Little Essays of Love and Virtue

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LITTLE ESSAYS
OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

HAVELOCK ELLIS

By THE SAME AUTHOR

STUDIES IN THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SEX*

Six Volumes
Philadelphia: F. A. Davis Company

MAN AND WOMAN

London: Walter Scott

New York: Charles Scribners' Sons

THE TASK OF SOCIAL HYGIENE

London: Constable and Company
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company

IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS*)

First and Second Series

London: Constable and Company
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company

LITTLE ESSAYS

OF

LOVE AND VIRTUE

BT

HAVELOCK ELLIS

r ^^
•^^^^^f

NEW yiSr YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1922,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1921,
BY MEDICAL REVIEW OF REVIEW!

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

PREFACE

In these Essays — little, indeed, as I know
them to be, compared to the magnitude of their
subjects — I have tried to set forth, as clearly as
I can, certain fundamental principles, together
with their practical application to the life of our
time. Some of these principles were stated, more
briefly and technically, in my larger Studies of
sex; others were therein implied but only to be
read between the lines. Here I have expressed
them in simple language and with some detail. It
is my hope that in this way they may more surely
come into the hands of young people, youths and
girls at the period of adolescence, who have been
present to my thoughts in all the studies I have
written of sex because I was myself of that age
when I first vaguely planned them. I would
prefer to leave to their judgment the question as
to whether this book is suitable to be placed in
the hands of older people. It might only give
them pain. It is in youth that the questions of
mature age can alone be settled, if they ever are
i Q be settled, and unless we begin to think about

vi PREFACE

adult problems when we are young all our think-
ing is likely to be in vain. There are but few
people who are able when youth is over either
on the one hand to re-mould themselves nearer
to those facts of Nature and of Society they
failed to perceive, or had not the courage to
accept, when they were young, or, on the other
hand, to mould the facts of the exterior world
nearer to those of their own true interior world.
One hesitates to bring home to them too keenly
what they have missed in life. Yet, let us re-
member, even for those who have missed most,
there always remains the fortifying and con-
soling thought that they may at least help to
make the world better for those who come after
them, and the possibilities of human adjustment
easier for others than it has been for themselves.
They must still remain true to their own tradi-
tions. We could not wish it to be otherwise.

The art of making love and the art of being
virtuous — two aspects of the great art of living
that are, rightly regarded, harmonious and not
at variance — remain, indeed, when we cease to
misunderstand them, essentially the same in all
ages and among all peoples. Yet, always and
everywhere, little modifications become neces-
sary, little, yet, like so many little things, im-

PREFACE vii

mense in their significance and results. In this
way, if we are really alive, we flexibly adjust our-
selves to the world in which we find ourselves, and
in so doing simultaneously adjust to ourselves
that ever-changing world, ever-changing, though
its changes are within such narrow limits that it
yet remains substantially the same. It is with
such modification that we are concerned in these

Little Essays.

H. E.

London, 1921

CONTENTS

OHAPTBt

I Children and Parents

II The Meaning of Purity

III The Objects of Marriage

IV Husbands and Wires •

V The Love-Rights of Women

VI The Play-Function of Sex

VET The Individual and the Race

»AGB

IS
87
63

75
102

116
184

Index

183

LITTLE ESSAYS
OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

LITTLE ESSAYS
OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

CHAPTER I
CHILDREN AND PARENTS

The twentieth century, as we know, has fre-
quently been called "the century of the child."
When, however, we turn to the books of Ellen
Key, who has most largely and sympathetically
taken this point „of view, one asks oneself
whether, after all, the child's century has brought
much to the child. Ellen Key points out, with
truth, that, even in our century, parents may for
the most part be divided into two classes: those
who act as if their children existed only for their
benefit, and those who act as if they existed only
for their children's benefit, the results, she adds,,
being alike deplorable. For the first group of
parents tyrannise over the child, seek to destroy
its individuality, exercise an arbitrary discipline
too spasmodic to have any of the good effects of
discipline and would model him into a copy of
themselves, though really, she adds, it ought to

13

14 LITTLE ESSAYS OP LOVE AND VIRTUE

pain them very much to see themselves exactly
copied. The second group of parents may wish
to model their children not after themselves but
after their ideals, yet they differ chiefly from the
first class by their over-indulgence, by their
anxiety to pamper the child by yielding to all his
caprices and artificially protecting him from the
natural results of those caprices, so that instead
of learning freedom he has merely acquired self-
will. These parents do not indeed tyrannise over
their children but they do worse ; they train their
children to be tyrants. Against these two ten-
dencies of our century Ellen Key declares her
own Alpha and Omega of the art of education.
Try to leave the child in peace ; live your own life
beautifully, nobly, temperately, and in so living
you will sufficiently teach your children to live.

It is not my purpose here to consider how far
this conception of the duty of parents towards
children is justified, and whether or not peace
is the best preparation for a world in which
struggle dominates. All these questions about
education are rather idle. There are endless
theories of education but no agreement concern-
ing the value of any of them, and the whole
question of education remains open. I am here
concerned less with the duty of parents in rela-
tion to their children than with the duty of
children in relation to their parents, and that
means that I am not concerned with young chil-

E CHILDREN AND PARENTS 15

Rdren, to whom that duty still presents no serious
problems, since they have not yet developed a
personality with self-conscious individual needs.
-Certainly the one attitude must condition the
: other attitude. The reaction of children against
: their parents is the necessary result of the par-
gents' action. So that we have to pay some atten-
: tion to the character of parental action.

We cannot expect to find any coherent or
~ uniform action on the part of parents. But there
have been at different historical periods different
general tendencies in the attitude of parents to-
wards their children. Thus if we go back four
•or five centuries in English social history we
seem to find a general attitude which scarcely
corresponds exactly to either of Ellen Key's two
jjroups. It seems usually to have been com-
pounded of severity and independence; children
•were first strictly compelled to go their parents'
^way and then thrust off to their own way. There
seems a certain hardness in this method, yet it
is doubtful whether it can fairly be regarded as
more unreasonable than either of the two mod-
ern methods deplored by Ellen Key. On the
contrary it had points for admiration. It was
primarily a discipline, but it was regarded, as
atny fortifying discipline should be regarded, as
st preparation for freedom, and it is precisely
there that the more timid and clinging modern
'Way seems to fail.

16 LITTLE ESSAYS OP LOVE AND VIRTUE

We clearly see the old method at work in the
chief source of knowledge concerning old English
domestic life, the Past on Letters. Here we find
that at an early age the sons of knights and gentle-
men were sent to serve in the houses of other
gentlemen : it was here that their education really
took place, an education not in book knowledge,
but in knowledge of life. Such education was
considered so necessary for a youth that a father
who kept his sons at home was regarded as negli-
gent of his duty to his family. A knowledge of
the world was a necessary part, indeed the chief
part, of a youth's training for life. The remark-
able thing is that this applied also to a large extent
to the daughters. They realised in those days,
what is only beginning to be realised in ours,*
that, after all, women live in the world just as
much, though differently, as men live in the
world, and that it is quite as necessary for the
girl as for the boy to be trained to the meaning
of life. Margaret Paston, towards the end of
the fifteenth century, sent her daughter Ann to
live in the house of a gentleman who, a little later,

♦This was illustrated in England when women first began to
serve on juries. The pretext was frequently brought forward
that there are certain kinds of cases and of evidence that do
not concern women or that women ought not to hear. The
pretext would have been more plausible if it had also been
argued that there are certain kinds of cases and of evidence
that men ought not to hear. As a matter of fact, whatever
frontier there may be in these matters is not of a sexual kind.
Everything that concerns men ultimately concerns women, and
everything that concerns women ultimately concerns men.
Neither women nor men are entitled to claim dispensation.

CHILDREN AND PARENTS IT

found that he could not keep her as he was pur-
posing to decrease the size of his household. The
mother writes to her son : "I shall be fain to send
for her and with me she shall but lose her time,
and without she be the better occupied she shall
oftentimes move me and put me to great unquiet-
ness. Remember what labour I had with your
sister, therefore do your best to help her forth" ;
as a result it was planned to send her to a rela-
tive's house in London.

It is evident that in the fifteenth century in
England there was a wide prevalence of this
method of education, which in France, a century
later, was still regarded as desirable by Mon-
taigne. His reason for it is worth noting;
children should be educated away from home,
he remarks,, in order to acquire hardness, for the
parents will be too tender to them. "It is an
opinion accepted by all that it is not right to bring
up children in their parents' laps, for natural love
softens and relaxes even the wisest." * %

In old France indeed the conditions seem sim-
ilar to those in England. The great serio-comic
novel of Antoine de la Salle, Petit Jean de
Saintre, shows us in detail the education and
the adventures, which certainly involved a very
early introduction to life, of a page in a great
house in the fifteenth century. We must not
take everything in this fine comedy too solemnly,

* Montaigne, Essais, Bk. I., ch. 25.

18 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

but in the fourteenth century Book of the Knight
of the Tour-Landry we may be sure that we
have at its best the then prevailing view of the
relation of a father to his tenderly loved daugh-
ters. Of harshness and rigour in the relationship
it is not easy to find traces in this lengthy and
elaborate book of paternal counsels. But it is
clear that the father takes seriously the right of
a daughter to govern herself and to decide for
herself between right and wrong. It is his object,
he tells his girls, "to enable them to govern them-
selves." In this task he assumes that they are
entitled to full knowledge, and we feel that he
is not instructing them in the mysteries of that
knowledge ; he is taking for granted, in the advice
he gives and the stories he tells them, that his
"young and small daughters, not, poor things,
overburdened with experience," already possess
the most precise knowledge of the intimate facts
of life, and that he may tell them, without turn-
ing a hair, the most outrageous incidents of de-
bauchery. Life already lies naked before them:
that he assumes ; he is not imparting knowledge,
he is giving good counsel.*

♦If the Knight went to an extreme in his assumption of his
daughters' knowledge, modern fathers often go to the opposite
and more foolish extreme of assuming in their daughters an
ignorance that would be dangerous even if it really existed. In
A Young Girl's Diary (translated from the German by Eden
and Cedar Paul), a work that is highly instructive for parents,
and ought to be painful for many, we find the diarist noting at
the age of thirteen that she and a girl friend of about the same
age overheard the father of one of them — both well brought up
and carefully protected, one Catholic and the other Protestant —

CHILDREN AND PARENTS 19

It is clear that this kind of education and this
attitude towards children must be regarded as
the outcome of the whole mediaeval method of
life. In a state of society where roughness and
violence, though not, as we sometimes assume,
chronic, were yet always liable to be manifested,
it was necessary for every man and woman to
be able to face the crudest facts of the world
and to be able to maintain his or her own rights
against them. The education that best secured
that strength and independence was the best
education and it necessarily involved an element
of hardness. We must go back earlier than
Montaigne's day, when the conditions were be-
coming mitigated, to see the system working in
all its vigour.

The lady of the day of the early thirteenth
century has been well described by Luchaire in
his scholarly study of French Society in the time
of Philip Augustus. She was, he tells us, as
indeed she had been in the preceding feudal cen-
turies, often what we should nowadays call a
virago, of violent temperament, with vivid pas-
sions, broken in from childhood to all physical
exercises., sharing the pleasures and dangers of
the knights around her. Feudal life, fertile in
surprises and in risks, demanded even in women

referring to "those innocent children." "We did laugh so, we and
innocent children!!! What our fathers really think of us; we
innocent ! ! ! At dinner we did not dare look at one another or
we should have exploded." It need scarcely be added that, at
the same time, they were more innocent than they knew.

*0 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

a vigorous temper of soul and body, a masculine
air, and habits also that were almost virile. She
accompanied her father or her husband to the
chase, while in war-time, if she became a widow
or if her husband was away at the Crusades, she
was ready, if necessary,, to direct the defences
of the lordship, and in peac,e time she was not
afraid of the longest and most dangerous pil-
grimages. She might even go to the Crusades
on her own account, and, if circumstances re-
quired, conduct a war to come out victoriously.

We may imagine the robust kind of education
required to produce people of this quality. But
as regards the precise way in which parents con-
ducted that education, we have, as Luchaire
admits, little precise knowledge. It is for the
most part only indirectly, by reading between the
lines, that we glean something as to what it was
considered befitting to inculcate in a good house-
hold, and as what we thus learn is mostly from
the writings of Churchmen it is doubtless a little
one-sided. Thus Adam de Perseigne, an ecclesi-
astic, writes to the Countess du Percl\e to advise
her how to live in a Christian manner ; he coun-
sels her to abstain from playing games of chance
and chess, not to take pleasure in the indecent
farces of actors, and to be moderate in dress.
Then, as ever, preachers expressed their horror
of the ruinous extravagance of women,, their
false hair, their rouge, and their dresses that

CHILDREN AND PARENTS 21

were too long or too short. They also reprobated
their love of flirtation. It was, however, in those
days a young girl's recognised duty, when a
knight arrived in the household, to exercise the
rites of hospitality, to disarm him, give him his
bath, and if necessary massage him to help him
to go to sleep. It is not surprising that the young
girl sometimes made love to the knight under
these circumstances,, nor is it surprising that he,
engaged in an arduous life and trained to disdain
feminine attractions, often failed to respond.

It is easy to understand how this state of
things gradually became transformed into the
considerably different position of parents and
child we have known, which doubtless attained
its climax nearly a century ago. Feudal condi-
tions, with the large households so well adapted
to act as seminaries for youth, began to decay,
and as education in such seminaries must have led
to frequent mischances both for youths and
maidens who enjoyed the opportunities of edu-
cation there, the regret for their disappearance
may often have been tempered for parents.
Schools, colleges, and universities began to spring
up and develop for one sex, while for the other
home life grew more intimate,, and domestic ties
closer. Montaigne's warning against the undue
tenderness of a narrow family life no longer
seemed reasonable, and the family became more
self-centred and more enclosed. Beneath this,

LITTLE ESSAYS
OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

24 LITTLE ESSAYS OP LOVE AND VIRTUE

the free association of an adult member of it with
the larger social organisation,, it is claiming that
the part is greater than the whole, and such a
claim cannot fail to be morbid and mischievous.
The old-world method of treating children,
we know, has long ago been displaced as con-
taining an element of harsh tyranny. But it was
not perceived, and it seems indeed not even yet
to be generally recognised, that the system which
replaced it, and is only now beginning to pass
away, involved another and more subtle tyranny,
the more potent because not seemingly harsh.
Parents no longer whipped their children even
when grown up, or put them in seclusion, or exer-
cised physical force upon them after they had
passed childhood. They felt that that would not
be in harmony with the social customs of a world
in which ancient feudal notions were dead. But
they merely replaced the external compulsion
by an internal compulsion which was much more
effective. It was based on the moral assumption
of claims and duties which were rarely formu-
lated because parents found it quite easy and
pleasant to avoid formulating them, and children,
on the rare occasions when they formulated
them, usually felt a sense of guilt in challenging
their validity. It was in the nineteenth century
that this state of things reached its full develop-
ment. The sons of the family were usually able,
as they grew up, to escape and elude it, although

CHILDREN AND PARENTS 86

they thereby often created an undesirable di-
vorce from the home, and often suffered, as well
as inflicted, much pain in tearing themselves
loose from the spiritual bonds — especially per-
haps in matters of religion — woven by long tradi-
tion to bind them to their parents. It was on the
daughters that the chief stress fell. For the
working class, indeed, there was often the pos-
sibility of escape into hard labour, if only that
of marriage. But such escape was not possible,
immediately or at all, for a large number.
During the nineteenth century many had been
so carefully enclosed in invisible cages, they
had been so well drilled in the reticences and
the duties and the subserviences that their
parents silently demanded of them, that we can
never know all the tragedies that took place.
In exceptional cases, indeed, they gave a sign.
When they possessed unusual power of intellect,
or unusual power of character and will, they suc-
ceeded in breaking loose from their cages, or at
least in giving expression to themselves. This is
seen in the stories of nearly all the women
eminent in life and literature during the nine-
teenth century, from the days of Mary Woll-

stonecraft onwards. The Brontes, almost, yet
not quite, strangled by the fetters placed upon
them by their stern and narrow-minded father,
and enabled to attain the full stature of their
genius only by that brief sojourn in Brussels, are

X6 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

representative. Elizabeth Barrett, chained to a
couch of invalidism under the eyes of an im-
periously affectionate father until with Robert
Browning's aid she secretly eloped into the open
air of freedom and health, and so attained com-
plete literary expression, is a typical figure. It
is only because we recognise that ghe is a typical
figure among the women who attained distinc-
tion that we are able to guess at the vast number
of mute inglorious Elizabeth Barretts who were
never able to escape by their own efforts and
never found a Browning to aid them to escape.

