That vigilant supervision of her young daughters for which the early Victorian mother is now decried, secured a purity of racial type, in fine physique and const.i.tution, in notable talent and enterprise, in rare womanly beauty and virile handsomeness, which proves the unique potentialities inherent in our Anglo-Saxon stock. No merely material service a woman can render to the State approaches in value the all-potent one of safeguarding the virtue of its young daughters.
Each s.e.x has its own morale to sustain. And personal virtue is woman"s.
The desire for equal liberty in this respect is added proof of the ascendancy, in modern women, of Male over their own natural Woman-traits. It springs not from an intensification of pa.s.sion, but, on the contrary, from a waning of that power to love which holds a woman true to one mate.
Last and most cogent of reasons: In view of those long centuries of suffering and aspiration, by way of which the evolution of the Woman-traits of love and purity has been achieved in blood and tears--albeit the monogamous ideal is far yet from attainment--beyond all else, the s.e.x should strive toward this, both personally and socially.
It is the soul of Love and Life, the impulse of Human advance. With decline of this ideal, the emotions cease to centre in the Home and Family, and civilisation relapses to barbarism.
IV
Ellen Key, in _Love and Marriage_, observes: "Few propositions are so lacking in proof as that monogamy is the form of s.e.xual life which is indispensable to the vitality and culture of nations." And further: "all the progress that is ascribed to Christian civilisation has taken place while monogamy was indeed the law, but polygamy the custom."
She overlooks the portentous truth that a law is the expression of a general aspiration toward an ideal for which a people is striving. That a law is broken proves that the higher in man moves him to set a standard beyond his power--or beside his inclination--to sustain undeviatingly. Yet although he may not act up to it undeviatingly, it stands, nevertheless, for the ideal he realises that he should reach.
Abolition of a good and elevating law proves, therefore, not only the serious lapse of a community from an established standard of conduct, but it inevitably lowers the level of conduct by removing barriers--self-respect and self-restraint, public opinion and so forth--standing in the way of laxity. Despite the death-penalty, murders are committed. But were the death-penalty to be abolished, murder would increase by leaps and bounds. The human mind is strangely susceptible.
And the power of habits acquired under fear of penalties is an invaluable force for good. The higher minds of a community evolve and establish codes for lesser minds to shape by. And undoubtedly the subconscious as well as the conscious shaping toward such standards furthers development in the directions thereof. To make honesty a matter of personal choice, with no penalties attaching to theft, would be in itself an incentive to theft.
Comparison with polygamous countries, of countries in which monogamy is the law, refutes straightway Miss Key"s discredit of monogamy; showing the polygamous uncivilised, unenlightened, unprogressive, subject to monogamous races, and in every sense, both materially and morally decadent. And if, with a notion of establishing equality in all things between the s.e.xes by emanc.i.p.ating woman from the higher moral code, leasehold marriage or other forms of wedded laxity should be subst.i.tuted--not only would national purity, but personal character and happiness too would suffer grievously.
If men have not kept the monogamous law, the instinct of jealousy, reinforced by repugnance to supporting alien offspring, has seen to it that wives should trespa.s.s as seldom, at all events, as was possible to be guarded against. Custom and public opinion, furthered by personal fear and fear of divorce, have all contributed toward advancing ideals of womanly honour and conduct. And from monogamous mothers--whether voluntarily or involuntarily so--progress has derived immense impulse.
Apart from biological considerations, the benefit to the family of the mother"s influence centred in her home and kept from straying thence, either by her own aspirations, by public opinion, or by fear of the husband, has been incalculable.
During and since the War, crime among children has increased by 50 per cent., largely owing to absence of mothers from their homes, working or drinking, or otherwise dissipating, while their children have been left to run wild in the streets.
Our reformatories are full to overflowing with these neglected unfortunates; deprived thus of the haven of homes and maternal control.
As a man is responsible to the State for the support of his family, so a woman should be held responsible to the State for the proper care and supervision of its future citizens, who, without due care and disciplinary influence, become a burden and scourge to the community.
In all these vitally-momentous issues, let us free our minds alike of s.e.x-bias and false sentiment, in order that we may see clearly, and may act honestly and wisely in the interests not only of women themselves, but in those of the Race.
V
The s.e.x-instinct in woman having had its origin in surrender, retains much still of this primal element. And both middle-cla.s.s men of lower evolutionary grade, and men of the working cla.s.ses, exercise still, to considerable degree, the brute-trait of terrorism over women--moral rather than physical terrorism.
In rescuing young girls from molestation in the streets, one may see in them the panic of such intimidation. They are pale and trembling, with pupils widely dilated. In full daylight, it may be in a crowded thoroughfare, with police at hand, primal instinctive emotionalism paralyses reason, resource and will-power. Weak-minded women, who lack their due share of masculine combativeness to stiffen resistance in them, frequently marry, or otherwise yield to such men, far more because they are afraid than because they are fond of them. And the terrorism husbands have exercised over wives has nerved wives against the terrorism exercised over them by other men; and has thus served to protect them from their own weaknesses.
