I venture to believe, however, that Eugenic propaganda has been too much in the direction of eliminating defect from the Race by prohibiting marriage to the so-called "Unfit." Whereas the true way of Racial health, of normality and excellence, is, surely, to eliminate from life the many conditions, material, economic, and personal, which make for Unfitness--which preclude, indeed, the survival of little save Unfitness.
For since we are not in the secret of Nature"s aims, and are wholly in the dark as to the human type for which she is aiming, to prohibit parenthood to any but the flagrantly abnormal, the insane and imbecile, the epileptic and the hopelessly-diseased, might be to quench the evolution of such higher Fitness as we are not qualified to foresee.
That which shows like disability in one age may be the incipient ability of a later. In cruder, primitive days, when standards of Fitness were physical strength, rapacity and cunning, honesty and mercy, and more delicate organisation of body--the starting-points of new routes of evolutionary development--would have been condemned as worthy only of extermination.
In sickly and declining stock there may exist, moreover, an ebbing vein of rare faculty, which, re-vitalised by a due potential of maternal re-creative power, might come to throb with genius.
Realising all the factors--the innumerable lives, the incalculable personal traits, endeavours and experiences, that have gone to make the Individualism of any strain of stock, and realising that just these factors of Individualism can have occurred in one line only of human ascent and can never be repeated, it becomes clear that summarily to extinguish any human strain, by arbitrary prohibition, would be to exterminate a unique branch of the great Life-tree, and thereby to deprive the Race of a specialised route of further ascent; a route which no other stock could supply.
The fact that great families, with great histories and talents behind them, fall into decadence shows that even in decadent stock are inherences of greatness which might be recruited to greatness again.
While apart from all this, the right of Parenthood, with the evolutionary impulse to character and faculty consequent upon the exercise of parental functions, is the birthright of every individual capable of fulfilling such. The counsel of Selective Parenthood is dangerous doctrine, indeed. Given Life, Nature by her methods of Disease is able to eliminate stock too deteriorate for, or beside her purpose.
But she alone knows her purpose. And she alone can judge as to what is intrinsic Fitness for Survival.
Selective Parenthood makes, moreover, for the elimination of those valuable object-lessons of inherited defect and disease, whereby Nature points her inestimable morals of healthy and disciplined living. For evasion, too, of those penalties and burdens in the care and maintenance of the Unfit, which a nation justly incurs by such social wrongs and maladministrations as are largely responsible for disease and defect.
The doctrine of operative sterilisation is not only humanly repugnant but, in view of the psychological import of every physical function, it is essentially evil.
X
Some momentous morals of the Feminist trend are pointed by the Insect-world, which may be regarded as a devolutionary back-water, wherein Life is slowly ebbing toward extinction by fluctuating out in ever smaller, meaner, drabber, ineffective, pulseless and spectral existences--chill and teeming myriads unwarmed by the throb of emotion, unillumined by the light of Mind. Dust which, raised from dust by power of Life, has caught the trick of living, and goes on living and perpetuating, without cause or impulse other than age-old, time-worn mechanistic habit imparted by the state of living.
And in this phantom under-world of Decadence, cast by the shadow of Life and peopled with distorted images thereof, the females are Dominant--larger in size, stronger, more active, more enterprising and ferocious than the males. As in the world of Vegetation, by way whereof Matter first quickened into Life, so in this realm of _Insectivorae_ by way of which Life is gravitating back to the inertia of Inorganic Matter, in ever shallower, denser and more sluggish strata, the male is seen as appanage and victim of the female.
In the beehive, he appears as ineffective drone amid a throng of strenuous neuter female-workers. And a female is his Queen.
Significant again is it that insect-females are seen increasingly to have emanc.i.p.ated themselves from mother-instincts and maternal functions, as regards nurture or affection for their young. The single process wherein the warring males and snarling females of finer fierce, evolving species sheathe their claws and mute their hates in a co-operative, self-effacing instinct--Reproduction, here in this disintegrating world of Devolution, functions without welding spark, or lighting gleam of parent-altruism. At best, it is as chill, as colourless and meticulously mechanical as the interminable tickings of a world of clockwork. At worst, it is a repulsive rapacity on the part of females to secure perpetuation. And this secured, they straightway sting the craven male to death, or tear him limb from limb and ghoulishly devour him.
Queen Bee leads her va.s.sal suitors so strenuous and dizzying an ante-nuptial dance, for privilege of mating with her, that only one survives to claim the prize; the others dropping, dead and dying, in the wake of her murderous supremacy. And, as with other masculine and muscular females, her progeny are neuter working-females (sterile) and emasculate males (drones).
As Feminists demand for human babes, the Bee-mother hands over her offspring to be brought up by the State. While some other insect-mothers, having reposited their eggs (to serve as bombs that explode and devastate their living hosts) straightway abandon them, and return to the more strenuous and repulsive female-pursuits of this Phantasmagoria-world--a clockwork kingdom fabricated of Life"s debris, and drably mimicking the throb and motion of its mechanism in ghoulish mockeries and vacuous reiterations; the while it runs down slowly, ticking back to the molecular vibration of mineral inertia.
END OF BOOK I
NOTE.--_Mendelian and other readers interested in the more scientific aspects of the subject are referred to an Appendix at the end of this volume, in which these issues are further considered and some important evidences adduced._
FOOTNOTE:
[2] I have observed that lameness in women, by restricting physical activities and thus conserving vital energy, conduces to male offspring.