It is sometimes said that those days are long
past and that young women, in all the countries
which we are pleased to called civilised, are now
emancipated, indeed, rather too much emanci-
pated. Critics come forward to complain of their
undue freedom, of their irreverent familiarity to
their parents, of their language, of their habits.
But there were critics who said the very same
things, in almost the same words, of the grand-
mothers of these girls! These incompetent
critics are as ignorant of the social history of the
past as they are of the social significance of the
history of the present. We read in Once a Week
of sixty years ago (ioth August, 1861), the very
period when the domestic conditions of girls were
the most oppressive in the sense here understood,
that these same critics were about at that time,
and as shocked as they are now at "the young

CHILDREN AND PARENTS 87

ladies who talk of 'awful swells' and 'deuced
bores/ who smoke and venture upon free dis-
course, and try to be like men." The writer of
this anonymous article, who was really (I judge
from internal evidence) so distinguished and so
serious a woman as Harriet Martineau, duly
snubs these critics, pointing out that such accu-
sations are at least as old as Addison and Horace
Walpole; she remarks that there have no doubt
been so-called "fast young ladies" in every age,
"varying their doings and sayings according to
the fopperies of the time." The question, as she
pertinently concludes is, as indeed it still remains
to-day: "Have we more than the average pro-
portion? I do not know." Nor to-day do we
know.

But while to-day, as ever before, we have a
certain proportion of these emancipated girls,
and while to-day, as perhaps never before, we
are able to understand that they have an element
of reason on their side, it would be a mistake to
suppose that they are more than exceptions. The
majority are unable, and not even anxious, to
attain this light-hearted social emancipation.
For the majority, even though they are workers,,
the anciently subtle ties of the home are still,
as they should be, an element of natural piety,
and, also, as they should not be, clinging fetters
which impede individuality and destroy personal
initiative.

£8 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

We all know so many happy homes beneath
whose calm surface this process is working out.
The parents are deeply attached to their children,
who still remain children to them even when
they are grown up. They wish to guide them
and mould them and cherish them, to protect them
from the world, to enjoy their society and their
aid, and they expect that their children shall con-
tinue indefinitely to remain children. The chil-
dren, on their side, remain and always will re-
main, tenderly attached to their parents, and it
would really pain them to feel that they are har-
bouring any unwillingness to stay in the home
even after they have grown up, so long as their
parents need their attention. It is, of course, the
daughters who are thus expected to remain in
the home and who feel this compunction about
leaving it. It seems to us — although, as we have
seen, so unlike the attitude of former days — a
natural, beautiful, and rightful feeling on both
sides.

Yet, in the result, all sorts of evils tend to
ensue. The parents often take as their moral
right the services which should only be accepted,
if accepted at all, as the offering of love and
gratitude, and even reach a degree of domineer-
ing selfishness in which they refuse to be-
lieve that their children have any adult rights of
their own, absorbing and drying up that physical
and spiritual life-blood of their offspring which

CHILDREN AND PARENTS *9

it is the parents' part in Nature to feed. If the
children are willing there is nothing to mitigate
this process; if they are unwilling the result is
often a disastrous conflict. Their time and
energy are not their own; their tastes are criti-
cised and so far as possible crushed ; their politi-
cal ideas, if they have any, are treated as
pernicious; and — which is often on both sides
the most painful of all— differences in religious
belief lead to bitter controversy and humiliating
recrimination. Such differences in outlook be-
tween youth and age are natural and inevitable
and right. The parents themselves, though they
may have forgotten it, often in youth similarly
revolted against the cherished doctrines of their
own parents ; it has ever been so, the only differ-
ence being that to-day, probably, the opportuni-
ties for variation are greater. So it comes about
that what James Hinton said half a century ago
is often true to-day: "Our happy Christian
homes are the real dark places of the earth."

It is evident that the problem of the relation
of the child to the parent is still incompletely
solved even in what we consider our highest
civilisation. There is here needed an art in which
those who have to exercise it can scarcely possess
all the necessary skill and experience. Among
trees and birds and beasts the art is surer because
it is exercised unconsciously, on the foundation
of a large tradition in which failure meant death.

80 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

In the common procreative profusion of those
forms of life the frequent death of the young
was a matter of little concern., but biologically
there was never any sacrifice of the offspring to
the well-being of the parents. Whenever sacri-
fice is called for it is the. parents who are sacri-
ficed to their offspring. In our superior human
civilisation, in which quantity ever tends to give
place to quality, the higher value of the indi-
vidual involves an effort to avoid sacrifice which
sometimes proves worse than abortive. An avian
philosopher would be unlikely to feel called upon
to denounce nests as the dark places of the earth,
and in laying down our human moral laws we
have always to be aware of forgetting the funda-
mental biological relationship of parent and child
to which all such moral laws must conjform. To
some would-be parents that necessity may seem
hard. In such a case it is well for them to re-
member that there is no need to become parents
and that we live in an age when it is not difficult
to avoid becoming a parent. The world is not
dying for lack of parents. On the contrary we
have far too many of them — ignorant parents,
silly parents, unwilling parents, undesirable
parents — and those who aspire to the high dig-
nity of creating the future race, let them be as
few as they will — and perhaps at the present
time the fewer the better — must not refuse the

CHILDREN AND PARENTS 81

responsibilities of that position, its pains as well
as its joys.

In our human world, as we know, the moral
duties laid upon us — the duties in which, if we
fail, we become outcasts in our own eyes or in
those of others or in both — are of three kinds:
the duties to oneself, the duties to the small circle
of those we love, and the duties to the larger
circle of mankind to which ultimately we belong,
since out of it we proceed, and to it we owe all
that we are. There are no maxims, there is only
an art and a difficult art, to harmonise duties
which must often conflict. We have to be true
to all the motives that sanctify our lives. To
that extent George Eliot's Maggie Tulliver was
undoubtedly right. But the renunciation of the
self is not the routine solution of every conflict,
any more than is the absolute failure to renounce.
In a certain sense the duty towards the self
comes before all others, because it is the condition
on which duties towards others possess any signi-
ficance and worth. In that sense, it is true ac-
cording to the familiar saying of Shakespeare, —
though it was only Polonius, the man of maxims,
who voiced it, — that one cannot be true to others
unless one is first true to oneself, and that one
can know nothing of giving aught that is worthy
to give unless one also knows how to take.

We see that the problem of the place of par-
ents in life, after their function of parenthood

88 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

has been adequately fulfilled, a problem which
offers no difficulties among most forms of life,
has been found hard to solve by Man. At some
places and periods it has been considered most
merciful to put them to death; at others they
have been almost or quite deified and allowed to
regulate the whole lives of their descendants.
Thus in New Caledonia aged parents, it is said
by Mrs. Hadfield, were formerly taken up to a
high mountain and left with enough food to last a
few days; there was at the same time great re-
gard for the aged, as also among the Hottentots
who asked: "Can you see a parent or a relative
shaking and freezing under a cold, dreary, heavy,
useless old age, and not think, in pity of them, of
putting an end to their misery?" It was generally
the opinion of the parents themselves, but in some
countries the parents have dominated and over-
awed their children to the time of their natural
death and even beyond, up to the point of ancestor
worship, as in China, where no man of any age
can act for himself in the chief matters of life
during his parents' life-time, and to some extent
in ancient Rome, whence an influence in this
direction which still exists in the laws and cus-
toms of France.* Both extremes have proved
compatible with a beautifully human life. To
steer midway between them seems to-day, how-

♦The varying customs of different peoples in this matter are
set forth by Westermarck, The Origin and Development of the
Moral Ideas, Ch. XXV.

CHILDREN AND PARENTS 88

ever, the wisest course. There ought to be no
reason, and under happy conditions there is no
reason, why the relationship between parent and
child, as one of mutual affection and care, should
ever cease to exist. But that the relationship
should continue to exist as a tie is unnatural and
tends to be harmful. At a certain stage in the
development of the child the physical tie with the
parent is severed, and the umbilical cord cut. At
a later stage in development, when puberty is at-
tained and adolescence is feeling its way towards
a complete adult maturity, the spiritual tie must
be severed. It is absolutely essential that the
young spirit should begin to essay its own wings.
If its energy is not equal to this adventure, then it
is the part of a truly loving parent to push it over
the edge of the nest. Of course there are dan-
gers and risks. But the worst dangers and risks
come of the failure to adventure, of the refusal
to face the tasks of the world and to assume the
full function of life. All that Freud has told of
the paralysing and maiming influence of infan-
tile arrest or regression is here profitable to
consider. In order, moreover, that the relation-
ship between parents and children may retain its
early beauty and love, it is essential that it shall
adapt itself to adult conditions and the absence
of ties so rendered necessary. Otherwise there
is little likelihood of anything but friction and

84 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

»

pain on one side or the other, and perhaps on both
sides.

The parents have not only to train their chil-
dren : it is of at least equal importance that they
should train themselves. It is desirable that
children, as they grow up, should be alive to this
necessity, and consciously assist in the process,
since they are in closer touch with a new world
of activities to which their more lethargic parents
are often blind and deaf. For every fresh stage
in our lives we need a fresh education, and there
is no stage for which so little educational prepa-
ration is made as that which follows the repro-
ductive period. Yet at no time — especially in
women, who present all the various stages of the
sexual life in so emphatic a form — would educa-
tion be more valuable. The great burden of repro-
duction, with all its absorbing responsibilities,
has suddenly been lifted; at the same time the
perpetually recurring rhythm of physical sex
manifestations,, so often disturbing in its effect,
finally ceases; with that cessation, very often,
after a brief period of perturbation, there is an
increase both in physical and mental energy.
Yet, too often, all that one can see is that a
vacuum has been created,, and that there is noth-
ing to fill it. The result is that the mother — for
it is most often of the mother that complaint
is made — devotes her own new found energies
to the never-ending task of hampering and crush-

CHILDREN AND PARENTS 85

ing her children's developing energies. How
many mothers there are who bring to our minds
that ancient and almost inspired statement con-
cerning those for whom "Satan finds some mis-
chief still" ! They are wasting, worse than wast-
ing, energies that might be profitably applied to
all sorts of social service in the world. There is
nothing that is so much needed as the "maternal
in politics," or in all sorts of non-political chan-
nels of social service, and none can be better
fitted for such service than those who have had
an actual experience of motherhood and acquired
the varied knowledge that such experience should
give There are numberless other ways, besides
social service, in which mothers who have passed
the age of forty, providing they possess the
necessary aptitudes, can more profitably apply
themselves than in hampering, or pampering,
their adult children. It is by wisely cultivating
their activities in a larger sphere that women
whose chief duties in the narrower domestic
sphere are over may better ensure their own
happiness and the welfare of others than either
by fretting and obstructing, or by worrying
over, their own children who are no longer chil-
dren. It is quite true that the children may go
astray even when they have ceased to be children.
But the time to implant the seeds of virtue, the
time to convey a knowledge of life, was when
they were small. If it was done well, it only

86 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

remains to exercise faith and trust. If it was
done ill, nothing done later will compensate, for
it is merely foolish for a mother who could not
educate her children when they were small to
imagine that she is able to educate them when
they are big.

So it is that the problem of the attitude of the
child to its parents circles round again to that of
the parents to the child. The wise parent realises
that childhood is simply a preparation for the
free activities of later life, that the parents exist
in order to equip children for life and not to
shelter and protect them from the world into
which they must be cast. Education, whatever
else it should or should not be., must be an
inoculation against the poisons of life and an
adequate equipment in knowledge and skill for
meeting the chances of life. Beyond that, and
no doubt in the largest part, it is a natural growth
and takes place of itself.

CHAPTER II
THE MEANING OF PURITY

We live in a world in which, as we nowadays
begin to realise, we find two antagonistic streams
of traditional platitude concerning the question
of sexual purity, both flowing from the far past.

The people who embody one of these streams
of tradition, basing themselves on old-fashioned
physiology, assume, though they may not always
assert, that the sexual products are excretions,
to be dealt with summarily like other excretions.
That is an ancient view and it was accepted by
such wise philosophers of old times as Montaigne
and Sir Thomas More. It had, moreover, the
hearty support of so eminent a theological au-
thority as Luther, who on this ground preached
early marriage to men and women alike. It is
still a popular view, sometimes expressed in the
crudest terms,, and often by people who, not fol-
lowing Luther's example, use it to defend prosti-
tution, though they generally exclude women
from its operation, as a sex to whom it fails to
. apply and by whom it is not required.

But on the other hand we have another stream
of platitude. On this side there is usually little

37

38 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

attempt either to deny or to affirm the theory of
the opposing party, though they would contradict
its conclusions. Their theory, if they have one,
would usually seem to be that sexual activity
is a response to stimulation from without or
from within, so that if there is no stimulation
there will be no sexual manifestation. They
would preach, they tell us, a strenuous ideal ; they
would set up a wholesome dictate of hygiene.
The formula put forward on this basis usually
runs: Continence is not only harmless but bene-
ficial. It is a formula which, in one form or
another, has received apparently enthusiastic
approval in many quarters, even from distin-
guished physicians. We need not be surprised.
A proposition so large and general is not easy
to deny, and is still more difficult to reverse;
therefore it proves welcome to the people — espe-
cially the people occupying public apd profes-
sional positions — who wish to find the path of
least resistance, under pressure of a vigorous
section of public opinion. Yet in its vagueness
the proposition is a little disingenuous ; it con-
descends to no definitions and no qualifications;
it fails even to make clear how it is to be recon-
ciled with any enthusiastic approval of marriage,
for if continence is beautiful how can marriage
make it cease to be so?

