THE SCIENCE OF PROCREATION

Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 by Havelock Ellis is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. THE SCIENCE OF PROCREATION

XII. THE SCIENCE OF PROCREATION

The Relationship of the Science of Procreation to the Art of Love—Sexual Desire and Sexual Pleasure as the Conditions of Conception—Reproduction Formerly Left to Caprice and Lust—The Question of Procreation as a Religious Question—The Creed of Eugenics—Ellen Key and Sir Francis Galton—Our Debt to Posterity—The Problem of Replacing Natural Selection—The Origin and Development of Eugenics—The General Acceptance of Eugenical Principles To-day—The Two Channels by Which Eugenical Principles are Becoming Embodied in Practice—The Sense of Sexual Responsibility in Women—The Rejection of Compulsory Motherhood—The Privilege of Voluntary Motherhood—Causes of the Degradation of Motherhood—The Control of Conception—Now Practiced by the Majority of the Population in Civilized Countries—The Fallacy of "Racial Suicide"—Are Large Families a Stigma of Degeneration?—Procreative Control the Outcome of Natural and Civilized Progress—The Growth of Neo-Malthusian Beliefs and Practices—Facultative Sterility as Distinct from Neo-Malthusianism—The Medical and Hygienic Necessity of Control of Conception—Preventive Methods—Abortion—The New Doctrine of the Duty to Practice Abortion—How Far is this Justifiable?—Castration as a Method of Controlling Procreation—Negative Eugenics and Positive Eugenics—The Question of Certificates for Marriage—The Inadequacy of Eugenics by Act of Parliament—The Quickening of the Social Conscience in Regard to Heredity—Limitations to the Endowment of Motherhood—The Conditions Favorable to Procreation—Sterility—The Question of Artificial Fecundation—The Best Age of Procreation—The Question of Early Motherhood—The Best Time for Procreation—The Completion of the Divine Cycle of Life.

We have seen that the art of love has an independent and amply justifiable right to existence apart, altogether, from procreation. Even if we still believed—as all men must once have believed and some Central Australians yet believe—that sexual intercourse has no essential connection with the propagation of the race it would have full right to existence. In its finer manifestations as an art it is required in civilization for the full development of the individual, and it is equally required for that stability of relationships which is nearly everywhere regarded as a demand of social morality.

When we now turn to the second great constitutional factor of marriage, procreation, the first point we encounter is that the art of love here also has its place. In ancient times the sexual congruence of any man with any woman was supposed to be so much a matter of course that all questions of love and of the art of love could be left out of consideration. The propagative act might, it was thought, be performed as impersonally, as perfunctorily, as the early Christian Fathers imagined it had been performed in Paradise. That view is no longer acceptable. It fails to commend itself to men, and still less to women. We know that in civilization at all events—and it is often indeed the same among savages—erethism is not always easy between two persons selected at random, nor even when they are more specially selected. And we also know, on the authority of very distinguished gynæcologists, that it is not in very many cases sufficient even to effect coitus, it is also necessary to excite orgasm, if conception is to be achieved.

Many primitive peoples, as well as the theologians of the Middle Ages, have believed that sexual excitement on the woman's part is necessary to conception, though they have sometimes mixed up that belief with false science and mere superstition. The belief itself is supported by some of the most cautious and experienced modern gynæcologists. Thus, Matthews Duncan (in his lectures on Sterility in Women) argued that the absence of sexual desire in women, and the absence of pleasure in the sexual act, are powerful influences making for sterility. He brought forward a table based on his case-books, showing that of nearly four hundred sterile women, only about one-fourth experienced sexual desire, while less than half experienced pleasure in the sexual act. In the absence, however, of a corresponding table concerning fertile women, nothing is hereby absolutely proved, and, at most, only a probability established.

Kisch, more recently (in his Sexual Life of Woman), has dealt fully with this question, and reaches the conclusion that it is "extremely probable" that the active erotic participation of the woman in coitus is an important link in the chain of conditions producing conception. It acts, he remarks, in either or both of two ways, by causing reflex changes in the cervical secretions, and so facilitating the passage of the spermatozoa, and by causing reflex erectile changes in the cervix itself, with slight descent of the uterus, so rendering the entrance of the semen easier. Kisch refers to the analogous fact that the first occurrence of menstruation is favored by sexual excitement.

Some authorities go so far as to assert that, until voluptuous excitement occurs in women, no impregnation is possible. This statement seems too extreme. It is true that the occurrence of impregnation during sleep, or in anæsthesia, cannot be opposed to it, for we know that the unconsciousness of these states by no means prevents the occurrence of complete sexual excitement. We cannot fail, however, to connect the fact that impregnation frequently fails to occur for months and even years after marriage, with the fact that sexual pleasure in coitus on the wife's part also frequently fails to occur for a similar period.

"Of all human instincts," Pinard has said,[422] "that of reproduction is the only one which remains in the primitive condition and has received no education. We procreate to-day as they procreated in the Stone Age. The most important act in the life of man, the sublimest of all acts since it is that of his reproduction, man accomplishes to-day with as much carelessness as in the age of the cave-man." And though Pinard himself, as the founder of puericulture, has greatly contributed to call attention to the vast destinies that hang on the act of procreation, there still remains a lamentable amount of truth in this statement. "Future generations," writes Westermarck in his great history of moral ideas,[423] "will probably with a kind of horror look back at a period when the most important, and in its consequences the most far-reaching, function which has fallen to the lot of man was entirely left to individual caprice and lust."

We are told in his Table Talk, that the great Luther was accustomed to say that God's way of making man was very foolish ("sehr närrisch"), and that if God had deigned to take him into His counsel he would have strongly advised Him to make the whole human race, as He made Adam, "out of earth." And certainly if applied to the careless and reckless manner in which procreation in Luther's day, as still for the most part in our own, was usually carried out there was sound common sense in the Reformer's remarks. If that is the way procreation is to be carried on, it would be better to create and mould every human being afresh out of the earth; in that way we could at all events eliminate evil heredity. It was, however, unjust to place the responsibility on God. It is men and women who breed the people that make the world good or bad. They seek to put the evils of society on to something outside themselves. They see how large a proportion of human beings are defective, ill-conditioned, anti-social, incapable of leading a whole and beautiful human life. In old theological language it was often said that such were "children of the Devil," and Luther himself was often ready enough to attribute the evil of the world to the direct interposition of the Devil. Yet these ill-conditioned people who clog the wheels of society are, after all, in reality the children of Man. The only Devil whom we can justly invoke in this matter is Man.

The command "Be fruitful and multiply," which the ancient Hebrews put into the mouth of their tribal God, was, as Crackanthorpe points out,[424] a command supposed to have been uttered when there were only eight persons in the world. If the time should ever again occur when the inhabitants of the world could be counted on one's fingers, such an injunction, as Crackanthorpe truly observes, would again be reasonable. But we have to remember that to-day humanity has spawned itself over the world in hundreds and even thousands of millions of creatures, a large proportion of whom, as is but too obvious, ought never to have been born at all, and the voice of Jehovah is now making itself heard through the leaders of mankind in a very different sense.

It is not surprising that as this fact tends to become generally recognized, the question of the procreation of the race should gain a new significance, and even tend to take on the character of a new religious movement. Mere morality can never lead us to concern ourselves with the future of the race, and in the days of old, men used to protest against the tendency to subordinate the interests of religion to the claims of "mere morality." There was a sound natural instinct underlying that protest, so often and so vigorously made by Christianity, and again revived to-day in a more intelligent form. The claim of the race is the claim of religion. We have to beware lest we subordinate that claim to our moralities. Moralities are, indeed, an inevitable part of our social order from which we cannot escape; every community must have its mores. But we are not entitled to make a fetich of our morality, sacrificing to it the highest interests entrusted to us. The nations which have done so have already signed their own death-warrant.[425] From this point of view, the whole of Christianity, rightly considered, with its profound conviction of the necessity for forethought and preparation for the life hereafter, has been a preparation for eugenics, a schoolmaster to discipline within us a higher ideal than itself taught, and we cannot therefore be surprised at the solidity of the basis on which eugenical conceptions of life are developing.

The most distinguished pioneers of the new movement of devotion to the creation of the race seem independently to have realized its religious character. This attitude is equally marked in Ellen Key and Francis Galton. In her Century of the Child (English translation, 1909), Ellen Key entirely identifies herself with the eugenic movement. "It is only a question of time," she elsewhere writes (Ueber Liebe und Ehe, p. 445), "when the attitude of society towards a sexual union will depend not on the form of the union, but on the value of the children created. Men and women will then devote the same religious earnestness to the psychic and physical perfectioning of this sexual task as Christians have devoted to the salvation of their souls."

Sir Francis Galton, writing a few years later, but without doubt independently, in 1905, on "Restrictions in Marriage," and "Eugenics as a Factor in Religion" (Sociological Papers of the Sociological Society, vol. ii, pp. 13, 53), remarks: "Religious precepts, founded on the ethics and practice of older days, require to be reinterpreted, to make them conform to the needs of progressive nations. Ours are already so far behind modern requirements that much of our practice and our profession cannot be reconciled without illegitimate casuistry. It seems to me that few things are more needed by us in England than a revision of our religion, to adapt it to the intelligence and needs of this present time.... Evolution is a grand phantasmagoria, but it assumes an infinitely more interesting aspect under the knowledge that the intelligent action of the human will is, in some small measure, capable of guiding its course. Man has the power of doing this largely, so far as the evolution of humanity is concerned; he has already affected the quality and distribution of organic life so widely that the changes on the surface of the earth, merely through his disforestings and agriculture, would be recognizable from a distance as great as that of the moon. Eugenics is a virile creed, full of hopefulness, and appealing to many of the noblest feelings of our nature."

As will always happen in every great movement, a few fanatics have carried into absurdity the belief in the supreme religious importance of procreation. Love, apart from procreation, writes one of these fanatics, Vacher de Lapouge, in the spirit of some of the early Christian Fathers (see ante p. 509), is an aberration comparable to sadism and sodomy. Procreation is the only thing that matters, and it must become "a legally prescribed social duty" only to be exercised by carefully selected persons, and forbidden to others, who must, by necessity, be deprived of the power of procreation, while abortion and infanticide must, under some circumstances, become compulsory. Romantic love will disappear by a process of selection, as also will all religion except a new form of phallic worship (G. Vacher de Lapouge, "Die Crisis der Sexuellen Moral," Politisch Anthropologische Revue, No. 8, 1908). It is sufficient to point out that love is, and always must be, the natural portal to generation. Such excesses of procreative fanaticism cannot fail to occur, and they render the more necessary the emphasis which has here been placed on the art of love.

"What has posterity done for me that I should do anything for posterity?" a cynic is said to have asked. The answer is very simple. The human race has done everything for him. All that he is, and can be, is its creation; all that he can do is the result of its laboriously accumulated traditions. It is only by working towards the creation of a still better posterity, that he can repay the good gifts which the human race has brought him.[426] Just as, within the limits of this present life, many who have received benefits and kindnesses they can never repay to the actual givers, find a pleasure in vicariously repaying the like to others, so the heritage we have received from our ascendents we can never repay, save by handing it on in a better form to our descendants.

It is undoubtedly true that the growth of eugenical ideals has not been, for the most part, due to religious feeling. It has been chiefly the outcome of a very gradual, but very comprehensive, movement towards social amelioration, which has been going on for more than a century, and which has involved a progressive effort towards the betterment of all the conditions of life. The ideals of this movement were proclaimed in the eighteenth century, they began to find expression early in the nineteenth century, in the initiation of the modern system of sanitation, in the growth of factory legislation, in all the movements which have been borne onwards by socialism hand in hand with individualism. The inevitable tendency has been slowly towards the root of the matter; it began to be seen that comparatively little can be effected by improving the conditions of life of adults; attention began to be concentrated on the child, on the infant, on the embryo in its mother's womb, and this resulted in the fruitful movement of puericulture inspired by Pinard, and finally the problem is brought to its source at the point of procreation, and the regulation of sexual selection between stocks and between individuals as the prime condition of life. Here we have the science of eugenics which Sir Francis Galton has done so much to make a definite, vital, and practical study, and which in its wider bearings he defines as "the science which deals with those social eugenics that influence, mentally or physically, the racial qualities of future generations." In its largest aspect, eugenics is, as Galton has elsewhere said, man's attempt "to replace Natural Selection by other processes that are more merciful and not less effective."

In the last chapter of his Memories of My Life (1908), on "Race Improvement," Sir Francis Galton sets forth the origin and development of his conception of the science of eugenics. The term, "eugenics," he first used in 1884, in his Human Faculty, but the conception dates from 1865, and even earlier. Galton has more recently discussed the problems of eugenics in papers read before the Sociological Society (Sociological Papers, vols. i and ii, 1905), in the Herbert Spencer Lecture on "Probability the Foundation of Eugenics," (1907), and elsewhere. Galton's numerous memoirs on this subject have now been published in a collected form by the Eugenics Education Society, which was established in 1907, to further and to popularize the eugenical attitude towards social questions; The Eugenics Review is published by this Society. On the more strictly scientific side, eugenic studies are carried on in the Eugenics Laboratory of the University of London, established by Sir Francis Galton, and now working in connection with Professor Karl Pearson's biometric laboratory, in University College. Much of Professor Pearson's statistical work in this and allied directions, is the elaboration of ideas and suggestions thrown out by Galton. See, e.g., Karl Pearson's Robert Boyle Lecture, "The Scope and Importance to the State of the Science of National Eugenics" (1907). Biometrika, edited by Karl Pearson in association with other workers, contains numerous statistical memoirs on eugenics. In Germany, the Archiv für Rassen und Gesellschafts-biologie, and the Politisch-Anthropologische Revue, are largely occupied with various aspects of such subjects, and in America, The Popular Science Monthly from time to time, publishes articles which have a bearing on eugenics.

