the same proportion to the population as at the period from which we set out. The situation of the laborer being then again tolerably comfortable, the restraints to population are in some degree loosened ; and, after a short period, the same retrograde and progressive movements with respect to happiness are repeated. This sort of oscillation will not probably be obvious to common view ; and it may be difficult even for the most attentive observer to calculate its periods. Yet that, in the generality of old states, some alternation of this kind does exist, though in a much less marked, and in a much more irregular manner, than I have described it, no reflecting man, who considers the subject deeply, can well doubt. One principal reason why this oscillation has been less re- marked, and less decidedly confirmed by experience than might naturally be expected, is, that the histories of mankind which we possess are, in general, histories only of the higher classes. We have not many accounts that can be depended upon, of the manners and customs of that part of mankind where these retro- grade and progressive movements chiefly take place. A satis- factory history of this kind, of one people and of one period, would require the constant and minute attention of many observ- ing minds in local and general remarks on the state of the lower classes of society, and the causes that influenced it ; and, to draw accurate inferences upon this subject, a succession of such histor- ians for some centuries wpuld be necessary. This branch of statistical knowledge has, of late years, been attended to in some countries,^ and we may promise ourselves a clearer insight into 1 The judicious questions which Sir John Sinclair circulated in Scotland, and the valuable accounts which he has collected in that part of the island, do him 32 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS • the internal structure of human society from the progress of these inquiries. But the science may be said yet to be in its infancy, and many of the objects on which it would be desirable to have information, have been either omitted or not stated with sufficient accuracy. Among these, perhaps, may be reckoned the proportion of the number of adults to the number of marriages ; the extent to which vicious customs have prevailed in consequence of the restraints upon matrimony ; the comparative mortality among the children of the most distressed part of the community, and of those who live rather more at their ease ; the variations in the real price of labor ; the observable differences in the state of the lower classes of society, with respect to ease and happiness, at different times during a certain period ; and very accurate regis- ters of births, deaths, and marriages, which are of the utmost importance in this subject. A faithful history, including such particulars, would tend greatly to elucidate the manner in which the constant check upon population acts ; and would probably prove the existence of the retrograde and progressive movements that have been mentioned ; though the times of their vibration must necessarily be rendered irregular from the operation of many interrupting causes ; such as, the introduction or failure of certain manufactures ; a greater or less prevalent spirit of agricultural enterprise ; years of plenty, or years of scarcity ; wars, sickly seasons, poor laws, emigrations, and other causes of a similar nature. the highest honor ; and these accounts will ever remain an extraordinary monu- ment of the learning, good sense, and general information of the clergy of Scotland. It is to be regretted that the adjoining parishes are not put together in the work, which would have assisted the memory both in attaining and recol- lecting the state of particular districts. The repetitions and contradictory opinions which occur are not, in my opinion, so objectionable ; as to the result of such testimony, more faith may be given than we could possibly give to the testimony of any individual. Even were this result drawn for us by some master hand, though much valuable time would undoubtedly be saved, the information would not be so satisfactory. If, with a few subordinate improvements, this work had contained accurate and complete registers for the last one hundred and fifty years, it would have been inestimable, and would have exhibited a better picture of the internal state of a, country than has yet been presented to the world. But this last most essential improvement no diligence could have effected.. THE MALTHUSIAN THEORY 33 A circumstance which has, perhaps, more than any other, con- tributed to conceal this oscillation from common view, is the difference between the nominal and real price of labor. It very rarely happens that the nominal price of labor universally falls ; but we well know that it frequently remains the same, while the nominal price of provisions has been gradually rising. This, indeed, will generally be the case, if the increase of manufactures and commerce be sufficient to employ the new laborers that are thrown into the market, and to prevent the increased supply from lowering the money-price.^ But an increased number of laborers receiving the same money-wages will necessarily, by their competition, increase the money-price of corn. This is, in fact, a real fall in the price of labor ; and, during this period, the condition of the lower classes of the community must be gradu- ally growing worse. But the farmers and capitalists are growing rich from the real cheapness of labor. Their increasing capitals enable them to employ a greater number of men ; and, as the population had probably suffered some check from the greater difficulty of supporting a family, the demand for labor, after a certain period, would be great in proportion to the supply, and its price would of course rise, if left to find its natural level ; and thus the wages of labor, and consequently the condition of the lower classes of society, might have progressive and retrograde movements, though the price of labor might never nominally fall. In savage life, where there is no regular price of laboi:, it is little to be doubted that similar oscillations take place. When popuWion has increased nearly to the utmost limits of the food, all the preventive and the positive checks will naturally operate with increased force. Vicious habits with respect to the sex will be more general, the exposing of children more frequent, and both the probability and fatality of wars and epidemics will be 1 If the new laborers thrown yearly into the market should find no employment but in agriculture, their competition might so lower the money-price of labor as to prevent the increase of population from occasioning an effective demand for more corn ; or, in other words, if the landlords and farmers could get nothing but an additional quantity of agricultural labor in exchange for any additional produce which they could raise, they might not be tempted to raise it. 34 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS considerably greater; and these causes will probably continue their operation till the population is sunk below the level of the food; and then the return to comparative plenty will again produce an increase, and, after a certain period, its further progress will again be checked by the same causes.^ But without attempting to establish these progressive and retro- grade movements in different countries, which would evidently require more minute histories than we possess, and which the progress of civilization naturally tends to counteract, the following propositions are intended to be proved : 1 . Population is necessarily limited by the means of subsistence. 2. Population invariably increases where the means of sub- sistence increase, unless prevented by some very powerful and obvious checks.^ 3. These checks, and the checks which repress the superior power of population, and keep its effects on a level with the means of subsistence, are all resolvable into moral restraint, vice, and misery. The first of these propositions scarcely needs illustration. The second and third will be sufficiently established by a review of the immediate checks to population in the past and present state of society. 1 Sir James Stuart very justly compares the generative faculty to a spring loaded with a variable weight (Polit. Econ., Vol. I, Bk. I, chap, iv, p. 20), which would of course produce exactly that kind of oscillation which has been men- tioned. In the first book of his Political Economy, he has explained many parts of the subject of population very ably. ^ I have expressed myself in this cautious manner, because I believe there are some instances where population does not keep up to the level of the means of subsistence. But these are extreme cases ; and, generally speaking, it might be said that 1. Population is necessarily limited by the means of subsistence. 2. Population always increases where the means of subsistence increase. 3. The checks which repress the superior power of population, and keep its effect on a level with the means of subsistence, are all resolvable into moral restraint, vice, and misery. It should be observed that by an increase in the means of subsistence is here meant such an increase as will enable the mass of the society to command more food. An increase might certainly take place which in the actual state of a particular society would not be distributed to the lower classes, and consequently would give no stimulus to population. THE MALTHUSIAN THEORY 35 2. GENERAL DEDUCTIONS FROM THE PRECEDING VIEW OF SOCIETY! That the checks which have been mentioned are the immediate causes of the slow increase of population, and that these checks result principally from an insufficiency of subsistence, will be evident from the comparatively rapid increase which has invari- ably taken place, whenever, by some sudden enlargement in the means of subsistence, these checks have in any considerable degree been removed. It has been universally remarked that all new colonies settled in healthy countries, where room and food were abundant, have constantly made a rapid progress in population. . . . Not to dwell on remote instances, the European settlements in America bear ample testimony to the truth of a remark that has never I believe been doubted. Plenty of rich land to be had for little or nothing is so powerful a cause of population as generally to overcome all obstacles. . . . The English North American colonies, now the powerful people of the United States of America, far outstripped all the others in the progress of their population. To the quantity of rich land which they possessed in common with the Spanish and Portuguese colonies, they added a greater degree of liberty and equality. Though not without some restrictions on their foreign commerce, they were allowed the liberty of managing their own internal affairs. The political institutions which prevailed were favorable to the alienation and division of property. Lands which were not cultivated by the proprietor within a limited time were declared grantable to any other person. In Pennsylvania there was no right of primogeniture, and in the provinces of New England the eldest son had only a double share. There were no tithes in any of the states, and scarcely any taxes. And on account of the extreme cheapness of good land, and a situation favorable to the exportation of grain, a capital could not be more advantageously employed than in agriculture, which, at the same ' By T. R. Malthus. Adapted from An Essay on the Principle of Population, 9th edition, pp. 252-262. London, 1888. 36 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS time that it affords the greatest quantity of healthy work, supplies the most valuable produce to the society. The consequence of these favorable circumstances united was a rapidity of increase almost without parallel in history. Through- out all the northern provinces the population was found to double itself in twenty-five years. The original number of persons which had settled in the four provinces of New England in 1643 was 21,200. Afterwards it was calculated that more left them than went to them. In the year 1760 they were increased to half a million. They had therefore all along doubled their number in twenty-five years. In New Jersey the period of doubling appeared to be twenty-two years, and in Rhode Island still less. In the back settlements, where the inhabitants applied themselves solely to agriculture, and luxury was not known, they were supposed to double their number in fifteen years. Along the seacoast, which would naturally be first inhabited, the period of doubling was about thirty-five years, and in some of the maritime towns the population was absolutely at a stand.^ From the late census made in America it appears that, taking all the states together, they have still continued to double their numbers within twenty-five years ; and as the whole population is now so great as not to be materially affected by the emigrations from Europe, and as it is known that in some of the towns and districts near the seacoast the progress of population has been comparatively slow, it is evident that in the interior of the country in general the period of doubling from procreation only must have been considerably less than twenty-five years. The population of the United States of America^ according to the fourth census in 1820, was 7,861,710. We have no reason 1 Price, Observ. on Revers. Paym., Vol. I, pp. 282, 283, and Vol. II, p. 260. I have lately had an opportunity of seeing some extracts from the sermon of Dr. Styles, from which Dr. Price has taken these facts. Speaking of Rhode Island, Dr. Styles says that though the period of doubling for the whole colony is twenty-five years, yet that it is different in different parts, and within land is twenty and fifteen years. The population of the five towns of Gloucester, Situate, Coventry, West Greenwich, and Exeter was 5033, a.d. 1748, and 6986, a.d. 1755, which implies a period of doubling of fifteen years only. He mentions afterwards that the county of Kent doubles in twenty years, and the county of Providence in eighteen years. THE MALTHUSIAN THEORY 37 to believe that Great Britain is less populous at present for the emigration of the small parent stock which produced these num- bers. On the contrary, a certain degree of emigration is known to be favorable to the population of the mother country. It has been particularly remarked that the two Spanish provinces from which the greatest number of people emigrated to America became in consequence more populous. Whatever was the original number of British emigrants which increased so fast in North America, let us ask, Why does not an equal number produce an equal increase in the same time in Great Britain ? The obvious reason to be assigned is the want of food ; and that this want is the most efficient cause of the three immediate checks to population, which have been observed to prevail in all societies, is evident from the rapidity with which even old states recover the desolations of war, pestilence, famine, and the convulsions of nature. They are then for a short time placed a little in the situation of new colonies, and the effect is always answerable to what might be expected. If the industry of the inhabitants be not destroyed, subsistence will soon increase beyond the wants of the reduced numbers ; and the invariable consequence will be that population, which before perhaps was nearly stationary, will begin immediately to increase, and will continue its progress till the former population is recovered. The fertile province of Flanders, which has been so often the seat of the most destructive wars, after a respite of a few years has always appeared as rich and populous as ever. The undimin- ished population of France, which has before been noticed, is an instance very strongly in point. . . . The effects of the dreadful plague in London in 1666 were not perceptible fifteen or twenty years afterwards. It may even be doubted whether Turkey and Egypt are upon an average much less populous for the plagues which periodically law them waste. If the number of people which they contain be considerably less now than formerly, it is rather to be attributed to the tyranny and oppression of the gov- ernments under which they groan, and the consequent discour- agements to agriculture, than to the losses which they sustain by the plague. The traces of the most destructive famines in China, 38 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS Indostan, Egypt, and other countries, are by all accounts very soon obliterated ; and the most tremendous convulsions of nature, such as volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, if they do not happen so frequently as to drive away the inhabitants or destroy their spirit of industry, have been found to produce but a trifling effect on the average population of any state. It has appeared from the registers of different countries, which have already been produced, that the progress of their population is checked by the periodical though irregular returns of plagues and sickly seasons. Dr. Short, in his curious researches into bills of mortality, often uses the expression " terrible correctives of the redundance of mankind";^ and in a table of all the plagues, pestilences, and famines of which he could collect accounts, shows the constancy and universality of their operation. The epidemical years in his table, or the years in which the plague or some great and wasting epidemic prevailed (for smaller sickly seasons seem not to be included) are 431,^ of which 32 were before the Christian era.^ If we divide therefore the years of the present era by 399, it will appear that the periodical returns of such epidemics, to some countries that we are acquainted with, have been on an average only at the interval of about four and one half years. Of the 254 great famines and dearths enumerated in the table, 15 were before the Christian era,* beginning with that which occurred in Palestine in the time of Abraham. If, subtract- ing these 15, we divide the years of the present era by the re- mainder, it will appear that the average interval between the visits of this dreadful scourge has been only about seven and one half years. How far these " terrible correctives to the redundance of man- kind " have been occasioned by the too rapid increase of popula- tion, is a point which it would be very difficult to determine with any degree of precision. The causes of most of our diseases appear to us to be so mysterious, and probably are really so various, that it would be rashness to lay too much stress on any 1 New Observ. on Bills of Mortality, p. 96. ' Ibid., p. 202. " Hist, of Air, Seasons, etc.. Vol. II, p. 366. * Ibid., p. 206. THE MALTHUSIAN THEORY 39 single one; but it will not perhaps be too much to say that among these causes we ought certainly to rank crowded houses and insufficient or unwholesome food, which are the natural consequences of an increase of population faster than the accom- modations of a country with respect to habitations and food will allow. Almost all the histories of epidemics which we possess tend to confirm this supposition, by describing them in general as making their principal ravages among the lower classes of people. In Dr. Short's tables this circumstance is frequently mentioned ; ^ and it further appears that a very considerable proportion of the epidemic years either followed or were accompanied by seasons of dearth and bad food.'' In other places he also mentions great plagues as diminishing particularly the numbers of the lower or servile sort of people ; ^ and in speaking of different diseases he observes that those which are occasioned by bad and unwhole- some food generally last the longest.* We know from constant experience that fevers are gener- ated in our jails, our manufactories, our crowded workhouses, and in the narrow and close streets of our large towns — all which situations appear to be similar in their effects to squalid poverty; and we cannot doubt that causes of this kind aggra- vated in degree contributed to the production and prevalence of those great and wasting plagues formerly so common in Europe, but which now from the mitigation of these causes are everywhere considerably abated, and in many places appear to be completely extirpated. Of the other great scourge of mankind, famine, it may be observed that it is not in the nature of things that the increase of population should absolutely produce one. This increase though rapid is necessarily gradual ; and as the human frame cannot be supported even for a very short time without food, it is evident that no more human beings can grow up than there is provision to maintain. But though the principle of population cannot absolutely produce a famine, it prepares the way for one, and by 1 Hist, of Air, Seasons, etc.. Vol. II, pp. 206 et seq. ' New Observ., p. 125. 2 Ibid., pp. 206 et seq. and 336. * Ibid., p. 108. 40 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS frequently obliging the lower classes of people to subsist nearly on the smallest quantity of food that will support life, turns eveh a slight deficiency from the failure of the seasons into a severe dearth, and may be fairly said therefore to be one of the principal causes of famine. Among the signs of an approaching dearth. Dr. Short mentions one or more years of luxuriant crops together ; i and this observation is probably just, as we know that the general effect of years of cheapness and abundance is to dispose a great number of persons to marry, and under such circumstances the return to a year merely of an average crop might produce a scarcity. . . . In all these cases how little soever force we may be disposed to attribute to the effects of the principle of population in the actual production of disorders, we cannot avoid allowing their force as predisposing causes to the reception of contagion, and as giving very great additional force to the extensiveness and fatality of its ravages. . . . The passion between the sexes has appeared in every age to be so nearly the same that it may always be considered in algebraic language as a given quantity. The great law of neces- sity, which prevents population from increasing in any country beyond the food which it can either produce or acquire, is a law so open to our view, so obvious and evident to our understandings, that we cannot for a moment doubt it. The different modes which nature takes to repress a redundant population do not indeed ap- pear to us so certain and regular; but though we cannot always predict the mode, we may with certainty predict the fact. If the proportion of the births to the deaths for a few years indicates an increase of numbers much beyond the proportional increased or acquired food of the country, we may be perfectly certain that unless an emigration take place, the deaths will shortly exceed the births, and that the increase which had been observed for a few years cannot be the real average increase of the population of the country. If there were no other depopulating causes, and if the preventive check did not operate very strongly, every country would without doubt be subject to periodical plagues and famines. 1 Hist, of Air, Seasons, etc., Vol. II, p. 367. THE MALTHUSIAN THEORY 41 The only true criterion of a real and permanent increase in the population of any country is the increase of the means of subsistence. But even this criterion is subject to some slight variations, which however are completely open to our observation. In some countries population seems to have been forced ; that is, the people have been habituated by degrees to live almost upon the smallest possible quantity of food. There must have. been periods in such countries when population increased permanently without an increase in the means of subsistence. China, India, and the countries possessed by the Bedoween Arabs, as we have seen in the former part of this work, appear to answer to this description. The average produce of these countries seems to be but barely sufficient to support the lives of the inhabitants, and of course any deficiency from the badness of the seasons must be fatal. Nations in this state must necessarily be subject to famines. In America, where the reward of labor is at present so liberal, the lower classes might retrench very considerably in a year of scarcity without materially distressing themselves. A famine therefore seems to be almost impossible. It may be expected that in the progress of the population of America the laborers will in time be much less liberally rewarded. The numbers will in this case permanently increase without a proportional increase in the means of subsistence. In the different countries of Europe there must be some varia- tions in the proportion of the number of inhabitants, and the quantity of food consumed, arising from the different habits of living which prevail in each state. The laborers in the south of England are so accustomed to eat fine wheaten bread, that they will suffer themselves to be half starved before they will submit to live like the Scotch peasants. They might perhaps in time, by the constant operation of the hard law of necessity, be reduced to live even like the lower classes of the Chinese, and the country would then with the same quantity of food support a greater population. But to effect this must always be a difficult, and every friend to humanity will hope an abortive, attempt. 42 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS I have mentioned some cases where population may peri manently increase without a proportional increase in the means of subsistence. But it is evident that the variation in different states between the food and the numbers supported by it is restricted to a limit beyond which it cannot pass. In every country the population of which is not absolutely decreasing, the food must be necessarily sufficient to support and continue the race of laborers. Other circumstances being the same, it may be affirmed that countries are populous according to the quantity of human food which they produce or can acquire ; and happy according to the liberality with which this food is divided, or the quantity which a day's labor will purchase. Corn countries are more populous than pasture countries, and rice countries more populous than corn countries. But their happiness does not depend either upon their being thinly or fully inhabited, upon their poverty or their riches, their youth or their age, but on the proportion which the population and the food bear to each other. This proportion is generally the most favorable in new colonies, where the knowledge and industry of an old state operate on the fertile unappropriated land of a new one. In other cases the youth or the age of a state is not in this respect of great impor- tance. It is probable that the food of Great Britain is divided in more liberal shares to her inhabitants at the present period than it was two thousand, three thousand, or four thousand years ago. And it has appeared that the poor and thinly inhabited tracts of the Scotch Highlands are more distressed by a redun- dant population than the most populous' parts of Europe. If a country were never to be overrun by a people more advanced in arts, but left to its own natural progress in civiliza- tion-, from the time that its produce might be considered as a unit to the time that it might be considered as a million, during the lapse of many thousand years, there might not be a single period when the mass of the people could be said to be free from distress, either directly or indirectly, for want of food. In every state in Europe since we have first had accounts of it, millions and millions of human existences have been repressed from this THE MALTHUSIAN THEORY 43 simple cause, though perhaps in some of these states an absolute famine may never have been known. Must it not then be acknowledged by an attentive examiner of the histories of mankind that in every age and in every state in which man has existed or does now exist, The increase to population is necessarily limited by the means of subsistence : Population invariably increases when the means of subsistence increase,^ unless prevented by powerful and obvious checks : These checks, and the checks which keep the population down to the level of the means of subsistence, are moral restraint, vice, and misery ? In comparing the state of society which had been considered in this second book with that which formed the subject of the first,'^ I think it appears that in modern Europe the positive checks to population prevail less, and the preventive checks more, than in past times, and in the more uncivilized parts of the world. War, the predominant check to the population of savage nations, has certainly abated, even including the late unhappy revolutionary contests, and since the prevalence of a greater degree of personal cleanliness, of better modes of clearing and building towns, and of a more equable distribution of the products of the soil from improving knowledge in political economy, plagues, violent diseases, and famines have been certainly miti- gated, and have become less frequent. With regard to the preventive check to population, though it must be acknowledged that that branch of it which comes under the head of moral restraint^ does not at present prevail much among the male part of society; yet I am strongly disposed to believe that it prevails more than in those states which were first ^ By an increase in the means of subsistence, as the expression is used here, is always meant such an increase as the mass of the population can command ; otherwise it can be of no avail in encouraging an increase of people. ^ Book I of the Essay treats " of the checks to population in the less civilized parts of the world and in past times," and Book II " of the checks to population in the different states of modern Europe." — Ed. ' The reader will recollect the confined sense in which I use this term. 44 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS considered ; and it can scarcely be doubted that in modern Europe a much larger proportion of women pass a considerable part of their lives in the exercise of this virtue than in past times and among uncivilized nations. But, however this may be, if we consider only the general term which implies principally a delay of the marriage union from prudential considerations, without reference to consequences, it may be considered in this light as the most powerful of the checks which in modern Europe keep down the population to the level of the means of subsistence. 3. OF OUR FUTURE PROSPECTS RESPECTING THE RE- MOVAL OR MITIGATION OF THE EVILS ARISING FROM THE PRINCIPLE OF POPULATION! Of Moral Restraint, and our Obli gation to practice THIS Virtue As it appears that in the actual state of every society which has come within, our review the natural progress of population has been constantly and powerfully checked, and as it seems evident that no improved form of governinent, no plans of emi- gration, no b.enevolent institutions, and no degree or direction of national industry can prevent the continued action of a great check to population in some form or other, it follows that we must submit to it as an inevitable law of nature ; and the only inquiry that remains is how it may take place with the least possible prejudice to the virtue and happiness of human society. All the immediate checks to population which have been observed to prevail in the same and different countries seem to be resolvable into moral restraint, vice, and misery; and if our choice be confined to these three, we cannot long hesitate in our decision respecting which it would be most eligible to encourage. In the first edition of this essay I observed that as from the laws of nature it appeared that some check to population must exist, it was better that this check should arise from a foresight 1 By T. R. Malthus. Adapted from An Ess^y on the Principles of Population, gth edition, pp. 389-422, 475-481. London, 1888. THE MALTHUSIAN THEORY 45 of the difficulties attending a family and tiie fear of dependent poverty than from the actual presence of want and sickness. This idea will admit of being pursued farther; and I am inclined to think that from the prevailing opinions respecting population, which undoubtedly originated in barbarous ages, and have been continued and circulated by that part of every community which may be supposed to be interested in their support, we have been prevented from attending to the clear dictates of reason and nature on this subject. Natural and moral evil seem to be the instruments employed by the Deity in admonishing us to avoid any mode of conduct which is not suited to our being, and will consequently injure our happiness. If we are intemperate in eating and drinking, our health is disordered ; if we indulge the transports of anger, we seldom fail to commit acts of which we afterwards repent ; if we multiply too fast, we die miserably of poverty and contagious diseases. The laws of nature in all these cases are similar and uniform. They indicate to us that we have followed these impulses too far, so as to trench upon some other law, which equally demands attention. The uneasiness we feel from reple- tion, the injuries that we inflict on ourselves or others in anger, and the inconveniences we suffer on the approach of poverty, are all admonitions to us to regulate these impulses better ; and if we heed' not this admonition, we justly incur the penalty of our dis- obedience, and our sufferings operate as a warning to others. . . . An implicit obedience to the impulses of our natural passions would lead us into the wildest and most fatal extravagances, and yet we have the strongest reasons for believing that all these passions are so necessary to our being that they could not be generally weakened or diminished without injuring our happiness. The most powerful and universal of all our desires is the desire of food, and of those things — such as clothing, houses, etc. — which are immediately necessary to relieve us from the pains of hunger and cold. It is acknowledged by all that these desires put in motion the greatest part of that activity from which the multiplied improvements and advantages of civilized life are de- rived, and that the pursuit of these pbjects and the gratification 46 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS of these desires form the principal happiness of the larger half of mankind, civilized or uncivilized, and are indispensably neces- sary to the more refined enjoyments of the other half. We are all conscious of the inestimable benefits that we derive from these desires when directed in a certain manner, but we are equally conscious of the evils resulting from them when not directed in this manner — so much so that society has taken upon itself to punish most severely what it considers as an irregular gratification of them. And yet the desires in both cases are equally natural, and, abstractedly considered, equally virtuous. The act of the hungry man who satisfies his appetite by taking a loaf from the shelf of another is in no respect to be distinguished from the act of him who does the same thing with a loaf of his own, but by its consequences. From the consideration of these consequences we feel the most perfect conviction that if people were not pre- vented from gratifying their natural desires with the loaves in the possession of others, the number of loaves would universally diminish. This experience is the foundation of the laws relating to property, and of the distinctions of virtue and vice in the gratification of desires otherwise perfectly the same. If the pleasure arising from the gratification of these propen- sities were universally diminished in vividness, violations of property would become less frequent; but this advantage would be greatly overbalanced by the narrowing of the sources of enjoy- ment. The diminution in the quantity of all those productions which contribute to human gratification would be much greater in proportion than the diminution of thefts, and the loss of general happiness on the one side would be beyond comparison greater than the gain of happiness on the other. When we contemplate the constant and severe toils of the greatest part of mankind, it is impossible not to be forcibly impressed with the reflection that the sources of human happiness would be most cruelly diminished if the prospect of a good meal, a warm house, and a comfortable fireside in the evening were not incitements sufficiently vivid to give interest and cheerfulness to the labors and privations of the day. After the desire of food, the most powerful and general of our desires is the passion between the sexes, taken in an enlarged THE MALTHUSIAN THEORY 47 sense. Of the happiness spread over human life by this passion very few are unconscious. Virtuous love, exalted by friendship, seems to be that sort of mixture of sensual and intellectual enjoy- ment particularly suited to the nature of man, and most power- fully calculated to awaken the sympathies of the soul, and produce the most exquisite gratifications. Perhaps there is scarcely a man who has once experienced the genuine delight of virtuous love, however great his intellectual pleasures may have been, who does not look back to that period as the sunny spot in his whole life, where his imagination loves most to bask, which he recollects and contemplates with the fondest regret, and which he would wish to live over again. It has been said by Mr. Godwin, in order to show the evident inferiority of the pleasures of sense, " Strip the commerce of the sexes of all its attendant circumstances, and it would be generally despised." He might as well say to a man who admires trees. Strip them of their spreading branches and lovely foliage, and what beauty can you see in a bare pole .? But it was the tree with the branches and foliage, and not without them, that excited admiration. . . . It is a very great mistake to suppose that the passion between the sexes only operates and influences human conduct when the immediate gratification of it is in contemplation. The formation and steady pursuit of some particular plan of life has been justly considered as one of the most permanent sources of happiness ; but I am inclined to believe that there are not many of these plans formed which are not connected in a considerable degree with the prospect of the gratification of this passion and with the support of children arising from it. The evening meal, the warm house, and the comfortable fireside would lose half their interest if we were to exclude the idea of some object of affection with whom they were to be shared. We have also great reason to believe that the passion between the sexes has the most powerful tendency to soften and meliorate the human character, and keep it more alive to all the kindlier emotions of benevolence and pity. Observations on savage life have generally tended to prove that nations in which this passion 48 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS appeared to be less vivid, were distinguished by a ferocious and malignant spirit, and particularly by tyranny and cruelty to the sex. If indeed this bond of conjugal affection were considerably weakened, it seems probable either that the man would make use of his superior physical strength, and turn his wife into a slave, as among the generality of savages, or at best that every little inequality of temper, which must necessarily occur between two persons, would produce a total alienation of affection ; and this could hardly take place without a diminution of parental fondness and care, which would have the most fatal effect on the happiness of society. . . . Considering then the passion between the sexes in all its bear- ings and relations, and including the endearing engagement of parent and child resulting from it, few will be disposed to deny that it is one of the principal ingredients of human happiness. Yet experience teaches us that much evil flows from the irregular gratification of it ; and though the evil be of little weight in the scale when compared with the good, yet its absolute quantity cannot be inconsiderable, on account of the strength and univer- sality of the passion. It is evident however from, the general conduct of all governments in their distribution of punishments, that the evil resulting from this cause is not so great and so immediately dangerous to society, as the irregular gratification of the desire of property ; but placing this evil in the most formi- dable point of view, we should evidently purchase a diminution of it at a very high price by the extinction or diminution of the passion which causes it ; a change which would probably convert human life either into a cold and cheerless blank or a scene of savage and merciless ferocity. A careful attention to the remote as well as immediate effect of all the human passions and all the general laws of nature, leads us strongly to the conclusion that under the present consti- tution of things few or none of them will admit of being greatly diminished, without narrowing the sources of good more power- fully than the sources of evil. And the reason seems to be obvious. They are in fact the materials of all our pleasures as well as of all our pains ; of all our happiness as well as of all THE MALTHUSIAN THEORY 49 our misery ; of all our virtues as well as of all our vices. It must therefore be regulation and direction that are wanted, not diminu- tion or extinction. . . . The fecundity of the human species is in some respects a dis- tinct consideration from the passion between the sexes, as it evidently depends more upon the power of women in bearing children than upon the strength and weakness of this passion. It is a law however exactly similar in its great features to all the other laws of nature. It is strong and general, and apparently would not admit of any very considerable diminution without being inadequate to its object; the evils arising from it are incidental to those necessary qualities of strength and generality ; and these evils are capable of being very greatly mitigated and rendered comparatively light by human energy and virtue. We cannot but conceive that it is an object of the Creator that the earth should be replenished ; and it appears to me clear that this could not be effected without a tendency in population to increase faster than food ; and as, with the present law of increase, the peopling of the earth does not proceed very rapidly, we have undoubtedly some reason to believe that this law is not too powerful for its apparent object. The desire of the means of subsistence would be comparatively confined in its effects, and would fail of produc- ing that general activity so necessary to the improvement of the human faculties, were it' not for the strong and universal effort of population to increase with greater rapidity than its supplies. If these two tendencies were exactly balanced, I do not see what motive there would be sufficiently strong to overcome the acknowl- edged indolence of man, and make him proceed in the cultivation of the soil. The population of any large territory, however fertile, would be as likely to stop at five hundred or five thousand, as at five millions or fifty millions. Such a balance therefore would clearly defeat one great purpose of creation ; and if the question be merely a question of degree, a question of a little more or a little less strength, we may fairly distrust our competence to judge of the precise quantity necessary to answer the object with the smallest sum of incidental evil. In the present state of things we appear to have under our guidance a great power, capable of so READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS peopling a desert region in a small number of years ; and yet under other circumstances capable of being confined by human energy and virtue to any limits, however narrow, at the expense of a small comparative quantity of evil. The analogy of all the other laws of nature would be completely violated, if in this instance alone there were no provision for accidental failures, no resources against the vices of mankind, or the partial mischiefs resulting from other general laws. To effect the apparent object without any attendant evil, it is evident that a perpetual change in the law of increase would be necessary, varying with the vary- ing circumstances of each country. But instead of this it is not only more consonant to the analogy of the other parts of nature, but we have reason to think that it is more conducive to the for- mation and improvement of the human mind, that the laws should be uniform and the evils incidental to it, under certain circum- stances, left to be mitigated or removed by man himself. His duties in this case vary with his situation ; he is thus kept more alive to the consequences of his actions ; and his faculties have evidently greater play and opportunity of improvement, than if the evil were removed by a perpetual change of the law according to circumstances. Even if from passions too easily subdued, or the facility of illicit, intercourse, a state of celibacy were a matter of indifference, and not a state of some privation, the end of nature in the peopling of the earth would be apparently liable to be defeated. It is of the very utmost importance to the happiness of mankind that population should not increase too fast ; but it does not appear that the object to be accomplished would admit of any considerable diminution in the desire of marriage. It is clearly the duty of each individual not to marry till, he has a prospect of supporting his children ; but it is at the same time to be wished that he should retain undiminished his desire of marriage, in order that he may exert himself to realize this prospect, and be stimulated to make provision for the support of greater numbers. It is evidently therefore regulation and direction which are required with regard to the principle of population, not diminu- tion or alteration. And if moral restraint be the only virtuous mode THE MALTHUSIAN THEORY 51 of avoiding the incidental evils arising from this principle, our obligation to practice it will evidently rest exactly upon the same foundation as our obligation to practice any of the other virtues. Whatever indulgence we may be disposed to allow to occasional failures in the discharge of a duty of acknowledged difficulty, yet of the strict line of duty we cannot doubt. Our obligation not to marry till we have a fair prospect of being able to support our children will appear to deserve the attention of the moralist, if it can be proved that an attention to this obligation is of most powerful effect in the prevention of misery ; and that if it were the general custom to follow the first impulse of nature and marry at the age of puberty, the universal prevalence of every known virtue in the greatest conceivable degree, would fail of rescuing society from the most wretched and desperate state of want, and all the diseases and famines which usually accompany it. Of the Effects vthich vstould result to Society from THE Prevalence of Moral Restraint One of the principal reasons which have prevented an assent to the doctrine of the constant tendency of population to increase beyond the means of subsistence, is a great unwillingness to believe that the Deity would by the laws of riature bring, beings into existence, which by the laws of nature could not be supported in that existence. But if, in addition to that general activity and direction of our industry put in motion by these laws, we further consider that the incidental evils arising from them are constantly directing our attention to the proper check to population, moral restraint ; and if it appear that by a strict obedience to the duties pointed out to us by the light of nature and reason, and con- firmed and sanctioned by revelation, these evils may be avoided, the objection will, I trust, be removed, and all apparent imputation on the goodness of the Deity be done away. The heathen moralists never represented happiness as attain- able on earth but through the medium of virtue ; and among their virtues prudence ranked in the first class, and by some was even considered as including every other. The Christian religion places 52 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS our present as well as future happiness in the exercise of those virtues which tend to fit us for a state of superior enjoyment; and the subjection of the passions to the guidance of reason, which, if not the whole, is a principal branch of prudence, is in consequence most particularly inculcated. If, for the sake of illustration, we might be permitted to draw a picture of society in which each individual endeavored to attain happiness by the strict fulfillment of those duties which the most enlightened of the ancient philosophers deduced from the laws of nature, and which have been directly taught and received such powerful sanctions in the moral code of Christianity, it would present a very different scene from that which we now contem- plate. Every act which was prompted by the desire of immediate gratification, but which threatened an ultimate overbalance of pain, would be considered as a breach of duty, and consequently no man whose earnings were only sufficient to maintain two children would put himself in a situation in which he might have to maintain four or five, however he might be prompted to it by the passion of love. This prudential restraint, if it were generally adopted, by narrowing the supply of labor in the market, would in the natural course of things soon raise its price. The period of delayed gratification would be passed in saving the earnings which were above the wants of a single man, and in acquiring habits of sobriety, industry, and economy, which would enable him in a few years to enter into the matrimonial contract without fear of its consequences. The operation of the preventive check in this way, by constantly keeping the population within the limits of the food though constantly following its increase, would give a real value to the rise of wages and the sums saved by laborers before marriage, very different from those forced advances in the price of labor or arbitrary parochial donations which, in propor- tion to their magnitude and extensiveness, must of necessity be followed by a proportional advance in the price of provisions. As the wages of labor would thus be sufficient to maintain with decency a large family, and as every married couple would set out with a sum for contingencies, all abject poverty would be removed from society, or would at least be confined to a very feyir THE MALTHUSIAN THEORY 53 who had fallen into misfortunes against which no prudence or foresight could provide. The interval between the age of puberty and the period at which each individual might venture on marriage must, according to the supposition, be passed in strict chastity, because the law of chastity cannot be violated without producing evil. The effect of anything like a promiscuous intercourse, which prevents the birth of children, is evidently to weaken the best affections of the heart, and in a very marked manner to degrade the female character; and any other intercourse would, without improper arts, bring as many children into the society as marriage, with a much greater probability of their becoming a burden to it. These considerations show that the virtue of chastity is not, as some have supposed, a forced produce of artificial society, but that it has the most real and solid foundation in nature and reason, being apparently the only virtuous means of avoiding the vice and misery which result so often from the principle of population. In such a society as we have been supposing it might be neces- sary for some of both sexes to pass many of the early years of life in the single state, and if this were general there w6uld certainly be room for a much greater number to marry afterwards, so that fewer, upon the whole, would be condemned to pass their lives in celibacy. If the custom of not marrying early prevailed generally, and if violations of chastity were equally dishonorable in both sexes, a more familiar and friendly intercourse between them might take place without danger. Two young people might converse together intimately without its being immediately sup- posed that they either intended marriage or intrigue, and a much better opportunity would thus be given to both sexes of finding out kindred dispositions, and of forming those strong and lasting attachments without which the married state is generally more productive of misery than of happiness. The earlier years of life would not be spent without love, though without the full gratifi- cation of it. The passion, instead of being extinguished as it now too frequently is by early sensuality, would only be repressed for a time that it might afterwards burn with a brighter, purer, 54 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS and steadier flame, and the happiness of the married state, instead of only affording the means of immediate indulgence, would be looked forward to as the prize of industry and virtue, and the reward of a genuine and constant attachment.^ The passion of love is a powerful stimulus in the formation of character and often prompts to the most noble and generous exertions, but this is only when the affections are centered in one object, and generally when full gratification is delayed by difficul- ties;^ The heart is perhaps never so much disposed to virtuous conduct, and certainly at no time is the virtue of chastity so little difficult to men as when under the influence of such a passion. Late marriages taking place in this way would be very different from those of the same name at present, where the union is too frequently prompted solely by interested views, and the parties meet not infrequently with exhausted constitutions and generally with exhausted affections. The late marriages at present are indeed principally confined to the men, of whom there are few, however advanced in life, who if they determine to marry do not fix their choice on a young wife. A young woman without for- tune, when she has passed her twenty-fifth year, begins to fear, an(t with reason, that she may lead a life of celibacy, and with a heart capable of forming a strong attachment feels as each year creeps on her hopes of finding an object on which to rest her 1 Dr. Currie, in his interesting observations on the character and condition of the Scotch peasantry, prefixed to his Life of Burns, remarks with a just knowledge of human nature that " in appreciating the happiness and virtue of a community there is perhaps no single criterion on which so much dependence may be placed as the state of the intercourse between the sexes. Where this displays ardor of attachment accompanied by purity of conduct, the character and the influence of women rise, our imperfect nature mounts in the scale of moral excellence, and from the source of this single affection a stream of felicity descends which branches into a thousand rivulets that enrich and adorn the field of life. Where the attachment between the sexes sinks into an appetite, the heritage of our species is comparatively poor, and man approaches to the condition of the brutes that perish " (Vol. I, p. i8). 2 Dr. Currie observes that " the Scottish peasant in the course of his passion often exerts a spirit of adventure of which a Spanish cavalier need not be ashamed." It is not to be doubted that this kind of romantic passion which Dr. Currie says characterizes the attachment of the humblest people of Scotland, and which has been greatly fostered by the elevation of mind given to them by a superior education, has had a most beneficial influence on the national character. THE MALTHUSIAN THEORY 55 affections gradually diminishing, and the uneasiness of her situa- tion aggravated by the silly and unjust prejudices of the world. If the general age of marriage among women were later the period of youth and hope would be prolonged, and fewer would be ultimately disappointed. That a change of this kind would be a most decided advantage to the more virtuous half of society we cannot for a moment doubt. However impatiently the privation might be borne by the men, it would be supported by the women readily and cheerfully, and if they could look forward with just confidence to marriage at twenty-seven or twenty-eight, I fully believe that if the matter were left to their free choice, they would clearly prefer waiting till this period to the being involved in all the cares of a large family at twenty-five. The most eligible age of marriage how- ever could not be fixed, but must depend entirely on circum- stances and situation. There is no period of human life at which nature more strongly prompts to a union of the sexes than from seventeen or eighteen to twenty. In every society above that state of depression which almost excludes reason and foresight, these early tendencies must necessarily be restrained ; and if in the actual state of things such a restraint on the impulses of nature be found unavoidable, at what time can we be consistently released from it but at that period, whatever it may be, when in the existing circumstances of the society a fair prospect presents itself of maintaining a family .' The difficulty of moral restraint will perhaps be objected to this doctrine. To him who does not acknowledge the authority of the Christian religion I have only to say that after the most careful investigation this virtue appears to be absolutely necessary in order to avoid certain evils which would otherwise result from the general laws of nature. According to his own principles it is his duty to pursue the greatest good consistent with these laws, and not to fail in this important end, and produce an overbalance of misery by a partial obedience to some of the dictates of nature , while he neglects others. The path of virtue, though it be the only path which leads to permanent happiness, has always been represented* by the heathen moralists as of difficult ascent. 56 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS To the Christian I would say that the Scriptures most clearly and precisely point it out to us as our duty to restrain our passions within the bounds of reason, and it is a palpable disobedience of this law to indulge our desires in such a manner as reason tells us will unavoidably end in misery. The Christian cannot consider the difficulty of moral restraint as any argument against its being his duty, since in almost every page of the sacred writings man is described as encompassed on all sides by temptations which it is extremely difficult to resist ; and though no duties are enjoined which do not contribute to his happiness on earth as well as in a future state, yet an undeviating obedience is never represented as an easy task. There is in general so strong a tendency to love in early youth that it is extremely difficult at this period to distinguish a genuine from a transient passion. If the earlier years of life were passed by both sexes in moral restraint, from the greater facility that this would give to the meeting of kindred dispositions, it might even admit of a doubt whether more happy marriages would not take place, and consequently more pleasure from the passion of love, than in a state such as that of America, the circumstances of which allow of a very early union of the sexes. But if we com- pare the intercourse of the sexes in such a society as I have been supposing with that which now exists in Europe, taken under all its circumstances, it may safely be asserted that, independently of the load of misery which would be removed, the sum of pleasur- able sensations from the passion of love would be increased in a very great degree. If we could suppose such a system general, the accession of happiness to society in its internal economy would scarcely be greater than in its external relations. It might fairly be expected that war, that great pest of the human race, would under such circumstances soon cease to extend its ravages so widely and so frequently as it does at present. One of its first causes and most powerful impulses was un- doubtedly an insufficiency of room and food ; and greatly as the circumstances of mankind have changed since it first began, the same cause still continues to operate and to produce^ though in THE MALTHUSIAN THEORY S; a smaller degree, the same effects. The ambition of princes would want instruments of destruction if the distresses of the lower classes of people did not drive them under their standards. A recruiting sergeant always prays for a bad harvest and a want of employment, or in other words a redundant population. In the earlier ages of the world when war was the great business of mankind, and the drains of population from this cause were beyond comparison greater than in modern times, the legislators and statesmen of each country, adverting principally to the means of offense and defense, encouraged an increase of people in every possible way, fixed a stigma on barrenness and celibacy, and honored marriage. The popular religions followed these prevailing opinions. In many countries the prolific power of nature was the object of solemn worship. In the religion of Mahomet, which was established by the sword, and the promul- gation of which in consequence could not be unaccompanied by an extraordinary destruction of its followers, the procreation of children to glorify the Creator was laid down as one of the prin- cipal duties of man, and he who had the most numerous offspring was considered as having best answered the end of his creation. The prevalence of such moral sentiments had naturally a great effect in encouraging marriage, and the rapid procreation which followed was partly the effect and partly the cause of incessant war. The vacancies occasioned by former desolations made room for the rearing of fresh supplies, and the overflowing rapidity with which these supplies followed constantly furnished fresh incite- ments and fresh instruments for renewed hostilities. Under the influence of such moral sentiments, it is difficult to conceive how the fury of incessant war should ever abate. It is a pleasing confirmation of the truth and divinity of the Christian religion, and of its being adapted to a more improved state of human society, that it places our duties respecting mar- riage and the procreation of children in a different light from that in which they were before beheld. Without entering minutely into the subject, which would evi- dently lead too far, I think it will be admitted that if we apply the spirit of St, Paul's declarations respecting marriage to the 58 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS present state of society and the known constitution of our nature, the natural inference seems to be that, when marriage does not interfere with higher duties, it is right ; when it does, it is wrong. According to the general principles of moral science, "the method of coming at the will of God from the light of nature is to inquire into the tendency of the action to promote or diminish the general happiness." ^ There are perhaps few actions that tend so directly to diminish the general happiness as to marry without the means of supporting children. He who commits this act therefore clearly offends against the will of God ; and having become a burden on the society in which he lives, and plunged himself and family into a situation in which virtuous habits are preserved with more difHculty than in any other, he appears to have violated his duty to his neighbors and to himself, and thus to have listened to the voice of passion in opposition to his higher obligations. In a society such as I have supposed, all the members of which endeavor to obtain happiness by obedience to the moral code derived from the light of nature, and enforced by strong sanctions in revealed religion, it is evident that no such marriages could take place ; and the prevention of a redundant population in this way would remove one of the principal encouragements to offensive war, and at the same time tend powerfully to eradicate those two fatal political disorders, internal tyranny and internal tumult, which mutually produce each other. Indisposed to a war of offense, in a war of defense such a society would be strong as a rock of adamant. Where every family possessed the necessaries of life in plenty, and a decent portion of its comforts and conveniences, there could not exist that hope of change, or at best that melancholy and disheartening indifference to it, which sometimes prompts the lower classes of people to say, " Let what will come, we cannot be worse off than we are now." Every heart and hand will be united to repel an invader when each individual felt the value of the solid advan- tages which he enjoyed, and a prospect of change presented only a prospect of being deprived of them. I Paley, Moral Philosophy, Vol. I, Bk. II, chap, iv, p. 65. THE MALTHUSIAN THEORY 59 As it appears therefore that it is in the power of each individ- ual to avoid all the evil consequences to himself and Society resulting from the principle of population by the practice of a virtue clearly dictated to him by the light of nature and expressly enjoined in revealed religion, and as we have reason to think that the exercise of this virtue to a certain degree would tend rather to increase than diminish individual happiness, we can have no reason to impeach the justice of the Deity because his , general laws make this virtue necessary, and punish our offenses against it by the evils attendant upon vice and the pains that accompany the various forms of premature death. A really virtu- ous society such as I have supposed would avoid these evils. It is the apparent object of the Creator to deter us from vice by the pains which accompany it, and to lead us to virtue by the happi- ness that it produces. This object appears to our conceptions to be worthy of a benevolent Creator. The laws of nature respecting population tend to promote this object. No imputation therefore on the benevolence of the Deity can be founded on these laws which is not equally applicable to any of the evils necessarily incidental to an imperfect state of existence. Of the Only Effectual Mode of improving the Condition of the Poor He who publishes a moral code or system of duties, however firmly he may be convinced of the strong obligation on each individual strictly to conform to it, has never the folly to imagine that it will be universally or even generally practiced. But this is no valid objection against the publication of the code. If it were, the same objection would always have applied, we should be totally without general rules, and to the vices of mankind arising from temptation would be added a much longer list than we have at present of vices from ignorance. Judging merely from the light of. nature, if we feel convinced of the misery arising from a redundant population on the one hand, and of the evils and unhappiness, particularly to the female sex, arising from promiscuous intercourse, on the other, I do not 6o READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS see how it is possible for any person who acknowledges the prin- ciple of utility as the great criterion of moral rules, to escape the conclusion that moral restraint, or the abstaining from marriage till we are in a condition to support a family, with a perfectly motal conduct during that period, is the strict line of duty ; and when revelation is taken into the question, this duty undoubtedly receives very powerful confirmation. At the same time I believe that few of my readers can be less sanguine than I am in their expectations of any sudden and great change in the general conduct of men on this subject ; and the chief reason why in the last chapter I allowed myself to suppose the universal prevalence of this virtue was that I might endeavor to remove any imputation on the goodness of the Deity, by showing that the evils arising from the principle of population were exactly of the same nature as the generality of other evils which excite fewer complaints, that they were increased by human ignorance and indolence, and diminished by human knowledge and virtue ; and on the supposi- tion that each individual strictly fulfilled his duty would be almost totally removed, and this without any general diminution of those sources of pleasure arising from the regulated indulgence of the passions, which have been justly considered as the principal ingredients of human happiness. If it will answer any purpose of illustration, I see no harm in drawing the picture of a society, in which each individual is sup- posed strictly to fulfill his duties ; nor does a writer appear to be justly liable to the imputation of being visionary, unless he make such universal or general obedience necessary to the practical utility of his system, and to that degree of moderate and partial improvement which is all that can rationally be expected from the most complete knowledge of our duties. But in this respect there is an essential difference between that improved state of society which I have supposed in the last chapter and most of the other speculations on this subject. The improvement there supposed, if we ever should make approaches towards it, is to be effected in the way in which we have been in the habit of seeing all the greatest improvements effected, by a direct application to the interest and happiness of each individual. THE MALTHUSIAN THEORY 6i It is not required of us to act from motives to which we are unaccustomed ; to pursue a general good which we may not dis- tinctly comprehend, or the effect of which may be weakened by distance and diffusion. The happiness of the whole is to be the result of the happiness of individuals, and to begin first with them. No cooperation is required. Every step tells. He who performs his duty faithfully will reap the full fruits of it, what- ever may be the number of others who fail. This duty is intelli- gible to the humblest capacity. It is merely that he is not to bring beings into the world for whom he cannot find the means of support. When once this subject is cleared from the obscurity thrown over it by parochial laws and private benevolence, every man must feel the strongest conviction of such an obligation. If he cannot support his children, they must starve ; and if he marry in the face of a fair probability that he shall not be able to support his children, he is guilty of all the evils which he thus brings upon himself, his wife, and his offspring. It is clearly his interest, and will tend greatly to promote his happiness, to defer marrying, till by industry and economy he is in a capacity to support the children that he may reasonably, expect from his marriage ; and as he cannot in the meantime gratify his passions without violating an express command of God, and running a great risk of injuring himself or some of his fellow creatures, consider- ations of his own interest and happiness will dictate to him the strong obligation to a moral conduct while he remains unmarried. However powerful may be the impulses of passion, they are generally in some degree modified by reason. And it does not seem entirely visionary to suppose that, if the true and permanent cause of poverty were clearly explained and forcibly brought home to each man's bosom, it would have some and perhaps not an inconsiderable influence on his conduct ; at least the experiment has never yet been fairly tried. Almost everything that has been hitherto done for the poor has tended, as if with solicitous care, to throw a veil of obscurity over this subject and to hide from them the true cause of their poverty. When the wages of labor are hardly sufficient to maintain two children, a man marries and has five or six ; he of course finds himself miserably distressed., 62 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS He accuses the insufficiency of the price of labor to maintain a family. He accuses his parish for their tardy and sparing fulfill- ment of their obligation to assist him. He accuses the avarice of the rich who suffer him to want what they can so well spare. He accuses the partial and unjust institutions of society which have awarded him an inadequate share of the produce of the earth. He accuses perhaps the dispensations of Providence which have assigned to him a place in society so beset with unavoidable distress and dependence. In searching for objects of accusation, he never adverts to the ■ quarter from which his misfortunes originate. The last person that he would think of accusing is himself, on whom in fact the principal blame lies except so far as he has been deceived by the higher classes of society. He may perhaps wish that he had not married, because he now feels the inconveniences of it; but it never enters into his head that he can have done anything wrong. He has always been told that to raise up subjects for his king and country is a very meritorious act. He has done this and yet is suffering for it ; and it cannot but strike him as most extremely unjust and cruel in his king and country to allow him thus to suffer in return for giving them what they are continually declaring that they particularly want. Till these erroneous ideas have been corrected, and the Ian-, guage of nature and reason has been generally heard on the subject of population, instead of the language of error and preju- dice, it cannot be said that any fair experiment has been made with the understandings of the common people ; and we cannot justly accuse them of improvidence and want of industry, till they act as they do now, after it has been brought home to their com- prehension that they are themselves the cause of their own poverty ; that the means of redress are in their own hands, and in the hands of no other persons whatever; that the society in which they live, and the government which presides over it, are without any direct power in this respect; and that however ardently they may desire to relieve them, and whatever attempts they may make to do so, they are really and truly unable to execute what they benevolently wish, but unjustly promise ; that when the wages of labor will not maintain a family it is an THE MALTHUSIAN THEORY 63 incontrovertible sign that their king and country do not want more subjects, or at least that they cannot support them ; that, if they marry in this case, so far from fulfilling a duty to society, they are throwing a useless burden on it, at the same time that they are plunging themselves into distress, and that they are acting directly contrary to the will of God, and bringing down upon themselves various diseases, which might all, or the greater part, have been avoided if they had attended to the repeated admonitions which he gives by the general laws of nature to every being capable of reason. Paley, in his Moral Philosophy, observes that " in countries in which subsistence is become scarce, it behoves the state to watch over the public morals with increased solicitude ; for nothing but the instinct of nature, under the restraint of chastity, will induce men to undertake the labor, or consent to the sacrifice of per- sonal liberty and indulgence, which the support of a family in such circumstances requires." ^ That it is always the duty of a state to use every exertion likely to be effectual in discouraging vice and promoting virtue, and that no temporary circumstances ought to cause any relaxation in these exertions, is certainly true. The means therefore proposed are always good ; but the particular end in view in this case appears to be absolutely criminal. We wish to force people into marriage, when from the acknowledged scarcity of subsistence they will have little chance of being able to support their children. We might as well force people into the water who are unable to swim. In both cases we rashly tempt Providence. Nor have we more reason to believe that a miracle will be worked to save us from the misery and mortality resulting from our conduct in the one case than in the other. The object of those who really wish to better the condition of the lower classes of society must be to raise the relative propor- tion between the price of labor and the price of provisions, so as to enable the laborer to command a larger share of the neces- saries and comforts of life. We have hitherto principally attempted to attain this end by encouraging the married poor, and conse- quently increasing the number of laborers, and overstocking the 1 Vol. II, chap, xi, p. 352. 64 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS market with a commodity which we still say that we wish to be dear. It would seem to have required no great spirit of divina- tion to foretell the certain failure of such a plan of proceeding. There is nothing however like experience. It has been tried in many different countries and for many hundred years, and the success has always been answerable to the nature of the scheme. It is really time now to try something else. . . . In an endeavor to raise the proportion of the quantity of pro- visions to the number of consumers in any country, our attention would naturally be first directed, to the increasing of the absolute quantity of provisions ; but finding that as fast as we did this the number of consumers more than kept pace with it, and that with all our exertions we were still as far as ever behind, we should be convinced that our efforts directed only in this way would never succeed, It would appear to be setting the tortoise to catch the hare. Finding therefore that from the laws of nature we could not proportion the food to the population, our next attempt should naturally be to proportion the population to the food. If we can persuade the hare to go to sleep, the tortoise may have some chance of overtaking her. We are not however to relax our efforts in increasing the quantity of provisions, but to combine another effort with it, that of keeping the population, when once it has been overtaken, at such a distance behind as to effect the relative proportion which we desire, and thus unite the two grand desiderata, a great actual population and a state of society in which abject poverty and dependence are comparatively but little known, two objects which are far from being incompatible. If we be really serious in what appears to be the object of such general research, the mode of essentially and permanently better- ing the condition of the poor, we must explain to them the true nature of their situation, and show them that the withholding of the supplies of labor is the only possible way of really raising its price, and that they themselves being the possessors of this com- modity have alone the power to do tliis. I cannot but consider this mode of diminishing poverty as so perfectly clear in theory, and so invariably confirmed by the THE MALTHUSIAN THEORY 65 analogy of every other commodity which is brought to market, that nothing but its being shown to be calculated to produce greater evils than it proposes to remedy can justify us in not making the attempt to put it into execution. Objections to this Mode Considered One objection which perhaps will be made to this plan is that from which alone it derives its value — a market rather under- stocked with labor. This must undoubtedly take place in a certain degree ; but by no means in such a degree as to affect the wealth and prosperity of the country. But putting this subject of a market understocked with labor in the most unfavorable point of view, if the rich will not submit to a slight inconvenience neces- sarily attendant on the attainment of what they profess to desire, they cannot really be in earnest in their professions. Their benevolence to the poor must be either childish play or hypocrisy; it must be either to amuse themselves or to pacify the minds of the common people with a mere show of attention to their wants. To wish to better the condition of the poor by enabling them to command a greater quantity of the necessaries and, comforts of life, and then to complain of higher wages, is the act of a silly boy who gives away his cake and then cries for it. A market overstocked with labor, and an ample remuneration to each laborer, are objects perfectly incompatible with each other. In the annals of the world they never existed together : and to couple them even in imagination betrays a gross ignorance of the simplest principles of political economy. ■ A second objection that may be made to this plan is the dim- 1 inution of population that it would cause. It is to be consideredj however that this diminution is merely relative ; and when once this relative diminution has been effected by keeping the popula- tion stationary while the supply of food has increased, it might then start afresh and continue increasing for ages with the increase of food, maintaining always nearly the same relative proportion to it. I can easily conceive that this country, with a proper direc- tion of the national industry, might in the course of* some cen- turies contain two or three times its present population, and yet 66 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS every man in the kingdom be much better fed and clothed than he is at present. While the springs of industry continue in vigor, and a sufficient part of that industry is directed to agriculture, we need be under no apprehensions of a deficient population; and nothing perhaps would tend so strongly to excite a spirit of industry and economy among the poor as a thorough knowledge that their happiness must always depend principally upon them- selves ; and that, if they obey their passions in opposition to their reason, or be not industrious and frugal while they are single to save a sum for the common contingencies of the married state, they must expect to suffer the natural evils which Providence has prepared for those who ^isobey its repeated admonitions. A third objection which may be started to this plan, and the only one which appears to me to have any kind of plausibility, is that, by endeavoring to urge the duty of moral restraint on the i pooTt, w_e rnay increase the quantity of vice relating to the sex. I should be extremely sorry to say anything which could either directly or remotely be construed unfavorably to the cause of virtue ; but I certainly cannot think that the vices which relate to the sex are the only vices which are to be considered in a moral question ; or that they are even the greatest and most degrading to the human character. They can rarely or never be committed without producing unhappiness somewhere or other, and therefore ought always to be strongly reprobated ; but there are other vices the eifects of which are still more pernicious ; aind there are other situations which lead more certainly to moral offenses than the refraining from marriage. Powerful as may be the temptations to a breach of chastity, I am inclined to think that they are impotent in comparison of the temptations arising from continued distress. A large class of women and many men, I have no doubt, pass a considerable part of their lives consist- ently with the laws of chastity ; ' but I believe there will be found very few who pass through the ordeal of squalid and hopeless poverty, or even of long-continued embarrassed circumstances, without a great moral degradation of character. . . . When indigence does not produce overt acts of vice, it palsies every virtue. Under the continued temptations to a breach of THE MALTHUSIAN THEORY 6y chastity, occasional failures may take place, and the moral sensi- bility in other respects not be very strikingly impaired ; but the continued temptations which beset hopeless poverty, and the strong sense of injustice that generally accompanies it from an ignorance of its true cause, tend so powerfully to sour the dispo- sition, to harden the heart, and deaden the moral sense, that generally speaking virtue takes her flight clear away from' the tainted spot, and does not often return. Even with respect to the vices which relate to the sex, mar- riage has been found to be by no means a complete remedy. Among the higher classes, our Doctors' Commons, and the lives that many married men are known to lead, sufficiently prove this ; and the same kind of vice, though not so much heard of among the lower classes of people, is probably in all our great towns not much less frequent. Add to this that abject poverty, particularly when joined with idleness, is a state the most unfavorable to chastity that can well be conceived. The passion is as strong, or nearly so, as in other situations ; and every restraint on it from personal respect, or a sense of morality, is generally removed. There is a degree of squalid poverty in which, if a girl was brought up, I should say that her being really modest at twenty was an absolute miracle. Those persons must have extraordinary minds indeed, and such as are not usually formed under similar circumstances, who can continue to respect themselves when no other person whatever respects them. If the children thus brought up were even to marry at twenty, it is probable that they would have passed some years in vicious habits before that period.'. . . If on contemplating the increase of vice which might contin- gently follow an attempt to inculcate the duty of moral restraint, and the increase of misery that must necessarily follow the attempts to encourage marriage and population, we come to the conclusion not to interfere in any respect, but to leave every man to his own free choice and responsible only to God for the evil which he does in either way ; this is all I contend for ; I would on no account do more ; but I contend that at present we are very far from doing this. 68 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS Among the lower classes of society, where the point is of the greatest importance, the poor laws afford a direct, constant, and systematical encouragement to marriage by removing from each individual that heavy responsibility which he would incur by the laws of nature for bringing beings into the world which he could not support. Our private benevolence has the same direction as the poor laws, and almost invariably tends to encourage marriage and to equalize as much as possible the circumstances of married and single men. Among the higher classes of people the superior distinctions which married women receive, and the marked inattentions to which single women of advanced age are exposed, enable many men who are agreeable neither- in mind nor person and are besides in the wane of life to choose a partner among' the young and fair, instead of being confined as nature seems .to dictate to persons of nearly their own age and accomplishments. It is scarcely to be doubted that the fear of being an old maid, and of that silly and unjust ridicule which folly sometimes attaches to this name, drives many women into the marriage union with men whom they dislike, or at best to whom they are perfectly indifferent. Such marriages must to every delicate mind appear little better than legal prostitutions, and' they often burden the earth with unnecessary children, without compensating for it by an accession of happiness and virtue to the parties themselves. Throughout all the ranks of society the prevailing opinions respecting the duty and obligation of marriage cannot but have a very powerful influence. The man who thinks that in going out of the world without leaving representatives behind him he shall have failed in an important duty to society, .will be disposed to force rather than to repress his inclinations on this subject ; and when his reason represents to him the difficulties attending a family he will endeavor not to attend to these suggestions, will still determine to venture, and will hope that in the discharge of what he conceives to be his duty he shall not be deserted by Providence. In a civilized country such as England, where a taste for the decencies and comforts of life prevails among a very large class THE MALTHUSIAN THEORY 69 of people, it is not possible that the encouragements to marriage from positive institutions and prevailing opinions should entirely obscure the light of nature and reason on this subject ; but still they contribute to make it comparatively weak . and indistinct. And till this obscurity is removed, and the poor are undeceived with respect to the principal cause of their poverty, and taught to know that their happiness or misery must depend chiefly upon themselves, it cannot be said that with regard to the great question of marriage we leave every man to his own free and fair choice. Effects of the Knowledge of the Principal Cause of Poverty on Civil Liberty It may appear, perhaps, that a doctrine which attributes the greatest part of the sufferings of the lower classes of society exclusively to themselves is unfavorable to the cause of liberty, as affording a tempting opportunity to governments of oppressing their subjects at pleasure and laying the whole blame on the laws of nature and the imprudence of the poor. We are not, however, to trust to first appearances ; and I am strongly disposed to believe that those who will be at the pains to ' consider this subject deeply will be convinced that nothing would so powerfully contribute to the advancement of rational freedom as a thorough knowledge generally circulated of the principal cause of poverty, and that the ignorance of this cause, and the natural conse- quences of this ignorance, form at present one of the chief obstacles to its progress. The pressure of distress on the lower classes of people, together with the habit of attributing this distress to their rulers, appears to me to be the rock of defense, the castle, the guardian spirit of despotism. It affords to the tyrant the fatal and unanswerable plea of necessity. It is the reason why every free government tends constantly to destruction, and that its appointed guardians become daily less jealous of the encroachments of power. It is the reason why so many noble efforts in the cause of freedom have failed, and why almost every revolution after long and pain- ful sacrifices has terminated in a military despotism. While any 70 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS dissatisfied man of talents has power to persuade the lower classes of people that all their poverty and distress arise solely from the iniquity of the government, though, perhaps, the greatest part of what they suffer is unconnected with this cause, it is evident that the seeds of fresh discontents and fresh revolutions are continu- ally sowing. When an estabUshed government has been destroyed, finding that their poverty is not removed, their resentment natur- ally falls upon the successors to power ; and when these have been immolated without producing the desired effect, other sacri- fices are called for, and so on without end. Are we to be surprised that under such circumstances the majority of well- disposed people, finding that a government with proper restrictions is unable to support itself against the revolutionary spirit, and weary and exhausted with perpetual change to which they can see no end, should give up the struggle in despair, and throw themselves into the arms of the first power which can afford them protection against the horrors of anarchy .? . . . Nothing would so effectually counteract the mischiefs occasioned by Mr. Paine's Rights of Man as a general knowledge of the real rights of man. What these rights are it is not my business at present to explain ; but there is one right which man has gener- ally been thought to possess, which I am confident he neither does nor can possess — a right to subsistence when his labor will not fairly purchase it. Our laws indeed say that he has this right, and bind the society to furnish employment and food to those who cannot get them in the regular market ; but in so doing they attempt to reverse the laws of nature, and it is in conse- quence to be expected not only that they should fail in their object, but that the poor, who were intended to be benefited, should suffer most cruelly from the inhuman deceit thus practiced upon them. The Abbd Raynal has said that " Avant toutes les loix sociales I'homme avoit le droit de subsister." i He might with just as much propriety have said that before the institution of social laws every man had a right to live a hundred years. Undoubtedly he had then and has still a good right to live a hundred years, nay ^ Raynal, Hist, des Indes, Vol. X, s. x, p. 322, 8vo. THE MALTHUSIAN THEORY 71 a thousand if he can, without interfering with the right of others to live; but the affair in both cases is principally an affair of power not of right. Social laws very greatly increase this power, by enabling a much greater number to subsist than could subsist without them, and so far very greatly enlarge le droit de subsister; but neither before nor after the institution of social laws could an unlimited number subsist ; and before as well as since, he who ceased to have the power ceased to have the right. If the great truths on these subjects were more generally cir- culated and the lower classes of people could be convinced that by the laws of nature, independently of any particular institutions except the great one of property, which is absolutely necessary in order to attain any considerable produce, no person has any claim of right on society for subsistence if his labor will not purchase it, the greatest part of the mischievous declamation on the unjust institutions of society would fall powerless to the ground. The poor are by no means inclined to be visionary. Their distresses are always real, though they are not attributed to the real causes. If these causes were properly explained to them, and they were taught to know what part of their present distress was attributable to government, and what part to causes totally unconnected with it, discontent and irritation among the lower classes of people would show themselves much less frequently than at present ; and when they did show themselves would be much less to be dreaded. The efforts of turbulent and discontented men in the middle classes of society might safely be disregarded if the poor were so far enlightened respecting the real nature of their situation as to be aware that by aiding them in their schemes of renovation they would probably be promoting the ambitious views of others with- out in any respect benefiting themselves. . . . The most suc- cessful supporters of tyranny are without doubt those general declaimers who attribute the distresses of the poor, and almost all the evils to which society is subject, to human institutions and the iniquity of governments. 72 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS Of our Rational Expectations respecting the Future Improvement of Society ^ In taking a general and concluding view of our rational expec- tations respecting the mitigation of the evils arising from the principle of population, it may be observed that though the increase of population in a geometrical ratio be incontrovertible, and the period of doubling when unchecked has been uniformly stated in this work rather below than above the truth ; yet there are some natural consequences of the progress of society and civilization, which necessarily repress its full effects. These are more particu- larly great towns and manufactures, in which we can scarcely hope, and certainly not expect, to see any very material change. It is undoubtedly our duty and in every point of view highly desirable, to make towns and manufacturing employments as little injurious as possible to the duration of human life ; but after all our efforts it is probable that they will always remain less healthy than country situations and country employments, and conse- quently operating as positive checks will diminish in some degree the necessity of the preventive check. In every old state it is observed that a considerable number of grown-up people remain for a time unmarried. The duty of prac- ticing the common and acknowledged rules of morality during this period has never been controverted in theory, however it may have been opposed in practice. This branch of the duty of moral restraint has scarcely been touched by the reasonings of this work. It rests on the same foundation as before, neither stronger nor weaker. And knowing how incompletely this duty has hitherto been fulfilled, it would certainly be visionary to expect that in future it would be completely fulfilled. The part which has been affected by the reasonings of this work is not therefore that which relates to our conduct during the period of celibacy, but to the duty of extending this period till we have a prospect of being able to maintain our children. And it is by no means visionary to indulge a hope of some favor- able change in this respect; because it is found by experience ^ This is the concluding chapter of the Essay. — Ed. THE MALTHUSIAN THEORY 73 that the prevalence of this kind of prudential restraint is ex- tremely different in different countries, and in the same countries at different periods. It cannot be doubted that throughout Europe in general, and most particularly in the northern states, a decided change has taken place in the operation of prudential restraint, since the prevalence of those warlike and enterprising habits which destroyed so many people. In later times the gradual diminution and almost total extinction of the plagues, which so frequently visited Europe in the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries, produced a change of the same kind. And in this country it is not to be doubted that the proportion of marriages has become smaller since the improvement of our towns, the less frequent returns of epidemics, and the adoption of habits of greater clean- liness. During the late scarcities it appears that the number of marriages diminished ; ^ and the same motives which prevented many people from marrying during such a period, would operate precisely in the same way, if in future the additional number of children reared to manhood from the introduction of the cow-pox, were to be such as to crowd all employments, lower the price of labor, and make it more difficult to support a family. Universally, the practice of mankind on the subject of mar- riage has been much superior to their theories ; and however frequent may have been the declamations on the duty of entering into this state, and the advantage of early unions to prevent vice, each individual has practically found it necessary to consider of the means of supporting a family before he ventured to take so important a step. That great vis medicatrix reipublicaej the desire of bettering our condition, and the fear of making it worse, has been constantly in action, and has been constantly directing people into the right road in spite of all the declamations which tended to lead them aside. Owing to this powerful spring of health in every state, which is nothing more than an inference from the general course of the laws of nature irresistibly forced on each man's attentjon, the prudential check to marriage has increased in Europe ; and it cannot be unreasonable to conclude 1 1800 and 1801. 74 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS that it will still make further advances. If this take place without any marked and decided increase of a vicious intercourse with the sex, the happiness of society will evidently be promoted by it; and with regard to the danger of such increase, it is con- solatory to remark that those countries in Europe where marriages are th'^atest or least frequent, are by no means particularly dis- tinguished by vices of this kind. . . . Experience seems to teach us that it is possible for moral and physical causes to counteract the effects that might at first be expected from an increase of the check to marriage ; but allowing all the weight to these effects which is in any degree probable, it may be safely asserted that the diminution of the vices arising from indigence would fully counterbalance them ; and that all the advantages of diminished mortality and superior comforts, which would certainly result from an increase of the preventive check, may be placed entirely on the side of the gains to the cause of happiness and virtue. It is less the object of the present work to propose new plans of improving society than to inculcate the necessity of resting contented with that mode of improvement which already has in part been enacted upon as dictated by the course of nature, and of not obstructing the advances which would otherwise be made in this way. It would be undoubtedly highly advantageous that all our posi- tive institutions, and the whole tenor of our conduct to the poor, should be such as actively to cooperate with that lesson of pru- dence inculcated by the common course of human events ; and if we take upon ourselves sometimes to mitigate the natural punish- ments of imprudence, that we could balance it by increasing the rewards of an opposite conduct. But much would be done if merely the institutions which directly tend to encourage marriage were gradually changed and we ceased to circulate opinions and inculcate doctrines which positively counteract the lessons of nature. The limited good which it is sometimes in our power to effect is often lost by attempting too much, and by making the adoption of some particular plan essentially necessary even to a partial degree of success. In the practical application of the reasonings THE MALTHUSIAN THEORY 7S of this work I hope that I have avoided this error. I wish to press on the recollection of the reader that though I may have given some new views of old facts, and may have indulged in the contemplation of a considerable degree of possible improvement that I rnight not shut out that prime cheerer hope, yet in my expectations of probable improvement and in suggesting the means of accomplishing it I have been very cautious. Thfe gradual abolition of the poor laws has already often been pro- posed in consequence of the practical evils which have been found to flow from them, and the danger of their becoming a weight absolutely intolerable on the landed property of the kingdom. The establishment of a more extensive system of national educa- tion has neither the advantage of novelty with some nor its dis- advantages with others to recommend it. The practical good effects of education have long been experienced in Scotland, and almost every person who has been placed in a situation to judge has given his testimony that education appears to have a consid- erable effect in the prevention of crimes,^ and the promotion of industry, morality, and regular conduct. Yet these are the only plans which have been offered, and though the adoption of them in the modes suggested would very powerfully contribute to for- ward the object of this work and better the condition of the poor, yet if nothing be done in this way I shall not absolutely despair of some partial good resulting from the general effects of the reasoning. . . . Among the higher and middle classes of society the effect of this knowledge will I hope be to direct without relaxing their efforts in bettering the condition of the poor ; to show them what they can and what they cannot do ; and that although much may be done by advice and instruction, by encouraging habits of pru- dence and cleanliness, by discriminate charity, and by any mode 1 Mr. Howard found fewer prisoners in Switzerland and Scotland than in other countries, which he attributed to a more regular education among the lower classes of the Swiss and the Scotch. During the number of years which the late Mr. Fielding presided at Bow Street only six Scotchmen were brought before him. He used to say that of the persons committed the greater part were Irish. — Preface to Vol. Ill of the Reports of the Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor, p. 32. ;6 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS of bettering the present condition of the poor which is followed by an increase of the preventive check ; yet that without this last effect all the former efforts would be futile ; and that in any old and well-peopled state to assist the poor in such a manner as to enable them to marry as early as they please and rear up large families, is a physical impossibility. This knowledge, by tending to prevent the rich from destroying the good effects of their own exertions and wasting their efforts in a direction where success is unattainable, would confine their attention to the proper objects, and thus enable them to do more good. Among the poor themselves its effects would be still more important. That the principal and most permanent cause of poverty has little or no direct relation to forms of government or the unequal division of property ; and that as the rich do not in reality possess the power of finding employment and maintenance for the poor, the poor cannot in the nature of things possess the right ■ to demand them, are important truths flowing from the principle of population which when properly explained would by no means be above the most ordinary comprehensions. And it is evident that every man in the lower classes of society who became acquainted with these truths would be disposed to bear the dis- tresses in which he might be involved with more patience ; would feel less discontent and irritation at the government and the higher classes of society on account of his poverty ; would be on all occasions less disposed to insubordination and turbulence ; and if he received assistance either from any public institution or from the. hand of private charity^ he would receive it with more thank- fulness, and more justly appreciate its value. If these truths were by degrees more generally known (which in the course of time does not seem to be improbable from the natural effects of the mutual interchange of opinions), the lower classes of people as a body would become more peaceable and orderly, would be less inclined to tumultuous proceedings in seasons of scarcity, and would at all times be less influenced by inflammatory and seditious publications from knowing how little the price of labor and the means of supporting a family depend upon a revolution. The mere knowledge of these truths, even if THE MALTHUSIAN THEORY ^^ they did not operate sufficiently to produce any marked change in the prudential habits of the poor with regard to marriage, would still have a most beneficial effect on their conduct in a political light ; and. undoubtedly one of the most valuable of these effects would be the power that would result to the higher and middle classes of society of gradually improving their govern- ments ^ without the apprehension of those revolutionary excesses, the fear of which at present threatens to deprive Europe even of that degree of liberty which she had before experienced to be prac- ticable, and the salutary effects of which she had long enjoyed. From a review of the state of society in former periods com- pared with the present, I should certainly say that the evils resulting from the principle of population have rather diminished than increased, even under the disadvantage of an almost total ignorance of the real cause. And if we can indulge the hope that this ignorance will be gradually dissipated, it does not seem un- reasonable to expect that they will be still further diminished. The increase of absolute population, which will of course take place, will evidently tend but little to weaken this expectation, as everything depends upon the relative proportion between popula- tion and food, and not on the absolute number of people. In the former part of this work it appeared that the countries which possessed the fewest people often suffered the most from the effects of the principle of population ; and it can scarcely be doubted that, taking Europe throughout, fewer famines and fewer diseases arising from want have prevailed in the last century than in those which preceded it. On the whole, therefore, though our future prospects respecting the mitigation of the evils arising from the principle of population may hot be so bright as we could wish, yet they are far from 1 I cannot believe that the removal of all unjust grounds of discontent against constituted authorities would render the people torpid and indifferent to advan- tages which are really attainable. The blessings of civil liberty are so great that they surely cannot need the aid of false coloring to make them desirable. I should be sorry to think that the lower classes of people could never be animated to assert their rights but by means of such illusory promises as will generally make the remedy of resistance much worse than the disease which it was intended to cure. 78 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS being entirely disheartening, and by no means preclude that gradual and progressive improvement in human society, which before the late wild speculations on this subject was the object of rational expectation. To the laws of property and marriage, and to the apparently narrow principle of self-interest which prompts each individual to exert himself in bettering his conditioh, we are indebted for all the noblest exertions of human genius, for every- thing that distinguishes the civilized from the savage state.