Both these streams of feeling, it may be noted,
sprang from a common source far back in the

THE MEANING OF PURITY 89

primitive human world. All the emanations of
the human body,, all the spontaneous manifesta-
tions of its activities, were mysterious and
ominous to early man, pregnant with terror un-
less met with immense precautions and sur-
rounded by careful ritual. The manifestations
of sex were the least intelligible and the most
spontaneous. Therefore the things of sex were
those that most lent themselves to feelings of
horror and awe, of impurity and of purity. They
seemed so highly charged with magic potency
that there were no things that men more sought
to avoid, yet none to which they were impelled
to give more thought. The manifold echoes of
that primitive conception of sex, and all the
violent reactions that were thus evolved and
eventually bound up with the original impulse,
compose the streams of tradition that feed our
modern world in this matter and determine the
ideas of purity that surround us.

At the present day the crude theory of the
sexual impulse held on one side, and the ignorant
rejection of theory altogether on the other side,
are beginning to be seen as both alike unjustified.
We begin to find the grounds for a sounder
theory. Not indeed that the problems of sex,
which go so deeply into the whole personal and
social life, can ever be settled exclusively upon
physiological grounds. But we have done much
to prepare even the loftiest Building of Love

40 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

when we have attained a clear view of its
biological basis.

The progress of chemico-physiological research
during recent years has now brought us to new
ground for our building. Indeed the image
might well be changed altogether, and it might
be said that science has entirely transferred the
drama of reproduction to a new stage with new
actors. Therewith the immense emphasis placed
on excretion, and the inevitable reaction that
emphasis aroused, both alike disappear. The
sexual protagonists are no longer at the surface
but within the most secret recesses of the or-
ganism, and they appear to science under the
name of Hormones or Internal Secretions, al-
ways at work within and never themselves
condescending to appear at all. Those products
of the sexual glands which in both sexes are cast
out of the body, and at an immature stage of
knowledge appeared to be excretions, are of
primary reproductive importance, but, as regards
the sexual constitution of the individual,, they
are of far less importance than the internal secre-
tions of these very same glands. It is, however,
by no means only the specifically sexual glands
which thus exert a sexual influence within the
organism. Other glands in the brain, the throat,
and the abdomen, — such as the thyroid and the
adrenals, — are also elaborating fermentative se-
cretions to throw into the system. Their mutual

THE MEANING OF PURITY 41

play is so elaborate that it is only beginning to
be understood. Some internal secretions stimu-
late, others inhibit, and the same secretions may
under different conditions do either. This fact
is the source of many degrees and varieties of
energy and formative power in the organism.
Taken altogether, the internal secretions are the
forces which build up the man's and woman's dis-
tinctively sexual constitution : the special disposi-
tion and growth of hair, the relative development
of breasts and pelvis, the characteristic differ-
ences in motor activity, the varying emotional
desires and needs. It is in the complex play of
these secretions that we now seek the explanation
of all the peculiarities of sexual constitution, im-
perfect or one-sided physical and psychic de-
velopment, the various approximations of the
male to female bodily and emotional disposition,
of the female to the male, all the numerous
gradations that occur, naturally as we now see,
between the complete man and the complete
woman.

When we turn the light of this new conception
on to our old ideas of purity, — to the virtue or
the vice, accordingly as we may have been pleased
to consider it, of sexual abstinence, — we begin
to see that those ideas need radical revision.
They appear in a new light, their whole meaning
is changed. No doubt it may be said they never
had the validity they appeared to possess, even

42 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

when we judge them by the crudest criterion,
that of practice. Thus, while it is the rule for
physicians to proclaim the advantages of sexual
continence, there is no good reason to believe
that they have themselves practised it in any emi-
nent degree. A few years ago an inquiry among
thirty-five distinguished physicians, chiefly Ger-
man and Russian, showed that they were nearly
all of opinion that continence is harmless., if not
beneficial. But Meirowsky found by inquiry of
eighty-six physicians, of much the same nation-
alities, that only one had himself been sexually
abstinent before marriage. There seem to be no
similar statistics for the English-speaking coun-
tries, where there exists a greater modesty —
though not perhaps notably less need for it — in
the making of such confessions. But if we turn
to the allied profession which is strongly on the
side of sexual abstinence, we find that among
theological students, as has been shown in the
United States, while prostitution may be infre-
quent,, no temptation is so frequent or so potent,
and in most cases so irresistible, as that to soli-
tary sexual indulgence. Such is the actual atti-
tude towards the two least ideal forms of sexual
practice — as distinguished from mere theory —
on the part of the two professions which most
definitely pronounce in favour of continence.

It is necessary, however, as will now be clearer,
to set our net more widely. We must take into

THE MEANING OF PURITY 48

consideration every form and degree of sexual
manifestation, normal and abnormal,, gross and
ethereal. When we do this, even cautiously and
without going far afield, s,exual abstinence is
found to be singularly elusive. Rohleder, a care-
ful and conscientious investigator, has asserted
that such abstinence, in the true and complete
sense, is absolutely non-existent, the genuine
cases in which sexual phenomena of some kind
or other fail to manifest themselves being simply
cases of inborn lack of sexual sensibility. He
met,, indeed, a few people who seemed exceptions
to the general rule, but, on better knowledge, he
found that he was mistaken, and that so far from
being absent in these people the sexual instinct
was present even in its crudest shapes. The ac-
tivity of sex is an activity that on the physical
side is generated by the complex mechanism of
the ductless glands and displayed in the whole
organism, physical and psychic, of the individual,
who cannot abolish that activity, although to
some extent able to regulate the forms in which
it is manifested., so that purity cannot be the
abolition or even the indefinite suspension of
sexual manifestations; it must be the wise and
beautiful control of them.

It is becoming clear that the old platitudes can
no longer be maintained, and that if we wish to
improve our morals we must first improve *Htr
knowledge.

44 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

II

We have seen that various popular beliefs and
conventional assumptions concerning the sexual
impulse can no longer be maintained. The
sexual activities of the organism are not mere
responses to stimulation, absent if we choose to
apply no stimulus, never troubling us if we run
away from them, harmless if we enclose them
within a high wall. Nor do they constitute a
mere excretion, or a mere appetite, which we can
control by a crude system of hygiene and dietet-
ics. We better understand the psycho-sexual
constitution if we regard the motive power be-
hind it as a dynamic energy, produced and main-
tained by a complex mechanism at certain inner
foci of the body, and realise that whatever
periodic explosive manifestations may take place
at the surface, the primary motive source lies in
the intimate recesses of the organism, while the
outcome is the whole physical and spiritual
energy of our being under those aspects which
are most forcible and most aspiring and even
most ethereal.

This conception, we find, is now receiving an
admirable and beautifully adequate physical
basis in the researches of distinguished physio-
logists in various lands concerning the parts
played by the ductless glands of the body, in
sensitive equilibrium with each other, pouring
out into the system stimulating and inhibiting

THE MEANING OF PURITY 45

hormones, which not only confer on the man's
or woman's body those specific sexual characters
which we admire but at the same time impart
the special tone and fibre and polarity of mascu-
linity or femininity to the psychic disposition.
Yet, even before Brown-Sequard's first epoch-
making suggestion had set physiologists to
search for internal secretions, the insight of
certain physicians on the medico-psychological
side was independently leading towards the same
dynamic conception. In the middle of the last
century Apstie, an acute London physician, more
or less vaguely realised the transformations of
sexual energy into nervous disease and into
artistic energy. James Hinton, whose genius
rendered him the precursor of many modern
ideas, had definitely grasped the dynamic nature
of sexual activity, and daringly proposed to
utilise it, not only as a solution of the difficulties
of the personal life but for the revolutionary
transformation of morality.* It was the wish to

* "The man who separated the thought of chastity from Service
and made it revolve round Self," wrote Hinton half a century
ago in his unpublished MSS., "betrayed the human race." "The
rule of Self," he wrote again, "has two forms: Self-indulgence
and Self-virtue; and Nature has two weapons against it: pain
and pleasure. ... A restraint must always be put away when
another's need can be served by putting it away; for so is re-
stored to us the force by which Life is made. . . . How curious
it seems ! the true evil things are our good things. Our thoughts
of duty and goodness and chastity, those are the things that
need to be altered and put aside; these are the barriers to true
goodness. ... I foresee the positive denial of all positive morals,
the removal of all restrictions. I feel I do not know what
'license/ as we should term it, may not truly belong to the per-
fect state of Man. When there is no self surely there is no

46 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

group together all the far-flung manifestations
of the inner irresistible process of sexual activity
that underlay my own conception of auto-erotism,
or the spontaneous erotic impulse which arises
from the organism apart from all definite ex-
ternal stimulation, to be manifested, or it may
be transformed, in mere solitary physical sex
activity, in dreams of the night, in day-dreams,
in shapes of literature and art, in symptoms of
nervous disorder such as some forms of hysteria,
and even in the most exalted phases of mystical
devotion. Since then, a more elaborate attempt
to develop a similar dynamic conception of sexual
activity has been made by Freud ; and the psycho-
analysts who have followed him, or sometimes
diverged, have with endless subtlety, and cour-
ageous thoroughness, traced the long and sinuous
paths of sexual energy in personality and in life.,
indeed in all the main manifestations of human
activity.

It is important for us to note about this

restriction; as we see there is none in Nature. . . . May we not
say of marriage as St. Augustine said of God : 'Rather would I,
not finding, find Thee, than finding, not find Thee'? . . . 'Be-
cause we like* is the sole legitimate and perfect motive of human
action. ... If this is what Nature affirms then it will be what
I believe." This dynamic conception of the sexual impulse, as
a force that, under natural conditions, may be trusted to build
up a new morality, obviously belongs to an indefinitely remote
future. It is a force whose blade is two-edged, for while it
strikes at unselfishness it also strikes at selfishness, and at present
we cannot easily conceive a time when "there is no self"; we
should be more disposed to regard it as a time when there is
much humbug. Yet for the individual this conception of the
constructive power of love retains much enlightenment and
inspiration.

THE MEANING OF PURITY 47

dynamic sexual energy in the constitution that
while it is very firmly and organically rooted, and
quite indestructible, it assumes very various
shapes. On the physical side all the characters
of sexual distinction and all the beauties of
sexual adornment are wrought by the power
furnished by the co-operating furnaces of the
glands, and so also, on the psychic side, are
emotions and impulses which range from the
simplest longings for sensual contact to the most
exalted rapture of union with the Infinite.
Moreover, there is a certain degree of correla-
tion between the physical and the psychic mani-
festation of sexual energy, and, to some extent,,
transformation is possible in the embodiment of
that energy.

A vague belief in the transformation of sexual
energy has long been widespread. It is appar-
ently shown in the idea that continence, as an
economy in the expenditure of sexual force, may
be practised to aid the physical and mental de-
velopment, while folklore reveals various sayings
in regard to the supposed influence of sexual
abstinence in the causation of insanity. There
is a certain underlying basis of reason in such
beliefs, though in an unqualified form they
cannot be accepted, for they take no account of
the complexity of the factors involved, of the
difficulty and often impossibility of effecting any
complete transformation, either in a desirable

48 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

or undesirable direction, and of the serious con-
flict which the process often involves. The
psycho-analysts have helped us here. Whether
or not we accept their elaborate and often shift-
ing conceptions, they have emphasised and de-
veloped a psychological conception of sexual
energy and its transformations, before only
vaguely apprehended, which is now seen to
harmonise with the modern physiological view.

The old notion that sexual activity is merely
a matter of the voluntary exercise, or abstinence
from exercise, of the reproductive functions of
adult persons has too long obstructed any clear
vision of the fact that sexuality, in the wide and
deep sense, is independent of the developments
of puberty. This has long been accepted as an
occasional and therefore abnormal fact, but we
have to recognise that it is true, almost or quite
normally, even of early childhood. No doubt
we must here extend the word "sexuality" * — in
what may well be considered an illegitimate way
— to cover manifestations which in the usual
sense are not sexual or are at most called "sexual
perversions." But this extension has a certain
justification in view of the fact that these mani-
festations can be seen to be definitely related to
the ordinary adult forms of sexuality. However

♦Perhaps, as applied to the period below puberty, it would
be more exact to say "pseudo-sexuality." Matsumato has lately
pointed out the significance of the fact that the interstitial
testicular tissue, essential to the hormonic function of the testes,
only becomes active at puberty.

THE MEANING OF PURITY 49

we define it, we have to recognise that the child
takes the same kind of pleasure in those functions
which are natural to his age as the adult is
capable of taking in localised sexual functions,
that he may weave ideas around such functions,
sometimes cultivate their exercise from love of
luxury, make them the basis of day-dreams
which at puberty, when the ideals of adult life
are ready to capture his sexual energy, he begins
to grow ashamed of.

At this stage, indeed, we reach a crucial point,
though it has usually been overlooked, in the lives
of boys and girls, more especially those whose
heredity may have been a little tainted or their
upbringing a little twisted. For it is here that
the transformation of energy and the resulting
possibilities of conflict are wont to enter. In
the harmoniously developing organism, one may
say, there is at this period a gradual and easy
transmutation of the childish pleasurable activi-
ties into adult activities, accompanied perhaps
by a feeling of shame for the earlier feelings,
though this quickly passes into a forget fulness
which often leads the adult far astray when he
attempts to understand the psychic life of the
child. The childish manifestations, it must be
remarked, are not necessarily unwholesome ; they
probably perform a valuable function and de-
velop budding sexual emotions, just as the petals

50 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

of flowers are developed in pale and contorted
shapes beneath the enveloping sheaths.

But in our human life the transmutation is
often not so easy as in flowers. Normally, in-
deed, the adolescent transformations of sex are
so urgent and so manifold — now definite sensual
desire, now muscular impulses of adventure, now
emotional aspirations in the sphere of art or re-
ligion — that they easily overwhelm and absorb
all its vaguer and more twisted manifestations in
childhood. Yet it may happen that by some aber-
ration of internal development or of external
influence this conversion of energy may at one
point or another fail to be completely effected.
Then some fragment of infantile sexuality sur-
vives, in rare cases to turn all the adult faculties
to its service and become reckless and triumph-
ant, in minor and more frequent cases to be
subordinated and more or less repressed into the
subconscious sphere by voluntary or even invol-
untary and unconscious effort. Then we may
have conflict,, which, when it works happily,
exerts a fortifying and ennobling influence on
character, when more unhappily a disturbing
influence which may even lead to conditions of
definite nervous disorder.

The process by which this fundamental sexual
energy is elevated from elementary and primi-
tive forms into complex and developed forms is
termed sublimation, a term, originally used for

THE MEANING OF PURITY 51

the process of raising by heat a solid substance
to the state of vapour, which was applied even
by such early writers as Drayton and Davies in
a metaphorical and spiritual sense.* In the
sexual sphere sublimation is of vital importance
because it comes into question throughout the
whole of life, and our relation to it must inti-
mately affect our conception of morality. The
element of athletic asceticism which is a part of
all virility, and is found even — indeed often in a
high degree — among savages, has its main moral
justification as one aid to sublimation. Through-
out life sublimation acts by transforming some
part at all events of the creative sexual energy
from its elementary animal manifestations into
more highly individual and social manifestations,
or at all events into finer forms of sexual ac-
tivity,, forms that seem to us more beautiful and
satisfy us more widely. Purity, we thus come
to see is, in one aspect, the action of sublimation,
not abolishing sexual activity, but lifting it into
forms of which our best judgment may approve.