The fact may well have been the origin of the Chinese custom of crippling the feet of female children. In my own professional practice, by prohibiting all strenuous and exhausting pursuits, intellectual, social or athletic, before and after marriage, I have succeeded in securing male offspring in patients whose stock had for generations given birth to girls only. In those _organically_ de-s.e.xed by male pursuits, rest will not avail, of course.--_Author._
BOOK II
WOMAN"S PART IN HUMAN DECADENCE
CHAPTER I
DECLINE AND FALL OF ANCIENT CIVILISATIONS DUE TO FEMINISM
"This is the function of our and every age, to grasp the knowledge already existing, to make it our own, and in so doing to develop it further and raise it to a higher level. In thus taking it to ourselves we make it different from what it was."--_Hegel._
I
Ancient history is depressing study.
It shows us peoples rising slowly and laboriously out of states of barbarism to high degrees of culture and enlightenment, and then, more or less suddenly, falling upon decline; lapsing to total extinction, even. One after another, we may watch them climb the Evolutionary Hill, then slacken pace and struggle on spasmodically. Till presently we find them steadily losing ground; slowly at first, but, gathering momentum, regressing more and more rapidly, until finally they are seen racing headlong to destruction.
Of some among the proudest and the greatest Civilisations, so absolute has been their ultimate extinction that nothing more than ruined temples and some statuary remain to mark their quondam glory.
Biologists tell us this is natural. Races, they say--like individuals--have only a certain life-tenure. They are born, develop, attain maturity, lapse to old age and then die; just as men do.
The a.n.a.logy is not sound, however. Because although individual men die, the stock they leave behind, if duly preserved and replenished by fresh blood, may live indefinitely. Moreover, such records as remain show that these past civilisations died, obviously, not of natural old age--but of disease. Natural old age is sane and wise, and self-controlled; healthful in mind and in body. Whereas the main features characterising the decline of these great powers, were viciousness and licentiousness; physical, mental and moral corruption.
Theirs was no pa.s.sing in gradual waning of strength and quiet dissolution; not even in senility. They may be described, on the contrary, as having rushed helter-skelter upon death in full vigour of their prime. We see in them, indeed, all the vehemence and self-destructive forces of "sthenic" disease--disease as it occurs in strong men struck down in full health. They died in riot, venality, and l.u.s.t, and every other form of vice and evil. Clearly, they died unnaturally--of disease, not naturally of old age.
How and why then did this happen? How and why should disease thus have stricken these in mid-career? Since history shows the political inst.i.tutions, the laws and the administration of many of such mighty decadents to have reached high levels of excellence, in respect of justice and intelligence, while Culture, Art and Industry were likewise notable among them, the causes of their downfall must be looked for elsewhere than in their sociology.
And since all human processes, sociological as well as natural, have their roots in Biology, we are led to examine such records as remain, for evidences of biological failure. Healthy and vigorous races do not decline in consequence of unjust laws or maladministration. If they are healthy and vigorous, they reform these.
II
Investigation shows one striking feature as having been common to most of these great decadences. In nearly every case, the dominance and licence of their women were conspicuous. And realising Woman"s portentous role in Racial advance, it is difficult to believe anything but that her role must be equally potent in Racial decline.
A nation becomes decadent because the individuals composing it have become decadent. The individuals composing it can only have become progressively decadent by progressive hereditary decadences. And since Woman is the racial reservoir and the Agency of Evolution, hereditary decline of individuals and nations must have its source in a decline of mother-power.
History confirms this view. It shows the progress and waxing supremacy of these great powers to have been concurrent with rising levels of womanly character and virtue, with high regard for woman by man, with high estimation and observance by woman of the functions of motherhood and of The Home. While neglect of the home, contempt for and evasion of the duties of motherhood, immorality and general licence among their women characterised their downfall.
And comparing some modern developments with these records of Ruin, one can but be struck by notable resemblances between these latter and the present-day trend of all our greater civilisations.
In the decline of Rome, the Roman women went to two extremes. A tendency that shows increasingly among our modern womanhood. They separated into two main orders. "Blue-stocking" and "Rake," they were then designated.
"Mannish" and "Womanish," or "Feminist" and "Ultra-Feminine," better characterise their latter-day presentments.
In America, these two orders of women are known as the "College" and the "Society" types, respectively. The "College" type makes a cult of masculinity of body and of brain. The "Society" type makes a cult of feminine graces and social accomplishments.
In the poorer, as in the superior cla.s.ses of all nations, similar extremes are found. One order is virile and hard-working; and for the most part plain and moral. The other is womanish and pretty; and for the most part frail.
With us--as with those earlier peoples--the demand for liberty and unrestricted economic opportunities for women is occasioning contempt for and evasion of the functions of wife and of mother, emanc.i.p.ation from the home, increasing absorption in public affairs, fever for pleasure, lapse of womanly traditions and morale. All of which developments pa.s.sed rapidly, in those others, into general laxity, licence and corruption; culminating finally in total ruin. With them, the claims of Home and of The Family became, as they are becoming more and more with us, secondary merely and subsidiary to other pursuits; to personal ambitions, public careers, to pleasures, excitements, crazes for notoriety. Woman"s inherent erraticism--defect of her intrinsic spontaneity, her bent for novelty and strong sensation--degenerated, under the licence accorded her in ancient Rome, into the appalling orgies of The Baccha.n.a.lia; which were inst.i.tuted by the s.e.x.
Women attended the displays of gladiators. They watched the wild beasts tear their victims. They themselves dressed as gladiators, and held mimic combats. By cult of muscle, they grew taller than the men.