- A strict inquiry into the principle of population obliges us to con- clude that we shall never be able to throw down the ladder by which we have risen to this eminence ; but it by no means proves that we may not rise higher by the same means. The structure of society in its great features will probably always remain un- changed. We have every reason to beheve that it will always consist of a class of proprietors and a class of laborers-; but the condition of each and the proportion which they bear to each other may be so altered as greatly to improve the harmony and beauty of the whole. It would indeed be a melancholy reflection that, while the views of physical science are daily enlarging so as scarcely to be bounded by the most distant horizon, the science of moral and political philosophy should be confined within such narrow limits, or at best be so feeble in its influence as to be unable to counteract the obstacles to human happiness arising from a single cause. But however formidable these obstacles may have appeared in some parts of this work, it is hoped that the general result of the inquiry is such as not to make us give up the improvement of human society in despair. The partial good which seems to be attainable is worthy of all our exertions, is sufficient to direct our efforts and animate our prospects. And although we cannot expect that the virtue and happiness of man- kind will keep pace with the brilliant career of physical discovery ; yet if we are not wanting to ourselves, we may confidently indulge the hope that to no unimportant extent they will be influenced by its progress and will partake in its success. CHAPTER II THE DECLINING BIRTH RATE The decline in fertility as shown by corrected birth rates, So. — Causes of the declining birth rate, 84. — The natural rate of population-increase in different countries, 94. — The effective desire for offspring, g6. — Spencer's theory of individuation, 100. [It would be interesting to review the earlier critics of Malthus, but it would serve no essential purpose, interesting and curious as many of their ideas were. In the main they either combat his theory on theological grounds, aim their shafts at some non- essential part of it, or attempt to set up crudely supported theories of their own to demonstrate the baselessness of a fear of over- population. The first attempt to deal with the population prob- lem, after Malthus, which has had any influence on present-day thought was that of Herbert Spencer, a theory based upon bio- logical and physiological postulates. Spencer's theory is worthy of close attention, but it is without scientific proof. John Rae's sojourn and observations in Hawaii led him to emphasize a psy- chological factor — the desire for offspring — and its variability in the face of racial contacts, a matter also touched upon by Robert Louis Stevenson.^ The necessity for a restatement of the theory of population has been forced in recent years not only by the development of the social sciences, but by the declining birth rate, which Malthus did not and could not foresee. Not only has the ratio of births to total population fallen, but the actual fertility rate has decreased also. Nevertheless the death rate has declined so fast that the rate of natural increase is as high as, or higher than, at any time in the past hundred years. While the decrease in the birth rate 1 The South Seas, chap. v. 79 8o READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS calls for explanation, and while its bearing on the future of the population problem must be analyzed, it remains evjdeht from the table of natural increase that the fundamental questifin of the relation of population to subsistence is before the future, as the past, for solution.] 4. THE DECLINE OF HUMAN FERTILITY IN THE UNITED KINGDOM AND OTHER COUNTRIES AS SHOWN BY COR- RECTED BIRTH RATES 1 In dealing with birth statistics one or the other of .two objects may be desired : to ascertain the rate of natural increase of a community, or to determine its fertility. The first object is achieved by deducting the crude death rate from the birth rate as ordinarily stated. The statistics thus obtained are of great im- portance as indicating the results of the natural forces at work. But they deal with results only, and if the forces themselves are to be made an object of inquiry, a rearrangement of the facts and their statement in different terms from those of the crude birth and death rates are necessary, ^ he c orrected rate measures a force, ^|jruds_rate the result of the operation of this force?) Thus in the case of death rates the inherent tendency to niortality is measured, not by- the crude, but by the corrected death rate, the crude death rate stating the result of the tendency to death acting upon a population of given age and sex constitution. The Registrar-General's reports have accustomed us to the distinction for death rates, arid we should not think of using crude death rates as an index of mortality in this sense. But for birth rates it is otherwise. The birth rate as ordinarily stated, which will .be referred to henceforward as the crude birth rate, is still generally employed as the measure of the tendency of a population to in- crease by natural means, no other measure being in most cases readily available. That such use is often entirely misleading will be abundantly proved by numerous specific instances in the course of this paper. 1 By Arthur Newsholme, M.D., and T. H. C. Stevenson, M.D. Adapted from the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, \o\. LXIX (March, 1906), pp. 34-87. THE DECLINING BIRTH RATE 8 1 If a clue as to the future and an explanation of past experience is required, a method of stating the birth rate analogous to that by which .icprrected death rates are obtained is necessary. Such a birth rate should be an accurate measure of the tendency of the community to increase, just as the corrected death rate forms an accurate statement of its tendency to decrease. In other words, the corrected birth rate must be a measure of fertility, which, operative in a population of given constitution as to age, sex, and conjugal condition, produces as its result the crude birth rate. . . } It must be remembered that by the method of calculation adopted in this paper, the influences of differences in proportion ^ The authors' description of their method of calculating corrected birth rates is given in \!as Journal of Hygiene, Vol. V, No. 2, April, 1905. In order fairly to compare the fertility of two populations, or of the same population at different periods, it is necessary to take some community of known age, sex, and marital condition, find in said community the actual birth rate in each age group of married women of childbearing age, if we are seeking legiti- mate birth rates (or of all womert of childbearing age, if we are seeking " total " birth rates), and to regard these rates by age groups as standard fertility rates for those groups. The authors chose the rates of Sweden in 1891 as the standard. Secondly, knowing the age, sex, and marital distribution of the population of Eng- land and Wales in igoi, they find for each age group of married women of child- bearing age (i 5-20, 20-25, etc.) the number of children that would have been born in England and Wales had the women there had the same actual fertility, age for age, as those in Sweden in 1891. This gives a hypothetical legitimate birth rate, calculated on the whole population, of 34.91, and this rate the authors take as their standard birth rate with which other birth rates are compared. Thirdly, sup- pose we wish to compare the fertility of London women with those of England and Wales as a whole. In the same way a standard birth rate for London is cal- culated. It represents the birth rate London would have had, had London women in 1901 been of the same fertility as Swedish women in 1891. It turns out to be 36.95. The question is if London had had the same age, sex, and marital distribu- tion of its population as had England and Wales, what would its crude birth rate have been ? This is the " corrected birth rate " for which we are seeking. The 34,91 ratio of the standard rate of England and Wales to that of London is -g— or .9448. The standard rate of England and Wales, in other words, is only 94.48 per cent of that of London because London has an age, sex, and conjugal distribution of its population more favorable to childbearing than have England and Wales at large. It follows that if we multiply the actual recorded London rate by this "factor of correction" (.9448) we shall get a figure which represents the birth rate London would have had had its population been of the same age, sex, and conjugal distribution as that of England and Wales. Since London's crude birth rate in igoj was 27.42, its corrected birth rate was 0.9448(27.42), or 25.91. The factor of correction is of course different for each community. — Ed. 82 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS of wives and in the ages of these wives has been eliminated, and we are thus enabled to separate between what we may call the arithmetical and the pathological causes of decline in the birth rate. France is the best instance of a pathological birth rate. The term (" natality pathologique" ) is used by Dr. Jacques Bertillon, the head of the Statistical Bureau of the City of Paris. France has rather a larger number of wives aged 15-45 than England and Wales per 1000 of total population. But its cor- rected legitimate birth rate is 29 per cent lower, and its total corrected birth rate 24 per cent lower than that of England and Wales. Ireland,, on the other hand, has a low crude birth rate, which becomes one of the highest in Europe when correction is made for the fact that only 76.5 per 1000 of population, as compared with 11 7.0 for England and Wales, are wives at childbearing age, only 32.5 per cent of the women aged 15-45 being married, as compared with 46.8 per cent in England and Wales. . . . In Table A the chief communities are set forth in the order of their total corrected birth rates in 1880 or 1881 and m 1901-1904. At the earlier period, Germany, Belgium, and Norway headed the list. At the later period the position of Germany as a whole has receded, Ireland now preceding it. England and Wales is next lowest to France at both periods. If the countries be classi- fied according to the percentage decline of total annual birth rate which has occurred during twenty-two years. New South Wales comes first with a decline of 32 per cent, Victoria next with a decline of 25 per cent, then Belgium with 24 per cent decline. Saxony 23 per cent. New Zealand 19 per cent, and England and Wales 18 per cent. The smallest declines occurred in Austria — I per cent, Norway and Sweden 6 per cent each, and Italy 9 per cent ; Ireland showed an increase of 3 per cent. Among the cities given in the table, the total birth rates of London, Berlin, and Dublin were nearly equal in 188 1, the birth rates of Hamburg and Edinburgh being higher than these, and that of Paris very much lower. In 1903 Paris is still lowest, but Berlin is rapidly approximating to it; next comes Sidney and THE DECLINING BIRTH RATE 83 Melbourne, then in order Hamburg, London and Edinburgh. The greatest decline among the cities was 34 per cent in Berlin ; next came Paris with a decline of 28 per cent, followed by Edin- burgh with a decline of 20 per cent, and London with a decline of 17 per cent. The earlier corrected birth rates for Melbourne and Sidney could not be calculated for lack of the necessary data. TABLE A Communities in Order OF Total Corrected Birth Rate, 1880-188 Corrected Birth Rate PER 1000 OF Population Total Legiti- mate Communities in Order OF Total Corrected Birth Rate, 1901-1904 Corrected * Birth Rate PER 1000 OF Population Total Legiti- mate Percentage Decline in Cor- rected Birth Rate In total birth rate Inlegiti- mate birthrate Bavaria . . . Saxony . . . Belgium . . . German Empire Norway . . . Prussia . . . Scotland . . Austria . . . Denmark . . New South Wales Sweden . . Italy . . . New Zealand Victoria . . Ireland . . Hamburg . Edinburgh . England and Wales Berlin . Dublin London France Paris . 4549 4145 40.76 40-37 40.12 39-87 39-29 39-04 38.92 38.80 38-49 36.89 36.68 36.02 35-17 34-98 34-97 34-65 33-" 32.24 32.21 25.06 23.27 39-55 35-05 38.06 36-44 37-59 36-54 36-47 32.86 35-36 36-53 35-56 33-40 34-88 34-25 34-59 31-35 32-93 32-73 28.26 31.61 30-92 22.73 16.46 Bavaria Austria Norway Sweden Ireland Prussia Dublin German Empii Italy . . . Scotland Denmark . Saxony Belgium . New Zealand England and Wales Edinburgh Victoria . London . New South Hamburg Melbourne Sidney Berlin France . Paris . . Wales 40-37 38.50 37-79 36-19 36.08 35-72 35-39 35-34 33-71 33-38 33-12 31-76 31.01 29-63 28.41 28.08 27-04 26.83 26.47 25.40 24.07 23-89 21.89 21.63 16.65 35-59 32.84 35.62 32.90 35-59 32.72 34-58 32.01 31-17 31-65 29-94 26.60 28.85 28.44 27.29 26.68 25-77 25-93 24.61 21.70 22.26 21.58 18.57 19.29 ii.g8 — II — I -6 -6 + 3 — 10 + 10 — 12 -9 -15 -IS -23 -24 -19 -18 — 20 -25 -17 -32 -27 -34 -14 -28 — 10 ±0 -5 -7 + 3 — II + 9 — 12 -7 -13 -15 -24 -24 -i8 -17 -19 -25 -16 -33 -31 -34 -15 -27 84 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS .Causes of Decline of Birth Rate The preceding detailed analysis of corrected birth statistics makes it practicable to draw certain conclusions on the subject. It must still be remembered that we are dealing with the problem of fertility, in the main that of married life, after arithmetical sources of incomparability have been removed. It is clear that in the majority of countries for which corrected statistics could be calculated there has been a great decline in the corrected legitimate birth rate and an even greater decline in the corrected illegitimate birth rate. It is unfortunate that data ena- bling corrected statistics for Russia, the United States, and for Canada to be calculated could not be obtained. The French Catholic population of Canada are known to have an exceptionally high birth rate. The decline in the legitimate birth rate, shown in Table A, might be due either to an increased number of sterile marriages, or to smaller families. French, Danish, Swedish, Australian, and other statistics agree in showing that it is the latter phenomenon with which we are chiefly, if not solely con- cerned.i jf t^e decline was due to physical degeneration affect- ing the reproductive powers, a decrease of fecundity, or, in other words, an increased number of sterile marriages, would be rea- sonably expected ; this has not occurred. This fact at once raises the presumption that the fall in the birth rate is due to conditions within the control of the people, and is, as sometimes described, a form of socva\. felo-de-se. Urbanization. We have already compared urban and rural birth rates in 1881 and 1903, and compared 1881 with KjOJ,."^ 1 In New South Wales* the fecund marriages per 1000 total marriages were: At age 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 In period 1871-1880 .... In period 1891-1897 .... 987 978 972 948 948 919 897 852 801 706 576 410 275 92 Percentage decline . . 0.9 2-5 3-1 5.0 11.9 28.8 66.5 * Report of Royal Commission on Decline of Birth Rate, etc., in New South Wales, Vol. 1, p. 69. The decline in fecundity shown above is extremely small as compared with that in fertility. ^ This part of the discussion is omitted. THE DECLINING BIRTH RATE 85 The steady increase of urbanization of the population in every civilized country is not, per se, a cause of lowered birth rate. On any such supposition one cannot explain the relatively high birth rate of a large nurnber of towns in 1881, and of Dublin and Belfast in 1903. This qonclusion is confirmed by a com- parison of the selected urban and rural counties of England and Wales in 1881 and 1903. In 1881 the selected urban counties had a relative corrected legitimate birth rate (figure of merit) represented by the figure 92.0, the selected rural counties a rela- tive corrected birth rate represented by the figure 97.7.^ Here was a material difference. In 1903 the corresponding figures were 77.9 and 80.3. Both now have a much reduced birth rate, the decline of the rural being greater than that of the urban birth rate (18 per cent as compared with 15 per cent). The four last counties in the following table may be taken as further special examples having chiefly rural populations : Corrected Legitimate Birth Rate Per Cent Reduction 1S81 1903 England and Wales . . London Bedfordshire .... Berkshire Cornwall Rutland 3273 30.92 32.61 33-97 3546 36-39 27.29 25.91 25.11 26.80 25.11 26.04 17 16 23- •(Rural counties) 28 _ Summing up the evidence as to rural and urban birth rates in this country, it may be said that (i) rural birth rates have declined more than urban birth rates, and are approximating to the latter ; (2) there is no essential reason why the urban should be lower than the rural birth rates. The fact that in Germany the reduction of the birth rate is chiefly shown in its great cities, is an indication not that urbani- zation favors a low birth rate, but that the operative causes of a low birth rate have not yet affected the rural population of that country to any great extent. 1 The "figure of merit" is a percentage of the Swedish rate of i8gi, taken as abase (100). — Ed. 86 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS Indust rial Conditions^ These are difficult to separate from social conditions, to be considered later, but one or two indications may be mentioned in this connection. In 1881 the agricultural counties showed the highest fertility. In 1903 this difference had largely disappeared. A table, not here reproduced, was prepared showing that both great and small declines in birth rate have occurred among the counties which have the highest proportion of persons engaged in agriculture. In New Zealand the popula- tion is largely agricultural, but it now has a corrected total birth rate not much higher than that of England, and its corrected total birth rate has declined 19 per cent in the same twenty-two years in which that of England has declined 18 per cent. The exces- sively low birth rates of Huddersfield, Halifax and Bradford do not reasonably lend themselves to the suggestion that employment in the woolen and worsted industries is concerned in producing a low birth rate ; ^ nor do the percentages of women industrially occupied in different counties vary with variations in the birth rate. The mining counties are, however, among those having the highest birth rate.' — ,g ggg. A ccording to the figures of 1881, Scotland, Bavaria, Belgium, Norway, Prussia, New South Wales, Sweden, Denmark, Saxony, and New Zealand all had corrected birth rates over the standard ; while urban communities Hke Paris, Kensington, Bradford, Beriin, Huddersfield, etc., were far below the standard. There is no evidence of differences of race fertility among these civilized races, whatever may be the case among races for whom exact and corrected statistics are unattainable. In 1903 we can- not expect to be able to institute comparisons of race, for other causes of variation are evidently in overwhelming operation. Relig ion. In 188 1 there was no evidence of any connection between the manner of life involved in any religious persuasion and birth rate. Bavaria (11 3.3), Belgium (109.0), and Ireland 1 Ethel M. Elderton, after an elaborate analysis of the data, arrives at a con- flicting conclusion, that " the fall in the birth rate has been most marked where women are industrially employed." (Report on the English Birth Rate, Part I, England North of the Humber. Eugenics Laboratory Memoirs, XIX and XX (1914), p. 21S). — Ed. THE DECLINING BIRTH RATE 87 (99.1), which are chiefly Roman Catholic, may be set against Norway (107.7), Prussia (104.7), and Scotland (104.5).! In 1902-1903 it is otherwise. The high fertility of French Catholic Canadians is well known, though exact statistics cannot be given here. Bavaria (101.9) and Ireland (101.9) have still birth rates over the standard, and are alone in this respect, ex- cepting Norway (102.0). Italy (95.7 in 1881 and 89.3 in 1903) and France (65.1 in 1881 and 55.3 in 1903) are exceptions to the rule, but there is little doubt that in both these countries orthodox religious restraints have greatly diminished. Austria (94.1 in 1 88 1 and 94.1 in 1901) remains stationary, and is the best example of constancy of corrected birth rate in a Roman Catholic country. ^ Social Conditions, incl uding Eovertv. The view usually taken is that fertility declines wiSETincreased prosperity. It undoubtedly is lower in the higher social strata, ajd diminishes in many com- munities with increase of prosperity. It may, however, be consid- ered an open question whether this change is partly physiological or is entirely due to artificial means. In England, in Germany, and in other countries the birth rate has declined with general increase of social comfort. Ireland is the only country on our list in which with some probable increase of general welfare the birth rate has increased. The instance of Ireland is somewhat complicated, for in 1881 there was a much greater amount of assisted emigration than in 1903, and it is possible that the popu- lation withdrawn a!t the earlier period was more prolific than that left in Ireland. On the other hand, Ireland is a chiefly Roman Catholic country, in which preventive measures against child- bearing are banned, and the birth rate represents in the main the true fertility of the country ; while in Germany and in England the birth rate is the resultant of two forces, the relative magni- tude of which is unknown, namely, natural fertility, and artificial measures against it. It is not unlikely that up to a certain point improvement in prosperity favors fertility, though beyond this it may act, to a limited extent, in tl^ opposite direction. Tak- ing countries as a whole, there cannot be said to be any direct 1 These are "figures of merit." — Ed. 88 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS relationship either in 1 88 1 or in 1902- 1903 between the degree of national prosperity and fertility. Norway and Ireland, both rela- tively poor countries, have a high fertility, but Bavaria and France, which are relatively more prosperous, have one a high and the other a low birth rate. The fact that in Bradford, Berlin, Huddersfield, Halifax, etc., as well as in Paris as early as 188 1, a low birth rate was already experienced, shows that high indus- trial and general prosperity may be associated with a low birth rate. Instances of a similar kind are much more numerous in recent years. The cases of Hampstead, Kensington, and Bourne- mouth suggest an inverse relationship between fertility and pros- perity. The greater decline of fertility in Huddersfield, Halifax, Burnley, Blackburn, and Bradford than in Bethnal Green, Glas- gow, Manchester, or Leeds suggests that the skilled artisan class, which probably form a larger proportion of the population of the former towns than of the latter, are adding less to the population than the class of unskilled workers. But such statements must be regarded rather in the nature of surmise than entirely justified by the facts. The following study of metropolitan statistics gives more exact data for forming a judgment on this question. Fertility of Groups of London Boroughs classified ACCORDING to SoCIAL POSITION In a paper read at the meeting of the International Statistical Institute at St. ' Petersburg, 1 897, Dr. Jaques Bertillon gave the following statistics as to the annual births per 1000 women aged ■fifteen to fifty in different quarters of the undernoted cities : TABLE B Classification Paris Vienna Very poor quarters . . . Poor quarters Comfortable quarters . Very comfortable quarters Rich quarters Very rich quarters . . . Average 108 95 72 6S S3 34 80 1 57 129 114 96 63 47 200 164 155 153 ■107 71 153 147 140 107 107 87 63 109 M THE DECLINING BIRTH RATE 89 Dr. Bertillon has since kindly supplied to one of us the following statement of the number of legitimate births per 1000 married women aged fifteen to fifty in Paris and Berlin : TABLE c Classification Paris Berlin 143 128 109 96 94 65 214 1 98 192 172 145 121 Poor quarters Comfortable quarters Very comfortable quarters Rich quarters Very rich quarters ....... In the following table we have made a similar calculation for London, substituting the more complete correction described in this paper for the method of correction used in Table- B. The metropolitan boroughs have been divided into six groups, which generally resemble Dr. Bertillon's groups. The classification has been based on the average number of domestic servants to every 100 families as displayed by the census returns for 1901. TABLE D. GROUPS OF METROPOLITAN BOROUGHS Number of Domestic Servants Corrected Birth Rate, 1903 Relative Corrected Birth Rate, that of London being taken AS 100 PER 100 Families Legitimate Illegitimate Total Legitimate Illegitimate Group I ... Under 10 30.78 0.78 31-56 I18.8 85-7 Group 2 . . . 10-20 24.81 1.01 25.82 95-8 iii.i Group 3 . . . 20-30 24.90 0-73 25.63 96.1 80.2 Group 4 . . . 30-40 24.82 0.68 25.50 95.8 74-7 Group 5 . . . 40-50 23.62 1.74I 25.36 91.2 191.2 Group 6 . . . Over 60 20.04 0.41 20.45 77-3 45.1 Total .... 25.91 0.91 26.82 1 00.0 100.0 Group I. Census population, 1901 = 1,1541142. comprises Shoreditch, Beth- nal Green, Bermondsey, Southwark, Poplar, Finsbury, and Stepney. 1 The excessive illegitimate birth rate in Group 5 was due entirely to the high rate in Marylebone, in which is situated Queen Charlotte's Lying-in Hospital, go READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS Group n. Census population, 1901 = 1,996,825, comprises Battersea, Wool- wich, Camberwell, Deptford, Islington, St. Pancras, Hackney, Lambeth, Fulham, Hammersmith. Group 3. Census population, 1901=206,422, comprises Holborn, Green- wich, Stoke Newington. Qioup 4. Census population, 1901 =386,452, comprises Wandsworth, Lewis- ham, City of London. Group 3. Census population, 1901 = 351,119, comprises Paddington, Mary- lebone, Chelsea.' Group 6. Census population, 1901=441,581, comprises Westminster, Ken- sington, Hampstead. It will be observed that Groups 2, 3, 4, and $, comprising 64.8 per cent of the total population of London, had a corrected total birth rate which only varied between 25.36 and 25.82. The two extreme groups show marked differences, the rich districts at one end of the scale having a corrected total birth rate of 20.45, a-^d the very poor districts at the other end of the scale a corrected total birth rate of 31.56 per 1000 of population. The former of these birth rates affects 9.7 per cent, the latter 25.4 per cent of the total population of London. The above facts suggest the conclusion that among the rich in London the prevention of childbearing is systematically and largely practiced, that among the very poor the practice is proba- bly almost unknown, and that the mass of the population which lies between these two social extremes occupies an intermediate position in regard to such preventive measures. Social Suicide The last sentence anticipates the general conclusion to which an impartial view of the whole field of corrected facts seems to us inevitably to lead. The decline of birth rate is not due to increased poverty. It is associated with a general raising of the standard of com- fort, and is an expression of the determination of the people to secure this greater comfort. It is not caused by greater stress in modern life, but is a con- sequence of the greater desire for luxury. Possibly the raising of the age for leaving school, and allied changes as to work, THE DECLINING BIRTH RATE 91 have aided in producing the result, by preventing children being an early source of profit. These and allied motives have made parents look round for the means of keeping their families within " prudent " limits. The gradual slackening of the reUgious restraints, which were formerly to a much greater extent associ- ated with family life, have doubtless aided in making husbands and wives willing to utilize such preventive means as they have been able to discover. Increased education has helped in securing access to the necessary information, and the greater aggregation of populations in towns has doubtless supplied not only increased facilities for the communication of information on the subject, but also for the purchase of the necessary appliances. Many druggists are stated to make a large share of their income in this way.^ A marked impetus in this direction was given in England by notorious trials in 1877. The special experience of towns like Halifax, Huddersfield and Northampton implies, and is known to be associated with, a special local propagandism. What caused the earlier implication of France in this policy of short-sighted prudential selfishness it would be beyond the scope of this paper to discuss. The examples already given indicate that the "gospel of com- fort" has been widely adopted, and that it is becoming the prac- tical ethical standard of a rapidly increasing number of civilized communities, both in this country and abroad. The selected rural counties in this country have now approximated to the urban counties. Prussia has not yet overtaken Berlin, but it is following its example. We have no hope that any nation — in the absence of strong and overwhelming moral influences to the contrary — will be permanently left behind in this race to decimate the race. We must look ^— failing the possibility indicated in the last sen- tence — for an increasing practice of the artificial prevention of childbearing, which, whatever may be said for exceptional in- stances, is at least difficult to justify when used merely as a sup- posed means towards increased social comfort. And with this we must look for a lower standard of moral outlook, a lowering of the ideal of married life, and a consequent deterioration of the 1 See Report of New South Wales Royal Commission, p. 15- 92 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS moral, if not also of the physical nature of mankind. France has anticipated the rest of the world, and has thus come near the consummation of its social felo-de-se. But it is only a question of decades, in the absence of a great change in the moral stand- point of the majority of the people, before others follow in the same direction, possibly even at the same pace. The outlook is gloomy, and we cannot look with confidence to the help which is likely to come either from preaching or medical teaching. What is the Bearing of the Preceding Facts on the Future Welfare of Mankind? It is by no means certain that children will be better reared because less numerous. Comparisons of in- fantile mortality are somewhat fallacious. Although it is true that infantile mortality is usually highest in the districts having a very high birth rate, this is probably due to the fact that such high birth rates occur in communities of low social position, and that the facts connoted by social position, and not the high birth rate, are the cause of the high infantile mortality. With the decreas- ing birth rate in England and Wales, there has been no reduction of infantile mortality.^ The fact that the birth rate is much smaller in higher than in lower social strata, has given rise to many Cassandra-like utter- ances. But there has always been a great difference between the two ; and it is notorious that branches of the aristocracy have only been kept alive by engrafting from other social strata. There are, unfortunately, but few facts bearing on the question whether the reduction of the birth rate is greater in the higher than in the lower social strata. Between 1881 and 1903 the corrected legitimate birth rate of London declined 16 per cent, that of England and Wales 17 per cent, that of Kensington 19 per cent, of Brighton 20 per cent, and of Hampstead 36 per cent, which, if the examples are not exceptional, seems to indi- cate that the population is now being replenished in a higher proportion than formerly from the lower strata of society. Whether 1 In 1879-1883 the infantile death rate in England and Wales averaged 139, in 1899-1903 it averaged 147, per 1000 births. In London the infantile death rate in 1879-1883 was 150 per 1000 births, and in 1899-1903 the same. [But since 1903 the decline in the infant death rate has been very appreciable. — Ed.] THE DECLINING BIRTH RATE 93 this means that the less fit are now contributing a greater share to the general population than in the past is by no means certain. Very few would venture 'to assert that the line of intellectual ability or of physical endurance is horizontal and not obHque, or possibly almost perpendicular in relation to social position. It must be remembered that the contribution to the future popu- lation is not directly proportional to the birth rate. When correc- tion is made for this fact, the position of the different social strata is considerably modified. Thus taking the six groups of popu- lation in London, which at the census of 1901 numbered 4,536,541, we find that the net addition to the population in' Group I by excess of corrected birth rate over death rate is much less than the births alone would indicate, and is less than in Group 4 (see Table E). Group 6 is exceptional and relatively TABLE E. GROUPS OF METROPOLITAN BOROUGHS 1 II " « b 1 n ^3 11 RECTED Natural REASE, THAT IS, ESS OF Corrected TH Rate over Cor- TED Death Rate B ■UB & u 55wraS lis Group I 34-97 31-56 18.41 1.0394 19-14 . 12.42 25-4 Group 2 38-32 25.82 14-43 1.0442 15.07 10-75 44-0 Group 3 25.99 25-63 14.56 1-0557 15-37 10.26 4.6 Group 4 25.88 25-50 12.07 1 .0496 12.67 12.83 8-5 Group 5 25-17 25.36 14.82 1 .0466 15-51 9-85 7-8 Group 6 18.24 20.45 12.99 1.1213 14-57 5.88 9-7 1 This method of presenting the facts gives a statement in each case of what the natural increase in the population of England and Wales would be if the same fertility, marriage, and death rates prevailed in its population as in that of the group, in question. The results are consequently comparable, and form the only proper basis for comparing the relative increments added to the population by such groups of districts. It may possibly be urged that marriage being a voluntary transaction, due credit should be given when instituting such a comparison to the group with the higher marriage rate for the increased number of births resulting from it. But it must be noted that (i) for the female domestics of Kensington and Hampstead as a class marriage is not a matter of choice, and that (2) although in, they are not of the district they inhabit, as they come from poorer districts, whose relative birth 94 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS small. Whether its contribution to the total result is much smaller than in the past must still be a matter of doubt, notwithstanding the instances already quoted ; and meanwhile it is satisfactory to find that the contribution to the population furnished by the aggregate of the first four groups, constituting 82.5 per cent of the total population of London, is not at a much less rate than that furnished by the poorest group of all. It is unfortunate that, owing to changes of boundaries of metropolitan boroughs, etc., the facts for the same groups could not be ascertained for 1881. 5. THE NATURAL INCREASE OF POPULATION 1 The table on page 95 gives for most of the countries of the world for which data are available the average annual excess of the birth rate over the death rate, by decades. It shows, for in- stance, that disregarding immigration and emigration there were in the German Empire, on the average, in each year from 1901 to 19 10, 14.3 more births than there were deaths in each 1000 of the total population. In other words there were 10 14.3 living people where there had been 1000 the year before. rate would by their absence be rendered unduly high if age and sex were corrected for, just as their presence would render that of the richer groups unduly low. In the absence of any means of ascertaining what proportion of the deficiency in the marriage rate of richer districts is due to such inevitable avoidance of marriage, and what, if any, to greater voluntary avoidance, the only safe method appears to be to exclude the influence of variations in the marital conditions as well as in the age and sex constitution of the populations compared. This is done in the " cor- rected natural increase " as stated above. 1 Adapted from R. Jaeckel : Die Geburten-, Heirats-, Sterbe-, und Geburten- UberschuPziffern in den hauptsachUchsten Kulturstaaten der Welt, 1801-1911, Jahrbuch fiir National-Oekonomie, Vol. GUI, in, chap, xlviii, pp. 86-go. (July, 1914.) Similar tables can be consulted in the Annual Reports of the Registrar- General of England and Wales. THE DECLINING BIRTH RATE 95. 1801 1811 1821 1831 1841 1851 1'861 1871 1881 1891 1901 TO TO TO TO TO TO TO TO TO TO TO 1810 1820 1830 1840 1850 1860 1870 1880 1890 1900 1910 German Empire . 9-3 8.9 10.3 1 1.9 1 1.7 13-9 14-3 Prussia . . , . 13-3 9.2 10.4 lO.I ■1-3 12.4 12.7 14.8 'S-i Bavaria .... 5-8 6.4 5-5 7-1 9-5 8-5 II. I 12.9 Saxony .... 1 0.0 10.9 12:5 12.4 13-8 13-8 iS-S 13-8 Alsace-Lorraine 7.8 S-3 6.6 74 6.5 8.6 9.8 Austria 10.4 57 5.2 6.2 8.0 7-5 8.4 10.5 II.O Hungary 11.5 10.7 II. I France S7 S-8 4.2 4.1 2.4 2.7 17 1.8 0.7 1.2 England andWales 10.2 11.9 12.7 14.0 134 11.7 II.8 Scotland 12.9 13-3 I3-I 11.9 1 1.8 Ireland 97 8.1 S4 4.8 S-9 Denmark .... 74 9-3 94 7-1 lO.I 11.9 10.8 12.0 134 12.7 12.0 Sweden 3-0 7.6 II.O 8.7 "•5 II. I 11.2 12.2 12.2 10.7 10.6 Norway 2-3 8.7 14.4 94 12.6 15.8 12.9 14.0 13-9 14.0 12.9 Finland 44 II.O 13-3 5-2 12.0 7-.2 2.2 14.8 13-9 12.5 13.2 Russia 15.1 Bulgaria 134 18.S Servia 13-9 6.2 19.8 14.7 1S.6 Koumania .... 6.9 37 '3-9 II.4 14.0 Greece 74 8.0 Italy V 7.0 lo.s 10.8 II. I Spain 7-1 4-5 S-3 9-2 Portugal 10.4 9-3 n.6 Holland 6.8 77 10.4 11.9 13.2 14.1 15.0 Belgium 7.6 6.1 7.6 8.3 9.8 9.6 10. 1 9-7 Switzerland . . . S-3 7.2 7-3 7-3 9-1 10.2 Australian Federa- tion 24-3 20.4 20.0 16.9 I S-3 New South Wales 25.2 23-3 19.8 18.0 .6.3 Victoria 19.1 24.4 18.3 16.3 14.6 12.7 Queensland . . . 24-5 21. 1 20.3 19.2 16.2 South Australia . 27.0 22.4 22i9 17.0 14.7 West Australia . . 20.7 17.0 18.7 13-9 17.9 Tasmania .... 17.1 14.6 19.4 18.0 18.4 New Zealand . . 27.8 28.3 234 16.9 17.0 Chile S-8 5.0 1.9 Uruguay 23-1 20.9 24.1 Japan 8.3 9.8 "-S Connecticut . . . 97 6-5 8.3 5.6 6-7 8.0 Massachusetts . . 10.9 6-3 6.1 S-9 8.4 9-3 Michigan .... 137 12.7 9.2 6.8 Vermont 5-3 6.1 34 4.4 4.8 96 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS 6. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE EFFECTIVE DESIRE FOR OFFSPRING! The laws of population as expounded by Malthus will be found to fail. His error arises from the fact that he assimilates man to the inferior animals. This was also the practice of the elder Mirabeau, who maintained that wherever there was subsistence, the human species would multiply "like rats in a barn." Now the nature of the two is different; and if you assume that two things of unlike nature obey the same laws, you are guilty of a rashness that almost infallibly vitiates your conclu- sions. The inferior animals are led by mere instinct, whereas man is guided by reason, by fancy, and by that changeful thing we call moral feeling. Moreover, man and the lower animals are different physically. With the' latter the female admits the male only when she is in a condition to conceive ; with man it is other- wise. There are still other important points of difference under this head which you will find set forth in the Memorabilia, where Socrates is enumerating the particulars of man's superiority. But the more significant differences are not those which are solely or chiefly physical ; but those which are psychological and moral. Man is the child of art, phantasy, and of reason full of freaks. The rapid depopulation of these islands [Hawaii] is, in itself, a curious circumstance, and highly interesting as connected with the probable fate of other rude nations, the mass of the earth, in fact, if subjected to similar influences. It is, moreover, a phe- nomenon which does not square with "the Mirabeau-Malthusian doctrine. Subsistence is easily procured here, there being an abundance of vacant, fertile land,' two hours daily labor on which would give every man ample support for a large family. Cattle, goats, and horses (the latter eaten by the natives and preferred 1 By John Rae. From The Sociological Theory of Capital, edited by C. W. Mixter, pp. 354-358. The Macmillan Company, New York, 1905. The selection is taken originally from a manuscript written by Rae in the early sixties while he was living in the Hawaiian Islands, but the last three paragraphs are from his New Principles of Political Economy, Boston, 1834. Two rather more elaborate versions of Rae's final position on the subject'of population may be found in the Economic Journal, March, igo2, pp. 111-120. THE DECLINING BIRTH RATE 97 to beef), have been added to the resources of former times. One would expect, therefore, on Malthusian principles, an increase of population instead of this "fearful diminution. Vice is put down by Malthus as one of the checks to popula- tion ; and here it is true of recent years that vice, in the form of drunkenness and licentiousness especially among young females, has greatly increased. But with, Malthus vice is treated as specif- ically "a check" to the pressure of a growing population upon the means of subsistence, and arising out of that pressure. Here, as has just been observed, there is no pressure of population. Those other forms of vice and things analogous to vice, which are the positive checks of a growing population in straightened material circumstances — wars, epidemics, human sacrifice, infanti- cide, inconstant marriages, and intercourse between males, which last was formerly an established institution, have all since the coming of the missionaries been greatly lessened or done away with altogether. The fact is that the Malthusian philosophy of population accounts for the vital phenomena of healthy societies only, not at all for that of sick societies, such as the one in these islands has become notwithstanding the efforts of the missionaries,^ and such as Rome was in the days of her decline. A scientific theory which does not explain the totality of the phenomena with which it is concerned, is manifestly insufficient; at best, it may be half right. A truly philosophical Essay on Population, fearlessly embracing the whole subject, might proceed thus. Man is an animal and more. Being an animal he. must in each generation exercise his powers of propagation to the extent of somewhat more than repro- ducing himself, else accidents would diminish and ultimately destroy the race. He resembles the inferior animals also in this, that the act of propagation is attended with vehement pleasure. But he differs from them in this, that he knows the probable results of this act (which they do not), and in dread of these results may altogether refrain or take measures to negative them. He has 1 See the article in the Economic Journal for the causes which Rae assigns for this social degeneration. 98 READINGS IN. SOCIAL PROBLEMS in short the capacity of diminishing his numbers by abstinence which his reason, either when on the right road or when a wan- dering, may teach him ; or by other modes in which the appetite is abundantly gratified. For the reason that man is more than an animal, therefore, to increase, or to merely preserve, the numbers of any society, it is necessary that there exist an effective desire of offspring}- This last in some respects coincides with the effective desire of accumulation, since if a man desire offspring he will generally effectively desire the means of supporting them (and advancing their position in the world). But it is, nevertheless, regulated by different principles. These are mainly certain sentiments per- vading the society, and which we may term instincts of Society. There is great difficulty in assigning a cause for these instincts, much the same as that we experience in accounting for the in- stincts proper of animals. We may rest on this without going farther, that in any particular species of animal and in any partic- ular society, they conduce to their respective well-being in some particular phase of their existence.* But though in consequence of having been " hammered into the race," these social instincts respecting population are relatively permanent, they may, nevertheless, change. And thus it comes about that we tread on dangerous ground whenever we preach Malthusianism to any people. The peculiar nature of the human mind, rather excited to action by motives, than passively oper- ated on by them, and molding, therefore, its energies to suit the course it adopts, occasions a difference between phenomena ^ The reader may be surprised at first sight that in this summary Rae makes no mention of man's need for food, seeing that in so far as he is an animal, that is a manifest requirement. The reason for the omission is that Rae is dealing here primarily with the specific principles of human propagation^ not with their com- bination with other principles (" diminishing returns," " invention," and the like) which have to do with wealth-production. In other words, throughout this Article he is concerned with setting forth not the complete doctrine of the actual multiplica- tion of the human species but with the pure theory of population itself. — C. W. M. " Rae believed that the strenuous warfare in which for many centuries the northern races of Europe were engaged, produced in them strong " instincts of society " respecting the desire for offspring and the sanctity of marriage, which still persist though threatened by modern conditions. THE DECLINING BIRTH RATE 99 influenced by it and all others. Hence, according to the preponder- ating motive, and the course of action followed, the same powers and principles take opposite directions, and the will is able to draw to its purposes and make allies of those which would seem naturally opposed to it. Thus in an intelligent and moral community, the vanity of the mother is gratified in the well-being of the child, and she prides herself in the proofs of her having been an affectionate and care- ful parent. In a vain and dissipated community, on the other hand, she would be ashamed of devoting her attention to the homely and unostentatious cares to which solicitude for the wel- fate of offspring prompts. In the one case, vanity excited parental affection, in the other it stifles it. The movement of the mind, in these instances, is somewhat analogous to that of those bal- ances, in which the poise, if in the least inclining to one side or the other, hurries it down with a rapid and continually increasing preponderance. This proneness in humanity to advance or recede with a speed accelerated by the subjugation of opposing motives, helps to afford an explanation of what I conceive to be one of the main causes of the decay of states. [In the Article in the Economic Journal mentioned above, Rae goes more extensively than in this brief outline into the nature and causes of what he calls the " instincts of society " touching matters of marriage and procreation. He develops there at some length the idea that the effective desire of offspring depends not only upon individual psychology (as we ordinarily set bounds to that order of facts), but also upon a general hopeful, optimistic outlook on life pervading the whole social group. When a society gets on the downward road, and its members feel a sense of depression and lack of self-respect, men cease to breed. Under such circumstances there is no agreement between material circumstances and the propagation of the species. The effective desire of off- spring means, of course, not merely the desire to bring children into the world, but the taking satisfaction in them, and the desire to rear them to maturity. On these points, and generally on the whole subject of the theory of popula- tion, powerful support is afforded Rae by Bagehot in his Economic Studies. In one particular it seems to the Editor [C. W. M.], Rae is not altogether correct ; and that is in the position he takes here and elsewhere with respect to the relation between the principle of the effective desire of offspring and the principle of the effective desire of accumulation. They may be often opposed lOO READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS to each other. In a healthful society, indeed, for general sociological reasons, both will be strong ; and in a sick society, on the other hand, both will be weak. But in a society which is neither wholly well or wholly sick (as is the state of most societies) a strong effective desire of accumulation with many in- dividuals, or with certain sections of the soeiety, may go along with a weak effective desire of offspring, and vice versa. Rae seems to have been led into this position, involving some degree of error, through his disposition to over- emphasize social solidarity for the purpose of getting strong contrasts, as wholes, between the different communities. But however this may be, it is certain that we cannot dogmatize for all times and places and classes in respect to population, in the Malthusian fashion. And it is also clear that in the principle of the effective desire of offspring we have the true center of gravity, so to speak, of this complex and difficult subject — the starting point for fresh and more fruitful studies. — C. W. M.] 7. THE LAW OF POPULATION BASED UPON THE OPPOSITION BETWEEN INDIVIDUATION AND GENESIS ^ The forces preservative of race are two — ability in each member of the race to preserve itself, and ability to produce other members — power ...^jmaintairL-indivMlial Ijfe, and posgr to genCTateJhe species. These must vary inversely. When, from lowness of organization, the ability to contend with external dan- gers is small, there must be great fertility to compensate for the consequent mortality ; otherwise the race must die out. When, on the contrary, high endowments give much capacity of self- preservation, a correspondingly low degree of fertility is requi- site. Given the dangers to be met as a constant quantity ; then, as the ability of any species to meet them must be a constant quantity too, and as this is made up of the two factors — power to maintain individual life and power to multiply — these can- not do other than vary inversely : one must decrease as the other increases. . . . The opposite side of this antagonism has also several aspects. Progress of organic evolution may be shown in increased bulk, in increased structure, in increased amount or variety of action, or in combinations of these; and under any of its forms this 1 By Herbert Spencer. Condensed from Principles of Biology, Vol. II, pp. 401, 406-410, 479-5°8- D- Appleton & Company, New York, 1867. THE DECLINING BIRTH RATE loi carrying higher of each individuahty, implies a correlative retar- dation in the establishment of new individualities. Other things equal, every addition to the bulk of an organism is an augmentation of its life. Besides being an advance in inte- gration it implies a greater total of activities gone through in the assimilation of materials ; and it implies, thereafter, a greater total of the vital changes taking place from moment to moment in all parts of the enlarged mass. Moreover, while increased size is thus, in so far, the expression of increased life it is also, where the organ- ism is active, the expression of increased ability to maintain life — increased strength. Aggregation of substance is almost the only mode in which self-preserving power is shown among the lowest types ; and even among the highest, sustaining the body in its integrity is that in which self-preservation fundamentally consists — is the end which the widest intelligence indirectly is made to subserve. While, on the one hand, the increase of tissue consti- tuting growth is conservative both in essence and in result; on the other hand, decrease of tissue, either from injury, disease, or old age, is in both essence and result the reverse. And if so, every addition to individual life thus implied, necessarily delays or diminishes the casting off of matter to form new individuals. Other things equal, too, a greater degree of organization in- volves a smaller degree of that disorganization shown by the sepa- ration of reproductive gemmas and germs. Detachment of portion or portions from what was previously a living whole, is a ceasing of coordination and is therefore essentially at variance with that establishment of greater coordination which is achieved by struc- tural development. In the extreme cases where a living mass is continually dividing and subdividing, it is manifest that there can- not arise much physiological division of labor; since progress towards mutual dependence of parts is prevented by the parts becoming independent. Contrariwise, it is equally clear that in proportion as the physiological division of labor is carried far, the separative process must be localized in some comparatively small portion of the organism, where it may go on without affecting the general structure — must become relatively subordinate. The ad- vance that is shown by greater heterogeneity, must be a hindrance I02 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS to multiplication in another way. For organization entails cost. That transfer and transformation of materials implied by differ- entiation, can be effected only by expenditure of force ; and this supposes consumption of digested and absorbed food, which might otherwise have gone to make new organisms, or the germs of them. Hence, that individual evolution which consists in pro- gressive differentiation, as well as that which consists in progres- sive integration, necessarily diminishes that species of dissolution, general or local, which propagation of the race exhibits. In active organisms we have yet a further opposition between self-maintenance and maintenance of the race. All motion, sen- sible and insensible, generated by an animal for the preservation of its life is motion liberated from decomposed nutriment — nutri- ment which if not thus decomposed, would have been available for reproduction ; or rather — might have been replaced by nutri- ment fitted for reproductive purposes, absorbed from other kinds of food. Hence in proportion as the activities increase — in pro- portion as, by its varied, complex, rapid, and vigorous actions, an animal gains power to support itself and to cope with surrounding dangers, it must lose power to propagate. If, of the force which the parent obtains from the environment, much is consumed in its own life, little remains to be consumed in producing other lives ; and, conversely, if there is a great consumption in produc- ing other lives, it can only be where comparatively litde is re- served for parental life. " Hence, then. Individuation and Genesis are necessarily i antag- onistic. Grouping under the word Individuation all processes by which individual life is completed and maintained and enlarging the meaning of the word Genesis so as to include all processes aiding the formation and perfecting of new individuals; we see that the two are fundamentally opposed. Assuming other things to remain the same — assuming that environing conditions as to climate, food, enemies, etc., continue constant; then, inevitably, every higher degree of individual evolution is followed by a lower degree of race-multiplication, and vice versa. Progress in bulk, complexity, or activity, involves retrogress in fertility ; and prog- ress in fertility involves retrogress in bulk, complexity, or activity. THE DECLINING BIRTH RATE 103 . . . We saw that a species cannot be maintained unless the power to preserve individual life and the power to propagate other individuals vary inversely. And here we have seen that, irrespec- tive of an end to be subserved, these powers cannot do other than vary inversely. Multiplication of the Human Race As a matter of course, the inverse variation between Individua- tion and Genesis holds of man as of all other organized beings. His extremely low rate of multiplication we shall recognize as the necessary concomitant of his much higher evolution. And the causes of increase or decrease in his fertility, we shall expect to find in those changes of bulk, of structure, or of expenditure, which we have in all other cases seen associated with such effects. In the absence of detailed proof that these parallelisms exist, it might suffice to contemplate the several communities between the reproductive function in human beings and other beings. I do not refer simply to the fact that genesis proceeds in a simi- lar manner ; but I refer to the similarity of the relation between the generative function and the functions that have for their joint end the preservation of the individual. In Man, as in other crea- tures that expend much, genesis commences only when growth and development are decUning in rapidity and approaching their termination. Among the higher organisms in general, the repro- ductive activity, continuing during the prime of life, ceases when the vigor declines, leaving a closing period of infertility ; and in like manner among ourselves, barrenness supervenes when mid- dle age brings the surplus vitality to an end. So, too, it is found that in Man, as in beings of lower orders, there is a period at which fecundity culminates. At the commencement of the repro- ductive period, animals bear fewer offspring than afterwards ; and towards the close of the reproductive period, there is a decrease in the number produced. In like manner, the fecundity of women increases up to the age of about twenty-five years ; and continuing high with but slight diminution till after thirty, then gradually wanes. Once more, there is the fact that a too early bearing of I04 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS young produces on a woman the same injurious effects as on an inferior creature — an arrest of growth and an enfeeblement of constitution. Considering these general and special parallelisms, we might safely infer that variations of human fertility conform to the same laws as do variations of fertility in general. But it is not needful to content ourselves with an implication. Evidence is assignable that what causes increase or decrease of genesis in other crea- tures, causes increase or decrease of genesis in Man. It is true that, even more than hitherto, our reasonings are beset by diffi- culties. So numerous are the inequalities in the conditions, that but few unobjectionable comparisons can be made. The human races differ considerably in their sizes, and notably in their degrees of cerebral development. The "climates they inhabit entail on them widely different consumptions of matter for maintenance of tem- perature. Both in their quaHties and quantities, the foods they live -on are unlike; and the supply is here regular and there very irregular. Their expenditures in bodily action are extremely un- equal ; and even still more unequal are their expenditures in men- tal action. Hence the factors, varying so much- in their amounts and combinations, can scarcely ever have their respective effects identified. Nevertheless there are a few comparisons, the results of which may withstand criticism. The increase of fertility caused by a nutrition that is greatly in excess of the expenditure, is to be detected by contrasting popu- lations of the same race, or allied races, one of which obtains good and abundant sustenance much more easily than the other. Three cases may be set down. [Two are here omitted — the Boors and the Kaffirs.] An instance is that of the French Canadians. "Nous sommes terribles pour les enfants," observed one of them to Professor Johnston ; who tells us that the man who said this "was one of fourteen children — was himself the father of fourteen and assured me that from eight to sixteen was the ugual number of the farmers' families. He even named one or two women who had brought their husbands five-and-twenty, and threatened ' le vingt-sixiime pour le pritre. ' " From these large families, joined with the early marriages and low rate of THE DECLINING BIRTH RATE 105 mortality, it results that, by natural increase, "there are added to the French-Canadian population of Lower Canada four persons for every one that is added to the population of England." Now these French Canadians are described by Professor Johnston as home-loving, contented, unenterprising ; and as living in a region where " land and subsistence are easily obtained." Very moderate industry brings to them liberal supplies of necessaries ; and they pass a considerable portion of the year in idleness. Hence the cost of Individuation being much reduced, the rate of Genesis is much increased. That this uncommon fertility is not due to any direct influence of the locality, is implied by the fact that along with the " restless, discontented, striving, burning energy of their Saxon neighbors " no such rate of multiplication is observed ; while further south, where the physical circumstances are more favorable if anything, the Anglo-Saxons, leading lives of excessive activity, have a fertility below the average. And that the peculiarity is not a direct effect of race, is proved by the fact that in Europe,, the rural French are certainly not more prolific than the rural English. We conclude, then, that in the human race, as in all other races, such absolute or relative abundance of nutriment as leaves a large excess after defraying the cost of carrying on parental life, is accompanied by a high rate of genesis.^ 1 This is exactiy the reverse of Mr. Doubleday's doctrine ; which is that throughout both the animal and vegetal kingdoms, "overfeeding checks in- crease ; whilst, on the other hand, a limited or deficient nutriment stimulates and adds to it." Or, as he elsewhere says — " Be the range of natural power to in- crease in any species what it may, the plethoric state invariably checks it, and the deplethoric state invariably develops it; and this happens in the exact ratio of the intensity and completeness of each state, until each state be carried so far as to bring about the actual death of the animal or plant itself." I have space here only to indicate the misinterpretations on which Mr. Double- day has based his argument. In the first place, he has confounded normal plethora with what I have, in § 355, distinguished as abnormal plethora. The cases of infertility accompanying fatness, which he cites in proof that overfeeding checks increase, are not cases of high nutrition properly so called ; but cases of such defective absorption or assimilation as constitutes low nutrition. In Chapter IX, abundant proof was given that a truly plethoric state is an unusually fertile state. It may be added that much of the evidence by which Mr. Doubleday seeks to show that among men, highly fed classes are infertile classes, may be outbalanced by counter- evidence. Many years ago Mr. Lewes pointed this out ; extracting from a book I06 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS Evidence of the converse truth, that relative increase of ex- penditure, leaving a diminished surplus, reduces the degree of fertility, is not wanting. To prove that much bodily labor renders women less prolific, requires more evidence than is obtainable. Some evidence, how- ever, may be set down. De Boismont in France and Dr. Szukits in Austria, have shown by extensive statistical comparisons, that the reproductive age is reached a year later by women of the laboring class than by middle-class women ; and while ascribing this delay in part to inferior nutrition, we may suspect that it is in part due to greater muscular expenditure. A kindred fact, on the peerage, the names of i6 peers who had, at that time, i86 children ; giving an average of 1 1.6 in a family. Mr. Doubleday insists much on the support given to his theory by the barren- ness of very luxuriant plants, and the fruitfulness produced in plants by depletion. Had he been aware that the change from barrenness to fruitfulness in plants, is a change from agamogenesis to gamogenesis — had it been as well known at the time when he wrote as it is now, that a tree which goes on putting out sexless shoots, is so producing new individuals ; and that when it begins to bear fruit, it simply begins to produce new individuals after another manner — he would have perceived that facts of this class do not tell in his favor. In the law which Mr. Doubleday alleges, he sees a guarantee for the mainte- nance of species. He argues that the plethoric state of the individuals constituting any race of organisms, presupposes conditions so favorable to life that the race can be in no danger ; and that rapidity of multiplication becomes needless. Con- versely, he argues that a deplethoric state implies unfavorable conditions — im- plies consequently, unusual mortality ; that is — implies a necessity for increased fertility to prevent the race from dying out. It may be readily shown, however, that such an arrangement would be the reverse of self-adjusting. Suppose a spe- cies, too numerous for its food, to be in the resulting deplethoric state. It will, according to Mr. Doubleday, become unusually fertile, and the next generation will be more numerous rather than less numerous. For, by the hypothesis, the unusual fertility due to the deplethoric state, is the cause of undue increase of population. But if the next generation is more numerous while the supply of food has remained the same, or rather has decreased under the keener competition for it, then this next generation will be in a still more deplethoric state, and will be still more fertile. Thus there will go on an ever-increasing rate of multiplication, and an ever-decreasing supply of food, until the species disappears. Suppose, on the other hand, the members of a species to be in an unusually plethoric state. Their rate of multiplication, ordinarily sufficient to maintain their numbers, will become insufficient to maintain their numbers. In the next generation, therefore, there will be fewer to eat the already abundant food, which, becoming relatively still more abundant, will render the fewer numbers of the species still more ple- thoric, and still less fertile, than their parents. And the actions and reactions con- tinuing, the species will presently die out from absolute barrenness. THE DECLINING BIRTH RATE 107 admitting of a kindred interpretation, may be added. Though the comparatively low rate of increase in France is attributed to other causes, yet, very possibly, one of its causes is the greater propor- tion of hard work entailed on French women, by the excessive abstraction of men for nonproductive occupations, military and civil. The higher rate of multiplication in England than in conti- nental countries generally, is not improbably furthered by the easier lives which English women lead. That absolute or relative infertility is generally produced in women by mental labor carried to excess, is more clearly shown. Though the regimen of upper-class girls is not what it should be, yet, considering , that their feeding is better than that of girls belonging to the poorer classes, while in most other respects, their physical treatment is not worse, the deficiency of reproduc- tive power among them may be reasonably attributed to the over- taxing of their brains — an overtaxing which produces a serious reaction on the physique. This diminution of reproductive power is not shown only by the greater frequency of absolute sterility; nor is it shown only in the earlier cessation of childbearing ; but it is also shown in the very frequent inability of such women to suckle their infants. In its full sense, the reproductive power means the power to bear a well-developed infant, and to supply that infant with the natural food for the natural period. Most of the flat-chested girls who survive their high-pressure education, are incompetent to do this. Were their fertility measured by the number of children they could rear without artificial aid, they would prove relatively very infertile. An illustration will best cle^r up any perplexity as to the con- ditions which govern the relation between individuation and genesis. Let us say that the fuel burnt in the furnace of a loco- motive steam engine, answers to the food which a man consumes ; let us say that the produced steam expended in working the en- gine, corresponds to that portion of absorbed nutriment which carries on the man's functions and activities ; and let us say that the steam blowing off at the safety valve, answers to that portion of the absorbed nutriment which goes to the propagation of the race. Such being the conditions of the case, several kinds of io8 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS variations are possible. All other circumstances remaining the same, there may be changes of proportion between the steam used for working the engine and the steam that escapes by the safety valve. There may be a structural or organic change of proportion. By enlarging the safety valve or weakening its spring, while the cylinders are reduced in size, there may be established a coinstitutionally small power of locomotion and a constitutionally large amount of escape-steam ; and inverse variations so produced, will answer to the inverse variations between Individuation and Genesis which different types of organisms show us. Again, there may be a functional change of proportion. If the engine has to draw a considerable load, the abstraction of steam by the cylinders greatly reduces the discharge by the safety valve ; and if a high velocity is kept up, the discharge from the safety valve entirely ceases. Conversely, if the velocity is low, the escape-steam bears a large ratio to the steam consumed by the motor apparatus ; and if the engine becomes stationary the whole of the steam escapes by the safety valve. This inverse variation answers to that which we have traced between Expenditure and Genesis, as displayed in the contrasts between species of the same type but unlike activities, and in the contrasts between active and inactive individ- uals of the same species. But now beyond these inverse variations between the quantities of consumed steam and escape-steam that are structurally and functionally caused, there are coincident vari- ations producible in both by changes in the quantity of steam supplied — changes that may be caused in several ways. In the first place, the fuel thrown into the furnace may be increased or made better. Other things equal, there will result a more active locomotion as well as a greater escape ; and this will an- swer to that simultaneous addition to its individual vigor and its reproductive activity, caused in an animal by a larger quantity, or a superior quality, of food. In the second place, the steam gener- ated may be economized. Loss by radiation from the boiler may be lessened by a covering of nonconducting substances ; and part of the steam thus prevented from condensing, will go to increase the working power of the engine, while part will be added to the quantity blowing off. This variation corresponds to that THE DECLINING BIRTH RATE 109 simultaneous addition to bodily vigor and propagative power, which results in animals that have to expend less in keeping up their temperatures. In the third place, by improvement of the steam- generating apparatus, more steam may be obtained from a given weight of fuel. A better-formed evaporating surface, or boiler plates which conduct more rapidly, or an increased number of tubes, may cause a larger absorption of heat from the burning mass or the hot gases it gives off ; and the extra steam generated by this extra heat, will, as before, augment both the motive force and the emission through the safety valve. And this last case of coinci- dent variation, is parallel to the case with which we are here concerned — the augmentation of individual expenditure and of reproductive energy, that may be caused by a superiority of some organ on which the utilizing or economizing of materials depends. Manifestly, therefore, an increased expenditure for Genesis, or an increased expenditure for Individuation, may arise in one of two quite different ways — either by diminution of the antagonistic expenditure, or by addition to the store which supplies both ex- penditure ; and confusion results from not distinguishing between these. There is no reason to suppose that the laws of multiplication which hold of other beings, do not hold of the human being. On the contrary, there are special facts which unite with general implications, to show that these laws do hold of the human being. The absence of direct evidence in some cases where it might be looked for, we find fully explained when all the factors are taken into account. And certain seemingly adverse facts, prove, on ex- amination, to be facts belonging to a different category from that in which they are placed, and harmonize with the rest when rightly interpreted. The conformity of human fertility to the laws of multiplication in general, being granted, it remains to inquire what effects must be caused by permanent changes in men's natures and circum- stances. Thus far we have observed how, by their extremely high evolution and extremely low fertility, mankind display the inverse variation between Individuation and Genesis, in one of its ex- tremes. And we have also observed how mankind, like other no READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS kinds, are functionally changed in their rates of multiplication by changes of conditions. But we have not observed how alteration of structure in Man entails alteration of fertility. The influence . of this factor is so entangled with the influences of other facts which are for the present more important, that we cannot recog- nize it. Here, if we proceed at all, we must proceed deductively. Human Population in the Future No more in the case of Man than in the case of any other being, can we presume, that evolution either has taken place, or will hereafter take place spontaneously. In the past, at present, and in the future, all modifications, functional and organic, have been, are, and must be immediately or remotely consequent on surrounding conditions. What, then, are those changes in the environment to which, by direct or indirect equilibration, the hu- man organism has been adjusting itself, is adjusting itself now, and will continue to adjust itself ? And how do they necessitate a higher evolution of the organism .' Civilization, everywhere having for its antecedent the increase of population, and everywhere having for one of its consequences a decrease of certain race-destroying forces, has for a further con- sequence an increase of certain other race-destroying forces. Danger of death from predatory animals lessens as men grow more numerous. Though, as they spread over the Earth and divide into tribes, men become wild beasts to one another, yet the danger of death from this cause also diminishes as tribes coalesce into nations. But the danger of death which does not diminish, is that produced by augmentation of numbers itself — the danger from deficiency of food. Supposing human nature to remain unchanged, the mortality hence resulting would, on the average, rise as human beings multiplied. If mortality, under such conditions, does not rise, it must be because the supply of food also augments; and this implies some change in human habits wrought by the stress of human needs. Here, then, is the permanent cause of modification to which civilized men are ex- posed. Though the intensity of its action is ever being mitigated THE DECLINING BIRTH RATE III in one direction, by greater production of food ; it is, in the other direction, ever being added to by the greater production. of indi- viduals. Manifestly, the wants of their redundant numbers consti- tute the only stimulus mankind have to obtain more necessaries of life : were not the demand beyond the supply, there would be no motive to increase the supply. And manifestly, this excess of demand over supply is perennial : this pressure of population, of which it is the index, cannot- be eluded. Though by the emi- gration that takes place when the pressure arrives at a certain intensity, temporary relief is from time to time obtained ; yet, as by this process, all habitable countries must become peopled, it follows that in the end, the pressure, whatever it may then be, must be borne in full. This constant increase of people beyond the means of sub- sistence, causes, then, a never-ceasing requirement for skill, intel- ligence, and self-control — involves, therefore, a constant exercise of these and gradual growth of them. Every industrial improve- ment is at once the product of a higher form of humanity, and demands that higher form of humanity to carry it into practice. The application of science to the arts, is the bringing to bear greater intelligence for satisfying our wants ; and implies contin- ued progress of that intelligence. To get more produce from the acre, the farmer must study chemistry, must adopt new mechan- ical appliances, and must, by the multiplication of processes, cultivate both his own powers and the powers of his laborers. To meet the requirements of the market, the manufacturer is perpetually improving his old machines, and inventing new ones ; and by the premium of high wages incites artisans to acquire greater skill. The daily widening ramifications of commerce en- tail on the merchant a need for more knowledge and more com- plex calculations ; while the lessening profits of the shipowner force him to build more scientifically, to get captains of higher intelligence, and better crews. In all cases, pressure of population is the original cause. Were it not for the competition this entails, more thought and energy would not daily be spent on the busi- ness of life ; and growth of mental power would not take place. Difficulty in getting a living is alike the incentive to a higher 112 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS education of children, and to a more intense and long-continued application in adults. In the mother it induces foresight, econ- omy, and skillful housekeeping ; in the father, laborious days and constant self-denial. Nothing but necessity could make men sub- mit to this discipline ; and nothing but this discipline could pro- duce a continued progression. In this case, as in many others, Nature secures each step in advance by a succession of trials ; which are perpetually repeated, and cannot fail to be repeated, until success is achieved. All mankind in turn subject themselves more or less to the discipline described ; they either may or may not advance under it ; but in the nature of things, only those who do advance under it even- tually survive. For, necessarily, families and races whom this increasing difficulty of getting a living which excess of fertility entails, does not stimulate to improvements in production^ — that is, to greater mental activity — are on the high road to extinction ; and must ultimately be supplanted- by those whom the pressure does so stimulate. This truth we have recently seen exemplified in Ireland. And here, indeed, without further illustration, it will be seen that premature death, under all its forms and from all its causes, cannot fail to work in the same direction. For as those prematurely carried off must, in the average of cases, be those in whom the power of self-preservation is the least, it unavoidably follows that those left behind to continue the race, must be those in whom the power of self-preservation is the greatest — must be the select of their generation. So that, whether the dangers to existence be of the kind produced by excess of fertility, or of any other kind, it is clear that by the ceaseless exercise of the faculties needed to contend with them successfully, there is in- sured a constant progress towards a higher degree of skill, intel- Hgence, and self-regulation — a greater coordination of actions — a more complete life. The proposition at which we have thus arrived, is then, that ex- cess of fertility, through the changes it is ever working in Man's environment, is itself the cause of Man's further evolution ; and the obvious corollary here to be drawn, is that Man's further evolu- tion so brought about, itself necessitates a decline in his fertility. THE DECLINING BIRTH RATE 113 That future progress of civilization which the- never-ceasing pressure of population must produce, will be accompanied by an enhanced cost of Individuation, both in structure and function ; and more especially in nervous structure and function. The peaceful struggle for existence in societies ever growing more crowded and more complicated, must have for its concomitant an increase of the great nervous centers in mass, in complexity, in activity. The larger body of emotion needed as a fountain of energy for men who have to hold their places and rear their families under the intensifying competition of social life, is, other things equal, the correlative of larger brain. Those higher feel- ings presupposed by the better self-regulation which, in a better society, can alone enable the individual to leave a persistent pos- terity, are, other things equal, the correlatives of a more complex brain ; as are also those more numerous, more varied, more gen- eral, and more abstract ideas, which must also become increasingly requisite for successful life as society advances. And the genesis of this larger quantity of feehng and thought, in a brain thus augmented in size and developed in structure, is, other things equal, the correlative of a greater wear of nervous tissue and greater consumption of materials to repair it. So that both in original cost of construction and in consequent cost of working, the nervous system must become a heavier tax on the organism. Already the brain of the civilized man is larger by nearly thirty per cent than the brain of the savage. Already, too, it presents an increased heterogeneity — especially in the distribution of its convolutions. And further changes like these which have taken place under the discipline of civilized life, we infer will continue to take place. But everywhere and always, evolution is antago- nistic to procreative dissolution. Whether it be in greater growth of the organs which subserve self-maintenance, whether it be in their; added complexity of structure, or whether it be in their higher activity, the abstraction of the required materials, implies a diminished reserve of materials for race-maintenance. And we have seen reason to believe, that this antagonism between Indi- viduation and Genesis, becomes unusually marked where the ner- vous system is concerned, because of the costliness of nervous 114 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS structure and function. The apparent connection between high cerebral development and prolonged delay of sexual maturity has been pointed out ; and the evidence went to show that where excep- tional fertility exists there is sluggishness of mind, and that where there has been during education excessive expenditure in mental action, there frequently follows a complete or partial infertility. Hence the particular kind of further evolution which Man is here- after to undergo, is one which, more than any other, may be expected to cause a decline in his powers of reproduction. The higher nervous development and greater expenditure in nervous action, here described as indirectly brought about by in- crease of numbers, must not be taken to imply an intenser strain — a mentally laborious life. The greater emotional and intellec- tual power and activity above contemplated, must be understood as becoming, by small increments, organic, spontaneous and pleasurable. As, even when relieved from the pressure of neces- sity, large-brained Europeans voluntarily enter on enterprises and activities which the savage could not keep up even to satisfy urgent wants ; so, their still larger-brained descendants will, in a still higher degree, find their gratifications in careers entailing still greater mental expenditures. This enhanced demand for materials to establish, and carry on the psychical functions will be a constitutional demand. We must conceive the type gradually so modified, that the more developed nervous system irresistibly draws off, for its normal and unforced activities, a larger propor- tion of the common stock of nutriment; and while so increasing the intensity, completeness, and length of the individual life, necessarily diminishing the reserve applicable to the setting up of new lives — no longer required to be so numerous. Though the working of this process will doubtless be interfered with and modified in the future, as it has been in the past, by the facilitation of living which ci.vilization brings ; yet nothing be- yond temporary interruptions can so be caused. However much the industrial arts may be improved, there must be a limit to the improvement; while, with a rate of multiplication in excess of the rate of mortality, population must continually tread on the heels of production. So that though, during the earlier stages of THE DECLINING BIRTH RATE 115 civilization, an increased amount of food may accrue from a given amount of labor ; there must come a time when this relation will be reversed, and when every additional increment of food will be obtained by a more than proportionate labor : the disproportion growing ever higher, and the diminution of the reproductive power becoming greater. There now remains but to inquire towards what limit this prog- ress tends. So long as the fertility of the race is more than sufficient to balance the diminution by deaths, population must continue to increase. So long as population continues to increase, there must be pressure on the means of subsistence. And so long as there is pressure on the means of subsistence, further mental development must go on, and further diminution of fertility must result. Thus, the change can never cease until the rate of mul- tiplication is just equal to the rate of mortality ; that is, can never cease until, on the average, each pair has as many children as are requisite to produce another generation qf childbearing adults equal in number to the last generation. At first sight, this would seem to imply that eventually each pair will rarely have more than two offspring ; but a little consideration shows that this is a lower degree of fertility than is likely ever to be reached. Supposing the Sun's light and heat, on which all terrestrial life depends, to continue abundant, for a period long* enough to allow the entire evolution we are contemplating ; there are still certain slow astronomic and geologic changes which must prevent such complete adjustment of human nature to surrounding conditions, as would permit the rate of multiplication to fall so low. As be- fore pointed out,i during an epoch of twenty-one thousand years, each hemisphere goes through a •cycle of temperate seasons and seasons extreme in their heat and cold — variations that are themselves alternately exaggerated and mitigated in the course of far longer cycles ; and we saw that these caused perpetual ebbings and flow- ings of species over different parts of the Earth's surface. Fur- ther, by slow but inevitable geologic changes, especially those of elevation and subsidence, the climate and physical characters of every habitat are modified ; while old habitats are destroyed and 1 Vol I, § 148. Ii6 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS new are formed. This, too, we noted ^ as a constant cause of migrations and of consequent alterations of environment. Now though the human race differs from other races in having a power of artificially counteracting external changes, yet there are limits to this power ; and, even were there no limits, the changes could not fail to work their effects indirectly, if not directly. If, as is thought probable, these astronomic cycles entail recurrent glacial periods in each hemisphere, then, parts of the Earth that are at one time thickly peopled, will at another time, be almost deserted, and vice versa. The geologically caused alterations of climate and surface, must produce further slow re- distributions of population ; and other currents of people, to and from different regions, will be necessitated by the rise of succes- sive centers of higher civilization. Consequently, mankind cannot but continue to undergo changes of environment, physical and moral, analogous to those which they have thus far been under- going. Such changes may eventually become slower and less marked ; but they can never cease. And if they can never cease, there can never arise a perfect adaptation of human nature to its conditions of existence. To establish that complete correspond- ence between inner and outer actions which constitutes the highest life and greatest power of self-preservation there must be a prolonged converse between the organism and circumstances that remain the same. If the external relations are being altered while the internal relations are being adjusted to them, the adjust- ment can never become exact. And in the absence of exact adjustment, there cannot exist that theoretically highest power of self-preservation with which there would coexist the theoretically lowest power of race-production. Hence though the number of premature deaths may ultimately become very small, it can never become so small as to allow the average number of offspring from each pair to fall as low as two. Some average number between two and three may be inferred as the limit — a number, however, that is not likely to be quite con- stant, but may be expected at one time to increase somewhat and afterwards to decrease somewhat, according as variations in physical and social conditions lower or raise the cost of self-preservation. 1 Vol. I, § 148. THE DECLINING BIRTH RATE 117 Be this as it may, however, it is manifest that in the end, pressure of population and its accompanying evils will disappear ; and will leave a state of things requiring from each individual no more than a normal and pleasurable activity. Cessation in the decrease of fertility implies cessation in the development of the nervous system ; and this implies a nervous system that has be- come equal to all that is demanded of it — has not to do more than is natural to it. But that exercise of faculties which does not exceed what is natural,- constitutes gratification. In the end, therefore, the obtainment of subsistence and discharge of all the parental and social duties, will require just that kind and that amount of action needful to health and happiness. The necessary antagonism of Individuation and Genesis, not only, then, fulfills with precision the a priori law of maintenance of race, from Monad up to Man, but insures final attainment of the highest form of this maintenance — a form in which the amount of life shall be the greatest possible, and the births and deaths the fewest possible. This antagonisni could not fail to work out the results we see it working out. The excess of fer- tility has itself rendered the process of civilization inevitable ; and the process of civilization must inevitably diminish fertility, and at last destroy its excess. From the beginning, pressure of population has been the proximate cause of progress. It produced the original diffusion of the race. It compelled men to abandon predatory habits and take to agriculture. It led to the clearing of the Earth's surface. It forced men into the social state ; made social organization inevitable ; and has developed the social senti- ments. It has stimulated to progressive improvements in produc- tion, and to increased skill and intelligence. It is daily thrusting us into closer contact and more mutually dependent relationships. And after having caused, as it ultimately must, the due peopling of the globe, and the raising of all its habitable parts into the highest state of culture — after having brought all processes for the satisfaction of human wants to perfection — ^ after having, at the same time, developed the intellect into complete competency for its work, and the feelings into complete fitness for social life — after having done all this, the pressure of population, as it gradually finishes its work, must gradually bring itself to an end. CHAPTER III SOCIALISM AND POPULATION Moral restraint under socialism, — an early English socialist's view, ii8. — The economic independence of women as a check to population, 123. — The views of Malthus with regard to population-increase under socialism, 125. — Would social- ism remove the institutional checks inherent in private property and competitive organization? 127. — The necessity for state pensions for mothers, 131. [From the time of Malthus, orthodox economists have been unable to see the expediency of socialism, among other reasons because of their belief that socialism would weaken the prudential check and defeat its own ends in a flood of population. Socialists as a rule have not demonstrated either much inclination or much ability to meet this charge squarely, but the development of democracy, the increasing economic independence of woman, and society's revaluation of woman as a human being have furnished them with a powerful counterargument. Meanwhile some of them are advocating state pensions for all mothers, as an aid to economic independence. This proposal must not be confused with the philanthropic or charitable state aid given to widowed mothers.] 8. PRUDENTIAL RESTRAINT UNDER SOCIALISM » If under the individual exertion and competition of equal or even partial security, the progress of improvement and consequent increase of comforts, would constantly tend to increase the pru- dential check, and limit the increase of numbers to the constantly 1 By William Thompson. Adapted from An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth Most Conducive to Human Happiness, pp. 545-562. London, 1824. 118 SOCIALISM AND POPULATION 119 increasing command of enjoyments ; what would be the peculiar effects under that branch of equal security, which takes mutual cooperation for its mode of production, and equality for its rule of enjoyment ? ^ Let us suppose, then, that the state of the country in which these [socialist] communities exist, is merely stationary, and ad- mits of no increase of population, of nothing more than the replacing by new births those who yearly cease to live. In such a state of things, in ordinary society, as we have seen, when the peo- ple live in comfort, the prudential check is called into full exer- tion, and is abundantly adequate to prevent an injurious increase of members, or such as would lessen those comforts : but when the circumstances of the people are wretched, it is not the pru- dential check that operates ; prudence has no place amidst eternal want; breeding goes on as amongst the lower animals, till cold, nakedness, hunger, disease, seize on their victims and keep down the population by misery to the level of their wretched means of support. What then is the modification that would be presented in the use of the prudential check by means of the system of co- operation, reposing, as all industry must repose, under the shelter of security ? First, abundant comforts and the habit of enjoying would beget an unwillingness to part with them as before. Next, superior information and extended sympathy would increase and justify this disinclination, from a view of the discomfort it would produce to the new sharers as well as to the old. True that the inconveniences of a large family would not under mutual co- operation press so heavily on the individual as under competition with the most perfect equal security ; but a regard for the common welfare and common loss of comforts in which their own would be included, would soon become at least as powerful a curb, in such minds of cooperators, as the simple individual motive pro- duces in the minds of competitors. Suppose this motive however, of the loss of general comforts, to be ever so much weakened, to be reduced to nothing, still no evil would arise from its absence ; for the circumstances of the new communities form such a bar- rier around them in the way of population, as would seem almost 1 That is, under socialism Ed. I20 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS to render superfluous the exercise of that prudence, with which, on this as on other occasions, they must be preeminently imbued. The case supposed is, that the cooperating community cannot increase its numbers without decreasing its comforts by divid- ing them amongst a larger number, and that this numerical expansion of diminished enjoyment will not counterbalance the loss of its intensity to the smaller number. It is hardly pos- sible to conceive any set of expedients better calculated to meet such a contingency, than those proposed for the cooperating communities. There is no check or inconvenience from want felt by the married from inequalities as to numbers of children, all being equally educated and maintained at the common board : the pecul- iar inconvenience is simply that of the pain, trouble, and care, chiefly on the woman's side, of nourishing and attending chil- dren till two years old. From that age the peculiar trouble ceases. Many married persons in such communities, under such circum- stances, would doubtless study the means of enjoying in the highest degree every pleasure of personal attachment, and even increasing those pleasures^ without the necessity of a continual increase of births — an object, simple, reconcilable with the ut- most delicacy, and demanding nothing but a mental effort from the party whom a new birth would most inconvenience. In agri- cultural districts of general society, where the capabilities of land and industry, and habits of the people, have been for a long time stationary, a marriage does not take place until an opening presents itself of succeeding to the occupation and establishment of old couples, or of those prematurely cut off by casualties. In such places, where the whole subject of overpopulation and its effects is brought within a narrow compass under the eye of the most simple, as in parts of Norway and Switzerland, we are told that they are perfectly understood, the prudential check is in the highest state of operation, comforts are not lessened by any tend- ency to breed beyond the means of support : and added to all this, early and tender attachments and domestic happiness and all the happiness that tiie sexes can render each other, are per- haps at their highest point. If such be the effect of having SOCIALISM AND POPULATION 121 the whole subject brought before the eye, under the system of competition, where the exertion of prudence on the part of every individual is requisite, the exertion of prudence on the part of the uninformed youth ; what will be the effect of having the sub- ject still more concentrated, of having the population concerns of a whole community more simple, clear, and less liable to chance, than those of any individual family, under the system of competition ? What will be the effect of having the deliberative prudence^of the whole community guiding, instructing, and if necessary supplying the place of the individual prudence of, the young, while at the same time that individual prudence, from previous education and completeness of the facts before it, can- not possibly make a false judgment; or if it err at all, must be with full perception of the circumstances necessary to the forma- tion of a right judgment ? Marriage would of course under these circumstances be late ; later in proportion to the healthiness of the community ; ten years perhaps later than where the circum- stances of the society admitted of a pretty rapid increase. There is a way, before alluded to, by which early marriages and universal healthiness, may coexist with a stationary popula- tion. Sexual, intellectual, and moral pleasures would be much increased thereby to the married parties. A mental effort on the side of refinement, not of grossness, is all the price necessary to ' be paid, and by only one party, for early marriages and mutual endearments, where the circumstances of society permit no in- crease of population. If this expedient of gentle exercise be not adopted, the risk of the evil — at whatever it may be estimated — of illicit intercourse, must be incurred. From the deplorable con- sequence of such intercourse, in the way of prostitution and all its miseries, the cooperating communities, as before shown, would, from their very organization, be altogether relieved. Women have as much command as men over the cojnmon property of the com- munity, partake of the same educartion, and thus raising them- selves to the same level, cast off at one bound their antiquated degradations arid miseries, and at least double the happiness of both sexes by raising all theiir intercourse to that of intelligence and affection amongst equals. 122 READINGS .IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS So very trivial being the evils to be apprehended from the principle of population amongst the cooperating communities, even under the most unfavorable circumstances in which they can be placed; what, if any, are the evils to be apprehended from this principle when the circumstances are more favorable and admit of an increase of population more or less rapid ? What effects as to happiness would arise from the principle of population amongst cooperating communities in an advancing state of society, under the shield of equal security, or under repre- sentative systems approaching to equal security, limited only by the want of knowledge amongst the general society adopting such representative systems ? ■ If in general society, such a state of things renders, even amongst individual competitors, the exercise of prudence as to marriage almost superfluous, how much more will it relieve partic- ular individuals from the anxious cares of numerous children, where no increase of exertion or privation of comfort will press upon the parents of many children more than on those of a few ! excepting always the additional pain of the first two years of the children's existence. Why should a father and mother be pun- ished — in diminished comforts — for having large families ? To prevent premature marriages? It can have no such effect. The average number of children is all that is or ought to be calcu- lated upon ; exceptions cannot form the general rule. Peculiar fecundity, altogether out of the power of calculation, generally occasions large families. The occupation of almost all the bloom and vigor of life of the mother, and the numerous casualties as to health attendant on a constant succession of children, are surely inconveniences enough to limit the desire to a moderate number without superadding comparative penury in the midst of general prosperity. If the society be advancing, and there be room for increased numbers without diminishing actual comforts to the general mass of productive laborers, why should they whom chance (causes which they could not calculate or control) has made most instrumental to this increase be more inconvenienced by it than the necessity of the case (physical or unavoidable moral causes) requires ? The parents, particularly the mother, should SOCIALISM AND POPULATION 123 be as'sisted and relieved under such circumstances ; their means should be increased, not diminished. Under individual compe- tition such evils are perhaps unavoidable. No remedy, except in the way of insurance, and that very partial and wasteful, could be applied : while under mutual cooperation the evil is completely remedied by an insurance exempt from waste, the joint efforts of all providing for the whole of the children in whatever numbers born to particular individuals. From the greater part of the trou- bles and anxieties of excessive numbers of children parents are relieved ; while all means of endearment by unrestricted commu- nication are kept open to them. Thus, as affects population, are the greatest benefits of early marriages secured by cooperation to all who think proper to con- tract them, while the evils arising occasionally from them are, by an invisible and unerring system of insurance, reduced to their lowest level, to those bars which nature has imposed. The great advantage of these cooperating communities over the same num- ber of individuals acting by competition, particularly as regards population, is that the whole subject is always plainly before the eyes of the whole community ; all gambling individual speculation is precluded ; imprudence is rendered so palpable, and public opinion so strong, that there is a moral impossibility of the occur- rence of imprudence : while all factitious love of wealth being re- moved, wherever a preponderance of happiness can be gained to all by early marriages and increasing numbers, beyond the evils of diminished comforts for all, there and there only will such marriages take place. 