*Wc may gather the history of the term from the Oxford
Dictionary, Bodies, said Davies, are transformed to spirit "by
sublimation strange/' and Ben Jonson in Cynthia's Revels spoke
of a being "sublimated and refined" ; Purchas and Jackson, early
in the same seventeenth century, referred to religion as "sub-
limating" human nature, and Jeremy Taylor, a little later, to
"subliming" marriage into a sacrament; Shaftesbury, early in
the eighteenth century, spoke of human nature being? "sublimated
by a sort of spiritual chemists" and Welton, a little later, of
"a love sublimate and refined," while, finally, and altogether in
our modern sense, Peacock in 1816 in his Headlong Hall re-
ferred to **that enthusiastic sublimation which is the source of
greatness and energy."

5« LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

We must not suppose — as is too often assumed
— that sublimation can be carried out easily,
completely, or even with unmixed advantage. If
it were so, certainly the old-fashioned moralist
would be confronted by few difficulties, but we
have ample reason to believe that it is not so. It
is with sexual energy, well observes Freud, who
yet attaches great importance to sublimation, as
it is with heat in our machines: only a certain
proportion can be transformed into work. Or, as
it is put by Lowenfeld, who is not a constructive
philosopher but a careful and cautious medical
investigator, the advantages of sublimation are
not received in specially high degree by those
who permanently deny to their sexual impulse
every natural direct relief. The celibate Catholic
clergy, notwithstanding their heroic achieve-
ments in individual cases, can scarcely be said
to display a conspicuous excess of intellectual
energy,, on the whole, over the non-celibate
Protestant clergy; or, if we compare the English
clergy before and after the Protestant Reforma-
tion, though the earlier period may reveal more
daring and brilliant personages, the whole in-
tellectual output of the later Church may claim
comparison with that of the earlier Church.
There are clearly other factors at work besides
sublimation, and even sublimation may act most
potently, not when the sexual activities sink or
are driven into a tame and monotonous subordi-

THE MEANING OF PURITY 68

nation, but rather when they assume a splendid
energy which surges into many channels. Yet
sublimation is a very real influence, not only in
its more unconscious and profound operations,
but in its more immediate and temporary appli-
cations, as part of an athletic discipline, acting
best perhaps when it acts most automatically,
to utilise the motor energy of the organism in
the attainment of any high physical or psychic
achievement.

We have to realise, however, that these trans-
mutations do not only take place by way of a
sublimation of sexual energy, but also by way
of a degradation of that energy. The new form
of energy produced, that is to say, may not be
of a beneficial kind; it may be of a mischievous
kind, a form of perversion or disease. Sexual
self-denial, instead of leading to sublimation,
may lead to nervous disorder when the erotic
tension, failing to find a natural outlet and not
sublimated to higher erotic or non-erotic ends
in the real world, is transmuted into an unreal
dreamland, thus undergoing what Jung terms
introversion; while there are also the people
already referred to, in whom immature childish
sexuality persists into an adult stage of develop-
ment it is no longer altogether in accord with,
so that conflict, with various possible trains of
nervous symptoms, may result. Disturbances
juid conflicts in the emotional sexual field may,

54 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

we know, in these and similar ways become
transformed into physical symptoms of disorder
which can be seen to have a precise symbolic
relationship to definite events in the patient's
emotional history, while fits of nervous terror,,
or anxiety-neurosis, may frequently be regarded
as a degradation of thwarted or disturbed sexual
energy, manifesting its origin by presenting a
picture of sexual excitation transposed into a
non-sexual shape of an entirely useless or mis-
chievous character.

Thus, to sum up, we may say that the sexual
energy of the organism is a mighty force, auto-
matically generated throughout life. Under
healthy conditions that force is transmuted in
more or less degree, but never entirely, into
forms that further the development of the in-
dividual and the general ends of life. These
transformations are to some extent automatic,
to some extent within the control of personal
guidance. But there are limits to such guidance,
for the primitive human personality can never
be altogether rendered an artificial creature of
civilisation. When these limits are reached the
transmutation .of sexual energy may become
useless or even dangerous, and we fail to attain
the exquisite flower of Purity.

THE MEANING OF PURITY 55

III

It may seem that in setting forth the nature of
the sexual impulse in the light of modern biology
and psychology, I have said but little of purity
and less of morality. Yet that is as it should be.
We must first be content to see how the machine
works and watch the wheels go round. We must
understand before we can pretend to control; in
the natural world, as Bacon long ago said, we
can only command by obeying. Moreover, in this
field Nature's order is far older and more firmly
established than our civilised human morality.
In our arrogance we often assume that Morality
is the master of Nature. Yet except when it is
so elementary or fundamental as to be part of
Nature, it is but a guide, and a guide that is only
a child,, so young, so capricious, that in every age
its wayward hand has sought to pull Nature in
a different direction. Even only in order to guide
we must first see and know.

We realise that never more than when we ob-
serve the distinction which conventional sex-
morals so often makes between men and women.
Failing to find in women exactly the same kind
of sexual emotions as they find in themselves,
men have concluded that there are none there at
all. So man has regarded himself asi the sexual
animal, and woman as either the passive object
of his adoring love or the helpless victim of his
degrading lust, in either case as a being who,

56 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

unlike man. possessed an innocent "purity" by
nature, without any need for the trouble of ac-
quiring it. Of woman as a real human being,
with sexual needs and sexual responsibilities,
morality has often known nothing. It has been
content to preach restraint to man, an abstract
and meaningless restraint even if it were pos-
sible. But when we have regard to the actual
facts of life, we can no longer place virtue in a
vacuum. Women are just as apt as men to be
afflicted by the petty jealousies and narrownesses
of the crude sexual impulse ; women just as much
as men need the perpetual sublimation of erotic
desire into forms of more sincere purity, of
larger harmony, in gaining which ends all the
essential ends of morality are alone gained. The
delicate adjustment of the needs of each sex to
the needs of the other sex to the end of what
Chaucer called fine loving, the adjustment of
the needs of both sexes to the larger ends of fine
living, may well furnish a perpetual moral dis-
cipline which extends its fortifying influence tc
men and women alike.

It is this universality of sexual emotion, blend-
ing in its own mighty stream, as is now realised,
many other currents of emotion, even the par-
ental and the filial, and traceable even in child-
hood, — the wide efflorescence of an energy con-
stantly generated by a vital internal mechanism,
— which renders vain all attempts either to sup-

THE MEANING OF PURITY 57

press or to ignore the problem of sex, however
immensely urgent we might foolishly imagine
such attempts to be. Even the history of the
early Christian ascetics in Egypt, as recorded in
the contemporary Paradise of Palladium, illus-
trates the futility of seeking to quench the un-
quenchable, the flame of fire which is life itself.
These "athletes of the Lord" were under the
best possible conditions for the conquest of lust;
they had been driven into the solitude of the
desert by a genuine deeply-felt impulse, they
could regulate their lives as they would, and they
possessed an almost inconceivable energy of
resolution. They were prepared to live on herbs,
even to eat grass, and to undertake any labour of
self-denial. They were so scrupulous that we
hear of a holy man who would even efface a
woman's footprints in the sand lest a brother
might thereby be led into thoughts of evil. Yet
they were perpetually tempted to seductive vi-
sions arid desires, even after a monastic life of
forty years, and the women seem to have been
not less liable to yield to temptation than the men.
It may be noted that in the most perfect saints
there has not always been a complete suppres-
sion of the sexual impulse even on the normal
plane, nor even, in some cases, the attempt at
such complete suppression. In the early days of
Christianity the exercise of chastity was fre-
quently combined with a close and romantic in-

«8 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

timacy of affection between the sexes which
shocked austere moralists. Even in the eleventh
century we find that the charming and saintly
Robert of Arbrissel, founder of the order of
Fontevrault, would often sleep with his nuns,
notwithstanding the remonstrances of pious
friends who thought he was displaying too heroic
a manifestation of continence, failing to under-
stand that he was effecting a sweet compromise
with continence. If, moreover, we consider the
rarest and finest of the saints we usually find
that in their early lives there was a period of
full expansion of the organic activities in which
all the natural impulses had full play. This was
the case with the two greatest and most influen-
tial saints of the Christian Church, St. Augus-
tine and St. Francis of Assisi, absolutely unlike as
they were in most other respects. Sublimation,
we see again and again, is limited, and the best
developments of the spiritual life are not likely
to come about by the rigid attempt to obtain a
complete transmutation of sexual energy.

The old notion that any strict attempt to ad-
here to sexual abstinence is beset by terrible risks,
insanity and so forth, has no foundation,, at all
events where we are concerned with reasonably
sound and healthy people. But it is a very seri-
ous error to suppose that the effort to achieve
complete and prolonged sexual abstinence is
without any bad results at all, physical or psychic,

ft

THE MEANING OF PURITY 59

either in men or women who are normal and
healthy. This is now generally recognised every-
where., except in the English-speaking countries,
where the supposed interests of a prudish moral-
ity often lead to a refusal to look facts in the
face. As Professor Nacke, a careful and cau-
tious physician, stated shortly before his death,
a few years ago, the opinion that sexual abstin-
ence has no bad effects is not to-day held by a
single authority on questions of sex; the fight
is only concerned with the nature and degree
of the bad effects which, in Nacke's belief — and
he was doubtless right — are never of a gravely
serious character.

Yet we have also to remember that not only,
as we have seen, is the effort to achieve com-
plete abstinence — which we ignorantly term
"purity" — futile, since we are concerned with a
force which is being constantly generated within
the organism,, but in the effort to achieve it we
are abusing a great source of beneficent energy.
We lose more than half of what we might gain
when we cover it up, and try to push it back, to
produce, it may be, not harmonious activity in
the world, but merely internal confusion and dis-
tortion, and perhaps the paralysis of half the
soul's energy. The sexual activities of the or-
ganism, we cannot too often repeat, constitute
a mighty source of energy which we can never
altogether repress though by wise guidance we

60 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

may render it an aid not only to personal devel-
opment and well-being but to the moral better-
ment of the world. The attraction of sex, ac-
cording to a superstition which reaches far back
into antiquity, is a baleful comet pointing to de-
struction, rather than a mighty star to which we
may harness our chariot. It may certainly be
either, and which it is likely to become depends
largely on our knowledge and our power of self-
guidance.

In old days when, as we have seen, tradition,
aided by the most fantastic superstitions, in-
sisted on the baleful aspects of sex, the whole
emphasis was placed against passion. Since
knowledge and self -guidance, without which pas-
sion is likely to be in fact pernicious, were then
usually absent., the emphasis was needed, and
when Bohme, the old mystic, declared that the
art of living is to "harness our fiery energies to
the service of the light/' it has recently been
even maintained that he was the solitary pioneer
of our modern doctrines. But the ages in which
ill-regulated passion exceeded — ages at least full
of vitality and energy — gave place to a more
anaemic society. To-day the conditions are
changed, even reversed. Moral maxims that
were wholesome in feudal days are deadly now.
We are in no danger of suffering from too much
vitality, from too much energy in the explosive
splendour of our social life. We possess, more-

THE MEANING OF PURITY 61

over,, knowledge in plenty and self-restraint in
plenty, even in excess, however wrongly they
may sometimes be applied. It is passion, more
passion and fuller, that we need. The moralist
who bans passion is not of our time; his place
these many years is with the dead. For we know
what happens in a world when those who ban
passion have triumphed. When Love is sup-
pressed Hate takes its place. The least regulated
orgies of Love grow innocent beside the orgies
of Hate. When nations that might well worship
one another cut one another's throats, when
Cruelty and Self -righteousness and Lying and
Injustice and all the Powers of Destruction rule
the human heart, the world is devastated, the
fibre of the whole organism of society grows
flaccid, and all the ideals of civilisation are de-
based. If the world is not now sick of Hate we
may be sure it never will be; so whatever may
happen to the world let us remember that the
individual is still left, to carry on the tasks of
Love, to do good even in an evil world.

It is more passion and ever more that we need
if we are to undo the work of Hate, if we are to
add to the gaiety and splendour of life, to the
sum of human achievement, to the aspiration of
human ecstasy. The things that fill men and
women with beauty and exhilaration, and spur
them to actions beyond themselves, are the things
that are now needed. The entire intrinsic puri-

63 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

fication of the soul, it was held by the great
Spanish Jesuit theologian, Suarez, takes place
at the moment when, provided the soul is of good
disposition, it sees God; he meant after death,
but for us the saying is symbolic of the living
truth. It is only in the passion of facing the
naked beauty of the world and its naked truth
that we can win intrinsic purity. Not all, indeed,
who look upon the face of God can live. It is
not well that they should live. It is only the
metals that can be welded in the fire of passion
to finer services that the world needs. It would
be well that the rest should be lost in those flames.
That indeed were a world fit to perish, wherein
the moralist had set up the ignoble maxim:
Safety first.

i

CHAPTER III
THE OBJECTS OF MARRIAGE

What are the legitimate objects of marriage?
We know that many people seek to marry for
ends that can scarcely be called legitimate, that
men may marry to obtain a cheap domestic
drudge or nurse, and that women may marry to
be kept when they are tired of keeping them-
selves. These objects in marriage may or may
not be moral, but in any case they are scarcely
its legitimate ends. We are here concerned to
ascertain those ends of marriage which are legiti-
mate when we take the highest ground as moral
and civilised men and women living in an ad-
vanced state of society and seeking, if we can,
to advance that state of society still further.