At one time there was a tendency to scoff, or to laugh, at the eugenic movement. It was regarded as an attempt to breed men as men breed animals, and it was thought a sufficiently easy task to sweep away this new movement with the remark that love laughs at bolts and bars. It is now beginning to be better understood. None but fanatics dream of abolishing love in order to effect pairing by rule. It is merely a question of limiting the possible number of mates from whom each may select a partner, and that, we must remember, has always been done even by savages, for, as it has been said, "eugenics is the oldest of the sciences." The question has merely been transformed. Instead of being limited mechanically by caste, we begin to see that the choice of sexual mates must be limited intelligently by actual fitness. Promiscuous marriages have never been the rule; the possibility of choice has always been narrow, and the most primitive peoples have exerted the most marked self-restraint. It is not so merely among remote races but among our own European ancestors. Throughout the whole period of Catholic supremacy the Canon law multiplied the impediments to matrimony, as by ordaining that consanguinity to the fourth degree (third cousins), as well as spiritual relationship, is an impediment, and by such arbitrary prohibitions limited the range of possible mates at least as much as it would be limited by the more reasonable dictates of eugenic considerations.

At the present day it may be said that the principle of the voluntary control of procreation, not for the selfish ends of the individual, but in order to extinguish disease, to limit human misery, and to raise the general level of humanity by substituting the ideal of quality for the vulgar ideal of mere quantity, is now generally accepted, alike by medical pathologists, embryologists and neurologists, and by sociologists and moralists.

It would be easy to multiply quotations from distinguished authorities on this point. Thus, Metchnikoff points out (Essais Optimistes, p. 419) that orthobiosis seems to involve the limitation of offspring in the fight against disease. Ballantyne concludes his great treatise on Antenanal Pathology with the statement that "Eugenics" or well-begetting, is one of the world's most pressing problems. Dr. Louise Robinovitch, the editor of the Journal of Mental Pathology, in a brilliant and thoughtful paper, read before the Rome Congress of Psychology in 1905, well spoke in the same sense: "Nations have not yet elevated the energy of genesic function to the dignity of an energy. Other energies known to us, even of the meanest grade, have long since been wisely utilized, and their activities based on the principle of the strictest possible economy. This economic utilization has been brought about, not through any enforcement of legislative restrictions, but through steadily progressive human intelligence. Economic handling of genesic function will, like the economic function of other energies, come about through a steady and progressive intellectual development of nations." "There are circumstances," says C. H. Hughes, ("Restricted Procreation," Alienist and Neurologist, May, 1908), "under which the propagation of a human life may be as gravely criminal as the taking of a life already begun."

From the general biological, as well as from the sociological side, the acceptance of the same standpoint is constantly becoming more general, for it is recognized as the inevitable outcome of movements which have long been in progress.

"Already," wrote Haycraft (Darwinism and Race Progress, p. 160), referring to the law for the prevention of cruelty to children, "public opinion has expressed itself in the public rule that a man and woman, in begetting a child, must take upon themselves the obligation and responsibility of seeing that that child is not subjected to cruelty and hardship. It is but one step more to say that a man and a woman shall be under obligation not to produce children, when it is certain that, from their want of physique, they will have to undergo suffering, and will keep up but an unequal struggle with their fellows." Professor J. Arthur Thomson, in his volume on Heredity (1908), vigorously and temperately pleads (p. 528) for rational methods of eugenics, as specially demanded in an age like our own, when the unfit have been given a better chance of reproduction than they have ever been given in any other age. Bateson, again, referring to the growing knowledge of heredity, remarks (Mendel's Principles of Heredity, 1909, p. 305): "Genetic knowledge must certainly lead to new conceptions of justice, and it is by no means impossible that, in the light of such knowledge, public opinion will welcome measures likely to do more for the extinction of the criminal and the degenerate than has been accomplished by ages of penal enactment." Adolescent youths and girls, said Anton von Menger, in his last book, the pregnant Neue Sittenlehre (1905), must be taught that the production of children, under certain circumstances, is a crime; they must also be taught the voluntary restraint of conception, even in health; such teaching, Menger rightly added, is a necessary preliminary to any legislation in this direction.

Of recent years, many books and articles have been devoted to the advocacy of eugenic methods. Mention may be made, for instance, of Population and Progress (1907), by Montague Crackanthorpe, President of the Eugenics Education Society. See also, Havelock Ellis, "Eugenics and St. Valentine," Nineteenth Century and After, May, 1906. It may be mentioned that nearly thirty years ago, Miss J. H. Clapperton, in her Scientific Meliorism (1885, Ch. XVII), pointed out that the voluntary restraint of procreation by Neo-Malthusian methods, apart from merely prudential motives, there clearly recognized, is "a new key to the social position," and a necessary condition for "national regeneration." Professor Karl Pearson's Groundwork of Eugenics, (1909) is, perhaps, the best brief introduction to the subject. Mention may also be made of Dr. Saleeby's Parenthood and Race Culture (1909), written in a popular and enthusiastic manner.

How widely the general principles of eugenics are now accepted as the sound method of raising the level of the human race, was well shown at a meeting of the Sociological Society, in 1905, when, after Sir Francis Galton had read papers on the question, the meeting heard the opinions of numerous sociologists, economists, biologists, and well-known thinkers in various lands, who were present, or who had sent communications. Some twenty-one expressed more or less unqualified approval, and only three or four had objections to offer, mostly on matters of detail (Sociological Papers, published by the Sociological Society, vol. ii, 1905).

If we ask by what channels this impulse towards the control of procreation for the elevation of the race is expressing itself in practical life, we shall scarcely fail to find that there are at least two such channels: (1) the growing sense of sexual responsibility among women as well as men, and (2) the conquest of procreative control which has been achieved in recent years, by the general adoption of methods for the prevention of conception.

It has already been necessary in a previous chapter to discuss the far-reaching significance of woman's personal responsibility as an element in the modification of the sexual life of modern communities. Here it need only be pointed out that the autonomous authority of a woman over her own person, in the sexual sphere, involves on her part a consent to the act of procreation which must be deliberate. We are apt to think that this is a new and almost revolutionary demand; it is, however, undoubtedly a natural, ancient, and recognized privilege of women that they should not be mothers without their own consent. Even in the Islamic world of the Arabian Nights, we find that high praise is accorded to the "virtue and courage" of the woman who, having been ravished in her sleep, exposed, and abandoned on the highway, the infant that was the fruit of this involuntary union, "not wishing," she said, "to take the responsibility before Allah of a child that had been born without my consent."[427] The approval with which this story is narrated clearly shows that to the public of Islam it seemed entirely just and humane that a woman should not have a child, except by her own deliberate will. We have been accustomed to say in later days that the State needs children, and that it is the business and the duty of women to supply them. But the State has no more right than the individual to ravish a woman against her will. We are beginning to realize that if the State wants children it must make it agreeable to women to produce them, as under natural and equitable conditions it cannot fail to be. "The women will solve the question of mankind," said Ibsen in one of his rare and pregnant private utterances, "and they will do it as mothers." But it is unthinkable that any question should ever be solved by a helpless, unwilling, and involuntary act which has not even attained to the dignity of animal joy.

It is sometimes supposed, and even assumed, that the demand of women that motherhood must never be compulsory, means that they are unwilling to be mothers on any terms. In a few cases that may be so, but it is certainly not the case as regards the majority of sane and healthy women in any country. On the contrary, this demand is usually associated with the desire to glorify motherhood, if not, indeed, even with the thought of extending motherhood to many who are to-day shut out from it. "It seems to me," wrote Lady Henry Somerset, some years ago ("The Welcome Child," Arena, April, 1895), "that life will be dearer and nobler the more we recognize that there is no indelicacy in the climax and crown of creative power, but, rather, that it is the highest glory of the race. But if voluntary motherhood is the crown of the race, involuntary compulsory motherhood is the very opposite.... Only when both man and woman have learned that the most sacred of all functions given to women must be exercised by the free will alone, can children be born into the world who have in them the joyous desire to live, who claim that sweetest privilege of childhood, the certainty that they can expand in the sunshine of the love which is their due." Ellen Key, similarly, while pointing out (Ueber Liebe und Ehe, pp. 14, 265) that the tyranny of the old Protestant religious spirit which enjoined on women unlimited submission to joyless motherhood within "the whited sepulchre of marriage" is now being broken, exalts the privileges of voluntary motherhood, while admitting that there may be a few exceptional cases in which women may withdraw themselves from motherhood for the sake of the other demands of their personality, though, "as a general rule, the woman who refuses motherhood in order to serve humanity, is like a soldier who prepares himself on the eve of battle for the forthcoming struggle by opening his veins." Helene Stöcker, likewise, reckons motherhood as one of the demands, one of the growing demands indeed, which women now make. "If, to-day," she says (in the Preface to Liebe und die Frauen, 1906), "all the good things of life are claimed even for women—intellectual training, pecuniary independence, a happy vocation in life, a respected social position—and at the same time, as equally matter-of-course, and equally necessary, marriage and child, that demand no longer sounds, as it sounded a few years ago, the voice of a preacher in the wilderness."

The degradation to which motherhood has, in the eyes of many, fallen, is due partly to the tendency to deprive women of any voice in the question, and partly to what H. G. Wells calls (Socialism and the Family, 1906) "the monstrous absurdity of women discharging their supreme social function, bearing and rearing children, in their spare time, as it were, while they 'earn their living' by contributing some half mechanical element to some trivial industrial product." It would be impracticable, and even undesirable, to insist that married women should not be allowed to work, for a work in the world is good for all. It is estimated that over thirty per cent. of the women workers in England are married or widows (James Haslam, Englishwoman, June, 1909), and in Lancashire factories alone, in 1901, there were 120,000 married women employed. But it would be easily possible for the State to arrange, in its own interests, that a woman's work at a trade should always give way to her work as a mother. It is the more undesirable that married women should be prohibited from working at a profession, since there are some professions for which a married woman, or, rather, a mother, is better equipped than an unmarried woman. This is notably the case as regards teaching, and it would be a good policy to allow married women teachers special privileges in the shape of increased free time and leave of absence. While in many fields of knowledge an unmarried woman may be a most excellent teacher, it is highly undesirable that children, and especially girls, should be brought exclusively under the educational influence of unmarried teachers.

The second great channel through which the impulse towards the control of procreation for the elevation of the race is entering into practical life is by the general adoption, by the educated classes of all countries—and it must be remembered that, in this matter at all events, all classes are gradually beginning to become educated—of methods for the prevention of conception except when conception is deliberately desired. It is no longer permissible to discuss the validity of this control, for it is an accomplished fact and has become a part of our modern morality. "If a course of conduct is habitually and deliberately pursued by vast multitudes of otherwise well-conducted people, forming probably a majority of the whole educated class of the nation," as Sidney Webb rightly puts it, "we must assume that it does not conflict with their actual code of morality."[428]

There cannot be any doubt that, so far as England is concerned, the prevention of conception is practiced, from prudential or other motives, by the vast majority of the educated classes. This fact is well within the knowledge of all who are intimately acquainted with the facts of English family life. Thus, Dr. A. W. Thomas writes (British Medical Journal, Oct. 20, 1906, p. 1066): "From my experience as a general practitioner, I have no hesitation in saying that ninety per cent. of young married couples of the comfortably-off classes use preventives." As a matter of fact, this rough estimate appears to be rather under than over the mark. In the very able paper already quoted, in which Sidney Webb shows that "the decline in the birthrate appears to be much greater in those sections of the population which give proofs of thrift and foresight," that this decline is "principally, if not entirely, the result of deliberate volition," and that "a volitional regulation of the marriage state is now ubiquitous throughout England and Wales, among, apparently, a large majority of the population," the results are brought forward of a detailed inquiry carried out by the Fabian Society. This inquiry covered 316 families, selected at random from all parts of Great Britain, and belonging to all sections of the middle class. The results are carefully analyzed, and it is found that seventy-four families were unlimited, and two hundred and forty-two voluntarily limited. When, however, the decade 1890-99 is taken by itself as the typical period, it is found that of 120 marriages, 107 were limited, and only thirteen unlimited, while of these thirteen, five were childless at the date of the return. In this decade, therefore, only seven unlimited fertile marriages are reported, out of a total of 120.

What is true of Great Britain is true of all other civilized countries, in the highest degree true of the most civilized countries, and it finds expression in the well-known phenomenon of the decline of the birthrate. In modern times, this movement of decline began in France, producing a slow but steady diminution in the annual number of births, and in France the movement seems now to be almost, or quite, arrested. But it has since taken place in all other progressive countries, notably in the United States, in Canada, in Australia, and in New Zealand, as well as in Germany, Austro-Hungary, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. In England, it has been continuous since 1877. Of the great countries, Russia is the only one in which it has not yet taken place, and among the masses of the Russian population we find less education, more poverty, a higher deathrate, and a greater amount of disease, than in any other great, or even small, civilized country.

It is sometimes said, indeed, that the decline of the birthrate is not entirely due to the voluntary control of procreation. It is undoubtedly true that certain other elements, common under civilized conditions, such as the postponement of marriage in women to a comparatively late age, tend to diminish the size of the family. But when all such allowances have been made, the decline is still found to be real and large. This has been shown, for instance, by the statistical analyses made by Arthur Newsholme and T. H. C. Stevenson, and by G. Yule, both published in Journal Royal Statistical Society, April, 1906.

Some have supposed that, since the Catholic Church forbids incomplete sexual intercourse, this movement for the control of procreation will involve a relatively much greater increase among Catholic than among non-Catholic populations. This, however, is only correct under certain conditions. It is quite true that in Ireland there has been no fall in the birthrate, and that the fall is but little marked in those Lancashire towns which possess a large Irish element. But in Belgium, Italy, Spain, and other mainly Catholic countries, the decline in the birthrate is duly taking place. What has happened is that the Church—always alive to sexual questions—has realized the importance of the modern movement, and has adapted herself to it, by proclaiming to her more ignorant and uneducated children that incomplete intercourse is a deadly sin, while at the same time refraining from making inquiries into this matter among her more educated members. The question was definitely brought up for Papal judgment, in 1842, by Bishop Bouvier of Le Mans, who stated the matter very clearly, representing to the Pope (Gregory XVI) that the prevention of conception was becoming very common, and that to treat it as a deadly sin merely resulted in driving the penitent away from confession. After mature consideration, the Curia Sacra Poenitentiaria replied by pointing out, as regards the common method of withdrawal before emission, that since it was due to the wrong act of the man, the woman who has been forced by her husband to consent to it, has committed no sin. Further, the Bishop was reminded of the wise dictum of Liguori, "the most learned and experienced man in these matters," that the confessor is not usually called upon to make inquiry upon so delicate a matter as the debitum conjugale, and, if his opinion is not asked, he should be silent (Bouvier, Dissertatio in sextum Decalogi præceptum; supplementum ad Tractatum de Matrimonio. 1849, pp. 179-182; quoted by Hans Ferdy, Sexual-Probleme, Aug., 1908, p. 498). We see, therefore, that, among Catholic as well as among non-Catholic populations, the adoption of preventive methods of conception follows progress and civilization, and that the general practice of such methods by Catholics (with the tacit consent of the Church) is merely a matter of time.