9. THE ECONOMIC INDEPENDENCE OF WOMEN AS A CHECK TO POPULATION ^ Before the eyes of both [Malthus and Godwin] there was grow- ing up a power unobserved by either, but predestined to solve their problem. Commerce could never cheapen itself out of exist- ence while population, varying with cheapness of food, kept up 1 By C. L. James. From Anarchism and Malthus, pp. 28-30. Mother Earth Publishing Co., New York, 19x0, 124 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS the struggle for existence : nor, though commerce^ which cannot do that^ teaches solidarity, could it prevent recurrence of those crises when the "eyeless I howls in darkness." But the increase of the prudential check on population has always kept up with, or rather it has gone before and been the source of, economic progress. Its increase has depended on that of hope, this on increase of liberty, increase of liberty on those "accidents" by which Providence has from time to time interfered to give men intent on enslaving each other and themselves another call to reflection. If, then, there be a tendency in the bourgeois system which brings liberty and hope to women ; from that we may really hope revolutionary changes. For the female is the less amorous sex. The last proposition, which certainly does sound like a stock assertion, may have been unknown to both Malthus and Godwin. But no reader of Darwin can help knowing that it has been demonstrated by exhaustive application to every animal species and been found the clue to progress through heredity. Women have never chosen to breed food for gunpowder. They have submitted to do so only because they could not help them- selves. Now there is in the bourgeois system a tendency, which by bringing liberty and hope to women, promises far more ener- getic restraint on propagation than the world has ever known, — a tendency which capitalists view with indifference ; reactionaries and socialists, not infrequently with alarm ; judicious friends of humanity, with unmixed satisfaction. The wages paid directly to women in the factories first afforded to proletarian women, unprotected by settlements or other contrivances of the rich, a means to live which was not easily taken from them. True to the maxim that it is not misery but hope which works improve- ment, they, who till now had been well enough content not to own themselves, became refractory the moment they had some- thing to lose. The entire modern movement for the property rights of married women, equality of pay with men for all work- ing women, opening of all the trades to women, political equality of the sexes, easy divorce, began with employment of women as breadwinners, which came in as a necessity of the bourgeois situation, SOCIALISM AND POPULATION 125 The Malthusian theory is the fatal objection to every form of socialism, even if called anarchism, which encourages man to think that he can enslave woman and escape the most righteous retribution of being a slave himself. It is the strongest possible argument for that kind of socialism or anarchism which proposes, through complete emancipation of women, to abolish the funda- mental tyranny from whence all others spring. 10. HOW SECURE THE EXERCISE OF MORAL RESTRAINT UNDER SOCIALISM?! It is a very superficial observation which has sometimes been made, that it is a contradiction to lay great stress upon the effi- cacy of moral restraint in an improved and improving state of society, according to the present structure of it, and yet to sup- pose that it would not act with sufficient force in a system of equality, which almost always presupposes a great diffusion of information and a great improvement of the human mind. Those who have made this observation do not see that the en- couragement and motive to moral restraint are at once destroyed in a system of equality and community of goods. Let us suppose that in a system of equality, in spite of the best exertions to procure more food, the population is pressing hard against the limits of subsistence, and all are becoming very poor. It is evidently necessary under these circumstances, in order to prevent the society from starving, that the rate at which the population increases should be retarded. But who are the persons that are to exercise the restraint thus called for, and either to marry late or not at all.? It does not seem to be a necessary consequence of a system of equality that all the human passions should be at once extinguished by it ; but if not, those who might wish to marry would feel it hard that they should be among the number' forced to restrain their inclinations, ^s all would be equal and in similar circumstances, there would be no reason whatever why one individual should think himself obliged 1 By T. R. Malthus. From An Essay on the Principle of Population, 9th edition, pp. 285-286. London, 1888. 126 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS to practice the duty of restraint more than another. The thing however must be done, with any hope of avoiding universal misery ; and in a state of equaHty the necessary restraint could only be effected by some general law. But how is this law to be supported, and how are the violations of it to be punished i Is the man who marries early to be pointed at with the finger of scorn .? is he to be whipped at the cart's tail ? is he to be confined for years in a prison ? is he to have his children ex- posed? Are not all direct punishments for an offense of this kind shocking and unnatural to the last degree ? And yet if it be absolutely necessary in order to prevent the most overwhelm- ing wretchedness, that there should be some restraint on the tendency to early marriages, when the resources of the country are only sufficient to support , a slow rate of increase, can the most fertile imagination conceive one at once so natural, so just, so consonant to the laws of God and to the best laws framed by the most enlightened men, as that each individual should be responsible for the maintenance of his own children ; that is, that he should be subjected to the natural inconveniences and difficulties arising from the indulgence of his inclinations and to no other whatever ? That this natural check to early marriages arising from a view of the difficulty attending the support of a large family operates very widely throughout all classes of society in every civilized state, and may be expected to be still more effective as the lower classes of people continue to improve in knowledge and prudence, cannot admit of. the slightest doubt. But the opera- tion of this natural check depends exclusively upon the exist- ence of the laws of property and succession ; and in a state of equality and community of property could only be replaced by some artificial regulation of a very different stamp, and a much more unnatural character. Of this Mr. Owen is fully sensible, and has in consequence taxed his ingenuity to the utmost to invent some mode by which the difficulties arising from the progress of population could be got rid of in the state of society to which he looks forward. His absolute inability to suggest any mode of accomplishing this object that is not unnatural, SOCIALISM AND POPULATION 127 immoral, or cruel in a high degree, together with the same want of success in every other person, ancient or modern, who has made a similar attempt, seem to show that the argument against systems of equality founded on the principle of popula- tion does not admit of a plausible answer even in theory. The fact of the tendency of population to increase beyond the means of subsistence may be seen in almost every register of a country parish in the kingdom. The unavoidable effect of this tendency to depress the whole body of the people in want and misery, unless the progress of the population be somehow or other retarded, is equally obvious ; and the impossibility of checking the rate of increase in a state of equality, without resorting to regulations that are unnatural, immoral, or cruel, forms an argument at once conclusive against every such system. 11. PRIVATE PROPERTY AND THE PRUDENTIAL CHECK * Progress has been marked by a lowering of the general birth rate, a still greater lowering of the death rate, and an improve- ment in the arts which has enabled the increased population to live in greater comfort than before. But it has left certain parts of the population in a state where they are constantly on the verge of starvation. Is this to be regarded as a necessary incident of progress, or as an unnecessary evil which constitutes an indict- ment against the modern industrial system .? Malthus holds the former view; the socialists the latter. The successive points in the Malthusian theory may be summed up as follows : 1. A low death rate is a necessity for national prosperity. A high death rate (say 40 per 1000) means a low average duration of life (say twenty-five years), much disease, and little industrial efficiency. 2. "Any excess of birth rate over death rate means increased population, and, in long-established communities, increased den- sity of population. As long as this increase is accompanied by 1 By Arthur T. Hadley. From Population and Capital. Publications of the American Economic Association, Vol. IX, 1894, pp. S57-S^^- 128 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS corresponding improvements in the arts of producing and utiliz- ing food, it has no adverse effect ; but when the increase of num- bers is more rapid than this, it means less food per unit of labor, more disease, stoppage of accumulation of capital and of the prog- ress which is dependent on such accumulations. 3. The physiological possibilities of the birth rate are so far in excess of any death rate which is consonant with social pros- perity, that the improvement in the arts of food supply has not kept pace with this possible excess and cannot be expected to do so. This diiference must therefore be reduced by " preventive " checks to lessen the birth rate. An individual who refuses to conform to this necessity has himself to blame for his poverty and that of his children, and must expect to see their numbers reduced by the positive checks of famine and disease. The socialistic criticism of Malthus may without unfairness, and with great gain in perspicuity, be analyzed into two heads : (i) There is almost never, in civilized society, a present or imme- diate pressure of population upon subsistence. There is always food enough to go around, if it were only better distributed. (2) If such a distribution were made, there is no likelihood of a future pressure of population upon subsistence, because increased comfort is accompanied by a lower birth rate instead of a higher one. The last point is erroneous. It is true that as society exists at present, high comfort and low birth rate are commonly asso- ciated, because comfort is made to depend upon prudence. Let the comfort be made independent of the exercise of prudence, as in the operation of the English poor law at the beginning of this century, and the birth rate tends to increase rather than di- minish. It may not be exactly true, as some Malthusians would have us believe, that the low birth rate is the cause of the com- fort; but it is much farther from the truth to assert that the comfort is the cause of the low birth rate. Both are the results of a common cause — the exercise of prudence, which gives high comfort and low birth rate to those who are capable of practicing it, while those who are incapable of so doing have at once a higher birth rate and lower level of comfort. SOCIALISM AND POPULATION 129 This line of thought enables us to explain satisfactorily a phe- nomenon which has been misunderstood by many of the opponents of Malthus, namely, that the fear of starvation does not lower the birth rate so much as the fear of losing caste. It is not that the desire of decencies in itself constitutes a greater preventive check to population than the need of subsistence ; but that the need of subsistence is felt by all men alike, emotional as well as intellec- tual, while the desire of decencies stamps the man or the race that possesses it as having reached the level of intellectual moral- ity. Ethical selection can therefore operate on the latter as it does not on the former. The intellectual man has possibilities of self-restraint which the emotional man has not. Give the intel- lectual man the chance to reap the benefit of such self-restraint and you will find reduced birth rate and increased comfort. There are some cases under the existing social order where men who are capable of higher things multiply recklessly through sheer hopelessness. With men like this, a better distribution of the results of labor would doubtless operate not only to increase their productive efficiency but to contribute to their prudence in marry- ing, and thus to diminish the birth rate. But this result would be accomplished by assimilating the condition of the hopelessly poor to the normal condition of property owners, and would be dependent on the operation of those capitalistic motives which the majority of the opponents of Malthus so severely disapprove. The more completely you give the prudent and efficient' man control of the results of his labor, the more you localize the pres- sure of population upon subsistence, and confine the effects of this pressure to a few. Under such circumstances there is habit- ually that surplus of food on which the anti-Malthusian lays so much stress. But give the children of the shiftless the right to eat the substance of the efficient and prudent, and you will soon lose both the capital and the morality under which that capital has been created, — witness the history of the Enghsh poor law. The fund of national capital is placed at the mercy of the paupers, and the restraints which now limit the number of these paupers are taken away. Let this process be carried to an extreme, and I30 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS the localized pressure of population upon subsistence, now so familiar under the name of poverty, widens more and more until we have that general imminence of starvation characteristic of savage or half-savage races. When the comfort of an individual is made dependent upon his foresight and prudence, and when the comfort of a group is made dependent on the existence of intellectual as distinct from emotional morality, we shall find prudent men and prudent races possessing high comfort and low birth rates. The history of civi- lization is in large measure a history of this development of pru- dence and comfort. Possibly some nations are carrying this conscious adaptation of means to ends a little too far for their own good. The waste of nerve power connected with the exercise of conscious prudence is a real evil, and if carried to an extreme may offset the gain attendant upon the possession and accumu- lation of capital. This is a fair point for socialistic criticism. But with the average man, the dangers of this extreme are less than those of the other. The evils of thinking too much and trusting Providence too little seem small in comparison with those which arise from trusting Providence for everything and not thinking at all. Doubtless Malthus made a mistake in giving too much countenance to the idea that preventive checks must be conscious. But his socialist critics make a greater mistake in holding that such checks are automatic. The truth would seem to be that such checks are for the most part institutional. The modern family and the modern law of capital have acted as a powerful system of preventive checks to population. The apparently automatic and. often nonconscious operation of these checks must not blind us to the historical power which has estabUshed and perpetuated them. To hope — as do the socialistic critics of the Malthusian theory — that the average character of a people will remain unchanged when the institutions under which this character has developed are radically modified or abolished, is a fatuous delusion. SOCIALISM AND POPULATION 131 12. THE NECESSITY FOR STATE PENSIONS FOR MOTHERS 1 The conclusion which the present writer draws from the declin- ing birth rate is one of hope, not of despair. It is something to discover the cause of the phenomenon. Moreover, the cause is one that we can counteract. If the decline in the birth rate had been due to physical degeneracy, whether brought about by " ur- banization ". or otherwise, we should not have known how to cope with it. But a deliberately volitional interference, due chiefly to eco- nomic motives, can at any moment be influenced partly by a mere alteration of the economic conditions, partly by the opportunity for the play of the other motives which will be thereby afforded. What seems indispensable and urgent is to alter the economic incidence of childbearing. Under the present social conditions the birth of children in households maintained on less than three pounds a week (and these form four fifths of the nation) is attended by almost penal consequences. The wife is incapaci- tated for some months from earning money. For a few weeks she is subject to a painful illness, with some risk. The husband has to provide a lump sum for the necessary medical attendance and domestic service. But this is not- all. The parents know that for the next fourteen years they will have to dock themselves and their other children of luxuries and even of some of the neces- saries of life, just because there will be another mouth to feed. To four fifths of all the households in the land each succeeding baby means the probability of there being less food, less clothing, less house room, less recreation, and less opportunity for advance- ment for every member of the family. Similar considerations appeal even more strongly to a majority of the remaining 20 per 1 By Sidney Webb. From The Decline in the Birth Rate (Fabian Tract No. 131. The Fabian Society, London, 1907). Reprinted in the Popular Science Monthly, Vol. LXIX. Mr. Webb set out to ascertain the real cause of " race suicide." Partly on statistical evidence, partly on the basis of answers to questionnaires sent out to about three hundred married people " who could be relied upon to give frank and truthful aftswers to a detailed interrogatory," , he arrived at the conclusion that the " decline of the birth rate is principally, if not entirely, the result of deliberate volition in the regulation of the marriage state," that is, of neo- Malthusian practices. That part of his article here reprinted gives his proposal for the removal of the economic penalty on people who have children. 132 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS cent of the population, who make up the "middle" and profes- sional classes. Their higher standard of life, with its requirements in the way of culture and refinement, and. with the long and ex- pensive education which it demands for their children, makes the advent even of a third or fourth child — to say nothing of the possibility of a family of eight or twelve — a burden far more psychologically depressing than that of the wage-earner. In order that a due number of children m^y be born, and that they may be born rather of the self-controlled and foreseeing members of each class than of those who are reckless or improvident, we must alter the balance of considerations in favor of the child-producing family. The question is whether we shall be able to turn round with sufificient sharpness and iii time. For we have unconsciously based so much of our social policy — so many of our habits, tra- ditions, prejudices, and beliefs — on the assumption that the growth of population is always to be reckoned with, and even feared, that a genuine realization of the contrary position will involve great changes. There are thousands of men thinking themselves educated citizens to-day to whose whole system of social and economic beliefs the discovery will be as subversive as was that announced by Copernicus. We may at last understand what the modern economist means when he tells us that the most valuable of the year's crops, as it is the most costly, is not the wheat harvest or the lambing, but the year's quota of adolescent young men and women enlisted in the productive service of the community ; and that the due production and best possible care of this particular product is of far greater consequence to the nation than any other of its occupations. Infant mortality, for instance — that terrible and quite needless slaughter within the first twelve months of one seventh of all the babies that are bom — is already appealing to us in a new way, though it is no greater than it was a generation ago. We shall suddenly remember, too, that one third of all the paupers are young children ; and we may then realize that it is, to the community, of far more consequence how it shall bring up this quarter of a million children over whom it has complete power than the exact degree of hardness with which it may choose to treat the adults. Instead of turning out SOCIALISM AND POPULATION 133 the children to tramp with the father or beg with the mother, whenever these choose to take their discharge from the work- house, which is the invariable practice to-day, we should rather jump at the chance of "adopting" these unfortunate beings in order to make worthy citizens of them. Half of the young pau- pers, moreover, are widows' children, bereft of the breadwinner. For them the community will have to anr.nge to continue in some form or another the maintenance which the father woifld have provided, had he lived. Above all, we must encourage the thrifty, foreseeing, prudent, and self-controlled parents to remove the check which, often unwillingly enough, they at present put on their natural instincts and love of children. We must make it easier fpr them to undertake family responsibilities. For instance, the argument against the unlimited provision of medical attend- ance on the childbearing mother and her children disappear. We may presently find the leader of the Opposition, if not the Prime Minister, advocating the municipal supply of milk to all infants, and a free meal on demand (as already provided by a farseeing philanthropist at Paris) to mothers actually nursing their babies. We shall, indeed, have to face the problem of the systematic endowment of motherhood, and place this most indispensable of all professions upon an honorable economic basis. The feeding of all the children at school appears in a new light, and we come, at a stride, appreciably nearer to that not very far distant article in the education code making obligatory in the time-table a new subject — namely, " 12 to i p.m., table manners (materials pro- vided)." There would be no greater encouragement to parentage in the best members in the middle and upper artisan classes than a great multiplication of maintenance scholarships for secondary, technical, and university education. Such a revolution in the economic incidence of the burden of childbearing would leave the way open to the play of the best instincts of mankind. To the vast majority of women, and espe- cially to those of fine type, the rearing of children would be the most attractive occupation, if it offered economic advantages equal to those, say, of school teaching or service in the post office. At present it is ignored as an occupation, unremunerated, and in no 134 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS Way honored by the state. Once the production of healthy, moral, and intelligent citizens is revered as a social service and made the subject of deliberate praise and encouragement on the part of the government, it will, we may be sure, attract the best and most patriotic of the citizens. Once set free from the overwhelming economic penalties with which it is at present visited, the rearing of a family may gradually be rendered part of the code of the ordi- nary citizen's morality. The natural repulsion to interference in marital relations will have free play. The mystic obligations of which the religious-minded feel the force will no longer be con- fronted by the dead wall of economic necessity. To the present writer it seems that only by some such " sharp turn " in our way of dealing with such problems can we avoid race deterioration, if not race suicide. CHAPTER IV EUGENICS The progress of eugenics, 135. — Beginnings, 136. — Francis Gallon, 137.— Karl Pearson, 148. — The Francis Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics, 149. — Eugenic investigations, 150. — The biometric method vs. the Mendelian formulae, 152. — Early American eugenic ideas, 155. — The American Genetic Association, 156. — The Eugenics Record Office, 157. — Methods of practical eugenics, 159. — Attempts to restrict the increase of undesirables, 161. — Excep- tional ability vs. general betterment, 162. — The psycho-physical elite and the economic ^lite, 167. — The social significance of hereditary feeble-mindedness, 173. [Until recently the population problem has been discussed too much as if population were of unvarying potential quality, no matter how much its quantity might change. If we are to regard the well-being of a whole people as the right aim of both indi- vidual and social endeavor, if we recognize that the material basis of this well-being lies in the power of man, within the limits set by natural laws, to utilize natural forces and materials in the most eiRcient and economical way, and if the psychical content of life derived from this material basis depends upon the intellectual, moral, and aesthetic sensitiveness of individual men and women, then it must be evident at once that a scientific study of the economy and efficiency of a population, in the largest sense, must include not only a study of the quantitative relation between a people and its natural resources, but a careful consideration also of the physical and mental qualities of the individuals, the families, and the stocks which compose the aggregate population.] 13. THE PROGRESS OF EUGENICS 1 The idea of a conscious selective improvement of the human breed is not new. Like many another stimulating thought it was clearly uttered long before the time when its fresh expression 1 By James A. Field. Adapted from the Quarterly Journal of Economics, November, 1911, pp. 2-46, 61-67. 13s 136 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS found the popular mind in the ready and impressionable state which makes possible a far-reaching thought movement. Twenty- three hundred years ago the political dialogues of Plato outlined a •policy of controUing marriage selection and parentage for the general good of society ; and declared that the statesman who would advance the welfare of his citizens should, like the fancier of birds, or dogs, or horses, take care to breed from the best only.i Plato's project was too fantastic for his time. In fol- lowing centuries the laws of the Roman Empire, the doctrines of the Church, and the policies of mercantilist states, in so far as they took cognizance of population problems, kept courjt in terms of soldiers, or souls, or laboring and taxpaying subjects, and for the most part overlooked the inborn differences of men. Even at the beginning of the last century, when the discussion of popu- lation problems reached a development quite unprecedented, the quality of the population was still almost ignored in the prevailing concern about questions of mere numbers. The present eugenics movement may be traced back definitely -to the decade beginning with the year 1865, and more generally to the thought-reaction which followed the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859. The new biological doctrines inevi- tably drew attention to the selective significance of inborn differ- ences, in human beings as in other living forms. Nor was the existence of such differences among men likely to be overlooked by the reactionary adherents of a waning aristocratic regime, confronted with the growing prominence of the masses, whose influence was enlarging with their new accession of political privilege and with the more gradual course of industrial change. The stress which Darwin had laid on the cumulative selection of qualities transmitted by heredity put an end to that placid indiffer- ence with which the unequal increase of different social classes had been regarded. Even more positively it dispelled the illusions of those who had rejoiced in the relative infertility of the well-to- do, hailing it either as the sign of prudence in at least some places, or as a providential compensation of the hardships of poverty by vouchsafing to the poor an untroubled career of procreation. ^ Republlfc, 459 ; Laws, 773 ; and elsewhere. EUGENICS 137 The specific starting point of the eugenics literature is to be recognized in two articles on " Hereditary Talent and Char- acter," written by Francis Galton and published in Macmillan s Magazine for June and August, 1865. Impressed by the plastic- ity of the physical forms of animals under the breeder's selec- tion, Galton here announced his purpose of showing, more pointedly than had been attempted before, that the mental quali- ties of men are equally under control. He not only repudiated the prevalent view that sons of great men are usually stupid : he went on to show by a mass of biographical evidence how strikingly the frequent occurrence of able sons of able men indi- cates that mental qualities, quite as much as physical traits, are subject to the principles of natural inheritance. Doubtless, the son of an eminent man may be favored by superior opportunities. Advantageous associations, as well as inherited capacity, may aid his career. All this Galton was quite willing to admit. B^t he did not regard established position as the chief reason for the recurrence of talent in distinguished families ; and to make his argument more conclusive he avoided the examples of statesmen and generals, who might be thought particularly the creatures of privilege, and sought his facts " in the more open fields of science and literature." ^ His inferences from these facts were eagerly hopeful. " How vastly would the offspring be improved," he exckims, '" supposing distinguished women to be commonly married to distinguished men, generation after generation, ac- cording to rules, of which we are now ignorant, but which a study of the subject would be sure to evolve." ^ " If a twentieth part of the cost and pains were spent in measures for the improvement of the human race that is spent on the improve- ment of the breed of horses and cattle, what a galaxy of genius might we not create." ^ He expressed the belief that if the im- portance of race improvement were recognized, and if the theory of heredity were understood, some way would be found to carry the improvement into eifect.^ 1 Macmillan' s Magazine, Vol. XII, p. 161. ° Hid-, p. 165. 2 Ibid., p. 164. - * Ibid; p. 320- 138 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS Four years later these preliminary sketches developed into a book, — Hereditary Genius, published in 1869. The main thesis, that great ability is hereditary, is here substantially un- altered ; supported, now, by abundant genealogical material, which nearly iills the book with pedigrees of judges, statesmen, the English peerage, commanders, .literary men, men of science, poets, musicians, painters, divines, the senior classics of Cambridge, — even oarsmen and wrestlers, as examples of the ability of the muscles rather than of the mind. The naturd consequence of the more careful method of inquiry and exposition he adopted in this book is a more guarded attitude with reference to putting into practice, for ends of social reform, the principles just restated and reaffirmed. Yet the enthusiasm of the magazine articles may well have been less eloquently convincing of the possibility of such reform than the book's- impressive chapter on Influences that Affect the Natural Ability of Nations.^ For in this the appeal is not merely to fanciful influences which, might be exerted, but to the actual modifications of human quality which stand recorded in history, or work themselves out in the commonplace happenings of our own every day. Celibacy of the intellectual classes is condemned anew ; the cloisters and nunneries of the Middle Ages and the academic celibacy of present times alike are proved apt means to the elimination of superior intellect. The irreparable debasement of type which followed the course of the Inquisition in Spain — a topic already touched upon by Lyell in his Principles of Geology"^ — yields a germane and telling argument. Less dramatic though perhaps more important is the lesson drawn from the fact that the social group or nation within which the interval between generations is relatively long will be outnumbered and overcome, through mere inferiority of increase. Galton's first essays in the subject he' was later to call eugenics had greatly expanded. They had in fact grown to the magnitude of a masterwork, which has served as a point of departure for 1 This chapter has been reprinted in Carver, Sociology and Social Progress, pp. 631-646. Ginn and Company, 1905. — Ed. 2 loth edition, Vol. II, p. 489, 1868. EUGENICS 1*39 his own later writings and for most of the work of others in the field which he had thus marked out. A second pioneer of eugenics was William Rathbone Greg, already for years a well-known writer on economic and political subjects. Philanthropic in sympathies and fair in presentation, Greg was chiefly distinguished by an attitude of keen prophetic criticism of the tendencies of his time, and felt a probably undue concern at the increase of democratic and popular influence in public affairs. So it was that he became aware of the menace of adverse selective influences working through the unequal rates of increase of different elements in the- population, and wrote, quite independently of Galton, a brilliant article, " On the Failure of ' Natural Selection ' in the Case of Man," ^ which, with slight alteration, became the chapter on Non-Survival of the Fittest in a subsequent book, — Enigmas of Life? For races and nations, he argued, the principle of the survival of the fittest holds good ; but as regards individuals " the indisputable effect of the state of social progress and culture we have reached ... is to counteract and suspend the operation of that righteous and salutary law. . . ." ^ We keep alive the weak and defective; by our institution of property we subsidize and perpetuate the incompetency which may inherit but could not produce. The rich and the poor, dis- advantaged by opposite extreme circumstances of excess and privation, propagate freely. The prudent members of the inter- mediate class, "most qualified and deserving to continue the race are precisely those who do so in the scantiest measure." * In a noteworthy passage Greg outlines a Utopian reversal of prevailing conditions : A republic is conceivable in which paupers should be forbidden to propagate ; in which all candidates for the proud and solemn privilege of continuing an un- tainted and perfecting race should be subjected to a pass or a competitive examination, and those only be suffered to transmit their names and families to future generations who had a pure, vigorous, and well-developed constitution to transmit. However, Greg was no Utopian. Hope was from within. 1 Fraser's Magazine, September, 1868. ^ London, 1872. , ' Fraser's Magazine, September, 1868, p. 356. ^ Ibid., pp. 360-361. 140 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS We can only trust to the slow influences of enlightenment and moral suscepti- bility, percolating downwards and in time permeating all ranks. We can only watch and be careful that any other influences we do set in motion shall be such as, when they work at all, may work in the right direction. In 1873 Galton was heard from again. In an essay on " Hereditary Improvement," printed in Eraser's Magazine, he maintained " that it is feasible to improve the race of man by a system which shall be perfectly in accordance with the moral sense of the present time." ^ As the foundation of this system he aimed "to build up ... a sentiment of caste among those who are naturally gifted," and thus, within each existing social group, to draw together in the solidarity of a new and exclusive class consciousness the individuals of greatest merit for what he now tentatively called " viriculture." ^ The achievement of this result must come gradually. Galtop did not expect his scheme " to flourish until the popular belief shall have waxed several degrees warmer." ^ But inteUigence and a religious sense of duty were alike urgent that a beginning be made. I propose as the first step, and the time is nearly ripe for it, that some society should undertake three scientific services : the first, by means of a moderate number of influential local agencies, to institute continuous inquiries into the facts of human heredity ; the second, to be a center of information on heredity for breeders of animals and plants ; and the third, to discuss and classify the facts that were collected.* Primary reliance was thus placed on the increase and diffusion of scientific knowledge with the confident expectation that if once the populace were convinced of the import of heredity, " quite as many social influences as are necessary will become directed to obtain the desired end."^ Thus far the forerunners of eugenics had been Englishmen; but in this same year 1873 an important contribution came from 1 Fraser's Magazine, N.S., Vol. VII, January, 1873, P' "l^- ^ Ibid., -p. iig. * /izi/., p. 123. * /W(f., p. 124. 5 Ibid., p. 125. At the close of the article Galton unluckily indulged in a vision of the ultimate results of his project. His picture of a class of the praised and privileged fit, superposed on a population of the rejected, is one which we may rejoice to believe impossible, as well as unjustified by an intelligent interpretation of the forces which he would set at work. If this forecast be ignored, the article agrees in large measure with the best eugenic opinion of the present day. EUGENICS 141 the Continent in the Histoire des sciences et des savants^ by a distinguished Swiss botanist, the younger Alphonse de Candolle. This book, like Hereditary Genius, is based on the results of an inquiry into the relationships of eminent men. But De Can- dolle confined his attention to men of science, and took for his criterion of eminence membership in the leading honorary scien- tific societies. Cases of the close relationship of these scientists he found strikingly frequent. Yet his conclusions were not alto- gether in accord with the conclusions of Galton ; in fact, at first sight they seem flatly contradictory. To heredity, properly speak- ing, he attributed little effect except in the case of the mathe- matical sciences.^ He was less convinced of the inheritance of genius than Galton had been. In fact, he expressly criticized the extreme conclusions which Galton drew.^ Yet he believed sufficiently in the heredity of human qualities to consider the possibility of improvement by artificial selection and to remark the appearances of degeneration due to selective causes like war, medicine, and unequal increase of rich and poor, which conserve the worse rather than the better types. But although he thus discussed artificial selection, he conceived it to be for practical purposes nonexistent or illusory : marriages of the unfit can hardly be prevented ; or, if they are in form prevented, they are likely to give way to illegitimacy. The influence of law or of religion he did not deny, but he classed it with the factors of natural, and not of artificial, selection. Thus, though he seemed incUned to belittle both the power of heredity and the means by which others hoped it might be made preponderatingly a power for good, his skepticism in each case was less extreme in reality than in appearance. The reaction of De Candolle's views upon the work of Gal- ton was immediate and unmistakable. Characteristically Galton set about further investigations of his own. Convinced that a more minute study of the antecedents of scientific men would 1 Histoire des sciences et des savants depuis deux siecles suivie d'autres etudes sur des sujets scientifiques, en particulier sur la selection dans I'espfece humaine. Geneva, 1873. 2 Cf. pp. 107-108. This and subsequent citations refer to the first edition. 8 Cf. e.g. pp. 243, 281, 380. 142 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS establish the superior importance of heredity as contrasted with education, he sent a searching questionnaire to one hundred and eighty scientists of reputation. The results of his study of more than a hundred replies were published the following year in his book entitled English Men of Science : their Nature and Nur- ture} The result, in Galton's mind, was further affirmation of the supremacy of nature over nurture^ — of inheritance over training — so far as the two are separable. " I am confident," he wrote in the preface, "that one effect of the evidence here collected will be to strengthen the utmost claims I ever made for the recognition of the importance of hereditary influence."^ One decade had produced all these writings. Clearly, the beginnings of eugenics were congenial to the thought of that period. Yet what was written seems to have been often, as in the cases of Darwin and Greg, an episode, brilliant but without direct continuance, in the course of other work. Apparently demonstration of selective influences reacting on the quality of the population seemed for the time rather to stimulate the new taste for biological speculation than to appeal strongly to persons practically concerned with human degeneracy or with measures of human improvement. " Popular feeling was not then ripe to accept even the elementary truths of hereditary talent and char- acter, upon which the possibility of Race Improvement depends, Still less was it prepared to consider dispassionately any pro- posals for practical action." * Even Galton, whose long span of consistent intellectual activity is the closest link between that early outburst of eugenic ideas and the reawakened eugenic move- ment of the present, "laid the subject wholly to one side for many years." ® The interim between 1874 and 1901 was, however, too pro- longed to pass without some new evidence of Galton's interest in ^ London, 1874. * " Nature is all that a man brings with himself into the world ; nurture is every influence from without that affects him after his birth" (p. 12). The distinction between nature and nurture had already been made in the article of 1873 on Hereditary Improvement, p. 116. ' Pp. vi-vii. * Galton, Memories of My Life, p. 310. 6 /^ij^,, p. 310, EUGENICS 143 eugenics. During this period he pubhshed, among other works, Inquiries into Human Faculty a^d its Development (1883), and Natural Inheritance (1889). Each has an important bearing on his later writing. The Inquiries into Human Faculty gave eugenics its name, . . . We greatly want a brief word to express the science of improving stock, which is by no means confined to questions of judicious mating, but which, especially in the case of man, takes cognizance of all influences that tend in however remote a degree to give to the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had. The word eugenics would sufficiently express the idea ; it is at least a neater word and a more generalized one than viriculture, which I once ventured to use.^ Nor was this coining of a term the only conspicuous contribu- tion to eugenics which the book contained. For Galton here considered, in a passage more interesting for its doubts than for its conclusions, the menace of loss of stamina through close breeding of human strains ; ^ and he maintained the possibility of some system of marks for ancestral and personal merit, on the basis of which endowments, portions, or adoption might be made available for persons of meritorious stock.^ Finally,^ he fore- shadowed the religious sanction for eugenic conduct which has characterized some of his most recent statements of eugenic principles.^ Natural Inheritance was essentially a study of the general biological principles of heredity. It dealt not so much with eugenics as with the foundations of eugenics. But it has left a lasting mark on subsequent eugenic discussion because of the new lengths to which it carried the mathematical method of analysis in heredity problems — the method which, outlined in Hereditary Genius and latterly elaborated by the biometricians, has involved its followers with the followers of Mendel in a spirited and possibly momentous controversy. 1 Inquiries into Human Faculty, p. 24, note. 2 Ibid., pp. 305-307. » Ibid., p. 327 a. * Ibid., p. 337. ^ Cf. especially, Sociological Papers, London, 1904, p. 50, and 1905, pp. 52-53. 144 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS A reawakening of interest in eugenics was heralded, on the eve of the present century, by Professor Karl Pearson's vigorous lecture on " National Life from the Standpoint of Science," ^ de- livered at Newcastle, November 19, 1900. The message of this lecture was primarily the answer which recent studies of heredity had given to those who concerned themselves with problems of national welfare: the nation is an organism in struggle to sur- vive, and its success in that struggle depends on the strong in- crease of the best elements of its population. The truth was put bluntly, in an attempt to impress it upon the newly sensitive minds of the British people, aroused at that time, by the course of events, to a questioning of the state of their national power. The time, indeed, appears to have been unusually favorable to the reception and spread of such teachings. The shock of the reverses in South Africa, by which, throughout England, spirits " were depressed in a manner probably never before experienced by those of our countrymen now living"'^ was "more or less directly"^ the reason for Professor Pearson's choice of his topic. " 1 have endeavored to place before you a few of the problems which, it seems to me, arise from a consideration of some of our recent difficulties in war and in trade." ^ England, in manufac- ture and commerce as in war, had shown " a want of brains in the right place." ^ But lack of physique as well as lack of brain was causing apprehension, as evidenced later by the appointment (September 2, 1903) of an Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration "to make a preliminary inquiry into the allegations concerning the deterioration of certain classes of the population as shown by the large percentage of rejections for physical causes of recruits for the Army and by other evidence, especially the Report of the Royal Commission on Physical Training (Scotland) " — ; which had been created the year before. Subsequently the Committee was further instructed "to indicate generally the causes of such physical deterioration as does exist 1 Part of this now famous lecture has been reprinted in Carver, Sociology and Social Progress, pp. 392-409. Ginn and Company, 1905. — Ed. ^ National Life from the Standpoint of Science, p. 9. London, 1901. ' Jbid., p. 13. * Ibid., p. 60. « Ibid., p. 30. EUGENICS 145 in certain classes, . . . and to point out the means by which it can be most effectually diminished." Probably the public had been prepared for notions of degeneracy in some parts of the population by the epoch-making investigations of Charles Booth in London — investigations which were just then culminating, after a duration of more than a decade. Finally, it was not without significance that the school of biologists who stood for quantita- tive studies by means of the technique of modern mathematical statistics, and among whom Galton was a recognized leader, signalized their growing solidarity and influence by establishing in October, 1901, their journal Biometrika, which, from the time of its initial number, has published many articles bearing more or less directly upon eugenics. In this same month of October, 1901, Galton delivered the Huxley Lecture of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, and returned to the field of eugenics by taking as his subject for the lecture " The Possible Improvement of the Human Breed, under the Existing Conditions of Law and Senti- ment." He echoed on this occasion the opinions which had marked his earlier utterances, putting them, however, in the mathematical form of his intervening work. He laid, as usual, special stress on the importance of increasing the productivity of the best stock, rather than repressing the worst ; and he out- lined, conservatively, possible means to that end, in economic aid, honors, and a sort of religious enthusiasm. ^ Since this Huxley Lecture, partly because of the receptivity of the public mind, partly no doubt through the collaboration of able scientists in allied studies, eugenics has made progress. " Now," wrote Galton, in his autobiography (1908), "" I see my way better, and an appreciative audience is at last to be had, though it be small." To this audience he repeatedly addressed himself : the extent of his activity during his last ten years quite precludes any attempt at this point to give each of his publications separate mention. Three papers only, delivered and discussed be- fore the Sociological Society, are chosen for special comment here. ' Nature, Vol. LXIV, pp. 663-664 ; also, Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution for 1901, p. 534. 146 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS The first of these papers, read May i6, 1904, bore the title : " Eugenics : Its Definition, Scope, and Aims." " Eugenics," as then defined, " is the science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race ; also with those that de- velop them to the utmost advantage." ^ But in what followed, as in most discussions of eugenics, only the improvement of inborn qual- ities was considered. " The aim of eugenics is to bring as many influences as can be reasonably employed, to cause the useful classes in the community to contribute more than their proportion to the next generation.* To the question thence arising — what influences can be reasonably employed? — came the answer which has taken rank as an authoritative scheme of eugenic activity.^ The course of procedure that Ues within the functions of a learned and active Society, such as the Sociological may become, would be somewhat as follows ; 1. Dissemination of a knowledge of the laws of heredity so far as they are surely known, and promotion of their farther study. Few seem to be aware how greatly the knowledge of what may be termed the actuarial side of hered- ity has advanced in recent years. . . . 2. Historical inquiry into the rates with which the various classes of society (classified according to civic usefulness)* have contributed to the population at various times, in ancient and modern nations. There is strong reason for believing that national rise and decline is closely connected with this influence. It seems to be the tendency of high civilization to check fertility in the upper classes, through numerous causes, some of which are well known, others are inferred, and others again are wholly obscure. . . .' 3. Systematic collection of facts showing the circumstances under which large and thriving families have most frequently originated ; in other words, the conditions of Eugenics." . . . 1 Sociological Papers, 1904, p. 45. ' Ibid., p. 47. ' Ibid., pp. 47-50. * Gallon was careful, and for the most part more than ordinarily successful, in maintaining the distinction between superior classes in a eugenic sense and the conventional " upper classes " whose position Is a matter of wealth or social pre- tensions. But the distinction is difficult to keep clear. For example, Galton's assumption that ability is satisfactorily measured by attainment would in many cases identify ability with the possession of wealth or station. [Cf. Loria, " The Psycho-Physical Elite and the Economic Elite," pp. 167-173 of this volume. - — Ed.] 6 " The latter class are apparently analogous to those which bar the fertility of most species of wildanimals in zoological gardens." — Sociological Papers,igo4, p. 48. « A thriving family, tentatively defined, " is one in which the children have gained distinctly superior positions to those who were their classmates in early life. Families may be considered " large ' that contain not less than three adult male children." — Sociological Papers, 1904, p. 48. EUGENICS 147 4. Influences affecting Marriage [i.e., the influences of social sanction or disapproval, which might be turned to the service of eugenics]. . . . 5. Persistence in setting forth the national importance of Eugenics. There are three stages to be passed through. Firstly it must be made faiiiiliar as an academic question, until its exact importance has been understood and accepted as a fact ; Secondly it must be recognized as a subject whose practical devel- opment deserves serious consideration ; and Thirdly it must be introduced into the national conscience, like a new religion. ... I see no impossibility in Eugenics becoming a religious dogma among mankind, but its details must first be worked out sedulously in the study. Over-zeal leading to hasty action would do harm. . . . The first and main point is to secure the general intellectual acceptance of Eugenics as a hopeful and most important study. Then let its principles work into the heart of the nation, who will gradually give practical effect to them in ways that we may not wholly foresee. After nearly a year^ Galton again addressed the Sociological Society ; not, as before, to outline a eugenic system, but rather, in the light of his maturer reflection, to revise the former em- phasis and to suggest paths of further work. Under the title of " Studies in National Eugenics," in indicating some of the work to be done, he touched newly on an old project : In some future time, dependent on circumstances, I look forward to a suitable authority issuing Eugenic certificates to candidates for them. They would imply a more than an [sic] average share of the several qualities of at least goodness of constitution, of physique, and of mental capacity.^ But the idea to which he gave most prominence, and which received most attention during the discussion, was that of " Re- strictions in Marriage." ^ By all sorts of folk customs, marriage relations throughout the world are restricted and controlled as social expediency directs. Monogamy, endogamy, exogamy, the Australian marriage usages, taboo, the prohibited degrees, celibacy — all demonstrate "how powerful are the various combinations of immaterial motives upon marriage selection, how they may all become hallowed by religion, accepted as custom, and enforced by law." ^ " The proverbial ' Mrs. Grundy ' has enormous influence in checking the marriages she considers indiscreet." ^ As for the 1 February 14. i905- ° ^*»«^-. PP- 3-i3- 2 Sociologic?' Papers, 1905, p. 17. « IHd., p. 12. ^ Ibid., p. e- This remark, from Gallon's reply to criticism, was apparently written after t^^ original session. 148 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS religious sanction, Galton was moved by the discussion to append in the published report a specific note on " Eugenics as a Factor in Religion." ^ Thus the imperiousness of social convention and the moral enthusiasm of religious belief, two motives that are always with us, are given emphatic recognition as potential forces of great promise for eugenic reform. With these parting instructions and renewed expressions of hopefulness, Galton's active efforts for eugenics may be said to have ended. Almost until his death, which occurred January 17, 191 1, he continued to lend the cause the support of his steady interest ; and on one or two occasions he consented to speak in public, despite his advanced age of nearly ninety years. But his main work was done. He had been given the rare experience of foreseeing and announcing a new branch of knowledge in advance of his generation, and yet, though he had made his announce- ment in middle age, of living to see a subsequent generation over- take his idea and gratefully adopt it. He created eugenics, named it, and formally defined it, as "the study of agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations, either physically or mentally .^ By his own achieve- ments, by the kindling influence of his enthusiasm, and by the final gift of his main fortune, he has insured that the science he founded shall go on. Of the recent developments in eugenic research, that which most closely links itself with Galton's inquiries is the work of Professor Karl Pearson and his associate^. By profession Pearson is a mathematician. Sincp 1896 he has occupied the chair of Applied Mathematics and Mechanics at University College, Lon- don. But an interest in philosophical problems and especially in the theory of evolution turned his attention to the mathematical aspects of various biological phenomena,^ and, riot surprisingly, to 1 Sociological Papers, 1905, pp. 52-53. • " Memories of My Life, p. 321. A later definition will be fotjnd in the form of a note to page 3 of Sociological Papers, 1905 : " Eugenics maylbe defined as the science which deals with those social agencies that influence, nientally or physi- cally, the racial qualities of future generations." '\ ' For early examples of Pearson's work in such subjects, cf. The Chances of Death and Other Studies in Evolution (1897) ; especially Vol. I. EUGENICS 149 the methods of study which Galton's Natural Inheritance had pro- posed. In a series of Mathematical Contributions to the Theory of Evolution he considered and revised the Galtonian Law of Ancestral Heredity, and greatly elaborated the theory of frequency curves and correlation methods, extending their applications to cases where the impossibility of exact quantitative measurement had previously made them inapplicable, and devising safeguards against biased errors in observation. Then, with the new refine- ments of this " biometric " method at his command, he proceeded to an estimate of the influence of heredity on human traits. Pre- liminary investigation of the inheritance of certain tangible char- acters of animals had provided a measure of the degree in which such characters are inherited, expressed in correlation coefficients indicating the resemblance between parent and progeny, or be- tween two individuals of common parentage. In the first of two articles, published in 1903, " On the Laws of Inheritance in Man," ^ Professor Pearson concluded that the inheritance of phys- ical characters in man is more marked than had been supposed : is in fact as strong as in other animals. More impressive still was the conclusion of the second article, dealing with mental and moral qualities, and showing them to be inherited in the same degree as physical traits. To be sure, the subject of this study offered peculiar difficulties ; and the method adopted — a study of fraternal resemblance as evidenced by the reports of school- teachers — is open to serious question on grounds of bias in the collection of the data. Yet, after allowance for fallacy and error, the result of the ' inquiry remained too striking to be longer ignored, and still further shifted the burden of proof toward those who denied the transmissibility of mental endowments. Eugenic investigation took on added definiteness about a year after the publication of these papers, through the generous inter- est of Francis Galton, who gave to the University of London funds to maintain a fellowship for the promotion of the study of "national eugenics." From The Francis Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics then organized has come an increasing out- put of interesting and often important studies. In 191 1 the will 1 Biometrika, Vol. II, pp. 357-462, and Vol. Ill, pp. 131-190. 150 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS of Sir Francis Galton bequeathed some ;£4 5,000 to the Univer- sity of London " for the establishment and endowment of a profes- sorship — to be known as 'The Galton Professorship of Eugenics,' with a laboratory or office and library attached thereto." The will further makes this statement of what the Galton professor is to do: 1 . Collect materials bearing on Eugenics. 2. Discuss such materials and draw conclusions. 3. Forni a Central OflBce to provide information, under appropriate restric- tions, to private individuals and to public authorities concerning the laws of inheritance in man, and to urge the conclusions as to social conduct which follow from such laws. 4. Extend the knowledge of Eugenics by all or any of the following means, namely : — (a) professorial instruction ; {d) occasional publications ; (c) occasional public lectures ; (d) experimental or observational work which may throw light on eugenic problems. In accordance with the founder's wish, Pearson has been chosen as the first Galton Professor. The publications of the Eugenics Laboratory are for the most part comprised in two series : The Eugenics Laboratory Memoirs and the Eugenics Laboratory Lecture Series. A third series, nominally distinct, — the- Studies in National Deterioration, pub- lished as 'Drapers' Company Research Memoirs by the Depart- ment of Applied Mathematics of University College — presents the results of similar inquiries conducted in the Biometric Labo- ratory, often by members of the Eugenics Laboratory Staff. Yet another series. Questions of the Day and of the Fray, also pub- lished by the Department of Applied Mathematics, has been inaugurated. However, a more intelligible statement of what has been accomplished can be made if the pubUcations be for the moment regarded as falling into three groups, namely: (i) com- pilations of mere material for the study of human inheritance; (2) intensive and technical studies of special eugenic problems; and (3) general statements of the conclusions reached, in simple form for popular information. The first group consists of those issues of the Eugenics Memoirs which are known collectively as The Treasury of Human Inheritance. These are designed to make available, in standard- ized, scientific form, without attempt at interpretation or anything EUGENICS iSi controversial, " published and unpublished family pedigrees, illus- trating the inheritance in man of mental and physical characters, of disease and of abnormality." The parts thus far issued contain pedigrees of diabetej _insipi dus, split-foot, polydactylism, brachy- dac^lism, tub erculos is, deaf-mut^mTnegal" ability, angioneurotic oedema, hermaphroditism, insanity, commerciaPabHityTTiarelip, cleft palate, and congenital cataract. The evidence thus gathered affords important data, not only for followers of the Galton-* 'Pearson school, but for all who perceive that the progress of eugenics depends on a further knowledge of the facts. The second group — detailed reports of special studies — com- prises most of the Eugenics Memoirs, and the Studies in National Deterioration. Here, perhaps, should also be placed the Ques- tions of the Day and of the Fray, which up to the present have mainly served to carry on a controversy that recent memoirs on the influence of parental alcoholism provoked. Apart from these polemics, fourteen ^ Memoirs and Studies have appeared, dealing with such subjects, among others, as tuberculosis, insanity, the inheritance of the phthisical and insane diatheses, the relative effect of heredity and environment on eyesight, the effect of home conditions on the physique and intelligence of children, and the inheritance of ability. The third group is coincident with the Eugenics Laboratory Lecture Series. To persons who wish to learn the gist of the results embodied in the more abstruse memoirs, but who are not so critical-minded or so mathematically trained as to grapple with their technicalities, these lectures carry the message of the Labo- ratory on the paramount import of heredity in human improve- ment or degeneration. " All human qualities are inherited in a marked and probably equal degree."'^ Sweepingly this is enun- ciated, as a foundation principle of eugenics ; " good and bad phy- sique, the liability to and the immunity from disease, the moral characters and the mental temperament"^ — all, so far as they 1 Twenty-two at the end of 1915. — Ed. 2 Pearson, The Groundwork of Eugenics, p. 20. ' Pearson, The Scope and Importance to the State of the Science of National Eugenics, p. 33. 152 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS are not acquired characters, are included in the claim. Environ- mental factors, on the contrary, exert an influence of altogether subordinate importance : I will not dogmatically assert that environment matters not at all ; phases of it may be discovered which produce more effect than any we have yet been able to deal with. But I think it quite safe to say that the influence of environment is not one fifth that of heredity, and quite possibly not one tenth of it.i Hence, clearly, attempts at the alleviation or cure of human dis- abilities should look much more to human nature and much less" to the external conditions of the milieu than has been usual ; and should especially beware of such changes in law or social custom as, by slackening or perverting biological selection, more than undo the direct benefits they have sought to accomplish. Hence, too, that notoriously adverse selection due to the restricted birth rate fundamentally menaces the racial quality of the future ; the more particularly since researches have shown that the neurotic, the insane, the tuberculous, and the criminal are more frequent among the elder-born members of families, and thus constitute an abnormally large proportion of the descendants of persons who have had exceptionally small families.^ The advance of the science of medicine and the spread of education could make but poor headway against a steady running-out of the stock which they are called on to restore. The philanthropist looks to hygiene, to education, to general environment, for the preservation of the race. It is the easy path, but it cannot achieve the desired result. These things are needful tools to the efficient, and passable crutches to the halt; but . . . there is no hope of racial purification in any environment which does not mean selection of the germ.* . . . Selection of parentage is the sole effective process known to science by which a race can continually progress.* The conclusions announced by the Galton Laboratory have fre- quently been called in question. Authoritative biological opinion, 1 Pearson, Nature and Nurture, p. 27. 2 Cf. Pearson, The Problem of Practical Eugenics, p. 19. [This conclusion, like others of the Pearson school, has been seriously questioned by a number of statis- ticians and medical men. It cannot as yet be considered as scientifically estab- lished. — Ed.] " The Scope and Importance ... of National Eugenics, p. 39. * The Groundwork of Eugenics, p. 20. EUGENICS 153 supported by quite different methods of research, has, to be sure, agreed in assigning much greater weight to heredity than to sur- rounding conditions. But the findings of Professor Pearson and his collaborators have challenged prevalent opinion so often as to plunge the authors in controversy. In particular, the studies deal- ing with the effects of parental alcoholism upon children have provoked much hostile comment. Obviously, the assertion that no marked influence on the physique and mentality of the child is produced by alcoholism of the parents discredits much of the best-meant effort now devoted to social betterment, and seems nothing less than high treason to the zealots of the temperance cause. Sentimental protest against such a finding was inevitable. In this instance the temper of the protests had doubtless been exacerbated by irritation at the mathematical treatment which characterizes all the work of the Eugenics Laboratory, and makes the published results nearly or quite unintelligible to persons unfamiliar with the manner of analysis and statement there em- ployed. The criticism which results from prejudice and mis- understanding is, of course, negligible. There remains, however, a valid ground for objection to the assumptions of the actuarial method in itself. To make this more clear it will be necessary to outline a different interpretation of the phenomena of heredity, for purposes of comparison. According to the Mendelian school, a cardinal principle of heredity is to be recognized in the segregation of alternative characters. The effect of this principle is that the so-called unit characters are, in heredity, indivisible. A given unit character either appears completely or wholly fails to appear in the bodily make-up of an individual. Thus, for example, either a man is color-blind or he is not, much as a person is either male or female. In so far as inheritance is in this way alternative the intermediate blending of unit characteristics is precluded. The disciple of Mendel therefore conducts his investigations " in such a way that the only possible answer is a direct ' Yes ' or a direct ' No.' " ^ The "actuarial" study of heredity, on the other hand, rests on an altogether different assumption. The Galtonian analysis, and 1 W, Bateson, The Methods and Scope of Genetics, p. 20, 154 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS the formulae of Professor Pearson which have developed and emended it, are based on the view that the traits of an individual are not alternative unit characters, but variations of greater or less degree in either direction from an intermediate normal type ; and that, if a large number of cases be studied together, the distribu- tion of observed variations about the mean will exemplify the " normal frequency " computed according to the theory of proba- bilities. Consequently the investigator at the Galton Laboratory does not ask questions to be answered by "yes" or "no." He asks, "to what extent?" and expresses his answer numerically in a coefficient of correlation. Theoretically, then, if the Mendelian formulation is right, the actuarial method is wrong. Between two alternative unit charac- ters a mean, in the sense of an actual intermediate type, does not exist. In such a case the biometricians' concept of deviations from the normal has no justification in fact. If proof of the in- compatibility of the two interpretations were needed, it might be found in the reluctance of Professor Pearson to accept the almost conclusive evidence adduced by experimenters of the other school. In practice, to be sure, the actuarial procedure may yield results broadly corresponding to the conclusions of the Mendelians ; especially where the mass of data is large or the characters studied, being in reality complex groups of undistinguished unit characters, yield collective results which partake of the nature of averages. But correlation methods afford at best a blind and clumsy way of dealing with unit characters. If the unit-character theory con- tinues to gain ascendancy, as now seems likely, the authority of the biometricians will decline, and the value of the publications which have thus far issued from the Galton Laboratory' will decline with it. Yet even though the actuarial method be sup- planted, it will have served a useful purpose by its example of quantitative work, inadequately conceived but rigorously carried out, at a time when the scientific pretensions of eugenics had still to be established. Hardly more than a decade has yet elapsed since the redis- covery of Mendel's writings gave a new impulse to the experi- mental study of heredity. In the course of the search for fresh EUGENICS 155 biological testimony in support of Mendel's views not a little evidence has been derived from inquiries into the transmission of human traits. The general literature of Mendelism has given some attention to unit-character inheritance in man. But thus far the task of systematic eugenic investigation based on Mendelian principles has been largely left to American scientists. Although the eugenics movement, under that name, is but a newcomer in America, the course of our earlier thinking and writing on social problems was not without its significant contri- butions to the subject of race improvement. The investigations of hereditary criminality carried on by Robert L. Dugdale, in 1874 and 1875, and summarized in his world-famous little book. The Jukes ^ must rank among the most fruitful studies of degen- eracy which have yet been made. Later, McCuUoch's Tribe of Ishmael assembled more evidence of similar purport. Dr. Amos Warner's illuminating chapter on Charity as a Factor in Human Selection, published in his American Charities nearly twenty years ago, dates back to a period when, in his own words, there was "almost no literature bearing directly on the subject." Since then the debt of eugenics to scientific philanthropy in the United States has continued to grow. The proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Correction and of the American Prison Association have contained, from the times of Dugdale and McCuUoch and Warner to the present day, interesting evi- dences of human heredity. Another branch of inquiry has sprung from the suggestion of Dr. Alexander Graham Bell's Memoir upon the Formation of a Deaf Variety of the Human Race (1883), which was followed by Dr. Fay's exhaustive work on Marriages of the Deaf in America, and supported by Dr. Bell's endowment of .the Volta Bureau, at Washington, for the collection of information concerning deaf-mutes. From biological begin- nings, revealed in a chapter or two of Footnotes to Evolution, Dr. David Starr Jordan developed the eugenic message of The 1 4th edition, 1910. Comparable to "The Jukes" are two monographs pub- lished by the Eugenics Record Office : The Nam Family, 1912, and The Hill Folk, 1912. — Ed. IS6 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS Blood of the Nation and The Human Harvest. Latterly, Dr. Woods, in his Mental and Moral Heredity in Royalty, has produced a valuable book after the manner of Galton's earlier studies. On the other side, Professor Ward's Applied Sociology, weaving its author's social philosophy and the conclusions of Alfred Odin's Genkse des grands hommes into a remarkable pro- test against the physical determinism of heredity as expressed in Galton's work, glowingly affirms the power of society to develop latent genius by the fostering social environment of education. Such are a few conspicuous examples of pioneer eugenic thought in this country. With them should be mentioned the httle-known project of Mr. Loring Moody, of Boston, who, in 1881 or 1882, proposed to establish an Institute of Heredity, and, by means of a school with lectures and a library, to diffuse " knowledge on the subject of improving our race by the laws of physiology." ^ This plan, however, was frustrated by Mr. Moody's death, and the organized dissemination of eugenic instruction which it contem- plated long remained unrealized. A new phase of eugenics in this country began in 1906 with the appointment of the Committee on Eugenics of the American Breeders' Association.^ The latter society had been formed in 1903, by scientific breeders of animals and plants, to promote the study of heredity in its bearings upon their methods. When, with the purpose of organizing this study, the Association deter- mined to appoint a comprehensive system of committees, it recognized the applications of heredity to human well-being by naming a Committee on Eugenics. Some persons, to be sure, felt at that time that a wholly independent organization would be more appropriate. The American Breeders' Association conse- quently authorized its eugenics committee to sever itself from the parent society if that course should be deemed best. But the opinion prevailed that the serious study of human heredity would be promoted by close alliance with investigators in related fields ; and that in so far as sentimental adherents might be frightened away by distaste for so frank an analogy between the breeding of ' The details of this project have been communicated to the Eugenics Record Office. ^ Now the American Genetic Association. — Ep, EUGENICS 1 57 men and the breeding of cattle, the effect on the ultimate use- fulness of the committee would be more salutary than otherwise. Accordingly, for three or four years the Committee on Eugenics continued to exist, with a growing membership and a slowly wid- ening sphere of activity. Then, in July, 19 lo, it was raised to the rank of Eugenics Section, coordinate with the Plant Section and Animal Section of the original constitution, and permitted to form committees of its own. The committees at present organ- ized are concerned with the heredity, respectively, of the feeble- minded, of insanity, of epilepsy, of criminality, and of deaf -mutism. Each committee has its chairman and its secretary, experts in the special subject. The chairman of the Eugenics Section as a whole is David Starr Jordan ; and the secretary is Dr. Charles B. Davenport, director of the Department of Experimental Evolution of the Cafnegie Institution, at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, where the work of the section virtually centered until the Eugenics Record Office was founded in order more definitely to centralize and supplement the activities of the several committees. The Eugenics Record Office was opened in October, 19 10, in a building of its own at Cold Spring Harbor, on land adjoin- ing the experiment station of the Carnegie Institution. This proximity permits of close touch between the investigators of human inheritance and the biological experimenters, and makes it possible for Dr. Davenport to direct the work of both. But the Record Office is none the less distinct, as it is maintained by special funds from contributors interested in the cause, and manned by its own staff. The main work of the Record Office' is the collection of family pedigrees revealing the presence of some trait or defect the inheri- tance of which is to be studied. Inasmuch as these pedigrees are analyzed not in masses and by averages, but individually accord- ing to Mendelian principles of descent, it is important that each should, if practicable, comprise the history of a wide family con- nection through several generations, with all possible detail that might bear on the subject of inquiry. The data for such compila- tions are secured partly by correspondence, in the form of stand- ardized " Records of Family Traits," and partly through the field 158 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS workers of the Record Office or of cooperating hospitals, asylums, and other institutions. Once secured, the material is recorded in genealogical charts, with the aid of conventional symbols showing at a glance not only degrees of relationship, but also legitimacy ; sex ; cause of death ; bad habits, diseases, or defects such as alco- holism, habitual wandering, criminality, sexual immorality, tuber- culosis, syphilis, epilepsy, feeble-mindedness, insanity, paralysis, neurotic condition, deafness, blindness ; or, if the information establishes it, normality. The completed records are kept on file in a fireproof room at Cold Spring Harbor, and made particularly accessible by an elaborate system of catalogue references to families, • localities, characteristics, and the like. As evidence accumulates it is published in the form of Eugenic Record Office Bulletins, Memoirs, and Reports. Thus far the researches of the Record Office have centered mainly about the heredity of mental disease and deficiency. The field workers have delved in the family histories of certain iso- lated, inbred, and degenerate communities in New York and New England. The striking lesson which these inquiries already foreshadow is not all that is gained. During the summer months the staff of the Record Office directs the training of a class in eugenic field work, conducting its students through isolated dis- tricts where the feeble-minded are found living in hovels, and more particularly through establishments for the insane and feeble- minded. There the students, confronted with patients and histories of patients, see with their own eyes a telling demonstration of the cost, in misery and care, caused by the breeding of tainted stocks. More than that, the students and their methods are them- selves seen by the persons in charge of hospitals and asylums, who are thus often convinced of the value, for their own purposes and for the public good, of such a tracing back of the ailments which they treat. The directors of the Eugenics Record Office have met with hearty cooperation at such institutions ; and it is most gratifying to hear that more than one State has taken steps to support in some measure the scientific economy of an investiga- tion which may lead to a momentous reduction of the burden of caring for the mentally unsound. EUGENICS 159 The practical application of eugenic principles lies mostly in the future, when there shall be more certain knowledge of the true principles to apply. But in the meantime, as knowledge grows, opportunity is given at least for partial and temporary remedial measures, to check the apparent degenerative tendencies that con- temporary economic and social conditions create. Moreover, if an ultimate policy of race improvement is to be elaborated, there must be a working hypothesis of the task to be accomplished. P'or both these reasons eugenists must look toward the problem of practical eugenic procedure, and consider in particular, though it be only provisionally, the distinction between positive and negative, or, in the happier terms of Mr. Crackanthorpe, constructive and restric- tive, eugenics.^ Is the eugenic ideal more attainable by promoting the increase of superior stock and thus cultivating high ability, or by checking the propagation of the inferior, and so eliminating the congenitally unfit .? It has been maintained that positive and negative eugenics are one and the same process, viewed from opposite sides : that the relative increase of the better is the relative decrease of the worse. However true this may be as an abstraction, it is not necessarily so significant in its application to actual conditions. We cannot divide all of mankind sharply into sheep and goats and deal with either half in its entirely. Practically, eugenics is likely always to have to concentrate its efforts on the comparatively few who are manifestly good or notoriously bad — working at the fringes of the population and leaving untouched a great residuum of mediocrity. And since these two conspicuous fringes may be of very different extent, very unequally distinguishable from the gen- eral stuff of society, and very unlike in their amenability to control, it is by no means clear that the reformer can work, at his pleasure, upon either the top or the bottom with the same result. For several reasons restrictive eugenics offers at present the greater promise of a beneficial outcome. A number of human defects, easily recognized and apparently nearly or quite unit characters in inheritance, are by common assent heavy burdens to 1 Cf. Eugenics Education Society, Second Annual Report, pp. 7-8. l6o READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS the individual whom they afiflict and the community in which he lives. Insanity, deaf-mutism, serious congenital defects of vision, epilepsy, haemophilia, would be grave disabilities in any state of society which we may reasonably foresee. The feeble-minded, already anachronisms of evolution, must presumably become more and more tragic laggards as intellectual development goes on. On the other hand, the positive virtues of the future are not so obvious and simple. Energy, versatility, a nervous organization sensitive but not fragile, strong parental instinct, altruism — such have been suggested as eugenic ideals ; but they, like the still more general desiderata of ability and health, are not so much unit characters as complexes and coordinations of qualities which our present understanding of heredity would find baffling and intractable.^ Galton himself was , not unaware of these perplex- ities ; ^ though he made but a lame attempt to evade them by contending that " conflicting ideals . . . alternative characters . . . are wanted to give fullness and interest to life." ^ His conclusion that "the aim of Eugenics is to represent each class or sect by its best specimens ; that done, to leave them to work out their common civilization in their own way," * scatters the difficulty, but does not meet it. Indeed, it adds to the previous confusion an impossible suggestion of a society compounded of as many subr races as there are recognizable virtues. Aside from these obstacles, the realization of constructive or positive eugenics awaits the coming of the eugenic conscience. Legislation, as we know it, can decree " Thou shalt not " and execute its decrees against unfit parenthood by segregation of defectives; it is nearly powerless to enforce "' Thou shalt." Even conscience could more easily master the primeval impulse that actuates human increase than create parental instinct where it did not already exist. Voluntary celibacy induced by a sense of eugenic duty is undeniably an unfortunate and perverse expedient. It almost surely aggravates the infertility of the thinking classes, 1 Cf. the trenchant chapter on The Problem of the Birth Supply in H. p. Wells's " Mankind in the Making." 2 Cf. " Eugenics : Its Definition, Scope and Aims," Sociological Papers, 1904, P- 45- ' Ibid., p. 46. 4 Ibid., p. 46. EUGENICS i6i and further weakens the spirit of nothing venture, nothing have, which national vigor and natural selection require. Nevertheless, where it is practiced it does accomplish the extinction of defective stock. Therein it is more effectual than the opposite manifesta- tion of duty is likely to be. For the vital human qualities will not be found to thrive in the atmosphere of a family life which is merely conscientious. Whatever the cogency of this reasoning, the preponderance of eugenic writers advocate the adoption of restrictive rather than constructive eugenics, believing that thus indirectly a result really more constructive will be achieved. In fact, before the eugenics movement had begun to make headway, many a worker among the criminal, degenerate, or diseased, had observed the nemesis that follows them from one generation to another, and had become persuaded that for the good of society and the rescue of unborn posterity such blighted lines of descent should be cut off. A concrete result of this conviction is to be seen in the restrictive marriage laws of a number of the American States," and several foreign countries, designed to prevent the marriage of persons afflicted with epilepsy, feeble-mindedness, or other specified de- fects or diseases. A motley literature, for the most part marked by advocacy of radical remedies, has been another result. An extreme example of such writings is W. D. McKim's Heredity and Human Progress, the author of which, satisfied "that heredity is the fundamental cause of human wretchedness," and without faith in the adequacy of systematic segregation to root out the evils he describes, argues for Nature's method of elimination by means of " a gentle, painless death,'' from carbonic acid gas asphyxiation, "restricting the plan, however, to the very weak and the very vicious," — idiots, imbeciles, most epileptics, insane or incorrigible criminals, and others who for one grave cause or another are now supported or detained by the State.^ Saner and altogether more impressive is the argument of Dr. Rentoul's earnest book. Race Culture ; or. Race Suicide f in favor of surgi- cal sterilization of degenerates and defectives. The operation of vasectomy, which Dr. Rentoul first proposed as a eugenic I op. cit., p. i88. i62 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS measure some years ago, and to which the name of " Rentoul's operation " is not infrequently applied, has already assumed im- portance as a practical measure. Sterilization, by this or some other method, has been legalized as a preventive of the procrea- tion of the imbecile, insane, and criminal in Indiana (1907), Cali- fornia (1909, amended in 191 3), Connecticut (1909), and New Jersey (1911).^ The results of this striking experiment are thus far regarded as favorable, though experience has been too brief and too Umited to warrant a final judgment.'^ ********** A review of what has been accomplished in the field of eugenics during the last decade clearly reveals that most of the solid writ- ing and of the really scientific and useful work has come from biologists. The competent student of economic and social ques- tions has rendered comparatively little aid. Perhaps until now his abstention from the discussion has been wise. Experts were not needed to repeat the memorable suggestiori that a civilization which should acquire control over the qualities of the human breed might thereby control human welfare also. That suggestion, vital in itself, has been readily enough kept alive by the convic- tion of the inexpert that anything is the better for tinkering ; and in the meantime the biologists, called upon to answer in terms of the laws of heredity whether such modification of mankind is pos- sible, have been coming more and more to the conviction that whoever can determine marriage selection in the present will determine, within large limits, the physique and intellect of the future, and will become in a new sense the maker of history. But in proportion as the biologist foreshadows the physical possibilities of heredity and selection, the want grows for wisdom with which 1 At the end of 191 3 the following states, in addition to those above mentioned, had sterilization statutes : Washington, 1909 (applies to rapists only), Nevada, 191 2 (applies only to rapists and " habitual criminals ") ; Iowa, 191 1 ; New York, 1912 j North Dakota, 1913; Michigan, 1913; Kansas, 1913; Wisconsin, 1913. Oregon passed a law in 1913, but the people revoked it by referendum a few months later. — Ed. " For a thorough critical study of the existing sterilization statutes and their operation, and for a proposed model law, see Bulletin No. 10 B of the Eugenics Record Office, " The Legal, Legislative, and Administrative Aspects of Sterili- zation" (1914), especially chaps, vi, vii, viii. — Ed. EUGENICS 163 to utilize them. What sort of history, then, is best worth the making? What sort of history does it he within our power to bring to pass ? Is this momentous marriage selection, from motives half rational, half mystical, in their veneration of the continuance of life, to prevail in spite of popular ignorance and passion ? Or, leaving this question of practicability for experience to decide, is it after all sensible to burden the present generation with concern for generations of the future whose needs we can hardly foretell ; and, in subservience to the science of the day, to repudiate instinct older than all human experience by " falling in love intelli- gently " ? ^ We have need of a social philosophy to tell us how far eugenic reforms are reasonable and worth while. Even in its broadly biological aspects eugenics is involved in the long-standing demarcation dispute over the respective juris- dictions of man's artificial control and the unmodified course of natural evolution; Less than twenty years ago one of the great- est of biologists, writing on this very subject, declared in no uncertain terms his disbelief in the practice of artificial selection, as a means of human betterment, by reformers who would elimi- nate the weak and unfortunate, and " on whose matrimonial under- takings the principles of the stud have the chief influence."^ Knowledge has grown, no doubt, since Evolution and Ethics was written, and new discoveries have gone far to discredit Huxley's belittlement of the potency of human selective agencies. The details of the biological mechanism by which changes are effected have become far better known. More dubious is the question how much advance has been made toward a wise guidance of such agencies. For Huxley, there was " no hope that mere human beings will ever possess enough intelligence to select the fittest." ^ Possibly the social consciousness of a people is an abler guide than he recognized. Perhaps, although the fittest state of society is beyond our perception, we may achieve by means of eugenic selection a succession of experimental changes which seem to us for the better. But still the order of nature decrees that eugenic experiments made in haste are repented at leisure. The 1 Cf. Davenport, Eugenics, chap, i, § 3. " Huxley, Evolution and Ethics, Prolegomena, p. 37. ' Ibid., p. 34. l64 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS eugenist who modifies the race type in the present predetermines for better or worse the mental and physical endowment of distant posterity. In the final analysis, eugenics, like other attempts at lasting reform, must move with the stream of processes which preceded human intervention and limit it still. Yet in such a stream a steered course may well be better than mere drifting. Traits that have shown themselves the constant sources of weakness and suffering for generations, or through successive culture epochs, seem authoritatively marked by the protest of nature as proper for extirpation. When, on the other hand, physical organs or mental capacities of fundamental impor- tance in modern life show signs of failing under the burden of the civilization which has been built like a superstructure upon them, the continuance of the present manner of civilization de- mands a strengthening of these, its organic foundations. So much may be hazarded, in generalization, touching the cases in which eugenic initiative is compatible with natural selection. But the eugenist in action must always proceed with the caution of one who reckons with the inscrutable. If the task of eugenics were to establish a new aristocracy of inborn ability, the prospect of success would be less obscure. The historical institutions of ruling castes and hereditary nobilities have shown that the special capacity which in one generation after another can seize and retain for itself special opportunity has long been competent to raise the family line of its possessors above their less favored fellow men. Now modern biology, from a new standpoint and with new significance, reasserts the privilege of birth. It is not surprising, therefore, that writers from Galton down, arguing for the eugenic selection which shall perpetuate and intensify exceptional ability, have virtually proposed an aris- tocratic social order of a novel kind. But every preferment of the abler members of a community is tantamount to a degradation of the less gifted. To create an exclusive caste founded on eugenic superiority would be to intensify the unhappiness of such persons as are already inferior. The principle of the survival of the fittest normally involves wholesale sacrifice of the unfit ; but such unmiti- gated rigor of selection does not commend itself as a humane EUGENICS 165 method of social amelioration. Nor is the temper of the times favorable to aristocracies of any sort. It calls for a general better- ment of the whole mass of mankind. Can eugenics bring to pass this universal improvement .? Prob- ably many a devoted follower of the cause has assumed that if its benefits can be realized by any they might be extended to all. Such was the vision of Greg : Every damaged or inferior temperament might be eliminated, and every special and superior one be selected and enthroned, till the human race, both in its manhood and its womanhood, became one glorious fellowship of saints, sages and athletes; till we were all Blondins, all Shakespeares, Pericles', Socrates', Columbuses, and Ffoelons.^ But to hold such opinions is to ignore the relativity of success, and to miss the very meaning of eminence. In a world of Blon- dins a tight-rope walker would command no profit or applause. A world of great teachers would lack for pupils to be taught. The unknown continent which every one had found could hardly immortalize its multitudinous discoverers. Nor could any one master dramatist make mankind his audience so long as all clam- ored with equal right for hearing. Unfortunately, too often we overlook, in our projects of reform, the comparative character of individual attainments and individual happiness. We bemoan the rarity of greatness, forgetting how largely the exceptional indi- viduals whom we call great are great because they are exceptional. If, then, we are to elevate a whole community, we must work by a standard free from the element of invidiousness ; for no social reform can achieve a general improvement of men's positions relative to the positions of their fellow men.* Apparently then, eugenic selection is concerned not with the conditions of eminence but with the conditions of efficiency. It must work for the internal efficiency which we roughly call sanity and a good constitution, and for the external efficiency which enables an individual, regardless of the comparative efficiency of ^ Enigmas of Life, p. 112. ■" It is interesting to note that this fact, so often ignored in contemporary dis- cussions of eugenics, was emphasized by Mr. Lawson Tait more than forty years ago, vrith reference to the passage from Greg cited in the text. Cf. Dublin Quar- terly Journal of Medical Science, Vol. XLVII, p. 1 12. I66 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS other individuals, to make steady progress in forcing his non- human surroundings into conformity with his needs. Doubtless the distinctions here implied are indefinite. For instance, the personal advantage of health and strength is diminished if equal physical vigor becomes the common possession of all. Unusual prowess in exploiting external physical resources — that is to say exceptional economic success — has notoriously been among the most potent causes of inequality. Yet in a civilization which al- ready ministers, by palliatives, to ill health ; and in which the distributed burden of caring for the incompetent almost certainly drags more heavily on those who are stronger than would the potential competition which incompetency now holds in check — in such a civilization, the promise of gain to come from the eradication of feeble-mindedness, or insanity, or the proneness to consumption, would outweigh any new stress of circumstances which it might involve. And with this alleviation of the miseries from within might come augmented economic efficiency, not of the few, but of the many : a general and continuous advance in those characteristics of body and mind which make for man's larger control of heretofore reluctant gifts of nature. If this sketching of the possibilities is even roughly true it calls again for the verdict of the biologist. Already he has shown reason to believe that factors of health and disease act in heredity with a simplicity and directness which permit of intelligent con- trol. It is now to be seen whether the constructive economic virtues may similarly be resolved in terms of tractable unit char- acters, and how far they may be reenforced with social solidarity capable of binding over to the service of the common welfare the industrial aggressiveness which might otherwise only aggravate the antagonisms of economic life. The future of eugenics thus depends still on the progress of sober, discriminating research in heredity. The time for applied eugenics, except in the restriction of obvious and serious disabilities, has hardly come. But it is by no means only the biologist whose judgment is required. Again and again, in the light of biological discoveries a more adequate answer must be sought to that crucial question the significance of which the biologists have mostly failed to EUGENICS 167 comprehend : granting that by rational marriage selection certain recombinations of human characteristics can be eiTected at will, what eugenic policy promises the maximum increase of human welfare? To aid in answering that question the economist is needed. For health and strength and intellect work out the good or ill fortunes of. their possessors according to the ways of eco- nomic civilization, and not by process of brute struggle for exist- ence. Eugenics is not mere biology. The problems of eugenics are problems of human society. 