The primary end of marriage is to beget and
bear offspring, and to rear them until they are
able to take care of themselves. On that basis
Man is at one with all the mammals and most
of the birds. If, indeed, we disregard the orig-
inally less essential part of this end — that is to
say, the care and tending of the young — this end

of marriage is not only the primary but usually

63

64 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

the sole end of sexual intercourse in the whole
mammal world. As a natural instinct, its
achievement involves gratification and well-be-
ing, but this bait of gratification is merely a de-
vice of Nature's and not in itself an end having
any useful function at the periods when concep-
tion is not possible. This is clearly indicated by
the fact that among animals the female only ex-
periences sexual desire at the season of impreg-
nation, and that desire ceases as soon as impreg-
nation takes place, though this is only in a few
species true of the male, obviously because., if his
sexual desire and aptitude were confined to so
brief a period, the chances of the female meeting
the right male at the right moment would be too
seriously diminished; so that the attentive and
inquisitive attitude towards the female by the
male animal — which we may often think we see
still traceable in the human species — is not the
outcome of lust fulness for personal gratification
("wantonly to satisfy carnal lusts and appetites
like brute beasts," as the Anglican Prayer Book
incorrectly puts it) but implanted by Nature for
the benefit of the female and the attainment of
the primary object of procreation. This primary
object we may term the animal end of marriage.
This object remains not only the primary but
even the sole end of marriage among the lower
races of mankind generally. The erotic idea, in
its deeper sense, that is to say the element of

THE OBJECTS OF MARRIAGE 65

love, arose very slowly in mankind. It is found,
it is true,, among some lower races, and it ap-
pears that some tribes possess a word for the joy
of love in a purely psychic sense. But even
among European races the evolution was late.
The Greek poets, except the latest, showed little
recognition of love as an element of marriage.
Theognis compared marriage with cattle-breed-
ing. The Romans of the Republic took much the
same view. Greeks and Romans alike regarded
breeding as the one recognisable object of mar-
riage; any other object was mere wantonness
and had better, they thought, be carried on out-
side marriage. Religion, which preserves so
many ancient and primitive conceptions of life,
has consecrated this conception also, and Chris-
tianity — though* as I will point out later, it has
tended to enlarge the conception — at the outset
only offered the choice between celibacy on the
one hand and on the other marriage for the pro-
duction of offspring

Yet, from an early period in human history, a
secondary function oi sexual intercourse had
been slowly growing up to become one of the
great objects of marriage. Among animals, it
may be said, and even sometimes in man, the sex-
ual impulse, when once aroused, makes but a
short and swift circuit through the brain to reach
its consummation. But as the brain and its fac-
ulties develop, powerfully aided indeed by the

66 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

very difficulties of the sexual life, the impulse
for sexual union has to traverse ever longer,
slower, more painful paths, before it reaches —
and sometimes it never reaches — its ultimate ob-
ject. This means that sex gradually becomes in-
tertwined with all the highest and subtlest human
emotions and activities, with the refinements of
social intercourse, with high adventure in every
sphere, with art,, with religion. The primitive
animal instinct, having the sole end of procre-
ation, becomes on its way tp that end the inspir-
ing stimulus to all those psychic energies which
in civilisation we count most precious. This
function is thus, we see, a by-product. But, as
we know, even in our human factories, the
by-product is sometimes more valuable than
the product. That is so as regards the f unctional
products of human evolution. The hand was
produced out of the animal forelimb with the
primary end of grasping the things we materially
need, but as a by-product the hand has developed
the function of making and playing the piano and
the violin, and that secondary ! functional by-
product of the hand we account, even as meas-
ured by the rough test of money, more precious,
however less materially necessary, than its prim-
ary function. It is, however, only in rare and
gifted natures that transformed sexual energy
becomes of supreme value for its own sake with-
out ever attaining the normal physical outlet.

THE OBJECTS OF MARRIAGE 67

For the most part the by-product accompanies
the product, throughout, thus adding a second-
ary, yet peculiarly sacred and specially human,
object of marriage to its primary animal object.
This may be termed the spiritual object of mar-
riage.

By the term "spiritual" we are not to under-
stand any mysterious and supernatural qualities.
It is simply a convenient name,, in distinction
from animal, to cover all those higher mental
and emotional processes which in human evolu-
tion are ever gaining greater power. It is need-
less to enumerate the constituents of this spiritual
end of sexual intercourse, for everyone is entitled
to enumerate them differently and in different
order. They include not only all that makes
love a gracious and beautiful erotic art, but the
whole element of pleasure in so far as pleasure
is more than a mere animal gratification. Our
ancient ascetic traditions often make us blind to
the meaning of pleasure. We see only its pos-
sibilities of evil and not its mightiness for good.
We forget that, as Romain Rolland says, "Joy
is as holy as Pain." No one has insisted so much
on the supreme importance of the element of
pleasure in the spiritual ends of sex as James
Hinton. Rightly used, he declares, Pleasure is
"the Child of God," to be recognised as a "mighty
storehouse of force," and he pointed out the sig-
nificant fact that in the course of human progress

68 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

its importance increases rather than diminishes.*
While it is perfectly true that sexual energy may
be in large degree arrested, and transformed into
intellectual and moral forms, yet it is also true
that pleasure itself, and above all, sexual pleas-
ure, wisely used and not abused, may prove the
stimulus and liberator of our finest and most
exalted activities. It is largely this remarkable
function of sexual pleasure which is decisive in
settling the argument of those who claim that
continence is the only alternative to the animal
end of marriage. That argument ignores the lib-
erating and harmonising influences, giving whole-
some balance and sanity to the whole organism,
imparted by a sexual union which is the outcome
of the psychic as well as physical needs. There
is, further, in the attainment of the spiritual end
of marriage, much more than the benefit of each
individual separately. There is, that is to say,
the effect on the union itself. For through har-
monious sex relationships a deeper spiritual unity
is reached than can possibly be derived from con-
tinence in or out of marriage, and the marriage
association becomes an apter instrument in the
service of the world. Apart from any sexual
craving, the complete spiritual contact of two
persons who love each other can only be attained
through some act of rare intimacy. No act can
be quite so intimate as the sexual embrace. In

♦Mrs. Havelock Ellis, James Hint on: A Sketch, Ch. IV.

THE OBJECTS OF MARRIAGE 69

its accomplishment, for all who have reached a
reasonably human degree of development, the
communion of bodies becomes the communion of
souls. The outward and visible sign has been
the consummation of an inward and spiritual
grace. "I would base all my sex teaching to
children and young people on the beauty and
sacredness of sex," wrote a distinguished woman;
"sex intercourse is the great sacrament of
life, he that eateth and drinketh unworthily
eateth and drinketh his own damnation; but it
may be the most beautiful sacrament between
two souls who have no thought of children."* To
many the idea of a sacrament seems merely ec-
clesiastical, but that is a misunderstanding. The
word "sacrament" is the ancient Roman name of
a soldier's oath of military allegiance, and the
idea, in the deeper sense, existed long before
Christianity, and has ever been regarded as the
physical sign of the closest possible union with
some great spiritual reality. From our modern
standpoint we may say, with James H in ton, that
the sexual embrace, worthily understood, can
only be compared with music and with prayer.
"Every true lover," it has been well said by a
woman, "knows this, and the worth of any and
every relationship can be judged by its success in
reaching, or failing to reach, this standpoint." f

* Olive Schreiner in a personal letter.

t Mrs. Havelock Ellis, James Hint on, p. 180.

70 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

I have mentioned how the Church — in part in-
fluenced by that clinging to primitive conceptions
which always marks religions and in part by its
ancient traditions of asceticism — tended to insist
mainly, if not exclusively, on the animal object of
marriage. It sought to reduce sex to a minimum
because the pagans magnified sex; it banned
pleasure because the Christian's path on earth
was the way of the Cross ; and even if theologians
accepted the idea of a "Sacrament of Nature"
they could only allow it to operate when the ac-
tive interference of the priest was impossible.,
though it must in justice be said that, before the
Council of Trent, the Western Church recognised
that the sacrament of marriage was effected en-
tirely by the act of the two celebrants themselves
and not by the priest. Gradually, however, a
more reasonable and humane opinion crept into
the Church. Intercourse outside the animal end
of marriage was indeed a sin, but it became mere-
ly a venial sin. The great influence of St. Augus^
tine was on the side of allowing much freedom
to intercourse outside the aim of procreation. At
the Reformation, John a Lasco,, a Catholic
Bishop who became a Protestant and settled in
England, laid it down, following various earlier
theologians, that the object of marriage, besides
offspring, was to serve as a "sacrament of con-
solation" to the united couple, and that view was
more or less accepted by the founders of the

THE OBJECTS OF MARRIAGE 71

Protestant churches. It is the generally accepted
Protestant view to-day.* The importance of the
spiritual end of intercourse in marriage, alike
for the higher development of each member of
the couple and for the intimacy and stability of
their union, is still more emphatically set forth
by the more advanced thinkers of to-day.

There is something pathetic in the spectacle of
those among us who are still only able to recog-
nise the animal end of marriage, and who point
to the example of the lower animals — among
whom the biological conditions are entirely dif-
ferent — as worthy of our imitation. It has taken
God — or Nature, if we will — unknown millions
of years of painful struggle to evolve Man, and
to raise the human species above that helpless
bondage to reproduction which marks the lower
animals. But on these people it has all been
wasted. They are at the animal stage still. They
have yet to learn the A. B. C. of love. A repre-
sentative of these people in the person of an
Anglican bishop, the Bishop of Southwark, ap-
peared as a witness before the National Birth-
Rate Commission which, a few years ago, met
in London to investigate the decline of the birth-
rate. He declared that procreation is the sole
legitimate object of marriage and that inter-
course for any other end was a degrading act of

* It is well set forth by the Rev. H. Northcote in his excellent
book, Christianity and Sex Problems.

7« LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

mere "self -gratification." This declaration had
the interesting result of evoking the comments of
many members of the Commission, formed of rep-
resentative men and women with various stand-
points — Protestant, Catholic, and other — and it
is notable that while not one identified himself
with the Bishop's opinion, several decisively op-
posed that opinion, as contrary to the best beliefs
of both ancient and modern times, as represent-
ing a low and not a high moral standpoint, and
as involving the notion that the whole sexual
activity of an individual should be reduced to
perhaps two or three effective acts of inter-
course in a lifetime. Such a notion obviously
cannot be carried into general practice, putting
aside the question as to whether it would be de-
sirable, and it may be added that it would have
the further result of shutting out from the life
of love altogether all those persons who, for
whatever reason, feel that it is their duty to re-
frain from having children at all. It is the atti-
tude of a handful of Pharisees seeking to thrust
the bulk of mankind into Hell. All this confu-
sion and evil comes of the blindness which cannot
know that, beyond the primary animal end of
propagation in marriage, there is a secondary
but more exalted spiritual end.

It is needless to insist how intimately that sec-
ondary end of marriage is bound up with the
practice of birth-control. Without birth-control,

THE OBJECTS OF MARRIAGE 7S

indeed, it could frequently have no existence at
all, and even at the best seldom be free from dis-
concerting possibilities fatal to its very essence.
Against these disconcerting possibilities is often
placed, on the other side, the un-aesthetic nature
of the contraceptives associated with birth-con-
trol. Yet, it must be remembered, they are of a
part with the whole of our civilised human life.
We at no point enter the spiritual save through
the material. Forel has in this connection com-
pared the use of contraceptives to the use of eye-
glasses. Eye-glasses are equally un-aesthetic, yet
they are devices, based on Nature, wherewith to
supplement the deficiencies of Nature. However
in themselves un-aesthetic, for those who need
them they make the aesthetic possible. Eye-
glasses and contraceptives alike are a portal to
the spiritual world for many who, without them,
would find that world largely a closed book.

Birth-control is effecting, and promising to
effect, many functions in our social life. By fur-
nishing the means to limit the size of families,
which would otherwise be excessive, it confers
the greatest benefit on the family and especially
on the mother. By rendering easily possible a
selection in parentage and the choice of the right
time and circumstances for conception it is, again,
the chief key to the eugenic improvement of the
race. There are many other benefits, as is now
generally becoming clear, which will be derived

A

74 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

from the rightly applied practice of birth-control.
To many of us it is not the least of these that
birth-control effects finally the complete libera-
tion of the spiritual object of marriage.

CHAPTER IV
HUSBANDS AND WIVES

It has always been common to discuss the
psychology of women. The psychology of men
has usually been passed over,, whether because it
is too simple or too complicated. But the mar-
riage question to-day is much less the wife-prob-
lem than the husband-problem. Women in their
personal and social activities have been slowly
expanding along lines which are now generally
accepted. But there has been no marked change
of responsive character in the activities of men.
Hence a defective adjustment of men and women,
felt in all sorts of subtle as well as grosser ways,
most felt when they are husband and wife, and
sometimes becoming acute.

It is necessary to make clear that, as is here
assumed at the outset, "man" and "husband" are
not quite the same thing, even when they refer
to the same person. No doubt that is also true
of "woman" and "wife." A woman in her qual-
ity as woman may be a different kind of person
from what she is in her function as wife. But
in the case of a man the distinction is more

75

76 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

marked One may know a man well in the world
as a man and not know him at all in his home
as a husband; not necessarily that he is unfav-
ourably revealed in the latter capacity. It is sim-
ply that he is different.

The explanation is not really far to seek. A
man in the world is in vital response to the influ-
ences around him. But a husband in the home is
playing a part which was created for him long
centuries before he was born. He is falling into
a convention, which, indeed, was moulded to fit
many masculine human needs but has become
rigidly traditionalised. Thus the part no longer
corresponds accurately to the player's nature nor
to the circumstances under which it has to be
played.

In the marriage system which has prevailed
in our world for several thousand years, a cer-
tain hierarchy, or sacred order in authority, has
throughout been recognised. The family has
been regarded as a small State of which the hus-
band and father is head. Classic paganism and
Christianity differed on many points, but they
were completely at one on this. The Roman sys-
tem was on a patriarchal basis and continued to
be so theoretically even when in practise it came
to allow great independence to the wife. Chris-
tianity, although it allowed complete spiritual
freedom to the individual, introduced no fund-
amentally new theory of the family, and, indeed,

HUSBANDS AND WIVES 77

re-in forced the old theory by regarding the fam-
ily as a little church of which the husband was
the head. Just as Christ is the head of the
Church, St. Paul repeatedly asserted, so the hus-
band is the head of the wife; therefore, as it was
constantly argued during the Middle Ages, a
man is bound to rule his wife. St. Augustine,
the most influential of Christian Fathers, even
said that a wife should be proud to consider her-
self as the servant of her husband, his ancilla, a
word that had in it the suggestion of slave. That
was the underlying assumption throughout the
Middle Ages, for the Northern Germanic peo-
ples, having always been accustomed to wife-pur-
chase before their conversion, had found it quite
easy to assimilate the Christian view. Protest-
antism, even Puritanism with its associations of
spiritual revolt, so far from modifying the ac-
cepted attitude, strengthened it, for they found
authority for all social organisation in the Bible,
and the Bible revealed an emphatic predomin-
ance of the Jewish husband, who possessed essen-
tial rights to which the wife had no claim. Mil-
ton, who had the poet's sensitiveness to the
loveliness of woman, and the lonely man's feel-
ing for the solace of her society, was yet firmly
assured of the husband's superiority over his
wife. He has indeed furnished the classical pic-
ture of it in Adam and Eve,

"He for God only, she for God in him,"

TO LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

and to that God she owed "subjection," even
though she might qualify it by "sweet reluctant
amorous delay." This was completely in har-
mony with the legal position of the wife. As a
subject she was naturally in subjection; she
owed her husband the same loyalty as a subject
owes the sovereign; her disloyalty to him was
termed a minor form of treason; if she murdered
him the crime was legally worse than murder
and she rendered herself liable to be burnt.

