“The dregs of the human species—the blind, the deaf mute, the degenerate, the imbecile, the epileptic—are better protected than pregnant women.”
—Bouchacourt.
“I hold that the two crowning and most accursed sins of the society of this present day are the carelessness with which it regards the betrayal of women, and the brutality with which it suffers the neglect of children.”
—Ruskin.
A chapter must be included here concerning a question which can never safely be ignored in any consideration of race-culture, but the importance of which, as I think I see it, is recognised by no one who has concerned himself at all with this subject, from Mr. Francis Galton himself downwards. We must all be agreed, Mr. Galton declares, as to the propriety of breeding, if it be possible, for health, energy and ability, whatever else may be doubtful. To this I would add that, whether we are agreed or not, we must breed for motherhood, and that, even if we do not, we shall have to reckon with it. The general eugenic position, I fancy, is that the requirements which we should make of both sexes, the mothers of the future as well as the fathers, are essentially identical: but it seems to me that we have not yet reckoned with the vast importance of motherhood as a factor in the evolution of all the higher species of animals, and its absolute supremacy, inevitable and persistent whether recognised or ignored, in the case of man. Any system of eugenics or race-culture, any system of government, any proposal for social reform—as, for instance, the reduction of infant[146] mortality—which fails to reckon with motherhood or falls short of adequately appraising it, is foredoomed to failure and will continue to fail so long as the basal facts of human nature and the development of the human individual retain even approximately their present character. Whatever proposals for eugenics or race-culture be made or carried out, the fact will remain that the race is made up of mortal individuals; that every one of these begins its visible life as a helpless baby, and that the system which does not permit the babies to survive, they will not permit to survive.
This is a general and universal proposition, admitting of no exceptions, past, present or to come. It applies equally to conscious systems of race-culture, to forms of marriage, to forms of government, to any other social institution or practice or character that can be named or conceived. Upon every one of these the babies pronounce a judgment from which there is no appeal. The baby may be a potential Newton, Shakespeare, Beethoven or Buddha, but it is at its birth the most helpless thing alive, the potentialities of which avail it not one whit. It is in more need of care, immediate and continuous, than a baby microbe or a baby cat, whatever the unpublished glories of which its brain contains the promise; and in the total absence of any apparatus, mechanical, legal, or scientific, which can provide the mother's breast and the mother's love, individual motherhood, in its exquisitely complementary aspects, physical and psychical, will remain the dominant factor of history so long as the final judgments upon every present and the final determinations for every future lie in the hands of helpless babyhood—which will be the case so long as man is mortal. When, if ever, science, having previously conquered disease, identifies the causes of natural death and removes them, then[147] motherhood and babyhood may be thrown upon the rubbish heap; but until that hour they are enthroned by decree of Nature, and can be dethroned only at the cost of Her certain and annihilative vengeance.
It is the master paradox that at his first appearance the lord of the earth should be the most helpless of living things. Consider a new-born baby. “Unable to stand, much less to wander in search of food; very nearly deaf; all but blind; well-nigh indiscriminating as to the nature of what is presented to its mouth; utterly unable to keep itself clean, yet highly susceptible to the effects of dirt; able to indicate its needs only by alternately turning its head, open-mouthed, from side to side and then crying; possessed of an almost ludicrously hypersensitive interior; unable to fast for more than two or three hours, yet having the most precise and complicated dietetic requirements; needing the most carefully maintained warmth; easily injured by draughts; the prey of bacteria (which take up a permanent abode in its alimentary canal by the eleventh day)—where is to be found a more complete picture of helpless dependence?”[42] How comes it that this creature is to be lord of the earth, and a member of the only species which succeeds in continually multiplying itself?
Motherhood and intelligence.
We have maintained that the vital character which is of supreme survival-value for man is his intelligence, and this, as we know, is his unique possession. It is very largely for intelligence, therefore, that race-culture or eugenics proposes, if possible, to work. But if there be certain conditions which must be complied with before intelligence can possibly be evolved, eugenics will come to disaster should it ignore them. These conditions do exist, and have hitherto been entirely ignored by all students of this question. Let certain great facts be observed.