From time to time many energetic persons have noisily demanded that a stop should be put to the decline of the birthrate, for, they argue, it means "race suicide." It is now beginning to be realized, however, that this outcry was a foolish and mischievous mistake. It is impossible to walk through the streets of any great city, full of vast numbers of persons who, obviously, ought never to have been born, without recognizing that the birthrate is as yet very far above its normal and healthy limit. The greatest States have often been the smallest so far as mere number of citizens is concerned, for it is quality not quantity that counts. And while it is true that the increase of the best types of citizens can only enrich a State, it is now becoming intolerable that a nation should increase by the mere dumping down of procreative refuse in its midst. It is beginning to be realized that this process not only depreciates the quality of a people but imposes on a State an inordinate financial burden.

It is now well recognized that large families are associated with degeneracy, and, in the widest sense, with abnormality of every kind. Thus, it is undoubtedly true that men of genius tend to belong to very large families, though it may be pointed out to those who fear an alarming decrease of genius from the tendency to the limitation of the family, that the position in the family most often occupied by the child of genius is the firstborn. (See Havelock Ellis, A Study of British Genius, pp. 115-120). The insane, the idiotic, imbecile, and weak-minded, the criminal, the epileptic, the hysterical, the neurasthenic, the tubercular, all, it would appear, tend to belong to large families (see e.g., Havelock Ellis, op. cit., p. 110; Toulouse, Les Causes de la Folie, p. 91; Harriet Alexander, "Malthusianism and Degeneracy," Alienist and Neurologist, Jan., 1901). It has, indeed, been shown by Heron, Pearson, and Goring, that not only the eldest-born, but also the second-born, are specially liable to suffer from pathological defect (insanity, criminality, tuberculosis). There is, however, it would seem, a fallacy in the common interpretation of this fact. According to Van den Velden (as quoted in Sexual-Probleme, May, 1909, p. 381), this tendency is fully counterbalanced by the rising mortality of children from the firstborn onward. The greater pathological tendency of the earlier children is thus simply the result of a less stringent selection by death. So far as they show any really greater pathological tendency, apart from this fallacy, it is perhaps due to premature marriage. There is another fallacy in the frequent statement that the children in small families are more feeble than those in large families. We have to distinguish between a naturally small family, and an artificially small family. A family which is small merely as the result of the feeble procreative energy of the parents, is likely to be a feeble family; a family which is small as the result of the deliberate control of the parents, shows, of course, no such tendency.

These considerations, it will be seen, do not modify the tendency of the large family to be degenerate. We may connect this phenomenon with the disposition, often shown by nervously unsound and abnormal persons, to believe that they have a special aptitude to procreate fine children. "I believe that everyone has a special vocation," said a man to Marro (La Pubertà, p. 459); "I find that it is my vocation to beget superior children." He begat four,—an epileptic, a lunatic, a dipsomaniac, and a valetudinarian,—and himself died insane. Most people have come across somewhat similar, though perhaps less marked, cases of this delusion. In a matter of such fateful gravity to other human beings, no one can safely rely on his own unsupported impressions.

The demand of national efficiency thus corresponds with the demand of developing humanitarianism, which, having begun by attempting to ameliorate the conditions of life, has gradually begun to realize that it is necessary to go deeper and to ameliorate life itself. For while it is undoubtedly true that much may be done by acting systematically on the conditions of life, the more searching analysis of evil environmental conditions only serves to show that in large parts they are based in the human organism itself and were not only pre-natal, but pre-conceptional, being involved in the quality of the parental or ancestral organisms.

Putting aside, however, all humanitarian considerations, the serious error of attempting to stem the progress of civilization in the direction of procreative control could never have occurred if the general tendencies of zoölogical evolution had been understood, even in their elements. All zoölogical progress is from the more prolific to the less prolific; the higher the species the less fruitful are its individual members. The same tendency is found within the limits of the human species, though not in an invariable straight line; the growth of civilization involves a diminution in fertility. This is by no means a new phenomenon; ancient Rome and later Geneva, "the Protestant Rome," bear witness to it; no doubt it has occurred in every high centre of moral and intellectual culture, although the data for measuring the tendency no longer exist. When we take a sufficiently wide and intelligent survey, we realize that the tendency of a community to slacken its natural rate of increase is an essential phenomenon of all advanced civilization. The more intelligent nations have manifested the tendency first, and in each nation the more educated classes have taken the lead, but it is only a matter of time to bring all civilized nations, and all social classes in each nation, into line.[429] This movement, we have to remember—in opposition to the ignorant outcry of certain would-be moralists and politicians—is a beneficent movement. It means a greater regard to the quality than to the quantity of the increase; it involves the possibility of combating successfully the evils of high mortality, disease, overcrowding, and all the manifold misfortunes which inevitably accompany a too exuberant birthrate. For it is only in a community which increases slowly that it is possible to secure the adequate economic adjustment and environmental modifications necessary for a sane and wholesome civic and personal life.[430] If those persons who raise the cry of "race suicide" in face of the decline of the birthrate really had the knowledge and intelligence to realize the manifold evils which they are invoking they would deserve to be treated as criminals.

On the practical side a knowledge of the possibility of preventing conception has, doubtless, never been quite extinct in civilization and even in lower stages of culture, though it has mostly been utilized for ends of personal convenience or practiced in obedience to conventional social rules which demanded chastity, and has only of recent times been made subservient to the larger interests of society and the elevation of the race. The theoretical basis of the control of procreation, on its social and economic, as distinct from its eugenic, aspects, may be said to date from Malthus's famous Essay on Population, first published in 1798, an epoch-marking book,—though its central thesis is not susceptible of actual demonstration,—since it not only served as the starting-point of the modern humanitarian movement for the control of procreation, but also furnished to Darwin (and independently to Wallace also) the fruitful idea which was finally developed into the great evolutionary theory of natural selection.

Malthus, however, was very far from suggesting that the control of procreation, which he advocated for the benefit of mankind, should be exercised by the introduction of preventive methods into sexual intercourse. He believed that civilization involved an increased power of self-control, which would make it possible to refrain altogether from sexual intercourse, when such self-restraint was demanded in the interests of humanity. Later thinkers realized, however, that, while it is undoubtedly true that civilization involves greater forethought and greater self-control, we cannot anticipate that those qualities should be developed to the extent demanded by Malthus, especially when the impulse to be controlled is of so powerful and explosive a nature.

James Mill was the pioneer in advocating Neo-Malthusian methods, though he spoke cautiously. In 1818, in the article "Colony" in the supplement to the Encyclopædia Britannica, after remarking that the means of checking the unrestricted increase of the population constitutes "the most important practical problem to which the wisdom of the politician and moralist can be applied," he continued: "If the superstitions of the nursery were discarded, and the principle of utility kept steadily in view, a solution might not be very difficult to be found." Four years later, James Mill's friend, the Radical reformer, Francis Place, more distinctly expressed the thought that was evidently in Mill's mind. After enumerating the facts concerning the necessity of self-control in procreation and the evils of early marriage, which he thinks ought to be clearly taught, Place continues: "If a hundredth, perhaps a thousandth part of the pains were taken to teach these truths, that are taken to teach dogmas, a great change for the better might, in no considerable space of time, be expected to take place in the appearance and the habits of the people. If, above all, it were once clearly understood that it was not disreputable for married persons to avail themselves of such precautionary means as would, without being injurious to health, or destructive of female delicacy, prevent conception, a sufficient check might at once be given to the increase of population beyond the means of subsistence; vice and misery, to a prodigious extent, might be removed from society, and the object of Mr. Malthus, Mr. Godwin, and of every philanthropic person, be promoted, by the increase of comfort, of intelligence, and of moral conduct, in the mass of the population. The course recommended will, I am fully persuaded, at some period be pursued by the people even if left to themselves."[431]

It was not long before Place's prophetic words began to be realized, and in another half century the movement was affecting the birthrate of all civilized lands, though it can scarcely yet be said that justice has been done to the pioneers who promoted it in the face of much persecution from the ignorant and superstitious public whom they sought to benefit. In 1831, Robert Dale Owen, the son of Robert Owen, published his Moral Physiology, setting forth the methods of preventing conception. A little later the brothers George and Charles Drysdale (born 1825 and 1829), two ardent and unwearying philanthropists, devoted much of their energy to the propagation of Neo-Malthusian principles. George Drysdale, in 1854, published his Elements of Social Science, which during many years had an enormous circulation all over Europe in eight different languages. It was by no means in every respect a scientific or sound work, but it certainly had great influence, and it came into the hands of many who never saw any other work on sexual topics. Although the Neo-Malthusian propagandists of those days often met with much obloquy, their cause was triumphantly vindicated in 1876, when Charles Bradlaugh and Mrs. Besant, having been prosecuted for disseminating Neo-Malthusian pamphlets, the charge was dismissed, the Lord Chief Justice declaring that so ill-advised and injudicious a charge had probably never before been made in a court of justice. This trial, even by its mere publicity and apart from its issue, gave an enormous impetus to the Neo-Malthusian movement. It is well known that the steady decline in the English birthrate begun in 1877, the year following the trial. There could be no more brilliant illustration of the fact, that what used to be called "the instruments of Providence" are indeed unconscious instruments in bringing about great ends which they themselves were far from either intending or desiring.

In 1877, Dr. C. R. Drysdale founded the Malthusian League, and edited a periodical, The Malthusian, aided throughout by his wife, Dr. Alice Drysdale Vickery. He died in 1907. (The noble and pioneering work of the Drysdales has not yet been adequately recognized in their own country; an appreciative and well-informed article by Dr. Hermann Rohleder, "Dr. C. R. Drysdale, Der Hauptvortreter der Neumalthusianische Lehre," appeared in the Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft, March, 1908). There are now societies and periodicals in all civilized countries for the propagation of Neo-Malthusian principles, as they are still commonly called, though it would be desirable to avoid the use of Malthus's name in this connection. In the medical profession, the advocacy of preventive methods of sexual intercourse, not on social, but on medical and hygienic grounds, began same thirty years ago, though in France, at an earlier date, Raciborski advocated the method of avoiding the neighborhood of menstruation. In Germany, Dr. Mensinga, the gynæcologist, is the most prominent advocate, on medical and hygienic grounds, of what he terms "facultative sterility," which he first put forward about 1889. In Russia, about the same time, artificial sterility was first openly advocated by the distinguished gynæcologist, Professor Ott, at the St. Petersburg Obstetric and Gynæcological Society. Such medical recommendations, in particular cases, are now becoming common.

There are certain cases in which a person ought not to marry at all; this is so, for instance, when there has been an attack of insanity; it can never be said with certainty that a person who has had one attack of insanity will not have another, and persons who have had such attacks ought not, as Blandford says (Lumleian Lectures on Insanity, British Medical Journal, April 20, 1895), "to inflict on their partner for life, the anxiety, and even danger, of another attack." There are other and numerous cases in which marriage may be permitted, or may have already taken place, under more favorable circumstances, but where it is, or has become, highly desirable that there should be no children. This is the case when a first attack of insanity occurs after marriage, the more urgently if the affected party is the wife, and especially if the disease takes the form of puerperal mania. "What can be more lamentable," asks Blandford (loc. cit.), "than to see a woman break down in childbed, recover, break down again with the next child, and so on, for six, seven, or eight children, the recovery between each being less and less, until she is almost a chronic maniac?" It has been found, moreover, by Tredgold (Lancet, May 17, 1902), that among children born to insane mothers, the mortality is twice as great as the ordinary infantile mortality, in even the poorest districts. In cases of unions between persons with tuberculous antecedents, also, it is held by many (e.g., by Massalongo, in discussing tuberculosis and marriage at the Tuberculosis Congress, at Naples, in 1900) that every precaution should be taken to make the marriage childless. In a third class of cases, it is necessary to limit the children to one or two; this happens in some forms of heart disease, in which pregnancy has a progressively deteriorating effect on the heart (Kisch, Therapeutische Monatsheft, Feb., 1898, and Sexual Life of Woman; Vinay, Lyon Medical, Jan. 8, 1889); in some cases of heart disease, however, it is possible that, though there is no reason for prohibiting marriage, it is desirable for a woman not to have any children (J. F. Blacker, "Heart Disease in Relation to Pregnancy," British Medical Journal, May 25, 1907).

In all such cases, the recommendation of preventive methods of intercourse is obviously an indispensable aid to the physician in emphasizing the supremacy of hygienic precautions. In the absence of such methods, he can never be sure that his warnings will be heard, and even the observance of his advice would be attended with various undesirable results. It sometimes happens that a married couple agree, even before marriage, to live together without sexual relations, but, for various reasons, it is seldom found possible or convenient to maintain this resolution for a long period.

It is the recognition of these and similar considerations which has led—though only within recent years—on the one hand, as we have seen, to the embodiment of the control of procreation into the practical morality of all civilized nations, and, on the other hand, to the assertion, now perhaps without exception, by all medical authorities on matters of sex that the use of the methods of preventing conception is under certain circumstances urgently necessary and quite harmless.[432] It arouses a smile to-day when we find that less than a century ago it was possible for an able and esteemed medical author to declare that the use of "various abominable means" to prevent conception is "based upon a most presumptuous doubt in the conservative power of the Creator."[433]

The adaptation of theory to practice is not yet complete, and we could not expect that it should be so, for, as we have seen, there is always an antagonism between practical morality and traditional morality. From time to time flagrant illustrations of this antagonism occur.[434] Even in England, which played a pioneering part in the control of procreation, attempts are still made—sometimes in quarters where we have a right to expect a better knowledge—to cast discredit on a movement which, since it has conquered alike scientific approval and popular practice, it is now idle to call in question.