14. THE PSYCHO-PHYSICAL ELITE AND THE ECONOMIC ELITE 1 No one is more inclined than I am to praise and promote the efforts of the eugenists to develop a better and more perfect humanity, but I am of opinion that this work cannot be accom- plished with the necessary success unless the particular sphere in which it is intended to operate is first exactly defined. As I understand the matter, it is expedient to distribute men according to their physical and mental capacities, and to encour- age marriage exclusively amongst those who are best endowed physically and morally, and that individuals who are physically and morally inferior should be excluded from marriage as far as possible. But this plan encounters the gravest practical difficul- ties, since it is not easy to grade men according to their capac- ities. Let us ignore that which relates to physical qualities, which can be subjected to a fairly satisfactory valuation. Very different is the case as regards mental and moral qualities, since a dynamometer of intellect has not yet been discovered. It is true some efforts have been made to classify scholars according to the results gained in their examinations, and Galton has worked on this plan, observing the distinctions of the graduates of the University of Cambridge. But this method is very fallible and uncertain, because often those first in the schools appear 1 By Achille Loria. From Problems in Eugenics ; Papers Communicated to the First International Eugenics Congress, pp. 179-183. The Eugenics Educa- tipfl .Sppjgty, London, igiz. 1 68 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS perfect imbeciles in life. Some men can be judged from their works — but these are always a small minority, and, besides, this method of judging is very difficult and uncertain, because it varies with the inclinations and tastes of the judge. And it must be noted that many men, and these often the best, do not leave be- hind them literary and scientific productions. Hence, there are many men who, though endowed with a most choice intellect, do not leave any visible trace behind them. In view of these formidable difficulties, the idea naturally arises of inferring the physical and mental aptitudes of individuals from their social or economic position, or from their income, which is easily estimated by methods accessible to all. And so many pro- pose to assume that the economic 61ite may -be regarded as the index and product of the psycho-physical 6lite. If we take a very numerous mass of men and arrange them according to their in- come, we find ourselves, it is affirmed, in face of a very positive classification which will be able to serve as a safe and easy guide in our task of eugenics. Assuming, in fact, that the position of individuals in this clas- sification is an index of their position in the hierarchy of apti- tudes, we should seek to promote marriages in the most elevated classes and to prevent, as far as possible, marriages of the inferior classes. It is important to note that this policy coincides in sub- stance with that advised by Malthus, who wished that individuals of the superior classes should marry, and that those of the infe- rior classes should not marry. He, indeed, advised this course in order to prevent the excess of population over the means of sub- sistence, while the eugenists recommend it in order to prevent the propagation of degenerates. But the result is substantially the same. But all these proposals arise from the idea that there is a very strict analogy between the economic ^lite and the psycho-physical dite, and that the former can be correctly inferred and substituted for the other. Now, that is precisely what I deny. The economic 61ite is not at all the product of the possession of superior quali- ties, but is simply the result of the blind struggle of the incomes, which brings to the top those who originally possess a larger EUGENICS 169 income through reasons which may be absolutely independent of the possession of superior capacity. This is a thesis which I have fully developed in my " Economic Synthesis " (Paris, Giard and Bri^re, 1911)^ by a series of proofs which it is not possible to sum up here. I shall confine myself to briefly summing up the point of my thought. Let us suppose, by a hypothesis far re- moved from the facts, that all individuals are endowed with equal psycho-physical aptitudes, but that, at the beginning of the period of observation, they are divided into groups furnished with a dif- ferent average income, which naturally does not exclude some disparity amongst the individuals possessing that income. This divergence amongst the average incomes of the various groups, as of the individuals in each group, can easily exist, even assum- ing that their individual capacities were identical, since it can arise simply from the possession of more fertile land, or more generally from property situated in more favorable physical con- ditions. Now, amongst these individuals thus furnished with di- verse incomes, there breaks forth a furious economic struggle, which is carried on with methods of violence, fraud, and monop- oly, and has as its result the ascent of the conquerors to a sphere of superior income, and the descent of the conquered into a sphere of inferior income. So, as the intensity of the struggle is in direct relation to the amount of income, it will be greater in the spheres of superior incomes, hence in these spheres there will be the greater number of income-holders who will be cast down. Therefore, supposing that at the beginning of the period of observation the various groups contained an equal number of income-holders, or that the entire number of the income-holders of various grades presented the figure of a square, the struggle, amongst the income-holders would gradually bring about a pro- gressive thinning of the spheres of the superior income-holders, and hence transform the original square into a pyramid. Now, those who come to find themselves at the summit of this pyramid do not find themselves there through the possession of superior capacity, but solely by the blind influence of the struggle amongst the income-holders. It may certainly be said it is possible that 1 English translation, London, 191 4. I/O READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS some of them are equipped with superior mental capacity, but it may also be possible that the large majority of them are composed of degenerates, and that no section of them excludes this class. The history of great fortunes goes to show that most often great patrimonies are created, not so much by supreme genius, as by shameful and iniquitous practices. The historical family of De Lazareff in Russia has for head of the race an Indian slave, a guardian in the temple of Siva, who one night steals one of the colossal diamonds forming the eyes of the god, and with this flies into Russia, where he sells the pre- cious gem to Catherine for a million and a half roubles. And Myers, in his recent work upon great fortunes, has endeavored to show how the property of American milUonaires has frequently been obtained by means of frauds and the most odious defalca- tions. Besides, if the founders of great fortunes should by chance, be gifted with superior capacity, it is certain that their descend- ants should be wanting in these, because with regard to them that law of " return to the mean," which Galton has successfully established, would apply. Thus, at any given moment, economic superiority is by no means an index of superior psycho-physical aptitudes, whether because many of those who now possess that position do not acquire it by virtue of the possession of elevated mental capacity, or because all the others who have inherited these positions from preceding possessors are completely devoid of such aptitudes. Thus, economic superiority cannot in any case be assumed to be the measure or reflection of psycho-physical superiority. But we can have an experimental proof of this conclusion, ob- serving conjugal selection, as it is practiced to-day, and its results. And, in fact, conjugal selection at the present day is carried on precisely according to the principle which we contest, because, regularly, individuals belonging to the upper economic classes marry exclusively amongst themselves. Now, if individuals be- longing to this class were truly the privileged depositories of superior aptitudes, clearly their offspring ought to show these aptitudes in marked degree, and, therefore, should present the EUGENICS 171 most wonderful results. Now, on the contrary, the very opposite takes place, and it is exactly marriages of class and caste which furnish the most deplorable results. Fahlbeck, in his authoritative work upon " Swedish Nobility," has shown how caste marriages prevailing amongst them produce a progressive degeneration, which manifests itself by frequent ceHbacy, much delayed mar- riage of the male sex, the large and increasing proportion of ster- ile marriages, the small and decreasing fecundity (now 15.4 per cent) always less than the death rate, the increasing number of female births, the increasing mortality of youths under 20 years of age, the deaths of the children before that of the parents, which gradually tends to cause the extinction of the stock. As a consequence of that, 70 per cent of the original noble families are now extinct, and notwithstanding the continual ennobling of bourgeois families, the number of noble families does not in- crease or very often declines. And Fahlbeck takes care to add that all this appUes precisely to the whole wealthy class, of which the nobility is only a fragment. But the same law of " return to the mean " which operates so inexorably in the circle of the upper classes, seems to me to be an ultimate proof of the absolute separation of psycho-physical superiority and eminence in the social scale. Let us take some individuals who are all possessed of a superior income, and therefore — according to the hypothesis which we dispute — of a mental quality above the average. If, now, these individuals marry, their children will inherit in marked degree their superior qualities, and hence will preserve, if not raise, the superior aver- age of their stock, nor give cause for any phenomenon of regres- sion, exception being made of the exceptional qualities of an extraordinarily gifted progenitor, which we can here completely ignore. Thus, if the caste selection were really a eugenic selec- tion, it ought to preserve the superior average in the descendants and never give occasion for descent from it. But, on the con- trary, these selected marriages give rise not only to a regression from the extraordinary qualities of some progenitor of the family, but precisely to a regression from the superior average to a fall into mediocrity. 172 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS Now, all this clearly cannot be understood or explained un- less it is understood that the economically superipr classes are not psychically superior classes, and on that account capable of pro- ducing a progeny superior to an indifferent average. If marriages included in this class gave origin to truly select offshoots, there would be in this fact an indication of the mental superiority of the progenitors. But if, on the contrary, these marriages gave origin to a degenerate offspring, it seems to me that such a fact throws a sufficiently unfavorable light upon the qualities of the progenitors, and that it destroys the theories that the economic 61ite are identical with the elite of thought and virtue. With all this, naturally we do not wish to assert the opposite conclusion — that the economically superior classes are always inferior psychically and vice versa — a position which is disproved by the most elementary experience. More modestly affirming the absolute independence between the superiority of income and the superiority of intellect, we believe that we scrupulously attain to the proof from actual fact, which affords the clearest evidence of this independence. And this conclusion seems to us the only one which can inspire a decisive and rational line of conduct to the existing eugenics movement. In fact, if we admit that a superiority of income indi- cates by itself a psycho'-physical superiority, we must conclude that the conjugal selection which takes place to-day in the circle of class is at present conformable to eugenic principles and alto- gether excludes any practical propaganda to effect it. Do we de- sire, on the contrary, to accept the opposite affirmation, according to which psycho-physical eminence would be exclusively met with in the inferior classes .' Well, then, in such a case we should be obliged to applaud the conjugal selection, which is practiced to-day, which, accelerating the extinction of the superior classes, removes from the theater of life degenerate individuals and finally secures the survival of well-balanced and vigorous popular elements. Thus any theory which recognizes the existence of a relation, direct or indirect, between psycho-physical superiority and eco- nomic superiority leads fatally to a eugenic nihilism and destroys all practical action. But, on the contrary, when one recognizes EUGENICS 173 (what is, besides, consistent with the facts) the absolute independ- ence of psycho-physical and economical superiority, a precise field of action is open to eugenic policy. It is requisite to pro- ceed to a minute and positive examination of individual charac- ters, which must be directly ascertained and not inferred from the fantastic criterion of their economic position, and it is necessary to take care, by means of wise institutions, so that marriages may take place exclusively amongst the most select class, physically and mentally. This will certainly be a difficult task, and one de- manding assiduous collective labor ; and we are convinced that only this conscientious effort can lead to positive results, and such as will throw light upon our practical action. 15. THE SOCIAL SIGNIFICANCE OF HEREDITARY FEEBLE-MINDEDNESS ^ [Most attempted investigations into the hereditability of mental traits have been open to grave criticism because, if for no other reason, they have failed to isolate the hereditary influence from the influences of environment. Dr. Goddard's investigation of the ancestry of the feeble-minded girl " Debor ah Kallikak," at the Vineland, New Jersey, Training SchodTfor FeebteOTnded Girls and Boys, comes perhaps as near as it is possible to come in sep- arating the effects of nature and nurture, and it is for that reason chosen for presentation here. Deborah's ancestry was traced back to Martin Kallikak Sr. " When he was a boy of fifteen," says Dr. Goddard, " his father died, leaving him without parental care or oversight. Just before attaining his majority the young man joined one of the numerous military companies that were formed to protect the country at the beginning of the Revolution. At one of the taverns frequented by the militia he met a feeble-minded girl by whom he became the father of a feeble-minded son. This child was given, by its ' mother, the name of its father in full, and thus has been handed down to posterity the father's name and the mother's mental 1 By H. H. Goddard. Adapted from The Kallikak Family, pp. 18, 29, 33-42, 50-69. The Macmillan Company, New York, 1912. 174 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS capacity. This illegitimate boy was Martin Kallikak Jr., and from him have come four hundred and eighty descendants. One hun- dred and forty-three of these, we have conclusive proof, were or are feeble-minded, while only forty-six have beeil found normal. The rest are unknown or doubtful. "" Martin Sr., on leaving the Revolutionary Army, straightened up and married a respectable girl of good family, and through that union has come another line of descendants of radically dif- ferent character. These now number four hundred and ninety-six in direct descent. All of them are normal people. In this family and its collateral branches we find nothing but good representative citizenship."] Chart I shows the line of descent of the Kallikak family from their first colonial ancestor. It was Martin who divided it into a bad branch on one hand and a good branch on the other. Each of these branches is traced through the line of the eldest son down to a person of the present generation. On the bad side it ends with Deborah Kallikak, an inmate of the Training School at Vineland, on the good side with the son of a prominent and wealthy citizen of the same family name, now resident of another State. Chart II shows the children of Martin. Sr. by his wife and by the nameless feeble-minded girl, and also the children of Martin Jr. Then follow Charts III to VI and A to F,i giving in detail each of these two branches, the upper series being the normal family, the descendants of Martin Kallikak Sr. through his wife : the lower is the bad family, his descendants throiigh the nameless feeble-minded girl who was not his wife. EXPLANATION OF SYMBOLS Individuals are represented by squares and circles, the squares being males, the circles, females. Black squares and circles (with a white " F ") mean feeble-minded individuals ; N means normal persons. The clear squares or circles indicate that the mentality of the person is undetermined. 1 Only about half of the original charts are here reproduced. — Ed. EUGENICS i;5 " d. inf." means died in infancy. A horizontal or slightly oblique line connects persons who are mated. Unless otherwise indicated, they are supposed to have been legally married. The symbols dependent from the same horizontal line are for brothers and sisters. A vertical line connecting this horizontal line with an individual or with a line connecting two individuals, indicates the parent or parents of the fraternity. Letters placed around the symbol for an individual are as follows: A — Alcoholic, meaning decidedly intemperate, a drunkard ; B — Blind ; C — Criminalistic ; D — Deaf ; E — Epileptic ; I — Insane ; Sy — Syphilitic ; Sx — Sexually immoral ; T — Tuberculous. A short vertical line dependent from the horizontal fraternity Hne indicates a child whose sex is unknown. An F at the end of the line indicates that such child was feeble-minded. N ? or F ? indicates that the individual has not been definitely determined, but, considering all the data, it is concluded that on the whole, the persoji was probably normal or feeble-minded, as the letter signifies. A small d. followed by a numeral means died at that age ; b. means born, usually followed by the date. A single figure below a symbol indicates that the symbol stands for more than one individual — the number denoted by the figure, e.g. a circle with a " 4 " below it, indicates that there were four girls in that fraternity, represented by that one symbol. The Hand indicates the child that is in the Institution at Vineland, whose family history is the subject of the chart. A black horizontal line under a symbol indicates that that individual was in some public institution at state expense. The fact that the parents were not married is indicated either by the ex- pression " unmarried " or by the word " illegitimate," placed near the symbol for the child. 176 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS Caspar [El— I—® m -® N The Lawful WIte -® ®- N The Xameleas Fooble-Minded Olrl 1 Not Married ^^ Martin Kallikak, Sr. d. 1837 ■m Frederick Martin Kallikak, Jr. N)— T— [n] -® ®- MiUard N Justin ®- -m '-m Martha ® Chart I Deborah EUGENICS 177 1/8 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS EUGENICS 179 [|] f.M, 1 -s lNGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS Fusion, then, we can expect only as we outgrow these antipa- thies and invidious comparisons. Aside from these there is noth- ing to keep white peoples apart, and it is hard to resist the conclusion that after a lapse of time which no one can, forecast, a fused and welded people will be the outcome, and that we are beholding the gradual creation of a new race of mankind. To turn to the previous question, assimilation as distinct from fusion, it is clear that the difficulty often lies in the fact that the process is regarded as a one-sided one, as mere absorption or, indeed, as a form of conquest and extirpation. "We two shall be one and I will be the one." As a matter of fact, men grow alike in intercourse as inevitably as two communicating bodies of water reach the same level. But the level reached is a new one, not that of. either before the interchange began. In America each immigrant group exerts a certain influence on the community into which it comes, and some newly imported customs take root, either because they are attractive or useful in themselves, or because the newcomers are so represented as to have local prestige ; but the laws of imitation work out on the whole to effect a much greater change in the immigrants than in the old settled American community. In the first place, the convenience of unity makes for Amer- icanization. The different immigrant groups neutralize one an- other's influence. In the steerage of an, eastward bound liner one finds perhaps Roumanians, Croatians, Jews, Germans, Italians, using English as their lingua franca, — men, some of them from the same village at home, yet unable to speak with one another until now. It is e pluribus ununt in a new sense. Again, in America the way to success on a large scale (whether political or financial or social or literary success), the only way to a national influence or position, is the way out of the Ghetto, Little Italy or " Bohemian Town." Thus American ways have practical value, whether good or bad in themselves. Further, the prestige of numbers is on the side of the Amer- ican example, and the more so the more scattered the newcomers are. . In a close colony the influence is the other way for those inside, yet even so, the attraction of the American mass makes ASSIMILATION OF THE IMMIGRANT 337 itself felt. The larger life tends to absorb the smaller group. In- deed, the prestige of America, and the almost hypnotic influence of this prestige on the poorer class of immigrants, is often both pathetic and absurd. They cannot throw away fast enough good things and ways that they have brought with them, to replace them by sometimes inferior American substitutes. Thus, under the joint influence of convenience, ambition and the natural human desire to be like other people, and especially to be like those who occupy the high seats in the synagogue, the unifying change goes on. The early Polish immigrants, patriots and men of education, melted into the common life so completely that later comers could find no point of attachment with them. The recent Slavic immigrants, Poles and others, have come in much larger numbers ; they have formed considerable colonies, and their hearts are set, with a strength of desire which we can hardly conceive, on having their children speak their own lan- guage as their proper tongue. The consequence is some degree of success in this aim, but it means, I am convinced, only a retardation of the process. In Cleveland a Bohemian-American teacher who took the school census found one or two young people in their early " teens," born in this country, yet unable to understand English. This was considered, however, very, unusual. I was told of a Hungarian who went to live in Prague, but there in the capital of Bohemia he never learned the language, as he found he could get on with German which he knew. Later he moved to Chicago and lived in the Bohemian quarter, where , he found it indispen- sable to learn Bohemian, and did so, with toil and pains. I have heard of graduates of Polish schools in Chicago and Baltimore who do not understand English. A thoiisand more items to show the separateness of the foreign life in our midst might be piled together, and in the end they would be as nothing against the irresistible influence through which it comes about that the immigrants find themselves the parents of American children. They are surprised, they are proud, they are scandalized, they are stricken to the heart, with regret, — whatever their emotion, they are powerless. The change 338 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS occurs in different ways among the educated and the uneducated, but it occurs in either case. The prestige ot America and the hatred of children for being different -from their playmates is something the parents cannot stand against. The result is often grotesque. A graduate at one of our women's colleges, the daughter of cultivated Germans, told a friend : "My father made me learn German and always was wanting me to read it. I hated to have anything to do with it. It seemed to me something inferior. People in the West call a thing ' Dutch ' as a term of scorn. It was not till I was in col- lege that I reahzed what German literature and philosophy have meant in the world, and that to be a German is not a thing to be ashamed of." Less educated parents, or those using a language less important than German, have a still more difficult task to hold the next generation. " I ain't no Hun, I'm an American," expresses their reaction on the situation. In a Nebraska county town, in a district largely settled by Bohemians, one father of a family told me his experience. The older children, he said, spoke Bohemian excellently, they used to take part in private theatricals in the Bohemian opera house in the town and did well ; but the younger children he simply could not induce to take to it. They knew so little that if he sent them with a message in Bohemian they were likely to make mistakes. This, I think, is typical. In remote country settlements, or in city colonies of a marked national character, there are plenty of exceptions, but I am confident that the rule is as stated by the Nebraska Bohemian. I have found instances of individual Amer- icans learning Polish, Bohemian or other languages as a matter of convenience, business or pleasure, or as children among play- mates, but I have never heard of a community where the process worked in general away from English, not toward it. With the acquisition of English the children are apt to lose their parents' language. Against this the parents strive. It is very common, for instance, for the parents to endeavor to have the children speak only the old language until they go to school, knowing that this is their one opportunity to acquire it, and fore- seeing that after the children have entered school, they will speak ASSIMILATION OF THE IMMIGRANT 339 English not only outside of the home but within it, too, so that it will be impossible to keep Enghsh from becoming also the family language. Henceforth the parents must talk with their own children in a foreign medium in which they are consciously at a disadvantage. Is it strange if the parents desire to avoid these difficulties ? What should be the American's attitude toward this question ? I personally have no doubt that the right thing to do is to wish the parents godspeed in their endeavor to have their children learn their language. One of the great evils among the children of foreigners, as everyone who knows them realizes, is the dis- astrous gulf between the older and the younger generations. Discipline, in this new freedom which both parents and children misunderstand, is almost impossible ; .besides which, the children, who have to act as interpreters for their parents and do business for them, are thrown into a position of unnatural importance, and feel only contempt for old-world ways, a feeling enhanced by the too common American .attitude. One hears stories of Italian children refusing to reply to their mother if spoken to in Italian.^ In addition to these considerations, and to the sufficiently obvious fact that to possess two languages instead of one is in itself an intellectual advantage, it is to be remembered that the leaders and teachers of the newcomers must be men who can speak both languages, and that it would be a national misfortune if these were solely men of foreign birth, including none of the second, or later, generations in this country. A final and less important consideration is that to know any immigrant language is -money in a man's pocket. An unfortunate element of difficulty is a common American jealousy of any speech but English. I was amused at the tact with which this feeling was disarmed when some Bohemians once wanted to get permission to use a public schoolroom out of hours for a Bohemian class. " If there should ever be a war," their spokesman said, "our boys would be among the first to 1 Cf. the wise and brief article on "The Struggle in the Family Life," by Miss McDowell, of The University of Chicago Settlement. Charities, Vol. XIII (Dec. 3, 1904), pp. 196-197. 340 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS volunteer. The Bohemian lad at the front would have to write in English to his mother, and though she could not read his letter she could readily iind someone to translate it to her. But the Bohemian letters which he received from her, and which, among the demoralizing life of the camp have such precious possibilities of influence, would be entirely useless, for he would not be able to read a word of them." The use of the schoolroom was granted. We cannot be surprised, however much we may regret it, that the duty of maintaining separate schools is urged on their people by clerical and other leaders, on both patriotic and religious grounds. Among the Slavs the Poles have done the most in this field. Both good priests who fear change on account of its threat to all that they hold most sacred, and greedy priests who desire to keep their hold for lower reasons, naturally strain every nerve to encourage parochial schools. Father Kruszka estimates that at the beginning of 1901 there were in the United States about 70,000 pupils in Polish Catholic schools alone. These schools undertake to train the children in religion and in the Polish language and Polish history, as well as in the regular public- school branches. English is taught as a subject throughout the classes, and generally some of the other subjects are taught in English, as for instance, geography. United States history, and bookkeeping and algebra for those who get so far. It is claimed by those interested, that children leaving these schools for the public schools enter classes above or on a level with those they have left.i I have seen parochial schools that were subject to criticism from the point of view of modern arrangements for the health and comfort of the pupils, and which were primitive in various ways (the same might be said, alas, of some public schools), but one must admire the devotion of these often very ignorant and poor people, who out of their slender means build and support all these schools, when free schools are already provided out of the taxes. Outside of the Roman Catholic groups — for instance among the Greek Catholic Ruthenians and the freethinking Bohemians — 1 There are, however, on the other hand critics of the parochial schools, not only among Americans, but among Poles. ASSIMILATION OF THE IMMIGRANT 341 it is very usual to find part-time supplementary schools for reli- gious or patriotic instruction, or both. This would seem highly desirable on one condition — that the strain on the children is not too great. Sunday schools and any reasonable amount of vacation schooling seem quite safe, but it is easy to imagine that such extra work is not always relished by the children, and this is one more element of friction which makes it difficult to modify or delay the Americanizing process. While it can be only an advantage to children to learn their parents' language, there can be no question that they should in any case learn English, and learn it well. A child has a right to be furnished with this key to success on precisely the same grounds that he has a right to be given a knowledge of those indispensable arts, reading and writing. And in some cases the state, as guardian of the rights of children, may have to require this, just as it has to require universal primary education. Beyond fulfilling this duty to the children growing up in our midst, there should be no compulsion in this whole matter, no suspicion of coercion or interference, but a confident faith in freedom, a candid recognition of the right of all to be as different as they please, with no reserves and no jealousies. Public libra- ries should follow the good example of Passaic and other places, and provide books in the language in which they will be read. The complaints of Poles in a certain district that they lose their mail because postal employees can speak only English, should be met with a businesslike and cheerful response to their wants. Apart from the prime reason that this is the just and friendly course, any other breeds ill will and discord out of all. proportion to the points at issue. We are dealing often with men sore and irritable from European experiences. A panicky desire to dena- tionalize our immigrants would result in unspeakable disaster, and would have no shadow of excuse. The process of change, goes on too fast and too superficially as it is ; it needs not forcing, but rather guidance toward what is best in America. Language is not the only, not even the main channel of influence. The example of personal conduct is even more effec- tive. Biologists show us by what natural laws animals take the 342 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS color of their environment ; for different reasons, but as surely, people do the same. Unfortunately, from the nature of the case the immigrant generally begins at the bottom. His helplessness makes him sought for as prey by sharpers and grafters ; it is all that the immigration officials can do to keep them off as he lands. As soon as he leaves the paternal care of Ellis Island they attack in force. Boarding-house runners, shady employment agents, sellers of shoddy wares, extortionate hack drivers and expressmen beset his way. One "hears all sorts of stories of abuses from both Americans and Slavs — of bosses who take bribes to give employment or to assign good chambers in the mine, of ill usage at the hands of those who should be officers of justice, of arrests for the sake of fees,9' of unjust fines, of excessive costs paid rather than incur a greater expense. The suffering and loss are less serious — bad as they are — than the evil lesson. In school the boy who has been cruelly hazed is apt to be cruel to the next crop of victims, and in the same way fraud and harshness tend to reproduce themselves in the larger world. But it is not only direct ill treatment that is a peril ; the economic pressure and low standards of our lowest industrial strata are in themselves disastrous. ' " My people do not live in America, they live underneath America. America goes on over their heads. America does not -begin till a man is a workingman, till he is earning two dollars a day. A laborer cannot afford to be an American." These words, which were said to be by one of the wisest Slav leaders that I have ever met, have rung in my mind during all the five years since he spoke them.® Beginning at the bottom, "living not in America but underneath America," means 'living 1 See Report of the Commission on Immigration of the State of New York, 1909, especially pp. 54-61. See also H. V. Blaxter, " The Aldermen and their Courts," Charities and ike Commons, Vol. XXI (February 6, 1909), pp. 851-858, and Koukol, " The Slav's a Man for A' That," ibid., pp. 589-598. ^ Father Paul Tymkevich, a Ruthenian Greek Catholic priest of Yonkers. Had he been spared, he could have helped his countrymen and us. See " A Shepherd of Immigrants," for some account of his work. Charities, Vol. XIII (December, 1909), pp. 193-194. ASSIMILATION OF THE IMMIGRANT 343 among the worst surroundings that the country has to show, worse, often, than the pubUc would tolerate, except that "only foreign- ers " are affected. Yet to foreigners they are doubly injurious because, coming as they often do, with low home standards, but susceptible, eager, and apt to take what they find as the American idea of what ought to be, they are likely to accept and adopt as '" all right " whatever they tumble into. The intoxication of the change from homes where there is no money to be made and no chance for any sort of advancement, to the boundless financial opportunities (or what appear such) of America, often results in a moral degeneration. Too often the educated immigrant has been imbued by what he has read before coming here with the idea that America is "the land of the almighty dollar," and arrives neither expecting nor desiring any- thing else of the country than the opportunity to get as rich as possible. It is a tragi-comedy to see at once the native American upbraiding the newcomer with having come here solely to make money (while he himself, very likely, is living in a town which he has chosen purely for the same reason, and which he makes no effort to serve), and the newcomer, making no move to get into touch with American strivings toward ideals, proclaiming to everyone that America is a country where no one cares for anything but material success. What then ought we to be doing for these strangers in our midst ? If we ought not to try to " Americanize " them, have we no obligations toward them at all ? ^ It is obviously our plain duty to give the immigrant (and every- one else) fair treatment and honest government, and to maintain ' conditions making wholesome, decent living possible. This is the minimum required at our hands, not by the Golden Rule — that asks much more — but by the most elementary ethic of civiliza^ tion. Yet as a matter of fact, this simple, fundamental thing we cannot do. It is not in our power. We can and must do what in the end will be a better thing. We must get our new neighbors to work with us for these things. If their isolation is not to continue, America must come to mean to them, not a rival nationality eager to make them forget their 344 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS past, and offering them material bribes to induce them to aban- don their ideals. We must learn to connect our ideals and theirs, we must learn, as Miss Addams has demonstrated, to work Together with them for justice, for humane conditions of living, for beauty and for true, not merely formal, liberty. Clubs and classes, libraries and evening schools, settlements, and, above all, movements in which different classes of citizens join to bring about specific improvements in government or in living conditions, are of infinite value as they conduce to this higher unity, in which we may preserve every difference to which men cling with affection, without feeling ourselves any the less fellow citizens and comrades. •^30. DEMOCRACY VERSUS THE MELTING POT — A STUDY OF AMERICAN NATIONALITY i In 1776 the mass of white men in the colonies were actually, with respect to one another, rather free and rather equal. I refer, not so much to the absence of great differences in wealth, as to the fact that the whites were like-minded. They were possessed of ethnic and cultural unity ; they were homogeneous with respect to ancestry and ideals. Their century-and-a-half-old tradition as Americans was continuous with their immemorially older tradition as Britons. They did not, until the economic-political quarrel with the mother country arose, regard themselves as other than Englishmen, sharing England's dangers and England's glories. When the quarrel came they remembered how they had left the mother country in search of religious liberty for themselves ; how they had left Holland, where they had found this liberty, for fear of losing their ethnic and cultural identity, and what hardships they had borne for the sake of conserving both the liberty and the identity. Upon these they grafted that political liberty the love of which was innate, perhaps, but the expression of which was occasioned by the economic warfare with the merchants of England. This grafting was not, of course, conscious. The 1 By Horace M. Kallen. Adapted from the Nation, February 18 and February 25, 191 5, pp. 190-194, 217-220. ASSIMILATION OF THE IMMIGRANT 345 continuity established itself rather as a mood than as an articulate idea. The economic situation was only an occasion, and not a cause. The cause lay in the homogeneity of the people, their like-mindedness, and in their self-consciousness . Now, it happens that the preservation and development of any given type of civilization rests upon these two conditions — like- mindedness and self-consciousness. Without them art, literature — culture in any of its nobler forms — is impossible : and colo- nial America had a culture — chiefly of New England — but representative enough of the whole British-American life of the period. Within the area of what we now call the United States this life was not, however, the only life. Similarly animated groups of Frenchmen and Germans, in Louisiana and in Penn- sylvania, regarded themselves as the cultural peers of the British, and because of their own common ancestry, their like-mindedness and self-consciousness, they have retained a large measure of their individuality and spiritual autonomy to this day, after generations of unrestricted and mobile contact and a century of political union with the dominant British populations. In the course of time the state, which began to be with the Declaration of Independence, became possessed of all the United States. French and Germans in Louisiana and Pennsylvania remained at home ; but the descendants of the British colonists trekked across the continent, leaving tiny self-conscious nuclei of population in their wake, and so established ethnic and cultural standards for the whole country. Had the increase of these settlements borne the same proportion to the unit of population that it bore between 18 10 and 1820, the Americans of British stock would have numbered to-day over 100,000,000. The inhab- itants of the country do number over 100,000,000 ; but they are not the children of the colonists and pioneers : they are immi- grants and the children of immigrants, and they are not British, but of all the other European stocks. Now, of all these immigrant peoples the greater part are peasants, vastly illiterate, living their lives at fighting weight, with a minimum of food and a maximum of toil. Mr. Ross^ thinks 1 See E. A. Ross, The Old World in the New. The Century Co., 1914. 346 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS that their coming to America was determined by no spiritual urge; only the urge of steamship agencies and economic need or greed. However generally true this opinion may be, he ignores, curiously enough, three significant and one notable exception to it. The significant exceptions are the Poles, the Finns, the Bohemians — the subjugated Slavic nationalities generally. Political and religious and cultural persecution plays no small role in the movement of the masses of them. The notable exception is the Jews. The Jews come far more with the attitude of the earliest settlers than any of the other peoples; for they more than any other present-day immigrant group are in flight from persecution and disaster ; in search of economic opportunity, liberty of con- science, civic rights. They have settled chiefly in the Northeast, with New York City as the center of greatest concentration. Among them, as among the Puritans, the Pennsylvania Germans, the French of Louisiana, self-consciousness and like-mindedness are intense and articulate. But they differ from the subjugated Slavic peoples in that the latter Igok backward and forward to actual, even if enslaved, homelands ; the Jews, in the mass, have thus far looked to America as their homeland. In sum, when we consider that portion of our population which has taken root, we see that it has not stippled the country in small units of diverse ethnic groups. It forms rather a series of stripes or layers of varying sizes, moving east to west along the central axis of settlement, where towns are thickest ; i.e., from New York and Philadelphia, through Chicago and St. Louis, to San Francisco and Seattle. Stippling is absent even in the towns, where the variety of population is generally greater. Probably 90 per cent of that population is either foreign-born or of foreign stock ; yet even so, the towns are aggregations, not units. Broadly divided into the sections inhabited by the rich and those inhabited by the poor, this economic division does not abolish, it only crosses, the ethnic one. There are rich and poor little Italys, Irelands, Hungarys, Germanys, and rich and poor Ghettos. The common city life, which depends upon like-mindedness, is not inward, corporate, and inevitable, but external, inarticulate, and incidental, a reaction to the need of amusement and the need of ASSIMILATION OF THE IMMIGRANT 347 protection, not the expression of a unity of heritage, mentality, and interest. Politics and education in our cities thus present the phenomenon of ethnic compromises not unknown in Austria- Hungary; concessions and appeals to "the Irish vote," "the Jew- ish vote," "the German vote"; compromise school committees where members represent each ethnic action, until, as in Boston, one group grows strong enough to dominate the entire situation. South of Mason and Dixon's line the cities exhibit a greater homogeneity. Outside of certain regions in Texas the descend- ants of the native white stock, often degenerate and backward, prevail among the whites, but the whites as a whole constitute a relatively weaker proportion of the population. They live among nine million negroes, whose own mode of living tends, by its mere massiveness, to standardize the " mind " of the proletarian South in speech, manner, and the other values of social organization. All the immigrants and their offspring are in the way of becoming "Americanized," if they remain in one place in the country long enough — say, six or seven years. The general notion, "Americanization," appears to denote the adoption of English speech, of American clothes and manners, of the Amer- ican attitude in politics. It connotes the fusion of the various bloods, and a transmutation by " the miracle of assimilation " of Jews, Slavs, Poles, Frenchmen, Germans, Hindus, Scandinavians into beings similar in background, tradition, outlook, and spirit to the descendants of the British colonists, the Anglo-Saxon stock. Broadly speaking, the elements of Americanism are somewhat external, the effect of environment; largely internal, the effect of heredity. Our economic individualism, our traditional laissez- faire policy, is largely the effect of environment: where nature offers more than enough wealth to go round, there is no im- mediate need for regulating distribution. What poverty and unemployment exist among us is the result of unskilled and wasteful social housekeeping, not of any actual natural barren- ness. And until the disparity between our economic resources and our population becomes equalized, so that the country shall attain an approximate economic equilibrium, this will always be the case. With our individualism go our optimism and our other 348 , READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS " pioneer " virtues : they are purely reactions to our unexploited natural wealth, and, as such, moods which characterize all soci- eties in which the relation between population and resource is similar. The predominance of the " new freedom " over the " new nationalism " is a potent political expression of this rela- tionship, and the overwhelming concern of both novelties with the economic situation rather than with the cultural or spiritual is a still stronger one. That these last alone justify or condemn this or that economic condition or program is a commonplace: "' by their fruits shall ye know the soils and the roots." The fruits in this case are those of New England. Eliminate from our roster Whittier, Longfellow, Lowell, Hawthorne, Emer- son, Howells, and what have we left ? Outstanding are Poe and Whitman, and the necromantic mysticism of the former is only a sick-minded version of the naturalistic mysticism of the latter, while the general mood of both is that of Emerson, who in his way expresses the culmination of that movement in mysticism from the agonized conscience of colonial and Puritan New England — to which Hawthorne gives voice — to serene and opti- mistic assurance. In religion this spirit of Puritan New England nonconformity culminates similarly : in Christian Science when it is superstitious and magical ; in Unitarianism when it is ration- alistic : in both cases, over against the personal individualism, there is the cosmic unity. For New England, religious, political, and literary interests remained coordinate and indivisible ; and New England gave the tone to and established the standards for the rest of the American state. Save for the very early political writers, the " solid South " remains unexpressed, while the march of the pioneer across the continent is permanently marked by Mark Twain for the Middle West, and by Bret Harte for the Pacific slope. Both these men carry something of the tone and spirit of New England, and with them the "great tradition" of Ameripa, the America of the '" Anglo-Saxon," comes to an end. There remains nothing large or significant that is unejtpressed, and no unmentioned writer who is so completely representative. The background, tradition, spirit, and outlook of the whole of the America of the "Anglo-Saxon," then, find their spiritual ASSIMILATION OF THE IMMIGRANT 349 expression in the New England school, Poe, Whitman, Mark Twain, Bret Harte. They realize an individual who has passed from the agonized to the optimistic conscience, a person of the solid and homely virtues tempered by mystic certainty of his destiny, his election, hence always ready to take risks, and always willing to face dangers. From the agony of Arthur Dimmesdale to the smug industrial and. social rise of Silas Lapham, from the irresponsible kindliness of Huck Finn to the " Luck of Roaring Camp," the movement, is the same, though on different social levels. In regions supernal its coordinate is the movement from the God of Jonathan Edwards to the Oversoul of Emerson and the Divinity of Mrs. Eddy. It is summed up in the contem- porary representative "average" American of British stock — an individualist, English-speaking, interested in getting on, kind, neighborly, not too scrupulous in business, indulgent to his women, optimistically devoted to laissez faire in economics and politics, very respectable, in private life, tending to liberalism and mysticism in religion, and moved, where his economic interests are unaffected, by formulas rather than ideas. He typifies the aristocracy of America. From among his fellows are recruited her foremost protagonists in politics, rehgion, art, and learning. He constitutes, in virtue of being heir of the oldest rooted eco- nomic settlement and spiritual tradition of the white man in America, the measure and the standard of Americanism that the newcomer is to attain. Other things being equal, a democratic society which should be a realization of the assumptions of the Declaration of Inde- pendence, supposing them to be true, would be a leveling soci- ety such that all persons become alike, either on the lowest or the highest plane. The outcome of free social contacts should, according to the laws of imitation, establish " equality " on the highest plane ; for imitation is of the higher by the lower, so that the cut of a Paris gown at ^1000 becomes imitated in department stores at ^17.50, and the play of the rich becomes the vice of the poof. This process of leveling up through imi- tation is facilitated by the so-called "standardization" of exter- nals. In these days of ready-made clothes, factory-made goods, 3 so READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS refrigerating plants, it is almost impossible that the mass of the inhabitants of this country should wear other than uniform clothes, use other than uniform furniture or utensils, or eat any- thing but the same kind of food. In these days of rapid transit and industrial mobility it must seem impossible that any stratifi- cation of population should be permanent. Hardly anybody seems to have been born where he lives, or to live where he has been born. The teetering of demand and supply in industry and com- merce keeps large masses of population constantly mobile; so that many people no longer can be said to have homes. This mobility reenforces the use of EngUsh — for a lingua franca, intelligible everywhere, becomes indispensable — by immigrants. And ideals that are felt to belong with the language tend to become "standardized," widespread, uniform, through the devices of the telegraph and the telephone, the syndication of " litera- ture," the cheap newspaper and the cheap novel, the vaudeville circuit, the "movie," and the star system. Even more signifi- cantly, mobility leads to the propinquity of the different stocks, thus promoting intermarriage and pointing to the coming of a new "American race" — a blend of at least all the European stocks (for there seems to be some difference of opinion as to whether negroes also should constitute an element in this blend) into a newer and better being whose qualities and ideals shall be the qualities and ideals of the contemporary American of British ancestry. Apart from the unintentional impulsion towards this end, of the conditions I have just enumerated, there exists the instrument especially devised for this purpose which we call the public school — and to some extent there is the state university. That the end has been and ig being attained, we have the bio- graphical testimony of Jacob Riis, of Steiner, and of Mary Antin — a Dane and two Jews, intermarried, assimilated even in reli- gion, and more excessively and self-consciously American than the Americans. And another Jew, Mr. Israel Zangwill, of Lon- don, profitably promulgates it as a principle and an aspiration, to the admiring approval of American audiences, under the device, "the melting pot." ASSIMILATION OF THE IMMIGRANT 351 All is not, however, fact, because it is hope ; nor is the biography of an individual, particularly of a literary individual, the history of a group. The Riises and Steiners and Antins protest too much, they are too self-conscious and self -centered, their "Americani- zation " appears too much like an achievement, a tour de force, too little like a growth. As for Zangwill, at best he is the obverse of Dickens, at worst he is a Jew making a special plea. It is the work of the Americanized writers that is really significant, and in that one senses, underneath the excellent writing, a dualism and the strain to overcome it. The same dualism is apparent in dif- ferent form among the Americans, and the strain to overcome it seems even stronger. These appear to have been most explicit at the high-water marks of periods of immigration : the Know- Nothing party was one early expression of it ; the organization, in the '8o's, of the patriotic societies — the Sons and the Daugh- ters of the American Revolution, later on of the Colonial Dames, , and so on — another. Since the Spanish War it has shown itself in the continual, if uneven, growth of the political conscience, first as a muckraking magazine propaganda, then as aj nation-wide attack on the corruption of politics by plutocracy, finally as the altogether respectable and evangehcal Progressive party, with its slogan of " Human rights against property rights." In this process, however, the non-British American or Conti- nental immigrant has not been a fundamental protagonist. He has been an occasion rather than a force. What has been causal has been "American." Consider the personnel and history of the Progressive party by way of demonstration : it is composed largely of the professional groups and of the "solid" and "upper" middle class ; as a spirit it has survived in Kansas, which by an historic accident happens to be the one Middle Western State predominantly Yankee; as a victorious party it has survived in California, one of the few States outstandingly "American" in population. What is significant in it, as in every other form of the political conscience, is the fact that it is a response to a feel- ing of " something out of gear," and naturally the attention seeks the cause, first of all, outside of the self, not within. Hence the 352 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS ' interest in economico-political reconstruction. But the maladjust- ment in that region is really external. And the political con- science is seeking by a mere change in outward condition to abolish an inward disparity. " Human rights versus property rights " is merely the modern version of the Declaration of Inde- pendence, still assuming that men are men merely, as hke as marbles and destined under uniformity of conditions to uniformity of spirit. The course of our economic history since the Civil War shows aptly enough how shrewd were, other things being equal, Marx's generalizations concerning the tendencies of capital towards concentration in the hands of a few. Attention conse- quently has fixed itself more and more upon the equalization of the distribution of wealth — not socialistically, of course. And this would really abolish the dualism if the economic dualism of rich and poor were the fundamental one. It happens merely that it is n't. The Afiglo-Sax on American, constituting as he does the eco- nomic upper class, would hardly have reacted to economic disparity as he has if that had been the only disparity.. In point of fact, it is the ethnic disparity that troubles him. His activity as entre- preneur has crowded our cities with progressively cheaper laborers of Continental stock, all consecrated to the industrial machine, and towns like Gary, Lawrence, Chicago, Pittsburgh, have become in- dustrial camps of foreign mercenaries. His undertakings have brought into being the terrible autocracies of Pullman and of Lead, South Dakota. They have created a mass of casual laborers numbering 5,000,000, and of work-children to the number of 1,500,000 (the latter chiefly in the South, where the purely "American" white predominates). They have done all this be- cause the greed of the entrepreneur has displaced high-demanding labor by cheaper labor, and has brought into being the unneces- sary problem of unemployment. In all things greed has set the standard, so that the working ideal of the people is to get rich, to live, and to think as the rich, to subordinate government to the service of wealth, making the actual government "invisible." Per contra it has generated "labor unrest," the I.W. W,, the civil war in Colorado. < ASSIMILATION OF THE IMMIGRANT 353 Because the great mass of the laborers happen to be of Con- tinental and not British ancestry, and because they are late- comers, Mr. Ross blames them for this perversion of our public life and social ideals. Ignoring the degenerate farming stock of New England, the " poor whites " of the South, the negroes, he fears the anthropological as well as the economic effects of the "fusion" of these Continental Europeans — Slavs, and Italians and Jews — with the native stock, and grows anxious over the fate of American institutions at their hands. Nothing could better illus- trate the fact that the dualism is primarily ethnic and not economic. Under the laissez-faire policy the economic process would have been the same, of whatever race the rich, and of whatever race the poor. Only race prejudice, primitive, spontaneous, and uncon- scious, could have caused a trained economist to ignore the so obvious fact that in a capitalistic industrial society labor is useless and helpless without capital ; that hence the external dangers of immigration are in the greed of the capitalist and the indifference of the Government. The restriction of immigration can naturally succeed only with the restriction of the entrepreneur's greed, which is its cause. But the abolition of immigration and the restoration of the supremacy of "human rights" over "property rights " will not abolish the fundamental ethnk; dualism ; it may aggravate it. The reason is obvious. That like-mindedness in virtue of which men are as nearly as is possible in fact " free and equal " is not primarily the result of a constant set of external conditions. Its prepotent cause is an intrinsic similarity which, for America, has its roots in that ethnic and cultural unity of which our funda- mental institutions are the most durable expression. Similar environments, similar . occupations, do, of course, generate simi- larities: "American" is an adjective of similarity applied to Anglo-Saxons, Irish, Jews, Germans, Italians, and so on. But the similarity is one of place and institution, acquired, not inher- ited, and hence not transmitted. Each generation has, in fact, to become "Americanized" afresh, and, withal, inherited nature has a way of redirecting nurture, of which our public schools give only too much evidence. If the inhabitants of the United States 354 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS are stratified economically as "rich" and "poor," they are strati- fied ethnically as Germans, Scandinavians, Jews, Irish, and although the two stratifications cross more frequently than they are coincident, they interfere with each other far less than is hopefully supposed. The history of the "International" in recent years, the present d^bdcle in Europe, are indications of how little " class consciousness " modifies national consciousness. To the dominant nationality in America nationality, in the European sense, has had no meaning ; for it had set the country's standards and had been assimilating others to itself. Now that the process seems to be slowing down, it finds itself confronted with the problem of nationality, just as do the Irish, the Poles, the Bohe- mians, the Czechs, and the other oppressed nationalities in Europe. " We are submerged," writes a great American man of letters, who has better than anyone I know interpreted the Amer- ican spirit to the world, "we are submerged beneath a conquest so complete that the very name^ of us means something not ourselves. ... I feel as I should think an Indian might feel, in the face of ourselves that were." The fact is that similarity of class rests upon no inevitable ex- ternal condition* while similarity of nationality is inevitably intrinsic. Hence the poor of two different peoples tend to be less like- minded than the poor and the rich of the same peoples. At his core no human being, even in "a state of nature," is a mere mathematical unit of action like the "economic man." Behind him in time, and tremendously in him in quality, are his ancestors ; around him in space are his relatives and kin, looking back with him to a remoter common ancestry. In all these he lives and moves and has his being. They constitute his, literally, natio, and in Europe every inch of his nonhuman environment wears the effects of their action upon it and breathes their spirit. The America he comes to, beside Europe, is nature virgin and in- violate : it does not guide him with ancestral blazings : externally he is cut off from the past. Not so internally : whatever else he changes, he cannot change his grandfather. Moreover, he comes rarely alone ; he comes companioned with his fellow nationals ; and he comes to no strangers, but to kin and friend who have ASSIMILATION OF THE IMMIGRANT 355 gone before. If he is able to excel, he soon achieves a local habitation. There he encounters the native American to whom he is a Dutchman, a Frenchy, a Mick, a wop, a dago, a hunky, or a sheeny, and he encounters these others who are unlike him, dealing with him as a lower and outlandish creature. Then, be he even the rudest and most primeval peasant, heretofore totally unconscious of his nationality, of his categorical difference from other men, he must inevitably become conscious of it. Thus, in our industrial and congested towns, where there are real and large contacts between, immigrant nationalities the first effect appears to be an intensification of spiritual dissimilarities, always to the disadvantage of the dissimilarities. The second generation, consequently, devotes itself feverishly to the attainment of similarity. The older social tradition is lost by attrition or thrown off for advantage. The merest externals of the new one are acquired — via the public school. But as the public school imparts it, or as the settlement imparts it, it is not really a life, it is an abstraction, an arrangement of words. Amer- ica is a word : as an historic fact, a democratic ideal of life, it is not realized at all. At best and at worst — now that the captains of industry are becoming disturbed by the mess they have made, and "vocational training" is becoming a part of the educational program — the prospective American learns a trade, acquiring at his most impressionable age the habit of being a cog in the industrial machine. And this he learns, moreover, from the sons and daughters of earlier immigrants, themselves essentially un- educated and nearly illiterate, with what spontaneity and teach- ing power they have squeezed out in the " normal " schools by the application of that Pecksniffian "efficiency" press called pedagogy. But life, the expression of emotion and realization of desire, the prospective American learns from the yellow press, which has set itself explicitly the task of appealing to his capacities. He learns of the wealth, the luxuries, the extravagances, and the immoralities of specific rich persons. He learns to want to be like them. As that is impossible in the mass, their amusements be- come his crimes or vices. Or suppose him to be strong enough 3S6 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS to emerge from the proletarian into the middle class, to achieve economic competence and social respectability. He remains still the Slav, the Jew, the German, or the Irish citizen of the Amer- ican commonwealth. Again, in the mass, neither he nor his children nor his children's children lose their ethnic individuality. For marriage is determined by sexual selection and by pro- pinquity, and the larger the town, the less the likelihood of mixed marriage. Although the gross number of such marriages is greater than it was fifty years ago, the relative proportions, in terms of variant units of population, tend, I think, to be signifi- cantly less. As the stratification of the towns echoes and stresses the stratification of the country as a whole, the hkelihood of a new "American" race is remote enough, and the fear of it unneces- sary. But equally remote also is the possibility of a universaliza- tion of the inwardness of the old American life. Only the externals succeed in passing over. It took over two hundred years of settled life in one place for the New England school to emerge, and it emerged in a com- munity in which like-mindedness was very strong, and in which the whole ethnic group performed all the tasks, economic and social, which the community required. How when ethnic and in- dustrial groups are coincident ? When ethnic and social groups are coincident } For there is a marked tendency in this country for the industrial and social stratification to follow ethnic lines. The first comers in the land constitute its aristocracy, are its chief protagonists of the pride of blood as well as of the pride of pelf, its formers and leaders of opinion, the standardizers of its culture. Primacy in time has given them primacy in status, like all " first-born," so that what we call the tradition and spirit of America is theirs. The non-British elements of the population are practically voiceless, but they are massive, " barbarian hordes," if you will, and the effect, the unconscious and spontaneous effect, of their pressure has been the throwing back of the Anglo- American upon his ancestry and ancestral ideals. This has taken two forms : (i) the "patriotic" societies — not, of course, the Cin- cinnati or the Artillery Company, but those that have arisen with the great migrations, the Sons and Daughters of the American ASSIMILATION OF THE IMMIGRANT 357 Revolution, the Colonial Dames ; and (2) the specific clan or tribal organizations consisting of families looking back to the same colonial ancestry — the societies of the descendants of John Alden, etc., etc. The ancient hatred for England is completely gone. Wherever possible, the ancestral line is traced across the water to England ; old ancestral homes are bought ; and those of the forbears of national heroes like John. Harvard or George Washington V become converted into shrines. More and more pub- lic emphasis has been placed upon the unity of the English and American stock — the common interests of the "Anglo-Saxon" nations, and of "Anglo-Saxon" civilization, the unity of the political, literary, and social tradition. If all that is not ethnic nationality returned to consciousness, what is it .'' Next in general estimation come the Germans and the Irish, with the Jews a close third, although the position of the last in- volves some abnormalities. Then come the Slavs and Italians and other central and south Europeans ; finally, the Asiatics. The Germans have largely a monopoly of brewing and baking and cabinetmaking. The Irish shine in no particular industries unless it be those carried on by municipalities and public-service corpora- tions. The Jews mass in the garment-making industries, tobacco manufacture, and in the "learned professions." The Scandinavians appear to be on the same level as the Jews in the general esti- mation, and going up. They are farmers, mostly, and outdoor men. The Slavs are miners, metal workers, and packers. The Italians tend to fall with the negroes into the "pick and shovel brigade." Such a country-wide and urban industrial and social stratification is no more likely than the geographical and sectional stratification to facilitate the coming of the "American race"! And as our political and "reforming" action is directed upon symptoms rather than fundamental causes, the stratification, as the country moves towards the inevitable equilibrium between wealth and population, will tend to grow more rigid rather than less. Thus far the pressure of immigration alone has kept the strata from hardening. Eliminate that, and we may be headed for a caste system based on ethnic diversity and mitigated to only a negligible degree by economic differences. 35 8 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS The array of forces for and against that like-mindedness which is the stuff and essence of nationality aligns itself as follows : For it, make social imitation of the upper by the lower classes, the facility of communications, the national pastimes of baseball and motion picture, the mobility of population, the cheapness of print- ing, and the public schools. Against it, make the primary ethnic differences with which the population starts, its stratification over an enormous extent of country, its industrial and economic strati- fication. We are an English-speaking country, but in no intimate and inevitable way, as is New Zealand or Australia, or even Canada. English is to us what Latin was to the Roman provinces and to the Middle Ages — the language of the upper and dominant class, the vehicle and symbol of culture : for the mass of our popula- tion it is a sort of Esperanto or Ido, a lingua franca necessary less in the spiritual than the economic contacts of the daily life. This mass is composed of elementals, peasants — Mr. Ross speaks of their menacing American life with "peasantism" — the pro- letarian foundation material of all forms of civilization. Their self-consciousness as groups is comparatively ' weak. This is a factor which favors their " assimilation," for the more cultivated a group is, the more it is aware of its individuality, and the less willing it is to surrender that individuality. One need think only of the Puritans themselves, leaving Holland for fear of absorp- tion into the Dutch population ; of the Creoles and Pennsylvania Germans of this country, or of the Jews, anywhere. Peasants, however, having nothing much to surrender in taking over a new culture, feel no necessary break, and find the transition easy. It is the shock of confrontation with other ethnic groups and the feeling of aliency that generates in them a more intense self- consciousness, which then militates against Americanization in spirit by reenforcing the two factors to which the spiritual expres- sion of the proletarian has been largely confined. These factors are language and rehgion. Religion is, of course, no more a "uni- versal" than language. The history of Christianity makes evident enough how religion is modified, even inverted, by race, place, and time. It becomes a principle of separation, often the sole reposi- tory of the national spirit, almost always the conservator of the ASSIMILATION OF THE IMMIGRANT 359 national language and of the tradition that is passed on with the language* to succeeding -generations. Among immigrants, hence, religion and language tend to be coordinate : a single expression of the spontaneous, and instinctive mental life of the masses, and the primary inward factors making against assimilation. Anxiety would, I think, be more than justified were it not that reUgion in these cases always does more than it intends. For it conserves the inward aspect of nationality rather than mere re- ligion, and tends to become the center of exfoliation of a higher type of personality among the peasants in the natural terms of their own natio. This natio, reaching consciousness first in a reaction against America, then as an effect of the competition with Americanization, assumes spiritual forms other than religious : the parochial school, to hold its own with the public school, gets secularized while remaining national. Natio is what underlies the vehemence of the "Americanized " and the spiritual and political unrest of the Americans. It is the fundamental fact of American life to-day, and in the light of it Mr. Wilson's resentment of the " hyphenated " American is both righteous and pathetic. But a hyphen attaches, in things of the spirit, also to the "pure" English American. His cultural mastery tends to be retrospec- tive rather than prospective. At the present time there is no dominant American mind. Our spirit is inarticulate, not a voice, but a chorus of many voices, each singing a rather different tune. How to get order out of this cacophony is the question for all those who are concerned about those things which alone justify wealth and power, concerned about justice, the arts, literature, philosophy, science. What must, what shall this cacophony become — a unison or a harmony? For decidedly the older America, whose voice and whose spirit was New England, is gone beyond recall. Americans still are the artists and thinkers of the land, but they work, each for him- self, without common vision or ideals. The older tradition has passed from a life into a memory, and the newer one, so far as it has an Anglo-Saxon base, is holding its own beside more and more formidable rivals, the expression in appropriate form of the national inheritances of the various populations concentrated 36o READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS in the various States of the Union, populations of whom their national self-consciousness is perhaps the chief spiritaal asset. Think of the Creoles in the South and the French Canadians in the North, clinging to French for so many generations and main- taining, however weakly, spiritual and social contacts with the mother country ; of the Germans, with their Deiitschtum, their Mdnnerchore, Tumvereine, and Schiltzenfeste; of the universally separate Jews ; of the intensely nationalistic Irish ; of the Penn- sylvania Germans ; of the indomitable Poles, and even more in- domitable Bohemians ; of the 30,000 Belgians in Wisconsin, with their "Belgian"' language, a mixture of Walloon and Flemish welded by reaction to a strange social environment. Except in such cases as the town of Lead, South Dakota, the great ethnic groups of proletarians, thrown upon themselves in a new environ- ment, generate from among themselves the other social classes which Mr. Ross misses so sadly among them : their shopkeepers, their physicians, their attorneys, their journalists, and their national and political leaders, who form the links between them and the greater American society. They develop their own literature, or become conscious of that of the mother country. As they grow more prosperous and "Americanized," as they become freed from the stigma of "foreigner," they develop group self-respect: i^s. "wop" changes into a proud Italian, the "hunky" into an \^ tensely nationalist Slav. They learn, or they recall, the spiritual heritage of their nationality. Their cultural abjectness gives way to cultural pride; and the public schools, the libraries, and the clubs become beset with demands for texts in the national language and literature. The Poles are an instance worth dwelling upon. There are over a million of them in the country, a backward people, pro- lific, brutal, priest-ridden — a menace to American institutions. Yet the urge that carries them in such numbers to America is not unlike that which carried the Pilgrim Fathers. Next to the Jews, whom their brethren in their Polish home are hounding to death, the unhappiest people in Europe, exploited by both their own upper classes and the Russian conqueror, they have resisted extinction at a great cost. They have clung to their religion ASSIMILATION OF THE IMMIGRANT 361 because it was a mark of difference between them and their con- querors ; because they love liberty, they have made their language of literary importance in Europe. Their aspiration, impersonal, disinterested, as it must be in America, to free Poland, to con- serve the Polish spirit, is the most hopeful and American thing about them — the one thing that stands actually between them and brutalization through complete economic degradation. It lifts them higher than anything that, in fact, America offers them. The same thing is true for the Bohemians, 1 7,000 of them, work- ingmen in Chicago, paying a proportion of their wage to maintain schools in the Bohemian tongue and free thought ; the same thing is true of many other groups. How true it is may be observed from a comparison of the ver- nacular dailies and weeklies with the yellow American press which is concocted expressly for the great American masses. The con- tent of the former, when the local news is deducted, is a mass of information, political, social, scientific ; often translations into the vernacular of standard English writing, often original work of high literary quality. The latter, when the news is deducted, consists of the sporting page and the editorial page. Both pander rather than awaken, so that it is no wonder that in fact the i'^'-ellectual and spiritual pabulum of the great masses consists t.- the vernacular papers in the national tongue. With them go also the vernacular drama, and the thousand and one other phe- nomena which make a distinctive culture, the outward expres- sion of that fundamental like-mindedness wherein men are truly " free and equal." This, beginning for the dumb peasant masses in language and religion, emerges in the other forms of life and art and tends to make smaller or larger ethnic groups autonomous, self-sufficient, and reacting as spiritual units to the residuum of America. What is the cultural outcome likely to be, under these con- ditions.? Surely not the melting pot. Rather something that has become more and more distinct in the changing State and city life of the last two decades, and which is most articulate and apparent among the Scandinavians, the Germans, the Irish, the Jews. 362 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS It is in the area where Scandinavians are most concentrated that Norwegian is preached on Sunday in more churches than in Norway. That area is Minnesota, not unhke Scandinavia in climate and character. There, if the newspapers are to be trusted, the " foreign language " taught in an increasingly larger number of high schools is Scandinavian. The Constitution of the State resembles in many respects the famous Norwegian Constitution of 1813. The largest city has been chosen as the "spiritual capital," if I may say so, the seat of the Scandinavian "house of life," which the Scandinavian Society in America is reported to be planning to build as a center from which there is to spread through the land Scandinavian culture and ideals. The eastern neighbor of Minnesota is Wisconsin, a region of great concentration of Germans. Is it merely a political accident that the centralization of State authority and control has been possible there to a degree heretofore unknown in this country .' That the Socialist organization is the most powerful in the land, able under ordinary conditions to have elected the mayor of a large city and a congressman, and kept out of power only by coalition of the other parties ? That German is the overwhelm- ingly predominant " foreign language " in the public schools and in the university ? Or that the fragrance of Deutschtum per- vades the life of the whole State .' The earliest German immi- grants to America were group conscious to a high degree. They brought with them a cultural tradition and political aspiration. They wanted to found a State. If a State is to be regarded as a mode of life of the mind, they have succeeded. Their language is the predominant " foreign " one throughout the Middle West. The teaching of it is required by law in many places, southern Ohio and Indianapolis, for example. Their national institutions, even to cooking, are as widespread as they are. They are organ- ized into a great national society, the German-American Alliance, which is dedicated to the advancement of German culture and ideals. They encourage and make possible a close and more inti- mate contact with the fatherland. They endow Germanic museums, they encourage and provide for exchange professorships, erect monuments to German heroes, and disseminate translations of ASSIMILATION OF THE IMMIGRANT 363 the German classics. And there are, of course, the very excellent German vernacular press, the German theater, the German club, the German organization of life. Similar are the Irish, living in strength in Massachusetts and New York. When they began to come to this country they were far less well off and far more passionately self-conscious than the Germans. For numbers of them America was and has remained just a center from which to plot for the freedom of Ireland. For most it was an opportunity to escape both exploitation and star- vation. The way they made was made against both race and re- ligious prejudice : in the course of it they lost much that was attractive as well as much that was unpleasant. But Americani- zation brought the mass of them also spiritual self-respect, and their growing prosperity both here and in Ireland is what lies behind the more inward phases of Irish Nationalism — the Gaelic movement, the Irish theater, the Irish Art Society. I omit con- sideration of such organized bodies as the Ancient Order of Hi- bernians. All these movements alike indicate the conversion of the negative nationalism of the hatred of England to the positive nationalism of the loving care and development of the cultural values of the Celtic spirit. A significant phase of it is the vot- ing of Irish history into the curriculum of -the high schools of Boston. In sum, once the Irish body had been fed and erected, the Irish mind demanded and generated its own peculiar form of self-realization and satisfaction. And, finally, the Jews. Their attitude towards America is dif- ferent in a fundamental respect from that of other immigrant nationalities. They do not come to the United States from truly native lands, lands of their proper natio and culture. They come from lands of sojourn, where they have been for ages treated as foreigners, at most as semicitizens, subject to disabilities and persecutions. They come with no political aspirations against the peace of other states such as move the Irish, the Poles, the Bohemians. They come with the intention to be completely incorporated into the body politic of the state. They alone, as Mr. H. G. Wells notes, of all the immigrant peoples have made spontaneously conscious and organized efforts to prepare themselves 364 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS and their brethren for the responsibilities of American citizenship. There is hardly a considerable municipality in the land, where Jews dwell, that has not its Hebrew Institute, or its Educational Alliance, or its Young Men's Hebrew Association, or its Com- munity House, especially dedicated to this task. They show the highest percentage of. naturalization. Yet of all self-conscious peoples they are the most self-conscious. Of all immigrants they have the oldest civiHzed tradition, they are longest accustomed to living under law, and are at the outset the most eager and the most successful in eliminating the external differences between them- selves and their social environment. Even their religion is flexible and accommodating, as that of the Christian sectaries is not, for change involves no change in doctrine, only in mode of life. Yet, once the wolf is driven from the door and the Jewish im- migrant takes his place in our Society a free man and an Ameri- can, he tends to become all the more a Jew. The cultural unity of his race, history, and background is only continued by the new life under the new conditions. Mr. H. G. Wells calls the Jewish quarter in New York a city within a city, and with more justice than other quarters because, although it is far more in tune with Americanism than the other quarters, it is also far more autono- mous in spirit and self-conscious in culture. It has its sectaries, its radicals, its artists, its literati ; its press, its literature, its theater, its Yiddish and its Hebrew, its Talmudical colleges and its Hebrew schools, its charities and its vanities, and its coordinat- ing organization, the Kehilla, all more or less duplicated wherever Jews congregate in mass. Here not religion alone, but the whole world of radical thinking, carries the mother tongue and the father tongue, with all that they imply. Unlike the parochial schools, their separate schools, being national, do not displace the public schools ; they supplement the public schools. The Jewish ardor for pure learning is notorious. And, again, as was the case with the Scandinavians, the Germans, the Irish, democracy applied to education has given the Jews their will that Hebrew shall be coordinate with French and German in the regent's examination. On a national scale of organization there is the American Jewish Committee, the Jewish Historical Society, the Jewish Publication ASSIMILATION OF THE IMMIGRANT 365 Society. Rurally, there is the model Association of Jewish Farmers, with their cooperative organization for agriculture and for agricul- tural education. In sum, the most eagerly American of the im- migrant groups are also the most autonomous and self-conscious in spirit and culture. Immigrants appear to pass through four phases in the course of being Americanized. In the first phase they exhibit economic eagerness, the greed of the unfed. Since external differences are a handicap in the economic struggle, they " assimilate," seeking thus to facilitate the attainment of economic independence. Once the proletarian level of such independence is reached, the process of assimilation slows down and tends to come to a stop. The immigrant group is still a national group, modified, sometimes improved, by environmental influences, but otherwise a solitary spiritual unit, which is seeking to find its way out on its own social level. This search brings to light permanent group dis- tinctions, and the immigrant, like the Anglo-Saxon American, is thrown back upon himself and his ancestry. Then a process of dissimilation begins. The arts, life, and ideals of the nationality become central and paramount ; ethnic and national differences change in status from disadvantages to distinctions. All the while the immigrant has been using the English language and behav- ing like an American in matters economic and political, and con- tinues to do so. The institutions of the Republic have become the liberating cause and the background for the rise of the cul- tural consciousness and social autonomy of the immigrant Irish- man, German, Scandinavian, Jew, Pole, or Bohemian. On the whole, Americanization has not repressed nationality. Americani- zation has liberated nationality. Hence what troubles so many Anglo-Saxon Americans is not really inequality ; what troubles them is difference. Only things that are alike in fact and not abstractly, and only men that are alike in origin and in spirit and not abstractly, can be truly " equal " and maintain that inward unanimity of action and outlook which make a national life. The writers of the Declaration of Independ- ence and of the Constitution were not confronted by the prac- tical fact of ethnic dissimilarity among the whites of the country. 366 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS Their descendants are confronted by it. Its existence, acceptance, and development provide one of the inevitable consequences of the democratic principle on which our theory of government is based, and the result at the present writing is to many worthies very unpleasant. Democratism and the federal principle have worked together with economic greed and ethnic snobbishness to people the land with all the nationalities of Europe, and to convert the early American nation into the present American state. For in effect we are in the process of becoming a true federal state, such a state as men hope for as the outcome of the European War, a great republic consisting of a federation or commonwealth of nationalities. Given, in the economic order, the principle of laissez faire applied to a capitalistic society, in contrast with the manorial and guild systems of the past and the Socialist Utopias of the future, the economic consequences are the same, whether in America, full of all Europe, or in England, full of the English, Scotch, and Welsh. Given, in the political order, the princi- ple that all men are equal and that each, consequently, under the law at least, shall have the opportunity to make the most of him- self, the control of the machinery of government by the plutoc- racy is a foregone conclusion. Laissez faire and unprecedentedly bountiful natural resources have turned the mind of the state to wealth alone, and in the haste to accumulate wealth considerations of human quality have been neglected and forgotten, the action of government has been remedial rather than constructive, and Mr. Ross's " peasantism," i.e., the growth of an expropriated, degraded industrial class, dependent on the factory rather than on land, has been rapid and vexatious. The problems which these conditions give rise to are important, but not primarily important. Although they have occupied the minds of all our political theorists, they are problems of means, of instruments, not of ends. They concern the conditions of life, not the kind of life, and there appears to have been a general assumption that only one kind of human life is possible in America. But the same democracy which underlies the evils of the economic order underlies also the evils — and the promise — ASSIMILATION OF THE IMMIGRANT 367 of the ethnic order. Because no individual is merely an individ- ual, the political autonomy of the individual has meant and is beginning to realize in these United States the spiritual autonomy of his group. The process is as yet far from fruition. We are, in fact, at the parting of the ways. A genuine social alternative is before us, either of which parts we may realize if we will. In social construction the will is father to the fact, for the fact is nothing more than the concord or conflict of wills. What do we will to make of the United States — a unison, singing the old Anglo-Saxon theme " America," the America of the New England school, or a harmony, in which that theme shall be dominant, perhaps, among others, but one among many, not the only one .? The mind reverts helplessly to the historic attempts at unison in Europe — the heroic failure of the pan-Hellenists, of the Romans, the disintegration and the diversification of the Christian Church, for a time the most successful unison in history ; the present-day failures of Germany and of Russia. Here, however, the whole social situation is favorable, as it has never been at any time elsewhere — everything is favorable but the basic law of America itself, and the spirit of American institutions. To achieve unison — it can be achieved — would be to violate these. For the end determines the means, and this end would involve no other means than those used by Germany in Poland, in Schleswig-Holstein, and in Alsace-Lorraine; by Russia in the Pale, in Poland, in Finland. Fundamentally it would require the complete nationalization of education, the abolition of every form of parochial' and private school, the abolition of instruction in other tongues than English, and the concentration of the teaching of history and literature upon the English tradition. The other insti- tutions of society would require treatment analogous to that administered by Germany to her European acquisitions. And all of this, even if meeting with no resistance, would not completely guarantee the survival as a unison of the older Americanism. For the program would be applied to diverse ethnic types, and the reconstruction that, with the best will, they might spontaneously make of the tradition would more likely than not be a far cry from the original. It is, already. 368 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS The notion that the program might be realized by radical and even enforced miscegenation, by the creation of the melting pot by law, and thus by the development of the new "American race," is, as Mr. Ross points out, as mystically optimistic as it is ignorant. In historic times, so far as we know, no new ethnic types have originated, and what we know of breeding gives us no assurance of the disappearance of the old types in favor of the new, only the addition of a new type, if it succeeds in surviving, to the already existing older ones. Biologically, life does not unify ; biologically, life diversifies ; and it is sheer ignorance to apply social analogies to biological processes. In any event we know what the qualities and capacities of existing types are ; we know how by education to do something towards the repression of what is evil in them and the conservation of what is good. The " American race " is a totally unknown thing ; to presume that it will be better because (if we like to persist in the illusion that it is com- ing) it will be later, is no different from imagining that, because contemporary, Russia is better than ancient Greece. There is nothing more to be said to the pious stupidity that identifies recency with goodness. The unison to be achieved cannot be a unison of ethnic types. It must be, if it is to be at all, a unison of social and histoi^ic interests, established by the complete cutting off of the ancestral memories of our populations, the enforced, exclusive use of the English language and English and American history in the schools and in the daily life. The attainment of the , other alternative, a harmony, also requires concerted pubhc action. But the action would do no violence to our fundamental law and the spirit of our institutions, nor to the qualities of men. It would seek simply to eliminate the waste and the stupidity of our social organization, by way of freeing and strengthening the strong 'forces actually in operation. Starting with our existing ethnic and cultural groups, it would seek to provide conditions under which each may attain the perfection that is proper to its kind. The provision of such conditions is the primary intent of our fundamental law and the function of our institutions. And the various nationalities which compose our commonwealth must learn first of all this fact, which is perhaps, ASSIMILATION OF THE IMMIGRANT 369 to most minds, the outstanding ideal content of " Americanism " — that democracy means self-realization through self-control, self- government, and that one is impossible without the other. For the application of this principle, which is realized in a harmony of societies, there are European analogies also. I omit Austria and Turkey, for the union of nationalities is there based more on inadequate force than on consent, and the form of their organi- zation is alien to ours. I think of England and of Switzerland. England is a state of four nationalities — the English, Welsh, Scotch, and Irish (if one considers the Empire, of many more), and while English history is not unmarred by attempts at unison, both the home policy and the imperial policy have, since the Boer War, been realized more and more in the appHcation of the principle of harmony : the strength of the kingdom and the empire have been posited more and more upon the voluntary autonomous cooperation of .the component nationalities. Switzerland is a state of three nationalities, a republic as the United States is, far more democratically governed, concentrated in an area not much different in size, I suspect, from New York City, with a population not far from it in total. Yet Switzerland has the most loyal citizens in Europe. Their language, literary and spiritual traditions are on the one side German, on another Italian, on a third side French. And in terms of social organization, of economic pros- perity, of public education, of the general level of culture, Switzer- land is the most successful democracy in the world. It conserves and encourages individuality. The reason lies, I think, in the fact that in Switzerland the conception of " natural rights " operates, consciously or uncon- sciously, as a generalization from the unalterable data of human nature. What is inalienable in the life of mankind is its intrinsic positive quality — its psychophysical inheritance. Men may change their clothes, their politics, their wives, their religions, their phi- losophies, to a greater or less extent : they cannot change their grandfathers. Jews or Poles or Anglo-Saxons, in order to cease being Jews or Poles or Anglo-Saxons, would have to cease to be. The selfhood which is inalienable in them, and for the realiza- tion of which they require "inalienable" liberty, is ancestrally 370 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS determined, and the happiness which they pursue has its form implied in ancestral endowment. This is what, actually, democ- racy in operation assumes. There are human capacities which it is the function of the state to liberate and to protect ; and the failure of the state as a government means its abolition. Government, the state, under the democratic conception is merely an instru- ment, not an end. That it is often an abused instrument, that it is often seized by the powers that prey, that it makes frequent mistakes and considers only seqondary ends, surface needs, which vary from moment to moment, is, of course, obvious : hence our social and political chaos. But that it is an instrument, flexibly adjustable to changing life, changing opinion, and needs, our whole electoral organization and party system declare. And as intelli- gence and wisdom prevail over " politics " and special interests, as the steady and continuous pressure of the inalienable qualities and purposes of human groups more and more dominate the confusion of our common life, the outlines of a possible great and truly democratic conimonwealth become discernible. Its form is that of the federal republic ; its substance a democracy of nationalities, cooperating voluntarily and autono- mously in the enterprise of self-realization through the perfection of men according to their kind. The common language of the commonwealth, the language of its great political tradition, is English, but each nationality expresses its emotional and volun- tary life in its own language, in its own inevitable aesthetic and intellectual forms. The common life of the commonwealth is politico-economic, and serves as the foundation and background for the realization of the distinctive individuality of each natio that composes it. Thus " American civilization " may come to mean the perfection of the cooperative harmonies of " European civilization," the waste, the squalor, and the distress of Europe being eliminated — a multiplicity in a unity, an orchestration of mankind. As in an orchestra, every type of instrument has its specific timbre and tonality, founded in its substance and form ; as every type has its appropriate theme and melody in the whole symphony, so in society each ethnic group is the natural instru- ment, its spirit and culture are its theme and melody, and the ASSIMILATION OF THE IMMIGRANT 371 harmony and dissonances and discords of them all make the symphony of civilization, with this difference : a musical sym- phony is written before it is played ; in the symphony of civiliza- tion the playing is the writing, so that there is' nothing so fixed and inevitable about its progressions as in mwsic, so that within the limits set by nature they may vary at will, and the range and variety of the harmonies may become wider and richer and more beautiful. But the question is, Do the dominant classes in America want such a society ? CHAPTER IX THE REGULATION AND RESTRICTION OF IMMIGRATION The main provisions of the Immigration Act of 1907, as amended in 1910, 373.— Recommendations of the United States Immigration Commission, 382. — The case for restrictive legislation, 387. — Possible remedies, 389. — Government con- trol of distribution, 391. — ^Requirement of passports for admission, 391. — Aboli- tion of the contract-labor clause, 392. — Restriction of the number of unskilled admitted, 394. — Some fallacies, 395. — Argument against restriction, 401. — Presi- dent Wilson's veto of the literacy test, 405. — The problem of Oriental immigra- tion, 409. — The ethical aspects of regulation, 419 [The conflict between the restrictionists and the anti-restriction- ists has been fought in and out of Congress for many years. The Immigration Act of 1907, which, as amended in 19 10 to prevent more effectively the importation of ahens for immoral purposes and to secure the deportation and punishment of ahens who profit by prostitution, constitutes the present immigration law, was a slight victory for the restrictionists, as it made certain additions to the excluded classes and otherwise provided for more stringent regulation. It also provided for a Congressional Immi- gration Commission, to make an exhaustive study of the whole problem. The Report of this Commission, from which several selections are reprinted in this volume, is a mine of information, unfortunately in large part ill-digested, upon nearly every aspect of immigration and especially upon the fundamentally important industrial and economic phases of the situation. The Commission as a result of its investigations declared- its belief in the desir- ability of restrictive legislation and advocated the literacy test as " the most feasible single method " of restriction. It is upon this specific method that the struggle is now centered, although the opponents to the literacy test are also to a great extent opposed to restriction in any form. The literacy test was passed by Con- gress in 1897, but the bill was vetoed by President Cleveland.^ 1 See his veto message, 54th Cong., 2d Session, Sen. Doc. No. 185. 372 THE REGULATION OF IMMIGRATION 373 Early in 191 3, Congress again provided for it, but President Taft vetoed it in a very brief message which did not state his reasons for so doing. Two years later Congress once more enacted the literacy test, only to have it vetoed by President Wilson, January 28, 1915. The House failed, by a very narrow margin, to pass the bill over his veto. A noteworthy development in recent years is the very strong organized opposition to restriction and to the literacy tests in particular.] 31. THE MAIN PROVISIONS OF THE IMMIGRATION ACT OF 19071 Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled. That there shall be .levied a tax of four dollars for every alien entering the United States. The money thus collected shall constitute a per- manent appropriation to be called the " immigrant fund," to be used to defray the expense of regulating the immigration of aliens into the United States. The tax imposed by this section shall be a lien upon the vessel or other vehicle of transportation bringing such aliens to the United States. Sec. 2. That the following classes of aliens shall be excluded from the United States : All idiots, imbeciles, feeble-minded per- sons, epileptics, insane persons, and persons who have been insane within five years previous ; persons who have had two or more attacks of insanity at any time previously ; paupers, persons likely to become a public charge, professional beggars, persons afflicted with tuberculosis or with a loathsome or dangerous contagious disease ; persons not comprehended within any of the foregoing excluded classes who are found to be mentally or physically de- fective, such mental or physical defect being of a nature which may affect the ability of such alien to earn a living ; persons who have been convicted of or admit having committed a felony or other crime or misdemeanor involving moral turpitude; polygamists 1 As amended in sections 2 and 3 by the Act of March 26, 1910. For the full text of the act, see Abstracts of the Reports of the Immigration Commission, 1911, Vol. II, pp. 731-747- 374 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS or persons who admit their belief in the practice of polygamy, anarchists, or persons who believe in or advocate the overthrow by force or violence of the Government of the United States, or of all government, or of all forms of law, or the assassination of public ofificials ; prostitutes, or women or girls coming into the United States for the purpose of prostitution or for any other immoral purpose ; persons who are supported by or receive in whole or in part the proceeds of prostitution ; persons who procure or attempt to bring in prostitutes or women or girls for the pur- pose of prostitution or for any other immoral purpose ; persons hereinafter called contract laborers, who have been induced or solicited to migrate to this country by offers or promises of em- ployment or in consequence of agreements, oral, written or printed, express or implied, to perform labor in this country of any kind, skilled, or unskilled ; those who have been, within one year from the date of application for admission to the United States, deported as having been induced or solicited to migrate as above described ; any person whose ticket or passage is paid for with the money of another, or who is assisted by others to come, unless it is affirmatively and satisfactorily shown that such person does not belong to one of the :foregoing excluded classes, and that said ticket or passage was not paid for by any corpora- tion, association, society, municipality, or foreign government, either directly or indirectly; all children under sixteen years of age, unaccompanied by one or both of their parents, at the dis- cretion of the Secretary of Commerce and Labor or under such regulations as he may from time to time prescribe: Provided, That nothing in this Act shall exclude, if otherwise admissible, persons convicted of an offense purely political, not involving moral turpitude: Provided further. That the provisions of this section relating to the payments for tickets or passage by any corporation, association, society, municipality, or foreign govern- ment shall not apply to the tickets or passage of aliens in imme- diate and continuous transit through the United States to foreign contiguous territory: And provided further. That skilled labor may be imported if labor of like kind unemployed cannot be found in this country : And provided further. That the provisions THE REGULATION OF IMMIGRATION 375 of this law applicable to contract labor shall not be held to exclude professional actors, artists, lecturers, singers, ministers of. any reli- gious denomination, professors for colleges or seminaries, persons belonging to any recognized learned profession, or persons em- ployed strictly as personal or domestic servants. Sec. 3. That the importation into the United States of any alien for the purpose of prostitution or for any other immoral purpose is hereby forbidden ; and whoever shall directly or in- directly, import, or attempt to import, into the United States, any alien for the purpose of prostitution or for any other immoral purpose, or whoever shall hold or attempt to hold any alien for any such purpose, in pursuance of such illegal importation, or whoever shall keep, maintain, control, support, employ, or harbor in any house or other place, for the purpose of prostitution or for any other immoral purpose, in pursuance of such illegal importa- tion, any alien, shall, in every such case, be deemed guilty of a felony, and on conviction thereof be imprisoned not more than ten years and pay a fine of not more than five thousand dollars. Jurisdiction for the trial and punishment of the felonies herein- before set forth shall be in any district to or into which said alien is brought in pursuance of said importation by the person or per- sons accused, or in any district in which a violation of any of the foregoing provisions of this section occur. Any alien who shall be found an inmate of or connected with the management of a house of prostitution or practicing prostitution after such alien shall have entered the United States, or who shall receive, share in, or derive benefit from any part of the earnings of any prosti- tute ; or who is employed by, in, or in connection with any house of prostitution or music or dance hall or other place of amuse- ment or resort habitually frequented by prostitutes, or where pros- titutes gather, or who in any way assists, protects, or promises to protect from arrest any prostitute, shall be deemed to be unlaw- fully within the United States and shall be deported in the manner provided by sections twenty and twenty-one of this Act. That any alien who shall, after he has been debarred or deported in pursu- ance of the provisions of this section, attempt thereafter to return to or to enter the United States shall be deemed guilty of a i,y6 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS misdemeanor, and shall be imprisoned for not more than two years. Any alien who shall be convicted under any of the provi- sions of this section shall, at the expiration of his sentence, be taken into custody and returned to the country whence he came, or of which he is a subject or a citizen, in the manner provided in sections twentj? and twenty-one of this Act. In all prosecutions under this section the testimony of a husband or wife shall be admissible and competent evidence against a wife or husband. Sec. 4. That it shall be a misdemeanor for any person, com- pany, partnership, or corporation, in any manner whatsoever, to prepay the transportation or in any way to assist or encourage the importation or migration of any contract laborer or contract laborers into the United States, unless such contract laborer or contract laborers are exempted under the terms of the last two provisos contained in section two of this Act. Sec. 5. That for every violation of any of the provisions of section four of this Act the person, partnership, company, or corporation violating the same, by knowingly assisting, encourag- ing, or soliciting the migration or importation of any contract laborer into the United States shall forfeit and pay for every such offense the sum of one thousand dollars. Sec. 6. That it shall be unlawful to assist or encourage the importation or migration of any alien by promise of employment through advertisements printed and published in any foreign coun- try ; and any alien coming to this country in consequence of such an advertisement shall be treated as coming under promise or agreement as contemplated in section two of this Act, and the penalties imposed by section five shall be applicable to such a case : Provided, that this section shall not apply to States or Terri- tories, the District of Columbia, or places subject to the jurisdic- tion of the United States advertising the inducements they offer for immigration thereto, respectively. Sec. 7. That no transportation company shall, directly or indi- rectly, either by writing, printing, or oral representation, solicit or encourage the immigration of any aliens' into the United States, but this shall not be held to prevent transportation companies from issuing letters, circulars, or advertisements, stating the THE REGULATION OF IMMIGRATION 377 sailings of their vessels and terms and facilities of transportation therein ; and for a violation of this provision, any such transpor- tation company . . . shall be . . . subjected to the penalties imposed by section five of this Act. Sec. 9. That it shall be unlawful for any person, including any transportation company other than railway lines entering the United States from foreign contiguous territory, ... to bring to the United States any alien subject to any of the following disabili- ties : Idiots, imbeciles, epileptics, or persons afflicted with tuber- culosis or with a loathsome or dangerous contagious disease, and if it shall appear . . . that any alien so brought to the United States was afflicted with any of the said diseases or disabilities at the time of foreign embarkation, and that the existence of such dis- ease or disability might have been detected by means of a competent medical examination at such time, such person or transportation company . . . shall pay 'to the collector of customs . . . the sum of one hundred dollars for each and every violation of the provisions of this section. Sec. 10. That the decision of the board of special inquiry, hereinafter provided for, based upon the certificate of the exam- ining medical officer, shall be final as to the rejection of aliens affected with tuberculosis or with any loathsome or dangerous contagious disease, or with any mental or physical disability which would bring such aliens within any of the classes excluded from admission. Sec 12. That upon the arrival of any alien by water at any port within the United States, it shall be the duty of the master or commanding officer of the . . . vessel ... to deliver to the immi- gration officers . . . lists or manifests made at the time and place of embarkation, . . . which shall . . . state as to each alien the full name, age, and sex ; whether married or single ; the calling or occu- pation ; whether able to read or write ; the nationahty ; the race ; the last residence ; the name and address of the nearest relative in the country from which the alien came ; the seaport for landing in the United States ; the final destination, if any, beyond the port of landing ; whether having a ticket through to such final desti- nation ; whether the alien has paid his own passage or whether 3;8 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS it has been paid by any other person or by any corporation, society, municipality, or government, and if so, by whom ; whether in pos- session of fifty dollars, and if less, how much ; whether going to join a friend or relative, and if so, what relative or friend, and his or her name and complete address ; whether ever before in the United States, and if so, when and where ; whether ever in prison or almshouse or an institution or hospital for the care of the insane and supported by charity; whether a polygamist, whether an anarchist, whether coming by reason of any offer, etc., express or implied, to perform labor in the United States, and what is the alien's condition of health, mental and physical, and whether deformed or crippled, and if so, for how long and from what cause. Sec. 13. That all aliens arriving by water . . . shall be listed in convenient" groups, and no one list or manifest shall contain more than thirty names. To each alien or head of a family shall be given a ticket on which shall be written his name, a number or letter designating the list in which his name, and so forth, is contained, and his number on said list, for convenience of identi- fication on arrival. Each list or manifest shall be verified by the signature and the oath or affirmation of the master or command- ing officer, or the first or second below him in command, taken before an immigration officer at the port of arrival, to the effect that he has caused the surgeon of said vessel sailing therewith to make a physical and oral examination of each of said aliens, and that from the report of said surgeon and from his own investiga- tion, he believes that no one of said aliens is an idiot, or imbecile, ^or a feeble-minded person, or insane person, or a pauper [etc., etc.]