Why is the human baby the most helpless of all creatures? Since it is to become the most capable, should it not, even in its infant state, show signs of its coming superiority? What is the meaning of this paradox?
The answer is that, so far as physical weapons of offence and defence are concerned, these have disappeared because intelligence makes them superfluous or even burdensome. But the peculiar helplessness of the human infant depends not upon its nakedness in the physical sense but upon its lack of very nearly all instinctive capacities. It is this absence of effective instincts which distinguishes the baby from the young of all other creatures. Why should its endowment in this respect be so inferior?
It is because of the fact that, if instinct is to give rise to intelligence, it must be plastic. A purely instinctive creature reacts to certain sets of circumstances in certain effortless, perfect and fixed ways. The reactions are the whole of its psychical life. They need no education, being as perfectly performed on the first occasion as on the last, and in many instances being performed only once in the whole history of the creature in question. But, on the other hand, they are almost incapable of education, and even in the cases where they lack absolute perfection at first, they only require the merest modicum of opportunity in order to acquire it. Perfect within their limits, they are yet most definitely limited. They never achieve the new, they are utterly at fault in novel circumstances, and they are wholly incapable of creating circumstances.
A creature cannot be at once purely instinctive and intelligent. An instinctive action is simply a compound reflex action, a highly adapted automatism: now automatism and intelligence are necessarily inversely proportional. It is possible for an intelligent creature to acquire automatisms, which are popularly described as instinctive. They are not instincts, however, but the acquired equivalents[149] of instincts: “secondary automatisms.” If they are used to replace intelligence, the individual, in so far, sinks from the human to the sub-human level. Their proper function is to leave the intelligence free for higher purposes more worthy of it than, say, the act of dressing oneself.
In order that an intelligent creature should be evolved it was necessary that instinct should become plastic. Intelligence could not be superposed upon a complete and final instinctive equipment. You cannot determine your own acts if they are already determined for you by your nervous organisation. The incomparable superiority of intelligence depends upon its limitless and creative character, in virtue of which, as Disraeli puts it, “men are not the creatures of circumstances: circumstances are the creatures of men.” But whilst intelligence can learn everything, it has everything to learn, and the most nearly intelligent creature whom the earth affords thus begins his independent life almost wholly bereft of all the instruments which have served the lower creatures so well, whilst, on the other hand, he is provided with an utterly undeveloped, and indeed, at that time non-existent, weapon which, even if it did exist, he could not use. Hence the unique helplessness of the human baby: one of the most wonderful and little appreciated facts in the whole of nature—effectively hidden from the glass eyes of the kind of man who calls a baby a “brat,” but, to eyes that can see, not only the master paradox from the philosophical point of view but also a fact of the utmost moment from the practical point of view.
The evolution of motherhood.
It directly follows that motherhood is supremely important in the case of man. It is the historical fact that its importance in the history of the animal world has been steadily increasing throughout æonian time. The most successful and ancient[150] societies we know, those of the social insects, which antedate by incalculable ages even the first vertebrates, could not survive for a single generation without the motherhood or foster-motherhood to which the worker females sacrifice their lives and their own chances of physical maternity.
The development of maternal care may be steadily traced throughout the vertebrate series—pari passu with the evolution of sexual relations towards the ideal of monogamy, which is ideal just because of its incomparable services to motherhood. But whilst motherhood is of the utmost service for lower creatures, tending always to lessen infant mortality—if it may be so called—and to increase the proportion of life to death and birth, it is of supreme service in the case of man because of the absolute dependence upon it of intelligence, the solitary but unexampled weapon with which he has won the earth. Hence in breeding for intelligence we cannot afford to ignore that upon which intelligence depends. Even if we could produce genius at will, we should find our young geniuses just as dependent upon motherhood as the common run of mankind. Newton himself was a seven months' baby, and the potentialities of gravitation and the calculus and the laws of motion in his brain could not save him: motherhood could and did.