We see that all the influences on our civili-
sation, religious and secular,, southern and north-
ern, have combined to mould the underlying bony
structure of our family system in such a way that,
however it may appear softened and disguised
on the surface, the husband is the head and the
wife subject to him. We must not be supposed
hereby to deny that the wife has had much au-
thority, many privileges, considerable freedom,
and in individual cases much opportunity to
domineer, whatever superiority custom or brute
strength may have given the husband. There
are henpecked husbands, it has been remarked,
even in aboriginal Australia. It is necessary to
avoid the error of those enthusiasts for the
emancipation of women who,, out of their eager
faith in the future of women, used to describe
her past as one of scarcely mitigated servitude
and hardship. If women had not constantly suc-
ceeded in overcoming or eluding the difficulties

HUSBANDS AND WIVES 79

that beset them in the past, it would be foolish
to cherish any faith in their future. It must,
moreover, be remembered that the very constitu-
tion of that ecclesiastico- feudal hierarchy which
made the husband supreme over the wife, also
made the wife jointly with her husband supreme
over their children and over their servants. The
Middle Ages, alike in England and in France, as
doubtless in Christendom generally, accepted the
rule laid down in Gratian's Decretum, the great
mediaeval text-book of Canon Law, that "the
husband may chastise his wife temperately, for
she is of his household," but the wife might chas-
tise her daughters and her servants, and she
sometimes exercised that right in ways that we
should nowadays think scarcely temperate.

If we seek to observe how the system worked
some five hundred years ago when it had not yet
become, as it is to-day, both weakened and dis-
guised, we cannot do better than turn to the
Paston Letters, the most instructive documents
we possess concerning the domestic life of ex-
cellent yet fairly average people of the upper
middle class in England in the fifteenth century.
Marriage was still frankly and fundamentally
(as it was in the following century and less
frankly later) a commercial transaction. The
wooer,, when he had a wife in view, stated as a
matter of course that he proposed to "deal" in
the matter ; it was quite recognised on both sides

80 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

that love and courtship must depend on whether
the "deal" came off satisfactorily. John Paston
approached Sir Thomas Brews, through a third
person, with a view to negotiate a marriage with
his daughter Margery. She was willing, even
eager, and while the matter was still uncertain
she wrote him a letter on Valentine's Day, ad-
dressing him as "Right reverent and worshipful
and my right well-beloved Valentine," to tell him
that it was impossible for her father to offer a
larger dowry than he had already promised. "If
that you could be content with that good, and my
poor person, I would be the merriest maiden on
ground." In his first letter — boldly written,, he
says, without her knowledge or license — he ad-
dresses her simply as "Mistress," and assures her
that "I am and will be yours and at your com-
mandment in every wise during my life." A few
weeks later, addressing him as "Right worship-
ful master," she calls him "mine own sweet-
heart," and ends up, as she frequently does,
"your servant and bedeswoman." Some months
later, a few weeks after marriage, she addresses
her husband in the correct manner of the time
as "Right reverent and worshipful husband,"
asking him to buy her a gown as she is weary of
wearing her present one, it is so cumbrous. Five
years later she refers to "all" the babies, and
writes in haste: "Right reverent and worshipful
Sir, in my most humble wise I recommend me

HUSBANDS AND WIVES 81

unto you as lowly as I can," etc., though she
adds in a postscript: "Please you to send for
me for I think long since I lay in your arms/'
If we turn to another wife of the Paston family,
a little earlier in the century, Margaret Paston,
whose husband's name also was John, we find the
same attitude even more distinctly expressed.
She always addressed him in her most familiar
letters, showing affectionate concern for his wel-
fare, as "Right reverent and worshipful hus-
band" or "Right worshipful master." It is sel-
dom that he writes to her at all, but when he
writes the superscription is simply "To my mis-
tress Paston," or "my cousin," with little greet-
ing at either beginning or end. Once only, with
unexampled effusion, he writes to her as "My
own dear sovereign lady" and signs himself
"Your true and trusting husband."*

If we turn to France the relation of the wife
to her husband was the same, or even more defin-
itely dependent, for he occupied the place of fa-
ther to her as well as of husband and sovereign,
in this respect carrying on a tradition of Roman
Law. She was her husband's "wife and sub-
ject"; she signed herself "Vostre humble obeis-

* We see just the same formulas in the fifteenth century letters
of the Stonor family (Stonor Letters and Papers, Camden So-
ciety), though in these letters we seem often to find a lighter
and more playful touch than was common among the Pastons.
I may refer here to Dr. Powell's learned and well written book
(with which I was not acquainted when I wrote this chapter),
English Domestic Relations 1 487-1653 (Columbia University
Press).

82 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

sante fille et amye." If also we turn to the Book
of the Chevalier de la Tour-Landry in Anjou,
written at the end of the fourteenth century, we
find a picture of the relations of women to men
in marriage comparable to that presented in the
Paston Letters, though of a different order. This
book was, as we know, written for the instruction
of his daughters by a Knight who seems to have
been a fairly average man of his time in his be-
liefs, and in character, as he has been described,
probably above it, "a man of the world, a Chris-
tian, a parent, and a gentleman." His book is
full of interesting light on the customs and man-
ners of his day, though it is mainly a picture of
what the writer thought ought to be rather than
what always was. Herein the Knight is saga-
cious and moderate, much of his advice is ad-
mirably sound for every age. He is less con-
cerned with affirming the authority of husbands
than with assuring the happiness and well-being
of his dearly loved daughters. But he clearly
finds this bound up with the recognition of the
authority of the husband, and the demands he
makes are fairly concordant with the relation-
ships we see established among the Pastons. The
Knight abounds in illustrations, from Lot's
daughters down to his own time, for the example
or the warning of his daughters. The ideal he
holds up to them is strictly domestic and in a sense
conventional. He puts the matter on practical

HUSBANDS AND WIVES 83

rather than religious or legal grounds, and his
fundamental assumption is "that no woman ought
ever to thwart or refuse to obey the ordinance of
her lord; that is, if she is either desirous to be
mistress of his affections or to have peace and
understanding in the house. For very evident
reasons submission should begin on her part."
One would like to know what duties the Knight
inculcated on husbands, but the corresponding
book he wrote for the guidance of his sons
appears no longer to be extant.

On the whole, the fundamental traditions of
our western world concerning the duties of hus-
bands and wives are well summed up in what
Pollock and Maitland term "that curious cabinet
of antiquities, the marriage ritual of the English
Church." Here we find that the husband prom-
ises to love and cherish the wife, but she prom-
ises not only to love and cherish but also to obey
him, though, it may be noted, this point was not
introduced into English marriage rites until the
fourteenth century, when the wife promised to be
buxom" (which then meant submissive) and
bonair" (courteous and kind), while in some
French and Spanish rites it has never been intro-
duced at all. But we may take it to be generally
implied. In the final address to the married
couple the priest admonishes the bride that
the husband is the head of the wife, and that her
part is submission. In some more ancient and

a
it

84 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

local rituals this point was further driven home,
and on the delivery of the ring the bride knelt
and kissed the bridegroom's right foot. In course
of time this was modified, at all events in France,
and she simply dropped the ring, so that her
motion of stooping was regarded as for the pur-
pose of picking it up. I note that change for it is
significant of the ways in which we modify the
traditions of the past, not quite abandoning them
but pretending that they have other than the
fundamental original motives. We see just the
same thing in the use of the ring, which was in
the first place a part of the bride-price, frequently
accompanied by money, proof that the wife had
been duly purchased. It was thus made easy to
regard the ring as really a golden fetter. That
idea soon became offensive., and the new idea was
originated that the ring was a pledge of affection ;
thus, quite early in some countries, the husband
also wore a wedding ring.

The marriage order illustrated by the Paston
Letters and the Book of the Chevalier de la Tour-
Landry before the Reformation, and the Angli-
can Book of Common Prayer afterwards, has
never been definitely broken; it is a part of our
living tradition to-day. But during recent cen-
turies it has been overlaid by the growth of new
fashions and sentiments which have softened its
hard outlines to the view. It has been disguised,
notably during the eighteenth century, by the

HUSBANDS AND WIVES 85

development of a new feeling of social equality,
chiefly initiated in France, which, in an atmo-
sphere of public intercourse largely regulated by
women, made the ostentatious assertion of the
husband's headship over his wife displeasing and
even ridiculous. Then, especially in the nine-
teenth century, there began another movement,
chiefly initiated in England and carried further
in America, which affected the foundations of
the husband's position from beneath. This move-
ment consisted in a great number of legislative
measures and judicial pronouncements and ad-
ministrative orders — each small in itself and
never co-ordinated — which taken altogether have
had a cumulative effect in immensely increasing
the rights of the wife independently of her hus-
band or even in opposition to him. Thus at the
present time the husband's authority has been
overlaid by new social conventions from above
and undermined by new legal regulations from
below.

Yet, it is important to realise, although the
husband's domestic throne has been in appear-
ance elegantly re-covered and in substance has
become worm-eaten, it still stands and still re-
tains its ancient shape and structure. There has
never been a French Revolution in the home, and
that Revolution itself, which modified society so
extensively, scarcely modified the legal suprem-
acy of the husband at all, even in France under

86 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

the Code Napoleon and still less anywhere else.
Interwoven with all the new developments, and
however less obtrusive it may have become, the
old tradition still continues among us. Since,
also, the husband is, conventionally and in large
measure really, the economic support of the
home, — the work of the wife and even actual
financial contributions brought by her not being
supposed to affect that convention, — this state
of things is held to be justified.

Thus when a man enters the home as a hus-
band, to seat himself on the antique domestic
throne and to play the part assigned to him of
old, he is involuntarily, even unconsciously, fol-
lowing an ancient tradition and taking his place
in a procession of husbands which began long
ages before he was born. It thus comes about
that a man, even after he is married, and a hus-
band are two different persons, so that his wife
who mainly knows him as a husband may be un-
able to form any just idea of what he is like as
a man. As a husband he has stepped out of the
path that belongs to him in the world, and taken
on another part which has called out altogether
different reactions, so he is sometimes a much
more admirable person in one of these spheres —
whichever it may be — than in the other.

We must not be surprised if the husband's posi-
tion has sometimes developed those qualities
which from the modern point of view are the less

HUSBANDS AND WIVES 87

admirable. In this respect the sovereign hus-
band resembles the Sovereign State. The Sov-
ereign State, as it has survived from Renais-
sance days in our modern world, may be made
up of admirable people, yet as a State they are
forced into an attitude of helpless egoism which
nowadays fails to commend itself to the outside
world, and the tendency of scientific jurists to-
day is to deal very critically with the old con-
ception of the Sovereign State. It is so with
the husband in the home. He was thrust by
ancient tradition into a position of sovereignty
which impelled him to play a part of helpless
egoism. He was a celestial body in the home
around which all the other inmates were revolv-
ing satellites. The hours of rising and retiring,
the times of meals and their nature and substance,
all the activities of the household — in which he
himself takes little or no part — are still arranged
primarily to suit his work, his play, and his
tastes. This is an accepted matter of course, and
not the result of any violent self-assertion on his
part. It is equally an accepted matter of course
that the wife should be constantly occupied in
keeping this little solar system in easy harmoni-
ous movement, evolving from it, if she has the
skill, the music of the spheres. She has no rec-
ognised independent personality of her own, nor
even any right to go away by herself for a little
change and recreation. Any work of her own,

88 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

play of her own,, tastes of her own, must be
strictly subordinated, if not suppressed alto-
gether.

In the old days, from which our domestic tra-
ditions proceed, little hardship was thus inflicted
on the wife. Her rights and privileges were, in-
deed, far less than those of the modern woman,
but for that very reason the home offered her a
larger field; beneath the shelter of her husband
the irresponsible wife might exert a maximum of
influential activity with a minimum of rights
and privileges of her own. To many men, even
to-day, that state of things seems the realisation
of an ideal.

Yet to women it seems increasingly less so,
and of necessity since the cleavage between the
position of woman in society and law, and the
position of the wife in the sacramental bonds of
wedlock, is daily becoming greater. To-day a
woman, who possibly for ten years has been lead-
ing her own life of independent work, earning
her own living, choosing her own conditions in
accordance with her own needs, and selecting her
own periods of recreation in accordance with her
own tastes, whether or not this may have in-
cluded the society of a man-friend — such a
woman suddenly finds on marriage, and with-
out any assertion of authority on her husband's
part, that all the outward circumstances of her
life are reversed and all her inner spontaneous

HUSBANDS AND WIVES 89

movements arrested. There may be no signs of
this on the surface of her conduct She loves her
husband too much to wish to hurt his feelings by
explaining the situation, and she values domestic
peace too much to risk friction by making unex-
pected claims. But beneath the surface there is
often a profound discontent, and even in women
who thought they had gained an insight into life,
a sense of disillusion. Everyone knows this who
is privileged to catch a glimpse into the hearts
of women — often women of most distinguished
intelligence as well as women of quite ordinary
nature — who leave a life of spontaneous activity
in the world to enter the home.*

It is not to be supposed that in this presenta-
tion of the situation in the home, as it is to-day
visible to those who are privileged to see beneath
the surface, any accusation is brought against

♦While this condition of things is sometimes to be found in
the more distinguished minority and in well-to-do families, it
is, of course, among the great labouring majority that it is
most conspicuous. Mrs. Will Crooks, of Poplar, speaking to a
newspaper reporter (Daily Chronicle, 17 Feb., 1919), truly re-
marked : "At present the average married woman's working day
is a flagrant contradiction of all trade-union ideals. The poor
thing is slaving all the time! What she needs — what she longs
for — is just a little break or change now and again, an oppor-
tunity to get her mind off her work and its worries. If her '
husband's hours are reduced to eight, well that gives her a
chance, doesn't it? The home and the children are, after all,
as much his as hers. With his enlarged leisure he will now be
able to take a fair share in home duties. I suggest that they take
it turn and turn about— one night he goes out and she looks
after the house and the children; the next night she goes out
and he takes charge of things at home. She can sometimes go
to the cinema, sometimes call on friends. Then, say once a
week, they can both go out together, taking the children with
them. That will be a Tittle change and treat for everybody."

90 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

the husband. He is no more guilty of an unrea-
sonable conservatism than the wife is guilty of
an unreasonable radicalism. Each of them is the
outcome of a tradition. The point is that the
events of the past hundred years have produced a
discrepancy in the two lines of tradition, with a
resultant lack of harmony, independent of the
goodwill of either husband or wife.

Olive Schreiner, in her Woman and Labour,
has eloquently set forth the tendency to parasit-
ism which civilisation produces in women; they
no longer exercise the arts and industries which
were theirs in former ages, and so they become
economically dependent on men, losing their en-
ergies and aptitudes, and becoming like those dull
parasitic animals which live as blood-suckers of
their host. That picture, which was of course
never true of all women, is now ceasing to be
true of any but a negligible minority ; it presents,
moreover, a parasitism limited to the economic
side of life. For if the wife has often been a
lazy gold-sucking parasite on her husband in the
world, the husband has yet oftener been a help-
less service-absorbing parasite on his wife in the
home. There is, that is to say, not only an eco-
nomic parasitism with no adequate return for
financial support, but a still more prevalent do-
mestic parasitism, with an absorption of services
for which no return would be adequate. There
are many helpful husbands in the home, but there

HUSBANDS AND WIVES 91

are a larger number who are helpless and have
never been trained to be anything else but help-
less, even by their wives, who would often detest
a rival in household work and management. The
average husband enjoys the total effect of his
home but is usually unable to contribute any of
the details of work and organisation that make
it enjoyable. He cannot keep it in order and
cleanliness and regulated movement, he seldom
knows how to buy the things that are needed for
its upkeep, nor how to prepare and cook and
present a decent meal; he cannot even attend to
his own domestic needs. It is the wife's consola-
tion that most husbands are not always at home.
"In ministering to the wants of the family,
the woman has reduced man to a state of con-
siderable dependency on her in all domestic af-
fairs, just as she is dependent on him for bodily
protection. In the course of ages this has gone
so far as to foster a peculiar helplessness on the
part of the man, which manifests itself in a some-
what childlike reliance of the husband on the
wife. In fact it may be said that the husband is,
to all intents and purposes, incapable of main-
taining himself without the aid of a woman."
This passage will probably seem to many readers
to apply quite fairly well to men as they exist to-
day in most of those lands •which we consider at
the summit of our civilisation. Yet it was not
written of civilisation, or of white men, but of

98 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

the Bantu tribes of East Africa,* complete Ne-
groes who, while far from being among the low-
est savages, belong to a culture which is only
just emerging from cannibalism, witchcraft, and
customary bloodshed. So close a resemblance
between the European husband and the Negro
husband significantly suggests how remarkable
has been the arrest of development in the hus-
band's customary status during a vast period of
the world's history.