It would be out of place to discuss here the various methods which are used for the control of procreation, or their respective merits and defects. It is sufficient to say that the condom or protective sheath, which seems to be the most ancient of all methods of preventing conception, after withdrawal, is now regarded by nearly all authorities as, when properly used, the safest, the most convenient, and the most harmless method.[435] This is the opinion of Krafft-Ebing, of Moll, of Schrenck-Notzing, of Löwenfeld, of Forel, of Kisch, of Fürbringer, to mention only a few of the most distinguished medical authorities.[436]

There is some interest in attempting to trace the origin and history of the condom, though it seems impossible to do so with any precision. It is probable that, in a rudimentary form, such an appliance is of great antiquity. In China and Japan, it would appear, rounds of oiled silk paper are used to cover the mouth of the womb, at all events, by prostitutes. This seems the simplest and most obvious mechanical method of preventing conception, and may have suggested the application of a sheath to the penis as a more effectual method. In Europe, it is in the middle of the sixteenth century, in Italy, that we first seem to hear of such appliances, in the shape of linen sheaths, adapted to the shape of the penis; Fallopius recommended the use of such an appliance. Improvements in the manufacture were gradually devised; the cæcum of the lamb was employed, and afterwards, isinglass. It appears that a considerable improvement in the manufacture took place in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, and this improvement was generally associated with England. The appliance thus became known as the English cape or mantle, the "capote anglaise," or the "redingote anglaise," and, under the latter name, is referred to by Casanova, in the middle of the eighteenth century (Casanova, Mémoires, ed. Garnier, vol. iv, p. 464); Casanova never seems, however, to have used these redingotes himself, not caring, he said, "to shut myself up in a piece of dead skin in order to prove that I am perfectly alive." These capotes—then made of goldbeaters' skin—were, also, it appears, known at an earlier period to Mme. de Sévigné, who did not regard them with favor, for, in one of her letters, she refers to them as "cuirasses contre la volupté et toiles d'arraignée contre le mal." The name, "condom," dates from the eighteenth century, first appearing in France, and is generally considered to be that of an English physician, or surgeon, who invented, or, rather, improved the appliance. Condom is not, however, an English name, but there is an English name, Condon, of which "condom" may well be a corruption. This supposition is strengthened by the fact that the word sometimes actually was written "condon." Thus, in lines quoted by Bachaumont, in his Diary (Dec. 15, 1773), and supposed to be addressed to a former ballet dancer who had become a prostitute, I find:—

"Du condon cependant, vous connaissez l'usage,

"Le condon, c'est la loi, ma fille, et les prophètes!"

The difficulty remains, however, of discovering any Englishman of the name of Condon, who can plausibly be associated with the condom; doubtless he took no care to put the matter on record, never suspecting the fame that would accrue to his invention, or the immortality that awaited his name. I find no mention of any Condon in the records of the College of Physicians, and at the College of Surgeons, also, where, indeed, the old lists are very imperfect, Mr. Victor Plarr, the librarian, after kindly making a search, has assured me that there is no record of the name. Other varying explanations of the name have been offered, with more or less assurance, though usually without any proofs. Thus, Hyrtl (Handbuch der Topographischen Anatomic, 7th ed., vol. ii, p. 212) states that the condom was originally called gondom, from the name of the English discoverer, a Cavalier of Charles II's Court, who first prepared it from the amnion of the sheep; Gondom is, however, no more an English name than Condom. There happens to be a French town, in Gascony, called Condom, and Bloch suggests, without any evidence, that this furnished the name; if so, however, it is improbable that it would have been unknown in France. Finally, Hans Ferdy considers that it is derived from "condus"—that which preserves—and, in accordance with his theory, he terms the condom a condus.

The early history of the condom is briefly discussed by various writers, as by Proksch, Die Vorbauung der Venerischen Krankheiten, p. 48; Bloch, Sexual Life of Our Time, Chs. XV and XXVIII; Cabanès, Indiscretions de l'Histoire, p. 121, etc.

The control of procreation by the prevention of conception has, we have seen, become a part of the morality of civilized peoples. There is another method, not indeed for preventing conception, but for limiting offspring, which is of much more ancient appearance in the world, though it has at different times been very differently viewed and still arouses widely opposing opinions. This is the method of abortion.

While the practice of abortion has by no means, like the practice of preventing conception, become accepted in civilization, it scarcely appears to excite profound repulsion in a large proportion of the population of civilized countries. The majority of women, not excluding educated and highly moral women, who become pregnant against their wish contemplate the possibility of procuring abortion without the slightest twinge of conscience, and often are not even aware of the usual professional attitude of the Church, the law, and medicine regarding abortion. Probably all doctors have encountered this fact, and even so distinguished and correct a medico-legist as Brouardel stated[437] that he had been not infrequently solicited to procure abortion, for themselves or their wet-nurses, by ladies who looked on it as a perfectly natural thing, and had not the least suspicion that the law regarded the deed as a crime.

It is not, therefore, surprising that abortion is exceedingly common in all civilized and progressive countries. It cannot, indeed, unfortunately, be said that abortion has been conducted in accordance with eugenic considerations, nor has it often been so much as advocated from the eugenic standpoint. But in numerous classes of cases of undesired pregnancy, occurring in women of character and energy, not accustomed to submit tamely to conditions they may not have sought, and in any case consider undesirable, abortion is frequently resorted to. It is usual to regard the United States as a land in which the practice especially flourishes, and certainly a land in which the ideal of chastity for unmarried women, of freedom for married women, of independence for all, is actively followed cannot fail to be favorable to the practice of abortion. But the way in which the prevalence of abortion is proclaimed in the United States is probably in large part due to the honesty of the Americans in setting forth, and endeavoring to correct, what, rightly or wrongly, they regard as social defects, and may not indicate any real pre-eminence in the practice. Comparative statistics are difficult, and it is certainly true that abortion is extremely common in England, in France, and in Germany. It is probable that any national differences may be accounted for by differences in general social habits and ideals. Thus in Germany, where considerable sexual freedom is permitted to unmarried women and married women are very domesticated, abortion may be less frequent than in France where purity is stringently demanded from the young girl, while the married woman demands freedom for work and for pleasure. But such national differences, if they exist, are tending to be levelled down, and charges of criminal abortion are constantly becoming more common in Germany; though this increase, again, may be merely due to greater zeal in pursuing the offence.

Brouardel (op. cit., p. 39) quotes the opinion that, in New York, only one in every thousand abortions is discovered. Dr. J. F. Scott (The Sexual Instinct, Ch. VIII), who is himself strongly opposed to the practice, considers that in America, the custom of procuring abortion has to-day reached "such vast proportions as to be almost beyond belief," while "countless thousands" of cases are never reported. "It has increased so rapidly in our day and generation," Scott states, "that it has created surprise and alarm in the minds of all conscientious persons who are informed of the extent to which it is carried." (The assumption that those who approve of abortion are necessarily not "conscientious persons" is, as we shall see, mistaken.) The change has taken place since 1840. The Michigan Special Committee on Criminal Abortion reported in 1881 that, from correspondence with nearly one hundred physicians, it appeared that there came to the knowledge of the profession seventeen abortions to every one hundred pregnancies; to these, the committee believe, may be added as many more that never came to the physician's knowledge. The committee further quoted, though without endorsement, the opinion of a physician who believed that a change is now coming over public feeling in regard to the abortionist, who is beginning to be regarded in America as a useful member of society, and even a benefactor.

In England, also, there appears to have been a marked increase of abortion during recent years, perhaps specially marked among the poor and hard-working classes. A writer in the British Medical Journal (April 9, 1904, p. 865) finds that abortion is "wholesale and systematic," and gives four cases occurring in his practice during four months, in which women either attempted to produce abortion, or requested him to do so; they were married women, usually with large families, and in delicate health, and were willing to endure any suffering, if they might be saved from further child-bearing. Abortion is frequently effected, or attempted, by taking "Female Pills," which contain small portions of lead, and are thus liable to produce very serious symptoms, whether or not they induce abortion. Professor Arthur Hall, of Sheffield, who has especially studied this use of lead ("The Increasing Use of Lead as an Abortifacient," British Medical Journal, March 18, 1905), finds that the practice has lately become very common in the English Midlands, and is gradually, it appears, widening its circle. It occurs chiefly among married women with families, belonging to the working class, and it tends to become specially prevalent during periods of trade depression (cf. G. Newman, Infant Mortality, p. 81). Women of better social class resort to professional abortionists, and sometimes go over to Paris.

In France, also, and especially in Paris, there has been a great increase during recent years in the practice of abortion. (See e.g., a discussion at the Paris Société de Médecine Légale, Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle, May, 1907.) Doléris has shown (Bulletin de la Société d'Obstétrique, Feb., 1905) that in the Paris Maternités the percentage of abortions in pregnancies doubled between 1898 and 1904, and Doléris estimates that about half of these abortions were artificially induced. In France, abortion is mainly carried on by professional abortionists. One of these, Mme. Thomas, who was condemned to penal servitude, in 1891, acknowledged performing 10,000 abortions during eight years; her charge for the operation was two francs and upwards. She was a peasant's daughter, brought up in the home of her uncle, a doctor, whose medical and obstetrical books she had devoured (A. Hamon, La France en 1891, pp. 629-631). French public opinion is lenient to abortion, especially to women who perform the operation on themselves; not many cases are brought into court, and of these, forty per cent. are acquitted (Eugène Bausset, L'Avortement Criminel, Thèse de Paris, 1907). The professional abortionist is, however, usually sent to prison.

In Germany, also, abortion appears to have greatly increased during recent years, and the yearly number of cases of criminal abortion brought into the courts was, in 1903, more than double as many as in 1885. (See, also, Elisabeth Zanzinger, Geschlecht und Gesellschaft, Bd. II, Heft 5; and Sexual-Probleme, Jan., 1908, p. 23.)

In view of these facts it is not surprising that the induction of abortion has been permitted and even encouraged in many civilizations. Its unqualified condemnation is only found in Christendom, and is due to theoretical notions. In Turkey, under ordinary circumstances, there is no punishment for abortion. In the classic civilization of Greece and Rome, likewise, abortion was permitted though with certain qualifications and conditions. Plato admitted the mother's right to decide on abortion but said that the question should be settled as early as possible in pregnancy. Aristotle, who approved of abortion, was of the same opinion. Zeno and the Stoics regarded the fœtus as the fruit of the womb, the soul being acquired at birth; this was in accordance with Roman law which decreed that the fœtus only became a human being at birth.[438] Among the Romans abortion became very common, but, in accordance with the patriarchal basis of early Roman institutions, it was the father, not the mother, who had the right to exercise it. Christianity introduced a new circle of ideas based on the importance of the soul, on its immortality, and the necessity of baptism as a method of salvation from the results of inherited sin. We already see this new attitude in St. Augustine who, discussing whether embryos that died in the womb will rise at the resurrection, says "I make bold neither to affirm nor to deny, although I fail to see why, if they are not excluded from the number of the dead, they should not attain to the resurrection of the dead."[439] The criminality of abortion was, however, speedily established, and the early Christian Emperors, in agreement with the Church, edicted many fantastic and extreme penalties against abortion. This tendency continued under ecclesiastical influence, unrestrained, until the humanitarian movement of the eighteenth century, when Beccaria, Voltaire, Rousseau and other great reformers succeeded in turning the tide of public opinion against the barbarity of the laws, and the penalty of death for abortion was finally abolished.[440]

Medical science and practice at the present day—although it can scarcely be said that it speaks with an absolutely unanimous voice—on the whole occupies a position midway between that of the classic lawyers and that of the later Christian ecclesiastics. It is, on the whole, in favor of sacrificing the fœtus whenever the interests of the mother demand such a sacrifice. General medical opinion is not, however, prepared at present to go further, and is distinctly disinclined to aid the parents in exerting an unqualified control over the fœtus in the womb, nor is it yet disposed to practice abortion on eugenic grounds. It is obvious, indeed, that medicine cannot in this matter take the initiative, for it is the primary duty of medicine to save life. Society itself must assume the responsibility of protecting the race.

Dr. S. Macvie ("Mother versus Child," Transactions Edinburgh Obstetrical Society, vol. xxiv, 1899) elaborately discusses the respective values of the fœtus and the adult on the basis of life-expectancy, and concludes that the fœtus is merely "a parasite performing no function whatever," and that "unless the life-expectancy of the child covers the years in which its potentiality is converted into actuality, the relative values of the maternal and fœtal life will be that of actual as against potential." This statement seems fairly sound. Ballantyne (Manual of Antenatal Pathology: The Fœtus, p. 459) endeavors to make the statement more precise by saying that "the mother's life has a value, because she is what she is, while the fœtus only has a possible value, on account of what it may become."

Durlacher, among others, has discussed, in careful and cautious detail, the various conditions in which the physician should, or should not, induce abortion in the interests of the mother ("Der Künstliche Abort," Wiener Klinik, Aug. and Sept., 1906); so also, Eugen Wilhelm ("Die Abtreibung und das Recht des Arztes zur Vernichtung der Leibesfrucht," Sexual-Probleme, May and June, 1909). Wilhelm further discusses whether it is desirable to alter the laws in order to give the physician greater freedom in deciding on abortion. He concludes that this is not necessary, and might even act injuriously, by unduly hampering medical freedom. Any change in the law should merely be, he considers, in the direction of asserting that the destruction of the fœtus is not abortion in the legal sense, provided it is indicated by the rules of medical science. With reference to the timidity of some medical men in inducing abortion, Wilhelm remarks that, even in the present state of the law, the physician who conscientiously effects abortion, in accordance with his best knowledge, even if mistakenly, may consider himself safe from all legal penalties, and that he is much more likely to come in conflict with the law if it can be proved that death followed as a result of his neglect to induce abortion.

Pinard, who has discussed the right to control the fœtal life (Annales de Gynécologie, vols. lii and liii, 1899 and 1900), inspired by his enthusiastic propaganda for the salvation of infant life, is led to the unwarranted conclusion that no one has the rights of life and death over the fœtus; "the infant's right to his life is an imprescriptible and sacred right, which no power can take from him." There is a mistake here, unless Pinard deliberately desires to place himself, like Tolstoy, in opposition to current civilized morality. So far from the infant having any "imprescriptible right to life," even the adult has, in human societies, no such inalienable right, and very much less the fœtus, which is not strictly a human being at all. We assume the right of terminating the lives of those individuals whose anti-social conduct makes them dangerous, and, in war, we deliberately terminate, amid general applause and enthusiasm, the lives of men who have been specially selected for this purpose on account of their physical and general efficiency. It would be absurdly inconsistent to say that we have no rights over the lives of creatures that have, as yet, no part in human society at all, and are not so much as born. We are here in presence of a vestige of ancient theological dogma, and there can be little doubt that, on the theoretical side at all events, the "imprescriptible right" of the embryo will go the same way as the "imprescriptible right" of the spermatozöon. Both rights are indeed "imprescriptible."