. Sec. 14. That the surgeon of said veslsel sailing therewith shall also sign each of said lists or manifests and make oath or affirmation in like manner before an immigration officer at the port of arrival, stating his professional experience and qualifica- tions as a physician and surgeon, and that he has made a per- sonal examination of each of the said aliens named therein, and that the said list or manifest, according to the best of his knowl- edge and belief, is full, correct, and true in all particulars rela- tive to the mental and physical condition of said aliens. If no surgeon sails with any vessel bringing aliens the mental and THE REGULATION OF IMMIGRATION 379 physical examinations and the verifications of the lists or mani- fests shall be made by some competent surgeon employed by the owners of the said vessel. Sec. 15. That in the case of the failure of . . . commanding officer of any vessel to deliver . . . lists or manifests of all aliens on board thereof, he shall pay ten dollars for each alien concern- ing whom the above information is not contained in any list as aforesaid. Sec. 16. That upon the receipt by the immigration officers of the lists or manifests of incoming aliens, it shall be their duty to inspect all such aliens. Said immigration officers may order a temporary removal of such aliens for examination at a desig- nated time and place, but such temporary removal shall not be considered a landing. Sec. 17. That the physical and mental examination of all arriving aliens shall be made by medical officers of the United States Public Health and Marine Hospital Service, who shall certify for the information of the immigration officers and the boards of special inquiry hereinafter provided for, any and all physical defects or diseases observed by said medical officers in any such alien. Sec. 19. That all aliens brought to this country in violation of law shall, if practicable, be immediately sent back to the country whence they respectively came on the vessels bringing them. The cost of their maintenance while on land, as well as the expense of their return, shall be borne by the owners of the vessels on which they came, and if any master shall refuse to receive back such aliens or to return them to the foreign port from which they came, he shall be deemed guilty of a misde- meanor and shall, on conviction, be punished by a fine of not less than three hundred dollars for each offense. Sec. 20. That any alien who shall enter the United States in violation of law, and such as become public charges from causes existing prior to landing, shall, upon the warrant of the Secretary of Commerce and Labor, be taken into custody and deported to the country whence he came at any time within three years after the date of his entry into the United States, 386 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS Sec. 22. That the Commissioner-General of Immigration, in addition to such other duties as may by law be assigned to him, shall, under the direction of the Secretary of Commerce and Labor, have charge of the administration of all laws relating to the immigration of aliens into the United States, and shall have . . . supervision of all officers . . . and employees appointed there- under. He shall establish such rules and regulations, prescribe such forms of bond, reports, entries, and other papers, and shall issue from time to time such instructions ... as he shall deem best calculated for carrying out the provisions of this Act and for protecting the United States and aliens migrating thereto from fraud and loss. . . . The decision of any . . . officer, if favorable to the admission of any alien, shall be subject to challenge by any other immigration officer, and such challenge shall operate to take the alien whose right to land is so challenged before a board of special inquiry for its investigation. Every alien who may not appear to the examining immigrant inspector at the port of arrival to be clearly and beyond a doubt entitled to land shall be detained for examination in relation thereto by a board of special inquiry. Sec. 25. That such boards of special inquiry shall be appointed by the commissioner of immigration at the various ports of arrival as may be necessary for the prompt determination of all cases of immigrants detained at such ports under the provisions of law. Each board shall consist of three members, who shall be selected from such of the immigrant officials in the service as the Commissioner-General of Immigration, with the approval of the Secretary of Commerce and Labor, shall from time to time desig- nate as qualified to serve on such boards. . . . Such boards shall have authority to determine whether an alien who has been duly held shall be allowed to land or shall be deported. All hearings before boards shall be separate and apart from the public, but the said boards shall keep a complete permanent record of their proceedings and of all such testimony as may be produced before them ; and the decision of any two members of a board shall prevail, but either the alien or any dissenting member of the said board may appeal through the commissioner of immigration at THE REGULATION OF IMMIGRATION 381 the port of arrival and the Commissioner-General of Immigration to the Secretary of Commerce and Labor, and the taking of such appeal shall operate to stay any action . . . until the receipt by the commissioner of immigration . at the port of arrival of such deci- sion which shall be rendered solely upon the evidence adduced before the board of special inquiry. Sec. 37. That whenever an alien shall have taken up his permanent residence in this country, and shall have filed his declaration of intention to become a citizen, and thereafter shall send for his wife, or minor children to join him, if said wife or any of said children shall be found to be affected with any con- tagious disorder, such wife or children shall be held, under such regulations as the Secretary of Commerce and Labor shall pre- scribe, until it shall be determined whether the disorder will be easily curable, or whether they can be permitted to land without danger to other persons ; and they shall not be either admitted or deported until such facts have been ascertained ; and if it shall be determined that the disorder is easily curable or that they can be permitted to land without danger to other persons, they shall, if otherwise admissible, thereupon be admitted. Sec. 38. That no person who disbelieves in or who is opposed to all organized government, or who is a member of or affiliated with any organization entertaining and teaching §uch disbelief in or opposition to all organized government, or who advocates or teaches the duty, necessity, or propriety of the unlawful assaulting or killing of any officer or officers, either of specific individ- uals or of officers generally, of the Government of the United States or of any other organized government, because of his or their official character, shall be permitted to enter the United States or any territory or place subject to the jurisdiction thereof. Sec. 40. Authority is hereby given the Commissioner-General of Immigration to estabHsh, under the direction and control of the Secretary of Commerce and Labor, a division of information in. the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization ; and the Secre- tary of Commerce and Labor shall provide such clerical assistance as may be necessary. It shall be the duty of said division to pro- mote a beneficial distribution of aliens admitted into the United 382 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS States among the several States and Territories desiring immi- gration. Correspondence shall be had with the proper officials of the States and Territories, and said division shall gather from all available sources useful information regarding the resources, products, and physical characteristics of each State and Territory, and shall publish such information in different languages and dis- tribute the pubhcations among all admitted aliens who may ask for such information at the immigrant stations of the United States and to such other persons as may desire the same. 32. RECOMMENDATIONS OF THE UNITED STATES IMMI- GRATION COMMISSION! As a result of the investigation the Commission is unanimously of the opinion that in framing legislation emphasis should be laid upon the following principles : 1. While the American people, as in the past, welcome the oppressed of other lands, care should be taken that immigration be such both in quality and quantity as not to make too difficult the process of assimilation. 2. Since the existing law and further special legislation recom- mended in this report deal with the physically and morally unfit, further general legislation concerning the admission of aliens should be based primarily upon economic or business considerations touching the prosperity and economic well-being of our people. . 3. The measure of the rational, healthy development of a coun- try is not the extent of its investment of capital, its output of products, or its exports and imports, unless there is a correspond- ing economic opportunity afforded to the citizen dependent upon employment for his material, mental, and moral development. 4. The development of business may be brought about by means which lower the standard of living of the wage-earners. A slow expansion of industry which would permit the adaptation and as- similation of the incoming labor supply is preferable to a very ! From Brief Statement of the Conclusions and Recommendations of the Immigration Commission (6ist Cong., 3d Session, Sen. Doc. No. 783), 191 1, pp. 37-40. THE REGULATION OF IMMIGRATION 383 rapid industrial expansion which results in the immigration of laborers of low standards and efficiency, who imperil the Amer- ican standard of wages and conditions of employment. The Commission agrees that : 1. To protect the United States more effectively against the immigration of criminal and certain other debarred classes — a. Aliens convicted of serious crimes within a period of five years after admission should be deported in accordance with the provisions of House bill 20,980, Sixty-first Congress, second session. b. Under the provisions of section 39 of the immigration act of February 20, 1907, the President should appoint commissioners to make arrangements with such countries as have adequate police records to supply emigrants with copies of such records, and that thereafter immigrants from such countries should be admitted to the United States only upon the production of proper certificates showing an absence of convictions for excludable crimes. c. So far as practicable the immigration laws should be so amended as to be made applicable to alien seamen. d. Any alien who becomes a public charge within' three years after his arrival in this country should be subject to deportation in the discretion of the Secretary of Commerce and Labor. 2. Sufficient appropriation should be regularly made to enforce vigorously the provisions of the laws previously recommended by the Commission and enacted by Congress regarding the impor- tation of women for immoral purposes. 3. As the new statute relative to steerage conditions took effect so recently as January i, 1909, and as the most modern steerage fully complies with all that is demanded under the law, the Com- mission's only recommendation in this connection is that a statute be immediately enacted providing for the placing of Government officials, both men and women, on vessels carrying third-class or steerage passengers, for the enforcement of the law and the pro- tection of the immigrant. The system inaugurated by the Com- mission of sending investigators in the steerage in the guise of immigrants should be -continued at intervals by the Bureau of Immigration. 384 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS 4. To strengthen the certainty of just and humane decisions of doubtful cases at ports of entry, it is recommended — That section 25 of the immigration act of 1907 be amended to provide that boards of special inquiry should be appointed by the Secretary of Commerce and Labor, and that they should be composed of men whose ability and training qualify them for the performance of judicial functions ; that the provisions compelling their hearings to be separate and apart from the public should be repealed, and that the office of an additional Assistant Secre- tary of Commerce and Labor to assist in reviewing such appeals be created. 5. To protect the immigrant against exploitation ; to discourage sending savings abroad ; to encourage permanent residence and naturalization ; and to secure better distribution of alien immi- grants throughout the country — a. The States should enact laws strictly regulating immigrant banks. b. Proper State legislation should be enacted for the regulation of employment agencies. c. Since* numerous aliens make it their business to keep im- migrants from influences that may tend toward their assimilation and naturalization as American citizens with the purpose of using their funds, of encouraging investment of their savings abroad, and their return to their Jiomeland, aliens who attempt to per- suade immigrants not to become American citizens should be made subject to deportation. d. Since the distribution of the thrifty immigrant to sections of the country where he may secure a permanent residence to the best advantage, and especially where he may invest his savings in farms or engage in agricultural pursuits, is most desirable, the division of information should be so conducted as to cooperate with States desiring immigrant settlers ; and information concern- ing the opportunities for settlement should be brought to the attention of immigrants in industrial centers who have been here for some time and who might be thus induced to invest their savings in this country and become permanent agricultural set- tlers. The division might also secure and furnish to all laborers THE REGULATION OF IMMIGRATION 385 alike information showing opportunities for permanent employ- ment in various sections of the country, together with the economic conditions in such places. 6. One of the provisions of section 2 of the act of 1907 reads as follows : And provided further. That skilled labor may be imported if labor of like kind unemployed cannot be found in this country. Instances occasionally arise, especially in the estabUshment of new industries in the United States, where labor of the kind de- sired, unemployed, cannot be found in this country and it becomes mecessaiy to import such labor. Under the law the Secretary of Commerce and Labor has no authority to determine the ques- tions of the necessity for importing such labor in advance of the importation, and it is recommended that an amendment to the law be adopted by adding to the clause cited above a pro- vision to the effect that the question of the necessity of importing such skilled labor in any particular instance may be determined by the Secretary of Commerce and Labor upon the application of any person interested prior to any action in that direction by such person ; such determination by the Secretary of Commerce and Labor to be reached after a full hearing and an investigation into the facts of the case. 7. The general policy adopted by Congress in 1882 of exclud- ing Chinese laborers should be continued. The question of Japanese and Korean immigration should be permitted to stand without furfeher legislation so long as the pres- ent method of restriction proves to be effective. An understanding should be reached with the British Govern- ment whereby East Indian laborers would be effectively prevented from coming to the United States. 8. The investigations of the Commission show an oversupply of unskilled labor in basic industries to an extent which indicates an •oversupply of unskilled labor in the industries of the country as a whole, and therefore demand legislation which will at the present time restrict the further admission of such unskilled labor. It is desirable in making the restriction that — 386 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS a. A sufficient' number be debarred to produce a marked effect upon the present supply of unskilled labor. b. As far as possible, the aliens excluded should be those, who come to this country with no intention to become American citi- zens or even to maintain a permanent residence here, but merely to save enough, by the adoption, if necessary, of low standards of living, to return permanently to their home country. Such per- sons are. usually men unaccompanied by wives or children. c. As far as possible the aliens excluded should also be those who, by reason of their personal qualities or habits, would least readily be assimilated or would make the least desirable citizens. The following methods of restricting immigration have been suggested : a. The exclusion of those unable to read or write in some language. b. The limitation of the number of each race arriving each year to a certain percentage of the average of that race arriving during a given period of years.' c. The exclusion of unskilled laborers unaccompanied by wives or families. d. The limitation of the number of immigrants arriving annu- ally at any port. e. The material increase in the amount of money required to be in the possession of the immigrant at the port of arrival. f. The material increase of the head tax. g. The levy of the head tax so as to make a marked discrim- ination in favor of men with famiiies. All these methods would be effective in one way or another in securing restrictions in a greater or less degree. A majority of the Commission favor the reading-and-writing test as the most feasible single method of restricting undesirable immigration. The Commission as a whole recommends restriction as demanded by economic, moral, and social considerations, furnishes in its report reasons for such restriction, and points out methods by which Congress can attain the desired result if its judgment coincides with that of the Commission. THE REGULATION OF IMMIGRATION 387 33. THE RESTRICTION OF IMMIGRATION! The immigration problem is not one which can be let alone. It is a dynamic question, which demands attention, and decision. If we settle the matter by determining to do nothing, we thereby make a decision, for which we may be more accountable than if we took some positive stand. And in this country immigration will not be let alone. Somebody must make decisions, and frame policies ; and, if the social scientists hold aloof, it will be done by selfish interests, and quack politicians. More than this, it is an immediate problem. Things are hap- pening with alarming rapidity, and what is to be done must be done speedily. These are the reasons which justify the presen- tation of certain suggestions for improvement in our method of handling the immigration situation in this country. One thing we may be sure of — any remedy ought to bear some immediate relation to the evils which it contemplates rem- edying. Before proceeding to the outline of the proposed new scheme it will be profitable to glance hastily over the most im- portant of the evils charged against immigration, and the foirembst remedies which have been suggested, with a view to determining to what extent the latter promise direct relief from the former. The chief objections to the present immigration situation may be summarized under eight heads, each with a convenient catchword to fix it in memory, as follows : 1. We have too many immigrants. A million a year of the peasants of Europe is more than this country can safely under- take to look after. This may be called the " numbers " objection. 2. The immigrants are poorly distributed. The great majority of them settle in the most densely populated states, and in the most congested sections of the largest cities of those states. The agricultural regions, which particularly want them, get very few of them. This is the " distribution " objection. 3. The immigrants are poorly assimilated, or not assimilated at all. This is in large measure due to the faulty distribution, 1 By H. P. Fairchild. Adapted from the American Economic Review Supple- ment, Vol. II, No. I (March, 1912), pp. 53-61. 388 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS and to the excessive numbers. There is great danger to the coun- try in the growing heterogeneity of population, which results from ever-increasing numbers of immigrants, of widely diverse races, who form compact colonies in our great cities, and come in slight touch with American life. The "assimilation" objection. 4. The competition of alien laborers, accustomed to a low standard of living, is lowering the wages and standard of living of the American workmen — at the very least, it is preventing them from rising. The " standard-of-living " objection. 5. Immigration seriously increases the amount of pauperism and crime in the United States, through the admission of large numbers of aliens of bad moral character, or low economic abil- ity. The " pauperism-and-crime " objection. 6. The present immigration movement is not a natural one, but is stimulated and fostered by transportation companies, labor agents, and other interested parties. Immigrants come with mis- conceptions and delusions, and without any natural fitness for American life ; and as a result many of them suffer bittfer hard- ships and add nothing to the life of this country. The " stimu- lation " objection. 7. Many — perhaps most — of the immigrants enter the coun- try as conscious lawbreakers, since a very large proportion of them knowingly evade the contract-labor provision of the law. Thus they begin their American life with a spirit of indifference or hostility to law,- which augury ill for their future usefulness to the country. The " illegal entrance " objection. 8. Immigration, as at present conducted, is proving of no real and lasting benefit to foreign nations. The stimulus given to the birth rate by the fact of emigration prevents any relief of congestion, and the other apparent benefits of emigration are offset by positive evils. The difference in economic level between the United States and foreign countries is gradually being obliter- ated at the expense of the United States, and without bettering the other nations. The " foreign-countries " objection. Not all of the foregoing charges have as yet been adequately proved. Some- of them perhaps never can be. But they contain the germ of the most important criticisms of the present system, THE REGULATION OF IMMIGRATION 389 and any proposed remedy ought to promise relief for at least two or three of them.- Among the principal remedies suggested for the problem under consideration the following stand out prominently : 1. The literacy test. This has received perhaps more attention than any other single remedy, and has a host of adherents. It would certainly meet the numbers objection. Since more than a quarter of the immigrants over fourteen years of age can neither read nor write, the strict application of the literacy test would probably cut down the total immigration to an approximately equal degree. It is difficult to see how the literacy test would be of any avail in meeting the distribution, standard of living, stimu- lation, or illegal-entrance objections. It might help to a limited degree in securing better assimilation (number 3), and it is claimed that literate immigrants are somewhat less prone to pauperism and crime than illiterate ones (number 5). 2. Consular or other inspection abroad, either at the port of embarkation, or in the native village of the immigrant. This might secure a somewhat better enforcement of the existing law, and obviate some of the hardships of the rejected immigrant. It is hard to see how it could materially affect any one of the foregoing objections. 3. Requiring immigrants to come up to a certain physical standard, such as is required for recruits to the army. This would probably remedy the numbers objection to a considerable extent, but would hardly meet any of the others. Our immi- grants are already as free from physical and mental diseases and weaknesses, and abnormalities, as a rigid examination can make them. 4. A minimum-wage requirement, making it illegal to employ an alien at less than a specified minimum wage. This is aimed directly at the standard-of -living objection. It hardly touches any of the others. It is, furtherniore, highly impracticable and unjust, as it would impose an ex post facto basis of admission. No immi- grant could possibly know before he left home what wage he might be sure of, unless, he was under contract, which is legally prohibited, nor could the examining inspectors tell anything about 390 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS it. It is hard to see what would be done^with ahens who could not earn the minimum wage, unless they were maintained at pub- lic expense, which would subject them to deportation, and would multiply the " tragedy of the rejected immigrant " a hundredfold. Other suggested remedies, mentioned in the Report of the Immigration Commission, are as follows : 5. The Umitation of the number of immigrants of each race. 6. The exclusion of unskilled laborers unaccompanied by wives or families. 7. The limitation of the number of immigrants arriving annu- ally at any port. 8. The material increase in the amount of money required to be in the possession of the immigrant, or of the head tax. 9. The levy of the head tax so as to make a marked discrimi- nation in favor of men with families. All of these last five remedies, except the very last, are designed primarily to meet the numbers objection, and would be effective to a greater or less extent. Those which aim to discriminate in favor of men with families might also have some effect in meet- ing the assimilation objection, as families are much more likely to come in touch with Americanizing influences than single indi- viduals. They might, however, operate to aggravate the pauper- ism-and-crime objection, as men might be induced to bring over their families when they were really not able to do so, and later fall into pauperism, or be led into crime. Looking over this list of remedies, it becomes apparent that the only objection which most of them seem likely to meet to any considerable extent is the numbers objection. The mere reduc- tion in the number of immigrants is very probably desirable, and might be accomplished in a variety of ways. Most of the reme- dies, however, fail absolutely to touch directly the great problems of distribution, assimilation, the degrading competition of low standards of living, pauperism and crime, unnatural immigration, and evasion of law, to say nothing of the somewhat idealistic problem of really bettering foreign nations. The scheme of regu- lation which is now to be discussed aims to touch directly every one of these objections. THE REGULATION OF IMMIGRATION 391 The first change involved in the proposed plan is for the gov- ernment to recognize frankly its responsibility for aliens after they have been admitted, and to take charge, officially and authori- tatively, of the distribution of immigrants in this country'. Hith- erto we have tacitly assumed that if sufficient care is exercised in the matter of admission, our duty is done, and the mere fact of residence in this country will bring to the immigrant all of those advantages which he is seeking, and the United States will secure all the benefit possible from his presence. We are tardily learning the utter falsity of this assumption. To promote better distribu- tion, the government should make it its business to ascertain where immigrant labor is actually needed, and where it can be sup- plied without injuring economic and social conditions — the two ideas are nearly correlative — and should see to it that the im- migrants go there and not elsewhere. To accomplish this, the aid of state and local boards should be enlisted. These agencies should furnish to the government authorities a statement of the number of immigrants who are desired in various sections, the nature of the work they are desired to do, and the wages they may expect. Private employers should be encouraged to state their needs to such boards, or directly to the federal authorities, and make known how many immigrants they wish to employ. All such requests should be investigated, and given official approval before they are acted upon. All of these requests, and this information, should be compiled and tabulated, and the officials of foreign governments shotild be supplied with the lists of places, the numbers of immigrants de- sired, wages, etc. Prospective immigrants should then be required to select the places to which they wish.to go before emigrating. A small proportion might possibly be allowed to emigrate without any specified destination — a sort of floating representation. To aid in the carrying out of this provision, passports should be required of all immigrants, bearing the approval of the foreign nation of the emigration of the individual, and stating the destination which the immigrant has chosen in this country. Under this system, the greater number — if not all — of the arriving immigrants would come with their destination already 392 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS picked out, and approved of by the United States government. The government should then see that they get there. The immi- grant should not be discharged from authority until he has reached his specified destination. Inspectors should accompany the immigrant trains, and turn their charges over to state or local officials, who should be held responsible for their safe delivery. In addition to the direct and obvious advantage of securing a more rational distribution, these provisions would also result in encouraging the immigrant to make a more careful study of con- ditions in America before he left home, and to choose his destina- tion on the grounds of the need of his services, rather than because some friend or relative lived there. This would help to do away with much of the ignorance and misconception which character- ize so many of the immigrants to-day. The passport provision, furthermore, would require the foreign government to scrutinize each would-be emigrant, and this, if conscientiously done, would tend to limit the number of inadmissibles who annually reach our shores. It may seem that this arrangement would tend to encourage- the immigration of contract laborers. There is no doubt that it would. In fact, one part of the proposed plan under discussion is the entire repeal and abolishment of the contract-labor clause of the immigration law. It is one of the greatest absurdities of our present legislation that it assumes and implies that the most desirable immigrant is the one who knows absolutely nothing about what work he is going to do in this country, or whether he will be able to find any. It puts a premium upon ignorance and lack of foresight. If we should see a group of our own fellow citizens starting out for some foreign country with such a hazy idea of their prospects there, we should brand them as most shiftless and foolhardy. This section of our laws has been made necessary so far because the government has not hitherto taken control of the number of immigrants, nor of their distribution, nor felt any responsibility for the condition of the immigrant after landing. Under the proposed system, the government should not only allow, but encourage, the making of contracts with prospective immi- grants, by state and local boards of public works, and by private THE REGULATION OF IMMIGRATION 393 employers. But every contract should be made under the ap- proval of the government, witnessed by an official stamp of some kind. The government authorities should also establish a minimum wage for each locality or industry, below which contracts must not be made. Any contract which lacked the official seal, or named a wage below the fixed minimum should be ipso facto null and void. Any immigrant, party to such a contract, should be subject to deportation, and the employer to punishment. To facilitate the making of legal contracts, the government should provide printed forms, stating the place, the name of the employer, the occupation, conditions of labor, and wage, leaving a blank for the name of the immigrant. By this means, em- ployers of labor who found themselves unable to secure an ade- quate supply of labor at a fair living wage in this country could send their agents to foreign countries, and secure laborers in an open and aboveboard, legal way, accomplishing the same end that they now achieve by underhand and illegal methods, through the assistance of unscrupulous labor agents and contractors. The great difference would be that under the new system the wage agreed upon would have to be such as met with official sanction. If employers did not find it worth 'while to engage foreign labor under such conditions, it would simply show that there was no real need for laborers in the country, and would work to the advantage of the workmen already here. The plan, as thus far outlined, contains three main proposi- tions : (i) government control of the distribution of immigrants ; (2) requirement of passports for admission ; (3) the abolition of the contract-labor clause, and the encouragement and govern- ment control of labor contracts with aliens, at a minimum wage. These three provisions meet most of the stock objections which have been outlined. They meet directly the distribution, and therefore the assimilation, objection. The aboHtion of the con- tract-labor clause, in connection with the minimum wage, meets the standard-of-living objection. The requirement of a passport, coupled with better distribution, would mitigate the dangers of pauperism and crime. The diminution of the power of the labor agent, and the various runners, would tend to make the movement 394 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS a more natural one. This would also be furthered by requiring the immigrant to choose a specific destination out of a long list recommended by the United States government. The abolition of the contract-labor clause would remove the greatest temptation to illegal entrance, for the majority of immigrants. The only objections not thus far provided for are the numbers objection and the foreign countries objection. In regard to these, it should be noted, first of all, that there is nothing in the three propositions which have been put forth which is inconsistent with most of the important plans for reducing numbers, or which would prevent them from being applied together. There is, how- ever, another method of meeting directly the two remaining objections, which harmonizes especially well with the rest of the proposed plan. It would be a decided innovation, and the attempt to introduce it might meet with insuperable obstacles of a political and administrative nature. At first sight it presents a decided aspect of impracticability. Nevertheless, it is interesting from a theoretic standpoint, and might prove more possible of applica- tion than at first seems probable. Briefly stated, it is as follows. The immigration of unskilled laborers to this country should be restricted to a single foreign nation, or group of nations, each year. Let it be understood, by international agreement, that in one year only immigrants from Germany would be admitted, the next from Italy, the next from Austria-Hungary, etc. Nations which send only small contingents of immigrants should be grouped, either with each other, or with one of the larger coun- tries. Passports to unskilled immigrants from other nations should not be recognized, with the possible exception that each nation might be allowed, every year, a small number of immigrants, to be chosen by themselves, to cover exceptional cases. The United States government could then maintain a special force of inspec- tors, who should make their headquarters in the nation whose turn it was, year by year, and help to direct and facilitate the movement from that end. This provision would manifestly help to cut down numbers, for it is not at all likely that ever, in a single year, would as many immigrants arrive from any single country, or group of countries, THE REGULATION OF IMMIGRATION 395 as now come from all countries. It would also give foreign nations a chance to utilize emigration, consciously and advisedly, for their own benefit. There is every reason to believe that the popular idea that a regular emigration from a country tends to reUeve congestion is a fallacy. Rather does it seem probable that population increases at least as fast, in a country with a large emigration, as if there was none at all. On the other hand, a sudden and extensive emigration, limited in time, may result in cutting down population and giving the standard of living time to rise before the forces of reproduction have filled up the gap. Under the proposed plan, any foreign nation which believed that a large emigration of its citizens would be a benefit both to those who went and those who stayed — as for instance, on the occasion of the introduction of some important labor-saving machine — could make arrangements with the United States to take its turn at such a time. If foreign nations did not care to do their part in such an arrangement, or if the natives did not wish to leave, the immigration problem would be happily solved for us, without any responsibility on our part. Against the plan thus outlined, a host of objections, criticisms, doubts, and queries arrays itself. Of these, no one can be more conscious than the writer. Yet the same can be said of almost any human device or project. The validity of such a proposition must rest upon searching analysis and criticism, and ultimately upon trial. The pressing and immediate nature of the immigration problem in the United States justifies the proposal of any seri- ously conceived plan which claims to rest on scientific principles. 34. SOME FALLACIES WITH REGARD TO IMMIGRATION 1 « I thoroughly concur in the opinion of Professor Fairchild^ that an agreement regarding the evils to be remedied should be sought before discussing remedial measures. For this reason I shall con- fine myself to examining the "chief objections to the present immigration situation " as stated in the first part of his paper. 1 By Walter F. Willcox. Adapted from the American Economic Review Supple- ment, March, 191Z, pp. 66-71. ^ See p. 387. 596 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS I. His first objection is that of numbers. We are told that "a million a year ... is more than this country can safely look after." In only four of the ten years 1900-1910 did the reported num- ber of immigrants exceed one million. The ten-year total was less than 8,800,000, or an annual average of seven eighths of a million. But this does not exclude those leaving our shores. For the last three years of the decade the number of departing aliens was ascer- tained and by deducting them from the alien arrivals the Bureau approximates the net annual increase due to immigration. That net increase was only 61 per cent of the gross immigration. If we assume that the net increase from immigration during the whole decade 1900-19 10 bore the same relation to the number of immigrants, then the net additions during the decade would be 5,365,000, or about 536,000 a year. The net addition due to ten years of immigration may also be estimated in another way from the results of the last two censuses. In 1900 there were ten and one-third million residents of the United States who had been born in foreign countries, nearly 99 per cent of whom were white. The death rate in 1900 of about two thirds of these, that is, the foreign-born whites residing in the registration area, is known. It was 19.4 per 1000. If the num- ber of foreign-born in the United States in 1900 be multiplied by this death rate, the estimated deaths subtracted, and the same process repeated nine times, the final result, eight and one-half million, is the estimated number of survivors in 1910 of those immigrants who were here in 1900. The number of foreign-born whites enumerated in 1910 and the total number of negroes, In- dians, Chinese, and Japanese in the country have been announced. The number of foreign-born colored of each class may be esti- mated by using the per cent of foreign-born in that class in 1900. The total foreign-born then in 19 10 was fifteen and one-half mil- lion. The difference between this number and the survivors of the foreign-born here in 1900 is 5,000,000. This is a first approx- imation to the net addition to our population from the immigra- tion of the decade 1900-19 10. But these immigrants also have suffered losses by death. I assume that they have been in the country on the average five years and that their death rate has THE REGULATION OF IMMIGRATION 397 been 19.4. The number of immigrants requisite to leave 5,000,- 000 survivors at the end of five years would be 5,5 16,000, or 552,- 000 a year. Thus one method of estimating the net annual increase from immigration, 1 900- 1 9 1 o, yields 5 36,000 and the other method 552,000. It seems safe to say that it has not been over 600,000 and consequently that the estimate of "a million a year " exceeds the probable number by about two thirds. But a country's power of assimilation might be held to vary, other things equal, with its population. If we compare the net immigration during the last decade as just estimated with the population of the country in 1900, the resulting ratio of 72 im- migrants to each 1000 total population, although greater than the ratio of gross immigration to population in the preceding decade, was less than that ratio in any decade of the half century between 1840 and 1890. During the decades 1841-1850 and 1 851-1860 there were probably very few birds of passage, and gross and net immigration must have been nearly identical. Rela- tive to the population of this country the net immigration into the United States, 1900-19 10, was less than the gross immigration in the decades 1841-1850, 1851-1860, or 1881-1890 and about the same as the gross immigration in 1861-1870 and 1871-1880. 2. Another of these eight objections is that " the immigrants are poorly assimilated or not assimilated at all." Here I would ask for the evidence. But not content with that, may I offer one or two opposing considerations ? In 1 890 among the foreign-born whites at least ten years of age 15.6 per cent were reported as unable to speak English ; in 1900 the proportion had fallen to 12.2 per cent. Perhaps the quality of our English is being debased, but in that decade at least we were not becoming a more polyglot people as the result of immigration.^ 1 The Census of 1910 shows that 2,953,011 foreign-born whites in this country could not speak English. This is 22.8 per cent of the total foreign-bom white population, as against the 12.2 per cent in 1900. The percentages in some indi- vidual states are as follows; West Virginia, 55.2; New Mexico, 54.4; Arizona, 54.1; Texas, 51.5; Florida, 42.8 ; Pennsylvania, 36.6 ; Delaware, 32.8 ; Ohio, 30.6; Indiana, 29.6 ; New Jersey, 25.0 ;• Illinois, 22.7 ; New York, 22.1 ; Wisconsin, 20.9. At the present time we certainly are becoming "a more polyglot people as the re- sult of immigration." These data apply to persons ten years of age and over. — Ed. 398 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS There were nearly six and one-half million persons of foreign birth in the United States in 1900 who had come from countries where English was not spoken. Of these rnore than four fifths (81.2 per cent) were reported as able to speak English. The number unable to speak English was about equal, apparently, to the number who had come from a country where EngUsh was not spoken and had been in the United States less than eight years. In other words, it takes an immigrant who cannot speak English when he arrives apparently about eight years on the average to learn enough of the language to claim that he speaks it. In the second generation the process is practically completed, for, if my estimates are correct, nearly 99 per cent of the children born in this country of immigrants from countries where English is not spoken and at least ten years old in 1900 claimed to speak English. These inferences, be it remembered, are drawn from a census now eleven years old. Since 1900 the pendulum may have been moving in the opposite direction, but about that we cannot speak with confidence.^ Much fear has been expressed lest our immigrants should lower the level of general education. The illiteracy of most illiterate immigrants is a characteristic of the country from which they come and not primarily of the persons. So far as census figures tell, the class with the smallest proportion of illiterates is the children of our immigrants. Thus among the children ten to fourteen years of age born of our native white stock 44 in 1000 [22 in 1000, in 1910] cannot write; among the children of our immigrants of the same age only 9 in 1000 cannot write [6 in 1000, in 19 10]. No doubt this is due largely to the fact that both immigrants and schools are more abundant in the North than in the South and in the cities than in the country. But who shall say that the immigrants do not avoid the South and the country dis- tricts largely because they desire for themselves and above all for their children the educational advantages and other oppor- tunities which are still found mainly in our cities and our northern states ? I do not believe that our immigrants as a class need the 1 The Census of 1910 does not tabulate the number of native-born of foreign parentage who cannot speak English. — Ed. THE REGULATION OF IMMIGRATION 399 help or the interference of government. Many of them have come to this country to escape a well-meant but fretting and harmful control on the part of those in power. 3. I come now to consider the statement that "immigration seriously increases the amount of pauperism and crime in the United States." I grant that the 13,000,000 foreign-born add to the amount of pauperism and crime. To make an effective argu- ment the word amount should be changed Xa proportion and I as- sume that this is meant. Do the foreign-born population contribute disproportionately to the crime and pauperism of the country ? There is little time to go into the evidence on this point. I may say, however, that I. have found nothing to prove that the foreign- bom contribute more largely to the almshouse population or the prison population than do the native whites of the same sex and age residing in the same part of the country. What indirect evidence there is points in the other way. Certainly a proper allowance for the lower average income of the foreign-born would sufficiently explain a slight tendency, and if there is any tendency of the sort I believe it to be a slight one, towards a larger pro- portion of foreign-born in the almshouse population than in the population outside. As to crime, when attention is confined to major or serious offenses, the proportion of foreign-born whites committed to prison is almost exactly the same as the proportion of native whites of the same age. The objections that immigration is created or fostered from motives of private gain, that many immigrants enter the country as conscious lawbreakers, and that immigration is of no benefit to foreign nations must be passed for lack of time. Lastly, a word regarding the objection that the immigrants are poorly distributed. The results of the preceding census I exam- ined in an article on "The Distribution of Immigrants," the main conclusions of which still seem to me sound. But doubtless they will not apply without considerable modification to the widely different conditions of the following decade. The distribution of the foreign-born, like that of the native population, is deter- mined by the intei;play of motives, largely economic, inviting to a change of residence, and other motives, among which human -'m 460 HEADINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS inertia is important, leading to a retention of the present abode. The foreign-born population is probably more migratory within the country than the native population, and responds more quickly to the suggestions of economic or other advantage. On the other hand, this class probably has fewer and less trustworthy sources of information than the native population. I see little objection to the government's gathering reports and disseminating news for the purpose of aiding in the wise distribution of our popula- tion whether native or of foreign birth, but I do not anticipate much effect from such governmental activities. On the other hand, to abandon our traditional policy of allowing free migration within the country, to substitute for it a policy of forced migration and apparently of compulsory residence at the spot assigned, to apply this new policy to our foreign-born residents and not to the natives, seems to me a most dangerous solution of a difficulty that is largely imaginary. What is the. evidence that it is not to the advantage of our recent immigrants to stay as long as they do in the northeastern states and the large cities where people of their own kind are congregated and can help far more effectively than the government their first steps towards American citizenship ? ^ 1 The following table, compiled from the Census of 1910 (Vol. I, p. 163), is of interest because it shows not only the broad changes in the distribution of foreign- born white and children of foreign-born white, but also the heavy percentage these two classes, taken together, constitute of the total white population: PERCENTAGE OF THE TOTAL WHITE POPULATION CONSTITUTED BY THE FOREIGN-BORN WHITE AND THE NATIVE-BORN WHITE OF FOR- EIGN OR MIXED PARENTAGE, 1890, 1900, AND 1910 1910 1900 1890 United States 394 38.7 37-5 New England . . Middle Atlantic East North Central 59-7 55-2 45.6 42.5 9.0 5.2 14.2 41.8 47.6 54.6 51.0 46.0 43-8 8.9 6.2 15.6 45.9 49.2 47-7 48.2 45.2 42.4 9-4 6.9 16.0 West North Central South Atlantic ■* East South Central West South Central 46.2 49-4 The concentration in the northeastern states is apparent. — Ed. THE REGULATION OF IMMIGRATION 40I The one serious objection to present immigration is its menace to American standards of wages and of living. The cost of rear- ing children in 'the United States is rapidly rising. In many, perhaps in most, cases it is simpler, speedier, and cheaper to im- port labor than to breed it. The arguments in favor of restric- tion for this reason are strengthening with the increasing cost of living and of rearing children. The time may have come for more radical methods of restriction. In that case a heavy increase of the head tax so as to make the cost of producing laborers in other countries and importing them into the United States more nearly equal to what it now costs to rear children for the labor market in the United States itself seems to me the simplest and best method of protecting our wage-earning class from debasing competition. 35. AN ARGUMENT AGAINST RESTRICTION OF IMMIGRATION! The claim is often made that we have an oversupply of un- skilled labor in this country to-day, and the report of the Immi- gration Commission is often invoked as establishing this fact, but its investigations, as distinguished from a few unjustified conclu- sions, make quite uniformly in favor of immigration. The Commis- sion did not iind that wages have decreased, but the contrary, though it claimed that employment is not uniform, and that Amer- ican standards of living are supposed to be in danger. Neither assumption seems warranted. Substantially all the field work of the Commission, on which these inferences were based, was conducted in 1 907- 1 908 in the midst of the panic, when employment was slack, proving nothing. Nor is the bituminous coal-mine industry of western Pennsylvania, where confirmation for this theory was sought, at all typical, although even there, despite the abnormal conditions, wages did not decrease. Affirmative action by States is doubtless called for, to improve housing and other conditions, particularly at such interior points, for the Commission reported 1 By Max J-JCohler. Adapted from the American Economic Review Supplement, March, 191 2, pp. 74-78. 402 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS that in the large congested cities, where most of the evils of im- migration were expected to be encountered, there were relatively slight signs of overcrowding, poor housing andMow standards of living, thanks largely to recent tenement-house reform, improved transit facilities, civic reform and the hke, there. It is a remark- able fact that the representatives in Congress of the so-called congested sections, which are supposed to be experiencing most acutely the evils of immigration, such as New York, Philadel- phia, Baltimore, Chicago, and even parts of Boston, are almost unanimously opposed to restrictive legislation. The opposition to immigration comes almost wholly from New England, and the South and other sparsely settled sections with few immigrant settlers. The anti-immigration feeling has been largely artificially stimulated. In fact, the immigrant laborer is indispensable to our eco- nomic progress to-day, and we can rely upon no one else to build our houses, railroads, and subways, and mine our ores for us. The effect of immigration upon native labor has, more- over, been well described as " forcing the American laborer up , not down." ^Norjs-iliaction in the matter of new legislation deciding against restriction. Our laws at present exclude the physically and morally diseased, the paupers and those likely to become paupers, the anarchist, and the contract laborer. During the fiscal year' 1910 an army of over 24,000 were actually deported after arriving here, while the Immigration Commission reports that fully four times as many are barred abroad annually on applying for tickets, as a result of the medical examinations there, and incalculable hun- dreds of thousands more are prevented annually from immigrat- ing by such reports. Nor is it true that the annual increase of immigration is approximately a miUion a year, for the hundreds of thousands of departing aliens are ignored. In fact, as Secre- tary Straus well pointed out, our immigration stream is largely self-regulating, decreasing with bad times here, both with respect to decrease of the incoming tide and increase of the outgoing stream of aliens. The enormous alien immigration of 1907 of 1,285,000 persons fell in the fiscal year 1908 to 782,870 alien THE REGULATION OF IMMIGRATION 403 immigrant arrivals, while 395,073 immigrant aliens departed. The number of net arrivals was approximately only 500,000 for 191 1.^ Particular suggested expedients for restriction are all either objectionable and dangerous, or useless. Chief of these is the so- called literacy test. The able veto message of President Cleveland of a similar bill in 1897 still contains convincing arguments against this expedient, while Secretary Nagel, the head of the Department of Commerce and Labor, has publicly disapproved of it, as did also his predecessor, Secretary Straus, and leaders of public opinion like President Eliot, President Schurman, Carl Schurz, and others. It would penalize those unfortunately deprived of schooling abroad, who often are the chief victims of intolerable persecution, and rush to seize our superior oppor- tunities for education here, immediately after arrival. We have properly forbidden the naturalization of the unlettered, but that prohibition should not apply to immigration. Moreover, it would arbitrarily exclude the manual labor which we need most, and which our own country does not adequately supply. During the fiscal year 19 10, 300,000 of our alien immigrants out of the million arrivals were, for example, farmers and farm laborers, besides their wives and young children. It requires no argument to show that a man with book learning is not likely to take up farm labor, so that a very large number of farm laborers — whom we need most — would be the first to be excluded by such a law. Time does not permit considering all the other suggested modes of restriction ; they would be oppressive, yet easily evadable. The plans to exclude unskilled laborers unaccompanied by wives or families, and to levy the head tax so as to discriminate in favor of men accompanied by their families, would be unjust and unwise, and would tend to supersede the present salutary practice of hav- ing heads of fan»ilies come over in advance of their families and prepare a home for them first, instead of handicapping themselves seriously thus at the start in new and untried surroundings. The proposed hmitation of the number of immigrants of each race would be very harsh ,and arbitrary, utterly un-American, and 1 The net increase of population by immigration was 815,303 in the fiscal year ending June 30, 1913 ; for the year ending June 30, 1914, it was 769,276. — Ed. 404 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS violative of nearly all our treaties, as well as probably unconsti- tutional. The Immigration Commission has unfortunately encour- aged such race discriminations by its treatment of the general question and some of its suggested remedies. Treaties welcom- ing all subjects here would be none the less violated, because all nations would be thus discriminated against. We recognized this fact by the veto of Chinese exclusion acts, and the opposition to Japanese exclusion, in advance of international arrangements therefor. The question is, of course, quite different from one which arises with respect to exclusion of inherently objectionable diseased persons, paupers, and criminals, under an exercise of the police power. The contention that the new immigrants are less easily assimilable than the old were, is pure assumption. It over- looks the facts that we have been rapidly assimilating these very immigrants for years, and similar objections were pressed in vain against the old immigrants. Moreover, our machinery for Amer- icanization to-day is tenfold as great as it was before 1881, so that Americanization takes place in general more, not less, rapidly, than before, despite greater differences in language and race stock. Our newly established immigrant-aid societies, our schools and lecture halls, our civic classes, our press, our political organizations and clubs, our labor unions and tenement-house laws and laws fixing hours of labor, all prove this, as James Bryce has just well pointed out in his new edition of the American Commonwealth. To attempt, in the light of these facts, to establish relative standards of race value, to the detriment of the new immigration, is purely unwarranted assumption, especially in the light of Pro- fessor Boas' interesting demonstration that even the most pro- nounced physical indication of race differences, the shape of the skull, is rapidly lost by immigrants born here. Until recently, par- ticularly in this country, dating its history from Ihe signing of the Declaration of Independence, Burke's famous statement was ac- cepted with respect to attempting to draw an indictment against a whole people. Such pseudoscience was ably ridiculed by Profes- sor Royce, in his study of " Race Questions and Provincialism," as dignifying race antipathies by giving them names, and then re- garding the antipathies named as sacred because they have a name. THE REGULATION OF IMMIGRATION 40$ To conclude, then, it is submitted that nothing justifies the view that we should depart from our open-door policy which Jefferson so ably advocated in his message of 1801 by the famous rhetorical question : " Shall oppressed humanity find no asylum on this globe ? " If our true interests demanded further restriction, all loyal Americans should support such demands, but it still re- mains true in the language of the poet : "It blesseth him that gives and him that takes " welcome into this our land of splen- did opportunity! 36. THE LITERACY TEST AS PROVIDED FOR BY THE SIXTY- THIRD CONGRESS, 1915, AND PRESIDENT WILSON'S VETO 1 The part of the comprehensive immigration bill which encoun- tered President Wilson's strong opposition and occasioned his veto of the whole bill is as follows : That after four months from the approval of this Act, in addition to the aliens who are by law now excluded from admission into the United States, the following persons shall also be excluded from admission thereto, to wit : All aliens over sixteen years of age, physically capable of reading, who can- not read the English language, or some other language or dialect, including Hebrew or Yiddish : Provided, That any admissible alien or any alien hereto- fore or hereafter legally admitted, or any citizen of the United States, may bring in or send for his father or grandfather over fifty-five years of age, his wife, his mother, his grandmother, or his unmarried or widowed daughter, if otherwise admissible, whether such relative can read or not ; and such relative shall be permitted to enter. That for the purpose of ascertaining whether aliens can read the immigrant inspectors shall be furnished with slips, of uni- form size, prepared under the direction of the Secretary of Labor, each con- taining not less than thirty nor more than forty words in ordinary use, printed \ in plainly legible type in some one of the various languages and dialects of immigrants. Each alien may designate the particular language or dialect in which he desires the examination to be made, and shall be required to read the words printed on the slip in such language or dialect. That the following classes of persons shall be exempt from the operation of the illiteracy test, to wit : All aliens who shall prove to the satisfaction of the proper immigration officer or to the Secretary of Labor that they emigrated from the country of which they were last permanent residents solely for the purpose of escaping from religious persecution ; all aliens who have been lawfully admitted to the 1 From 63d Cong., 3d Session, House Doc. No. 1527, pp. 2, 3, 7, 8. 4o6 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS United States and who have resided therein continuously for five years, and vyho have in accordance with the law declared their intention of becoming citizens of the United States and who return to the United States within six months from the date of their departure therefrom ; all aliens in transit through the United States ; all aliens who have been lawfully admitted to the United States and who later shall go in transit from one part of the United States to another through foreign contiguous territory : Provided^ That nothing in this Act shall exclude, if otherwise admissible, persons convicted of an offense purely political, not involving moral turpitude: Provided further. That the provisions of this Act relating to the payments for tickets or passage by any corporation, association, society, municipality, or foreign Government shall not apply to the tickets or passage of aliens in immediate and continuous transit through the United States to foreign contiguous territory: Provided further. That skilled labor, if otherwise admissible, may be imported if labor of like kind unemployed cannot be found in this country, and the question of the necessity of importing such skilled labor in any particular instance may be determined by the Secretary of Labor upon the application of any person interested, such application to be made before such importation, and such determination by the Secretary of Labor to be reached after a full hearing and an investigation into the facts of the case: Provided further. That the pro- visions of this law applicable to contract labor shall not be held to exclude professional actors, artists, lecturers, singers, ministers of any religious denom- ination, professors for colleges or seminaries, persons belonging to any recog- nized learned profession, or persons employed stricdy as personal or domestic servants: Provided further. That whenever the President shall be satisfied that passports issued by any foreign Government to its citizens or subjects to go to any country other than the United States, or to any insular possession of the United States or to the Canal Zone, are being used for the purpose of enabling the holder to come to the continental territory of the United States to the detriment of labor conditions therein, the President shall refuse to permit such citizens or subjects of the country issuing such passports to enter the con- tinental territory of the United States from such other country or from such insular possessions or from the Canal Zone: Provided further, That aliens who have declared their intention to become citizens may be admitted in the discretion of the Secretary of Labor, and under such conditions as he may pre- scribe: Provided further. That nothing in the contract-labor or reading-test provisions of this Act shall be construed to prevent, hinder, or restrict any alien exhibitor, or holder of concession or privilege for any fair or exposition authorized by Act of Congress, from bringing into the United States, under contract, such bthervrise admissible alien mechanics, artisans, agents, or other employees, natives of his country, as may be necessary for installing or con- ducting his exhibit or for preparing for installing or conducting any business authorized or permitted under any concession or privilege which may have been or may be granted by any such fair or exposition in connection therewith. THE REGULATION OF IMMIGRATION 40; under such rules and regulations as the Commissioner General of Immigra- tion, with the approval of the Secretary of Labor, may prescribe both as to the admission and return of such persons: Provided further. That noth- ing in this Act shall be construed to apply to accredited officials of foreign Governments, nor to their suites, families, or guests. President Wilson's veto message follows : To THE House of Representatives : It is with unaffected regret that I find myself constrained by clear conviction to return this bill (H. R. 6060, " An act to reg- ulate the immigration of aliens to and the residence of aliens in the United States ") without my signature. Not only do I feel it to be a very serious matter to exercise the power of veto in any case, because it involves opposing the single judgment of the President to the judgment of a majority of both the Houses of the Congress, a step which no man who realizes his own liability to error can take without great hesitation, but also because this par- ticular bill is in so many important respects admirable, well con- ceived, and desirable. Its enactment into law would undoubtedly enhance the efficiency and improve the methods of handling the important branch of the public service to which it relates. But candor and a sense of duty with regard to the responsibility so clearly imposed upon me by the Constitution in matters of legislation leave me no choice but to dissent. In two particulars of vital consequence this bill embodies a radical departure from the traditional and long-established policy of this country, a policy in which our people have conceived the very character of their Government to be expressed, the very mission and spirit of the Nation in respect of its relations to the peoples of the world outside their borders. It seeks to all but close entirely the gates of asylum which have always been open to those who could find nowhere else the right and opportunity of constitutional agitation for what they conceived to be the natural and inahenable rights of men ; and it excludes those to whom the opportunities of elementary education have been denied, without regard to their character, their purposes, or their natural capacity. 4o8 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS Restrictions like these, adopted earlier in our history as a Nation, would very materially have altered the course and cooled the humane ardors of our poUties. The right of political asylum has brought to this country many a man of noble character and elevated purpose who was marked as an outlaw in his own less fortunate land, and who has yet become an ornament to our citizenship and to our public councils. The children and the compatriots of these illustrious Americans must stand amazed to see the representatives of their Nation now resolved, in the full- ness of our national strength and at the maturity of our great institutions, to risk turning such men back from our shores with- out test of quality or purpose. It is difficult for me to believe that the full effect of this feature of the bill was realized when it was framed and adopted, and it is impossible for me to assent to it in the form in which it is here cast. The literacy test and the tests and restrictions which accom- pany it constitute an even more radical change in the policy of the Nation. Hitherto we have generously kept our doors open to all who were not unfitted by reason of disease or incapacity for self-support or such personal records and antecedents as were likely to make them a menace to our peace and order or to the wholesome and essential relationships of life. In this bill it is proposed to turn away from tests of character and of quality and impose tests which exclude and restrict ; for the new tests here embodied are not tests of quality or of character or of personal fitness, but tests of opportunity. Those who come seeking oppor- tunity are not to be admitted unless they have already had one of the chief of the opportunities they seek, the opportunity of educa- tion. The object of such provisions is restriction, not selection. If the people of this country have made up their minds to limit the number of immigrants by arbitrary tests and so reverse the pohcy of all the generations of Americans that have gone before them, it is their right to do so. I am their servant and have no license to stand in their way. But I do not believe that they have. I respectfully submit that no one can quote their mandate to that effect. Has any political party ever avowed a policy of restriction in this fundamental matter, gone to the THE REGULATION OF IMMIGRATION 409 country on it, and been commissioned to control its legislation ? -Does this bill rest upon the conscious and universal assent and desire of the American people ? I doubt it. It is because I doubt it that I make bold to dissent from it. I am willing to abide by the verdict, but not until it has been rendered. Let the platforms of parties speak out upon this policy and the people pronounce their wish. The matter is too fundamental to be settled otherwise. I have no pride of opinion in this question. I am not foolish enough to profess to know the wishes and ideals of America better than the body of her chosen representatives know them. I only want instruction direct from those whose fortunes, with ours and all men's, are involved. WOODROW WILSON The White House, 28 January, igij CP. THE PROBLEM OF ORIENTAL IMMIGRATION 1 Many think that this problem is permanently settled by the present Chinese exclusion laws and the "gentlemen's agreement" with Japan. They little realize, however, that this exclusion policy can be nothing more than a temporary makeshift and that even now it is serving to aggravate the relations between America and the Orient. The policy is fundamentally wrong. In the first place, it is humiliating to Asiatics. Exclusion, entirely on the basis of race, contradicts the most fundamental characteristics of human nature, the sense of intrinsic manhood, worth, and rights. The natural and entirely justifiable self-respect of Chinese, Japanese, and Hindu is affronted. So long as they are nationally helpless, we may indeed feel no ill results from this policy; but when, China becomes as completely westernized and armed as Japan is to-day, China will insist, as Japan insists, that we accord Asiatics equality of treatment with that granted to aliens of other lands. That Chinese are capable of action on entirely sentimental and humanitarian grounds, the "Chinese boycott" of 1905-1906 proves. American merchants suffered the loss of millions of 1 By Sidney L, Gulick. Adapted from the Survey, March 7, 1914, pp. 720-722, 730. 731- 4IO READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS dollars of trade entirely because of the resentment felt by Chinese merchants because of the humiliating treatment inflicted on Chinese entering the port of San Francisco. If we wish to retain and develop to its utmost our trade with the Orient we must treat Asiatics on a basis of friendship and honor, in har- mony with their dignity and self-respect. The Asiatic-exclusion policy is also an economic blunder. For it erects an artificial protection for our people which cannot be permanently maintained, and the longer it is maintained the more serious will be the consequences when it does break down. Japan tried the exclusion policy for two hundred and fifty years. It resulted in such an absence of the normal stimulus of international life, that when she was no longer able to maintain her policy of exclusion, she found herself in a most pitiable plight. She was hopelessly out-distanced by all the great nations of the West. Inner turmoil and finally revolution were her lot before she could adjust herself to the new world-situation. Even fifty years of the most strenuous eifort have not enabled her people to catch up fully with the nations of the West. The policy of Asiatic exclusion, moreover, promotes among the whites increasing Asiatic antipathy, fear, and suspicion, and this evokes the same attitude toward the whites on the part of Asiatics. This policy, therefore, increases both the yellow and the white perils, and must inevitably produce increasing milita- rism in both East and West, which in time will bring disastrous consequences to the political, industrial, and commercial life of both races. But what other possible policy is there for us than that of Asiatic exclusion } If we opened our doors as freely to Asiatic as to European immigration, should we not be completely swamped in a decade or two } Would not our entire economic situation be hopelessly ruined ? Could our democratic institutions stand the strain ? Would not the low scale of Asiatic Ufe, with its accom- panying ignorance and despotism, be forced upon us ? Is not Asiatic exclusion the only way to meet these dangers .' Here we come upon the fundamental fallacy of the exclu- sion poUcy. It rests on the assumption that there are only two THE REGULATION OF IMMIGRATION 411 possibilities — complete exclusion or complete surrender. The maintenance of our civilization, it is argued, depends on the former. The adoption of the latter means complete collapse of the white man's standards and ideals. There is, nevertheless, a third course possible — a course which conserves the great interests of Occidental civilization, and at the same time accords to the Asiatic a treatment not only in harmony with his self-respect and dignity, but that also promotes Asiatic adoption of our ideals and our standards of life. In proportion as Asia's millions adopt these, the severity of the Asiatic economic competition will be diminished, their purchasing power will be enhanced, and the free interrelation of East and West will become possible, to the inestimable advantage of both. The full discussion of this question is of course beyond the scope of a single article. Even a volume I have found all too brief for the presentation of the numberless factors and considerations involved. First of all, I wish to say that I am in hearty agreement with the fundamental postulate of California's general Oriental policy. An immigration from Asia, swamping the white man, overturning the democratic institutions of the Pacific coast and ultimately of all America, or bringing wide economic disaster to Caucasian laborers and farmers, is not for a moment to be tolerated. Cali- fornia is right in her general policy. She is nevertheless wrong in her mode of applying that policy. Right in principle — wrong in method. She seeks to settle what is an international, nay, a universal problem in the light of exclusively local interests. Her solution in fact aggravates the difficulty, for it ignores pertinent facts, such as the actual diminution of Japanese resi- dents in America due to the efficient administration by Japan of the "gentlemen's agreement." It ignores also the willingness of Japan to accede to the fundamental desire of California. Her anti-alien legislation which, as Attorney-General Webb stated, "seeks to limit their (Japanese) presence by curtailing their privileges, for they will not come in large numbers nor long abide with us if they may not acquire land " — is accordingly need- less; it is, moreover, humiliating to Japan; it is unscientific, 412 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS unjust, short-sighted, and contrary to the spirit and substance of all American treaties with Japan. The present Oriental policy of the United States as a whole also is in important respects humiliating to them and disgraceful to us. California's anti-alien legislation really rests back upon the refusal of our federal government to grant rights of American citizenship to any individuals save those of white ancestry and men " of African descent." Professing friendship in words, we deny it in important deeds. Demanding an open door for Americans in Asia and -equality of opportunity for our citizens with that accorded to citizens of the " most favored nation," we do not ourselves grant the same to Asiatics in our land. Here then is a serious situation : on the one hand, California, conscious of a danger which she believes threatens to reach vast proportions if not radically and promptly dealt with ; on the other hand, Japan, a nation with which America secured and has maintained exceptional relations of friendship, deeply wounded, yet earnestly desiring the maintenance of the historic friendship on a basis of dignity and mutual profit. This is a difficult, delicate, and intricate problem. Both sides have their measure of truth and right. The problem is how to harmonize these real rights and interests. How is it possible to grant what California so insistently and rightly demands and at the same time to secure to Japan what she demands with equal insistence } The problem, however, is not so difficult as first appears. We' need accurate knowledge as to the facts, clear thinking as to principles, the adoption of correct fundamental postulates and their consistent and wise elaboration into concrete policies and laws. The new American Oriental policy must hold as its major premise the principles announced by President Wilson. He was speaking, it is true, with the South American nations in view, but the principles he announced apply equally to the nations of the Orient. As reported, he said : We must prove ourselves their friends and champions upon terms of equal- ^ ity and honor. You cannot be friends upon any other terms than upon the terms of equality. THE REGULATION OF IMMIGRATION 413 You cannot be friends at all except upon the terms of honor ; and we must show ourselves friends by comprehending their interest, whether it squares with our interest or not. Upon such principles consistently applied, would I found America's new Oriental policy. America should treat the Oriental on a basis of complete equality with the citizens of other races, granting to them as to the most favored nation, treatment even as we give it to others and demand it for ourselves. The policy needed is one that shall conserve all the permanent interests of California and of the entire United States, shall do so in harmony with the dignity of the peoples of the Orient, and shall provide likewise for their permanent welfare. A new general immigration law is needed which shall apply impartially to all races. We must abandon all differential Asiatic treatment, even as regards immigration. The danger of an over- whelming Oriental immigration can be obviated by a general law allowing as the maximum annual immigration from any land a certain fixed percentage of those from that land already here and naturalized. The valid principle on which such a law would rest is the fact that newcomers from any land enter and become assimilated to our life chiefly through the agency of those from that land already here. These know the languages, customs, and ideals of both nations. Consequently, the larger the number already assimilated, the larger the number of those who can be wisely admitted year by year. The same percentage rate would permit of great differ- ences in actual numbers from 'different lands. By way of illustrating this suggestion, consider the following outline of a general immigration law. The maximum number of immigrants in a single year from any nation, race or group having a single " mother tongue " shall be : Five per cent of those from that land already naturalized Amer- ican citizens, including their American-born children. In addition to these there shall also be admitted from any land all who are returning to America, having at some previous time had a residence here of not less than three years. 414 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS All immediate dependent relatives of those who have had a residence here of not less than three years. All who have had an education in their own land equivalent to the American high school, with not less than three years' study of some foreign tongue. In the application of these provisions, individuals who come as bona fide travelers, government officials, students — in a word, all who are provided for by funds from their native land — should not be counted as immigrants ; but merchants, professionals, students, and all others who, even though not technically laborers, yet de- pend-on their own efforts in this land for a living, should be so reckoned. Applied to Germany, this 5 per cent rate would admit as many as 405,000 immigrants, whereas only 27,788 entered in 191 2. From Great Britain 363,500 might enter, whereas 82,979 came in that year. Russian immigration would be diminished from 162,395 in 19 1 2 to a possible maximum of 94,000; while im- migration from Italy would fall from 157,134 to 54,850. From Japan 220 immigrants would be admitted and from China 738. I am not particularly concerned, however, with defending the 5 per cent rate here suggested. I merely use it by way of illustration. Those better acquainted with the facts' of immigration and the speed of social assimilation must determine just what percentage would be wise. The present contention centers on the point that whatever the wise rate may be, it should be applied equally to all races. This principle alone avoids the difficulty of invidious race discrimination. A bureau of alien, registration aAd education is needed for the supervision of the education of all aliens. Every alien permanently residing in this country should be making steady preparation for citizenship ; that is, for ability to live here intelligently and profit- ably both to himself and to us. All aliens should be required to register in this bureau, paying a substantial annual fee of, say $10, until naturalized. Graded courses of study in American history, politics, civics, and English should be prepared, as well as some adequate presen- tation of the fundamental traits of American civilization, and THE REGULATION OF IMMIGRATION 415 opportunity should be given for annual examinations, free of charge. The annual registration fee might be diminished with each examination passed. ' Certificates of graduation should be essential for naturalization. Federal aid might be given to States, cities, and towns providing facilities for alien education. Night schools might be opened in public-school buildings. All institu- tions, such as Y.M.C.A.'s or churches providing systematic education for aliens along the lines of the federal law, might receive subsidies. The systematic care and education of all aliens in America is essential to the welfare of the country, of far more practical and also of pressing importance than our splendid educational enter- prise in the Philippines. The Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization might well be divided, and the functions of the latter modified and extended. The work and responsibility of granting naturalization to aliens should be taken away from courts which are not qualified for such a function and vested in a body specially constituted for that purpose. Every candidate for citizenship should present certificates of grad- uation in American history, politics, civics, English, and principles of American civilization. The Bureau of Naturalization should also secure from the Bureau of Registration certificates of the good behavior and the moral fitness of candidates, granting nat- uralization only to those morally as well as educationally qualified. A day might be set aside each year, perhaps the Fourth of July, or Washington's Birthday, or both, on which to administer the oath of allegiance and to extend official welcome to. all new citizens. Patriotic processions, banquets, and speeches, with appro- priate pins, banners, and badges, could make the event as im- portant and significant as commencement exercises are in our colleges and universities. A fresh definition of eligibility for American citizenship is needed. American citizenship should be based on individual quali- fication. Race of itself should be neither a qualification nor a disqual- ification for citizenship. Let us raise the standards for citizenship as high as may be needed ; but, whatever the standards are, let us apply them impartially. Whoever qualifies should be admitted. 4i6 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS Let such special legislation as may be needed to enable Asiatic naturalization be taken promptly by Congress. The granting of rights of naturalisation to all on a personal^ not a racial, basis would go far toward solving the entire problem now pending with Japan. Existing anti-Japanese legislation of California and other states would at once be void. The Japanese nation and government would be intensely gratified, for they would recognize that America as a whole insists on justice and equality of treatment for Japanese in our land. Japanese individuals who have taken th? required courses of education for citizenship and are ready on the one hand to re- nounce openly their allegiance to Japan, and on the other to take the oath of allegiance to the United States, would without doubt make as loyal Americans as those who come from any other land. Direct federal responsibility in all legal and legislative matters involving aliens is also essential. Aliens are guests of the nation, not of the States ; and the nation is responsible to foreign gov- ernments for their just treatment. Foreign governments have no relation with the States, but only with the federal government. It is, therefore, the duty of the federal government to provide that the treaty rights of aliens are accorded them. It logically follows that legal proceedings involving aliens should be handled exclusively in federal, not in State, courts. The nation must provide that treaty and other rights shall be accorded aliens, regardless of the ignorance or prejudice of unfriendly localities. A national commission on biological and social assimilation is needed. This should be a commission of expert biologists, physiologists, and sociologists of international repute, and should be adequately financed. The results of such study should be em- bodied in national laws concerning (i) the intermarriage of indi- viduals of different races ; (2) the elimination by sterilization of those whose heredity renders procreation a menace to the nation ; and (3) wise methods for Americanizing already compacted unassimilated groups of aliens. "[ There is no more intricate, and at the same time important, problem confronting our country to-day than that of the inter- marriage of the races. THE REGULATION OF IMMIGRATION 417 We need rational national laws on this subject. It is absurd for California to have laws forbidding the marriage of whites and Mongolians while Colorado does not. It is preposterous to make a crime in California what is perfectly legal in Colorado or Ne- vada. And the California law is of no practical effect; for she has to recognize the legitimacy of mixed marriages if performed outside of her own limits. If the California law rests on good scientific grounds, then it should be national ; if it does not, then California should have no such law. Systematic education of public-school children in Oriental his- tory is another item in the writer's vision of the new American Oriental policy. Indeed, for the general elimination of race prej- udice education is needed in regard to the history of all peoples from whom immigrants come to our shores. Anthropological readers should be prepared, devoting one or more chapters to each race and people of whom representatives live in our land, I written from an appreciative standpoint and setting forth the notable deeds of each. They should be well illustrated with fine engravings of the best representatives, dressed in modern Euro- pean clothing in order to avoid those caricatures which are so common in pictures of strange peoples. Such readers would help the young to get over their spontaneous feelings of race antipathy. Sjich are the outlines of a comprehensive policy for the treat- ment of all races and nations and the care of all resident ahens in our lands. To some it may perhaps seem a misnomer to call this plan a new Oriental policy, for it advocates nothing distinctive regarding Orientals. True ! And this exactly is the reason for calling it our new Oriental policy. It is a policy which does not discriminate against Asiatics, and therefore it is new. It is new both in its spirit and in its concrete elements. The early adoption of the main features of this policy would assure California on the one hand that no swamping Asiatic im- migration is to be allowed, thus securing what she demands. It would also satisfy and even please Japan, granting the substance of what she urges. In regard to the Chinese, also, the situation would be much improved. The fairness, yes, the generosity of our policy, adopted 41.8 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS by us with no pressure from her side, would serve to strengthen and deepen the spirit of friendship for America and render still more effective American influence in guiding that new republic through the troublous times that are surely ahead. If America can permanently hold the friendship and trust of Japan and China through just, courteous, and kindly treatment, she will thereby destroy the anti-white Asiatic solidarity. If America proves to Asia that one white people at least does not despise the Asiatics as such nor seek to exploit them, but rather on a basis of mutual respect and justice seeks their real prosperity, Asia will discover that the " white peril " is in fact an inesti- mable benefit. And that change of feeling will bring to naught the " yellow peril " now dreaded by the whites. Even from the lower standpoint of commercial and economic interests the policy of justice toward and friendship with the Orient is beyond question the right one. Armed conflict, or even merely sullen hostility, mightily hampers trade success. Rapid internal development in China and a rising standard of life among her millions means enormous trade with America, if we are friendly and just. And unselfish friendship and justice on our side will hasten the uplift of China's millions. Our own highest prosperity is inseparable from that of all Asia. So long as friendship is maintained and peace based on just international relations, the military yellow peril will be impossible. In propor- tion as the scale of living among Asia's working millions rises to the level of our own is the danger of an economic yellow peril diminished. Every consideration, therefore, of justice, humanity and self- interest demands the early adoption of the general principles of this new Oriental policy. It. conserves all the interests of the East and the West and is in harmony with the new era of universal evolution of mankind.^ 1 For a more extended treatment of the Japanese situation in California, see Gulick, The American Japanese Problem, 1914, and Millis, The Japanese Problem in the United States, 191 5. THE REGULATION OF IMMIGRATION 419 38. THE ETHICAL ASPECTS OF REGULATION 1 In any discussion of the immigration question, there are always many persons who, admitting the legal power, question the moral right of a country to exclude immigrants, at least such as are honest and well disposed. Among tl^e opponents of restriction in this country have been a number of high-minded and public- spirited men who have based their opposition to such legislation upon this ground. It is desirable, therefore, to consider for a moment the ethical aspects of the matter. We can sympathize with Professor Mayo-Smith when he says : The control of immigration must be free from the base cry of "America for the Americans " and from any narrow spirit of trade unionism, or from a selfish desire to monopolize the labor market. It must find its justification in the needs of the community, and in the necessity of selecting those elements which will contribute to the harmonious development of our civilization.^ It must be remembered, however, that we are living in a democ- racy which our ancestors established here, and that a democracy is a very delicate machine, requiring for its successful operation certain political and moral ideals and the intelligent cooperation of every citizen. Our institutions were established by a relatively homogeneous community, consisting of the best elements of pop- ulation selected by the circumstances under which they came to the new world. To-day much of our immigration is an artificial selection by the transportation companies of the worst elements of European and Asiatic peoples. If the founders of the nation had been of the recent types, can we suppose for a moment that this country would enjoy its present civilization ? Even as it is, we have been obliged to desert the political theories of the early days, and to adopt various despotic devices in order to control the inferior elements which have come into our body politic. The most valuable service which the American nation can render to humanity at large is to preserve and to perfect the institutions 1 By Prescott F. Hall. From Immigration and its Effects upon the United States, 2d edition (revised), pp. 320-323. Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1908. Mr. Hall is the head of the Immigration Restriction League, Boston. " Emigration and Immigration, p. 278. 420 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS of its founders. Assuming that we are aiming at making the world as a whole a better place to live in, we must remember that we can accomplish this through the medium of the nation as well as through the medium of the individual ; and, bearing in mind that the birth rate in the older countries soon restores in them the precise condition which obtained before immigration took place, we find that in many cases the benefit is not to the country whence the immigrants come, but only, if at all, to the immigrants themselves. By making this " great experiment of free laws and educated labor," as General Walker has called it, a triuniphant success we shall help the world more than by allowing indiscrim- inate immigration. We may go further, and say it is our duty toward the world, not only to preserve in this country the conditions necessary to successful democracy, but to develop here the finest race of men and the highest civilization. We have in the United States a unique opportunity to try the effect of hybridizing race-stocks upon an enormous scale. In every other department, when we try such experiments, we take care to select the best specimens of each stock. The race horse, the seedless orange, and scores of valuable animals and plants have been developed as the result of artificial selection, which would never have been brought intb existence without it. The human reason is, indeed, one of the forces through which the Power of the Universe works, and it is hard to understand why the laissez-faire advocates claim it should be excluded from the one field of immigration problems. Natural selection cannot be trusted to itself to bring about the best results. " Survival of the fittest " means that those survive who are fittest for survival, but not necessarily fittest for any other purpose. This is seen when we compare the statesman or a college president who has two children and educates them so that they take useful and important places in society, with some poor drunkard in the slums who has a dozen children and gives them no advantages at all. With modern sanitation these chil- dren do not die, as they might have once, but they start with a frightful handicap and are hkely to be, to some extent, weak, criminal, and comparatively valueless to the community. Now, the THE REGULATION OF IMMIGRATION 421 second man has " survived " in his children six times as much as the first man, and yet neither he nor his children may be as fit for any purpose as the first man and his children. In other words, the mere test of productive power in time is not a test of qualitative or teleological value. Many who perished in the French Revolution and in the other great massacres of history were undoubtedly superior in every way to those who killed ihem. The tempest, the plague and the avalanche destroy equally the just and the unjust. Nature tries her expenme'nts on a vast scale and can afford to do so. She has infinite time to work in, and so is " careless of the single life." But man can hasten the production of finer types. A recent writer in New Zealand attributes the success of that country, which has the largest per capita wealth of any country in the world, to the artificial selection of its early settlers, follow- ing the policy of Gibbon Wakefield. Let us, then, continue the benefits of that selection which took' place in the early days of the nation by sifting the immigration of to-day, so that no discordant elements shall enter to imperil the ideals and institutions of our nation, and to the end that we may produce a still finer race to help the world in its progress. Such selection of immigration surely has the highest ethical sanction. Dr. Phillips Brooks^ one of the largest-hearted men of our times, has stated this in the following words : No nation, as no man, has a right to take possession of a choice bit of God's earth, to exclude the foreigner from its territory, that it may live more comfort- ably and be a little more at peace. But if to this particular nation there has been given the development of a certain part of God's earth for universal pur- poses ; if the world, in the great march of the centuries, is going to be richer for the development of a certain national character, built up by a larger type of manhood here, then for the world's sake, for the sake of every nation that would pour in upon us that which would disturb that development, we have a right to stand guard over it. We are to develop here in America a type of na- tional character, we believe, for which the world is to be richer always. It may be the last great experiment for God's wandering humanity upon earth. We have a right to stand guard over the conditions of that experiment, letting nothing interfere with it, drawing into it the richness that is to come by the entrance of many men from many nations and they in sympathy with our Con- stitution and our laws. 422 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS references 1 Government Publications * Annual Reports of the United States Commissioner of Immigration. Report of the United States Immigration Commission (42 vols.). *See especially Vols. I and II, which are an abstract of the whole report Report of New York State Commission on Immigration, 1909. General * Commons, John R., Races and Immigrants in America, 1907. * Fairchild, H. p.. Immigration, a Wjorld Movement and its American Significance, 19 13. * Hall, P. F., Immigration and its Effects upon the United States, 1906. Jenks, J. W., and Lauck, W. J., The Immigration Problem, 3d edition^ 1913. Roberts, Peter, The New Immigration, 191 2. *Ross, E. A., The Old World in the New, 191 4. Warne, F. J., The Immigrant Invasion, 191 3. Specific Races Babcock, K. C, The Scandinavian Element in the United States. Uni- versity of Illinois Studies in the Social Sciences, Vol. Ill, No. 3 (September, 191 4). Balch, E. G., Our Slavic Fellow Citizens, 1910. CooLiDGE, M. R., Chinese Immigration, 1909. Fairchild, H. P., Greek Immigration, 191 1. Faust, A. B., The German Element in the United States (2 vols.), 1909. GuLiCK, S. L., The American Japanese Problem, 1914. Joseph, Samuel, Jewish Immigration to the United States from 1881 to 1 910. Columbia University Studies in History, Economics, and Public Law, Vol. LIX, No. 4, 1914. Lord, Trenor, and Barrows, The Italian in America, 1903. Descriptive and Narrative *Antin, Mary, The Promised Land, 191 2. * Balch, E. G., Our Slavic Fellow Citizens, 1910. Brandenburg, B., Imported Americans, the Experience of a Disguised American and his Wife on a Steerage Trip to and from Italy, 1904. Byington, M. F., Homestead: the Households of a Mill Town, 1910. Riis, Jacob A., The Making of an American, 1901. Steiner, E. a., The Immigrant Tide, 1909. Steiner, E. a., On the Trail of the Immigrant, 1906. Woods, R. A. (Editor), Americans in Process, 1902. Woods, R. A. (Editor), The City Wilderness, 1898. 