Even our least biological reformers must admit that purely physical motherhood, up to the point of birth, can scarcely be omitted in any schemes for social reform or race-culture. Some of them will even admit that purely physical motherhood, so far as the mother's breasts are concerned, cannot wisely be dispensed with. The psychical aspects of motherhood, however, many of these writers—I do not call them thinkers—ignore. In relation to infant mortality—which is the most obvious symptom of causes productive of vast and widespread physical deterioration[151] amongst the survivors, and which must be abolished before any really effective race-culture is possible—it is worth noting that motherhood cannot safely be superseded. I do not believe in the crèche or the municipal milk depôt except as stop-gaps, or as object-lessons for those who imagine that the slaughtered babies are not slaughtered but die of inherent defect, and that therefore infant mortality is a beneficent process. In working for the reduction of this evil we must work through and by motherhood. In some future age, boasting the elements of sanity, our girls will be instructed in these matters. At present the most important profession in the world is almost entirely carried on by unskilled labour, and until this state of things is put an end to, it is almost idle to talk of race-culture at all. But under our present system of education, false and rotten as it is in principles and details alike, it is necessary for us to send visitors to the homes of the classes which, in effect, supply almost the whole of the future population of the country, and to establish schools for mothers on every hand.
Psychical motherhood.
I confess myself opposed to the principle of bribing a woman to become a mother, whether overtly or covertly, whether in the guise of State-aid or in the form of eugenic premiums for maternity. It may sound very well to offer a bonus for the production of babies by mothers whom the State or any eugenic power considers fit and worthy. But though the bonus may help motherhood in its physical aspects, the importance of which no one questions, I do not see what service it renders to motherhood in its psychical aspects—which are at least equally important. What is the outlook for the baby when the bonus is spent? In fact, with all deference to Mr. Galton, and with such deference as may be due to the literary triflers who have discussed this matter, I am inclined to think that a[152] cardinal requisite for a mother is love of children. Ignorant this may be, and indeed at first always is, but if it is there it can be instructed. The woman who does not think the possession of a baby a sufficient prize is no fit object, I should say, for any other kind of bribe or lure. The woman who “would rather have a spare bedroom than a baby” is the woman whom I do not want to have a baby. Thus I look with suspicion on any proposals which assume that the psychical elements of motherhood are of little moment in eugenics. I see no sign or prospect that they can be dispensed with, and I think eugenics is going to work on wrong lines if it proposes to ignore them. Even if you turn out Nature with a fork she will yet return—tamen usque recurret.
In this question we should be able to derive great assistance from biography. Real guidance, I believe, is obtained from this source, but only a pitiable fraction of that which should be obtained. Scientific biography is yet to seek, and it is the ironical fact that when Herbert Spencer, in his Autobiography, devoted a large amount of space to the discussion of both his parents and their relatives, the literary critics were bored to death. Nevertheless, we cannot know too much about the ancestry, on both sides, and the early environment, of great men. At present it is always tacitly assumed that a great man is the son of his father alone. The biographer would probably admit, if pressed, that doubtless some woman or other was involved in the matter, and that her name was so and so—if any one thinks it worth mentioning. On the score of heredity alone, however, we derive, men and women alike, with absolute equality from both parents; and we cannot know too much about the mothers of men of genius. Such knowledge would often avail us materially in cases where the paternal ancestry offers little explanation of the child's destiny.
We do owe, however, to great men themselves many warm and unqualified tributes to their mothers, not on the score of heredity, but on the score of the psychical aspects of motherhood. This, indeed, is one of the great lessons of biography which some eugenists have forgotten. It is all very well to breed for intelligence, but intelligence needs nurture and guidance, and that need is the more urgent, the more powerful and original the intelligence in question. The physical functions of motherhood from the moment of birth onwards can be effected, no doubt, though at very great cost, by means of incubators and milk laboratories, and so forth. But there is no counterfeiting or replacing the psychical component of complete maternity, and a generation of the highest intelligence borne by unmaternal women would probably succeed only in writing the blackest and maddest page in history.
The eugenic demand for love.