The Woman-traits, always at a disadvantage in concrete affairs against superior strength, have been b.u.t.tressed thus and coerced--often cruelly and tyrannously, "tis true. But they have nevertheless been greatly furthered in development by a mate who, if he did not recognise the higher calibre of woman"s nature, nor himself aspired to the code he exacted from her, recognised, at all events, that this higher code he exacted of her was that best adapted to progress. Thus has poor mortality been beaten and shapen on the anvils of compulsion and exigency. And always the woman has most suffered--to be beautiful of nature.
Were it not that an advance-guard of higher and chivalrous men stand, by force of the laws they have made, between women and the lower and coa.r.s.er masculine orders, no woman"s life would be worth the living because of perpetual affront. With existing laws, indeed, which protect even the most degraded of the s.e.x, the women of the poorer cla.s.ses are everywhere subject to insult and unseemly jest, open or covert. Because to many men of crude order, the eternal mystery of s.e.x shows mainly as subject for levity. The cra.s.s and unimaginative frequently deride thus things too high for their dense understanding.
Women have come to take their chivalrous protection by law as mere matter-of-course, precisely as they take it as matter-of-course that men should labour, and should endow them with the benefits of their industry. These things are by no means matter-of-course, however, but are matter of chivalry--chivalry so innate as to have become convention.
It would be occasion for laughter, were it not cause for profoundest regret, that the hypertrophy of male-traits in woman has engendered to-day a s.e.x-antagonism which has set her in open revolt against man, from whom, if she has suffered and suffers, and will continue to suffer at the hands of his defects, she nevertheless derives, and has always derived from his chivalries her most gracious human privileges.
That the obligations and the recompenses of the s.e.xes are reciprocal, is true. It is equally true, however, that the choice has lain with men to have ignored the n.o.bler issues of the compact. As the seraglio-imprisoned women of the less manly and progressive peoples prove.
All our civilisation, with its complex sociological, intellectual, and moral developments, rests on a basis of Force. Men must still prove their right to each and all of their laboriously-won achievements by arms and the valours of war. In peace, the laws--which alone make life tolerable--rest equally upon the powers of masculine will and strength to inflict due punishment for violation thereof.
And laws having been made by men, it was clearly optional with them to have left women unprotected, or far less protected than the other s.e.x; in place of having extended special protection to their more delicate attributes.
In safeguarding women in general, men safeguard their own individual women, of course. Human motive is involved; is the product of a number of factors. That this is so is reason for eliminating no single one of these factors, lest the resultant undergo a wholly unexpected and disastrous transformation.
The Plan sets most women at the mercy of most men, by reason of the greater physical strength of males, and by temptation of their more urgent s.e.x-instinct. In view of her inherent disabilities, it would have seemed, _a priori_, that no woman could in ruder days have attained to womanhood, inviolate.
And yet that her very disabilities have served for her increasing protection is shown by the fact of her increasing protection as, with the evolution of her higher organisation, her disabilities have intensified.
Civilised woman, with her more delicate organisation, is far more defenceless than was savage woman. But in response to the claims of her increasing defencelessness, the instinctive chivalry of the stronger male, her natural protector, has become progressively the intelligent and moral chivalry of higher man. No strength or capability of woman"s own to defend herself could so have served her; nor could so have served the other s.e.x for fine incentive.
To free woman of her highly specialised and inspiring disabilities by subst.i.tuting in her, powers, muscular and mental, that would fit her to meet the male on equal terms, would be to frustrate the method of the male evolutionary ascent, by eliminating the humanising and uplifting appeal to his manhood of these her inspiring unfitnesses.
The deplorable decadence in masculine regard for and bearing toward women, which has resulted in direct proportion as the s.e.x has subst.i.tuted male efficiencies for womanly inept.i.tudes, serves for one of many other valuable object-lessons of the War.
VI
Among other Feminist fallacies, the _demi-mondaine_ has come to be regarded as victim merely, on the one hand, of an unjust, man-administered economic system, on the other, of masculine libertinism. The truth is that the vast majority of immoral women are under no compulsion, but voluntarily adopt this mode of life either to escape work, or because of a natural vicious proclivity. A number are mental defectives; some actually feeble-minded, others only morally deficient.
It must always be remembered, moreover, that, biologically speaking, the separation of the _genus_ woman into the folds, respectively, of sheep and goats is of signal racial and social service. That some goats are in the sheep-fold, some lambs among the goats, is not to be denied.
Fatalities, injustices, and incongruities are inevitable to all broad human cla.s.sifications. In the main, however, the women who resist temptation and remain virtuous are obviously better fitted to be the wives and mothers of the Race than are they who fall.