Of recent years a new, and, it must be admitted, somewhat unexpected, aspect of this question of abortion has been revealed. Hitherto it has been a question entirely in the hands of men, first, following the Roman traditions, in the hands of Christian ecclesiastics, and later, in those of the professional castes. Yet the question is in reality very largely, and indeed mainly, a woman's question, and now, more especially in Germany, it has been actively taken up by women. The Gräfin Gisela Streitberg occupies the pioneering place in this movement with her book Das Recht zur Beiseitigung Keimenden Lebens, and was speedily followed, from 1897 onwards, by a number of distinguished women who occupy a prominent place in the German woman's movement, among others Helene Stöcker, Oda Olberg, Elisabeth Zanzinger, Camilla Jellinek. All these writers insist that the fœtus is not yet an independent human being, and that every woman, by virtue of the right over her own body, is entitled to decide whether it shall become an independent human being. At the Woman's Congress held in the autumn of 1905, a resolution was passed demanding that abortion should only be punishable when effected by another person against the wish of the pregnant women herself.[441] The acceptance of this resolution by a representative assembly is interesting proof of the interest now taken by women in the question, and of the strenuous attitude they are tending to assume.

Elisabeth Zanzinger ("Verbrechen gegen die Leibesfrucht," Geschlecht und Gesellschaft, Bd. II, Heft 5, 1907) ably and energetically condemns the law which makes abortion a crime. "A woman herself is the only legitimate possessor of her own body and her own health.... Just as it is a woman's private right, and most intimate concern, to present her virginity as her best gift to the chosen of her heart, so it is certainly a pregnant woman's own private concern if, for reasons which seem good to her, she decides to destroy the results of her action." A woman who destroys the embryo which might become a burden to the community, or is likely to be an inferior member of society, this writer urges, is doing a service to the community, which ought to reward her, perhaps by granting her special privileges as regards the upbringing of her other children. Oda Olberg, in a thoughtful paper ("Ueber den Juristischen Schutz des Keimenden Lebens," Die Neue Generation, June, 1908), endeavors to make clear all that is involved in the effort to protect the developing embryo against the organism that carries it, to protect a creature, that is, against itself and its own instincts. She considers that most of the women who terminate their pregnancies artificially would only have produced undesirables, for the normal, healthy, robust woman has no desire to effect abortion. "There are women who are psychically sterile, without being physically so, and who possess nothing of motherhood but the ability to bring forth. These, when they abort, are simply correcting a failure of Nature." Some of them, she remarks, by going on to term, become guilty of the far worse offence of infanticide. As for the women who desire abortion merely from motives of vanity, or convenience, Oda Olberg points out that the circles in which these motives rule are quite able to limit their children without having to resort to abortion. She concludes that society must protect the young life in every way, by social hygiene, by laws for the protection of the workers, by spreading a new morality on the basis of the laws of heredity. But we need no law to protect the young creature against its own mother, for a thousand natural forces are urging the mother to protect her own child, and we may be sure that she will not disobey these forces without very good reasons. Camilla Jellinek, again (Die Strafrechtsreform, etc., Heidelberg, 1909), in a powerful and well-informed address before the Associated German Frauenvereine, at Breslau, argues in the same sense.

The lawyers very speedily came to the assistance of the women in this matter, the more readily, no doubt, since the traditions of the greatest and most influential body of law already pointed, on one side at all events, in the same direction. It may, indeed, be claimed that it was from the side of law—and in Italy, the classic land of legal reform—that this new movement first begun. In 1888, Balestrini published, at Turin, his Aborto, Infanticidio ed Esposizione d'Infante, in which he argued that the penalty should be removed from abortion. It was a very able and learned book, inspired by large ideas and a humanitarian spirit, but though its importance is now recognized, it cannot be said that it attracted much attention on publication.

It is especially in Germany that, during recent years, lawyers have followed women reformers, by advocating, more or less completely, the abolition of the punishment for abortion. So distinguished an authority as Von Liszt, in a private letter to Camilla Jellinek (op. cit.), states that he regards the punishment of abortion as "very doubtful," though he considers its complete abolition impracticable; he thinks abortion might be permitted during the early months of pregnancy, thus bringing about a return of the old view. Hans Gross states his opinion (Archiv für Kriminal-Anthropologie, Bd. XII, p. 345) that the time is not far distant when abortion will no longer be punished. Radbruch and Von Lilienthal speak in the same sense. Weinberg has advocated a change in the law (Mutterschutz, 1905, Heft 8), and Kurt Hiller (Die Neue Generation, April, 1909), also from the legal side, argues that abortion should only be punishable when effected by a married woman, without the knowledge and consent of her husband.

The medical profession, which took the first step in modern times in the authorization of abortion, has not at present taken any further step. It has been content to lay down the principle that when the interests of the mother are opposed to those of the fœtus, it is the latter which must be sacrificed. It has hesitated to take the further step of placing abortion on the eugenic basis, and of claiming the right to insist on abortion whenever the medical and hygienic interests of society demand such a step. This attitude is perfectly intelligible. Medicine has in the past been chiefly identified with the saving of lives, even of worthless and worse than worthless lives; "Keep everything alive! Keep everything alive!" nervously cried Sir James Paget. Medicine has confined itself to the humble task of attempting to cure evils, and is only to-day beginning to undertake the larger and nobler task of preventing them.

"The step from killing the child in the womb to murdering a person when out of the womb, is a dangerously narrow one," sagely remarks a recent medical author, probably speaking for many others, who somehow succeed in blinding themselves to the fact that this "dangerously narrow step" has been taken by mankind, only too freely, for thousands of years past, long before abortion was known in the world.

Here and there, however, medical authors of repute have advocated the further extension of abortion, with precautions, and under proper supervision, as an aid to eugenic progress. Thus, Professor Max Flesch (Die Neue Generation, April, 1909) is in favor of a change in the law permitting abortion (provided it is carried out by the physician) in special cases, as when the mother's pregnancy has been due to force, when she has been abandoned, or when, in the interests of the community, it is desirable to prevent the propagation of insane, criminal, alcoholic, or tuberculous persons.

In France, a medical man, Dr. Jean Darricarrère, has written a remarkable novel, Le Droit d'Avortement (1906), which advocates the thesis that a woman always possesses a complete right to abortion, and is the supreme judge as to whether she will or not undergo the pain and risks of childbirth. The question is, here, however, obviously placed not on medical, but on humanitarian and feminist grounds.

We have seen that, alike on the side of practice and of theory, a great change has taken place during recent years in the attitude towards abortion. It must, however, clearly be recognized that, unlike the control of procreation by methods for preventing conception, facultative abortion has not yet been embodied in our current social morality. If it is permissible to interpolate a personal opinion, I may say that to me it seems that our morality is here fairly reasonable.[442] I am decidedly of opinion that an unrestricted permission for women to practice abortion in their own interests, or even for communities to practice it in the interests of the race, would be to reach beyond the stage of civilization we have at present attained. As Ellen Key very forcibly argues, a civilization which permits, without protest, the barbarous slaughter of its carefully selected adults in war has not yet won the right to destroy deliberately even its most inferior vital products in the womb. A civilization guilty of so reckless a waste of life cannot safely be entrusted with this judicial function. The blind and aimless anxiety to cherish the most hopeless and degraded forms of life, even of unborn life, may well be a weakness, and since it often leads to incalculable suffering, even a crime. But as yet there is an impenetrable barrier against progress in this direction. Before we are entitled to take life deliberately for the sake of purifying life, we must learn how to preserve it by abolishing such destructive influences—war, disease, bad industrial conditions—as are easily within our social power as civilized nations.[443]

There is, further, another consideration which seems to me to carry weight. The progress of civilization is in the direction of greater foresight, of greater prevention, of a diminished need for struggling with the reckless lack of prevision. The necessity for abortion is precisely one of those results of reckless action which civilization tends to diminish. While we may admit that in a sounder state of civilization a few cases might still occur when the induction of abortion would be desirable, it seems probable that the number of such cases will decrease rather than increase. In order to do away with the need for abortion, and to counteract the propaganda in its favor, our main reliance must be placed, on the one hand, on increased foresight in the determination of conception and increased knowledge of the means for preventing conception,[444] and on the other hand, on a better provision by the State for the care of pregnant women, married and unmarried alike, and a practical recognition of the qualified mother's claim on society.[445] There can be little doubt that, in many a charge of criminal abortion, the real offence lies at the door of those who have failed to exercise their social and professional duty of making known the more natural and harmless methods for preventing conception, or else by their social attitude have made the pregnant woman's position intolerable. By active social reform in these two directions, the new movement in favor of abortion may be kept in check, and it may even be found that by stimulating such reform that movement has been beneficial.

We have seen that the deliberate restraint of conception has become a part of our civilized morality, and that the practice and theory of facultative abortion has gained a footing among us. There remains a third and yet more radical method of controlling procreation, the method of preventing the possibility of procreation altogether by the performance of castration or other slighter operation having a like inhibitory effect on reproduction. The other two methods only effect a single act of union or its results, but castration affects all subsequent acts of sexual union and usually destroys the procreative power permanently.

Castration for various social and other purposes is an ancient and widespread practice, carried out on men and on animals. There has, however, been on the whole a certain prejudice against it when applied to men. Many peoples have attached a very sacred value to the integrity of the sexual organs. Among some primitive peoples the removal of these organs has been regarded as a peculiarly ferocious insult, only to be carried out in moments of great excitement, as after a battle. Medicine has been opposed to any interference with the sexual organs. The oath taken by the Greek physicians appears to prohibit castration: "I will not cut."[446] In modern times a great change has taken place, the castration of both men and women is commonly performed in diseased conditions; the same operation is sometimes advocated and occasionally performed in the hope that it may remove strong and abnormal sexual impulses. And during recent years castration has been invoked in the cause of negative eugenics, to a greater extent, indeed, on account of its more radical character, than either the prevention of conception or abortion.

The movement in favor of castration appears to have begun in the United States, where various experiments have been made in embodying it in law. It was first advocated merely as a punishment for criminals, and especially sexual offenders, by Hammond, Everts, Lydston and others. From this point of view, however, it seems to be unsatisfactory and perhaps illegitimate. In many cases castration is no punishment at all, and indeed a positive benefit. In other cases, when inflicted against the subject's will, it may produce very disturbing mental effects, leading in already degenerate or unbalanced persons to insanity, criminality, and anti-social tendencies generally, much more dangerous than the original state. Eugenic considerations, which were later brought forward, constitute a much sounder argument for castration; in this case the castration is carried out, by no means in order to inflict a barbarous and degrading punishment, but, with the subject's consent, in order to protect the community from the risk of useless or mischievous members.

The fact that castration can no longer be properly considered a punishment, is shown by the possibility of deliberately seeking the operation simply for the sake of convenience, as a preferable and most effective substitute for the adoption of preventive methods in sexual intercourse. I am only at present acquainted with one case in which this course has been adopted. This subject is a medical man (of Puritan New England ancestry) with whose sexual history, which is quite normal, I have been acquainted for a long time past. His present age is thirty-nine. A few years since, having a sufficiently large family, he adopted preventive methods of intercourse. The subsequent events I narrate in his own words: "The trouble, forethought, etc., rendered necessary by preventive measures, grew more and more irksome to me as the years passed by, and finally, I laid the matter before another physician, and on his assurances, and after mature deliberation with my wife, was operated on some time since, and rendered sterile by having the vas deferens on each side exposed through a slit in the scrotum, then tied in two places with silk and severed between the ligatures. This was done under cocaine infiltrative anæsthesia, and was not so extremely painful, though what pain there was (dragging the cord out through the slit, etc.) seemed very hard to endure. I was not out of my office a single day, nor seriously disturbed in any way. In six days all stitches in the scrotum were removed, and in three weeks I abandoned the suspensory bandage that had been rendered necessary by the extreme sensitiveness of the testicles and cord.

"The operation has proved a most complete success in every way. Sexual functions are absolutely unaffected in any way whatsoever. There is no sense of discomfort or uneasiness in the sexual tract, and what seems strangest of all to me, is the fact that the semen, so far as one can judge by ordinary means of observation, is undiminished in quantity and unchanged in character. (Of course, the microscope would reveal its fatal lack.)

"My wife is delighted at having fear banished from our love, and, taken all in all, it certainly seems as if life would mean more to us both. Incidentally, the health of both of us seems better than usual, particularly so in my wife's case, and this she attributes to a soothing influence that is attained by allowing the seminal fluid to be deposited in a perfectly normal manner, and remain in contact with the vaginal secretions until it naturally passes off.

"This operation being comparatively new, and, as yet, not often done on others than the insane, criminal, etc., I thought it might be of interest to you. If I shed even the faintest ray of light on this greatest of all human problems ... I shall be glad indeed."

Such a case, with its so far satisfactory issue, certainly deserves to be placed on record, though it may well be that at present it will not be widely imitated.