Mr. Galton desires that we breed for physique, ability, and energy. But we also need more love, and we must breed for that. Nothing is easier or more inevitable once we make human parenthood conscious and deliberate. When children are born only to those who love children, and who will tend to transmit their high measure of that parental instinct from which all love is derived, we shall bring to earth a heaven compared with which the theologian's is but a fool's paradise.
The first requisite, then, for the mothers of the future, the elements of physical health being assumed, is that they should be motherly. They may or may not, in addition, be worthy of such exquisite titles as “the female Shakespeare of America,” but they must have motherliness to begin with. For this indispensable thing there is no substitute. It must certainly be granted, and the fact should not be ignored, that the hidden spring of motherliness in a girl may be revealed only by actual maternity,[154] and the frivolous damsel who used to think babies “silly squalling things” may be mightily transformed when the silly squalling thing is her own—and the Fifth Symphony sound and fury signifying nothing compared with its slightest whimper. I will grant even that the maternal instinct is so deeply rooted and universal that its absence must be regarded as either a rare abnormality or else as the product of the grossest mal-education in the wide sense. But the reader will not blame me for insisting at such length upon what, as he would think, no one could deny, when he discovers that these salient truths are denied, and that in what should be the sacred name of eugenics, they are openly flouted and defied.
Before we go on to consider these perversions of a great idea, it may briefly be observed that, though fatherhood is historically a mushroom growth compared with motherhood, and though its importance is vastly less, yet as a complementary principle, aiding and abetting motherhood, and making for its most perfect expression, fatherhood played a great part in animal evolution, in the right line of progress, ages before man appeared upon the earth at all, and that its work is not yet done. To this subject we must return. Meanwhile it is well to note the dangers with which eugenics is at present threatened in the form of certain proposals which, if for a time they became popular—and they have elements making for popularity—would inevitably throw the gravest discredit upon the whole subject.
Eugenics and the family.
Certain remarkable tendencies invoking the name of eugenics are now to be observed in Germany. These have considerable funds, much enthusiasm, journalistic support, and even a large measure of assistance in academic circles. In pursuance of the idea of eugenics there is a movement the nature of[155] which is indicated by the following quotation from a private letter:—
“I wonder if your attention was drawn to the German projects of the reform of the Family. They all aim at improving the German race and rendering decisive its superiority over all others. The means seem to be too revolutionary. The more modern wish the establishment of the matriarchal family (ein nach Mutterrecht), the more logical require universal polygamy and polyandry, an individualisation of Society. Others hope to increase the production of German geniuses by the ‘hellenic friendship.’[!] The three movements are strongly organised, command large pecuniary means, a phalanx of original and prolific writers, and enthusiastic devotion to their cause. More even than the support of Courts and aristocracy is, in my eyes, that of the Universities. It is there that the destinies of Germany have always been shaped, and if they are determined to reform the Family in that way, it will be done.... The Herren Professoren are terribly in earnest, yet they say things which even to the least prejudiced minds appear ridiculous and even vulgar. Still, their projects have some relation to Eugenics, and to Sociology in general.”
This sufficiently indicates the dangers run by the eugenic principle at the hands of those who see in it an instrument of protest and rebellion against established things. We dare not repudiate the sacred principles of protest and rebellion, which have been the conditions of all progress, but believing in motherhood as we must, believing it to be authorised by nature herself and not by any human conventions, we must deplore any tendencies such as the two last cited. For us in this country, however, a more immediate interest attaches to the views of a much admired and discussed writer who claims to be a social philosopher of the first order, and whose claims must now be examined.
The opinions of Mr. Bernard Shaw on the question of eugenics may be quoted from his contribution to the subject published in Sociological Papers 1904, pp. 74, 75, in discussion of Mr. Galton's great paper. Mr. Shaw begins by saying: [156]“I agree with the paper and go so far as to say that there is now no reasonable excuse for refusing to face the fact that nothing but a eugenic religion can save our civilisation from the fate that has overtaken all previous civilisations.” And further:—
“I am afraid we must make up our minds either to face a considerable shock to vulgar opinion in this matter or to let eugenics alone.... What we must fight for is freedom to breed the race without being hampered by the mass of irrelevant conditions implied in the institution of marriage. If our morality is attacked, we can carry the war into the enemy's country by reminding the public that the real objection to breeding by marriage is that marriage places no restraint on debauchery, so long as it is monogamic.... What we need is freedom for people who have never seen each other before and never intend to see one another again, to produce children under certain definite public conditions, without loss of honour.”