And although this is not, of course, the calculated purpose of this lamentable under-world, the rough division of the s.e.x thereby into two main cla.s.ses has been of service, by supplying a sociological backwater wherein the worst of our racial derelicts--mental and moral defectives--are segregated; and are precluded, for the most part, from perpetuating their mental and moral defectiveness.
Women, like men, must uphold and battle for their standards in the teeth of circ.u.mstance. The most notable types of parasite-women, selfish, slothful, worthless, venal, vicious, whose standards are jewels and clothes, their goals luxury and pleasure and the evasion of all that is difficult and distasteful in life, are found among the aristocratic and the plutocratic orders; safely secured against economic necessity or lack of scope and outlet for their powers.
The Feminist fallacy that prost.i.tution is almost entirely a product of male economics has been strikingly refuted, too, by War-conditions, which opened numerous well-remunerated employments for the s.e.x. Yet, coincident with a sad deficit of women to fill these, prost.i.tution has waxed rampant.
Wise and discreet were those early Victorians, with their uncompromising ostracism of loose women. Apart altogether from such salutary expression of their condemnation of impure living, they were vastly too clever and far-seeing to admit persons of notoriously evil habit, peeress or actress, to a.s.sociation with their clean young girls, as modern mothers do; to meet and to mix freely with them socially or at Charity Bazaars, on Flag-Days, and so forth. With the result that girls all the world over have become increasingly lax and decadent in tone and manner, in dress and morale, from confusion of their young standards by social tolerance and recognition of such persons, as also from corruption by demoralising contact with and observation of such.
Intolerance? Pharisaism? By no means!
The strong and straight, uncompromising moral standards of its women serve as landmarks of, and impulse to a nation"s progress. Clear and definite lines of demarcation between good and evil, between possible and impossible modes of conduct, point the moral of advance, and turn the scale in the upward direction for the weak, the hesitating, and the imitative.
Dread of consequences went far, in less sophisticated days, to safeguard and foster womanly virtue. Modern expedients have, unfortunately, removed all cause for fear in this relation; permitting an impunity of action demoralising to the weak in will or principle, who require every possible aid and check to guide them aright. In simpler days, girls who had lapsed were steadied and strengthened in character and self-restraint by the compulsion to support, as too by their natural fondness for the unwanted child. Now the first step--having cost them nothing--predisposes to further backslidings. And both character and self-control degenerate increasingly.
VII
To weaken the marriage-bond by setting it for a term of years only, or by making it terminable by consent, would virtually destroy marriage and family-life. The fact that the bond would not be binding would make persons more careless even than they are at present in selection of the mate, and would thus multiply the number of mis-matings. Which would be still further to deteriorate species, since the finer types of children are born only of well-mated parents.
The finality of the bond, if it does not always prevent one or both from meeting some other they prefer, prevents the scrupulous, at all events, from seeking such. Or having found, it keeps many from fostering and from yielding to temptation. Were marriage terminable, or, as is sometimes proposed, were it abolished wholly, and love the only bond between the s.e.xes, there would be no confidence, no sense of security between the partners, no stability of family life; no centring of interests in this, and but small endeavour to retain affections which for the many could be easily replaced--and replaced, moreover, with the zest of novelty. On the contrary, a curse of unrest would afflict the vast majority of married folk with the unsettling--mayhap with the alluring--prospect of meeting their further "Fate"; perhaps their second, possibly their third, it might be, their seventh "Fate."
Only the few are strong enough of heart or stable enough of character to remain steadfast for a lifetime in any undertaking, unless bound stringently thereto by authorised obligations, incentives, and penalties. Only the few are deep enough of nature to love for a lifetime; or are deep enough of nature to love so intensely as to justify altering the marriage-code in order to spare these few suffering. The wane of nine out of ten honeymoons impresses the value of an inflexible decree that declines to reckon with disillusion, but sternly bids the disillusioned take up their burden and make the best of it. And having no choice, many do this and make a success of it--on new, and, it may be, on far higher lines than those they had set out upon.
That but few love so deeply as to love for life by no means implies that marriage for less than a lifetime should be subst.i.tuted. It shows, on the contrary, that the majority of persons would prove as incapable of loving No. Two for long as they had been incapable of loving No. One; or as they would be incapable of loving No. Three, or No. Ten. A bond that rivets them for life to No. One therefore, and entails loss or suffering when they fail to abide by it, is safeguard for them against such a succession of loves as would be as demoralising to the individual as it must be destructive of society.
Examples of this tendency to amorous licence have been furnished by the complications of War-"widows," who, on report of the death of soldier-husbands, remarried in unseemly haste--only to find the husband return. So too, by the widespread infidelity of wives to absent soldier-husbands. If the grave and moving circ.u.mstance of a husband facing death or mutilation in the trenches, for his country"s defence, was not grave nor moving enough to keep his wife faithful to him, then we should congratulate ourselves upon a marriage-law which, by exacting penalties whereby such a wife suffers material damage, supplies the only argument likely to stiffen the morale of so light-minded and callous a creature.