It is in the considerable group of couples where
the husband's work separates him but little from
the home that the pressure on the wife is most
severe, and without the relief and variety secured
by his frequent absence. She has perhaps led a
life of her own before marriage, she knows how
to be economically independent ; now they occupy
a small dwelling, they have, maybe, one or two
small children, they can only afford one helper
in the work or none at all, and in this busy little
hive the husband and wife are constantly tumb-
ling over each other. It is small wonder if the
wife feels a deep discontent beneath her willing
ministrations and misses the devotion of the lover
in the perpetual claims of the husband.

But the difficulty is not settled if she persuades
him to take a room outside. He is devoted to his
wife and his home,, with good reason, for the

♦Hon. C. Dundas, Journal of the Anthropological Institute,
Vol. 45, 1915, p. 302.

HUSBANDS AND WIVES 99

wife makes the home and he is incapable of mak-
ing a home. His new domestic arrangements
sink into careless and sordid disorder, and he is
conscious of profound discomfort. His wife soon
realises that it is a choice between his return to
the home and complete separation. Most wives
never get even as far as this attempt at solution
of the difficulty and hide their secret discontent.

This is the situation which to-day is becoming
intensified and extended on a vast scale. The
habit and the taste for freedom, adventure, and
economic independence is becoming generated
among millions of women who once meekly trod
the ancient beaten paths, and we must not be so
foolish as to suppose that they can suddenly re-
nounce those habits and tastes at the threshold of
marriage. Moreover, it is becoming clear to men
and to women alike, and for the first time, that
the world can be remoulded, and that the claims
for better conditions of work, for a higher stand-
ard of life, and for the attainment of leisure,
which previously had only feebly been put for-
ward, may now be asserted drastically. We see
therefore to-day a great revolutionary movement,
mainly on the part of men in the world of Labour,
and we see a corresponding movement, however
less ostentatious, mainly on the part of women,
in the world of the Home.

It may seem to some that this new movement
of upheaval in the sphere of the Home is merely

94 LITTLE ESSAYS OP LOVE AND VIRTUE

destructive. Timid souls have felt the like in
every period of transition, and with as little rea-
son. Just as we realise that the movement now
in progress in the world of Labour for a higher
standard of life and for, as it has been termed,
a larger "leisure-ration/' represents a wholesome
revolt against the crushing conditions of pro-
longed monotonous work — the most deadening
of all work — and a real advance towards those
ideals of democracy which are still so remote, so
it is with the movement in the Home. That also
is the claim for a new and fairer allotment of
responsibility, of larger opportunities for free-
dom and leisure. If in the home the husband is
still to be regarded as the capitalist and the wife
as the labourer, then at all events it has to be
recognised that he owes her not only the satis-
faction of her physical needs of food and shelter
and clothing, but the opportunity to satisfy the
personal spontaneous claims of her own indi-
vidual nature. Just as the readjustment of
Labour is really only an approach to the long
recognised ideals of Democracy, so the read-
justment of the Home, far from being subversive
or revolutionary, is merely an approximation to
the long recognised ideals of marriage.

How in practice, one may finally ask, is this
readjustment of the home likely to be carried
out?

In the first place we are justified in believing

HUSBANDS AND WIVES 95

that in the future home men will no longer be so
helpless, so domestically parasitic,, as in the past.
This change is indeed already coming about. It
is an inestimable benefit throughout life for a
man to have been forcibly lifted out of the rou-
tine comforts and feminine services of the old-
fashioned home and to be thrown into an alien
and solitary environment, face to face with
Nature and the essential domestic human needs
(in my own case I owe an inestimable debt to the
chance that thus flung me into the Australian
bush in early life), and one may note that the
Great War has had, directly and indirectly, a re-
markable influence in this direction, for it not
only compelled women to exercise many enlarg-
ing and fortifying functions commonly counted
as pertaining to men, it also compelled men,
deprived of accustomed feminine services, to de-
velop a new independent ability for organising
domesticity, and that ability, even though it is
not permanently exercised in rendering domestic
services, must yet always make clear the nature
of domestic problems and tend to prevent the
demand for unnecessary domestic services.

But there is another quite different and more
general line along which we may expect this
problem to be largely solved. That is by the
simplification and organisation of domestic life.
If that process were carried to the full extent
that is now becoming possible a large part of the

96 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

problem before us would be at once solved. A
great promise for the future of domestic life is
held out by the growing adoption of birth-con-
trol, by which the wife and mother is relieved
from that burden of unduly frequent and un-
wanted maternity which in the past so often
crushed her vitality and destroyed her freshness.
But many minor agencies are helpful. To sup-
ply heat, light,, and motive power even to small
households, to replace the wasteful, extravagant,
and often inefficient home-cookery by meals
cooked outside, as well as to facilitate the grow-
ing social habit of taking meals in spacious public
restaurants, under more attractive, economical,
and wholesome conditions than can usually be
secured within the narrow confines of the home,
to contract with specially trained workers from
outside for all those routines of domestic
drudgery which are often so inefficiently and
laboriously carried on by the household-worker,
whether mistress or servant, and to seek perpetu-
ally by new devices to simplify, which often
means to beautify, all the everyday processes of
life — to effect this in any comprehensive degree
is to transform the home from the intolerable
burden it is sometimes felt to be into a possible
haven of peace and joy.* The trouble in the past,

* This aspect of the future of domesticity was often set forth
by Mrs. Havelock Ellis, The New Horizon in Love and Life,
1021.

HUSBANDS AND WIVES 97

and even to-day, has been, not in any difficulty
in providing the facilities but in prevailing people
to adopt them. Thus in England, even under the
stress of the Great War, there was among the
working population a considerable disinclination
— founded on stupid conservatism and a mean-
ingless pride — to take advantage of National
Kitchens and National Restaurants, notwith-
standing the superiority of the meals in quality,
cheapness, and convenience, to the workers' home
meals, so that many of these establishments, even
while still fostered by the Government, had
speedily to close their doors. Ancient traditions,
that have now become not only empty but mis-
chievous, in these matters still fetter the wife
even more than the husband. We cannot regu-
late even the material side of life without culti-
vating that intelligence in the development of
which civilisation so largely consists.

Intelligence, and even something more than
intelligence, is needed along the thifd line of
progress towards the modernised home. Simpli-
fication and organisation can effect nothing in
the desired transformation if they merely end
in themselves. They are only helpful in so far
as they economise energy, offer a more ample
leisure, and extend the opportunities for that
play of the intellect,, that liberation of the emo-
tions with accompanying discipline of the primi-
tive instincts, which are needed not only for the

98 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

development of civilisation in general, but in
particular of the home. Domineering egotism,
the assertion of greedy possessive rights, are out
of place in the modern home. They are just as
mischievous when exhibited by the wife as by
the husband. We have seen, as we look back,
the futility in the end of the ancient structure of
the home, however reasonable it was at the be-
ginning, under our different modern social con-
ditions, and for women to attempt nowadays to
reintroduce the same structure, merely reversed,
would be not only mischievous but silly. That
spirit of narrow exclusiveness and self centred
egoism — even if it were sometimes an egoisme
d deux — evoked, half a century ago, the scathing
sarcasm of James Hinton, who never wearied
of denouncing the "virtuous and happy homes"
which he saw as "floating blotches of verdure on
a sea of filth." Such outbursts seem extrava-
gant, but they were the extravagance of an ideal-
ist at the vision which, as a physician in touch
with realities, he had seen beneath the surface of
the home.

It is well to insist on the organisation of the
mechanical and material side of life. Some lead-
ers of women movements feel this so strongly
that they insist on nothing else. In old days it
was conventionally supposed that women's sphere
was that of the feelings ; the result has been that
women now often take ostentatious pleasure in

HUSBANDS AND WIVES 99

washing their hands of feelings and accusing
men of "sentiment." But that wrongly debased
word stands for the whole superstructure of life
on the basis of material organisation, for all the
finer and higher parts of our nature, for the
greater part of civilisation.* The elaboration of
the mechanical side of life by itself may merely
serve to speed up the pace of life instead of ex-
panding leisure., to pile up the weary burden of
luxury, and still further to dissipate the energy
of life in petty or frivolous channels.f To bring
order into the region of soulless machinery
running at random, to raise the super-structure
of a genuinely human civilisation, is not a task
which either men or women can afford to fling
contemptuously to the opposite sex. It concerns
them both equally and can only be carried out
by both equally, working side by side in the most
intimate spirit of mutual comprehension, con-
fiding trust, and the goodwill to conquer the

♦"The growth of the sentiments," remarks an influential
psychologist of our own time (W. McDougall, Social Psychology,
p. 1 60), "is of the utmost importance for the character and con-
duct of individuals and of societies ; it is the organisation of the
affective and conative life. In the absence of sentiments our
emotional life would be a mere chaos, without order, consistency,
or continuity of any kind; and all our social relations and con-
duct, being based on the emotions and their impulses would be
correspondingly chaotic, unpredictable, and unstable. . . . Again,
our judgments of value and of merit are rooted in our senti-
ments ; and our moral principles have the same source, for they
are formed by our judgments of moral value."

tThe destructive effects of the mechanisation of modern life
have lately been admirably set forth, and with much precise
illustration, by Dr. Austin Freeman, Social Decay and Regenera-
tion.

100 LITTLE ESSAYS OP LOVE AND VIRTUE

demon of jealousy, that dragon which slays love
under the pretence of keeping it alive.

This task, it may finally be added, is always
an adventure. However well organised the
foundations of life may be, life must always be
full of risks. We may smile, therefore, when it
is remarked that the future developments of the
home are risky. Birds in the air and fishes in
the sea, quite as much as our own ancestors on
the earth, have always found life full of risks.
It was the greatest risk of all when they insisted
on continuing on the old outworn ways and so
became extinct. If the home is an experiment
and a risky experiment, one can only say that life
is always like that. We have to see to it that in
this central experiment, on which our happiness
so largely depends, all our finest qualities are
mobilised. Even the smallest homes under the
new conditions cannot be built to last with small
minds and small hearts. Indeed the discipline
of the home demands not only the best intellectual
qualities that are available, but often involves —
and in men as well as in women — a spiritual
training fit to make. sweeter and more generous
saints than any cloister. The greater the free-
dom, the more complete the equality of husband
and wife, the greater the possibilities of discipline
and development. In view of the rigidities and
injustices of the law, many couples nowadays
dispense with legal marriage, and form their own

HUSBANDS AND WIVES 101

private contract; that method has sometimes
proved more favourable to the fidelity and per-
manence of love than external compulsion; it
assists the husband to remain the lover, and it
is often the lover more than the husband that the
modern woman needs; but it has always to be
remembered that in the present condition of law
and social opinion a slur is cast on the children
of such unions. No doubt, however, marriage
and the home will undergo modifications, which
will tend to make these ancient institutions a little
more flexible and to permit a greater degree of
variation to meet special circumstances. We can
occupy ourselves with no more essential task,
whether as regards ourselves or the race, than
to make more beautiful the House of Life for
the dwelling of Love,

CHAPTER V
THE LOVE-RIGHTS OF WOMEN

What is the part of woman, one is sometimes
asked, in the sex act? Must it be the wife's con-
cern in the marital embrace to sacrifice her own
wishes from a sense of love and duty towards
her husband? Or is the wife entitled to an equal
mutual interest and joy in this act with her hus-
band? It seems a simple problem. In so funda-
mental a relationship, which goes back to the
beginning of sex in the dawn of life, it might
appear that we could leave Nature to decide.
Yet it is not so. Throughout the history of
civilisation,, wherever we can trace the feelings
and ideas which have prevailed on this matter
and the resultant conduct, the problem has ex-
isted, often to produce discord, conflict, and
misery. The problem still exists to-day and with
as important results as in the past.

In Nature, before the arrival of Man, it can
scarcely be said indeed that any difficulty existed.
It was taken for granted at that time that the
female had both the right to her own body, and
the right to a certain amount of enjoyment in

102

THE LOVE-RIGHTS OF WOMEN 109

the use of it. It often cost the male a serious
amount of trouble — though he never failed to
find it worth while — to explain to her the point
where he may be allowed to come in, and to per-
suade her that he can contribute to her enjoy-
ment. So it generally is throughout Nature,
before we reach Man, and, though it is not in-
variably obvious, we often find it even among
the unlikeliest animals. As is well known, it is
most pronounced among the birds, who have in
some species carried the erotic art, — and the
faithful devotion which properly accompanied
the erotic art as being an essential part of it, —
to the highest point. We have here the great
natural fact of courtship. Throughout Nature,
wherever we meet with animals of a high type,
often indeed when they are of a lowly type-
provided they have not been rendered unnatural
by domestication— every act of sexual union is
preceded by a process of courtship. There is a
sound physiological reason for this courtship,
for in the act of wooing and being wooed the
psychic excitement gradually generated in the
brains of the two partners acts as a stimulant
to arouse into full activity the mechanism which
ensures sexual union and aids ultimate impregna-
tion. Such courtship is thus a fundamental
natural fact.

It is as a natural fact that we still find it in
full development among a large number of peo-

104 LITTLE ESSAYS OP LOVE AND VIRTUE

pies of the lower races whom we are accustomed
to regard as more primitive than ourselves. New
conditions, it is true, soon enter to complicate
the picture presented by savage courtship. The
economic element of bargaining, destined to
prove so important, comes in at an early stage.
And among peoples leading a violent life, and
constantly fighting, it has sometimes happened,
though not always, that courtship also has been
violent. This is not so frequent as was once
supposed. With better knowledge it was found
that the seeming brutality once thought to take
the place of courtship among various peoples in
a low state of culture was really itself courtship,
a rough kind of play agreeable to both parties
and not depriving the feminine partner of her
own freedom of choice. This was notably the
case as regards so-called "marriage by capture."
While this is sometimes a real capture, it is more
often a mock capture; the lover perhaps pursues
the beloved on horseback, but she is as fleet and
as skilful as he is, cannot be captured unless
she wishes to be captured, and in addition, as
among the Kirghiz, she may be armed with a
formidable whip; so that "marriage by capture,"
far from being a hardship imposed on women is
largely a concession to their modesty and a grati-
fication of their erotic impulses. Even when the
chief part of the decision rests with masculine
force courtship is still not necessarily or usually

THE LOVE-RIGHTS OF WOMEN 105

excluded, for the exhibition of force by a lover,
— and this is true for civilised as well as for
savage women, — is itself a source of pleasurable
stimulation, and when that is so the essence of
courtship may be attained even more successfully
by the forceful than by the humble lover.