1 Starred references are those worthy of first attention in additional reading. BOOK III THE WOMAN PROBLEM CHAPTER X THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY IDEAL OF WOMAN AND THE EARLY MOVEMENT FOR WOMEN'S RIGHTS An early nineteenth-century estimate of the character and duties of women, 424. — Attitude of the orthodox clergy toward the early women's-rights movement, 427. — Rousseau's ideas on the proper education for girls, 428. — Mary WoUstone- craft on the influence of education and social surroundings, 433. — Declaration of Sentiments adopted by the first Woman's Rights Convention, 440. [We may perhaps get a fair understanding of some social situ- ations without going back to their historical setting, but hardly of the feminist movement. While some knowledge of the anthropo- logical background and still more of the position of women in Greece and Rome and under Canon Law and Medieval Chris- tian sentiment is desirable, it is essential that we know something of the position of woman and of the accepted ideals of her " character and duties " in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, especially in England and the United States. Only if we see clearly the significance of this historical aspect of woman's place in society, are we in position to understand the animus and the meaning of the early women's-rights movement or of the sporadic early literature of the question, from Mary Wollstonecraft to John Stuart Mill. It is a question how much of the eight- eenth-century ideal of woman still remains. Certainly it lasted well down past the middle of the nineteenth century. There are doubtless still many survivals of it in our unconscious atti- tudes, and even now, here and there, a writer is found who harks back to it as a forsaken ideal which should be returned 423 424' READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS to.i In any case it is most instructive to compare the social, eco- nomic, and moral status of woman to-day with what it was before the Industrial Revolution and modern democratic ideals had begun to work their profound change on woman's relation to society.] 39. AN ESTIMATE OF THE CHARACTER AND CAPACITY OF WOMEN 2 The Power who called the human race into being has, with infinite wisdom, regarded, in the structure of the corporeal frame, the tasks which the different sexes were respectively destined to fill. To man, on whom the culture of the soil, the erection of dwellings, and, in general, those operations of industry, and those measures of defense, which include difficult and dangerous exer- tion, were ultimately to devolve, he has imparted the strength of limb, and the robustness of constitution, requisite for the perse- vering endurance of toil. The female form, not commonly doomed, in countries where the progress of civilization is far advanced, to labors more severe than the offices of domestic life, he has cast in a smaller mold, and bound together by a looser texture. But t o protect weakne "" fro"^ '"^^ npprpgginn ni Hnmi- neer ing superiorit y, thpse whom he_h as not qualified to conten d h e has enabled to fascinate ; and has amplv compensated the d e- fect of muscular vigor by syminetiy and ex prpssinn, by eleg ance and;^g^cer~ToTneTt~appears that he has adopted, and that he has adopted with the most conspicuous wisdom, a corresponding plan of discrimination between the mental powers and disposi- tions of the two sexes. The science of legislation, of jurispru- dence, of political economy, the conduct of government in all its executive functions, the abstruse researches of erudition, the in- exhaustible depths of philosophy, the acquirements subordinate to navigation, the knowledge indispensable in the wide field of ' See, for instance, Ferrero, " The Problem of Women from a Bio- Sociological Point of View," in the Monist, Vol. IV, No. z, pp. 262 ff. Also Lyman Abbott, The Home Builder, 1908. * By Thomas Gisborne. From An Inquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex, 13th edition, pp. 12-16, 21-23. London, 1823. THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY IDEAL OF WOMAN 425 commercial enterprise, the arts of defense and of attack by land and by sea, which the violence or fraud of unprincipled assailants render needful ; these and other studies, pursuits, and occupations, assigned chiefly or entirely to men, demand the efforts of a mind indued with the powers of close and comprehensive reasoning, and of intense and continued application, in a degree in which they are not requisite for the discharge of the customary ofHces of female duty. It would therefore seem natural to, expect, and ex- perience, I think, confirms the justice of the expectation, that the Giver of all good, after bestowing those powers on men with a liberality proportioned to the existing necessity, would impart them to the female mind with a more sparing hand. It was equally natural to expect that in the dispensation of other quali- ties and talents, useful and important to both sexes, but particu- larly suited to the sphere in which women were intended to move, he would confer the larger portion of his bounty on those who needed it the most. It is accordingly manifest that in sprightli- ness and vivacity, in quickness of perception, in fertility of inven- tion, in powers adapted to unbend the brow of the learned, to refresh the overlabored faculties of the wise, and to diffuse throughout the family circle the enlivening and endearing smile of cheerfulness, the superiority of the female mind is unrivaled. Does man, vain of his preeminence in the track of profound investigation, boast that the result of the inquiry is in his favor > Let him check the premature triumph, and listen to the statement of another article in the account, which, in the judgment of prejudice itself, will be found to restore the balance. As yet the native worth of the female character has been imperfectly devel- oped. To estimate it fairly, the view must be extended from the compass and shades of intellect, to the dispositions and feelings of the heart. Were we called upon to produce examples of the most amiable tendencies and affections implanted in human nature, of modesty, of delicacy, of sympathizing sensibility, of prompt and active benevolence, of warmth and tenderness of attachment ; whither should we at once turn our eyes ? To the sister, to the daughter, to the wife. These endowments form the glory of the female sex. They shine amidst the darkness of 426 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS uncultivated barbarism ; they give to civilized society its brightest and most attractive luster. Of the errors and vices which infest human nature, some are equally prevalent in the two sexes ; while others, in consequence of the peculiarities by which the character of the one sex is dis- criminated from that of the other, peculiarities which gain addi- tional strength from the diversity in the offices of life respec- tively assigned to each, do not exercise an equal power over both. Thus, among women in whom feminine delicacy and feeling have not been almost obliterated (I am not, at present, taking religious principle into the account), intemperance in wine, and the use of language grossly profane, are nearly unknown; and she who would be guilty of either sin, would be generally re- garded as having, debased herself to the level of a brute. On the other hand, there are failings and temptations to which the female mind is particularly exposed by its native structure and dispositions. On these treacherous underminers, these inbred assailants of female peace and excellence, the superintending eye of education is steadfastly to be fixed. The remains of their unsubdued hostility will be among the circumstances which will exercise even to the close of life the most vigilant labors of con- science. It is necessary, therefore, to be explicit on the subject. The gay vivacity, and the quickness of imagination, so con- spicuous among the qualities in which the superiority of women is acknowledged, have a tendency to lead to unsteadiness of mind; to fondness of novelty, to habits of frivolousness and trifling employment, to dislike of sober application, to repugnance to graver studies, and a too low estimation of their worth, to an unreasonable regard for wit, and shining accomplishments, to a thirst for admiration and applause, to vanity and affectation. Sensibility itself, singularly engaging and amiable as it is, comes not without its disadvantages. It is liable to sudden excesses ; it nurtures unmerited attachments ; it is occasion- ally the source of suspicion, fretfulness, and groundless discon- tent ; it sometimes degenerates into weakness and pusillanimity, and prides itself on the feebleness of character which it has occasioned. I THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY IDEAL OF WOMAN 427 40. ATTITUDE OF THE ORTHODOX CLERGY TOWARD THE EARLY WOMEN'S RIGHTS MOVEMENT 1 We invite your attention to the dangers which at present seem to threaten the female character with widespread and permanent injury. The appropriate duties and influence of women are clearly, stated in the New Testament. Those duties and that influence are un- obtrusive and private, but the source of mighty power. When the mild, dependent, softening influence of women upon the stern- ness of man's opinions is fully exercised, society feels the effect of it in a thousand forms. The power of woman is her depend- ence, flowing from the consciousness of that weakness which God has given her for her protection, and which keeps her in those departments of life that form the character of individuals, and of the nation. There are social influences which females use in promoting piety and the great objects of Christian benevolence which we cannot too highly commend. We appreciate the unostentatious prayers and efforts of woman in advancing the cause of religion at home and abroad ; in Sab- bath-schools ; in leading religious inquirers to the pastors for in- struction ; and in all such associated effort as becomes the modesty of their sex ; and earnestly hope that she may abound more and more in thes^ labors of piety and love. But when she assumes the place and tone of man as a public reformer, our care and protection to her seem unnecessary ; we put ourselves in self- defense against her ; she yields the power which God has given her for her protection, and her character becomes unnatural. If the vine, whose strength and beauty is to lean upon the treUis work, and half conceal its clusters, thinks to assume the inde- pendence and overshadowing nature of the elm, it will not only cease to bear fruit, but fall in shame and dishonor into the dust. We cannot, therefore, but regret the mistaken conduct of those who encourage females to bear an obtrusive and ostentatious part ' Extract from a Pastoral Letter of the General Association of Massachusetts to the churches under their care, 1837. From The History of Woman Suffrage, Vol. I, pp. 81-82. 428 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS in measures of reform, and countenance any of that sex who so far forget themselves as to itinerate in the character of pubhc lec- turers and teachers. We especially deplore the intimate acquaint- ance and conversation of females with regard to things which ought not to be named ; by which that modesty and delicacy which is the charm of domestic life, and which constitutes the true influence of woman in society, is consumed, and the way opened, as we apprehend, for degeneracy and ruin. We say these things not to discourage proper influences against sin, but to secure such reformation as we believe is Scriptural, and will be permanent. 41. ON THE CHARACTER AND PROPER EDUCATION OF WOMEN 1 Sophie ought to be a woman, as ifimile is a m.an — that is, she should have whatever is befitting the constitution of her species and of her sex, in order to fill her place in the physical and moral world. Let us then begin by examining the conformities and "differences between her sex and ours. All that we know with a certainty is that the only thing in common between man and woman is the species, and that they differ only in respect of sex. Under this double point of view we find between them so many semblances and so many con- trasts, that it is perhaps one of the wonders of Nature that she could make two beings so similar and yet constitute them so differently. These correspondences and these differences must needs have their moral effect. This consequence is obvious, is in conformity ^ By J. J. Rousseau. Adapted from fimile, or Treatise on Education (abridged and translated by W. H. Payne), pp. 259-281. D. Appleton and Company, New York, 1892. fimile, an educational classic, was first published in 1762. Few books have had a more powerful or more lasting influence upon educational ideals. Rous- seau, after laying down the principles of the education of fimile up to the time he is of marriageable age, then devotes some incidental attention to the proper ed- ucation of fimile's future wife, Sophie. The selections here given are significant not only as revealing the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century attitude toward women, but also because they constituted a direct stimulus to the writing of Mary WoUstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women (see p. 433.) THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY IDEAL OF WOMAN 429 with experience, and shows the vanity of the disputes as to the superiority or the equahty of the sexes; as if each of them, answering the ends of Nature according to its particular destina- tion, were not more perfect on that account than if it bore a greater resemblance to the other! With respect to what they have in common they are equal ; and in so far as they are different they are not capable of being compared. A perfect man and a perfect woman ought no more to resemble each other in mind than in features ; and perfection is not susceptible of greater or less. In the union of the sexes each contributes equally toward the common end, but not in the same way. Hence arises the first assignable difference among their moral relations. One must be active and strong, the other passive and, weak. One must needs have power and will, while it suffices that the other have little power of resistance. This principle once established, it follows that woman is espe- cially constituted to please man. If man ought to please her in return, the necessity for it is less direct. His merit lies in his power; he pleases simply because he is strong. I grant that this is not the law of love, but it is the law of Nature, which is anterior even to love. All the faculties common to the two sexes are not equally di- vided, but, taken as a whole, they offset one another. Woman is worth more as a woman, but less as a man ; wherever she improves her rights she has the advantages and wherever she attempts to usurp ours she remains inferior to us. Only exceptional cases can be urged against this general truth — the usual mode of argu- ment adopted by the gallant partisans of the fair sex. To cultivate in women the qualities of the men and to neglect those which are their own is, then, obviously to work to their detriment. The shrewd among them see this too clearly to be the dupes of it. They ought to learn multitudes of things, but only those which it becomes them to know. Whether I consider the particular destination of woman, or observe her inclinations, or take account of her duties, everything concurs equally to indicate to me the form of education which befits her. 430 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS On the good constitution of mothers depends, in the first place, that of children ; on the care of women depends the early educa- tion of men ; and on women, again, depend their manners, their passions, their tastes, their pleasures, and even their happiness, Thus the whole education of women ought to be relative to men. To please them, to be useful to them, to make themselves loved and honored by them, to educate them when young, to care for them when grown, to counsel them, to console them, and to make life sweet and agreeable to them — should be taught them from their infancy. So long as we do not ascend to this principle we shall miss the goal, and all the precepts which we give them will accomplish nothing either for their happiness or for our own. Little girls, almost from birth, have a love for dress. Not con- tent with being pretty, they wish to be thought so. We see in their little airs that this care already occupies their minds ; and they no sooner understand what is said to them than we control them by telling them what people will think of them. The same motive, very- indiscreetly presented to little boys, is very far from having the same power over them. Provided they are independ- ent and happy, they care very little of what will be thought of them. Boys seek movement and noise — drums, tops, carts ; but girls prefer what appeals to the sight and serves as ornament — mirrors, trinkets, rags, and especially dolls. The doll is the especial amusement of this sex ; and in this case the girl's taste is very evidently determined by her destination. The mechanics of the art of pleasing consists in dress, and this is all of this art that children can cultivate. Here, then, [in doll-dressing] is a very decided primitive taste, and you have only to follow it and regulate it. Almost all littie girls learn to read and write with repugnance : but as to holding the needle, they always learn this willingly. They imagine themselves already grown, and take pleasure in thinking that these little talents will one day be of service in adorning them. The first and most important quality of a woman is gentleness. Made to obey a being as imperfect as man, often so full of vices, and always so full of faults, she ought early to learn to suffer even THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY IDEAL OF WOMAN 431 injustice, and to endure the wrongs of a husband without com- plaint ; and it is not for him, but for herself, that she ought to be gentle. The harshness and obstinacy of women serve only to increase the wrongs and bad conduct of husbands ; they feel that it is not with these arms that their wives should conquer them. For the reason that the conduct of woman is subject to public opinion, her belief is subject to authority. Evejy daughter should have the religion of her mother, and every wife that of her husband. Even were this religion false, the docility which makes the mother and the daughter submit to the order of nature expunges in the sight of God the sin of error. As they are not in a condition to judge for themselves, women should receive the decision of fathers and husbands as they would the decision of the Church, Not being able to draw from themselves alone the rule of their faith, women cannot confine it within the boundaries of evidence and reason, but, allowing themselves to be carried away by a thousand extraneous impulses, they are always on this side or that of the truth. Always, extremists, they are all free- thinkers or devotees ; none of them are able to combine discre- tion with piety. Since authority ought to regulate the religion of women, it is not so important to explain to them the rea'sons which we have for believing as to expound to them with clear- ness what we believe. The reason which leads man to a knowledge of his duties is not very complex, and the reason which leads woman to a knowledge of hers is still simpler. The obedience and fidelity which she owes to her husband, the tenderness and care which she owes to her children, are such natural and obvious conse- quences of her condition, that she cannot, without bad faith, refuse to consent to the inner sense which guides her, nor fail to recognize her duty in the inclination which has not yet been perverted. If a woman were wholly restricted to the tasks of her sex, and were left in profound ignorance of everything else, I would not indulge in indiscriminate censure ; but this would require a very simple and wholesome state of public morals, or a very retired manner of living. In large cities and among corrupt men such 432 -READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS a woman would be too easily led astray, and in this philosophical age, she must be above temptation ; she must know in advance what may be said of her, and what she ought to think of it. Moreover, subject to the judgment of men, she ought to merit their esteem ; she ought, above all, to secure the esteem of her husband ; she ought not only to make him love her person, but make him approve her conduct ; she ought to justify before the public the choice which he has made, and make her husband honored with the honor which is paid his wife. Now, how shall she go about all this if she is ignorant of our institutions, if she knows nothing of our usages and our social customs, if she knows neither the source of human judgments nor the passions which determine them ? When she depends at once on her own con- science and the opinions of others, she must learn to compare these two rules, to reconcile them, and to prefer the first only when they are in opposition. She becomes the judge of her judges ; she decides when she ought to submit to them and when she ought to challenge them. Before rejecting or admitting their prejudices she weighs them ; she learns to ascend to their source, to antici- pate them, and render them favorable to her; she is careful never to draw censure on herself when her duty permits her to avoid it. Nothing of all this can be done without cultivating her mind and "her reason. The ^search for abstract and speculative truths, principles, and scientific axioms, whatever tends to general ideas, does not fall within the compass of women ; all their studies ought to have reference to the practical ; it is for them to make the application of the principles which man has discovered, and to make the observations which lead man to the establishment of principles. All the reflections of women which are not immediately connected with their duties ought to be directed to the study of men and to that pleasure-giving knowledge which has only taste for its object ; for as to works of genius, they are out of their reach, nor have they sufficient accuracy and attention to succeed in the exact sciences. Woman, who is weak, and who sees nothing external, appreciates and judges the motive powers which she can set to THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY IDEAL OF WOMAN 433 work to offset her weakness, and these motive powers are the pas- sions of men. Whatever her sex can do for itself, and which is necessary or agreeable to her, she must have the art of making us desire.^ 42. THE INFLUENCE OF EDUCATION AND SOCIAL ENVI- RONMENT ON WOMAN'S CHARACTER" After considering the historic page ... I have sighed when obliged to confess that either nature has made a great difference between man and man, or that the civilization which has hitherto taken place in the world has been very partial. I have turned over various books written on the subject of education, and patiently observed the conduct of parents and the mariagement of schools ; but what has been the result .' — a profound, convic- tion that the neglected education of my fellow creatures is the grand source of the misery I deplore ; and that women, in par- ticular, are rendered weak and miserable by a variety of concur- ring causes, originating from one hasty conclusion. The conduct and manners of women, in fact, evidently prove that their minds are not in a healthy state. ... I attribute this to a false system of education, gathered from the books written on this subject by men who, considering females rather as women than as human creatures, have been more anxious to make them alluring mis- tresses than rational wives ; and the understanding of the sex has been so bubbled by this specious homage, that the civilized women of the present century, with a few exceptions, are only anxious- to inspire love, when they ought to cherish a nobler ambition, and by their abilities and virtues exact respect. 1 This seems to be the modern " indirect-influence " argument against the franchise for women put into a nutshell. — Ed. " By Mary Wollstonecraft. Adapted from A Vindication of the Rights of Women, ist edition, pp. i, 2, 32-33, 38-41, 87-91, 106-108, 330-335, 337-342- Lon- don, 1792. This book has become, with Mill's " Subjection of Women," one of the two classics of the woman movement in England. The extracts here given, in spite of occasional quaintness of style, are surprisingly modern in point of view. 434 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS The Prevailing Opinion of Sexual Character Discussed To account for, and excuse, the t3Tanny of man, many ingen- ious arguments have been brought forward to prove that the two sexes, in the acquirement of virtue, ought to aim at attaining a very different character : or, to speak explicitly, women are not allowed to have sufficient strength of mind to acquire what really deserves the name of virtue. Yet it should seem, allowing them to have souls, that there is but one way appointed by Providence to lead mankind to either virtue or happiness. If then women are not a swarm of ephemeron triflers, why should they be kept in ignorance under the specious name of innocence ? . . . Women are told from their infancy, and taught by the example of their mothers, that a Uttle knowledge of human weakness, justly termed cunning, softness or temper, outward obedience, and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of pro- priety, will obtain for them the protection of man ; and should they be beautiful, everything else is needless, for at least twenty years of their life. How grossly do they insult us who advise us to render ourselves gentle, domestic brutes ! I may be accused of arrogance; still I must declare, what I firmly believe, that all the writers on the subject of female educa- tion and manners, from Rousseau to Dr. Gregory,^ have contrib- uted to render women more artificial, weak characters than they otherwise would have been, and consequently more useless mem- bers of society. Many are the causes that, in the present corrupt state of society, contribute to enslave women by cramping their under- standings and sharpening their senses. One, perhaps, that silently does more mischief than all the rest, is their disregard of order. To do everything in an orderly manner, is a most important precept, which women, who, generally speaking, receive only a disorderly kind of education, seldom attend to with that degree of exactness that men, who from their infancy are broken into method, observe. This negligent kind of guesswork . . . prevents 1 Legacy to his Daughters, 1796. THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY IDEAL OF WOMAN 435 their generalizing matters of fact — so they do to-day what they did yesterday merely because they did it yesterday. This contempt of the understanding in early life has more baneful consequences than is commonly supposed ; for the little knowledge which women of strong minds attain, is, from various circumstances, of a more desultory kind than the knowledge of men, and it is acquired mq»re by sheer observations on real life, than from comparing what has been individually observed with the results of experience generalized by speculation. Led by their dependent situation and domestic employments more into society, what they learn is rather by snatches ; and as learning is with them, in general, only a secondary thing, they do not pursue any one branch with that persevering ardor necessary to give vigor to the faculties, and clearness to the judgment In the present state of society a little learning is required to support the character of a gentleman ; and boys are obliged to submit to a few years of discipline. But in the education of women, the cultivation of the understanding is always subordi- nate to the acquirement of some corporeal accompUshment ; even while enervated by confinement and false notions of modesty, the body is prevented from attaining that grace and beauty which relaxed half-formed limbs never exhibit. Besides, in youth their faculties are not brought forward by emulation ; and having no serious scientific study, if they have natural sagacity it is turned too soon on life and manners. I have probably had an opportunity of observing more girls in their infancy than J. J. Rousseau — I can recollect my own feel- ings, and I have looked steadily around me; yet, so far from coinciding in opinion respecting the first dawn of female charac- ter, I will venture to affirm that a girl whose spirits have not been damped by inactivity, or innocence tainted by false shame, will always be a romp, and the doll will never excite attfentioH unless confinement allows her no alternative. Girls and boys; in short, would play harmlessly together, if the distinction of sex was not inculcated long before nature makes any difference. Most of the women in the circle of my observation who have acted; like rational creatures or shown any vigor of intellect, have 436 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS accidentally been allowed to run wild — as some of the elegant formers of the fair sex would, insinuate. Women are everywhere in this deplorable state ; for in order to preserve their innocence, as ignorance is courteously termed, truth is hidden from them, and they are made to assume an artificial character before their faculties have acquired any strength. Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's scepter, the mind shapes itself to the body, and, roaming around its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison. Men have various employments and pursuits which engage their attention, and give a character to the opening mind ; but women, confined to one, and having their thoughts constantly directed to the most insignificant part of themselves, seldom extend their views beyond the triumph of the hour. I wish to sum up what I have said in a few words, for I here throw down my gauntlet, and deny the existence of sexual virtues, not excepting modesty. For man and woman, truth, if I under- stand the meaning of the word, must be the same ; yet the fanciful female character so prettily drawn by poets and novelists, demand- ing the sacrifice of truth and sincerity, virtue becomes a relative idea, having no other foundation than utility, and of that utility men pretend arbitrarily to judge, shaping it to their own convenience. Women, I allow, have very different duties to fulfill ; but they are human duties, and the principles that* should regulate the discharge of them, I sturdily maintain, must be the same. To become respectable, the exercise of their understanding is neces- sary ; there is no other foundation for independence of character. I mean explicitly to say that they must only bow to the authority of reason, instead of being the modest slaves of opinion. . . . Allowing women to be rational creatures, they should be incited to acquire virtues of their own, for how can a rational being be ennobled by anything that is not obtained by its own exertions ? Women, obtaining power by unjust means, by practicing or fostering vice, become either abject slaves or capricious tyrants. They lose all simplicity, all dignity of mind, in acquiring power, and act as men are observed to act when they have been exalted by the same means. THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY IDEAL OF WOMAN 437 Of the Pernicious Effects which Arise from Unnatural Distinctions in Society Women are, in common with men, rendered weak and luxU' rious by the relaxing pleasures which wealth procures ; but added to this they are made slaves to their persons, and must render them alluring that man may lend them his reason to guide their tottering steps aright. Or should they be ambitious, they must govern their tyrants by sinister tricks, for without rights there cannot be any incumbent duties. The laws respecting women which I mean to discuss in a future part,^ make an absurd unit of a man and his wife ; and then by the easy transition of con- sidering only him as responsible, she is reduced to a mere cipher. The being who discharges the duties of its station is independ- ent ; and speaking of women at large, their first duty is to them- selves as rational creatures, and the next, in point of importance, as citizens, is that, which incfudes so many, of a mother. The rank in life that dispenses with their fulfiUing this duty, . nec- essarily degrades them by making them mere dolls. Or, should they turn to something more important than merely fitting drapery upon a smooth block, their minds are only occupied by some soft Platonic attachment ; or, the actual management of an intrigue may keep their thoughts in motion ; for when they neglect domestic duties, they have it not in their power to take the field to march and countermarch like soldiers, or wrangle in the senate to keep their faculties from rusting. ... I am not going to advise them to turn their distaff into a musket, though I sincerely wish to see the bayonet converted into a pruning hook. I only recreated an imagination, fatigued from contemplating the vices and follies which all proceed from a feculent stream of wealth that muddied the pure rills of natural affection, by suppos- ing that society will some time or other be so constituted that man must necessarily fulfill the duties of a citizen, or be despised, and that while he was employed in any of the departments of 1 This projected volume on the political and legal status of women was never published. — Ed. 438 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS civil life, his wife, also as active citizen, should be equally intent to manage her family, educate her children, and assist her neighbors. But, to render her really virtuous and useful, she must not, if she discharge her civil duties, want, individually, the protection of the civil laws ; she must not be dependent on her husband's bounty for her subsistence during his life, or support after his death — for how can a being be generous who has nothing of his own ? or, virtuous, who is not free ? The wife in the present state of things who is faithful to her husband, and neither suckles nor educates her children, scarcely deserves the name of wife, and has no right to that of citizen. But take away natural rights, and there is of course an end to duties. Women thus infallibly become only the wanton solace of men, when they are so weak in mind and body that they cannot exert themselves, unless to pursue some frothy pleasure, or to invent some frivolous fashion. What can be a more melancholy sight to a thinking mind, than to look into the numerous carriages that drive helter-skelter about this metropolis in a morning full of pale-faced creatures who are flying from themselves. I have often wished, with Dr. Johnson, to place some of them in a' little shop with half a dozen children looking up into their languid counte- nances for support. I am much mistaken, if some latent vigor would not soon give health and spirit to their eyes, and some lines drawn by the exercise of reason on their blank cheeks, which be- fore were only undulated by dimples, might restore lost dignity to the character, or rather enable it to attain the true dignity of its nature. Virtue is not to be acquired even by speculation, much less by the negative supineness which wealth naturally generates. I cannot help lamenting that women of a superior cast have not a road open by which theyi can pvirsue more extensive plans of usefulness and independence. I may excite laughter by drop- ping a hint, which I mean to pursue, at some future time, for I really think that women ought to have representatives, instead of being arbitrarily governed without having any direct share allowed them in the deliberations of government. THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY IDEAL OF WOMAN 439 But what have women to do in society ? I may be asked, but to loiter with easy grace; surely you would not condemn them all to suckle fools and chronicle small beer ! No. Women might certainly study the art of healing, and be physicians as well as nurses. They might also study politics, and settle their benevo- lence on the broadest basis ; for the reading of history will scarcely be more useful than the perusal of romances, if read as mere bi- ography ; if the character of the time, the political improvements, arts, etc. be not observed. Business of various kinds they might likewise pursue, if they were educated in a more orderly manner, which might save many from common and legal prostitution. Women would not then marry for a support, as men accept of places under government, and neglect the implied duties ; nor would an attempt to earn their own subsistence, a most laudable one ! sink them almost to the level of those poor abandoned creatures who live by prostitution. For are not milliners and mantua-makers reckoned the next class ? The few employments open to women, so far from being liberal, are menial ; and when a superior education enables them to take charge of children as governesses, they are not treated like the tutors of sons, though even clerical tutors are not always treated in a manner calculated to render them respectable in the eyes of their pupils, to say nothing of the private comfort of the individual. It is a melancholy truth ; yet such is the blessed effect of civi- lization ! the most respectable women are the most oppressed ; and, unless they have understanding far superior to the common run of understandings, taking in both sexes, they must, from being treated like contemptible beings, become contemptible. How many women thus waste life away, the prey of discontent, who might have stood erect, supported by their own industry, instead of hanging their heads surcharged with the dew of sensibility ! Would men but generously snap our chains, and be content with rational fellowship instead of slavish obedience, they would find us more observant daughters, more affectionate sisters, more faithful wives, more reasonable mothers — in a word, better citizens. We should then love them with true affection, because we should learn to respect ourselves. 440 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS 43. DECLARATION OF SENTIMENTS i Adopted by the First Woman's Rights Convention, 1848 The Seneca County Courier, a semiweekly journal, of July 14, 1848, contained the following announcement: SENECA FALLS CONVENTION Woman's Rights Convention. — A convention to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of woman, will be held in the Wesleyan Chapel, at Seneca Falls, N. Y., on Wednesday and Thursday, the 19th and 20th of July, current ; commencing at ten o'clock A. M. During the first day, the meeting will be exclusively for women, who are earnestly invited to attend. The public generally are invited to be present on the second day, when Lucretia Mott, of Philadelphia, and other ladies and gentlemen, will address the convention. This call, without signature, was issued by Lucretia Mott, Martha C. Wright, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Mary Ann McClintock. They had often discussed "the propriety of holding a woman's convention." They now decided to put their long-talked-of reso- lution into action. On Sunday morning they met to write their declaration, resolutions, and to consider subjects for speeches. As the convention was to assemble in three days, the time was short for such productions ; but having no experience in the modus operandi of getting up conventions, nor in that kind of literature, they were quite innocent of the herculean labors they proposed. On the first attempt to frame a resolution, to crowd a complete thought, clearly and concisely, into three lines, they felt as help- less and hopeless as if they had been suddenly asked to construct a steam engine. The reports of Peace, Temperance, and Anti- Slavery conventions were examined, but all alike seemed too tame and pacific for the inauguration of a rebellion such as the world had never before seen. They knew women had wrongs, but how to state them was the difficulty, and this was increased from the fact that they themselves were fortunately organized and condi- tioned ; they were neither " sour old maids," '" childless women," nor " divorced wives," as the newspapers declared them to be. 1 By Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage. Adapted from the History of Woman Suffrage, Vol. I, pp. 63-73. New York, 1881. THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY IDEAL OF WOMAN 441 After much delay, one of the circle took up the Declaration of 1776, and read it aloud with much spirit and emphasis, and it was at once decided to adopt the historic document, with some sUght changes such as substituting " all men " for " King George." Knowing that women must have more to complain of than men under any circumstances possibly could, and seeing the Fathers had eighteen grievances, a protracted search was made through statute books, church usages, and the customs of society to find that exact number. Several well-disposed men assisted in collecting the grievances, until, with the announcement of the eighteenth, the women felt they had enough to go before the world with a good case. One youthful lord remarked, " Your grievances must be grievous indeed, when you are obhged to go to books in order to find them out." The eventful day dawned at last, and crowds in carriages and on foot wended their way to the Wesleyan Church. It had been decided to have no men present, but as they were already on the spot, and as the women who must take the responsibility of organizing the meeting, and leading the discussions, shrank from doing either, it was decided, in a hasty council round the altar, that this was an occasion when men might make themselves preeminently useful. It was agreed they should remain, and take the laboring oar through the Convention. The Declaration of Sentiments When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to assume among the people of the earth a position different from that which they have hitherto occupied, but one to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes that impel them to such a course. We hold these truths to be self-evident : that all men and women are created equal ; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights ; that among these are life, lib- erty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights 442 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS ' ■gGvernments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of those who suffer from it to refuse allegiance to it, and to insist upon the institution of a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Pru- dence, indeed, will dictate that governments long estabUshed should not be changed for light and transient causes ; and accord- ingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by aboUshing the forms to which they were accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their duty to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient suffer- ance of the women under this government, and such is now the necessity which constrains them to demand the equal station to which they are entitled. The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world. He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise. He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice. He has withheld from her rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men — both natives and foreigners. Having deprived her of this first right of a citizen, the elective franchise, thereby leaving her without representation in the halls of legislation, he has oppressed her on all sides. He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead. He has taken from her all right in property, even to the wages she earns. He has made her, morally, an irresponsible being, as she can commit many crimes with impunity, provided they be done in THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY IDEAL OF WOMAN 443 the presence of her husband. In the covenant of marriage, she is compelled to promise obedience to her husband, he" becoming, to all intents and purposes, her master — the law giving him power to deprive her of her liberty, and to administer chastisement. He has so framed the laws of divorce, as to what shall be the proper causes, and in case of separation, to whom the guardian- ship of the children shall be given, as to be wholly regardless of the happiness of women — the law, in all cases, going upon a false supposition of the supremacy of man, and giving all power into his hands. After depriving her of all rights as a married woman, if single, and the owner of property, he has taxed her to support a government which recognizes her only when her property can be made profitable to it. He has monopolized nearly all the profitable employments, and from those she is permitted to follow, she receives but a scanty remuneration. He closes against her all the avenues to wealth and distinction which he considers most honorable to himself. As a teacher of theology, medicine, or law, she is not known. He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education, all colleges being closed against her. He allows her, in Church, as well as State, but a subordinate position, claiming Apostolic authority for her exclusion from the ministry, and, with some exceptions, from any public participation in the affairs of the Church. He has created a false public sentiment by giving to the world a different code of morals for men and women, by which moral delinquencies which exclude women from society, are not only tolerated, but deemed of little account in man. He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his right to assign for her a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and to her God. He has endeavored, in every way that he could, to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing- to live a dependent and abject life. Now, in view of this entire disfranchisement of one half the people of this country, their social and religious degradation — 444 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS in view of the unjust laws above mentioned, and because women do feel themselves aggrieved, oppressed, and fraudulently deprived of their most sacred rights, we insist that they have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of the United States. In entering upon the great work before us, we anticipate no small amount of misconception, misrepresentation, and ridicule; but we shall use every instrumentality within our power to effect our object. We shall employ agents, circulate tracts, petition the State and National legislatures, and endeavor to enlist the pulpit and the press on our behalf. We hope this Convention will be followed by a series of Conventions embracing every part of the country. The following resolutions were also adopted : Whereas, The great precept of nature is conceded to be, that "man shall pursue his own true and substantial happiness." Blackstone in his Commentaries remarks, that this law of Nature being coeval with mankind, and dictated by God himself, is of course superior in obligation to any other. It is binding over all the globe, in all countries and at all times ; no human laws are of any validity if contrary to this, and such of them as are valid, derive all their force, and all their validity, and all their authority, mediately and immediately, from this original ; therefore, Resolved, That such laws as conflict, in any way, with the true and substantial happiness of woman, are contrary to the great precept of nature and of no validity, for this is " superior in obligation to any other." Resolved, That all laws which prevent woman from occupying such a station in society as her conscience shall dictate, or which place her in a position inferior to that of man, are contrary to the great precept of nature, and therefore of no force or authority. Resolved, That woman is man's equal — was intended to be so by the Creator, and the highest good of the race demands that she should be recognized as such. Resolved, That the women of this country -ought to be en- lightened in regard to the laws under which they live, that they may no longer publish their degradation by declaring themselves THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY IDEAL OF WOMAN 445 satisfied with their present position, nor their ignorance, by assert- ing that they have all the rights they want. Resolved, That inasmuch as man, while claiming for himself intellectual superiority, does accord to woman moral superiority, it is preeminently his duty to encourage her to speak and teach, as she has an opportunity, in all religious assemblies. Resolved, That the same amount of virtue, delicacy, and re- finement of behavior that is required of woman in the social state, should also be required of man, and the same transgres- sions should be visited with equal severity on both man and woman. Resolved, That the objection of indelicacy and impropriety, which is so often brought against woman when she addresses a public audience, comes with a very ill grace from those who en- courage, by their attendance, her appearance on the stage, in the concert, or in feats of the circus. Resolved, That woman has too long rested satisfied in the cir- cumscribed limits which corrupt customs and a perverted appli- cation of the Scriptures have marked out for her, and that it is time she should move in the enlarged sphere which her great Creator has assigned her. Resolved, That it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise. Resolved, That the equality of human rights results necessarily from the fact of the identity of the race in capabilities and responsibilities. Resolved, therefore. That, being invested by the Creator with the same capabilities, and the same consciousness of responsibility for their exerci;se, it is demonstrably the right and duty of woman, equally with man,, to promote every righteous cause by every righteous means ; and especially in regard to the great subjects of morals and religion, it is self-evidently her right, to participate with her brother in teaching them, both in private and in piibHc, by writing and by speaking, by any instrumentalities proper to be used, and in any assemblies proper to be held ; and this being a self-evident truth growing out of the divinely implanted printiples of human nature, any custom or authority adverse to it, whether 446 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS modern or wearing the hoary sanction of antiquity, is to be re- garded as a self-evident falsehood, and at war with mankind. At the last session Lucretia Mott offered and spoke to the following resolution : Resolved, That the speedy success of our cause depends upon the zealous and untiring efforts of both men and women, for the overthrow of the monopoly of the pulpit, and for the securing to woman an equal participation with men in the various trades, professions, and commerce. The only resolution that was not unanimously adopted was the ninth, urging the women of the country to secure to themselves the elective franchise. Those who took part in the debate feared a demand for the right to vote would defeat others they deemed ■ more rational and make the whole movement ridiculous. Thus it will be seen that the Declaration and the resolutions in the very first Convention, demanded what all the most radical friends of the movement have since claimed — such as equal rights in the universities, in the trades and professions; the right to vote ; to share in all political offices, honors, and emol- uments ; to complete equality in marriage, to personal freedom, property, wages, children ; to make contracts ; to sue, and be sued ; and to testify in courts of justice.^ * Very interesting contemporary press comments upon the Convention and its proceedings may be found in the History of Woman Suffrage, Vol. I, Appendix. CHAPTER XI THE LEGAL AND POLITICAL STATUS' OF WOMEN Position of women under the English common law, 448. — Woman suffrage, 452. — Mill's classic argument for woman suffrage, 452. — The modern eco- nomic argument for equal suffrage, 466. ^- A statement of the case against equal suffrage, 478 [Blackstone published his Commentaries in 1765. The legal status of women in England remained substantially as he stated it until a beginning of a slow reform was made by the first Mar- ried Women's Property Act in 1870 — followed by further reforms in 1874, 1882, 1893, and 1907. In the United States the first significant reform of the legal disabilities of married women was made in New York in 1848, but no lasting reform was made in that state until i860, and the naovement to grant married women the right of contract, to own and control property, etc., did not gain headway in the country at large until after the Civil War. The brutal injustices to which women were subjected under the old law, and which they still may be called upon to endure in some belated States,^ was a powerful stimulus to the early women's-rights campaigns, although on the surface the move- ment in this country started as a by-product of the antislavery agitation in the early 40's. That the early ideals of feminism were not concerned, any more than those of to-day, merely with political rights is clear. Women have sought the franchise first as a right — a means of protection -^ and latterly as a means to larger social service — whether advisedly or not must be left to the student of the question. While the suffrage movement, from the granting of the right to vote for poor-law guardians in 1 In 191 1 there were, for instance, still seven states in which the father could by will prevent the mother from being the guardian of her own children after his death. There were twenty-four states in which the mother during the lifetime of the father had no legal right whatever in the control of the children, that is, states in which the father was the sole guardian. 447 448 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS England, in 1834, and for school trustees in Kentucky, in 1838, was of slow growth, it has now, for good or ill, become a power- ful world-wide movement. The change in the character of the chief line of argument for equal suffrage is shown in the two selections here given, the one from Mill, the other from a recent campaign pamphlet, and the arguments which in one shape or another have been urged against it from the first are shown in their most unmistakable form in the selection from the historian Parkman.^] 44. THE POSITION OF WOMEN UNDER THE COMMON LAW 2 By marriage the husband and wife are one person in law : that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated iiito that of the husband : under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs everything; and is therefore called in our law-French a feme covert, fcemina viro co-operta ; is said to be covert baron, or under the prdtection and influence of her hus- band, her baron, or lord ; and her condition during her marriage is called her coverture. Upon this principle, of an union of person in husband and wife, depend most of the legal rights, duties, and disabilities, that either of them acquire by the marriage. I speak not at present of the rights of property, but of such as are merely personal. For this reason a man cannot grant anything to his wife, or enter into covenant with her, for the grant would be to suppose her separate existence : and to covenant with her would be only to covenant with himself : and therefore it is also gener- ally true that all compacts made between husband and wife, when single, are voided by the intermarriage. A woman may indeed be 1 Full suffrage has been granted to women on equal terms with men. in the following states and countries: Wyoming, 1869; Colorado,- 1893; New Zealand, 1893; South Australia, 1895; Utah, 1896; Idaho, 1896; West Australia, 1900; The Australian Federation, 1902 ; New South Wales, 1902 ; Tasmania, 1904 ; Queensland, 1905; Finland, 1906; Victoria, 1908; Washington, 1910; California, 1911; Oregon, 1912; Kansas, 1912; Arizona, 1912 ; Alaska, 1913; Norway, 1913; Montana, 191 4; Nevada, 191 4; Manitoba, 191 6; Alberta, 1916. 2 By William Blackstone. From Commentaries on the Laws of England, iSth edition, Vol. I, pp. 441-445. London, 1809. First published in 17.65. THE LEGAL AND POLITICAL STATUS OF WOMEN 449 attorney for her husband ; for that imphes no separation from, but is rather a representation of, her lord. And a husband may also bequeath anything to his wife by will ; for that cannot take effect till the coverture is determined by his death. The husband is bound to provide his wife with necessaries by law, as much as himself ; and if she contracts debts for them, he is obliged to pay them ; but for anything besides necessaries he is not chargeable. Also if a wife elopes, and lives with another man, the husband is not chargeable even for necessaries ; at least if the person who furnishes them is sufficiently apprised of her elopement. If the wife be indebted before marriage, the husband- is bound after- wards to pay the debt ; for he has adopted her and her circum- stances together. If the wife be injured in her person or property, she can bring no action for redress without her husband's con- currence, and in his name as well as her own : neither can she be sued, without making the husband a defendant. There is indeed one case where the wife shall sue and be sued as a feme sole, viz. where the husband has abjured the realm, or is banished, for then he is dead in law ; and the husband being thus disabled to sue for or defend the wife, it would be most unreasonable if she had no remedy, or could make no defense at all. In criminal prosecutions, it is true, the wife may be indicted and punished separately ; for the union is only a civil union. But, in trials of any sort, they are not allowed to be evidence for, or against, each other : partly because it is impossible their testi- mony should be indifferent ; but principally because of the union of person : and therefore, if they were admitted to be witnesses for each other, they would contradict one maxim of law, "nemo in propria causa testis esse debet;" and if against each other, they would contradict another maxim, " nemo tenetur seipsum accusare." But, where the offense is directly against the person of the wife, this rule has been usually dispensed with : and there- fore, by statute 3 Hen. VII. c. 2, in case a woman be forcibly taken away, and married, she maybe a witness against such her husband, in order to convict him of felony. For in this case she can with no propriety be reckoned his wife; because a main ingredient, her consent, was wanting to the contract: and alstf 450 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS there is another maxim of law, that no man shall take advantage of his own wrong ; which the ravisher here would do, if by forcibly marrying a woman, he could prevent her from being a witness, who is perhaps the only witness, to that very fact. In the civil law the husband and wife are considered as two distinct persons ; and may have separate estates, contracts, debts, and injuries : and therefore in our ecclesiastical courts a woman may sue and be sued without her husband. But, though our law in general considers man and wife as one person, yet there are some instances in which she is separately considered ; as inferior to him and acting by his compulsion. And therefore all deeds executed, and acts done, by her, during her coverture, are void ; except it be a fine or the like matter of record, in which case she must be solely and secretly examined, to learn if her act be voluntary. She cannot by will devise lands to her husband, unless under special circumstances ; for at the time of making it she is supposed to be under his coercion. And in some felonies, and other inferior crimes, committed by her, through restraint of her husband, the law excuses her : but this extends not to treason or murder. The husband also (by the old law) might give his wife moder- ate correction. For, as he is to answer for her behavior, the law thought it reasonable to intrust him with this power of restrain- ing her, by domestic chastisement, in the same moderation that a man is allowed to correct his apprentices or children ; for whom the master or parent is also liable in some cases to answer. But this power of correction was confined within reasonable bounds, and the husband was prohibited from using any violence to his wife, aliter quant ad virum, ex causa regiminis et castigationis uxoris suae, licite et rationabiliter pertinet. The civil law gave the husband the same, or a larger, authority over his wife : allow- ing him, for some misdemeanors, flagellis et fustibus acriter verberare uxorem ; for others, only modicum castigationem adhi- bere. But, with us in the politer reign of Charles the Second, this power of coercion began to be doubted : and a wife may now have security of the peace against her husband ; or, in return,, 3 husband- against his wife. Yet the lower rank of people, who; THE LEGAL AND POLITICAL STATUS OF WOMEN 451 were always fond of the old common law, still claim and exert their ancient privilege ; and the courts of law still permit a hus- band to restrain a wife of her liberty, in case of any gross misbehavior. These are the chief legal effects of marriage during the cover- ture ; upon which we may observe, that even the disabilities which the wife lies under are for the most part intended for her pro- tection and benefit. So great a favorite is the female sex of the laws of England. [How great a " favorite " the female sex was of the law of England is brought out by Edward Christian, the editor of this edition of the Commentaries, in a footnote :] Nothing, I apprehend, would more conciliate the good will of the student in favor of the laws of England, than the persuasion that they had shown a par- tiality to the female sex. But I am not so much in love with my subject as to be inclined to leave it in possession of a glory which it may not fully deserve. In addition to what has been observed in this chapter, by the learned Com- mentator, I shall here state some of the principal differences in the English law, respecting the two sexes ; and I shall leave it to the reader to determine on which side is the balance, and how far this compliment is supported by truth. Husband and wife, in the language of the law, are styled baron zxAfeme: the word baron, or lord, attributes to the husband not a very courteous superiority. But we might be inclined to think this merely an unmeaning technical phrase, if we did not recollect, that if the baron kills his feme, it is the same as if he had killed a stranger or any other person ; but if the feme kills her baron, it is regarded by the laws a much more atrocious crime ; as she not only breaks through the restraints of humanity and conjugal affection, but throws off all subjection to the authority of her husband. And therefore the law denomi- nates her crime a species of treason, and condemns her to the same punish- ment as if she had killed. the king. And for every species of treason (though in petit treason the punishment of men was only to be drawn and hanged) till the 30 Geo. III. c. 48 the sentence of women was to l?e drawn and burnt alive. By the common law all women were denied the benefit of clergy ; and till the 3 and 4 W. & M. c. 9 they received the sentence of death, and might have been executed, for the first offense in simple larceny, bigamy, man- slaughter, etc., however learned they were, merely because their sex precluded the possibility of their taking holy orders ; though a man who could read was for the same crime subject only to burning in the hand and a few months imprisonment. These are the principal distinctions in criminal matters. Now let us see how the account stands with regard to civil rights. 452 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS Intestate personal property is equally diyided between males and females ; but a son, though younger than all his sisters, is heir to the whole of real property. A woman's personal property, by marriage, becomes absolutely her hus- band's which at his death he may leave entirely away from her; but if he dies without will she is entitled to one third of his personal property, if he has children : if not, to one half. In the province of York to four ninths or three fourths. By the marriage, the husband is absolutely master of the wife's lands during coverture ; and if he has had a living child, and survives the wife, he retains the whole of those lands, if they are estates of inheritance, during his life : but the wife is entitled only to dower, or one third, if she survives, out of the husband's estates of inheritance: but this she has whether she has had a child or not. But a husband can be a tenant by curtesy of the trust estates of the wife, though the wife cannot be endowed of the trust estates of the husband. With regard to the property of women, there is taxation without repre- sentation : for they pay taxes without having the liberty of voting for rep- resentatives ; and indeed there seems at present no substantial reason why single women should be denied this privilege. Though the chastity of women is protected from violence, yet a parent can have no reparation, by our law, from the seducer of his daughter's virtue, but by stating that she is his servant, and that by the consequence of the seduction, he is deprived of the benefit of her labor: or where the seducer, at the same time, is a trespasser upon the close or premises of the parent. But when by such forced circumstances the law can take cognizance of the offense, juries disregard the pretended injury, and give damages commensurate to the wounded feelings of the parent. Female virtue, by the temporal law, is perfectly exposed to the slanders of malignity and falsehood ; for any one may proclaim in conversation, that the purest maid, or the chastest matron, is the most meretricious and incontinent of women, with impunity, or free from the animadversions of the temporal courts. Thus female honor, which is dearer to the sex than their lives, is left by the common law to be the sport of an abandoned calumniator. From this impartial statement of the account, I fear there is Uttle reason to pay a compliment to our laws for their respect and favor to the female sex. 45. SUFFRAGE FOR WOMEN i I rise, sir, to propose an extension of the suffrage which can excite no party or class f eeUng in the house — which can give no umbrage to the keenest assertor of the claims either of property or of numbers ; an extension which has not the faintest tendency 1 Speech by John Stuart Mill, in the British Parliament, May 20, 1867. Re- printed by the College Equal Suffrage League. THE LEGAL AND POLITICAL STATUS OF WOMEN 453 to disturb, what we have heard so much about lately, the balance of political power; which cannot afflict the most timid alarmist by any revolutionary terrors, or offend the most jealous democrat as an infringement of popular rights, or a privilege granted to one class of society at the expense of another. There is nothing to distract our minds from the simple consideration whether there is any reasonable ground for excluding an entire half of the nation, not only from actual admission, but from the very possi- bility of being admitted within the pale of citizenship, though they may fulfill every one of the conditions legally and constitu- tionally sufficient in all cases but theirs. This is, under the laws of our country, a solitary case. There is no other example of an exclusion which is absolute. If it were the law that none should have a vote but the possessors of ;£5,ooo a year, the poorest man in the community might, and now and then would, attain to the privilege. But neither birth, nor merit, nor exertion, nor intellect, nor fortune, nor even that great disposer of human affairs — acci- dent, can enable any woman to have her voice counted in those common concerns which touch her and hers as nearly as any other person in the nation. Now, sir, before going any farther, permit me to say that a prima facie case is already made out. It is not just to make dis- tinctions, in rights and privileges, between one of Her Majesty's subjects and another, unless for a positive reason. I do not mean that the suffrage, or any other political function, is an abstract right, or that to withhold it from anyone, on sufficient grounds of expediency, is a personal wrong ; it is an utter misunderstand- ing of the principle I maintain to confound this with it; my whole argument is one of expediency. But all expediencies are not on exactly the same level. There is a kind of expediency which is called justice ; and justice, though it does not necessarily demand that we should bestow political rights on everyone, does demand that we should not capriciously and without cause give those rights to one, and withhold them from another. ... To lay a ground for the denial of the franchise to anyone, it is necessary to allege either personal unfitness or public danger. Can either of these be asserted in the present case .? Can it be pretended 454 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS that women who manage a property or conduct a business, who pay rates and taxes, often to a large amount, and often from their own earnings, many of whom are responsible heads of families, and some of whom, in the capacity of schoolmistresses, teach more than a great many of the male electors have ever learned are not capable of a function of which every male householder is capable? Or is it supposed that, if they were allowed to vote, they would revolutionize the State, subvert any of our valuable institutions, or that we should have worse laws, or be, in any single respect, worse governed by means of their suffrage ? No one thinks anything of the kind ; and it is not only the general principles of justice that are infringed, or at any rate set aside by excluding women, merely as women, from the election of representatives. That exclusion is repugnant to the particular principles of the British Constitution. It violates the oldest of our constitutional axioms — a principle dear to all reformers, and theoretically acknowledged by conservatives — that taxation and representation should be coextensive ; that the taxes should be voted by those who pay them. Do not women pay taxes .' Does not every woman who is sui juris pay exactly the same as a man who has the same electoral qualifications .? If having a stake in the country means anything, the owner of freehold or leasehold property has the same stake, whether it is owned by a man or a woman. There is evidence in our constitutional records that women have voted in counties and in some boroughs at former, though certainly distant, periods of history. But the house will expect that I should not rest my case on general principles, either of justice or of the Constitution, but should produce what are called practical arguments. ' Now I frankly admit that one very serious practical argument is entirely wanting in the case of women : they do not hold great meetings in Hyde Park nor demonstrations at Islington. How far this omission may be considered to invalidate their claims, I will not pretend to say. But other practical arguments — practical even in the most restricted sense of the term — are not wanting ; and I am ready to state them if I may first be THE LEGAL AND POLITICAL STATUS OF WOMEN 455 allowed to ask, Where are the practical objections ? In general, the difficulty which people feel on this subject is not a practical objection ; there is nothing practical in it ; it is a mere feeling — a feeling of strangeness. The idea is so very new ; at least they think so, though that is a mistake : it is a very old idea. Well, strangeness is a thing which wears off. Some things were strange enough to many of us three months ago which are not at all so now ; and many which are strange now will not be strange to the same person a few years hence, not to say a few months ; and, as for novelty, we live in a world of novelties. The despotism of custom is on the wane : we are not now con- tent to know that things are : we ask whether they ought to be ; and in this house, I am bound to suppose that an appeal lies from custom to a higher tribunal, in which reason is judge. Now, the reasons which custom is in the habit of giving for itself on this subject are very brief : that, indeed is one of my difficulties. It is not easy to refute an interjection. Interjections, however, are the only arguments among those we usually hear on this sub- ject which it appears to me at all difficult to refute. The others chiefly consist of siich aphorisms as these : Politics is not women's business, and would make them neglect their proper duties. Women do not desire the suffrage, and would rather not have it. Women are sufficiently represented through their rhale relatives.^ Women have power enough already. I shall perhaps be thought to have done enough in the way of answer- ing, when I have answered all these : it may perhaps instigate any honorable gentleman who takes the trouble of replying to me, to produce something more recondite. Politics, it is said, is not a woman's business. I am not aware that politics is a man's business either, unless he is one of the 1 It is of interest to note, in this connection, that John Stuart Mill's father, James Mill, in an article on " Government " in an early edition of the Encyclo- pedia Britannica, took this position. " One thing is pretty clear," he said, " that [in considering who should choose representatives] all those individuals whose interests are indisputably included in those of other individuals may be struck off without inconvenience. In this light may be viewed all children, up to a certain age, whose interests are involved in those of their parents. In this light, also, women may be regarded, the interest of almost all of whom is involved either in that of their fathers or that of their husbands." — Ed. 456 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS few who is paid for devoting his time to the public service, or is a member of this or of the other house. The great majority of male visitors have their own business, which engrosses nearly the whole of their time ; but I have never heard that the hours occu- pied in attending, once in a few years, at a polling booth, even if we throw in the time spent in reading newspapers and political treatises, has hitherto made them neglect their shops or their counting-houses. I have not heard that those who have votes are worse merchants, or worse lawyers, or worse physicians, or even worse clergymen, than other people. One would think that the British Constitution allowed no man to vote who was not able to give up the greater part of his time to politics ; if that were the case, we should have a very limited constituency. But let me ask, what is the meaning of political freedom ? Is it not the control of those who do make a business of politics by those who do not ? It is the very principle of constitutional liberty that men come from their looms and their forges to decide — and decide well — whether they are properly governed, and whom they will be governed by ; and the nations who prize this privi- lege, and who exercise it fully, are invariably those who excel most in the common affairs of life. The occupations of most women are, and are likely to remain, principally domestic ; but the idea that those occupations are in- compatible with taking an interest in national affairs, or in any of the great concerns of humanity, is as futile as the terror once sincerely entertained, lest artisans should desert the workshops and the factory if they were taught to read. I know there is an obscure feeling, a feeling which is ashamed to express itself openly, that women have no right to care about anything but how they may be the most useful and devoted serv- ants of some man. But as I am convinced that there is not one member of this house whose conscience accuses him of any such mean feeling, I may say that the claim to confiscate the whole existence of half the human species for the convenience of the other half, seems to me, independently of its injustice, particularly silly. For who that has had ordinary experience of human life, and ordinary capacity for profiting by that experience, THE LEGAL AND POLITICAL STATUS OF WOMEN 457 fancies that those do their own business best who understand nothing else? A man has Hved to little purpose who has not learned that without general mental cultivation no particular work that requires understanding can be done in the best manner. It requires brains to use practical experience ; and brains, even with- out practical experience, go further than any amount of practical experience without brains. But perhaps it is thought that the ordinary occupations of women are more antagonistic than men's occupations are to any comprehension of public affairs. Perhaps it is thought that those who are principally charged with the moral education of the future generations of men must be quite unfit to judge of the moral and educational interest of a community; or that those whose chief daily business is the judicious laying out of money so as to .produce the greatest results with the smallest means, could not give any lessons to right honorable gentlemen on that side of the house, or on this, who produce such singularly small results with such vast means. I feel a degree of confidence on this subject, which I could not feel if the political change, in itself not a great or formidable one, for which I contend, were not grounded, as beneficent and salutary political changes usually are, upon a previous social change. The idea of a peremptory and absolute line of separa- tion between men's province of thought and women's — the notion of forbidding women to take interest in what interests men — belongs to a gone-by state of society which is receding farther and farther into the past. We think and talk about the political revolutions of the world, but we do not pay sufficient attention to the fact that there has taken place among us a silent domestic revolution : women and men are, for the first time in history, really companions. Our traditions about the proper relations between them have descended to us from a time when their lives were apart — when they were separate in their thoughts because they were separate both in their amusements and in their serious occupations. The man spent his hours of leisure among men : all his friendships, all his real intimacies were with men : with men alone did he converse on any serious subject : the wife was 458 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS either a plaything or an upper servant. All this among the edu- cated classes is changed : men no longer give up their spare time to violent outdoor exercise and boisterous conviviality with male associates : the home has acquired the ascendancy : the two sexes now really pass their lives together : the women of the family are the man's habitual society : the wife is his chief associate, his most confidential friend, and often his most trusted counselor. Now, does any man wish to have for his nearest companion, linked so closely with himself, and whose wishes and preferences have so strong a claim upon him, one whose thoughts are alien from those which occupy his own mind — one who can give neither help nor comfort nor support to his noblest feelings and pur- poses .' Is this close and almost exclusive companionship com- patible with women being warned off all large subjects — taught that they ought not to care about what it is man's duty to care for, and that to take part in any serious interests outside the household is stepping beyond their province ? Is it good for a man to pass his life in close communion of thought and feeling with a person studiously kept inferior to himself, whose earthly interests are forcibly confined within four walls, who is taught to cultivate as a grace of character ignorance and indifference about the most inspiring subjects, those among which his highest duties are cast? Does anyone suppose that this can happen without detriment to the man's own character .' The time has come when, if women are not raised to the level of men, men will be pulled down to theirs. The women of a man's family are either a stimulus and a support to his higher aspirations, or a drag upon them. You may keep them ignorant of politics, but you cannot keep them from concerning them- selves with the least respectable part of politics — its personalities. If they do not understand, and cannot enter into the man's feel- ings of public duty, they do care about his private interests, and that is the scale into which their weight is certain to be thrown. They are an influence always at hand, cooperating with his selfish promptings, watching and taking advantage of every moment of moral irresolution, and doubling the strength of every teniptation. Even if they maintain a modest neutrality, their mere absence of THE LEGAL AND POLITICAL STATUS OF WOMEN 459 sympathy hangs a dead weight upon his moral energies, and makes him averse to incur sacrifices which they will feel, and to forego worldly successes and advantages in which they would share, for the sake of objects which they cannot appreciate. But suppose him to be happily preserved from temptation to an actual sacrifice of conscience, the insensible influence on the higher parts of his own nature is still deplorable. Under an idle notion that the beauties of character of the two sexes are mutually incompatible, men are afraid of manly women ; but those who have reflected on the nature and power of social influences, know that, when there are not manly women, there will not much longer be manly men. When men and women are really companions, if women are frivo- lous, men will be frivolous ; if women care only for personal interests and trifling amusements, men in general will care for little else. The two sexes must now rise or sink together. It may be said that women can take interest in great national questions without having a vote. They can, certainly; but how many of them will.' AH that society and education can do is exhausted in inculcating on women that the rule of their conduct ought to be what society expects from them, and the denial of the vote is a proclamation, intelligible to everyone, that society does not expect them to concern themselves with public interests. Why, the whole of a girl's thoughts and feelings are toned down by it from her earliest school days ; she does not take the inter- est, even in national history, that a boy does, because it is to be no business of hers when she grows up. If there are women, and fortunately there now are, who do care about these subjects, and study them, it is because the force within is powerful enough to bear up against the worst kind of discouragement, that which acts not by interposing obstacles which may be struggled against, but by deadening the spirit which faces and conquers obstacles. We are told that women do not wish the suffrage. If this be so, it only proves that nearly all women are still under this dead- ening influence, that the opiate still benumbs their mind and con- science. But there are many women who do desire the suffrage, and have claimed it by petitions to this house. How do we know how many more thousands there are who have not asked for what 46o READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS they do not hope to get, either for fear of being ill thought of by men or by other women, or from the feeling so sedulously culti- vated by the whole of their education — aversion to make them- selves conspicuous ? Men must have a great faculty of self-delusion if they suppose that leading questions put to the ladies of their families, or of their acquaintances, will elicit their real sentiments, or will be answered with entire sincerity by one woman in ten thousand. No one is so well schooled as most women are in making a virtue of necessity. It costs little to disclaim caring for what is not offered; and frankness in expressing feelings that may be dis- agreeable or unflattering to their nearest connections is not one of the virtues which a woman's education tends to cultivate. It is, moreover, a virtue attended with sufficient risk to induce pru- dent women to reserve its exercise for cases in which there is some nearer interest to be promoted by it. At all events, those who do not care for the suffrage will not use it. Either they will not register, or if they do, they will vote as their male relatives advise them, by which, as the advantage would probably be about equally shared among all classes, no harm would be done. Those, whether they be few or many, who do value the privilege, would exercise it, and would experience that stimulus to their faculties, and that widening and liberalizing influence on their feelings and sympathies, which the suffrage seldom fails to exert over every class that is admitted to a share in it. Meanwhile, an unworthy stigma would have been taken off the whole sex, the law would have ceased to stamp them as inca- pable of serious things, would have ceased to proclaim that their opinions and wishes do not deserve to have any influence in things which concern them equally with men, and in many that concern them much more than men. They would no longer be classed with children, idiots, and lunatics as incapable of taking care either of themselves or others, and needing that everything should be done for them without asking for their consent. If no more than one woman in twenty thousand used the vote, it would be a gain to all women to be declared capable of using it. Even so purely theoretical an enfranchisement would remove an artificial THE LEGAL AND POLITICAL STATUS OF WOMEN 461 weight from the expansion of their faculties, the real evil of .which . is far greater than the apparent. Then it is said that women do not need direct political power because they have so much indirect through the influence they possess over their male relatives and connections. I should like to try this argument in other cases. Rich people have a great deal of indirect influence. Is this a reason for denying them a vote .■• Did anyone ever propose a rating qualification the wrong way, and bring in a reform bill to disfranchise everybody who lives in a ;£500 house, or pays ;£ioo a year in direct taxes .' Unless this rule for distributing the franchise is to be reserved for the exclusive benefit of women, the legitimate con- sequences of it would be that persons above a certain amount of fortune should be allowed to bribe, but should not be allowed to vote. It is true that women have already great power. It is part of my case that they have great power. But they have it under the worst possible conditions, because it is indirect, and, there- fore, irresponsible. I want to make that power a responsible power. I want to make the woman feel her conscience interested in its honest exercise. I want to make her feel that it is not given to her as a mere means of personal ascendancy. I want to make her influence work by a manly interchange of opinions, and not by cajolery. I want to awaken in her the political point of honor. At present many a woman greatly influences the political conduct of her male connections, sometimes by force of will actually governs it ; but she is never supposed to have anything to do with it. The man she influences, and perhaps misleads, is alone responsible. Her power is like the backstairs influence of a favorite. The poor creature is nobody, and all is referred to the man's superior wisdom ; and as, of course, he will not give way to her if he ought not, she may work upon him through all his strongest feelings without incurring any responsibility. I demand that all who exercise power should have the burden laid upon them of knowing something about the things they have power over. With the admitted right to a voice would come a sense of the corresponding duty. 462 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS A woman is not generally inferior in tenderness of conscience to a man. Make her a moral agent in matters of public conduct. Show that you require from her a political conscience, and when she has learned to understand the transcendent importance of these things, she will see why it is wrong to sacrifice political con- victions for personal interest and vanity ; she will understand that political honesty is not a foolisli personal crotchet, which a man is bound for the sake of his family to give up, but a serious duty ; and the men whom she can influence will be better men in all public relations, and not, as they often are at present, worse men by the whole effect of her influence. But, at all events, it will be said women, as women, do not suffer any practical inconvenience by not being represented. The interests of all women are safe in the hands of their fathers, husbands, and brothers, whose interest is the same with theirs, and who, besides knowing better than they do what is good for them, care a good deal more for them than they care for themselves. This is exactly what has been said of all other unrepresented classes — the operatives, for instance ; are they not all virtually represented through their employers ? are not the interests of the employer and that of the employed, when properly under- stood, the same ? To insinuate the contrary, is it not the horrible crime of setting class against class .' Is not the farmer interested along with his laborer in the prosperity of agriculture .' Has not the cotton manufacturer as great an interest in the high price of calicoes as his workmen ? Is not the employer interested as well as his men in the repeal of taxes .' Have not employer and employed a common interest against outsiders, just as man and wife have against all outside the family.? And are not all em- ployers kind, benevolent, charitable men, who love their work- people, and always know and do what is most for their good.? Every one of these assertions is exactly as true as the parallel assertion repecting men, and women. We are not living in Arcadia, but, as we were lately reminded, in ftzce Romuli ; and in that region workmen need other protection than that of their masters, and women than that of their men. f"!; THE LEGAL AND POLITICAL STATUS OF WOMEN 463 I should like to see a return laid before the house of the number of women who are annually beaten to death, kicked to death, or trodden to death, by their male protectors. I should like this document to contain, in an opposite column, a return of the sen- tences passed in those cases in which the dastardly criminal did not get off altogether ; and in a third column a comparative view of the amount of property, the unlawful taking of which had, in the same sessions or assizes, by the same judge, been thought worthy of the same degree of punishment. We should thus ob- tain an arithmetical estimate of the value set by a male legisla- ture and male tribunals upon the murder of a woman by habitual torture, often prolonged for years, which, if there be any shame in us, would make us hang our heads. Before it is contended that women do not suffer in their in- terests, ■ especially as women, by not being represented, it must be considered whether women, as women, have no grievances — whether the law, and t:hose practices which law can reach, treat women in every respect as favorably as men. Well, sir, is that the case ? As to education, for example, we continually hear it said that the education of the mothers is the most important part of the education of the country, because they educate the men. Is as much importance really attached to it.? Are there many fathers who care as much, or are willing to expend as much, for the good education of their daughters as of their sons ? Where are the universities, where the public schools, where the schools of any high description for them ? If it is said that girls are best educated at home, where are the training schools for governesses ? What has become of the endowments which the bounty of our forefathers established for the instruction, not of boys alone, but of boys and girls indis- criminately .? I am informed by one of the highest authorities on the subject that, in the majority of the deeds of endowment, the provision was for education generally, and not especially for boys. One great endowment — Christ's Hospital — was desig- nated expressly for both. That establishment maintains and edu- cates one thousand one hundred boys, and exactly twenty-six girls. Then when they have attained womanhood, how does it fare 464 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS with the large and increasing portion of the sex, who, though sprung from the educated classes, have not inherited a provision ; and, not having obtained one by marriage, or disdaining to marry merely for a provision, depend on their exertions for support? Hardly any decent educated occupation, save one, is open to them. They are either governesses, or nothing. A fact has quite recently occurred which is worth commem- orating. A young lady. Miss Garrett, from no pressure of neces- sity, but from an honorable desire to find scope for her activity in alleviating the sufferings of her fellow creatures, applied her- self to the study of medicine. Having duly qualified herself, she, with an energy and perseverance which cannot be too highly praised, knocked successively at every one of the doors through which, in this country, a student can pass into medical practice. Having found every other door fast shut, she at last discovered one which had been accidentally left ajar. The Society of Apoth- ecaries, it appears, had forgotten to shut out those whom they never thought would attempt to come in ; and through that narrow entry this young lady obtained admission into the medical profes- sion. But so objectionable did it appear to this learned body that women should be permitted to be the medical attendants, even of women, that the narrow wicket which Miss Garrett found open has been closed after her, and no second Miss Garrett is to be suffered to pass through it. This is instar omnium. As soon as ever women become cap- able of successfully competing with men in any career, if it be lucrative and honorable, it is closed to them. A short time ago women could be associates of the Royal Academy ; but they were so distinguishing themselves, they were taking so honorable a rank in their art, that this privilege, too, has been taken from them. That is the kind of care taken of women by the men who so faithfully represent them. That is our treatment of un- married women ; and now about the married. They, it may be said, are not directly concerned in the amend- ment which I have moved, but it concerns many who have been married as well as others who will be so. By the common law of England, everything that a woman has belongs absolutely to THE LEGAL AND POLITICAL STATUS OF WOMEN 465 her husband; he may tear it all away from her, may spend the last penny of it in debauchery, leaving her to maintain by her labor both herself and her children ; and if, by heroic exertion, she earns enough to put by anything for their future support, unless she is judicially separated from him, he can pounce upon her savings, and leave her penniless ; and such cases are of very common occurrence. If we were besotted enough to think such things right, there would be more excuse for us ; but we know better. The richer classes have found a way of exempting their own daughters from this iniquitous state of the law. By the con- trivance of marriage settlements, they can make in each case a private law for themselves, and they always do. Why do we not provide that' justice for the daughters of the poor which we take good care shall be done to our own daughters ? Why is not what is done in every particular case that we personally care for made the general law of the land ? — that a poor man's child, whose parents could not afford the expense of a settlement, may be able to retain any little property which may devolve on her, and may have a voice in the disposal of her own earnings, often the best and only reliable part of the sustenance of the family.? I am sometimes asked what practical grievance I propose to remedy by enabling women to vote. I propose, for one thing, to remedy this. I have given these few instances to prove that women are not the petted favorites of society which some people seem to imagine ; that they have not that abundance, that superfluity of influence, which is ascribed to them^ and are not sufficiently rep- resented by the representation of those who have never cared to do in their behalf so obvious an act of justice. Grievances of less magnitude than the laws of the property of married women, when affecting persons and classes less inured to passive endur- ance, have provoked revolutions. We ought not to take advantage of the security which we feel against any such danger in the present case to refuse to a limited class of women that small amount of participation in the enact- ment and the improvement of our laws which this motion solicits for them, and which would enable the general feelings of women to be heard in this house through a few female representatives. 466 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS We ought not to deny to them, what we are going to accord to everybody else : a right to be consulted ; the common chance of placing in the great council of the nation a few organs of their sentiments ; of having what every petty trade or profession has — a few members of the legislature, with a special call to stand up for their interests, and direct attention to the mode in which those interests are affected by the law, or by any changes in it. No more is asked by this motion ; and when the time comes, as it is certain to come, when this will be conceded, I feel the firmest conviction that you will never repent of the concession. I move, that the word "man" be omitted, and the word "person" in- serted in its place. 46. IS WOMAN SUFFRAGE IMPORTANT ?i We have no militant suffrage movement in this country, per- haps chiefly because there is nothing to militate against. There is no active opposition.^ What we have to overcome is a polite but perfectly useless acquiescence. What we have to prove is not that woman suffrage is right, but that it is important. In my opinion it has an importance too far-reaching for the grasp of persons immersed in politics or business, and I shall try to set forth, in a brevity suitable to their leisure rather than to the sub- ject, the nature of that importance. In so doing I can present no new "arguments," but only try to show that among the old, two at least have at the present day a vital thmst in them. To clear the field for those two, let me say at the start that we do not look to women's votes for the purification and moral elevation of the body politic. That is a lovely hope, transmitted to us, in its classic form, I believe, by George William Curtis. " I am asked," he exclaims, " would you drag women down into the mire of politics .? No, sir, I would have them lift us out of it." ^ By Max Eastman. Pamphlet published by the New York State Men's League for Woman Suffrage. Revised by the author. " This is scarcely true at present, since in recent campaigns the liquor inter- ests are known to have given large sums and to have built up organizations to defeat equal suffrage. This was notably true in Wisconsin in 1912, in Ohio in 1912 and 1914, and in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania in 191 5. — Ed. THE LEGAL AND POLITICAL STATUS OF WOMEN 467 But we are not much stirred by the prophecy of such miracles in this day. We are more scientific than to judge women in gen- eral by the one we have in our romantic eye. We look round in the city and the country, and we see who the men are and who the women are, and we conclude that neither sex has an exclusive monopoly of the virtues. Indeed, it has been maintained in New York City, by persons with an eye to the private profits of politics, that woman suffrage would be a help to them in their business. Nor is it possible to deny — speaking from that city only — that this sudden extension of the franchise might furnish to the powers of corruption a temporary help. That is because, after the vote is granted to them, some time will elapse before a normal proportion of women acquire the habit of voting ; a natural inertia will have to be over- come ; and the powers of corruption have a better-perfected system for overcoming the inertia of voters upon election day than the powers of reform. "The children of darkness are wiser in their generation than the children of light." That is why nobody ever quite succeeds in the salvation of society. That state of affairs, however, besides being local, will be tem- porary. Nothing will call out the votes of the better class of wives and mothers quicker than a striking ascendancy of the cor- rupt powers. And when an equal proportion of all classes of the women's votes is called out we shall find our educated and our American-bom vote increased, and our uneducated and foreign- born vote decreased, in the final proportion.^ Therefore, while we cannot look to women's votes for such an inundation of purity as certain chivalric souls would love to think, we can assure our- selves that they will not do any permanent appreciable harm to the body-politic. On the contrary, they will increase the average intellectual culture and acquaintance with American institutions in the electorate. Moreover, we cannot ignore the fact that women, even when their opportunity and the demands we make of them are as great 1 In 1908-1909 there were enrolled in the high schools of the United States 475,761 girls and only36s,5i2 boys. And of the total number of immigrants to' this country in the fiscal year 1909, 519,969 were males and only 231,817 females. 