The earliest advocacy of castration, which I have met with as a part of negative eugenics, for the specific "purpose of prophylaxis as applied to race improvement and the protection of society," is by Dr. F. E. Daniel, of Texas, and dates from 1893.[447] Daniel mixed up, however, somewhat inextricably, castration as a method of purifying the race, a method which can be carried out with the concurrence of the individual operated on, with castration as a punishment, to be inflicted for rape, sodomy, bestiality, pederasty and even habitual masturbation, the method of its performance, moreover, to be the extremely barbarous and primitive method of total ablation of the sexual organs. In more recent years somewhat more equitable, practical, and scientific methods of castration have been advocated, not involving the removal of the sexual glands or organs, and not as a punishment, but simply for the sake of protecting the community and the race from the burden of probably unproductive and possibly dangerous members. Näcke has, from 1899 onwards, repeatedly urged the social advantages of this measure.[448] The propagation of the inferior elements of society, Näcke insists, brings unhappiness into the family and is a source of great expense to the State. He regards castration as the only effective method of prevention, and concludes that it is, therefore, our duty to adopt it, just as we have adopted vaccination, taking care to secure the consent of the subject himself or his guardian, of the civil authorities, and, if necessary, of a committee of experts. Professor Angelo Zuccarelli of Naples has also, from 1899 onwards, emphasized the importance of castration in the sterilization of the epileptic, the insane of various classes, the alcoholic, the tuberculous, and instinctive criminals, the choice of cases for operation to be made by a commission of experts who would examine school-children, candidates for public employments, or persons about to marry.[449] This movement rapidly gained ground, and in 1905 at the annual meeting of Swiss alienists it was unanimously agreed that the sterilization of the insane is desirable, and that it is necessary that the question should be legally regulated. It is in Switzerland, indeed, that the first steps have been taken in Europe to carry out castration as a measure of social prophylaxis. The sixteenth yearly report (1907) of the Cantonal asylum at Wil describes four cases of castration, two in men and two in women, performed—with the permission of the patients and the civil authorities—for social reasons; both women had previously had illegitimate children who were a burden on the community, and all four patients were sexually abnormal; the operation enabled the patients to be liberated and to work, and the results were considered in every respect satisfactory to all concerned.[450]

The introduction of castration as a method of negative eugenics has been facilitated by the use of new methods of performing it without risk, and without actual removal of the testes or ovaries. For men, there is the simple method of vasectomy, as recommended by Näcke and many others. For women, there is the corresponding, and almost equally simple and harmless method of Kehrer, by section and ligation of the Fallopian tubes through the vagina, as recommended by Kisch, or Rose's very similar procedure, easily carried out in a few minutes by an experienced hand, as recommended by Zuccarelli.

It has been found that repeated exposure to the X-rays produces sterility in both sexes, alike in animals and men, and X-ray workers have to adopt various precautions to avoid suffering from this effect. It has been suggested that the application of the X-rays would be a good substitute for castration; it appears that the effects of the application are only likely to last a few years, which, in some doubtful cases, might be an advantage. (See British Medical Journal, Aug. 13, 1904; ib., March 11, 1905; ib., July 6, 1907.)

It is scarcely possible, it seems to me, to view castration as a method of negative eugenics with great enthusiasm. The recklessness, moreover, with which it is sometimes proposed to apply it by law—owing no doubt to the fact that it is not so obviously repulsive as the less radical procedure of abortion—ought to render us very cautious. We must, too, dismiss the idea of castration as a punishment; as such it is not merely barbarous but degrading and is unlikely to have a beneficial effect. As a method of negative eugenics it should never be carried out except with the subject's consent. The fact that in some cases it might be necessary to enforce seclusion in the absence of castration would doubtless be a fact exerting influence in favor of such consent; but the consent is essential if the subject of the operation is to be safeguarded from degradation. A man who has been degraded and embittered by an enforced castration might not be dangerous to posterity, but might very easily become a dangerous member of the society in which he actually lived. With due precautions and safeguards, castration may doubtless play a certain part in the elevation and improvement of the race.[451]

The methods we have been considering, in so far as they limit the procreative powers of the less healthy and efficient stocks in a community, are methods of eugenics. It must not, however, be supposed that they are the whole of eugenics, or indeed that they are in any way essential to a eugenic scheme. Eugenics is concerned with the whole of the agencies which elevate and improve the human breed; abortion and castration are methods which may be used to this end, but they are not methods of which everyone approves, nor is it always clear that the ends they effect would not better be attained by other methods; in any case they are methods of negative eugenics. There remains the field of positive eugenics, which is concerned, not with the elimination of the inferior stocks but with ascertaining which are the superior stocks and with furthering their procreative power.

While the necessity of refraining from procreation is no longer a bar to marriage, the question of whether two persons ought to marry each other still remains in the majority of cases a serious question from the standpoint of positive as well as of negative eugenics, for the normal marriage cannot fail to involve children, as, indeed, its chief and most desirable end. We have to consider not merely what are the stocks or the individuals that are unfit to breed, but also what are these stocks or individuals that are most fit to breed, and under what conditions procreation may best be effected. The present imperfection of our knowledge on these questions emphasizes the need for care and caution in approaching their consideration.

It may be fitting, at this point, to refer to the experiment of the Oneida Community in establishing a system of scientific propagation, under the guidance of a man whose ability and distinction as a pioneer are only to-day beginning to be adequately recognized. John Humphrey Noyes was too far ahead of his own day to be recognized at his true worth; at the most, he was regarded as the sagacious and successful founder of a sect, and his attempts to apply eugenics to life only aroused ridicule and persecution, so that he was, unfortunately, compelled by outside pressure to bring a most instructive experiment to a premature end. His aim and principle are set forth in an Essay on Scientific Propagation, printed some forty years ago, which discusses problems that are only now beginning to attract the attention of the practical man, as within the range of social politics. When Noyes turned his vigorous and practical mind to the question of eugenics, that question was exclusively in the hands of scientific men, who felt all the natural timidity of the scientific man towards the realization of his proposals, and who were not prepared to depart a hair's breadth from the conventional customs of their time. The experiment of Noyes, at Oneida, marked a new stage in the history of eugenics; whatever might be the value of the experiment—and a first experiment cannot well be final—with Noyes the questions of eugenics passed beyond the purely academic stage in which, from the time of Plato, they had peacefully reposed. "It is becoming clear," Noyes states at the outset, "that the foundations of scientific society are to be laid in the scientific propagation of human beings." In doing this, we must attend to two things: blood (or heredity) and training; and he puts blood first. In that, he was at one with the most recent biometrical eugenists of to-day ("the nation has for years been putting its money on 'Environment,' when 'Heredity' wins in a canter," as Karl Pearson prefers to put it), and at the same time revealed the breadth of his vision in comparison with the ordinary social reformer, who, in that day, was usually a fanatical believer in the influence of training and surroundings. Noyes sets forth the position of Darwin on the principles of breeding, and the step beyond Darwin, which had been taken by Galton. He then remarks that, when Galton comes to the point where it is necessary to advance from theory to the duties the theory suggests, he "subsides into the meekest conservatism." (It must be remembered that this was written at an early stage in Galton's work.) This conclusion was entirely opposed to Noyes' practical and religious temperament. "Duty is plain; we say we ought to do it—we want to do it; but we cannot. The law of God urges us on; but the law of society holds us back. The boldest course is the safest. Let us take an honest and steady look at the law. It is only in the timidity of ignorance that the duty seems impracticable." Noyes anticipated Galton in regarding eugenics as a matter of religion.

Noyes proposed to term the work of modern science in propagation "Stirpiculture," in which he has sometimes been followed by others. He considered that it is the business of the stirpiculturist to keep in view both quantity and quality of stocks, and he held that, without diminishing quantity, it was possible to raise the quality by exercising a very stringent discrimination in selecting males. At this point, Noyes has been supported in recent years by Karl Pearson and others, who have shown that only a relatively small portion of a population is needed to produce the next generation, and that, in fact, twelve per cent. of one generation in man produces fifty per cent. of the next generation. What we need to ensure is that this small reproducing section of the population shall be the best adapted for the purpose. "The quantity of production will be in direct proportion to the number of fertile females," as Noyes saw the question, "and the value produced, so far as it depends on selection, will be nearly in inverse proportion to the number of fertilizing males." In this matter, Noyes anticipated Ehrenfels. The two principles to be held in mind were, "Breed from the best," and "Breed in-and-in," with a cautious and occasional introduction of new strains. (It may be noted that Reibmayr, in his recent Entwicklungsgeschichte des Genics und Talentes, argues that the superior races, and superior individuals, in the human species, have been produced by an unconscious adherence to exactly these principles.) "By segregating superior families, and by breeding these in-and-in, superior varieties of human beings might be produced, which would be comparable to the thoroughbreds in all the domestic races." He illustrates this by the early history of the Jews.

Noyes finally criticises the present method, or lack of method, in matters of propagation. Our marriage system, he states, "leaves mating to be determined by a general scramble." By ignoring, also, the great difference between the sexes in reproductive power, it "restricts each man, whatever may be his potency and his value, to the amount of production of which one woman, chosen blindly, may be capable." Moreover, he continues, "practically it discriminates against the best, and in favor of the worst; for, while the good man will be limited by his conscience to what the law allows, the bad man, free from moral check, will distribute his seed beyond the legal limits, as widely as he dares." "We are safe every way in saying that there is no possibility of carrying the two precepts of scientific propagation into an institution which pretends to no discrimination, allows no suppression, gives no more liberty to the best than to the worst, and which, in fact, must inevitably discriminate the wrong way, so long as the inferior classes are most prolific and least amenable to the admonitions of science and morality." In modifying our sexual institutions, Noyes insists there are two essential points to remember: the preservation of liberty, and the preservation of the home. There must be no compulsion about human scientific propagation; it must be autonomous, directed by self-government, "by the free choice of those who love science well enough to 'make themselves eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven's sake.'" The home, also, must be preserved, since "marriage is the best thing for man as he is;" but it is necessary to enlarge the home, for, "if all could learn to love other children than their own, there would be nothing to hinder scientific propagation in the midst of homes far better than any that now exist."

This memorable pamphlet contains no exposition of the precise measures adopted by the Oneida Community to carry out these principles. The two essential points were, as we know, "male continence" (see ante p. 553), and the enlarged family, in which all the men were the actual or potential mates of all the women, but no union for propagation took place, except as the result of reason and deliberate resolve. "The community," says H. J. Seymour, one of the original members (The Oneida Community, 1894, p. 5), "was a family, as distinctly separated from surrounding society as ordinary households. The tie that bound it together was as permanent, and at least as sacred, as that of marriage. Every man's care, and the whole of the common property, was pledged for the maintenance and protection of the women, and the support and education of the children." It is not probable that the Oneida Community presented in detail the model to which human society generally will conform. But even at the lowest estimate, its success showed, as Lord Morely has pointed out (Diderot, vol. ii, p. 19), "how modifiable are some of these facts of existing human character which are vulgarly deemed to be ultimate and ineradicable," and that "the discipline of the appetites and affections of sex," on which the future of civilization largely rests, is very far from an impossibility.

In many respects, the Oneida Community was ahead of its time,—and even of ours,—but it is interesting to note that, in the matter of the control of conception, our marriage system has come into line with the theory and practice of Oneida; it cannot, indeed, be said that we always control conception in accordance with eugenic principles, but the fact that such control has now become a generally accepted habit of civilization, to some extent deprives Noyes' criticism of our marriage system of the force it possessed half a century ago. Another change in our customs—the advocacy, and even the practice, of abortion and castration—would not have met with his approval; he was strongly opposed to both, and with the high moral level that ruled his community, neither was necessary to the maintenance of the stirpiculture that prevailed.

The Oneida Community endured for the space of one generation, and came to an end in 1879, by no means through a recognition of failure, but by a wise deference to external pressure. Its members, many of them highly educated, continued to cherish the memory of the practices and ideals of the Community. Noyes Miller (the author of The Strike of a Sex, and Zugassant's Discovery) to the last, looked with quiet confidence to the time when, as he anticipated, the great discovery of Noyes would be accepted and adopted by the world at large. Another member of the Community (Henry J. Seymour) wrote of the Community long afterwards that "It was an anticipation and imperfect miniature of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth."

Perhaps the commonest type of proposal or attempt to improve the biological level of the race is by the exclusion of certain classes of degenerates from marriage, or by the encouragement of better classes of the community to marry. This seems to be, at present, the most popular form of eugenics, and in so far as it is not effected by compulsion but is the outcome of a voluntary resolve to treat the question of the creation of the race with the jealous care and guardianship which so tremendously serious, so godlike, a task involves, it has much to be said in its favor and nothing against it.

But it is quite another matter when the attempt is made to regulate such an institution as marriage by law. In the first place we do not yet know enough about the principles of heredity and the transmissibility of pathological states to enable us to formulate sound legislative proposals on this basis. Even so comparatively simple a matter as the relationship of tuberculosis to heredity can scarcely be said to be a matter of common agreement, even if it can yet be claimed that we possess adequate material on which to attain a common agreement. Supposing, moreover, that our knowledge on all these questions were far more advanced than it is, we still should not have attained a position in which we could lay down general propositions regarding the desirability or the undesirability of certain classes of persons procreating. The question is necessarily an individual question, and it can only be decided when all the circumstances of the individual case have been fairly passed in review.

The objection to any legislative and compulsory regulation of the right to marry is, however, much more fundamental than the consideration that our knowledge is at present inadequate. It lies in the extraordinary confusion, in the minds of those who advocate such legislation, between legal marriage and procreation. The persons who fall into such confusion have not yet learnt the alphabet of the subject they presume to dictate about, and are no more competent to legislate than a child who cannot tell A from B is competent to read.

Marriage, in so far as it is the partnership for mutual help and consolation of two people who in such partnership are free, if they please, to exercise sexual union, is an elementary right of every person who is able to reason, who is guilty of no fraud or concealment, and who is not likely to injure the partner selected, for in that case society is entitled to interfere by virtue of its duty to protect its members. But the right to marry, thus understood, in no way involves the right to procreate. For while marriage per se only affects the two individuals concerned, and in no way affects the State, procreation, on the other hand, primarily affects the community which is ultimately made up of procreated persons, and only secondarily affects the two individuals who are the instruments of procreation. So that just as the individual couple has the first right in the question of marriage, the State has the first right in the question of procreation. The State is just as incompetent to lay down the law about marriage as the individual is to lay down the law about procreation.

That, however, is only one-half of the folly committed by those who would select the candidates for matrimony by statute. Let us suppose—as is not indeed easy to suppose—that a community will meekly accept the abstract prohibitions of the statute book and quietly go home again when the registrar of marriages informs them that they are shut out from legal matrimony by the new table of prohibited degrees. An explicit prohibition to procreate within marriage is an implicit permission to procreate outside marriage. Thus the undesirable procreation, instead of being carried out under the least dangerous conditions, is carried out under the most dangerous conditions, and the net result to the community is not a gain but a loss.