The conception of individual fatherhood here stated involves a deliberate reversion to the order of the beast: it excludes individual fatherhood from any function in aiding motherhood or in serving the future. It involves, of course, the total abolition of the family. It denies and flouts the very best elements in human nature. It assumes that the best women will find motherhood worth while without the interest and sympathy and help and protection of the father. It does not, however, condemn or exclude the psychical functions of motherhood, since so far as this quotation goes it might be assumed that the mother would be permitted to live with her own child. On this point, however, Mr. Shaw offered us further guidance in his controversy with myself in the Pall Mall Gazette, in December, 1907. One or two of his dicta must here be quoted—they followed upon my remark, “Anything less like a mother than the State I find it hard to imagine”:—
“When the State left the children to the mothers, they got no schooling; they were sent out to work under inhuman conditions, under-ground and over-ground for atrociously long hours, as soon as they were able to walk; they died of typhus fever in heaps; they grew up to be as wicked to their own children as their parents had been to them. State socialism rescued them from the worst of that, and means to rescue them from all of it. I now publicly challenge Dr. Saleeby to propose, if he dares, to withdraw the hand of the State and abandon the children to their mothers as they fall.... All I need say is that before Dr. Saleeby can persuade me to sacrifice the future of human society to his maternalism, he will have to tackle me with harder weapons than the indignant enthusiasm of a young man's mother worship.”
Mr. Shaw's teaching constitutes a brutal and deliberate libel upon the highest aspects of womanhood. For his own purposes he attributes to the mothers all the abominations which, as every one knows, have lain and in some measure still lie, at the door of the State. The man who has this opinion of motherhood is complacently ignorant of the elements of the subject. His charge is denied by every one who has worked as doctor or nurse or visitor or missionary amongst the poorer classes, and knows that the mothers there met are of the very salt of the earth.
It is well to state plainly here that these utterly irresponsible dicta have absolutely no relation or resemblance whatever to the opinions or proposals of Mr. Francis Galton himself, who desires to effect race-culture through marriage, and whose whole propaganda is based upon this assumption. This we shall afterwards see. Meanwhile we may note Mr. Galton's own words: “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.” Mr. Galton would be the first to assert that influences designed to supersede motherhood and to abolish everything but the physical aspect of fatherhood, would not be reasonable, but insane in the highest degree.
The ideal of race-culture without fatherhood or motherhood, except in the mere physiological sense, constitutes[158] a denial of the greatest facts in evolution, as we have seen. It ignores everything that is known and daily witnessed regarding the development of the individual, and the formation of character, without which intelligence is a curse. There is not the slightest fear that any such reversion to the order of the beast is possible, absolutely forbidden as it is by the laws of human nature. There is, however, reasonable ground for apprehension, especially when the recent developments in Germany are remembered, that the public may obtain its notions of eugenics in a highly-garbled form.[43]
It must be asserted as fervently and plainly as possible that, if the idea of race-culture is even in the smallest degree to be realised, it must work through motherhood and fatherhood not less in their psychical than in their physical aspects. It is time to have done with the gross delusions of Nietzsche regarding the nature and course of organic evolution. Morality is not an invention of man but man the child of morality, and it is not by the abolition of motherhood, in which morality originated, nor of fatherhood, its first ally, that the super-man is to be evolved: but by the attainment of those lofty conceptions of the function, the responsibility and the privilege of parenthood which it is the first business of eugenics to inculcate.
As for marriage, invaluable though at its best it be for the completion and ennoblement of the individual life, its great function for society and for the race is in relation to childhood. Thus considered, the dictum of Professor Westermarck may be understood, that children are not[159] the result of marriage but marriage the result of children. This, in other words, is to say that marriage has become evolved and established as a social institution because of its services to race-culture. It is, in short, the supreme eugenic institution. This great subject must next occupy our attention.