468 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS as they should be, will remain in certain ways normally different from men. Women are mothers, and men are not. When all psychic marvels and parlor nonsense are laid aside, that is the scientist's difference between men and women. Women inherit, with instinctive motherhood, a body of passionate interests that men only partially share. And when we say that those interests are needed in government, we but extend to the State as a whole a generalization already applied to every essential part of it. For we freely acknowledge, in the daily progress of our lives, that women's vital intuitive judgments tend often to recall us from our theoretical and commercial vagaries to the chief business, the conservation of human resources. An extension of that tendency into the sphere of politics will appear less incongruous and more advisable with every year that the profession of politics continues to improve as it is now improving. Governments are more and more approaching the real concerns of humanity. All those moral and social problems, the preserva- tion of health and safety, the regulation of hours and conditions of labor, the guidance of competition, even the determination of wages and the cure of poverty — problems that used to be handled by a few supernormal individuals under the name of " charity " — are creeping into the daily business of bureaus and legislatures. And this civilizing of governments is a process which we must fur- ther with all our might, in order that ultimately even the greatest questions of democratic equality, which are still only agitated by a handful of noteworthy idealists, may become the substance of party platforms and the fighting-ground of practical politics. Perhaps we have not enough experimental evidence for a con- clusion, but we have the opinions of hundreds of good men in those States and nations where women vote, to support our rea- sonable expectation that their influence will favor rather than retard this process. Another hope we may cherish of the political effect, not of women's votes, but of the fact that they vote : The sexes are more idealistic in what they do together than in what they do apart. And for this reason the coming of women — or the com- ing of families — into politics, will bring a certain benefit other THE LEGAL AND POLITICAL STATUS OF WOMEN 469 than what you might estimate by counting the wise or virtuous women's votes. It will make impossible, for instance, that state of conscience prevalent among male politicians, who go into the service of the State with the happy feeling that they have left their virtues at home in the safe-keeping of their wives and daughters. Men throw the innocence of their women-folk as a sop to God, and go about the devil's business. But I doubt whether God, or anyone else, was ever satisfied with innocence as a substitute for virtue active in the world. I could never see the value of pre- served innocence. It is possible that our republic will be damned to moral destruction, men and women together, and it is possible that it will be saved to great usefulness, but certainly if it is saved, it will be saved not because of the number of cloistered innocents it contains within its boundaries, but because of the number of effective human beings who save it. Any measure, therefore, will do well, which tends to reduce the number of those persons who think that an ineffectual wife can do the being good for the whole family. Especially it will do well if it reduces the number of such men in public affairs, where the lack of those high standards that we set for ourselves in our homes is lamentably apparent. " He is such a good man in his family ! " we say of our disgraced repre- sentative. Perhaps if we do not waste our time trying to make him good outside his family, but allow his family and its acquaint- ance with him to extend into the sphere of his political activity, he will be good there too, or else nowhere, and there will be no doubt about it. He will at least realize the importance of honor in public service, and no longer be able to return home and think he is better than his acts. Such probabilities, however, with so brief experiments to test them, do not give political equality a pressing importance to the man of average interest in experimental progress. In consider- ing the effect of women's votes upon politics, as in mentioning the question of abstract rights, I have but endeavored to clear the way for the arguments that are most vital. It is not justice as a theoretic ideal, nor feminine virtue as a cure for politics, but democratic government as the practical 470 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS method of human happiness that compels our minds. The Anglo- Saxon race has progressed so far as it has, in intellectual and moral and material culture, largely because it has carried forth the great venture of popular government. We have learned to take it for granted, and so to forget, that civil liberty is the foun- dation of our good fortune, but we ought to remind ourselves of it every morning. We ought to remind ourselves that we are the van of a great exploit. Had we been alive when the daring plans were laid, we should remember. The greatest hypothesis in the history of moral and political science was set up in this laboratory, and our business is to try out the experiment until the last breath of hope is gone. The democratic hypothesis is that a State is good, not when it conforms to some general abstract ideal of what a State ought to be or do, as the Greeks thought, but when it conforms to the interests of' certain particular concrete individuals — namely, its citizens, all of them that are in mental and moral health ; and that the way to find out their interests is not to sit on a throne or a bench and think about it, but go and ask them. Now to discriminate against an approximate half of the citizens — just because they have, as we say, such different interests from the rest — is to betray our hypothesis and destroy our experiment at its crucial point. For the whole point of it was that we would give up asking an expert political class of the people what the State ought to do, and go down and ask all the people, expert or not and political or not, what they are interested in having it do. Not only have the thinkers of the world waked up to the fact that women are individuals and so to be counted under this theory of government, but the world itself has so changed that the practical necessity of applying the theory to them drives itself home to us. We have only to open our minds to the facts. With the advance of industrial art the work of women has gone from the house to the factory and market. Women have followed it there, and there they must do it until this civilization perishes. In 1900, approximately one woman in every five in the United States was engaged in gainful employment, and the number was increasing. Most of these women have no choice as to whether THE LEGAL AND POLITICAL STATUS OF WOMEN 4; I they will work or not, and many of them are working in circum- stances corrupting their health and motherhood. It is, therefore, a vital problem for the future of our race, how to render the con- ditions of industry compatible with the physical and moral health of women. And to one who is willing to know a little about human nature and the deep wisdom of representative govern- ment, it is clear that the only first step in solution of that prob- lem is to give to the women themselves the dignity and defense of political recognition. Compared to the variety of their needs, and the subtlety of the disadvantages under which they enter a competitive system, it is a srnall thing to give them. But it is the first and manifest thing. It is the ancient antidote of that prejudice which everywhere opposes them, and its smallness not a reason for withholding, but for bestowing it. Give them that small thing for which Anglo-Saxon men have groveled and lied and slaughtered and perished for a thousand years, to win — namely, a little bit of the personal sacredness of sovereigns before their rulers and the law. A small thing, but their own, — and an indispensable- prerequisite and guarantee of every other privilege or opportunity you may hope to confer upon them. Women have that guarantee in a male democracy, it is stated, through their husbands and fathers who represent them. And to an extent the statement is true. To an extent it is true, even when the husbands and fathers have none of that perfect loyalty to them which the statement assumes, for the habit of mind which democracy engenders in its officials involuntarily extends to their dealing with the unenfranchised. But there is a time when it is not true, and a point where that habit of mind does not extend. And it is a crucial point for them — when as a class they, the unenfranchised workers, segregate themselves and dare to stand alone for their special aims in a labor organization. Then they are severed in our mind, as they are in fact, from any voter who might represent them ; and then, above all, they need standing in the political system. For there are just two dependable guar- antees of the effectiveness of an organization of people without wealth, and one is gunpowder and the other is the ballot. 472 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS " Why, the ballot never helped the working classes ! " we hear it exclaimed. " Organization is the sole hope of labor ! " But such ignorance of the history and significance of popular sover- eignty is revealed in the exclamation, that one knows not with what kind of kindergarten instruction to begin to answer it. He has read nothing or he has read in vain of nineteenth-century democracy, who thinks that labor organizations of males could have arrived where they are, in the respect of men and the law, if they had been unable to compel consideration from the State. It is because organization is the sole hope of labor that labor must have its portion of the sovereignty. And it is because, when united together for their special purposes, women lose even that second-hand sovereignty they are elsewhere alleged to have, that they must have a first-hand sovereignty. They must have a genuine guarantee that their needs shall be of consequence to the community they serve. Such certified consideration from the powers of law is both a symbol and a force indispensable to any group, or person, that either desires, or is compelled by fortune, to enter the competitive world. A hearing was recently held at Albany upon a bill to limit the hours of women's labor. Twelve big employers appeared against the bill, stating that the working women do not want it. Five elected delegates from the working-women's organizations ap- peared in favor of the bill, stating that they do want it. No woman appeared against the bill. That was a drawn conflict of two vital interests in the State. The stronger and wealthier and better organized of those interests we clothe with the whole power and prestige of political citizenship, and the knowledge of political methods. The weaker and poorer and less organized we leave with no power and no standing in the community, and no political experience whatever. We let those employers come down to the Capitol and demand what they want from their representatives, and we make those workers come up and beg what they want from somebody else's representatives. The idea of such a hearing upon such a bill ought to disgust every clear-minded American with this old-fashioned masculine pretense at representative government. Such is the argument from the ideal of democracy, theoretic. THE LEGAL AND POLITICAL STATUS OF WOMEN 473 practical, and coercive in the concrete present. Yet, in so far as we are moral, in so far as we are believers in the progressive enrichment of life, we have something more to do than live up to our ideals. We have to illumine and improve them continually. The Athenian youths had a running-match in which they carried torches, and it was no victory to cross the tape with your torch gone out. Such is the race that is set before us. And we may well remember — we in America who scorn the contemplative life — that no amount of strenuousness with the legs will keep a flame burning while you run. You will have to be thinking. And it is out of a thoughtful endeavor, not merely to live up to an ideal of ours, but to develop it greatly, that the suffrage movement derives its chief force. I mean our ideal of woman- hood. It is not expected by the best advocates of this change that women will reform politics or purge society of evil, but it is expected, with reasoned and already proved certainty, that polit- ical knowledge and experience will benefit women. Political responsibility, the character it demands and the recognition it receives, will alter the nature and function of women in society to the improvement of themselves and their husbands and their children and their homes. Upon that ground we can declare that it is of vital importance to the advance of civilized life, not only to give the ballot to those women who want it, but to rouse those women who do not know enough to want it, to a better appre- ciation of the great age in which they live. The Industrial Era — for all the ill we say of it, we must say this great good, that it has made possible and inevitable the physical and social and moral and intellectual liberation of women. The simpUfication of home life through invention and manufac- ture, the growth of large cities with their popular education, and above all the division of labor, have given her a free place in the active world. This fact is the distinctive feature of these ages. To a distant and universal historian — a historian who writes the lives of the people — I beheve that this change in the position of women will appear not only the most striking, but the most excellent achievement of ours. For we could never evolve a heroic race of people on the earth until we gave them a twofold 474 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS inheritance and tradition of active, intelligent virtue. That we have begun to do. And no act of ours at the present time can more urge and certify this great step in the history of life than to give it a political expression and guarantee. Citizenship will rouse and educate women, it will develop our ideal of them ; therefore, it is a dominant necessity of advancing civilization that they have it.^ The relegating of women, outside the period of motherhood, to a life of futile sainthood, with exclusive charge of the goodness of the community and nothing to do with the community's behavior, is a great foolishness at the bottom of our social habits. Of this ancient practice and the quite recent idealization of it, of the damage it has done to men and women and children, no history can give the account. Nor is it easy to establish a sense of this in an age which is permeated by the sentiments of a degenerate feudalism. It may awake the sane and heroic in us, however, to recall the pagan ideal of Plato. He says, in the seventh book of the laws : The legislator ought to be whole and perfect, and not half a man only. He ought not to let the female sex live softly and waste money and have no order of life, while he takes the utmost care of the male sex, and leaves half of life only blessed with happiness when he might have made the whole state happy. Two truths that will be news to many after two thousand years are contained in that sentence. First, that it is just as important ' I cannot refrain from saying a word here in apparent contradiction of my theme. It is addressed to those self-assured reformers who, with small sense for the real in history, find themselves in too fatuous agreement with that theme. There was scope for great character, and life's full experience, in the lot of woman long ago, when many arts and industries and the business management of them, and of a household," fell to her. Spirited and splendidly intelligent women lived then. And they profited by opportunities for growth which are now gone. There are few places to be filled in the modern industrial world equal in variety and amplitude to the place of the " circumscribed" women of old. Hence, in gain- ing, through the development of industry, a great social freedom, women have lost in many cases a valuable breadth of experience. It is, however, lost irretriev- ably, and now we must replace it to what extent we can. We must replace that ample interest and stimulus to growth which women used to find in the home with interests beyond it, and chief among them — as being equally vital — the civic interest. Thus in so far as women are gaining freedom in this era, they demand citizenship as a guarantee of that freedom, and in so far as they are losing a certain breadth of life they require citizenship as a guarantee against narrowness. THE LEGAL AND POLITICAL STATUS OF WOMEN 475 for women to be happy as for men ; and, second, that true hap- piness for the best spirits of either sex does not consist in Hving softly and wasting money and having no order of Hfe, but in regulated purpose and achievement. Compare that elevated utterance with the ideals of the age just behind us. Take a sentence from Martin Luther : The woman's will, as God says, shalT be subject to the man, and he shall be her master ; that is, the woman shall not live according to her free will . . . and must neither begin nor complete anything without the man ; where he is, there must she be, and bend before him as before her master, whom she shall fear, and to whom she shall be subject and obedient. The same morbid tyranny appears, although without the offense of imputing it to God, in Jean Jacques Rousseau, a preacher of the native equality of men : The education of the women should be always relative to the men. To please, to be useful to us, to make us love and esteem them, to educate us ■ when young, to take care of us when grown up, to advise, to console us, to render our lives easy and agreeable : these are the duties of women at all times and what they should be taught in their infancy. In these quotations the ideal woman, although drained of intelligence and power, appears to retain a monopoly of the distinctly Christian virtues, while the man permits himself, upon Biblical or other authority, the bearing of a despot. If you add to these ethics a certain idealization of that powerless woman, a tendency to erect her enforced feebleness into a holy thing, and add also a sentimental subservience of the man to this enslaved queen in matters of no moment, you have the attitude of the leisure class of our own day, our inheritance of 61ite sentiment. It is expressed by Lyman Abbott in his little book about the womanly woman : ^ When the wedding-day comes she has no desire to omit from the service the promise to obey. . . . She wishes not to submit a reluctant will to his, but to make his will her own. She wishes a sovereign and is glad to have found him. ... To give up her home, abandon her name, merge her personality in his keeping — this is her glad ambition, and it swallows up all other ambitions. 1 The Home Builder. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1908. 476 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS In this modem example it is still tyrannically demanded of the woman that she confine herself to the virtues of passivity, but the demand is made in morbid idealism rather than mere brutal bigotry. It ought to be necessary only to point away from these unnatural dogmas to the great judgment of Plato ; it ought to be necessary only to recall the high attitude «f Jesus.^ It wants no argument to support the development of women, for a developed personality is a good that justifies itself. The purpose of life is that it be greatly lived, and it can be greatly lived only by great characters. Yet it can be shown, upon a practical demand, for what special purposes we need women of great spirit. We need them, in the first place, for the cultivation of a certain gentle humility and good sense in their husbands. It is bad for a man's morals to regard himself as the constant purveyor of privilege to a supposedly inferior being. This attitude of con- descending overbearance toward women is one of the chief follies . of that very immature person, the average man of affairs. And when he tries to make up for it with a great deal of sentimental adoration, he makes it only the more foolish. For to worship that which is held inferior in power and wisdom because it excels in innocence of the actual world, is the old and sure way to falsify your moral sentiments. We hear to-day a good deal of protest against that " double standard of morality," which allows men, but not women, to be vicious without loss of standing. The roots of that evil lie in this false attitude. When we have abolished that double standard of morality which allows the " ideal woman " to be ignorant and silly, we shall see the disappearance of that double standard which allows her husband to be profligate and self-centered. When we have less innocence and more virtue in women, we shall have less vice and more virtue in men. Both changes will be for the better, but the latter more obviously. 1 His superiority to His age, and especially to Saint Paul, in wisdom upon this point, is shown negatively in all His recorded dealings with women, so far as I remember, but particularly in that interview at the well with a woman, and a Samaritan, which so astonished His followers. THE LEGAL AND • POLITICAL STATUS OF WOMEN 477 And therefore I put it first, if not greatest, of the uses of the developed woman that she will foster the development of men. But she will also foster the development of the home and the human family, and make that institution truly beautiful in its nature and great in its effect. That such results will ultimately flow from this political reform, is proved by the outcries which oppose it : " You are bringing dissension into our homes ! " " You are striking a blow at the family, which is the cornerstone 'of society ! " — hysterical outcries from persons whose families are already tottering. Certain it is that many of these cornerstones 'of society are tottering. And why are they tottering ? Because there dwell in them triviality and vacuity, which prepare the way of the devil. Who can think that intellectual divergence, disagreement upon a great public question, could disrupt a family worth holding together? On the contrary, nothing save a community of great interests, with agreement and disagreement inevitable, can revive a fading romance. When we have made matrimony synonymous with a high and equal comradeship, we shall have done the one thing that we can do to rescue those. families which are the tot- tering cornerstones of society. A greater service of the developed woman, however, will be her service in motherhood. For we are in extreme need of mothers who have that wisdom which comes from wide interest, and wide activity, and wide experience of the world, and from no other source under the sun. To hear the sacred duty of mother- hood advanced as a reason why woman should not become public- spirited and active and effective, you would think we had no greater duty to our race and nation than to rear in innocence a generation of grown-up babies. Keep your mothers in a state of invalid remoteness from genuine life, and who is to arm the young with efficient virtue.' Are their mothers only to suckle them, and then for their education pass them over to some one who knows life ? To educate a child is to lead him out into the world of his experience ; it is not to propel him with ignorant admonitions from the door. A million lives wrecked at the off-go can bear witness to the failure of that method. I think that the 478 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS best thing you could add to the mothers of posterity is a little of the rough sagacity and humor of public affairs. Such are the great reasons for making the sexes equal in poli- tics ; such have been the reasons ever since the question was first broached in the age of Pericles. It is not merely a demand for justice upon the part of citizens unrecognized. It is not a plan to prevent corrupt practices in politics, or instill into the people's representatives any virtue other than the virtue of representing the whole people. It is an act demanded by the ideal principle to the proof of which our government is devoted. It is the solution, indicated by that principle, of one of the chief problems of our industrial civilization. And it is a heroic step that we can take with nature in .the evolution of a great and symmetrical race. 47. SOME OF THE REASONS AGAINST WOMAN SUFFRAGE.' It has been said that the question of the rights and employ- ment of women should be treated without regard to sex. It should rather be said that those who consider it regardless of sex do not consider it at all. It will not do to exclude from the prob- lem the chief factor in it, and deal, with women only as if they were smaller and weaker men. Yet these have been the tactics of the agitators for female suffrage, and to them they mainly owe what success they have had. Hence their extreme sensitiveness whenever the subject is approached on its most essential side. If it could be treated like other subjects, and discussed fully and freely, the cause of the self-styled reformers would have been hopeless from the first. It is happy for them that the relations of women to society cannot be so discussed without giving just offense. Their most important considerations can be touched but slightly ; and even then offense will be taken. Whatever liberty the best civilization may accord to women, they must always be subject to restrictions unknown to the other 1 By Francis Parkman. Pamphlet issued by the Massachusetts Association Opposed to the Further Extension of Suffrage to Women. This polemic was first published some time between 1876 and 1880. THE LEGAL AND POLITICAL STATUS OF WOMEN 479 sex, and they can never dispense with the protecting influences which society throws about them. A man, in lonely places, has nothing to lose but life and property ; and he has nerve and muscles to defend them. He is free to go whither he pleases, and run what risks he pleases. Without a radical change in human nature, of which the world has never given the faintest sign, women cannot be equally emancipated. It is not a question of custom, habit, or public opinion ; but of an all-pervading force, always formidable in the vast number of men in whom it is not controlled by higher forces. A woman is subject, also, to many other restrictions, more or less stringent, necessary to the main- tenance of self-respect and the respect of others, and yet placing her at a disadvantage, as compared to men, in the active work of the world. All this is mere truism, but the plainest truism may be ignored in the interest of a theory or a " cause." Again, everybody knows that the physical and mental consti- tution of woman is more delicate than in the other sex ; and, we may add, the relations between mind and body are more intimate and subtile. It is true that they are abundantly so in men ; but their harder organism is neither so sensitive to disturbing influ- ences nor subject to so many of them. It is these and other inherent conditions, joined to the engross- ing nature of a woman's special functions, that have determined through all time her relative position. What we have just said — and we might have said much more — is meant as a reminder that her greatest limitations are not of human origin. Men did not make, them, and they cannot unmake them. Through them, God and Nature have ordained that those subject to them shall not be forced to join in the harsh conflicts of the world militant. It is folly to ignore them, or try to counteract them by political and social quackery. They set at naught legislatures and peoples. Here we may notice an idea which seems to prevail among the woman suffragists, that they have argued away the causes which have always determined the substantial relations of the sexes. This notion arises mainly from the fact that they have had the debate very much to themselves. Their case is that of the self-made philosopher who attacked the theory of gravitation, 48o READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS and, because nobody took the trouble to answer him, boasted that he had demoUshed it, and called it an error of the past. The frequent low state of health among American women is a fact as undeniable as it is deplorable. In this condition of things, what do certain women demand for the good of their sex ? To add to the excitements that are wast- ing them other and greater excitements, and to cares too much for their strength other and greater cares. Because they cannot do their own work, to require them to add to it the work of men, and launch them into the turmoil where the most robust some- times fail. It is much as if a man in a state of nervous exhaus- tion were told by his physician to enter at once for a foot race or a boxing match. To hold the man responsible and yet deprive him of power is neither just nor rational. The man is the natural head of the family, and is responsible for its maintenance and order. Hence he ought to control the social and business agencies which are essential to the successful discharge of the trust imposed upon him. If he is deprived of any part of this control, he should be freed also in the same measure from the responsibilities attached to it. Woman suffrage mUst have one of two effects. If, as many of its advocates complain, women are subservient to men, and do nothing but what they desire, then woman suffrage will have no other result than to increase the power of the other sex ; if, on the other hand, women vote as they see fit, without regarding their husbands, then unhappy marriages will be multiplied and divorces redoubled. We cannot afford to add to the elements of domestic unhappiness. One of the chief dangers of popular government is that of in- considerate and rash legislation. In impatience to be rid of one evil, ulterior consequences are apt to be forgotten. In the haste to redress one wrong, a door may be opened to many. This dan- ger would be increased immeasurably if the most impulsive and excitable half of humanity had an equal voice in the making of laws, and in the administration of them. Abstract right would then be made to prevail after a fashion somewhat startling. A lady of intelligence and admirable intentions, an ardent partisan THE LEGAL AND POLITICAL STATUS OF WOMEN 481 on principles of pure humanitarianism, confessed that, in the last presidential election, Florida had given a majority for the Demo- crats ; but insisted that it was right to count it for Hayes, because other States had been counted wrongfully for Tilden. It was im- possible to make her comprehend that government conducted on such principles would end in anarchy. In politics, the virtues of women would sometimes be as dangerous as their faults. If the better class of women flatter themselves that they can control the others, they are doomed to disappointment. They will be outvoted in their own kitchens, without reckoning the agglomerations of poverty, ignorance, and vice, that form a start- ling proportion of our city populations. It is here that the male vote alone threatens our system with its darkest perils. The female vote would enormously increase the evil, for it is often more numerous, always more impulsive and less subject to reason, and almost devoid of the sense of responsibility. Here the bad politician would find his richest resources. He could not reach the better class of female voters, but the rest would be ready to his hand. Three fourths of them, when not urged by some press- ing need or contagious passion, would be moved, not by prin- ciples, but by personal predilections. It is not woman's virtues that would be prominent or influential in the political arena. They would shun it by an invincible repul- sion; and the opposite qualities would be drawn into it. The Washington lobby has given us some means of judging what we may expect from the woman " inside politics." If politics are to be purified by artfulness, effrontery, insensibility, a pushing self- assertion, and a glib tongue, then we may look for regeneration ; for the typical female politician will be richly endowed with all these gifts. Thus accoutered for the conflict, she may fairly hope to have the better of her masculine antagonist. A woman has the in- alienable right of attacking without being attacked in turn. She may strike, but must not be struck, either literally or figuratively. Most women refrain from abusing their privilege of noncombat- ants ; but there are those in whom the sense of impunity breeds the cowardly courage of the virago. 482 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS In reckoning the resources of the female pohticians, there is one which can by no means be left out. None know better than women the potency of feminine charms aided by feminine arts. The woman " inside politics " will not fail to make use of an influence so subtile and strong, and of which the management is peculiarly suited to her talents. If — and the contingency is in the highest degree probable — she is not gifted with charms of her own, she will have no difficulty in finding and using others of her sex who are. If report is to be trusted, Delilah has already spread her snares for the congressional Samson ; and the power before which the wise fail and the mighty fall has been invoked against the sages and heroes of the Capitol. When " woman " is fairly " inside politics," the sensation press will reap a harvest of scandals more lucrative to itself than profitable to public morals. And, as the zeal of one class of female reformers has been, and no doubt will be, largely directed to their grievances in matters of sex, we shall have shrill-tongued discussions of subjects which had far better be let alone. It may be said that the advocates of female suffrage do not look to political women for the purifying of politics, but to the votes of the sex at large. The two, however, cannot be sepa- rated. It should be remembered that the question is not of a limited and select female suffrage, but of a universal one. To limit would be impossible. It would seek the broadest areas and the lowest depths, and spread itself through the marshes and malarious pools of society. Again, one of the chief arguments of the agitators is that gov- ernment without the consent of the governed is opposed to inalienable right. But most women, including those of the best capacity and worth, fully consent that their fathers, husbands, brothers, or friends, shall be their political representatives ; and no exhortation or teasing has induced them to withhold their consent. Nor is this surprising ; for a woman is generally repre- sented in a far truer and more. intimate sense by her male rela- tive than is this relative by the candidate to whom he gives his vote, commonly without knowing him, and often with dissent from many of his views. THE LEGAL AND POLITICAL STATUS OF WOMEN 483 Nothing is more certain than that women will have the suffrage if they ever want it ; for when they want it, men will give it to them, regardless of consequences. A more than readiness on the part of men to conform to the wishes of the other sex is a national trait in America, though whether it would survive the advent of the female politician is matter for reflection. We venture to remind those who demand woman suffrage as a right that, even if it were so, the great majority of intelligent women could judge for themselves whether to exercise it, better than the few who assume to teach them their duty. The agitators know well that, in spite of their persistent impor- tunity, the majority of women are averse to the suffrage. ... A small number of women have spent their time for several decades in ceaseless demands for suffrage, but they have lost their best argu- ment in failing to show that they are prepared to use the franchise when they have got it. A single sound and useful contribution to one side or the other of any question of current politics — the tariff, specie payments, the silver bill, civil-service reform, railroad , monopoly, capital and labor, or a half score of other matters — would have done more for their cause than years of empty agitation. The agitators say that no reason can be given why women should not take a direct part in politics, except that they have never done so. There are other reasons, and strong ones, in abundance. But this particular one is nevertheless good. All usages, laws, and institutions have risen and perished, and risen and perished again. Their history is the history of mutability itself. But, from the earliest records of mankind down to this moment, in every race and every form or degree of civilization or barbarism, the relative position of the sexes has been essen- tially the same, with exceptions so feeble, rare, and transient that they only prove the rule. Such permanence in the foundation of society, while all that rests upon it has passed from change to change, is proof in itself that this foundation lies deep in the essential nature of things. It is idle to prate of the old time that has passed away and the new time that is coming. The " new time " can no more stir the basis of human nature than it can stop the movement of the earth. 484 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS The cause of this permanence is obvious. Women have great special tasks assigned them in the work of life, and men have not. To these tasks their whole nature, moral and physical, is adjusted. There is scarcely a distinctive quality of women that has not a direct or indirect bearing upon them. Everything else in their existence is subordinated to the indispensable functions of continuing and rearing the human race ; and, during the best years of life, this work, fully discharged, leaves little room for any other. Rightly considered, it is a work no less dignified than essential. It is the root and stem of national existence, while the occupations of men are but the leaves and branches. On women of the intelligent and instructed classes depends the future of the nation. If they are sound in body and mind, impart this soundness to a numerous Offspring, and rear them to a sense of responsibility and duty, there are no national evils that we cannot overcome. If they fail to do this their part, then the masses of the coarse and unintelligent, always of rapid increase, will over- whelm us and our institutions. When these indispensable duties are fully discharged, then the suffrage agitators may ask with- better grace, if not with more reason, that they may share the political functions of men. It has. been claimed as a right that woman should vote. It is no right, but a wrong, that a small number of women should im- pose on all the rest political duties which there is no call for their assuming, which they do not want to assume, and which, if duly discharged, would be a cruel and intolerable burden. This pre- tense of the female suffragists was reduced to an absurdity when some of them gravely affirmed that, if a single woman wanted to vote, all the others ought to be required to do so. Government by doctrines of abstract right, of which the French Revolution set the example and bore the fruits, involves enormous danger and injustice. No political right is absolute and of uni- versal application. Each has its conditions, qualifications, and limitations. If these are disregarded, one right collides with another, or with many others. Even a man's right to liberty is subject to the condition that he does not use it to infringe the rights of his neighbors. It is in the concrete, and not in the THE LEGAL AND POLITICAL STATUS OF WOMEN 485 abstract, that rights prevail in every sound and wholesome society. They are applied where they are applicable. A government of glittering generalities quickly destroys itself. The object of gov- ernment is the accomplishment of a certain result, the greatest good of the governed ; and the ways of reaching it vary in differ- ent countries and different social conditions. Neither liberty nor the suffrage are the end ; they are nothing but means to reach it ; and each should be used to the extent in which it is best adapted to its purpose. If the voting of women conduces to the greatest good of the community, then they ought to vote, and otherwise they ought not. The question of female suffrage thus becomes a practical question, and not one of declamation. What would be the results of the general application of the so-called right to vote, a right which, if it exists at §11, must be common to all mankind ? Suppose that the populations of Tur- key, the Sudan, or Zululand were to attempt to exercise it and govern themselves by universal popular suffrage. The conse- quence would be anarchy, and a quick return to despotism as a relief. The same would be the case, in less degree^ among peoples more civilized, yet not trained to self-government by the habits and experience of generations. In fact, there are but a few of the most advanced nations in whom the universal exercise of the pre- tended "inalienable right" to vote would not produce political and social convulsions. The truth is this : If the exercise of the suffrage by any individual or body of individuals involves detri- ment to the whole people, then the right to exercise it does not exist. It is the right and the duty of the people to provide itself with good government, and this great practical right and duty is im- perative and paramount ; whatever conflicts with it must give way. The air-blown theory of inalienable right is unworthy the good sense of the American people. The most rational even of the suffragists themselves have ceased to rely on it. Many women of sense and intelligence are influenced by the fact that the woman-suffrage movement boasts itself a movement of progress, and by a wish to be on the liberal or progressive side. But the boast is unfounded. Progress, to be genuine, must be in 486 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS accord with natural law. If it is not, it ends in failure and retro- gression. To give women a thorough and wholesome training both of body and mind ; to prepare such of them as have strength and opportunity for various occupations different from what they usually exercise, and above all for the practice of medicine, in which we believe that they may render valuable service ; to rear them in more serious views of life and its responsibilities, are all in the way of normal and healthy development : but to plunge them into politics, where they are not needed and for which they are unfit, would be scarcely more a movement of progress than to force them to bear arms and fight. The social power of women has grown with the growth of civilization, but their political power has diminished. In former times and under low social conditions, women have occasionally had a degree of power in public affairs unknown in the foremost nations of the modern world. The most savage tribes on this con- tinent, the Six Nations of New York, listened, in solemn assem- bly, to the counsels of its matrons, with a deference that has no parallel among its civilized successors. The people of ancient Lycia, at a time when they were semibarbarians, gave such power to their women that they were reported to live under a gynecoc- racy, or female government. The word gynecocracy, by the way, belongs to antiquity. It has no application in modern life ; and, in the past, its applications were found, not in the higher developments of ancient society, but in the lower. Four hundred years before Christ, the question of giving political power to women was agitated among the most civilized of ancient peoples, the Athenians, and they would not follow the example of their barbarian neighbors. The advocates of woman suffrage have ridiculed the idea of any connection between voting and the capacity to fight. Their attitude in this matter shows the absence of reflection on ques- tions of government, or the inability to form rational judgment upon them. In fact, it is with nearly all of them a matter, not of reason, but of sentiment. The human race consists of two equal parts, the combatant and the noncombatant, and these parts are separated by the line of sex. It is true that some men are permanently disabled from THE LEGAL AND POLITICAL STATUS OF WOMEN 487 fighting, and others may be disabled in one year or one month, and fit to bear arms in the next ; but the general fact remains that men are the fighting half of humanity, and women are not. Fundamental laws are made in reference to aggregates of persons, and not to individual exceptions ; and it would be absurd to exact a surgeon's certificate of military competency from every voter at the polls. It is enough that he belongs to a body which, as a whole, can and will fight. The question remains. What has this to do with voting ? It has a great deal to do with it, and above all in a government purely popular. Since history began, no government ever sustained itself long unless it could command the physical force of the nation ; and this, whether the form of government was despotism, constitu- tional monarchy, or democracy. The despot controls the army which compels the people to obey ; the king and parliament con- trol the force of the kingdom, and malcontents dare not rise in insurrection till they think they have drawn away an equal or greater share of it. Finally, the majority in a democratic republic feels secure that its enactments will take effect, because the defeated minority, even if it does not respect law, will respect a force greater than its own. But suppose the majority to consist chiefly of women. Then legality would be on one side and power on the other. The majority would have the law, and the minor- ity the courage and strength. Hence, in times of political excite- ment, when passions were roused and great interests were at stake, the majority, that is, the legal authority, would need the help of a standing army. Without such support the possession of the suffrage by the noncombatant half of the nation would greatly increase the chances of civil discord. Once in our history a minority rose against the majority, in the belief that it could out- fight it. This would happen often if the minority, as in the sup- posed case of woman suffrage, had not only the belief but the certainty that it could master the majority. It may not be credit- able to human nature that if we would have a stable government it is necessary to keep the balance of power on the side of law ; but the business of government is to shape itself to the actual, and not the ideal or millennial, condition of mankind. 488 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS Suppose, again, a foreign war in which the sympathies of our women were enhsted on one side or the other. Suppose them to vote against the judgment of the men that we should take part in it ; or, in other words, that their male fellow citizens should fight whether they liked it or not. Would the men be likely to obey .' . There is another reason why the giving of the suffrage to women would tend to civil discord. In the politics of the future, the predominant, if not the engrossing, questions will be to all appearance those of finance and the relations of labor and, capital. From the nature of their occupations, as well as other causes, women in general are ignorant of these matters, and not well fitted to deal with them. They require an experience, a careful attention, a deliberation and coolness of judgment, and a freedom from passion, so rare that at the best their political treatment is full of difficulty and danger. If these qualities are rare in men, they are still more so in women, and feminine instinct will not in the present case supply their place. The peculiar danger of these questions is that they raise class animosities, and tend to set the poor against the rich and the rich against the poor. They become questions of social antagonism. Now, most of us have had occasion to observe how strong the social rivalries and ani- mosities of women are. They far exceed those of men. If, in the strife between labor and capital, which, without great self- restraint on both sides, is likely to be a fierce one, women should be called to an active part, the effect would be like throwing pitch and resin into the fire. The wives and daughters of the poor would bring into the contest a wrathful jealousy and hate against the wives and daughters of the rich, far more vehement than the corresponding passions in their husbands and brothers. The real issue is this : Is the object of government the good of the governed, or is it not.? A late writer on woman suffrage says that it is not. According to her, the object of government is to give his or her rights to everybody. Others among the agitators do not venture either on this flat denial or this brave assertion, but only hover about them with longing looks. Virtu- ally they maintain that the object of government is the realization of certain ideas or theories. They believe in principles, and so THE LEGAL AND POLITICAL STATUS OF WOMEN 489 do we ; they believe in rights, and so do we. But as the sublime may pass into the ridiculous, so the best principles may be trans- ported into regions of folly or diabolism. There are minds so constituted that they can never stop till they have run every virtue into its correlative weakness or vice. Government should be guided by principles ; but they should be sane and not crazy, sober and not drunk. They should walk on sohd ground, and not roam the clouds hanging to a bag of gas. Rights may be real or unreal. Principles may be true or false ; but even the best and truest cannot safely be pushed too far, or in the wrong direction. The principle of truth itself may be carried, into absurdity. The saying is old that truth should not be spoken at all times ; and those whom a sick conscience worries into habitual violation of the maxim are imbeciles and nuisances. Religion may pass into morbid enthusiasm or wild fanaticism, and turn from a blessing to a curse. So the best of political principles must be kept within bounds of reason, or they will work mischief. That greatest and most difficult of sciences, the science of government, dealing with interests so delicate, compli- cated, and antagonistic, becomes a perilous guide when it deserts the ways of temperance. The suffragists' idea of government is not practical, but utterly unpractical. It is not American, but French. It is that govern- ment of abstractions and generalities which found its realization in the French Revolution, and its apostle in the depraved and half-crazy man of genius, Jean Jacques Rousseau. The French had an excuse for their frenzy in the crushing oppression they had just flung off and in their inexperience of freedom. We have no excuse. Since the nation began we have been free and our liberty is in danger from nothing but its own excesses. Since France learned to subject the ideas of Rousseau to the principles of stable freedom embodied in the parliamentary government, of England and in our own republicanism, she has emerged from alternate tumult and despotism to enter the paths of hope and progress. The government of abstractions has been called, sometimes the a priori, and sometimes the sentimental, method. We object to 490 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS this last term, unless it is carefully defined. Sentiments, like principles, enter into the life of nations as well as that of indi- viduals ; and they are vital to both. But they should be healthy, and not morbid ; rational, and not extravagant. It is not common sense alone that makes the greatness of states ; neither is it senti- ments and principles alone. It is these last joined with reason, reflection, and moderation. Through this union it is that one small island has become the mighty mother of nations ; and it is because we ourselves, her greatest offspring, have chosen the paths of Hampden, Washington, and Franklin, and not those of Rousseau, that we have passed safe through every danger, and become the wonder and despair of despotism. Out of the wholesome fruits of the earth, and the staff of life itself, the perverse chemistry of man distills delirious vapors, which, condensed and bottled, exalt his brain with glorious fan- tasies, and then leave him in the mud. So it is with the unhappy suffragists. From the sober words of our ancestors they extract the means of mental inebriety. Because the fathers of the repub- lic gave certain reasons to emphasize their creed that America should not be taxed because America was not represented in the British Parliament, they cry out that we must fling open the flood- gates to vaster tides of ignorance and folly, strengthen the evil of our system and weaken the good, feed old abuses, hatch new ones, and expose all our large cities — we speak with deliberate conviction — to the risk of anarchy.^ Neither Congress, nor the States, nor the united voice of the whole people could permanently change the essential relations of the sexes. Universal female suffrage, even if decreed, would undo itself in time ; but the attempt to establish it would work deplorable mischief. The question is, whether the persistency of a few agitators shall plunge us blindfold into the most reckless of all experiments ; whether we shall adopt this supreme device for developing the defects of women, and demolish their real 1 Counting Illinois, in which women were in 1913 granted the right to vote for presidential electors and for statutory municipal, township, and county officers, there are now (19 16) over 4,000,000 women in the United States alone who have the franchise. — Ed. THE LEGAL AND POLITICAL STATUS OF WOMEN 491 power to build an ugly mockery instead. For the sake of woman- hood, let us hope not. In spite of the effect on the popular mind of the incessant repetition of a few trite fallacies, and in spite of the squeamishness that prevents the vast majority averse to the movement from uttering a word against it, let us trust that the good sense of the American people will vindicate itself against this most unnatural and pestilent revolution. In the full and normal development of womanhood lie the best interests of the world. Let us labor earnestly for it ; and, that we may not labor in vain, let us save women from the barren perturbations of American politics. Let us respect them ; and, that we may do so, let us pray for deliverance from female suffrage. CHAPTER XII THE MODERN WOMAN MOVEMENT : ECONOMIC, SOCIAL, AND ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS Woman and the occupations, 493. — Effect of society life and fashion upon women, 509. — How home conditions react upon the family, 521. — Woman service, 527. — The economic dependence of women, 528. — The postgraduate mother, 535. [The statutory modifications of the common law, alluded to in the preceding chapter,^ which gradually gave to women a legal personality, with the right to own and control property, make contracts, to sue and be sued, to devise property by will, etc., have been due in large part, no doubt, to the development of an elementary sense of justice toward women, but this was stimulated greatly by the changed economic condition of women brought about by the Industrial Revolution. The transformation of meth- ods of production from the old domestic system to the factoty regime, bringing in its train as it necessarily did the transference of millions of unmarried girls and women from the unpaid in- dustry of the old industrial household to the paid work of the factoty and shop, is the historical cause of much that is of fun- damental significance in the present woman movement. It is one reason, for instance, why the argument for equal suffrage has shifted from the early emphasis on natural rights to the modern plea for suffrage as a social expediency and a social justice in view of the fact that so many millions of women are at work outside the home and under conditions that demand the franchise as a matter of protection. The entrance of women into industty, mercantile and clerical pursuits, and the professions constitutes one of the most profound economic and social changes in histoty. It has given rise to a set of conditions which it is the task of those actively engaged 1 Page 447. 492 THE MODERN WOMAN MOVEMENT 493 in finding solutions for the many-faceted labor problem to correct — long hours, less than subsistence wages, lack of organization and poor bargaining capacity, unsanitary and unfair conditions of work, and the like. Into these specific matters, despite their present signal importance to the welfare of the working women and to society as a whole, this book does not attempt to enter. The change in woman's economic status has far-reaching conse- quences, which must carry those who are concerned not only with immediate problems but with the future long-run develop- ment and welfare of society far beyond the confines of the ques- tion of pecuniary justice. Attention is here therefore the rather directed to certain suggestions as to the social and ethical conse- quences of the old domestic traditions and of the new industrial opportunities (or lack of them, as the case may be) with regard to the character and ambitions and social economy of girls and women ; to the larger psychological and ethical influence of work outside the home ; to the deeply important question as to whether it is possible for women in any large number to combine and harmonize the function of maternity with a specialized economic work other than housekeeping ; and to the ethics of economic dependence and economic independence, respectively. Thought along these lines should not only make clear the economic and ethical causes which lie back of the power and breadth of the present complex and not wholly unified feminist movement, but lead to some basis of scientific and ethical judgment as to the aim and content of the movement.] 48. WOMAN AND THE OCCUPATIONS 1 The women who are interested in suffrage for their sex, and who have shown themselves keen in utilizing all the arguments in favor of this movement, have grasped at the idea set forth by anthropologists that the women of early society occupied, a promi- nent place in the political life of those times. And it is certainly true that the women of savage and barbarous societies and even 1 By W. I. Thomas. Adapted from the American Magazine, September, 1909, pp. 463-470. 494 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS the women of our own historical times have sometimes had a more honorable and functional if not a more romantic position than the women of to-day. But I notice that the women who are using this argument for the advancement of woman's suffrage are ignoring the fact that the women had even a more important relation to the occupational than to the political life of those times. It is true that the women of the Wyandot tribe of Indians con- stituted four fifths of the civil council of that tribe, but they had no voice in the military council, and the recognition which they hid was due to the fact that about four fifths of the tribal indus- tries were in their hands, in addition to the main care of the children. Tacitus states that the ancient Germans "consulted their women in all grave matters," but it is also true that in these times the women performed all the labors which built up society, except only the fighting. Before the Roman law had modified the German life, the woman was in possession of all the house- hold goods, and in fact these could be inherited only by women, never by men. In somewhat later times, as we see from a col- lection of laws called the Sachsenspiegel, the man's goods were his sword, his harness, and his horse. As a further concession he had two dishes, a towel, a tablecloth, and a piece of bedding, which had originally been his war blanket. The women of these times built the houses, cultivated and owned the land, and did the manufacturing, with such assistance as they could get from the men. They created the goods, and men had as yet devised no means of dislodging them from the position of importance to which their labors had elevated them. No one would wish to restore a state of society where the women bore the whole industrial burden, but it is noticeable that the ef- fect of these varied occupational activities on early women was excellent, both in respect to their character and their social posi- tion. They were functional, strong, and normal, and they had a dignity and respect worthy of their work. And it is also signifi- cant that wherever women have some definite occupational inter- ests in the society of to-day, they still retain this real dignity and respect, and they retain them nowhere else. In colonial and frontier life, and likewise in the poor and the not-very-rich classes THE MODERN WOMAN MOVEMENT 495 of society in general, woman is still functional and is more likely to be accepted as an individual. . . . The most pitiful and the most just cry which I have heard from women comes from peas- ant Russia. The women of the three villages of Tver recently sent a message to the Duma begging that they should have the same rights as the men. "Till now," they said, "even though we were beaten sometimes, still we decided various matters to- gether. . . . Have pity on us, in the name of God ! We had formerly the same rulers as our husbands. Now our husbands are going to write the laws for us." These women are not sup- ported by their husbands and they cannot apprehend why they should be ruled by them. Women have lost their importance in society and their natu- ral character as they have been withdrawn from the real work of society, and they have been particularly and wholly excluded from politics because politics has been and continues to be a continua- tion of those fighting activities with which women have never had anything to do. And they will regain and maintain their normal position in society in just the proportion that they regain their relation to the activities of society. 'The glorification of fighting, with its attendant contempt for labor, is one of the worst turns taken in the development of our society. As early as Tacitus the German warrior considered it " a dull and stupid thing to painfully accumulate by the sweat of his brow what might be won with a little blood." And some centuries later we find the sentiment commonly accepted that work was not " honest " in a " gentleman." War was the gentlemanly occu- pation — the "great game" it is constantly called in the old literature — and not only the laborer but the scholar, the "clerk" as they called him, was "a thing of naught." This sentiment was also the direct forerunner of that distemper which we call romanticism toward women. The lines of Guido Guinicelli, Before the gentle heart in Nature's scheme Love was not, nor the gentle heart ere Love, express the general sentiment that refined feeling and passion were a monopoly of the aristocracy, and it was demanded that 496 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS « the women of the aristocracy should be as delicate as this senti- ment. The true lady was the prize of the true gentleman, and that must remain her only occupation. But in the meantime our ideas of value have been revolution- ized. We now appreciate intelligence more highly than fighting, and creative activity more than "conspicuous leisure," and we have a growing conception of the dignity of labor. In America, particularly, the conception of the value and even the obligation of labor has grown until the son of the rich man is beginning to be ashamed not to work, just as he was formerly ashamed to work. The old feehng has survived only in the tendency to ex- empt women from labor where this is economically possible, to keep them at any rate as the sign of an aristocratic grade. We are still ashamed of the mention of work in connection with the women for whom we are responsible. At the same time the spirit of democracy and individualism is not a thing of applicability to men alone. Without any logical design we have been educating our girls as well as our boys, and women are beginning to wish to resume their personality in pre- cisely the same way that " the masses " yearned for this and achieved it. Indeed, the well-born or educated women who have so far freed themselves from habit and tradition as to enter the world as individuals, no longer find any serious opposition, and they are succeeding in the arts and professions at least as well as men would succeed if they had been to the same degree de- prived of personality and limited in opportunity. But the question of woman's work is no longer one of senti- ment alone. Under our individualistic and competitive indus- trial system men are no longer able to keep their women or even their children at home. Both Mr. Booth and Mr. Rowntree esti- mate that out of a population of 40,000,000 in Great Britain, 1 2,000,000 are either under or on the poverty line. The women and even the children are forc;ed to work, because the present organization of society is no longer able to feed them. And just here transpires one of the saddest chapters in human history. The machine which man invented to relieve him of labor and to produce value more rapidly has led to the factory system of THE MODERN WOMAN MOVEMENT 497 industry, and the women and children are forced to follow the work to the factory. The machine is a wonderful expression of man's ingenuity, of his effort to create an artificial workman, to whom no wages have to be paid, but it falls just short of human intelligence. It has no discriminative judgment, no control of the work as a whole. It can only finish the work handed out to it, but it does this with superhuman energy. The manufacturer has, then, to purchase enough intelligence to supplement the machine, and he secures as low a grade of this as the nature of the machine will permit. The child, the immigrant, and the woman are frequently adequate to furnish that oversight and judgment necessary to supplement the activity of the machine, and the more ignorant and necessitous the human being the more the profit to the in- dustry. But now comes the ironical and pitiful part. The ma- chine which was invented to save human energy, and which is so great a boon when the individual controls it, is a terrible thing when it controls the individual. Power-driven, it has almost no limit to its speed, and no limit whatever to its endurance, and it has no nerves. When, therefore, under the pressure of business competition the machine is speeded up and the girl operating it is speeded up to its pace, we have finally a situation in which the machine destroys the worker. Mrs. Kelley says of the sewing trade : " In the best factories the speed of the sewing machines has been increased so that they set, in 1905, twice as many stitches in a minute as they did in 1899. Machines which formerly carried one needle now carry from two to ten, sewing parallel seams. . . . Thus a girl using one of these machines is now responsible for twice as many stitches at the least and for twenty times as many at the most as in 1899. Some girls are not capable of the sustained speed in- volved in this improvement, and are no longer eligible for this occupation. Those who continue in the trade are required to feed twice as many garments to the machine as were required five years ago. The strain upon their eyes is, however, far more than twice what it was before the improvement. In the case of ma- chines carrying multiple needles this is obvious ; but it is true of the single-needle machines also. It is the duty of the operator 498 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS to watch the needle so intently as to discern the irregularity caused by a broken thread or broken needle, and to stop the machinery by pressing an electric button before any threads are cut by the broken needle or any stitches of the seam are omitted because of the broken thread. Now when the machine was 2,200 stitches a minute, as was the case in 1899, the writer, whose eyes are unusually keen, could see the needle when the machine was in motion. At the present speed the writer, whose eyes have remained unimpaired, is wholly unable to see the needle, discerning merely the steady gleam of light where it is in motion. To meet this difficulty ... it is now the custom to suspend an electric light directly above the machine, so that a ray strikes the needle. The strain upon the eyes of the operators is alrriost in- tolerable, and a further winnowing out of the women eligible for this occupation follows." When a girl cannot keep the pace she is thrown out. The manufacturer cannot afford to keep a girl at a costly machine when the machine is not producing at a maximum rate. This would be to have a part of his plant lying idle. The manufacturers say : "If a girl cannot earn six dollars a week at machine work, after she has been doing it from six weeks to three months, she is not adapted to the work, and it is better to put another girl at her machine." And on the other hand, a comment frequently made by the girls is : " She got too slow. She could n't keep up with her machine any longer." It amounts to this, that the girl can earn a living wage, if she is unusually gifted, until she is worn out. It is, I beUeve, considered good business policy in some cases to work a horse to death, to wear him out fast, and take another. Certainly it would be a good policy to do so if horses had a very trifling value and could be had in unlimited quantities. At any rate it is good business to wear girls out in this way, for the initial outlay in their case is nothing at all, and they can be had in un- limited numbers. Professor James's theory of "getting your second wind," and " tapping unused reservoirs of energy " is doubtless sound psychology, up to the point where he leaves it, but there is a limit to it, and evidently working under great strain is advantageous only if the strain is relieved by considerable THE MODERN WOMAN MOVEMENT 499 intervals of rest and recuperation. This is the condition under which the artist worlcs preferably, and is the most favorable one for creative work. But the girl paced by the machine has no considerable interval, and is doomed to break down, or to be pushed to a lower economic level. Her only other chance is mar- riage. The machine is the most effective device for "speeding up," because it puts more strain on the worker than he can put on himself without it, but in all "piecework" the operator is under heavy strain. There are factories in Chicago where the rate of pay per hundred pieces is one Cent. Of course, the work passes through many hands, and each operation is simple, but a hundred operations of any kind for one cent is a great deal. A humane employer in Chicago recently looked into the case of a girl who had quit work in his factory, and found that she had been earning ninety-eight cents a week. And machine or no machine, our treatment of the working girl, particularly th'e fac- tory girl, is scandalously out of harmony not only with our roman- ticism but with our plain human sentiments. I will not go into the budget which I have before me of a French working girl whose annual wage is ^80, nor refer to the small earnings of the English factory girls whose wage is lower than that in this country, and usually about half that received by men for the same work. " In Perth and Bungay, for instance, the women put in a bill at the end of each week, worked out on the men's scale. The cashier then divides the total by two, and pays the women accord- ingly." In London women are still working nineteen hours for one shilling, and shirts are still being made for seven and a half pence per dozen. These distressing conditions are well known, and they are actually a source of great concern to employers. The employer under the competitive system is as helpless as the operative. He does not profit by the low wages, but the pub- lic, the "innocent bystander," gets the benefit. The employer of the girl who had received only ninety-eight cents a week allowed the operatives on a large contract of long standing to run their wages up to ^16 and ;^i8 a week (they had become so expert in the course of time), with result that another firm bid in the con- tract, amounting to many thousands of dollars annually. 500 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS Admitting, then, that conditions are very bad in certain of the occupations and that they are particularly and horribly bad for woman, is it wise for her to push out into this world ? Is it not rather a world with which she should have nothing to do except to stay out of it or get away from it as fast as possible ? Or ad- mitting that certain women are being forced into work and even that they have complicated the industrial situation, should not the women of leisure and social position, who are economically pro- vided for, refrain from entering or meddling ? Well, this is not fundamentally a part of the woman question at all, except to the extent that women have always been subject to exploitation by men, and that they are particularly helpless at present because our traditions and their training make them of little economic worth when they are thrown on the world. A woman has no safe and recognized place in society except as a dependent. But the whole question is broader than woman. When we come to examine society as a whole, and particularly our great industrial centers — the long hours and inadequate pay for both men and women, the sweating system, " unsanitary housing, poisonous sewage, contaminated water, infant mortality, the spread of contagion, adulterated food, impure milk, smoke-laden air, ill-ventilated factories, dangerous occupations, juvenile crime, un- wholesome crowding, prostitution, and drunkenness" — we must conclude that no one of these conditions stands alone, but all are symptoms of a very bad general social situation — that society has not been looked after in these points wisely, affectionately, and honestly. This is due partly to greed, partly to helpless ignorance, and partly to sheer neglect of what was no one's particular business. . One of the standard arguments of those who believe in the low and essentially unimprovable mental condition of the savage is that he has no foresight, that he kills the emu chicken when it weighs only three pounds, that he fails to throw back the small fry when fishing, that with him it is either a feast or a famine, and that in general he thoughtlessly depletes his environment. But when we talk in this way we fail to recognize that a sense of thrift, an ability to spare and save, and to postpone an imme- diate satisfaction for the sake of improved conditions in the THE MODERN WOMAN MOVEMENT 501 future, is one of the hardest and latest lessons learned by the white race, and one only incompletely learaed as yet. How much game have we spared in order to let it grow up ? The wanton destruction of game and wholesale denudation of forests in this country represent heedlessness on a scale unexampled among the savages. And while we have learned the lesson of economy in a particularistic and industrial way we have failed to develop the idea that the individual has a social value which we cannot afford to destroy, and that in using up the Ufe of the working girl and in the tolerance of an evil and destructive environment we are playing havoc with our own property. In certain of our great in- dustrial organizations, indeed, the employer is already beginning to recognize that it is bad business to put the employee under an unendurable strain. The engineers on the eighteen-hour trains of the Pennsylvania road between Chicago and New York work only ten days in a month, and only reasonable hours on those days. The operative in this case is a valuable part of a valuable plant, not easily replaced and too precious to be wan- tonly destroyed or worked out in the shortest possible time. By taking a temporary and shortsighted advantage of the nu- merosity, cheapness, and helplessness of women and girls we are in fact doing business on a ruinous principle. I do not believe that anyone in the world has a program that would immediately set these matters right, nor that any committee of persons could offhand formulate such a program. The only way is to work point by point, by legislation, sentiment, experiment, education, by the development of good will, and the substitution of simpler standards of living among the more -fortunate classes. And I think that even more women than men, entirely uninvited and often unwelcome, have been working for some years at these questions, and they have displayed a wonderful amount of energy, good will, patience, and ability. As a matter of fact that occupa- tion or rather that complex of activities which would conserve those interests of society so sadly neglected by politics has been called by. Miss Addams "civic housekeeping." She says: "A city is in many respects a great business corporation, but in other respects it is enlarged housekeeping. If American cities have 502 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS failed in the first, partly because officeholders have carried with them the predatory instinct learned in competitive business, and cannot help 'working a good thing,' when they have an oppor- tunity, may we not say that city housekeeping has failed partly because women, the traditional housekeepers, have not been con- sulted as to its multiform activities ? The men of the city have been carelessly indifferent to much of this civic house- keeping, as they have always been indifferent to the details of the household." It is idle, indeed, to speak of the exclusion of women from the occupations. They are entering them from the top and from the bottom. The ill-conditioned are being forced into them and the well-conditioned — those whom men have been educating while deploring the use of their education — are already entering them in considerable numbers at the top. And they are finding new and characteristic ways of giving to society that reserve of affec- tion ancj nurture which they have heretofore reserved for the child and the home. In the year 1900 there were more than 5,000,000 women gain- fully employed in the United States (as against 23,753,836 men),^ the rate of increase between 1890 and 1900 of the number of women so employed was much greater than the corresponding increase for the employment of men (for women 32.8 per cent ; for men 21.9 per cent), and the number of women gainfully employed increased more rapidly in the decade than the female population. So, whether we wish it or not, the old order is al- ready changing rapidly. It is too late to theorize on this point. It means simply that the old idea that all women should live on the activities of men and should limit their own interests to the bearing and rearing of children has gone to pieces. , But what of the home .? Shall the married woman and the mother undertake anything seriously outside the home > Yes, I think it is psychologically, if not economically, necessary that she should be no exception. Let us for a moment assume that woman's participation in industry and the professions is of no 1 The number of women gainfully employed in 1910 was 8,075,772, as against 30,091,564 men. — Ed. THE MODERN WOMAN MOVEMENT 503 importance from the economic standpoint, that men and machines are capable of producing enough wealth for the family. And let us recognize that from the human standpoint nature has been very unfair to woman, that her life is not a thing of her own but is imperiously demanded by the coming generation, that "bearing the torch of life " is a more important social function than nature has intrusted to any man, and that there is nothing good enough for woman within the power of man to confer on her. Yet in- carceration within the home is the greatest curse that could over- take the nervous system and the mind of woman. The question is, in fact, fundamentally one of psychology, and from this standpoint there is no doubt that our girls and women are viciously treated, or, let us say, they are in a vicious psycho- logical situation, for nobody bears them any ill will. A principle firmly established in modern psychology is that there can be no high order of intelligence without a preponderating number of voluntary acts. The lower forms of life have no real choice. They have habitual reactions to a somewhat uniform outside world, but the outside world controls them, in the sense that they are obliged to respond to all stimulations. The moth does not plan to fly into the flame, but it is drawn in as the iron filing is drawn by the magnet. It has no mental machinery and no will to choose or resist — and this we may call the fatalistic stage of animal life. At the other end of the scale, the human mind legislates on all suggestions coming from without. And it is only on this principle of selecting some stimulations and rejecting others, of sitting still and picking and choosing, that you have freedom of action, and a situation in which the individual controls the outside world instead of being controlled by it. Now it is possible to view the whole of human history from the standpoint of the proportion of willed over unwilled acts, of the preponderance of liberty over authority. The savage is pop- ularly regarded as enjoying a state of freedom and irresponsibility, but it would be possible to show, as it has often been shown, that he is the most unfree person in the world. His obligation to the customs of his society, his magical ideas of what he must do and what he may not do, and his positive horror of departure from 504 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS the usual are very nearly absolutely binding. He views all non- conformity from the same standpoint of prejudice and habituation from which we view such a matter as carrying food to the mouth with a knife. All of his acts have been socially predetermined for him. With the growth of great states and great religious sys- tems, — with their absolutism, despotism, aristocracy, omniscience, omnipotence, predestination, foreordination, will of god, will of the king, will of the pope, will of the priest, will of the master, — we have the power of choice assumed by a few members of so- ciety and negatived and paralyzed in the minds of the masses. The most attractive formulation of this practice in politics was that the best form of government is a wise and benevolent despotism, and that the history of the world is the fulfilling of the will of God. For these views we have substituted others — that the best govern- ment is a government of the people, for the people, by the people, and that the history of the world is a record of the mind and will of man. And we have gone so far as revolutions to establish these newer ideals. To man we grant a free personality and a free choice, but to woman we conceded only the status of infancy and tutelage — affectionate but psychologically as vicious as political or ecclesiastical absolutism. There is a comfortable side to the theory that the wise and beneficent ruler will see that you suffer- nothing in this world, on the sole condition of your obedience, and that holy men will mediate for you an eternal bliss on the sole condition of conform- ity to the will and doctrine of the church, and this sentiment of attaining the good for others, of conferring it on them instead of letting them work it out for themselves, has lived on in our patronage of the poor, of the workingman and of woman, even after our formal repudiation of the principle. But this attitude is a slur on the mind, and its persistence in any form is an ad- mission that society has failed to provide conditions within which the mind can freely realize itself. The ideally wise and sound choice is one in which all pos- sible alternatives are considered. Any choice, in fact, involves the rejection of all other possible choices which present them- .'Selves, and consequently the most important principle in mental THE MODERN WOMAN MOVEMENT 505 life and the essential to wisdom is to know the conditions of the world as completely as possible. In this sense there is no such thing as a private mind. The mind must be open to all sorts of intrusions from the outside world. There is no possibility of de- termining beforehand what information may go into the formation of a judgment, and there is the certainty that if full information is absent the judgment will be imperfect. The content of the mind all comes, in fact, from the outside, and the mind must be open to the outside world in all possible ways — in freedom of motion, in freedom of conversation, and in freedom to explore all territories — even the outlawed territory of sex. It would be possible also to go back to the .beginning and show that the grade of mind of any species or organism corresponds with its restricted or free power of exploration. The vegetable which does not move at all has no mind at all. The animal mind, which is closed to all but the simple and monotonous stimulations connected with food and sex, remains a simple and monotonous type of mind. That period of history when the mind was not free to explore certain questions is called the "dark ages." And the period of democracy, which is from the psychological standpoint the period of free mental exploration, is also the period of invention, not alone of the mechanical invention which is so conspicuous, but of such inventions as free public schools, preventive medicine, eugenics, and the evolutionary view of the world. Nor is the case of illustrious men who have withdrawn them- selves from society and worked in seclusion an exception to the law that the mind is not a private matter. The materials of knowledge are so vast and so various that out of mere economy of attention and time we have been compelled to resort to spe- cialization, in which a man is supposed to know "something of everything and everything of something." The specialist is often very ill-informed about things in general, and our schools attempt to anticipate this defect by supplying him with a body of "cul- tural " materials before allowing him to specialize. But the nar- rowest specialist is not only filUng in his consciousness through experiment, reflection, and classification, but he lives in a world of books which are a short cut to the opinions of millions of 5o6 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS men. He can virtually converse with any man, living or dead, who has anything of importance to say to him, by resort to the printed page. And it is even an economy of time to do this through books rather than conversation. Mental improvement in both the individual and the race as a whole is closely associated with the development of the occupa- tions. The mind is a product of activity, and the occupations are merely a formulation of activities along definite and habitual lines. The mind of man, indeed, is not radically improved, but the intensive and unremitting application of attention by men to special subjects gives in the aggregate more, and more varied, results than could be had if the attention of all played loosely over the whole field. The progress of the world is dependent on the emergence of what we call useful ideas, and these ideas almost invariably emerge in connection with the occupations. We cannot control or predict their appearance, we can only increase the number of chances of their appearance by opening the field of competition to the maximum number of minds. Such an idea as electricity sets thousands to work along lines which they would otherwise never have entered, or gives a particular and socially valuable direction to their efforts. And thus the sum of knowledge is built up through those specialized pursuits which we call occupa- tional. To exclude women from the occupations is therefore not only to exclude them from those forms of activity which most stimulate the mind, but to deprive society of the benefits which would follow both from their work and from those ideas which they would thus be put in the way of developing. And if there is any value in that variety of personality which compels men to different fields of interest, it is evident that women, differing from men in personality more than men differ from one another, are sure to contribute unanticipated results. Their admission is to increase the probability of the emergence of genius. But I do not contend that women should go into the occupa- tions so much because the occupations need them, though that is also true, as because of the need women have of the occupa- tions. No one is altogether either male or female. The life of THE MODERN WOMAN MOVEMENT 507 men and women corresponds more than it differs. There is no mental function absent in either sex. The occupations represent modes in which the mind expresses itself. They are the moral field, the field of will, of experience, of practice, and of concrete purpose. In this sense work is not a duty but a right. Society may not only claim service from the individual, but the individual may claim the right to function. At present the strain on women even in the well-to-do families is intolerable. Their isolation, the triviality of their interests, and their dependence on the will of another make them nervous and intensely personal, and merely to relieve the tension, if for noth- ing else, they should prepare themselves for an occupation which they can practice before marriage, continue to practice if they do not enter marriage, which they may intermit in those intervals when the child is entirely helpless, and which they can resume when the child is adult and departed. Such a preparation would not only overcome their feeling of dependence but would tend to make their choice in marriage more rational. And I do not think the ideals of eugenics can be realized until woman is as free as man in the choice of a mate. Nor would I give a very definite meaning to the term occupa- tion. There is no possible doubt that the lines containing the occupations will continue to shift and that the participation of women will continue to create new occupations. If the women of enforced leisure, for instance, would shift their interests from dress and fashionable functions and standards, that would consti- tute an occupation engaging their attention for some years. It is even certain that motherhood will become one of the occupations. The occupations imply a preparation and a purpose, and we can- not regard reproduction and the traditional home life of women as occupational, becaus^ mere reproduction is an organic act, fre- quently inadvertent, and the traditional home life has involved no adequate preparation for motherhood. We may fairly set down eugenic motherhood among the occupations, but even then a part of the mother's occupation will be to continue her concrete pur- poses and practices in the world at large, and to make excursions from the home for the sake of the home. So8 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS And, after all, it is not fair play to say that woman's whole life is demanded by the child, and let it go at that. Already the nurture of the child is carried on to a large extent outside of the home. And if those newer ideals of the home and the sentiment of eugenics to which I have referred are realized, if the child is not only in theory but in practice recognized as the main interest of society, the family and society will more and more assist the mother in his nurture. We must remember also that when women are naturally reared they have an astonishing amount of energy. The records of savage society and of peasant life still demonstrate this, as did the home before the coming of the machine. It may seem ungracious to say so, but we indulge a good deal in what the rhetoricians call the " pathetic fallacy " in connection with the bearing of children by women. Nature has given them an energy and disposition in proportion to this very serious function, so that under normal conditions it may be classed among the pleasures, almost among the intoxications. A normal woman can bear children and still retain more energy and more tenacity of life than nature usually gives to man. The close asso- ciation which we find between marriage and the abandonment of concrete purposes is not therefore a sacrifice to motherhood but a habit. The ordinary woman instantly and utterly abandons all occupational preparation or practice at the altar, and this is quite aside from the anticipation of children. And the university women succumb almost as completely. Women indeed have im- proved in their mental attitude toward life since the early Vic- torian period to this extent, that they actually make a preparation for life, which they can use in case they do not accept marriage. But they keep only a wavering eye on the occupational outlook as a makeshift in case of their failure to realize on their matri- monial anticipations. Or at any rate when marriage is proposed to them they are unable to abandon the traditional view that mar- riage means a retirement from the world only less complete than retirement to a convent. Woman's responsibility to the race may well be regarded as paramount, but it is not overwhelming, and it is neither wise nor kind to regard her life as a total loss in all points but this single THE MODERN WOMAN MOVEMENT 509 one. It would indeed seem that opposition to woman's partici- pation in the totality of life is a romantic subterfuge, resting not so much on a belief in the disability of woman as on the disposi- tion of man to appropriate conspicuous and' pleasurable objects for his sole use and ornamentation. "A little thing, but all mine own" was one of the remarks of Achilles to Agamemnon in their quarrel over the two maidens, and it contains the secret of man's world-old disposition to overlook the intrinsic worth of woman. 49. THE EFFECT OF SOCIETY LIFE AND FASHION UPON WOMEN IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 1 The society manner was an extension of the habits acquired by girls for the purpose of their sphere, which included entertaining along with housekeeping and motherhood. Objectively, it was intended to make the guest have a good time by putting him at ease, and at the same time pleasing and piquing him with interest ; subjectively, it was the accepted method of displaying the feminine charm, of giving marriageable girls a chance to make their mar- ket, and of maintaining the social status of the household. It therefore demanded a careful attention to appearances, the play- ing up of all the attractive resources of the feminine members of the family, and the concealment of whatever might not be credit- able. If a woman thus set out to please everybody, even within the confines of her own social circle, she could never say what she thought nor behave as she felt. Indeed, the more charming she was, the more insincere she must necessarily be. She must always be complimentary to her acquaintances, praising their dress, belongings, and performances. The guest who loved music and sang off the key must be invited to perform as cordially as if she were a really pleasing musician ; the man who told wearisome anecdotes must be met with all the spontaneous laughter due to wit. The more tactful the woman contrived to be, the more social success she attained and,/^r contra, the more insincere she became. 1 By Mary R. Coolidge. Adapted from Why Women are So , pp. 103-107, 114-117, 148-168. 'Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1912. Sio READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS It is evident that slow-witted or straightforward women would have no chance at all in a society where the coin of exchange was mutual and graceful flattery. In the nature of things the quickest-witted women were the most capable of practicing con- cealment of their thoughts, while those of more solid qualities would either not be able to attain the acrobatic grace necessary to social success, or would have an honest distaste for its superfici- ality. The more intellectual and sincere, and the more reasonable a young woman was, the less likely she was to be socially suc- cessful, and she must either be content to be a " bluestocking," and remain unmarried, or she must conceal her natural common- sense and imitate the feminine characteristics then in vogue. Thus imitation rather than originality became the keynote of women's lives. In a democratic society composed largely of people born in the working classes, whose social ambitions were chiefly limited to financial ease and the hope of rising into the next higher stratum, there were many kinds of men, but only two sorts of women. The success of a man consisted in material achievement; of a woman in appearing to be what was pleasing to man in order that she might be invited to share his height. Men were making themselves, so to speak, of the genuine stuff — soft or hard, fine or coarse-grained, of pine, oak, or mahogany ; while women, of whatever material, must be carefully veneered with a thin and costly layer of unreality — a sort of imitation composite, a spurious femininity. It is certainly significant that, in proportion as the women of the nineteenth century were released from domestic, manual labor, they become more and more extravagantly feminine ; and that this phenomenon was a repetition of what had previously marked the behavior of every class of women at leisure throughout the world's history. There is no evidence that our manufacturing grandmothers of the early nineteenth century were afflicted with any such degree of effusive, excitable, unreasoning temperament as that which characterized the strictly feminine ideal of their immediate descendants. Among Parisians at the present day, where there is almost no line drawn between the economic sphere of men and women, and where both husband and wife THE MODERN WOMAN MOVEMENT 511 among the masses must work to make a living, there is no marked difference between them in respect to emotional expres- sion. The women of Paris have fought as savagely as men in the revolutions ; and French men are notoriously as emotional as the typical American woman, and as unreasoning when carried beyond self-control. There can be no doubt that the social behavior which is com- monly described as "typically feminine" is an overdevelopment of characters not at all uncommon among men, and often lacking in women. When women have been more given to superficial talk and gayety than men, it is because men desired them to be so, and because it was, therefore, to their advantage. If they have been accustomed to use hysteria as their weapon of defense, instead of talking reason or using their fists, it was probably be- cause they had never had either encouragement or opportunity to employ mind or brute force. With the opening of all occupations to woman, and with nearly equal opportunities for intellectual training, there has been devel- oped in a single generation a large number of American women who are less excitable than a Frenchman, less sentimental than a German, and less emotional than an Italian — in short, almost as reasonable and self-poised as the men of their own class and race. The Influence of Dress and Fashion The ideals of art and physique, of beauty and of dress, had a constant reaction upon one another. The Puritan conception of womanhood which dominated this country till quite recently was less patently sexual than that of the older Christian teaching, but, as far as possible, it suppressed romantic love and the beauty- loving instinct. While the natural conditions in America were more favorable and were producing a common population of finer physique, orthodox religion was still insisting upon the " vileness " of humanity, the weakness and ensnaring nature of women, and the inevitable connection between vice and every form of art. The insistence upon the essential sinfulness of every natural instinct which might have flowered in art, had a terrible effect 512 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS upon the minds of women. It produced in them a feeling of intimate shame. The body being vile, all their functions were shameful and to be concealed. From suppression to shame, from shame to distortion, were logical steps in the treatment of their bodies. The corset, for instance, worn originally in Europe as a means of emphasizing sex characters — the bust and the hips — became the armor of respectability for innocent and overmodest women. To be seen without it was not merely slovenly, it was improper, even vulgarly suggestive. As soon as any young girl approached adolescence, she had to put it on. Some mothers said, for propriety's sake ; and other mothers, that she might have a good figure when she grew to womanhood. That is to say, she must develop the small waist, and the large hips and bust, like a French fashion plate, in order to meet" the require- ments of Puritan modesty. No better illustration could be found of the conflicting traditions which ignorant women were blindly following. Without attempting to account for the vagaries of modesty — a subject upon which much has already been written — the effect of a single convention upon the health and beauty of women may be dwelt upon. Throughout the past century, to be obviously two-legged was to be immodest. The Chinese woman — as modest and feminine as any of her sex in the world, perhaps — has had the use of her legs, if not of her feet, for thousands of years, but the American woman has always had to pretend that she had only one. The peasant woman of northern Europe, though burdened with heavy petticoats, might exhibit her body below the knee, but the " free " woman of the new democracy had to conceal, as far as possible, even her ankles. This convention restricted every activity, and was, unquestion- ably, one of the factors in the deterioration of the health of American women. For three hundred years western women have ridden on horseback sidewise, with feet enveloped in a volumi- nous skirt, solely because a French Princess long ago set the fashion to conceal her own deformed spine. Because the rou6s of a decadent society attached sexual significance to ankles, the American girl walked encased in heavy drapery, which compelled THE MODERN WOMAN MOVEMENT 513 a narrow, uncertain tread. Millions of women lifted their petti- coats billions of times in the course of their lives ; while house- wives scoured their floors, hampered by the uniform of their sex, and endangered their lives whenever they got in or out of a vehicle ; all for no other reason than that the particular form of modesty inculcated by Puritan society had tabooed legs in women. The early advocates of Women's Rights were right, if not wise, in associating a bifurcated costume with equality and freedom, but it was equally necessary to the production of true beauty. Shame and inactivity, thus linked together, produced a strangely distorted and bloodless creature whose only sign of real loveliness was a pretty face. The grace of symmetry and the exhilaration of free motion were denied not only to women of the leisure classes, but to working women as well, because every woman in America was trying "to be a lady," and the conventions of the Foretime had so ordained. Even when the Puritan regime declined and women were beginning to be released from the older conventions, they were at the same time presented with a vicious foreign model by the vogue of fashions which had been brought in to promote journalism and manufacture. Ever since the Civil War the amount of time and expense put upon dress by women in this country has been increasing, until now it has become the chief occupation and the accepted amuse- ment of a very large number of those above the laboring class. It has been generally assumed that this is due to some inherent personal taste on the part of women ; but it is a matter of eco- nomic history that dress as a pursuit has been the result of the development of manufacture and of modern methods of trade promotion rather than of an innate frivolity, to which leisure and idleness have always contributed. When we visualize the typical jeweler, deft-handed, short- sighted, and stoop-shouldered; or the dry-goods clerk, radiating smiles and ladylike manners ; or the politician, swollen with self-confidence and overeating ; we do not assume that he could never have been any other sort of man, even though his natural temperament may have dictated his choice of occupation. It is taken for granted in explaining such men that their ambitions in 514 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS life have been molded by their environment to produce certain types of physique and character. It is a matter of common ex- perience that there are very few human beings so specialized by their hereditary qualities that they could not have been different had they been born in another environment than the one in which we see them. When they are so specialized they are called eccentrics, and sometimes recognized as having genius. One has only to observe the modifications of character and habits which take place in men who change from one industrial medium to another requiring very different qualifications, to infer that women of the same breed might show unexpected variations if their environment were as varied and as stimulating. The effect of social surroundings in developing in women an inordi- nate love of adornment can be best measured, perhaps, by contem- plating other and rather unusual types produced by exceptional circumstances. During the past century, wherever a girl, by force of circumstance or natural hatred of physical restraint, refused to submit to the tyranny of dress, she became almost invariably and, it might almost be said, by virtue thereof, a superior human being. The wives of the California pioneers, brought up like other Eastern girls to give the ,utmost care to their dress, when transplanted to isolated homes on ranches and in mining camps, without servants, and often compelled to do the labor of a large household, while rearing their families, almost always emancipated their bodies from the trammels of long skirts and from corsets. Utility and cleanliness became the sole requisites of their clothing, and thus was released a vast amount of physical and mental energy to be spent in other and worthier directions. They managed complicated households, reared vigorous children, in emergencies guarded water rights and mining properties with a shotgun ; and in their old age were as fearless, as able-bodied, as warm-hearted, and as capable as their partners. The influence of the Quaker costume and plain traditions in minimizing feminine and developing larger human qualities in women is registered in the women's rights movement, in which the Friends played so large a part between 1840 and 1870. Lucretia Mott, the Quaker preacher, an exquisite, gentle, frail, THE MODERN WOMAN MOVEMENT 515 and yet brilliant woman, was doubtless the most important figure among all the delegates to the World's Anti-Slavery Convention in London. Clothes were the least of all concerns to her, we may infer, for she wrote of herself : My life, in the domestic sphere, has passed much as that of other wives and mothers in this country. I have had six children. Not accustomed to resigning them to the care of a nurse, I was much confined to them during their infancy and childhood. Being fond of reading, I omitted much unnecessary stitching and ornamental work in the sewing for my family, so that I might have time for this indulgence and for the improvement of the mind. For novels and light reading I never had much taste. The " Ladies' Department " in the periodicals of the day had no attraction for me. By dwelling on such exceptional women, it may be possible to conceive what the effect of ornamentation as a principle aim in life has been upon the greater number of average young girls brought up in middle-class homes. To them dress involved a constant consideration of money — how to get it without directly entering the wage-earning class, how far it might be made to go, and even how things might be got without it. Money has rarely been looked at in the large by women as income or capital, but rather as a succession of petty, irregular sums to be spread over a thousand necessities and luxuries. Because the husband and father was the earning partner he was inevitably the financial head, paying the larger household expenses himself, and handing out to the wife and minor children for their clothing and inciden- tals such generous or niggardly pin money as his temperament and means dictated. The effect upon women was similar to that of an irregular wage upon the casual workingman ; there was no incentive to thrift, but every inducement to shortsighted and petty extravagance. There was never butter to cover a whole slice of bread, therefore why trouble about butter at all ? — why not have a string of imitation pearls? — so women naturally reasoned. Expenditure dribbled along on the hand-to-mouth principle : a girl might need hat, shoes, underwear, all at once, but, as the sum given her at any one time was never enough to cover them all, she naturally bought thehkt first, the shoes next, and postponed the underwear, making the best appearance she could. 