What seems usually to happen, in the presence of a formal legislative prohibition against the marriage of a particular class, is a combination of various evils. In part the law becomes a dead letter, in part it is evaded by skill and fraud, in part it is obeyed to give rise to worse evils. This happened, for instance, in the Terek district of the Caucasus where, on the demand of a medical committee, priests were prohibited from marrying persons among whose relatives or ancestry any cases of leprosy had occurred. So much and such various mischief was caused by this order that it was speedily withdrawn.[452]

If we remember that the Catholic Church was occupied for more than a thousand years in the attempt to impose the prohibition of marriage on its priesthood,—an educated and trained body of men, who had every spiritual and worldly motive to accept the prohibition, and were, moreover, brought up to regard asceticism as the best ideal in life,[453]—we may realize how absurd it is to attempt to gain the same end by mere casual prohibitions issued to untrained people with no motives to obey such prohibitions, and no ideals of celibacy.

The hopelessness and even absurdity of effecting the eugenic improvement of the race by merely placing on the statute book prohibitions to certain classes of people to enter the legal bonds of matrimony as at present constituted, reveals the weakness of those who undervalue the eugenic importance of environment. Those who affirm that heredity is everything and environment nothing seem strangely to forget that it is precisely the lower classes—those who are most subjected to the influence of bad environment—who procreate most copiously, most recklessly, and most disastrously. The restraint of procreation, and a concomitant regard for heredity, increase pari passu with improvement of the environment and rise in social well-being. If even already it can be said that probably fifty per cent. of sexual intercourse—perhaps the most procreatively productive moiety—takes place outside legal marriage, it becomes obvious that statutory prohibition to the unfit classes to refrain from legal marriage merely involves their joining the procreating classes outside legal matrimony. It is also clear that if we are to neglect the factor of environment, and leave the lower social classes to the ignorance and recklessness which are the result of such environment, the only practical method of eugenics left open is that by castration and abortion. But this method—if applied on a wholesale scale as it would need to be[454] and without reference to the consent of the individual—is entirely opposed to modern democratic feeling. Thus those short-sighted eugenists who overlook the importance of environment are overlooking the only practical channel through which their aims can be realized. Attention to procreation and attention to environment are not, as some have supposed, antagonistic, but they play harmoniously into each other's hands. The care for environment leads to a restraint on reckless procreation, and the restraint of procreation leads to improved environment.

Legislation on marriage, to be effectual, must be enacted in the home, in the school, in the doctor's consulting room. Force is helpless here; it is education that is needed, not merely instruction, but the education of the conscience and will, and the training of the emotions.

Legal action may come in to further this process of education, though it cannot replace it. Thus it is very desirable that when there has been a concealment of serious disease by a party to a marriage such concealment should be a ground for divorce. Epilepsy may be taken as typical of the diseases which should be a bar to procreation, and their concealment equivalent to an annulment of marriage.[455] In the United States the Supreme Court of Errors of Connecticut laid it down in 1906 that the Superior Court has the power to pass a decree of divorce when one of the parties has concealed the existence of epilepsy. This weighty deliverence, it has been well said,[456] marks a forward step in human progress. There are many other seriously pathological conditions in which divorce should be pronounced, or indeed, occur automatically, except when procreation has been renounced, for in that case the State is no longer concerned in the relationship, except to punish any fraud committed by concealment.

The demand that a medical certificate of health should be compulsory on marriage, has been especially made in France. In 1858, Diday, of Lyons, proposed, indeed, that all persons, without exception, should be compelled to possess a certificate of health and disease, a kind of sanitary passport. In 1872, Bertillon (Art. "Demographic," Dictionnaire Encyclopédique des Sciences Médicales) advocated the registration, at marriage, of the chief anthropological and pathological traits of the contracting parties (height, weight, color of hair and eyes, muscular force, size of head, condition of vision, hearing, etc., deformities and defects, etc.), not so much, however, for the end of preventing undesirable marriages, as to facilitate the study and comparison of human groups at particular periods. Subsequent demands, of a more limited and partial character, for legal medical certificates as a condition of marriage, have been made by Fournier (Syphilis et Mariage, 1890), Cazalis (Le Science et le Mariage, 1890), and Jullien (Blenorrhagie et Mariage, 1898). In Austria, Haskovec, of Prague ("Contrat Matrimonial et L'Hygiène Publique," Comptes-rendus Congrès International de Médecine, Lisbon, 1906, Section VII, p. 600), argues that, on marriage, a medical certificate should be presented, showing that the subject is exempt from tuberculosis, alcoholism, syphilis, gonorrhœa, severe mental, or nervous, or other degenerative state, likely to be injurious to the other partner, or to the offspring. In America, Rosenberg and Aronstam argue that every candidate for marriage, male or female, should undergo a strict examination by a competent board of medical examiners, concerning (1) Family and Past History (syphilis, consumption, alcoholism, nervous, and mental diseases), and (2) Status Presens (thorough examination of all the organs); if satisfactory, a certificate of matrimonial eligibility would then be granted. It is pointed out that a measure of this kind would render unnecessary the acts passed by some States for the punishment by fine, or imprisonment, of the concealment of disease. Ellen Key also considers (Liebe und Ehe, p. 436) that each party at marriage should produce a certificate of health. "It seems to me just as necessary," she remarks, elsewhere (Century of the Child, Ch. I), "to demand medical testimony concerning capacity for marriage, as concerning capacity for military service. In the one case, it is a matter of giving life; in the other, of taking it, although certainly the latter occasion has hitherto been considered as much the more serious."

The certificate, as usually advocated, would be a private but necessary legitimation of the marriage in the eyes of the civil and religious authorities. Such a step, being required for the protection alike of the conjugal partner and of posterity, would involve a new legal organization of the matrimonial contract. That such demands are so frequently made, is a significant sign of the growth of moral consciousness in the community, and it is good that the public should be made acquainted with the urgent need for them. But it is highly undesirable that they should, at present, or, perhaps, ever, be embodied in legal codes. What is needed is the cultivation of the feeling of individual responsibility, and the development of social antagonism towards those individuals who fail to recognize their responsibility. It is the reality of marriage, and not its mere legal forms, that it is necessary to act upon.

The voluntary method is the only sound way of approach in this matter. Duclaux considered that the candidate for marriage should possess a certificate of health in much the same way as the candidate for life assurance, the question of professional secrecy, as well as that of compulsion, no more coming into one question than into the other. There is no reason why such certificates, of an entirely voluntary character, should not become customary among those persons who are sufficiently enlightened to realize all the grave personal, family, and social issues involved in marriage. The system of eugenic certification, as originated and developed by Galton, will constitute a valuable instrument for raising the moral consciousness in this matter. Galton's eugenic certificates would deal mainly with the natural virtues of superior hereditary breed—"the public recognition of a natural nobility"—but they would include the question of personal health and personal aptitude.[457]

To demand compulsory certificates of health at marriage is indeed to begin at the wrong end. It would not only lead to evasions and antagonisms but would probably call forth a reaction. It is first necessary to create an enthusiasm for health, a moral conscience in matters of procreation, together with, on the scientific side, a general habit of registering the anthropological, psychological, and pathological data concerning the individual, from birth onwards, altogether apart from marriage. The earlier demands of Diday and Bertillon were thus not only on a sounder but also a more practicable basis. If such records were kept from birth for every child, there would be no need for special examination at marriage, and many incidental ends would be gained. There is difficulty at present in obtaining such records from the moment of birth, and, so far as I am aware, no attempts have yet been made to establish their systematic registration. But it is quite possible to begin at the beginning of school life, and this is now done at many schools and colleges in England, America, and elsewhere, more especially as regards anthropological, physiological, and psychological data, each child being submitted to a thorough and searching anthropometric examination, and thus furnished with a systematic statement of his physical condition.[458] This examination needs to be standardized and generalized, and repeated at fixed intervals. "Every individual child," as is truly stated by Dr. Dukes, the Physician to Rugby School, "on his entrance to a public school should be as carefully and as thoroughly examined as if it were for life insurance." If this procedure were general from an early age, there would be no hardship in the production of the record at marriage, and no opportunity for fraud. The dossier of each person might well be registered by the State, as wills already are, and, as in the case of wills, become freely open to students when a century had elapsed. Until this has been done during several centuries our knowledge of eugenics will remain rudimentary.

There can be little doubt that the eugenic attitude towards marriage, and the responsibility of the individual for the future of the race, is becoming more recognized. It is constantly happening that persons, about to marry, approach the physician in a state of serious anxiety on this point. Urquhart, indeed (Journal of Mental Science, April, 1907, p. 277), believes that marriages are seldom broken off on this ground; this seems, however, too pessimistic a view, and even when the marriage is not broken off the resolve is often made to avoid procreation. Clouston, who emphasizes (Hygiene of the Mind, p. 74) the importance of "inquiries by each of the parties to the life-contract, by their parents and their doctors, as to heredity, temperament, and health," is more hopeful of the results than Urquhart. "I have been very much impressed, of late years," he writes (Journal of Mental Science, Oct., 1907, p. 710), "with the way in which this subject is taking possession of intelligent people, by the number of times one is consulted by young men and young women, proposing to marry, or by their fathers or mothers. I used to have the feeling in the back of my mind, when I was consulted, that it did not matter what I said, it would not make any difference. But it is making a difference; and I, and others, could tell of scores of marriages which were put off in consequence of psychiatric medical advice."

Ellen Key, also, refers to the growing tendency among both men and women, to be influenced by eugenic consideration in forming partnerships for life (Century of the Child, Ch. I). The recognition of the eugenic attitude towards marriage, the quickening of the social and individual conscience in matters of heredity, as also the systematic introduction of certification and registration, will be furthered by the growing tendency to the socialization of medicine, and, indeed, in its absence would be impossible. (See e.g., Havelock Ellis, The Nationalization of Health.) The growth of the State Medical Organization of Health is steady and continuous, and is constantly covering a larger field. The day of the private practitioner of medicine—who was treated, as Duclaux (L'Hygiène Sociale, p. 263) put it, "like a grocer, whose shop the customer may enter and leave as he pleases, and when he pleases"—will, doubtless, soon be over. It is now beginning to be felt that health is far too serious a matter, not only from the individual but also from the social point of view, to be left to private caprice. There is, indeed, a tendency, in some quarters, to fear that some day society may rush to the opposite extreme, and bow before medicine with the same unreasoning deference that it once bowed before theology. That danger is still very remote, nor is it likely, indeed, that medicine will ever claim any authority of this kind. The spirit of medicine has, notoriously, been rather towards the assertion of scepticism than of dogma, and the fanatics in this field will always be in a hopelessly small minority.

The general introduction of authentic personal records covering all essential data—hereditary, anthropometric and pathological—cannot fail to be a force on the side of positive as well as of negative eugenics, for it would tend to promote the procreation of the fit as well as restrict that of the unfit, without any legislative compulsion. With the growth of education a regard for such records as a preliminary to marriage would become as much a matter of course as once was the regard to the restrictions imposed by Canon law, and as still is a regard to money or to caste. A woman can usually refrain from marrying a man with no money and no prospects; a man may be passionately in love with a woman of lower class than himself but he seldom marries her. It needs but a clear general perception of all that is involved in heredity and health to make eugenic considerations equally influential.

A discriminating regard to the quality of offspring will act beneficially on the side of positive eugenics by substituting the pernicious tendency to put a premium on excess of childbirth by the more rational method of putting a premium on the quality of the child. It has been one of the most unfortunate results of the mania for protesting against that decline of the birthrate which is always and everywhere the result of civilization, that there has been a tendency to offer special social or pecuniary advantages to the parents of large families. Since large families tend to be degenerate, and to become a tax on the community, since rapid pregnancies in succession are not only a serious drain on the strength of the mother but are now known to depreciate seriously the quality of the offspring, and since, moreover, it is in large families that disease and mortality chiefly prevail, all the interests of the community are against the placing of any premium on large families, even in the case of parents of good stock. The interests of the State are bound up not with the quantity but with the quality of its citizens, and the premium should be placed not on the families that reach a certain size but on the individual children that reach a certain standard; the attainment of this standard could well be based on observations made from birth to the fifth year. A premium on this basis would be as beneficial to a State as that on the merely numerical basis is pernicious.

This consideration applies with still greater force to the proposals for the "systematic endowment of motherhood" of which we hear more and more. So moderate and judicious a social reformer as Mr. Sidney Webb writes: "We shall have to face the problem of the systematic endowment of motherhood, and place this most indispensable of all professions upon an honorable economic basis. At present it is ignored as an occupation, unremunerated, and in no way honored by the State."[459] True as this statement is, it must always be remembered that an indispensable preliminary to any proposal for the endowment of motherhood by the State is a clear conception of the kind of motherhood which the State requires. To endow the reckless and indiscriminate motherhood which we see around us, to encourage, that is, by State aid, the production of citizens a large proportion of whom the State, if it dared, would like to destroy as unfit, is too ridiculous a proposal to deserve discussion.[460] The only sound reason, indeed, for the endowment of motherhood is that it would enable the State, in its own interests, to further the natural selection of the fit.

As to the positive qualities which the State is entitled to endow in its encouragement of motherhood, it is still too early to speak with complete assurance. Negative eugenics tends to be ahead of positive eugenics; it is easier to detect bad stocks than to be quite sure of good stocks. Both on the scientific side and on the social side, however, we are beginning to attain a clearer realization of the end to be attained and a more precise knowledge of the methods of attaining it.[461]

Even when we have gained a fairly clear conception of the stocks and the individuals which we are justified in encouraging to undertake the task of producing fit citizens for the State, the problems of procreation are by no means at an end. Before we can so much as inquire what are the conditions under which selected individuals may best procreate, there is still the initial question to be decided whether those individuals are both fertile and potent, for this is not guaranteed by the fact that they belong to good stocks, nor is even the fact that a man and a woman are fertile with other persons any positive proof that they will be fertile with each other. Among the large masses of the population who do not seek to make their unions legal until those unions have proved fertile, this difficulty is settled in a simple and practical manner. The question is, however, a serious and hazardous one, in the present state of the marriage law in most countries, for those classes which are accustomed to bind themselves in legal marriage without any knowledge of their potency and fertility with each other. The matter is mostly left to chance, and as legal marriage cannot usually be dissolved on the ground that there are no offspring, even although procreation is commonly declared to be the chief end of marriage, the question assumes much gravity. The ordinary range of sterility is from seven to fifteen per cent. of all marriages, and in a very large proportion of these it is a source of great concern. This could be avoided, in some measure, by examination before marriage, and almost altogether by ordaining that, as it is only through offspring that a marriage has any concern for the State, a legal marriage could be dissolved, after a certain period, at the will of either of the parties, in the absence of such offspring.

It was formerly supposed that when a union proved infertile, it was the wife who was at fault. That belief is long since exploded, but, even yet, a man is generally far more concerned about his potency, that is, his ability to perform the mechanical act of coitus, than about his fertility, that is, his ability to produce living spermatozoa, though the latter condition is a much more common source of sterility. "Any man," says Arthur Cooper (British Medical Journal, May 11, 1907), "who has any sexual defect or malformation, or who has suffered from any disease or injury of the genito-urinary organs, even though comparatively trivial or one-sided, and although his copulative power may be unimpaired, should be looked upon as possibly sterile, until some sort of evidence to the contrary has been obtained." In case of a sterile marriage, the possible cause should first be investigated in the husband, for it is comparatively easy to examine the semen, and to ascertain if it contains active spermatozoa. Prinzing, in a comprehensive study of sterile marriages ("Die Sterilen Ehen," Zeitschrift für Sozialwissenschaft, 1904, Heft 1 and 2), states that in two-fifths of sterile marriages the man is at fault; one-third of such marriages are the result of venereal diseases in the husband himself, or transmitted to the wife. Gonorrhœa is not now considered so important a cause of sterility as it was a few years ago; Schenk makes it responsible for only about thirteen per cent. sterile marriages (cf. Kisch, The Sexual Life of Woman). Pinkus (Archiv für Gynäkologie, 1907) found that of nearly five hundred cases in which he examined both partners, in 24.4 per cent. cases, the sterility was directly due to the husband, and in 15.8 per cent. cases, indirectly due, because caused by gonorrhœa with which he had infected his wife.

When sterility is due to a defect in the husband's spermatozoa, and is not discovered, as it usually might be, before marriage, the question of impregnating the wife by other methods has occasionally arisen. Divorce on the ground of sterility is not possible, and, even if it were, the couple, although they wish to have a child, have not usually any wish to separate. Under these circumstances, in order to secure the desired end, without departing from widely accepted rules of morality, the attempt is occasionally made to effect artificial fecundation by injecting the semen from a healthy male. Attempts have been made to effect artificial fecundation by various distinguished men, from John Hunter to Schwalbe, but it is nearly always very difficult to effect, and often impossible. This is easy to account for, if we recall what has already been pointed out (ante p. 577) concerning the influence of erotic excitement in the woman in securing conception; it is obviously a serious task for even the most susceptible woman to evoke erotic enthusiasm à propos of a medical syringe. Schwalbe, for instance, records a case (Deutsche Medizinisches Wochenschrift, Aug., 1908, p. 510) in which,—in consequence of the husband's sterility and the wife's anxiety, with her husband's consent, to be impregnated by the semen of another man,—he made repeated careful attempts to effect artificial fecundation; these attempts were, however, fruitless, and the three parties concerned finally resigned themselves to the natural method of intercourse, which was successful. In another case, recorded by Schwalbe, in which the husband was impotent but not sterile, six attempts were made to effect artificial fecundation, and further efforts abandoned on account of the disgust of all concerned.

Opinion, on the whole, has been opposed to the practice of artificial fecundation, even apart from the question of the probabilities of success. Thus, in France, where there is a considerable literature on the subject, the Paris Medical Faculty, in 1885, after some hesitation, refused Gérard's thesis on the history of artificial fecundation, afterwards published independently. In 1883, the Bordeaux legal tribunal declared that artificial fecundation was illegitimate, and a social danger. In 1897, the Holy See also pronounced that the practice is unlawful ("Artificial Fecundation before the Inquisition," British Medical Journal, March 5, 1898). Apart, altogether, from this attitude of medicine, law, and Church, it would certainly seem that those who desire offspring would do well, as a rule, to adopt the natural method, which is also the best, or else to abandon to others the task of procreation, for which they are not adequately equipped.

When we have ascertained that two individuals both belong to sound and healthy stocks, and, further, that they are themselves both apt for procreation, it still remains to consider the conditions under which they may best effect procreation.[462] There arises, for instance, the question, often asked, What is the best age for procreation?

The considerations which weigh in answering this question are of two different orders, physiological, and social or moral. That is to say, that it is necessary, on the one hand, that physical maturity should have been fully attained, and the sexual cells completely developed; while, on the other hand, it is necessary that the man shall have become able to support a family, and that both partners shall have received a training in life adequate to undertake the responsibilities and anxieties involved in the rearing of children. While there have been variations at different times, it scarcely appears that, on the whole, the general opinion as to the best age for procreation has greatly varied in Europe during many centuries. Hesiod indeed said that a woman should marry about fifteen and a man about thirty,[463] but obstetricians have usually concluded that, in the interests alike of the parents and their offspring, the procreative life should not begin in women before twenty and in men before twenty-five.[464] After thirty in women and after thirty-five or forty in men it seems probable that the best conditions for procreation begin to decline.[465] At the present time, in England and several other civilized countries, the tendency has been for the age of marriage to fall at an increasingly late age, on the average some years later than that usually fixed as the most favorable age for the commencement of the procreative life. But, on the whole, the average seldom departs widely from the accepted standard, and there seems no good reason why we should desire to modify this general tendency.

At the same time, it by no means follows that wide variations, under special circumstances, may not only be permissible, but desirable. The male is capable of procreating, in some cases, from about the age of thirteen until far beyond eighty, and at this advanced age, the offspring, even if not notable for great physical robustness, may possess high intellectual qualities. (See e.g., Havelock Ellis, A Study of British Genius, pp. 120 et seq.) The range of the procreative age in women begins earlier (sometimes at eight), though it usually ceases by fifty, or earlier, in only rare cases continuing to sixty or beyond. Cases have been reported of pregnancy, or childbirth, at the age of fifty-nine (e.g., Lancet, Aug. 5, 1905, p. 419). Lepage (Comptes-rendus Société d'Obstétrique de Paris, Oct., 1903) reports a case of a primipara of fifty-seven; the child was stillborn. Kisch (Sexual Life of Woman, Part II) refers to cases of pregnancy in elderly women, and various references are given in British Medical Journal, Aug. 8, 1903, p. 325.

Of more importance is the question of early pregnancy. Several investigators have devoted their attention to this question. Thus, Spitta (in a Marburg Inaugural Dissertation, 1895) reviewed the clinical history of 260 labors in primiparæ of 18 and under, as observed at the Marburg Maternity. He found that the general health during pregnancy was not below the average of pregnant women, while the mortality of the child at birth and during the following weeks was not high, and the mortality of the mother was by no means high. Picard (in a Paris thesis, 1903) has studied childbirth in thirty-eight mothers below the age of sixteen. He found that, although the pelvis is certainly not yet fully developed in very young girls, the joints and bones are much more yielding than in the adult, so that parturition, far from being more difficult, is usually rapid and easy. The process of labor itself, is essentially normal in these cases, and, even when abnormalities occur (low insertion of the placenta is a common anomaly) it is remarkable that the patients do not suffer from them in the way common among older women. The average weight of the child was three kilogrammes, or about 6 pounds, 9 ounces; it sometimes required special care during the first few days after birth, perhaps because labor in these cases is sometimes slow. The recovery of the mother was, in every case, absolutely normal, and the fact that these young mothers become pregnant again more readily than primiparæ of a more mature age, further contributes to show that childbirth below the age of sixteen is in no way injurious to the mother. Gache (Annales de Gynécologie et d'Obstétrique, Dec., 1904) has attended ninety-one labors of mothers under seventeen, in the Rawson Hospital, Buenos Ayres; they were of so-called Latin race, mostly Spanish or Italian. Gache found that these young mothers were by no means more exposed than others to abortion or to other complications of pregnancy. Except in four cases of slightly contracted pelvis, delivery was normal, though rather longer than in older primiparæ. Damage to the soft parts was, however, rare, and, when it occurred, in every case rapidly healed. The average weight of the child was 3,039 grammes, or nearly 6¾ pounds. It may be noted that most observers find that very early pregnancies occur in women who begin to menstruate at an unusually early age, that is, some years before the early pregnancy occurs.

It is clear, however, that young mothers do remarkably well, while there is no doubt whatever that they bear unusually fine infants. Kleinwächter, indeed, found that the younger the mother, the bigger the child. It is not only physically that the children of young mothers are superior. Marro has found (Pubertà, p. 257) that the children of mothers under 21 are superior to those of older mothers both in conduct and intelligence, provided the fathers are not too old or too young. The detailed records of individual cases confirm these results, both as regards mother and child. Thus, Milner (Lancet, June 7, 1902) records a case of pregnancy in a girl of fourteen; the labor pains were very mild, and delivery was easy. E. B. Wales, of New Jersey, has recorded the history (reproduced in Medical Reprints, Sept. 15, 1890) of a colored girl who became pregnant at the age of eleven. She was of medium size, rather tall and slender, but well developed, and began to menstruate at the age of ten. She was in good health and spirits during pregnancy, and able to work. Delivery was easy and natural, not notably prolonged, and apparently not unduly painful, for there were no moans or agitation. The child was a fine, healthy boy, weighing not less than eleven pounds. Mother and child both did well, and there was a great flow of milk. Whiteside Robertson (British Medical Journal, Jan. 18, 1902) has recorded a case of pregnancy at the age of thirteen, in a Colonial girl of British origin in Cape Colony, which is notable from other points of view. During pregnancy, she was anæmic, and appeared to be of poor development and doubtfully normal pelvic conformation. Yet delivery took place naturally, at full term, without difficulty or injury, and the lying-in period was in every way satisfactory. The baby was well-proportioned, and weighed 7½ pounds. "I have rarely seen a primipara enjoy easier labor," concluded Robertson, "and I have never seen one look forward to the happy realization of motherhood with greater satisfaction."

The facts brought forward by obstetricians concerning the good results of early pregnancy, as regards both mother and child, have not yet received the attention they deserve. They are, however, confirmed by many general tendencies which are now fairly well recognized. The significant fact is known, for instance, that in mothers over thirty, the proportion of abortions and miscarriages is twice as great as in mothers between the ages of fifteen and twenty, who also are superior in this respect to mothers between the ages of twenty and thirty (Statistischer Jahrbuch, Budapest, 1905). It was, again, proved by Matthews Duncan, in his Goulstonian lecture, that the chances of sterility in a woman increase with increase of age. It has, further, been shown (Kisch, Sexual Life of Woman, Part II) that the older a woman at marriage, the greater the average interval before the first delivery, a tendency which seems to indicate that it is the very young woman who is in the condition most apt for procreation; Kisch is not, indeed, inclined to think that this applies to women below twenty, but the fact, observed by other obstetricians, that mothers under eighteen tend to become pregnant again at an unusually short interval, goes far to neutralize the exception made by Kisch. It may also be pointed out that, among children of very young mothers, the sexes are more nearly equal in number than is the case with older mothers. This would seem to indicate that we are here in presence of a normal equilibrium which will decrease as the age of the mother is progressively disturbed in an abnormal direction.

The facility of parturition at an early age, it may be noted, corresponds to an equal facility in physical sexual intercourse, a fact that is often overlooked. In Russia, where marriage still takes place early, it was formerly common when the woman was only twelve or thirteen, and Guttceit (Dreissig Jahre Praxis, vol. i, p. 324) says that he was assured by women who married at this age that the first coitus presented no especial difficulties.

There is undoubtedly, at the present time, a considerable amount of prejudice against early motherhood. In part, this is due to a failure to realize that women are sexually much more precocious than men, physically as well as psychically (see ante p. 35). The difference is about five years. This difference has been virtually recognized for thousands of years, in the ancient belief that the age of election for procreation is about twenty, or less, for women, but about twenty-five for men; and it has more lately been affirmed by the discovery that, while the male is never capable of generation before thirteen, the female may, in occasional instances, become pregnant at eight. (Some of the recorded examples are quoted by Kisch.) In part, also, there is an objection to the assumption of responsibilities so serious as those of motherhood by a young girl, and there is the very reasonable feeling that the obligations of a permanent marriage tie ought not to be undertaken at an early age. On the other hand, apart from the physical advantages, as regards both mother and infant, on the side of early pregnancies, it is an advantage for the child to have a young mother, who can devote herself sympathetically and unreservedly to its interests, instead of presenting the pathetic spectacle we so often witness in the middle-aged woman who turns to motherhood when her youth and mental flexibility are gone, and her habits and tastes have settled into other grooves; it has sometimes been a great blessing even to the very greatest men, like Goethe, to have had a youthful mother. It would also, in many cases, be a great advantage for the woman herself if she could bring her procreative life to an end well before the age of twenty-five, so that she could then, unhampered by child-bearing and mature in experience, be free to enter on such wider activities in the world as she might be fitted for.

Such an arrangement of the procreative life of women would, obviously, only be a variation, and would probably be unsuited for the majority. Every case must be judged on its own merits. The best age for procreation will probably continue to be regarded as being, for most women, around the age of twenty. But at a time like the present, when there is an unfortunate tendency for motherhood to be unduly delayed, it becomes necessary to insist on the advantages, in many cases, of early motherhood.

There are other conditions favorable or unfavorable to procreation which it is now unnecessary to discuss in detail, since they have already been incidentally dealt with in previous volumes of these Studies. There is, for instance, the question of the time of year and the time of the menstrual cycle which may most properly be selected for procreation.[466] The best period is probably that when sexual desire is strongest, which is the period when conception would appear, as a matter of fact, most often to occur. This would be in spring or early summer,[467] and immediately after (or shortly before) the menstrual period. The Chinese have observed that the last day of menstruation and the two following days—corresponding to the period of œstrus—constitute the most favorable time for fecundation, and Bossi, of Genoa, has found that the great majority of successes in both natural and artificial fecundation occur at this period.[468] Soranus, as well as the Talmud, assigned the period about menstruation as the best for impregnation, and Susruta, the Indian physician, said that at this time pregnancy most readily occurs because then the mouth of the womb is open, like the flower of the water-lily to the sunshine.

We have now at last reached the point from which we started, the moment of conception, and the child again lies in its mother's womb. There remains no more to be said. The divine cycle of life is completed.

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