5l6 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS A constantly rising scale of dress accessories often cut off — among poorer girls — garments, and even food, necessary to health. It is evident enough without further illustration that, because women did not earn their money, and received it irregularly in small amounts, they had no occasion to develop a balanced finan- cial sense; but acquired, on the one hand, a wonderful skill in spreading petty amounts thinly over large areas, and, on the other, a perverted judgment of values. If this had produced in them only a petty thrift and foolish expenditure, the remedy would be obvious and easy; but it has, in truth, eaten into character much more deeply. For the love of dress and the ne- cessity of satisfying it by getting it from some man who earned it, made girls from their childhood contrive, deceive, and maneuver. It is a common enough joke that men are better-humored after dinner than before, but among women it is a commonplace quite without any humorous color. Every dependent creature, whether woman or child, peon or dog, as a matter of safety or comfort, learns to read the temper of his master; and in proportion as he is able to play upon it, finds life easier. Wheedling and cunning, the whole battery of feminine weapons from caresses to tears and temper, were inevitably employed upon negligent and selfish men by their dependents ; and often to the extent of imposition upon generous men. The stylish woman had forever to pursue that will-o'-the-wisp of fashion, "the newest thing," not only in boots, stockings, lingerie, dresses, and hats, but also the latest-uttermost-refinement- of-the-newest-thing in braids, lace, embroidery, beads, passemen- terie, trimmings, of which there were hundreds of designs rapidly succeeding each other. There were, besides, an infinitude of shades, widths, textile surfaces, in an ever-enlarging variety of stuffs ; and these had to be combined by herself or the dress- maker, after consultation of several American and French fashion books, in the momentarily approved design. And all this energy was expended without hope of anything more than temporary success, except for those who could make over or replace the garment to meet the next incoming fashion. THE MODERN WOMAN MOVEMENT 517 The making over of clothes every year, if not every six months; as the. pace of fashion speeded up, came to take the place of many of those spurious handicrafts with which the clever woman of the mid-century had been wont to busy her hands. It became a matter of pride with those of small means to "make something out of nothing," as the complimentary phrase went — to contrive a new and stylish dress out of two old ones ; to conceal paucity of material by piecing small bits of cloth together, and decorating the tell-tale seams ; to make a jacket of a man's discarded over- coat, lined with the less-worn portions of an old silk petticoat. As the rule of fashion spread to carpets, curtains, bedding, and furniture, the inexorable principle of multiplying designs to stim- ulate buying, invaded this field as well ; and the devoted house- wife, according to her means and her ingenuity, conscientiously set herself the duty of keeping her house as well as herself and children " in the fashion." In all this she exercised her brain as much as her manufacturing grandmother had done before her, but with infinitely less of real value to show for it. Perhaps all the more because the result did not command satisfactory appreciation from her men-folk, whose crude tastes and practical turn of mind did not readily grasp the desperate need of women to be in the fashion, she required the approval of other womankind. So much struggle and economy must be worthy of recognition ; and if, unhappily, her men friends did not notice and praise the triumphs of her ingenious — and often wasted — skill, she turned to other women to secure their proper appraisal. It is no doubt true that women competing in the dress contest are often jealous of each other, but it is far more significant that they have devised a code of manners with which to satisfy each other's hunger for appreciation. Each agrees to admire, or, at any rate, to appear to admire, the other's dress. When two women meet, it is customary, after the conventional greeting, for one to say : " How pretty your new hat is 1 " And for the other to reply : " I 'm so glad you like it — I saw the new shape at Smith's Emporium, and I trimmed it with the velvet off my last winter's hat." When this topic has been canvassed to the satisfaction of the wearer of the hat, she in turn will 5i8 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS compliment her friend's taste and ingenuity by praising some- thing she is wearing. In such wise have women expended their perverted abilities and kindliness, spurred on by the race of com- mercial fashion, and lacking an education in larger things. Dress, moreover, came to take the place of healthful exercise and recreation. The lazy afternoon parade through the shopping streets, to see the newest fashions displayed four times a year at the change of season^, became a weekly excursion as the varieties of materials and style increased. And in our day many women of small means know scarcely any other way of spending their leisure except to drag a fretful child past the shop windows every week-day afternoon, and then to go home and try to copy the most violent combinations of color and the most striking designs in sleazy, cheap imitations. It is a trite old saying that a man with a champagne taste and a beer income is sure of trouble. In women a similar desire for display, gratified at the cost of the earning power of which they themselves have no direct experience, is equally disastrous in producing effeminacy and discontent. The capacity for detail developed through a thousand generations of domestic necessity has been turned into a few narrow channels, the chief of which has at last come to be the pursuit of dress. Their age-long economy has become shortsighted pinching in some, and equally ill-judged extravagance in others. And the constant chase after fashions which no amount of money would enable them really to come up with has produced a state of chronic dissatisfaction with themselves, their lot, and with the men who supply their income. Petty-mindedness has at last become the distinguishing character- istic of the average woman. The marvelous thrift which enables her to dress stylishly on a small sum ; the originality with which she contrives and imitates ever-new prettinesses ; the ingenuity with which she makes a good show on small resources — all these valuable but perverted qualities would, if applied to the larger problems of common life, clean up the cities, find a home for every normal child, and reform our haphazard domestic economy ; and would produce that sureness of aim, that sense of being a THE MODERN WOMAN MOVEMENT 519 useful cog in the world's machinery, without which no human being can be happy. The female mind, thus fed on details of ephemeral importance, had no reason for larger intellectual interests ; and constant occu- pation with the attainment of the correct accessories of her cos- tume left little leisure for reading. Such books as she found time for would naturally be of the emasculated sort, whose heroines were the beautiful and perfectly dressed kind she strove to be ; to whom impossible, but perfectly moral, adventures happened, until they culminated in a blissful engagement. For a quarter of a century at least, the Sunday-school novel and magazines of the type of Godey's Lady's Book supphed the mental pabulum of the majority of American women. The magazines inculcated the pursuit of dress as a most important duty of woman as part of the ideal of gentility and religion set before the perfect lady. And if it be thought that women no longer feed on this anaemic literary diet, one has ojily to examine any one of the strictly feminine journals to learn how pervasive it still is. Many of them profit by, if they are not published in, the interest of trade and manufactures for women, arid it is highly important to them that the love of dress should be intensified. Since the days of the forties, when French fashion plates were successfully introduced, this sort of literature has been served up to make women buy new, and always more fantastic, clothing. It requires no great acumen to conclude that it would inevitably lead to extravagance. Having no responsibility for earning their own money — though indirectly they might, nevertheless, earn it — and very little experience in handling it, except in small amounts, they did not reckon its value in the large. And having been encouraged to concentrate their energies on appearance, they came to have a highly cultivated taste — nay, more than taste, appetite — for pretty clothes which, like an appetite for drink or games of chance, must be satisfied. Yet it, like many another social habit, could never be satisfied. It might also be said that thS more time and money they had to give to dress, the more discontented they were sure to be. If the father or husband S20 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS could not meet this rising demand, they pitied themselves for his lack of success; if he set a limit of expenditure, they regarded him as a selfish brute. Now and then they degenerated into dishonest schemers, running up large bills for which their men- kind were responsible ; cheating the dressmaker and the miUiner ; sending back garments as unsatisfactory after wearing them ; practicing the deceits of the adventuress in the guise of a respectable woman of society. Yet, in justice to womankind, it must be granted that the dress mania produced very few of these types, as compared with hundreds of conscientious, economical women, who, misled by the conventions of their social station, took ouir of themselves, rather than out of men's pockets, the wherewithal to achieve the proper clothes of a lady. These dear, fussy, dutiful creatures sacrificed their health, their love of nature, their taste for art, for litera- ture, even their companionableness, to the Juggernaut of women — Suitability. Moreover, because men were conspicuously the producing class, and women for the most part obviously the con- sumers, extravagance came to be regarded as a female propensity ; while, as a matter of fact, it was no more truly characteristic of one than of the other. What men spent in cigars and tobacco, in heavy eating and drinking, in club life and dues, and in care- less, unconsidered sums, women balanced by their equally wasteful but careful spreading of small sums upon the elaboration of dress. One of the last and most demoralizing aspects of fashion- promotion has been the infliction upon children of the over- developed taste for tawdry ornament. The women's magazines cater to the mother's pride by providing embroidery patterns to be worked upon little boys' blouses ; suggestions of how to cut over little girls' dresses to keep pace with the newest idea. While the laundry bills mount ever higher, the fashionable little girl is rigged out in more fragile and impracticable and unwholesome clothing. It is as if the mother were still a child herself, playing with a live doll which, though it cannot be broken, may still be distorted into her own foolish image, • As a result of the combined influence of economic forces and social traditions, centering in dress, women have acquired a set "THE MODERN WOMAN MOVEMENT 521 of habits of expenditure and thinking which lead to discontent and waste of time in the triviaUties of taste, in the pursuit of petty economies, and in the discussion of dress detail. These are, however, the least of the evil effects of the dress cult : in many women they degenerate into exploitation of men, dishonesty toward tradespeople, and the vulgarities of conspicuous display. It may almost be asserted that competence, good humor, and intel- ligence in women are now in inverse proportion to the amount of time they spend on the fashion of their clothes. A woman of influence and a "real lady" in the 'twentieth century is known, more often than not, by the fact that she is not dressed conspic- uously in the latest fashion. She may be known even more by the fact that her children are dressed in the simplest and most childlike manner. 50. HOW HOME CONDITIONS REACT UPON THE FAMILY » Discussion of social processes, to be fruitful, must rest on some hypothesis as to the nature and purpose of society. It is here assumed that society is a life-form in course of evolution, that its processes are to be measured like those of other life-forms, as they affect the three main issues of existence — being, repro- duction, improvement. In so far as social processes are genetic they interest us as students and critics ; in so far as they are telic they form the most practical and important subjects of study. The family has its origin in the genetic process of reproduction ; but is modified continually by telic forces. In its present form it is an institution of confused values, based on vital necessity, but heavily encum- bered with rudiments of earlier stages of development, some beneficent, some useless, some utterly mischievous ; and showing also the thriving growth of new and admirable features. We must consider it first on its biological basis, as a sex-related group for the purpose of rearing young ; and the effect of con- ditions upon it should be measured primarily by this purpose. 1 By Charlotte Perkins Gilman. From Publications of the American Sociologi- cal Society, Vol. Ill (1908), pp. 16-29. 522 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS Next we find in the existing family clear traces of that' early long-dominant social unit, the woman-centered group of the matriarchate. Our universal and deep-seated reverence for the mother-governed home, with its peace, comfort, order, and good will, has survived many thousand years of patriarchal govern- ment, and refuses to be changed even by innumerable instances- of discomfort, discord, waste, and unhappiness. Superimposed upon this first social group comes the estab- lishment of the patriarchate, the family with the male head, based upon the assumption by the male of sole efficiency as transmitter of life. In this form the family enters upon an entirely new phase, and includes purposes hitherto unknown. It becomes a vehicle of mascuHne power and pride — was indeed for long their sole vehicle : it produces its ethics, its codes of honor, its series of religions, its line of political development through tribe and clan, princedom and monarchy, its legal system in which all personal and property rights are vested in the man, and its physical expression in the household of servile women. It is from this period that we derive our popular impressions that the family is the unit of the state, that the man is the head of the house, and other supposedly self-evident propositions. The patri- archal family, even in its present reduced and modified forrti, is the vital core and continuing cause of our androcentric culture. Fourthly, we must view it as an industrial group of self- centered economic activities, the birthplace of arts and crafts as well as of persons. While the natural origin of these industries is in maternal energy, the voluntary efforts of the mother being the real source of human production, yet the family, as an eco- nomic group in the modern sense, is also an androcentric institu- tion. Besides the mother's work for her children, the patriarchal family required the service of the man by his women — a claim ■which has no parallel in nature. There is nothing in maternity, nothing in the natural relation of the sexes which should make the female the servant of the male. This form of economic relationship was developed when the, man learned to take advantage of the industrial value of the w6man and added to his profitable group as many women as T^HE MODERN WOMAN MOVEMENT 523 possible. Moreover, when the masculine instinct of sex-combat swelled and broadened, blended with the hunter's predatory appe- tite, organized, and became war, then in course of time male captives were compelled to labor as the price of life, and set to work in the only social group then existent. It is to this custom, to this remote and painful period, that our institution owes its present name. Not father, mother, nor child, but servant, christens the family. Further than this we find in our family group the develop- ment of a new relation, a new idea as yet but little understood, that which is vaguely expressed by the word marriage. Monog- amy, the permanent union of one male and one female for repro- ductive purposes, is as natural a form of sex-relation as any other, common to many animals and birds, a resultant of con- tinued and combined activities of both parents for the same end. This natural base of a true marriage should b6 carefully studied; Continued union in activity for a common purpose necessarily develops ease and pleasure in the relationship. The same couple can carry on these activities more easily than a new combination; hence monogamy. In our human family we find many forms : androgyny, polyg- yny, and then the slow and halting evolution of monogyny. Monogynous marriage should include sex-attraction, romantic love, and a high degree of comradeship. It is now our common race ideal, recognized as best for the advantage of the child and the individual happiness of the parent; also, through greater personal efficiency, for the good of society. This form of mar- riage is slowly evolving in the family, but is by no means invariably present. Lastly we must bear in mind that the family is our accepted basis of mere living; it, and its outward expression, the home, are so universally assumed to be the only natural form of exist- ence, that to continue on earth outside of "a family," without " a home," is considered unnatural and almost immoral. In this regard thfe family must be studied as ministering to the health, comfort, happiness, and efficiency of adult individuals, quite aside from parental purposes, or those of marriage; as for instance 524 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS in the position of adult sons and daughters, of aged persons no longer actively valuable as parents; or of coadjacent aunts, uncles, and cousins ; as also in relation to the purely individual interests of members of the family proper. When we now take up our study of home conditions, we have definite ground from which to judge and to measure them. How do they react upon the family in regard to those three major purposes of life — being, reproduction, improvement? Do they best maintain human life .? Do they best minister to the repro- duction of the species.? And to the evolution of monogyny? Above all do they tend to race improvement ? Mere existence is no justification, else might we all remain Archaean rocks. Reproduction is not sufficient, else the fertile bacterium would be our ideal. All social institutions must be measured as they tend not only to maintain and reproduce, but to improve humanity. We will make brief mention of our essen- tial home conditions and examine their reaction on the family as touching (a) marriage, (3) parentage, (c) child-culture, (d) the individual and social progress. What are our essential home conditions ? Here we are confronted with so vast and tumultuous a sea of facts — noisy, painful, prominent facts— -that propdr perspective is difficult to obtain. Here we are confronted also with the most sensitive, powerful, universal, and ancient group of emotions known to man. This complex of feelings, tangled and knotted by ages of iron-bound association ; fired with the quenchless vitality of the biological necessities on which they rest ; intensified by all our conscious centuries of social history ; hallowed, sanctified, made imperative by recurrent religions ; enforced with cruel penal- ties by law, and crueller ones by custom ; first established by those riotous absurdities of dawning ethics, the sex-tabus of the primi- tive savage, and growing as a cult down all our ages of literature and art ; the emotions, sentiments, traditions, race-habits, and fixed ideas which center in the home and family — form the most formidable obstacle to clear thought and wise corrclusion. Forced by increasing instances of discontent, inefficiency, and protest within the group, we are beginning to make some study THE MODERN WOMAN MOVEMENT 525 of domestic conditions ; but so far this study has been on the one hand superficial ; and on the other either starkly reactionary or merely rebellious. The first home conditions forced upon our consideration are the material. Here we note most prominently the effects of economic pressure in our cities; the physical restriction of the home in the block, the tenement, the apartment house ; the dev- astating effects of the sweatshop; the tendency toward what we call "" cooperative housekeeping." As far as mere physical crowding is a home condition we may find that as far back as the cliff dwellers, find it in every city of the world since there were cities, find it consistent with any form of marriage, with families matriarchal, patriarchal, polygynous, and monogynous. The Jew throughout Christian history has suffered from overcrowding as much as any people ever did ; but he has preserved the family in a most intense form, with more success than many of the races which oppressed him. Even the sweatshop, while working evil to the individual, does but draw tighter the family bond. Therefore we are illogical in our fear of the city-crowding as the enemy of the home, the destroyer of family life. Others, identifying family life with the industries so long accompanying it, disapprove of that visible and rapid economic evolution in which the " domestic industries " as such dissolve and disappear. Yet if these observers would but study the history of economics they would find the period vof undisputed " home industries " was not that of high development in family life, but rather of the mixed group of women slaves and male captives, when marriage in our sense was utterly unknown. The attempt to "revive home industries" is not difficult, since our modern family still maintains that primitive labor status ; but it is reactionary, and tends to no real improvement. " Cooperative housekeeping," as a term, needs brief but clear discussion. The movement to which the phrase is applied is a natural one, inevitable and advantageous. It consists in the orderly development of domestic industries into social ones; in the gradual substitution of the shirt you buy for the shirt your 526 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS wife makes, of the bread of the public baker for the bread of the private cook, of the wine of known manufacture and vintage for the wine made for you by your affectionate great-aunt. All industry was once domestic. All industry is becoming social. That is the line of industrial evolution. Now what is "cooperative housekeeping " ? It is an attempt to continue domestic industry without its natural base. The family was for long the only eco- nomic unit. The family is still, though greatly reduced and waste- fully inefficient, an economic unit. A group of families is not a unit at all. It has no structure, no function, no existence. Indi- viduals may combine, do combine, should combine, must combine, to form social groups. Families are essentially uncombinable. Vintner, brewer, baker, spinner, weaver, dyer, tallow chandler, soapmaker, and all their congeners were socially evolved from the practicers of inchoate domestic industries. Soon the cook and the cleaner will take place with these, as the launderer already has to a great degree. At no step of the process is, there the faintest hint of " cooperative housekeeping." Forty families may patronize and maintain one bakeshop. They do not "co- operate" to do this ; they separately patronize it. The same forty families might patronize and maintain one cookshop, and never know one another's names. If the forty families endeavored to "cooperate" and start that bakeshop, or that cookshop, they would meet the same difficulty, the same failure, that always faces illegitimate and unnatural processes. The material forms of home life, the character of its structure and functions depend upon the relation of the members of the family. In analyzing home conditions therefore we will classify them thus : A. Ownership of women. — It is to this condition that we may clearly trace the isolation of the home, the varying degree of segregation of the woman or women therein. The home is inaugurated immediately upon marriage, its nature and situation depending upon the man, and in it the man secludes his wife. In this regard our home is a lineal descendant of the harem. It is but a short time since the proverb told us " the woman, the THE MODERN WOMAN MOVEMENT 52; cat, and the chimney should never leave the house " ; and again, "A woman should leave the house but three times — when she is christened, when she is married, when she is buried." In cur- rent comment upon modern home conditions we still find deep displeasure that the woman is so much away from home. The continued presence of the woman in the home is held to be an essential condition. Following this comes — B. Woman service. — The house is a place where the man has his meals cooked and served by the woman ; his general cleaning and mending done by her; she is his servant. This condition accompanies marriage, be it observed, and precedes maternity. It has no relation whatever to motherhood. If there are no children the woman remains the house-servant of the man. If she has many, their care must not prevent the service of his meals. In America to-day, in one family out of sixteen, the man is able to hire other women to wait upon him ; but his wife is merely raised to the position of a sort of " section boss " ; she still manages the service of the house for him. This woman service has no relation to the family in any vital sense ; it is a relic of the period of woman slavery in the patriarchal time; it exhibits not the evolution of a true monogamy, but merely the ancient industrial polygamous group shorn down to one lingering female slave. Under this head of wife service, we must place all the confused activities of the modern home. Reduced and sim- plified as these are, they still involve several undeveloped trades and their enforced practice by nearly all women keeps down the normal social tendency to specialization. While all men, speaking generally, have specialized in some form of social activities, have become masons, smiths, farmers, sailors, carpenters, doctors, mer- chants, and the like; all women, speaking generally, have remained at the low industrial level of domestic servants. The limitation is clear and sharp, and is held to be an essential, if not the essen- tial, condition of home life; the woman, being married, must work in the home for the man. We are so absolutely accustomed to this relation, that a statement of it produces no more result than if one solemnly announces that fire is hot and ice cold. 528 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS To visualize it let us reverse the position. Let us suppose that the conditions of home life required every man upon marriage to become his wife's butler, footman, coachman, cook ; every man, all men, necessarily following the profession of domestic servants. This is an abhorrent, an incredible idea. So is the other. That an entire sex should be the domestic servants of the other sex is abhorrent and incredible. Under this same head we may place all the prominent but little understood evils of the " servant question." The position is simple. The home must be served by women. If the wife is unable to perform the service other women must be engaged. These must not be married women, for no married man wishes his private servant to serve another man. When the coachman marries the cook, he prefers to segregate her in the rooms over the stables, to cook for him alone. Therefore our women servants form an endless procession of apprentices, untrained young per- sons learning of the housewife mainly her personal preferences and limitations. Therefore is the grade of household services necessarily and permanently low ; and household service means most of the world's feeding, cleaning, and the care of children. The third essential hoine condition is : C. The economic dependence of women. — This is the natural corollary of the other two. If a man keeps a servant he must feed him, or her. The economic dependence of the woman fol- lows upon her servitude. The family with the male head has assumed that the male shall serve society and the female shall serve him. This opens up an immense field of consequences, reacting most violently upon the family, among which we will select here two most typical and conspicuous. Suppose that the man's social service is of small value as we measure and reward our laborers. His return is small. His wages we will roughly estimate at ;g6oo a year, a sum the purchasing power of which is variable. In our present conditions $600 is little enough for one person. For two it allows but 1^300 each. For six, if they have four children, it is ^100 a year apiece — less than ^2.00 a week for each, to pay for food, clothes, shelter, everything. This visibly spells poverty. While one man's production is worth to THE MODERN WOMAN MOVEMENT 529 society but so much, and while that one man's production is forced* to meet the consumption of six ; so long, even without any other cause, the resultant is general poverty— a persistent condition in the majority of homes. To segregate half the pro- ductive energy of the world and use it in private service of the crudest sort is economic waste. To force the low-grade man to maintain an entire family is to force a constant large supply of low-grade men. The second of these consequences is the unnatural phenome- non of the idle woman. The man, whose sex-relation spurs him to industry, and whose exceptional powers meet special reward, then proceeds to shower gifts and pleasures upon the woman he loves. That man shall be " a good provider " is frankly held to be his end of the family duty, a most essential condition of home life. This result, as we so frequently and sadly see, is the devel- opment of a kind of woman who performs no industrial* service, produces nothing, and consumes everything ; and a kind of man who subordinates every social and moral claim to this widely accredited "first duty," to provide, without limit, for his wife and children. These two home conditions, the enormous tax upon the father, if he is poor, together with the heavy toil of the mother, and the opposite one of the rich man maintaining a beautiful parasite, have visible and serious results upon the family. The supposedly essential basic relations, the ownership of woman, the servitude of woman, and the economic dependence of woman, with their resultants, give rise to the visible material conditions with which we are familiar. The predominant con- cerns of the kitchen and dining room, involving the entire serv- ice of the working housewife, rigidly measure the limitations of such families; while the added freedom of the woman whose housework is done vicariously seldom tends to a nobler life. Our insanitary households, our false and shallow taste, our low stand- ard of knowledge in food values and "nutrition, the various prosaic limitations within which we are born and reared are in the main traceable to the arrested development of the woman, owing to the above major conditions of home life. S30 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS Let us now show the reaction of the conditions above stated upon the family in modern society, in the order given, as they affect {a) marriage, {b) maternity, {c) child-culture, {d) the indi- vidual and society. We are much concerned in the smooth and rapid development of a higher type of marriage, yet fail to see that our home con- ditions militate against such development. The effect of the modern home, even with its present degree of segregation of women, with its inadequate, confused, laborious industrial proc- esses, and with its overwhelming expenses, is to postpone and often prevent marriage, to degrade marriage when accomplished through the servile and dependent position of the wife, and also to precipitate unwise and premature marriage on the part of young women because of their bitter dissatisfaction with the con- ditions of their previous home. This last gives an advantage in reproduction to the poorer types. The wiser women, preferring the ills she has to those she foresees only too clearly, hesitates long, delays, often refuses altogether; not from an aversion to marriage, or to motherhood, but from a steadily growing objection to the position of a servant. The man, seeing about him the fretful inefficiency of so many misplaced women, hearing ad nauseam the reiterant uniform complaints on "the servant question," knowing the weight of the increasing burden for which the man must " pay, pay, pay," waits longer and longer before he can " afford to marry " ; with a resultant increase in immorality. This paradoxical position must be faced fully and squarely. The industrial conditions of the modern home are such as to delay and often prevent marriage. Since "the home" is sup- posed to arise only from marriage, it looks as though the situa- tion were frankly suicidal. So far, not seeing these things, we have merely followed our world-old habit of blaming the woman. She used to be content with these conditions we say — she ought to be now — back to nature ! The. woman refuses to go back, the home refuses to go forward, and marriage waits. The initial con- dition of ownership, even without service, reacts unfavorably upon the kind of marriage most desired. A woman slave is not a wife. THE MODERN WOMAN MOVEMENT 531 The more absolutely the woman is her own mistress, in accepting her husband and in her life with him, the higher is the grade of love and companionship open to them. Again the economic dependence of the womari militates against a true marriage, in that the element of economic profit degrades and commercializes love and so injures the family. It may be said that the family with the male head cannot exist in, a pure form without its orig- inal concomitants of absolute personal ownership and exploitation of woman. When the ownership is no longer that of true slavery but enters the contract stage, when marriage becomes an eco- nomic relation, then indeed is it degraded. Polygyny is a low form of marriage ; but, as modern polygynists have held, it at least tends to preclude prostitution. The higher marriage toward which we are tending requires a full-grown woman, no one's property or servant, self-supporting and proudly independent. Such marriage will find expression in a very different home. Next comes the reaction upon motherhood, the most vital fact in the whole institution. Our home conditions affect motherhood injuriously in many ways. The ownership of the woman by the man has developed a false code of morals and manners, under which girls are not reared in understanding of the privileges, rights, and preeminent duties of motherhood. We make the duty to the man first, the duty to the child second — an artificial and mischievous relation. There is no more important personal func- tion than motherhood, and every itein of arrangement in the family, in the home, should subtend its overmastering interests. Ownership of women first interferes with the power of selec- tion so essential to right motherhood, and, second, enforces motherhood undesired — a grave physiological evil. The ensuant condition of female servitude is an injury in demanding labor in- compatible with right maternity, and in lowering the average of heredity through the arrest of social development in the mother. It is not good for the race that the majority of its female parents should be unskilled laborers, plus a few unskilled idlers. In poverty the overworked woman dreads maternity, and avoids it if she can. If she cannot, her unwelcome and too frequent children are not what is needed to build up our people. In wealth, 532 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS the woman becomes a perpetual child, greedy and irresponsible, dreads maternity, and avoids it if she can. Her children are few and often frail. Neither the conditions of the poor home nor of the rich tend to a joyous and competent maternity. In this one respect the home, under present conditions, is proved an unfit vehicle for the family. In itself it tends to reduce the birth rate, or to lower the quality of the most numerous children; and all of them inherit the limitations of a servile or an irresponsible motherh'ood. As regards child-culture, our home conditions present a further marked unfitness. Not one home in a thousand even attempts to make provision for child-culture. If the home has but one room that room is a kitchen ; but few indeed are the families who can "afford a nursery." Child-care is wholly subordinate to kitchen service ; the home is a complicated, inconsistent group of indus^ tries, in which the child must wait for spare moments of attention; which attention when given is that of a tired cook, or a worried housekeeper. No clearer comment can be made on the inade- quacy of home conditions to serve their natural ends than in this major instance ; they do not promote, but on the contrary they prohibit the development of higher standards of child-culture. As to mere maintenance of life, our children die most numer- ously during the years of infancy, when they are most wholly at home. As to reproduction, we have shown the effect on that; and as to improvement, it is a general admission that the im- provement of the human stock does not keep pace with material progress. We need here a wise revision of domestic conditions in the interests of the child. At present any man who has a home to let, be it room, apartment, or house, prefers his tenants to be without children. The home, the birthplace, the rearing- place, is not built, fitted, nor managed for the benefit of children. What is its further effect on the individual, and through him on society.? Do the common home conditions of our time pro- mote health, insure peace and comfort, tend to that higher development of the individual so essential to social progress ? Here we find another large ground for criticism. Modern soci- ety calls for individuals broad-minded, public-spirited, democratic. THE MODERN WOMAN MOVEMENT 533 courageous, just, intelligent, educated, and specialized for social service. The family with the male head and its accompanying conditions of woman-ownership, service, and dependence tends to maintain in our growing democracy the grade of develop- ment, the habits of mind, the childish limitations of its remote past. In it is a masculine dominance which finds expression in our political androcracy. In it is a degraded womanhood which not only limits individual development in the mother, but checks it in the father through heredity and association, and acts power- fully to keep back the progress of the child. Because of the low grade of domestic industry, the food habits of humanity have remained so long what they are, tending to self-indulgence and excess, to extravagance, to many forms of disease. Mere confinement to a house is in itself unwholesome, and when that house is a cookshop and laundry, it is further disadvantageous. The man, bound in honor (in his androcentric code of honor) to provide at all costs for his dependent family, has saddled him- self with the task of, making the product of one meet the con- sumption of many ; and in making the woman a nonproductive consumer, he has maintained in half the world the attitude of the child — the willingness to take, with no , thought of giving an equivalent. The social processes, left wholly to the male, are necessarily belligerent and competitive ; and in the resultarit turmoil, each man must needs strive to maintain his little island of personal comfort rather than to do his best work for the world. Home conditions which tend to results Hke these require most serious consideration. They react upon the family in general as tending to restrict its natural evolution toward higher forms. They react upon it specifically as we have seen, precipitating injudicious marriage, postponing marriage, degrading mari-iage; similarly do they affect motherhood, enforcing it where the woman is not free to choose, and where she is free to chopse tending to postpone and prevent it because of its difficulties; The mechanical and industrial conditions of our homes, with their reaction upon character, lie at the base of that artificial restriction of motherhood so widely lamented. 534 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS Again, they react upon child-culture, in age-long suppression of that greatest of sciences, in confining the care of little chil- dren to the ignorance of incompetent mothers and less competent servants. While the home enforces the condition of female servitude our children must continue to be born of and reared by servants. Finally, these same conditions, these limitations in structure and function, this arrested womanhood and low-grade child-culture do not tend to develop the best individuals nor to promote social progress. Such as we are we are largely made by our homes, and surely we do not wish to remain such as we are. Our aver- age health, longevity, efficiency, standard of comfort, happiness, arid pleasure do not show the most wholesome influences. The work of the constructive sociologist in this field is to establish what hnes of change and development in our homes, what broad and hopeful new conditions, will act in harmony with social processes, will tend to a better marriage, a higher grade of motherhood, a freer and nobler environment for the individual. We need homes in which mother and father will be equally, free and equally bound, both resting together in it? shelter and privacy, both working together for its interests. This requires structural and functional changes that shall elim- inate the last of our domestic industries and leave a home that is no one's workshop. The woman, no longer any man's property, nor any man's servant, must needs develop social usefulness, becoming more efficient, intelligent, experienced. Such women will bring to bear upon their proper problems, maternity and child-culture, a larger wisdom and a wider power than they now possess. The home, planned, built, and maintained by men and women of this sort, would react upon its constituent family in wholly advantageous ways.^ 1 For a detailed and more definite statement of Mrs. Oilman's ideas concern- ing the reaction of the family and our present domestic economy upon women and children, see her " Women and Economics " and her " Concerning Children." THE MODERN WOMAN MOVEMENT 535 51. SOCIAL USE OF THE POSTGRADUATE MOTHERS Nature has indeed conveyed to us in no uncertain manner her determination that her gifts shall be shared with an absolute justice between her men-children and her women-children. The boy has his long, straight path of progress, passing on into youth, and later manhood, up to the point where senile decay threatens; which point clean living, noble purpose, intellectual activity and wise physical, mental, and moral hygiene of every sort may push far into the seventies or eighties, or even beyond, if the prophets of a longer term of life for mankind may be believed. This long straight pathway gives man his preeminence as a special worker and vocational expert. The girl, on the other hand, has her better start in constitutional vigor and her surer normality and balance of faculties ; and the woman, throughout early and later experience, possesses her stronger recuperative power, her greater capacity for constant labor if free from excessive strain and varied in sort; and her curving line of muscular and nervous power, while giving more variability and less dependable response to highly organized labor, insures her a finer and more flexible ad- justment to the general demands of the social order. If she marries and has children she has her longer " curve " of recurrent need for special consideration, protection and care. At last she emerges from the variability which is the price of her special sex- contribution to the social fabric, and becomes in a peculiar and a new sense a citizen of the world ; a Person, whose own relation- ship to the social whole may now of right become her main concern. The audiences composed of professional workers and members of reformatory organizations and leaders in philanthropy are often a striking testimony to the as yet half-conscious response of women to this call of their second youth. The faces of women of sixty years and over, lined with marks of many emotions and much lore of life-experience, are alight with an enthusiasm and a hope, a strong and vital interest in life and its meaning, which loses nothing in attractiveness when matched against the groups 1 By Anna Garlin Spencer. From Woman's Share in Social Culture, pp. 233- 252. Mitchell Kennerley, New York, 1913. 536 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS of college girls as they leave their Alma Mater. Indeed the mothers are often younger at the moment- than their daughters just graduating, because love has taught them as well as books, and contact with child-nature has kept them hopeful as well as made them wise, while the student, still in the period of acquisi- tion, is always in danger of mistaking words for life, theories for realities. Moreover, women who have had a true marriage and a welcome discipline of family service have had what no young women, and few if any unmarried women possess, the constant help of the masculine way of looking at things to balance and keep sane their distinctly feminine approach to life. They are therefore able, if they have used well their opportunities, to under- stand men and women alike and to work for and with both im- partially. This is a point of far more social importance than is at present recognized. If there are any dangers of " feminization " threatening us in the school or in society at large, any real over- plus of specially " womanly influence " in our present civilization, those dangers inhere in the large celibate majority of intellectual leaders and representatives of womanhood in the field of expert knowledge and work. There is a "finicky," overprecise, ultra- refined morality and idealism which women develop by them- selves, and which is difficult to adjust to the larger, looser, simpler, but often more vital ethics and aspiration of men. The rounded wisdom and experience of the postgraduate mother (who usually has to practice her motherhood on her husband as well as her sons and thus learns tolerance and breadth of view) will come to be prized at its full social value, therefore, when more women qualify for its highest potency and the world learns at last what "old women" are for, and what social end they may serve. Then it will be at last understood why nature preserves so carefully both the life and the health of women ; why she gives them a new strength of body, a new youthfulness of purpose, a new capacity for spiritual adventure, so far in excess of men, when the time comes that their whole life may rightfully become their own in a more complete sense than ever before. It is said of the high-caste Brahman that he has three stages in life, three grand divisions of duty and of experience. First, he THE MODERN WOMAN MOVEMENT 537 must be a learner, devoted to acquiring the knowledge that a leader of men should possess ; next, he must be a father and house- holder, paying loyally his debt to society by rearing offspring who may connect his ancestors with his descendants in worship and family continuity ; last, he may become a pilgrim, a solitary seeker for truth, enjoying at will the high communion of those who live but for spiritual ends of being. The modern woman has now out- lined before her, faintly as yet but growing in clearness, her own " threefold path of life." First, the learner and the doer fitting for self-support and self-direction ; next, the devoted servant of life's most intimate demands upon human beings of the mother sex ; last, a conscious sharer, in a new and more inspiring sense, in the larger life of the race. There can be no general clearness of vision as to this three- fold path of womanhood, however, until more educated and com- petent women prepare for their last and splendid opportunity of service by a better use of the leisure hours of that period of life which is given especially to family interests. The vulgar phrase, " She does not need accomplishments now, her market is made," only emphasizes the too frequent undercurrent of women's atti- tude toward personal achievement. If one must earn a living out- side the home, ambition now makes most women seek to do it in the best way they can and. to the highest results of financial and social return. But the average married woman, with or with- out children, is too prone to look upon her life as ceasing to afford or to need new or continued modes of self-expression. There is an almost fatal tendency among young married women of average education and circumstances to give up wholly the vocational interest which was theirs before marriage. " No, I don't play now, I gave up practicing after John was born." " No, I don't paint now, the house takes so much time and Mary is a great care." " I never think of reading a book now, the maga- zines are all I can manage with the house, and no maid," " I can't work at my trade or my clerical work now, of course, for I can't be gone from the house all day." How often these and similar expressions are heard ! It is true, of course, that competi- tive industry being arranged for all-day service, most married 538 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS women are unable to engage profitably or properly in the work they did before marriage. But there are few women who cannot keep at least a selective and constant interest, and some small practice to "keep the hand in," that will stand them in stead if there should be need of earning in case of widowhood or finan- cial calamity, or when larger leisure from the upgrowing of the children makes it well for them to have some special interest of their own. Moreover, the period of life when a woman has the largest end of her activity fastened to the family need, and her economic position, therefore, properly secured by her husband's work for the family, is precisely the period when she may use her leisure, be it much or little, in preparation for some kind of work she wants to do but was not trained for as a girl. How many men find themselves in positions where they are kept doing what they would so gladly exchange for another sort of labor no one was wise enough to fit them for in youth ! The tragedies of misfit industry, the heroisms of men who stick at a hated task because it is all they know how to do and they dare not leave it for the sake of wife and bairns, — these are material for great dramas. How rich an opportunity many women waste, an oppor- tunity to prepare in a leisurely way, through years of security of home protection and care, by use of the bits of leisure almost every day affords, for the work nature intended they should do. Women have but just begun to see and use the advantages of their threefold path of life and only those most clear-sighted and brave can as yet do so. One thing stands in the way of women's realization and ap- propriation of these advantages, and that is the aristocratic attitude of both men and women toward "paid work" for women. So long as it is thought unfitting for a married woman to earn money inside or outside the home, so long as it popularly discredits a man if his wife thus earns as a result of her own labor outside domestic work, we shall have a majority of women unwilling and unable to use to best advantage the leisure hours of their earlier married life and hence unable to use most effectively their third stage of opportunity. Enough has been said in this discussion to show that it is intended to strengthen rather than to weaken the THE MODERN WOMAN MOVEMENT 539 demands of family life and child-care upon women. It remains to insist that until women themselves outgrow, and teach their " men folks " to outgrow, the notion that it is honorable for men to earn money in useful labor but dishonorable or a dire mis- fortune for women to do so, the right personal and social use of women's lives cannot be accomplished. It is now considered right and highly proper for a woman to earn money if unmarried and her " father can't take care of her," or if a widow whose " hus- band did not leave enough to support her," or a wife whose hus- band is disabled, ill, or incompetent. It must become natural and common in the public eye for any woman to earn money who wants to and can. At present we have advanced little beyond the period when the " wife of Thomas Hawkins " was granted by the selectmen of her town, in the seventeenth century, the " right to sell liquors by retayle, considering the necessitie and weak con- dition of her husband "; and when widows were " approved " by the church trustees to earn a pittance in " sweeping and dusting the meetinghouse " because they had no " provider." ^ The great city of New York still requires its married women teachers to swear that their husbands are morally, mentally or physically in- competent in order to retain their positions! The adjustment in plans of living to home needs and obliga- tions is a private concern of each married pair. The only social claim is that the children, if there are any, shall be well cared for in all respects, physical, mental, moral and vocational. The ad- justment of each woman to her own vocational desires, capacities and opportunities is a matter for herself and her husband to settle between them ; it is not even the proper concern of either mother-in-law ! The more exceptional women earn in art and lit- erature, in singing, painting, acting, on a plane where it is clear they are conferring social benefits and hence have a right to finan- cial returns which do not degrade but give distinction, the more nearly we approach a time when common women may earn money by any sort of labor they can do well enough to be paid, and whether married or single, without injuring their own or their husband's social position. We are, however, a long way from 1 Early Colonial Records. 540 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS that day now, when even the law penalizes the marriage of teachers and custom forbids any organized adjustment of labor to the special needs of the house-mother. The choice for the manual worker is sharply made, "labor all day and leave your baby at the day-nursery or stop at home and starve." The choice is almost equally difficult for the clerk, the stenographer, the tele- phone operator, the professional woman, the business manager. The Utopias in which all these difficulties vanish with a "presto change" are interesting to read of in books; but what is really helping the actual situation is that men and women, richer or poorer, but of the moral and intellectual ^lite, are now working out for themselves many modifications of the rigidity of modern industry as it relates to the married woman and the mother, in a most difficult but a most useful domestic experimentation. Meanwhile the average young married woman, and especially the average young married woman of good education and fairly good financial circumstances, needs most of all to see and to use her fine chance for preparation for vocational achievement, or for social usefulness, after she has become released from the heaviest duties to her family. Everything done by such a young woman in a professional manner and for pay on a business basis, helps to democratize the industry of women and to place the whole relationship of her sex to industry on a truly social plane. The aristocratic notion that it is a dire calamity for a married woman to have to earn money can only be outgrown by having multi- tudes of married women who do not have to earn money for per- sonal comforts or family well-being do something that the world wants to pay for and take their compensation naturally as men take it for worthy service. Whether or not, however, women earn money in personal labor outside the home during the years when their chief devotion must be to the family needs, they can keep interest and study and acquaintance open toward the free time of their second youth, when they will need and want to do something for and by themselves to round out their own personal lives : whether that something shall be a paid or an unpaid serv- ice. All this presupposes that women shall have had needed care and protection and support in their distinctive function of THE MODERN WOMAN MOVEMENT 541 motherhood and thus have escaped that too common tragedy of overwork and neglect which now' leaves so many women helpless and invalid in middle life. The majority of house-niothers among the wage-earning class are now overworked and underfed ; over- burdened with care and denied all the diversions and rest that enable women to keep well and happy and able to enter upon' their third stage of life fitted for its opportunities and its joys. Moreover, it must be pressed home to the public mind and conscience that the waste of womanhood in its later life has been throughout the ages, and now is, the result of an ignorant and careless treatment of girlhood. The same scientific inquiry which proves the eligibility of womanhood to a ripe and useful, a vital and youthful-hearted old age, demonstrates beyond cavil the social crime of ignoring the special danger point in the physical life of woman. We learn from every quarter of science that the weak point in womanhood is between the ages of thirteen or fourteen, and nineteen or twenty years. At that time and that alone death and disease stand nearer and more threatening to the girl than to the boy. At that time and at no other, save during actual childbearing, the womanhood of the race stands in greater need of special protection and help from society and from parenthood than does the manhood of the race. Mature women may always need social protection against long-continued, monotonous and uninterrupted labor. They may always be less able than men to survive shocks of accident or to sustain hardest trials of muscular effort without permanent harm. As Professor Thompson says : " Men are stronger in relation to spasmodic efforts and isolated feats." Hence the rule of the sea in shipwreck, or of the land in any terrible disaster, the rule of "women first to be saved," has a reason in the nature of things, since men can summon so much more special power for the special demand. The greater tenacity of life among women, however, their greater resistance to disease, their larger capacity for continual, sustained effort if that is varied in form and not too severe, are ample proofs that women need not be invalids or "weak," and that it is a social mistake or a social crime, or both, if they are so in any prevail- ing numbers at any period of life. The reason that the old age 542 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS of women is so often pathological in condition, the reason that marriage and maternity mean so often extreme suffering and disease, the reason that so many women fail of the second youth that is their birthright and have instead a long decay of life in depressing helplessness and futile longing, is more than all else because the first youth of women is so generally misused. Those years between fourteen and twenty when death and disease stand nearest to womanhood are the very years when in maay civili- zations marriage and childbearing have made their heaviest demands upon the young life. The physical weakness of both men and women in India, their lack of stamina, their easy yield- ing to all manner of diseases, their quick fading at the touch of hardship, this is the price India has paid for her child marriages. And not this alone, although this is so obvious that all mark its terrible consequences of social mistake. There is another price paid, the very life-portion of nature's dower to the women of India, nature's dower of health and happiness. Nowhere do women so age in mid-life, so suffer with all manner of maladjust- ments of physical, mental, and moral condition, as in countries where girlhood is thus sacrificed, and the time of all others when womanhood most needs care for the upbuilding of the individual life is misused for a premature devotion to other lives. The sad- ness of the women of India, who have become conscious of their lot and its contrast with happier lives, is only understood when we see clearly what an outrage upon nature's laws is this mar- riage of unformed girlhood. We trace in every civilization that has thus ignored the danger point in womanhood's physical de- velopment the same weakness in the race, the same unutterable sadness of premature old age and of widespread disease among the women. We are not to take credit to ourselves, however, as a civiliza- tion humane and wise in this matter. We are doing almost as wicked and wasteful a thing as respects the girlhood of the poorer classes in these United States in the morning of the twentieth century. Read again what we do to our young girls between the ages of fourteen and twenty, when of all the periods of life for women there is most danger of premature death and of wasting THE MODERN WOMAN MOVEMENT 543 and disabling disease.^ Concerning. the two hundred and ninety- five separate employments in which women earn wages and salary, as recorded in the census of 1900, two facts stand out prom- inently, — namely, the youth of the women and girls, and the low quality and poor pay of the work of the majority among them. Other facts are coming clearly into light, baleful in their signifi- cance, as we more closely study conditions. In the canning fac- tories 2400 rapid and regular motions a day in tin-cutting for the girls employed ; girls sixteen to twenty years of age, and speeded to the limit of supreme exhaustion in this race to keep ahead of the other workers. In the confectionery business, 3000 chocolates " dipped " every day at fever heat of energy. In the cracker-making trade, the girls standing or walking not six feet from the ovens show a white faintness from heat and hurry as they handle a hundred dozen a day ; and " can't stand the work long," as even the strongest confess. In the cigar-making in- dustry 1400 " stogies " a day worked over by girls seventeen to twenty years of age ; and not only that but children, boys and girls from five to twelve years old, stripping tobacco as helpers and the whole work so exhausting that even the older girls say they " can't keep the pace more than six years." In the garment trades, the sewing machines speeded to almost incredible limits, the unshaded electric bulbs and the swift motion of the needle giving early " eyeblur " and a nerve strain that enables the strongest to earn only five to six dollars a week, while the goal of eight dollars won by a ruinous " spurt " only crowds down the average wage by cutting " piecework " prices. And in this trade " custom work " brings the unsanitary tenement sweatshop into union with the best factories, to work the children younger and under worse conditions and leave no rest-time for youth even in the home. In the laundries women are operating machines so heavy that their whole bodies tremble with the strain of their use ; and the muscular system, drawn upon for this " spasmodic effort for an isolated feat," repeated as rapidly as the body can be forced to act, under the spur of a never-ceasing pressure, is often that of young girls, many of them under sixteen years of age. 1 See Edith Abbott, Women in Industry. 544 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS In the metal trades 10,000 " cores " a day turned out after two or three years' apprenticeship, and still the young girl under twenty is most in evidence in the bewilderingly rapid process. In the manufacture of "caskets " and other articles where strong lacquer is used, the manufacturer often says he " can't stand it more than two or three minutes in the room " where the fumes of the preparation are worst, but his girls work in it ten hours a day for the pitiful wage of nine dollars a week, called "good pay for women." In the soapmaking business the girls must wrap 1 100 cakes of soap a day in the bad air and worse smells of most such places in order to get a decent wage. The " telephone girl " gets many a harsh criticism ; it might be better if she got a little more attention as a social factor. Her age is seldom over twenty ; seventeen to eighteen years is the average. Physicians tell us that it is ruinous to the nervous system to do this exact- ing work more than five hours a day even with an hour's rest, complete and in the best possible conditions, between each two and one-half hours of service. But our telephone girls work their five hours in continuous service and if after four or five years of such labor they "break down," what then ? In mercantile houses the all-day standing which is the rule injures girls so . seriously that physicians continually complain about it. The law that requires seats in department stores is so much a dead letter that the girls laugh bitterly at any question concerning its enfoirce- ment. In places where five or six hundred girls are employed nineteen to thirty seats may be provided ; but to use even these may cost the girl her position. The hours, from eight to five or from eight to six o'clock, and the low wage which forbids proper clothing and nourishment if wholly depended upon for self- support, add to the peril of the shopgirl's condition. The " moral jeopardy of her position," as Miss Butler ^ calls it, is also a factor of sinister suggestion, when we remember that with all their hard and continuous labor, three fifths of the shopgirls earn less than seven dollars a week. The much vaunted " chivalry of men," the proudly assumed "reverence for womanhood" paraded in public addresses on the glory and moral excellence of our present 1 Elizabeth B. Butler, Women in the Trades. THE MODERN WOMAN MOVEMENT 545 civilization, do not work far down in the social scale. The fact is that because women are the cheapest of laborers and because young women must all work for pay between their school life and their marriage in the case of the poverty-bound, the poorest-paid and many of the hardest and most health-destroying of employ- ments are given them as almost a monopoly. Nature has warned mankind through unnumbered centuries, since the human intel- ligence has been able to perceive cause and effect, that if we wanted strong nations we must have strong mothers, and if we wanted strong mothers we must safeguard the girls from over- work arid all manner of economic evils : but we still turn deaf ears to the warning. In circles of society less pressed by economic need we misuse girlhood in many other ways. The pressure upon the early pre- cocity of the girl in school, the strain of " society " functions too elaborate and nerve-wearing for youth, the undercurrent of vulgar and wicked selling of maidenhood in legal but unholy marriage to the highest bidder in rank and money, — all these things despoil the precious and lovely freedom and joy of the potential mother. Some time we must be wiser and shield and protect, as now even the most careful parent finds it almost impossible to do alone and unaided by social customs and ways of living, what nature has asserted by her most solemn commands to be the first right of human beings of the mother-sex, namely, a happy and natural girlhood. Given that for the majority of the sex, given the right use of the period of marriage and maternity not only as related to the duty to the family but also as that may be a prep- aration for the best use of the later years, then indeed would the second youth of women show such fruitage in personal values and in social service as the world has not yet seen. Then would it be clearer, even to dull perception, why more women than men live to old age and why more women than men " keep the child- like in the larger mind " and hence may have many a belated springtime of growth. The moral of all this must be pressed home to the master forces of vocational direction and control. It must of all things be emphasized that not only is " teaching woman's organic oflSce 546 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS in the world," but that married women and mothers have done most of the teaching of all the younger children in all the past civilizations, and there are the best of reasons why they should continue to do so. Instead of penalizing the marriage of women teachers the public-school management of the United States should oifer a premium for the marriage of these women ; espe- cially those whose proved fitness for the teacher's office presents the first diploma in the curriculum of successful motherhood. The private schools now utilize such women both as heads of schools and as teachers. The premium that should be offered by the public-school system need not and should not be a continu- ance in the school work under the same exhausting and inexora- ble demands which are met by the unmarried teacher, who works so well after her many years of experience in " the system " while trying so heroically to change and improve it. The premium given the married woman teacher, with children or of whom society may expect offspring of a needed kind, should be in free- dom of choice of lines of work, in adjustable hours, and in all other details of flexibility of service needed by the house-mother. Although compensation should of course be given, the scale of wages of these part-time workers should not disarrange those schedules which secure to unmarried teachers, who give uninter- rupted service for a long career and who constitute the permanent staff in every schdol, their full share of " equal pay for women for equal work with men " in the higher competitions of profes- sional life. Such schedules are a vital need, not only for the sake of justice but for the right use of those exceptional educators among women who, whether married or unmarried, can serve as superintendents and heads of departments in the highest posi- tions. There is nothing more needed in education, however, than a vastly increased teaching force,' and a corresponding opportunity to modify and vary the grade system, especially in the elementary schools, to suit the needs of a wider range of child-capacity. We ought to have two or three part-time married women teachers to every celibate woman, younger or older, who gives whole service to the public schools. Moreover, the care- taking of the weak and ignorant and undeveloped, the moral THE MODERN WOMAN MOVEMENT 547 protection of children and youth in recreation and in labor, the succor of the needy, and the general expression of social control and social uplift, these are woman's special functions in the social order and have ever been her peculiar responsibility. The vital need in these fields to-day is not alone for a minority of trained workers, such as the schools for social workers are turn- ing out each year, but also for a large majority of citizens devoted to the public weal and able and willing intelligently to carry out and perfect, modify and balance the schemes of the experts and " paid workers " who make " scientific philanthropy " a life work. Women will doubtless always take a larger share in this part-time service in the lines indicated than men can do ; and older women, those in the third stage of life, are now entering this field with enthusiasm. As volunteers and as helpers, paid and unpaid, they are doing much of the constructive and ameliorative, the reform- atory and the preventive work of social reform. When, however, women enter this field late in life, or after a merely amateur and impulsive response in earlier life to the call of social need, they enter by a vocational leap, as it' were, from the inner to the outer circle of human interests. This gives, at the worst, an awkward meddling with established rules of procedure ; and at best fails to give highest effectiveness. Women who have had four years of college and two years of special training in a teacher's college or school of philanthropy and then, after two to six years of professional work in their chosen field, marry to take charge of an individual home, are too valuable assets of educational oppor- tunity to be left without social pressure and financial incentive to continue that work with the necessary modifications. The same is true of the minister, the lawyer, and above all the doctor and the nurse, as well as of all other women specialists in professional labor. The difficulties of the woman worker who marries and has children increase as we go down the scale through commercial, clerical, and manual employments ; but they are not insuperable ; and the ingenuity of industrial mechanism needed for the higher utilization of the paid work of women in other than purely pri- vate domestic lines waits for development only for a more just perception in the common sense regarding women's work-power. 548 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS The present pressure upon the wages of men that makes so many house-mothers obliged to add to the family income at the worst time of their lives for economic strain, and at any work they can get, however exploited and health-destroying, is no solu- tion of the problem ; it is an aggravation of it dire in social results. Real solutions of social problems are not worked out by people wholly "under" their circumstances. With, however, a true solution of the problems of womanhood, achieved not by flights of fancy but by patient infinitesimal efforts of daily living in which no inherited or present duty is neglected, and no opportunity for shaping toward future conditions is ignored, we shall gain at last for social culture in all lines, and for industry in many forms, a needed class of slowly trained, slowly apprenticed workers in every field where women naturally excel ; to rise finally at the third period of their lives to positions of command where women are now most needed. This will mean new ways of conserving hitherto exploited capacities and gifts of the mass of mankind. For women of the right sort and the right training, shielded by men's protection and care from the heaviest economic pressure during early life and developed in personality by the special demands upon them in the home, will see to it when they arrive at their rightful place of control that neither professional demand nor the industrial order shall take such a heavy toll from life itself in the effort to make a living ! " Old men for counsel ? " Yes, surely, now as of old ; and it is well for humanity that it learned this bit of sociar wisdom so early. Old women for new work for the race ? Yes, surely ; and well will it be for human progress when mankind learns this new lesson of social wisdom and makes fitting social use of the postgraduate mother, eager and fresh in her second youth, for a new pathfinding for the feet of the coming generations before she draws down the curtain and says good night. CHAPTER XIII THE EDUCATION OF WOMEN Plato's view, 550. — Differences in the mentality of the sexes, 552. — Woman's education — a man's view, 562. — Woman's education — a woman's view, 567. [Much of the limitation of women's activity and of the suppres- sion of her freedom of thought and impulse, which has come to be called, after Mill, "the subjection of women," has been due to preconceived and erroneous ideas as to the influence of the fact of sex upon the nonsexual functions of life. One of the most ill-used terms in the English language is the word " natural," especially when it is used in relation to sex. People speak glibly of this or that characteristic of women, or men, as the case may be, as "natural," meaning thereby that the trait is inborn in the individual through organic heredity, and that it is not a product of response to a given environment. It is difficult to realize how great are the differences of social training, of environmental stimuli in general, afforded the boy and the girl. Nowhere has this unscientific and superficial mode of thought, of attributing to nature what may be due to " nurture," played sadder havoc to the cause of justice and progress than in its easy assumption of innate and ineradicable mental differences between the sexes. There are perhaps certain a priori reasons, such as the physio- logical relation of the mother to the child, why we might look for a more widely diffused and active sense of sympathy, for instance, in women than in men, but no one can say scientifically, oh the basis of ordered and carefully examined inductive evidence, that important natural mental differences do, or do not, exist. Modern scientific psychology has made but the veriest beginnings of a study of this problem, and the general tendency is to rele- gate it to the limbo of " academic " questions — possibly because of the almost hopeless nature of the task of distinguishing between 549 SSO READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS facts that are natural, the result of organic heredity, and those that are due to education, using that term in the broad sense of adaptation to, and by, a social environment. Nevertheless, no small portion of society is organized, and carries on its processes, upon the old assumptions of the inferior intellectuality and ration- ality of woman, and her " finer sensibilities." Far more attention is still given to the policies which should govern the education of boys and men than is given to the edu- cation of girls and women. The new movement for vocational guidance, which fortunately has been taken up for girls as well as for boys, as well as the growth of the women's colleges and coeducational institutions, and the great number of girls in the high schools, is beginning to draw more attention to the question of the proper education for women. We are thus introduced to a most interesting and socially significant opposition of ideals for thq future of the education of girls and women in this country.] 52. PLATO ON THE TALENTS AND EDUCATION OF WOMEN i If the male and female sex appear to differ in reference to any art, or other occupation, we shall say that siich occupation must be appropriated to the one or to the other : but if we find the differences between the sexes to consist simply in the parts they respectively bear in the propagation of the species, we shall assert that it has not yet been by any means demonstrated that the difference between men and women touches our purpose ; on the contrary we shall still think it proper for our guardians and their wives to engage in the same pursuits. Pray tell us whether, when you say that one man possesses talents for a particular study, and that another is without them, you mean that the former learns it easily, the latter with difficulty ; and that the one with little instruction can find out much for himself in the subject he has studied, whereas the other after much teaching and practice cannot even retain what he has learned ; and that the mind of the one is duly aided, that of the other thwarted, by the bodily powers. Are not these the only 1 Adapted from "The Republic," sections 454-456. THE EDUCATION 0"F WOMEN 551 marks by which you define the possession and the want of natural talents for any pursuit ? Well, then, do you know of any branch of human industry in which the female sex is not inferior in these respects to the male ? or need we go to the length of specifying the art of weaving, and the manufacture of pastry and preserves, in which women are thought to excel, and in which their discomfiture is most laughed at ? In almost every employment the one "py ig vastly sug grior to the othe r. There are many women, no doubt, who are better in many things than many men. I conclude, then, that none of the occupations which comprehend the ordering of a state belong to women as women, nor yet to man as man ; but natural gifts are to be found here and there, in both sexes alike ; and, so far as her nature is concerned, the woman is admissible to all pursuits as well as the man ; though in all of them the woman is weaker than the man. Shall we then appropriate all duties to men and none to women .? On the contrary we shall hold that one woman may have talents for medicine, and another be without them ; and that one may be musical and another unmusical. And may there not be a love of knowledge in one and a distaste for it in another? and may not one be spirited and another spiritless ? If that be so, there are some women who are fit and others who are unfit, for the office of guardians. For were not those the qualities that we selected, in the case of the men, as marking their fitness for that office ? Then as far as the guardianship of the state is concerned, there is no difference between the natures of the man and of the woman, but only various degrees of weakness and of strength. Then we shall have to select duly qualified women also, to share in the life and official labors of the duly qualified men; since we find that they are competent to the work, and of kindred nature with the men. If the question is how to render a woman fit for the office of guardian, we shall not have one education for men, and another for women, especially as the nature to be wrought upon is the same in both cases. 5 52 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS 53. ARE THERE "NATURAL" DIFFERENCES IN THE MEN- TALITY OF THE SEXES ?i We may now bring together the results obtained from the various fields, and ascertain whether or not any broad generali- zations with reference to the psychological norms of men and women which can be regarded as of fundamental importance have been reached. It has been found that motor ability in most of its forms is better developed in men than in women. In strength, rapidity of movement, and rate of fatigue, they have a very decided advantage, and in precision of movement a slight advantage. These four forms of superiority are probably all expressions of one and the same fact — the greater muscular strength of men. In the formation of a new coordination women are superior to men. The greater muscular strength of men is a universally accepted fact. There has been more or less dispute as to which sex displays greater manual dexterity. According to the present- results, manual dexterity which consists in the ability to make very delicate and minutely controlled movements is slightly greater in men ; that which consists in the ability to coordinate movements rapidly to unforeseen stimuli is clearly greater in women. There have been two opposing views on the general subject of the sensibility of the sexes ; one assigning the keener senses to men, and the other to women. They have been based either on inadequate experiment in a few fields of sensibility or on general theoretical considerations. The present investigation of the total field of sensibility has resulted in the following conclusions re- garding thresholds and discriminative sensibility : Thresholds. — Women have lower thresholds in the recognition of two points on the skin ; in touch ; in sweet, salt, sour, and bitter taste; in smell; in color; and in pain through pressure. 1 By Helen B. Thompson. From The Mental Traits of Sex, pp. 169-182. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1903. Dr. Thompson carried out rigid experiments on twenty»-five men and twenty-five women, all students, in the psychological laboratory of The University of Chicago, to determine whether there were measurable differences, and if so, how great, in the mental activities of the two sexes. The pages here given are the concluding chapter of her book. THE EDUCATION OF WOMEN 553 Men and women are alike in respect to the upper and lower limits of pitch. Men have a lower threshold in the perception of light. Discriminative sensibility. — Women have finer discrimination in pitch and in color. Men and women have equal discrimina- tion in temperature, in odor, and in passive pressure. Men have finer discrimination in lifted weights ; in sweet, sour, and bitter taste ; in shades of gray ; probably in areas on the skin (the test on this subject does not warrant "certainty) ; and in visual areas. The number of cases in which the advantage is on the side of the women is greater than the number of cases in which it is on the side of the men. The thresholds are on the whole lower in women ; discriminative sensibility is on the whole better in men. Those sensory judgments into which sensations of movement enter directly, such as the discrimination of lifted weights and of visual lines and areas, are somewhat better in men. All these differences, however, are slight. As for the intellectual faculties, women are decidedly superior to men in memory, and possibly more rapid in associative thinking. Men are probably superior in ingenuity. In general information and intellectual interests there is no difference characteristic of sex. The data on the life of feeUng indicate that there is little, if any, sexual difference in the degree of domination by emotion, and that social consciousness is more prominent in men and religious consciousness in women. Let us now turn to the question how well or how ill these results accord with the prevailing biological view of the mental differences between the sexes. It is perhaps not fair to speak of a prevailing view in a ques- tion regarding which dispute is so rife ; but the view which seems to command the adherence of most scientists at present is that advanced by Geddes and Thompson.^ It is worked out in some detail on the psychological side by Fouill^e.^ Brooks^ and 1 Patrick Geddes and J. Arthur Thompson, The Evolution of Sex. London, 1889. ^ Alfred Fouillee, Temperament et caractere selon les individus, les sexes et les races. Paris, 1895. » W. K. Brooks, " On the Development of Voluntary Motor Ability," American Journal of Psychology, Vol. V (1892), p. 269. 554 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS Patrick^ represent the same tendency. The view is not alto- gether free from contradictions, nor entirely satisfactory in so far as it pretends to be a theory of the evolution of sex. Leaving these points aside, its general tenets are that the differentiation between the sexes in the course of evolution has been in the direction of a sort of division of labor, the male assuming the processes of nutrition and the female those of reproduction, which has made women more anabolic and men more katabolic in physi- ological structure. This difference is displayed in its most elementary form by the two sexual cells. The female is large and immobile. It represents stored nutrition. The male cell is small and agile. It represents expenditure of energy. From these fundamental characteristics the social and psychological differences can be deduced. The female represents the conser- vation of the species — the preservation of past gains made by the race. Her characteristics are continuity, patience, and stability. Her mental life is dominated by integration. She is skilled in particular ideas and in the application of generalizations already obtained, but not in abstraction or the formation of new concepts. Since woman is receptive, she possesses keener senses and more intense reflexes than man. Her tendency to accumulate nutrition brings about a greater development of the viscera, and, since emotions are reflex waves from the viscera, woman is more emotional than man. The male, on the other hand, represents the introduction of new elements. Males are more variable than females throughout the animal kingdom. Everywhere we find the male sex adventurous and inventive. Its activities are char- acterized everywhere by impulsiveness and intensity, rather than by patience and continuity. Men are more capable of intense and prolonged concentration of attention than women. They are less influenced by feeling than women. They have greater powers of abstraction and generalization. It is evident that, on the surface at least, the results at which we have arrived accord very well with this theory. Men did prove in our experiments to have better-developed motor ability 1 G. T. W. Patrick, " The Psychology of Woman," Popular Science Monthly, Vol. XLVII (189s), p. 209. THE EDUCATION OF WOMEN 555 and more ingenuity. Women did have somewhat keener senses and better memory. The assertion that the influence of emotion is greater in the life of women found no confirmation. Their greater tendency toward religious faith, however, and the greater number of superstitions among them, point toward their con- servative nature — their function of preserving established beliefs and institutions. But before we accept the theory advanced as the correct inter- pretation of the facts, it would be well to examine a little more closely the evidence on which it rests, and consider whether or not there is any other possible interpretation with equal claims to a hearing. In the first place, this theory, in so far as its deductions about mental characteristics are derived as necessary conclusions from the nature of the genital cells, seems to rest oil somewhat far- fetched analogies only. The sets of characteristics deduced for the sexes may be correct, but the method of deriving them is not very convincing, nor is the set of characteristics derived for each sex entirely consistent. Women are said to represent concentra- tion, patience, and stability in emotional life. One might logically conclude that prolonged concentration of attention and unbiased generalization would be their intellectual characteristics. But these are the very characteristics assigned to men. Women, though more stable in their emotions, are more influenced by them, and, although they represent patience and concentration, they are in- capable of prolonged efforts of attention. Men, whose activity is essentially intermittent, and whose emotions are greater in variety and more unstable, are characterized by prolonged strains of attention and unbiased judgment. It may be true, but the proof for it does not appeal to one as very cogent. In fact, after read- ing the several expositions of this theory, one is left with a strong impression that, if the authors' views as to the mental differences of sex had been different, they might as easily have derived a very different set of characteristics. There is truth as well as humor in Lourbet's ^ suggestion that, if the nature of the genital cells were reversed, it would be a little easier for this school of 1 Jacques Lourbet, La Femme devant la science contemporaire. Paris, i8g6. 5S6 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS evolutionists to derive the characteristics of sex with which they finally come out. In that case, the female cell, smaller and more agile than the male, would represent woman with her smaller size, her excitable nervous system, and her incapacity for sus- tained effort of attention ; while the male cell, large, calm, and self-contained, would image the size and strength, the impartial reason, and the easy concentration of attention of men. The fact which is put forward to prove the greater natural ingenuity and inventiveness of man is his greater variability. Lombroso, without more ado, asserts that the male is everywhere, and in all respects, more variable than the female, and that this fact alone is sufficient to prove his greater creative ability. The doctrine has been unquestioningly adopted by all the advocates of this theory. It is called upon to explain the occurrence of more individuals of unusual mental capacity, both above and below the norm, as well as to account for the greater versatility and inventiveness of the male mind. Unfortunately for the theory, the latest researches on the ques- tion of variability have failed to sustain it. Pearson ^ subjects the previous methods of measuring variability to criticism, and finds them very faulty. He insists that pathological variations are not a fair test of average variability in the sexes, because many dis- eases have a tendency to attack one sex rather than the other. The true measure of the variability which must be regarded as important in evolution is, he says, the amount of normal variation found in organs or characteristics not of a secondary sexual .char- acter. The variation, however, of any organ must be judged by its relative departure from its mean, not, as has formerly been done, by its absolute variation, or by its variation relatively to some other organ. Taking all the available physical measure- ments of human beings as a basis for his calculation, Pearson finds the total trend of his observations to be toward a some- what greater tendency to variation in women than in men. He concludes that " the principle that man is more variable than woman must be put aside as a pseudo-scientific superstition until ' Karl Pearson, The Chances of Death, Vol. I, chap, viii ("Variation in Man and Woman"), p. 256. London, 1897. THE EDUCATION OF WOMEN 55; it has been demonstrated in a more scientific manner than' has hitherto been attempted." While it may still prove true that men are intellectually more variable than women, it cannot be deduced directly from the uni- versally greater variability of man. The fact is often held to be proved from the greater prevalence of both genius and imbecility among men, but, as Pearson points out, these are both forms of abnormal variation. It is perfectly conceivable that the class which presented the greatest number of abnormalities in a char- acter might not be the class which displayed the widest normal variations of that character. But even though it could be shown that men are intellectually more variable than women, it is still difficult to see why this would give a basis for the statement that inventiveness and abil- ity to arrive at new generalizations are characteristic of the male mind as opposed to the female. It would, if true, lead us to ex- pect a greater number of intellectually inferior and -of intellectually superior individuals belonging to the male sex. In so far as great originality is characteristic of exceptional mental ability, it would lead us to expect that the greatest discoveries and inventions should come from these exceptional individuals. But that is not at all the same thing as saying that originality and inventiveness are characteristic of the male mind as a whole, in opposition to the female mind, as a whole. This statement assumes not merely greater variability of mind in general, but the presence of a variation in a given direction. , The biological theory of psychological differences of sex is not in a condition to compel assent. While it is true, therefore, that the present investigation tends to support the theory, it is just as true that the uncertain basis of the theory itself leaves room for other explanations of the facts, if there are other satisfactory ways of explaining them. In considering the question whether or not there is any other explanation for the facts' in the case, it is important to remember that the make-up of any adult individual cannot be attributed entirely to inherited tendency. The old question of Jthe relative importance of heredity and environment in the final outcome of 558 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS the individual must be taken into consideration. Although the timeworn controversy is far from satisfactory settlement, the re- sults of recent observation on individual development have tended to emphasize more and more the extreme importance of environ- ment. The sociological experiments in which very young children from the criminal classes have been placed in good' surroundings, with no knowledge of their antecedents, have shown that such children usually develop into good members of society. The entire practical movement of sociology is based on the firm conviction that an individual is very vitally molded by his surroundings, and that even slight modifications may produce important changes in character. The suggestion that the observed psychological differences of sex may be due to difference in environment has often been met with derision, but it seems at least worthy of unbiased considera- tion. The fact that very genuine and important differences of environment do exist can be denied only by the most superficial observer. Even in our own country, where boys and girls are allowed to go to the same schools and to play together to some extent, the social atmosphere is different, from the cradle. Dif- ferent toys are given them, different occupations and games are taught them, different ideals of conduct are held up before them. The question for the moment is not at all whether or not these differences in education are right and proper and necessary, but merely whether or not, as a matter of fact, they exist, and, if so, what effect they have on the individuals who are subjected to them. The difference in physical training is very evident. Boys are encouraged in all forms of exercise and in out-of-door life, while girls are restricted in physical exercise at a very early age. Only a few forms of exercise are considered ladylike. Rough games and violent exercise of all sorts are discouraged. Girls are kept in the house and taught household occupations. The development of physical strength is not held up to girls as an ideal, while it is made one of the chief ambitions of boys. While it is improbable that all the difference of the sexes with regard to ghysical strength can be attributed to persistent dif- ference in training, it is certain that a large part of the difference THE EDUCATION OF WOMEN 559 is explicable on this ground. The great strength of savage women and the rapid increase in strength in civilized women, wherever systematic physical training has been introduced, both show the importance of this factor. When we consider other forms of motor ability than mere muscular force, such as quickness of reac- tion and accuracy of coordination, it seems very probable that mere differences of physical training are ample to account for these differences of sex. While it seems to be true that slower rates of movement and decreased accuracy of coordination do result from greatly inferior physical strength, it is not true that the correlation is quantitatively a close one. Even with wide differences in muscular force, the difference in motor ability is comparatively slight. Where .the diiferences in strength are slight, we have no reason to expect differences in motor ability on that ground. When we consider the other important respect in which men are supposed to be superior to women — ingenuity or inventive- ness — we find equally important differences in social surround- ings which would tend to bring about this result. Boys are encouraged to individuality. They are trained to be independent in thought and action. This is the ideal of manliness held up before them. They are expected to understand the use of tools and machinery, and encouraged to experiment and make things for themselves. Girls are taught obedience, dependence, and deference. They are made to feel that too much independence of opinion or action is a drawback to them — not becoming or womanly. A boy is made to feel that his success in life, his place in the world, will depend upon his ability to go ahead with his chosen occupation on his own responsibility, and to accom- plish something new and valuable. No such social spur is applied to girls. Royce ^ in his article on the psychology of invention says : Only heredity can account for the very wide differences between clever men and stupid men, or explain why men of genius exist at all. But the minor and still important inventiveness of the men of talent, the men of the second grade, ' Josiah Royce, " The Psychology of Invention," Psychological Review, Vol. V (1898), p. 113. S6o READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS is' somehow due to a social stimulation which sets their habits varying in differ- ent directions. And this stimulation is of the type which abounds in periods of individualism. . . . For once more, the primary character of the social in- fluences to which we are exposed is that, within limits, they set us to imitating models ; they tend to make us creatures of social routine, slaves of the mob, or obedient servants of the world about us. . . . Inventions thus seem to be the results of the encouragement of individuality. If one applies these words to the question of the relative in- ventiveness of the sexes, and realizes the wide differences in social influence which still exist even in a community where women have more freedom and more education than anywhere else in the world, it seems rash to assume that the, observed difference in inventiveness represents a genuine and fundamental sexual difference of mind. The fact that the difference revealed by ex- periment is so slight in men and women whose educations have been as nearly alike as those of students in a coeducational university, tends to throw further doubt on the fundamental importance of this distinction. The very brief period in which women have been given any systematic education, or any freedom of choice in occupation, makes it impossible to decide the ques- tion on the basis of previous achievement. The same social influences which have tended to retard the development of motor ability and of inventiveness in women would tend to develop keenness of sense ' and the more repro- ductive mental processes, such as memory. The question is largely one of the distribution of attention. A large part of a boy's attention goes toward his activities — the learning of new movements, the manipulating of tools, the making of contrivances of various sorts. A girl's less active existence must be filled with some other sort of conscious process. The only* possibility is that sensory and perceptual processes should be more promi- nent. In some cases the special training of girls tends directly toward the development of a special sense. This is notably true in color, and perhaps has some influence in taste. On the more purely intellectual level, it is only natural that in the. absence of a sufficient social spur toward originality and inventiveness, they should depend more upon memory for their supply of ideas. It THE EDUCATION OF WOMEN 561 is easier for any individual to learn someone else's ideas than to think out his own. Every teacher has to struggle against the tendency to memorize merely, and to endeavor in every way to stimulate original thought and help pupils to form the habit of doing their own thinking. It is no great matter of surprise that in the absence of social stimulus toward originality of thought, women should have tended, from inertia, to stay in th_e realm of reproductive thinking. It will probably be said that this view of the case puts the cart before the horse — that the training and social surroundings of the sexes are different because their natural characteristics are different. It will be said that a boy is encouraged to activity because he is naturally active — that he is given tools instead of a doll because he is naturally more interested in tools than in dolls. But there are many indications that these very interests are socially stimulated. A small boy with an older sister and no brothers is very sure to display an ambition to have dolls. It is in most cases quenched early by ridicule, but it is evident that a boy must be taught what occupations are suited to boys. The sorrows of a small girl with brothers because she is not allowed to run and race with the boys and take part in their sports and games have frequently been recounted. If it were really a funda- mental difference of instincts and characteristics which determined the difference of training to which' the sexes are subjected, it would not be necessary to spend so much effort in making boys and girls follow the lines of conduct proper to their sex. The more probable interpretation of the facts is that the necessities of social organization have in the past brought about a division of labor between the sexes, the usefulness of which is evident. Social ideals have been developed in connection with this eco- nomic necessity, and still persist. This is not the place to discuss the question whether or not the conditions of social organization still demand the same divi- sion of labor, and make the preservation of the traditional ideals for the sexes necessary to the good of society. If such is the case, there is no doubt that the present state of affairs will persist. There are, as everyone must recognize, signs of a radical change 562 READINGS IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS in the social ideals of sex. The point to be emphasized as the outcome of this study is that, according to our present light, the psychological differences of sex seem to be largely due, not to difference of average capacity, nor to difference in type of mental activity, but to differences in the social influences brought to bear on the developing individual from early infancy to adult years. The question of the future development of the intellectual life of women is one of social necessities and ideals, rather than of the inborn psychological characteristics of sex. 54. WOMAN'S EDUCATION— A FORECAST i When I was invited to speak here it was suggested to me that I say something about the future of the higher education of women ; and that task I gladly accepted. We cannot tell much about the future except as we study the past and the present ; and therefore the first thing I want to do is to state as clearly as I can what seems to me to have been accomplished in the last thirty-five years concerning the higher education of women in our country. I remember very well the beginnings. I remember the doubts which accompanied those beginnings — doubts in which your president has just intimated that I might possibly have shared. Three doubts, at least, fundamental in their nature, important with regard to the immediate success of the higher education of women, and important, certainly, with regard to their future, seem to me to have been resolved. Three distinct apprehensions con- cerning the effect of the higher education upon women seem to me to have been dissipated, to have been removed. In the first place, there was perfectl ^f einr^rp rlnnVit- ^l-