The evolution of society, however, tended to
overlay and sometimes even to suppress those
fundamental natural tendencies. The position of
the man as the sole and uncontested head of the
family, the insistence on paternity and male
descent, the accompanying economic develop-
ments, and the tendency to view a woman less as
a self -disposing individual than as an object of
barter belonging to her father, the consequent
rigidity of the marriage bond and the stern in-
sistence on wifely fidelity — all these conditions
of developing civilisation, while still leaving
courtship possible, diminished its significance and
even abolished its necessity. Moreover, on the
basis of the social, economic, and legal develop-
ments thus established, new moral, spiritual, and
religious forces were slowly generated, which
worked on these rules of merely exterior order,
and interiorised them, thus giving them power
over the souls as well as over the bodies of
women.

The result was that, directly and indirectly,
the legal, economic, and erotic rights of women

106 LITTLE ESSAYS OP LOVE AND VIRTUE

were all diminished. It is with the erotic rights
only that we are here concerned.

No doubt in its erotic aspects, as well as in
its legal and economic aspects, the social order
thus established was described, and in good faith,
as beneficial to women, and even as maintained
in their interests* Monogamy and the home, it
was claimed, alike existed for the benefit and
protection of women. It was not so often ex-
plained that they greatly benefited and protected
men, with, moreover, this additional advantage
that while women were absolutely confined to
the home, men were free to exercise their activi-
ties outside the home, even, with tacit general
consent, on the erotic side.

Whatever the real benefits, and there is no
occasion for questioning them, of the sexual
order thus established, it becomes clear that in
certain important respects it had an unnatural
and repressive influence on the erotic aspect of
woman's sexual life. It fostered the reproductive
side of woman's sexual life, but it rendered
difficult for her the satisfaction of the instinct
for that courtship which is the natural prelimi-
nary of reproductive activity, an instinct even
more highly developed in the female than in the
male,, and the more insistent because in the order
of Nature the burden of maternity is preceded
by the reward of pleasure. But the marriage
order which had become established led to the

THE LOVE-RIGHTS OF WOMEN 107

indirect result of banning pleasure in women, or
at all events in wives. It was regarded as too
dangerous, and even as degrading. The women
who wanted pleasure were not considered fit for
the home, but more suited to be devoted to an
exclusive "life of pleasure," which soon turned
out to be not their own pleasure but men's. A
"life of pleasure," in that sense or in any other
sense, was not what more than a small minority
of women ever desired. The desire of women
for courtship is not a thing by itself, and was
not implanted for gratification by itself. It is
naturally intertwined — and to a much greater
degree than the corresponding desire in men —
with her deepest personal, family, and social in-
stincts, so that if these are desecrated and lost its
charm soon fades.

The practices and the ideals of this established
morality were both due to men, and both were so
thoroughly fashioned that they subjugated alike
the actions and the feelings of women. There is
no sphere which we regard as so peculiarly
women's sphere as that of love. Yet there is no
sphere which in civilisation women have so far
had so small a part in regulating. Their deepest
impulses — their modesty, their maternity, their
devotion, their emotional receptivity — were used,
with no conscious and deliberate Machiavellism,
against themselves, to mould a moral world for
their habitation which they would not themselves

108 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

have moulded. It is not of modern creation, nor
by any means due, as some have supposed, to the
asceticism of Christianity, however much Chris-
tianity may have reinforced it. Indeed one may
say that in course of time Christianity had an
influence in weakening it, for Christianity dis-
covered a new reservoir of tender emotion, and
such emotion may be transferred, and, as a mat-
ter of fact, was transferred, from its first re-
ligious channel into erotic channels which were
thereby deepened and extended, and without
reference to any design of Christianity. For the
ends we achieve are often by no means those
which we set out to accomplish. In ancient
classic days this moral order was even more
severely established than in the Middle Ages.
Montaigne, in the sixteenth century, declared
that "marriage is a devout and religious relation-
ship, the pleasures derived from it should be
restrained and serious, mixed with some sever-
ity." But in this matter he was not merely
expressing the Christian standpoint but even
tnore that of paganism, and he thoroughly agreed
with the old Greek moralist that a man should
approach his wife "prudently and sever ely" for
fear of inciting her to lasciviousness ; he thought
that marriage was best arranged by a third party,
and was inclined to think, with the ancients, that
women are not fitted to make friends of.
Montaigne has elsewhere spoken with insight of

THE LOVE-RIGHTS OF WOMEN 109

women's instinctive knowledge of the art and
discipline of love and has pointed out how men
have imposed their own ideals and rules of action
on women from whom they have demanded op-
posite and contradictory virtues; yet, we see, he
approves of this state of things and never sug-
gests that women have any right to opinions of
their own or feelings of their own when the
sacred institution of marriage is in question.

Montaigne represents the more exalted aspects
of the Pagan-Christian conception of morality
in marriage which still largely prevails. But that
conception lent itself to deductions, frankly ac-
cepted even by Montaigne himself, which were
by no means exalted. "I find," said Montaigne,
"that Venus, after all, is nothing more than the
pleasure of discharging our vessels, just as
nature renders pleasurable the discharges from
other parts." Sir Thomas More among Cath-
olics, and Luther among Protestants, said exactly
the same thing in other and even clearer words,
while untold millions of husbands in Christen-
dom down to to-day, whether or not they have
had the wit to put their theory into a phrase,
have regularly put it into practice, at all events
within the consecrated pale of marriage, and
treated their wives, "severely and prudently," as
convenient utensils for the reception of a natural
excretion.

Obviously, in this view of marriage, sexual

110 LITTLL ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

activity was regarded as an exclusively masculine
function* in the exercise of which women had
merely a passive part to play. Any active par-
ticipation on her side thus seemed unnecessary,
and even unbefitting, finally, though only in com-
paratively modern times, disgusting and actually
degrading. Thus Acton, who was regarded half
a century ago as the chief English authority on
sexual matters, declared that, "happily for so-
ciety," the supposition that women possess sexual
feelings could be put aside as "a vile aspersion,"
while another medical authority of the same
period stated in regard to the most simple physical
sign of healthy sexual emotion that it "only hap-
pens in lascivious women." This final triumph
of the masculine ideals and rule of life was,
however, only achieved slowly. It was the cul-
mination of an elaborate process of training. At
the outset men had found it impossible to speak
too strongly of the "wantonness" of women.
This attitude was pronounced among the ancient
Greeks and prominent in their dramatists.
Christianity again, which ended by making
women into the chief pillars of the Church, be-
gan by regarding them as the "Gate of Hell."
Again, later,, when in the Middle Ages this
masculine moral order approached the task of
subjugating the barbarians of Northern Europe,
men were horrified at the licentiousness of those

THE LOVE-RIGHTS OF WOMEN 111

northern women at whose coldness they are now
shocked.

That, indeed, was, as Montaigne had seen, the
central core of conflict in the rule of life imposed
by men on woman. Men were perpetually
striving, by ways the most methodical, the most
subtle, the most far-reaching, to achieve a result
in women, which, when achieved, men themselves
viewed with dismay. They may be said to be
moved in this sphere by two passions, the passion
for virtue and the passion for vice. But it so
happens that both these streams of passion have
to be directed at the same fascinating object:
Woman. No doubt nothing is more admirable
than the skill with which women have acquired
the duplicity necessary to play the two contra-
dictory parts thus imposed upon them. But in
that requirement the play of their natural re-
actions tended to become paralysed, and the
delicate mechanism of their instincts often dis-
turbed. They were forbidden, except in a few
carefully etiquetted forms, the free play of
courtship, without which they could not perform
their part in the erotic life with full satisfaction
either to themselves or their partners. They
were reduced to an artificial simulation of cold-
ness or of warmth, according to the particular
stage of the dominating masculine ideal of wo-
man which their partner chanced to have reached.
But that is an attitude equally unsatisfactory to

11« LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

themselves and to their lovers, even when the lat-
ter have not sufficient insight to see through its
unreality. It is an attitude so unnatural and
artificial that it inevitably tends to produce a real
coldness which nothing can disguise. It is true
that women whose instincts are not perverted at
the roots do not desire to be cold. Far from it.
But to dispel that coldness the right atmosphere
is needed, and the insight and skill of the right
man. In the erotic sphere a woman asks nothing
better of a man than to be lifted above her cold-
ness, to the higher plane where there is reciprocal
interest and mutual joy in the act of love.
Therein her silent demand is one with Nature's.
For the biological order of the world involves
those claims which, in the human range, are the
erotic rights of women.

The social claims of women, their economic
claims, their political claims, have long been be-
fore the world. Women themselves have actively
asserted them, and they are all in process of
realisation. The erotic claims of women, which
are at least as fundamental, are not publicly
voiced, and women themselves would be the last

*

to assert them. It is easy to understand why that
should be so. The natural and acquired qualities
of women, even the qualities developed in the art
of courtship, have all been utilised in building up
the masculine ideal of sexual morality; it is on
feminine characteristics that this masculine ideal

THE LOVE-RIGHTS OF WOMEN 113

has been based, so that women have been helpless
to protest against it. Moreover, even if that
were not so,, to formulate such rights is to raise
the question whether there so much as exists
anything that can be called "erotic rights." The
right to joy cannot be claimed in the same way
as one claims the right to put a voting paper in
a ballot box. A human being's erotic aptitudes
can only be developed where the right atmosphere
for them exists, and where the attitudes of both
persons concerned are in harmonious sympathy.
That is why the erotic rights of women have been
the last of all to be attained.

Yet to-day we see a change here. The change
required is, it has been said, a change of attitude
and a resultant change in the atmosphere in
which the sexual impulses are manifested. It
involves no necessary change in the external
order of our marriage system, for, as has already
been pointed out, it was a coincident and not
designed part of that order. Various recent lines
of tendency have converged to produce this
change of attitude and of atmosphere. In part
the men of to-day are far more ready than the
men of former days to look upon women as their
comrades in the every day work of the world,
instead of as beings who were ideally on a level
above themselves and practically on a level con-
siderably below themselves. In part there is the
growing recognition that women have conquered

114 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

many elementary human rights of which before
they were deprived, and are more and more tak-
ing the position of citizens., with the same kinds of
duties, privileges, and responsibilities as men. In
part, also, it may be added, there is a growing
diffusion among educated people of a knowledge
of the primary facts of life in the two sexes,
slowly dissipating and dissolving many foolish
and often mischievous superstitions. The result
is that, as many competent observers have noted,
the young men of to-day show a new attitude
towards women and towards marriage, an atti-
tude of simplicity and frankness,, a desire for
mutual confidence, a readiness to discuss diffi-
culties, an appeal to understand and to be under-
stood. Such an attitude, which had hitherto
been hard to attain, at once creates the atmos-
phere in which alone the free spontaneous erotic
activities of women can breathe and live.

This consummation, we have seen, may be re-
garded as the attainment of certain rights, the
corollary of other rights in the social field which
women are slowly achieving as human beings on
the same human level as men. It opens to wo-
men, on whom is always laid the chief burden
of sex, the right to the joy and exaltation of sex,
to the uplifting of the soul which, when the right
conditions are fulfilled, is the outcome of the
intimate approach and union of two human
beings. Yet while we may find convenient so to

THE LOVE-RIGHTS OF WOMEN 115

formulate it, we need to remember that that is
only a fashion of speech, for there are no rights
in Nature. If we take a broader sweep, what we
may choose to call an erotic right is simply the
perfect poise of the conflicting forces of life,
the rhythmic harmony in which generation is
achieved with the highest degree of perfection
compatible with the make of the world. It is our
part to transform Nature's large conception into
our own smaller organic mould, not otherwise
than the plants, to whom we are far back akin,
who dig their flexible roots deep into the moist
and fruitful earth, and so are able to lift up
glorious heads toward the sky.

CHAPTER VI
THE PLAY-FUNCTION OF SEX

When we hear the sexual functions spoken of
we commonly understand the performance of an
act which normally tends to the propagation of
the race. When we see the question of sexual
abstinence discussed, when the desirability of
sexual gratification is asserted or denied, when
the idea arises of the erotic rights and needs of
woman, it is always the same act with its physical
results that is chiefly in mind. Such a conception
is quite adequate for practical working purposes
in the social world. It enables us to deal with
all our established human institutions in the
sphere of sex, as the arbitrary assumptions of
Euclid enable us to traverse the field of elemen-
tary geometry. But beyond these useful purposes
it is inadequate and even inexact. The functions
of sex on the psychic and erotic side are of far
greater extension than any act of procreation,
they may even exclude it altogether, and when
we are concerned with the welfare of the indi-
vidual human being we must enlarge our outlook
and deepen our insight.

116

THE PLAY-FUNCTION OF SEX 117

There are,, we know, two main functions in the
sexual relationship, or what in the biological
sense we term "marriage/' among civilised hu-
man beings, the primary physiological function
of begetting and bearing offspring and the sec-
ondary spiritual function of furthering the
higher mental and emotional processes. These
are the main functions of the sexual impulse, and
in order to understand any further object of the
sexual relationship— or even in order to under-
stand all that is involved in the secondary object
of marriage — we must go beyond conscious mo-
tives and consider the nature of the sexual im-
pulse, physical and psychic, as rooted in the
human organism.

The human organism, as we know, is a ma-
chine on which excitations from without, stream-
ing through the nerves and brain, effect internal
work, and, notably, stimulate the glandular
system. In recent years the glandular system,
and especially that of the ductless glands, has
taken on an altogether new significance. These
ductless glands, as we know, liberate into the
blood what are termed "hormones," or chemical
messengers., which have a complex but precise ac-
tion in exciting and developing all those physical
and psychic activities which make up a full life
alike on the general side and the reproductive side,
so that their balanced functions are essential to

118 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

wholesome and complete existence. In a rudi-
mentary form these functions may be traced back
to our earliest ancestors who possessed brains.
In those times the predominant sense for arous-
ing the internal mental and emotional faculties
was that of smell, the other senses being gradu-
ally evolved subsequently, and it is significant
that the pituitary, one of the chief ductless glands
active in ourselves to-day, was developed out of
the nervous centre for smell in conjunction with
the membrane of the mouth. The energies of the
whole organism were set in action through
stimuli arising from the outside world by way
of the sense of smell. In process of time the
mechanism has become immensely elaborated.,
yet its healthy activity is ultimately dependent
on a rich and varied action and reaction with the
external world. It is becoming recognised that
the tendency to pluri-glandular insufficiency,
with its resulting lack of organic harmony and
equilibrium, can be counteracted by the physical
and psychic stimuli of intimate contacts with the
external world. In this action and reaction,
moreover, we cannot distinguish between sexual
ends and general ends. The activities of the
ductless glands and their hormones equally serve
both ends in ways that cannot be distinguished.
"The individual metabolism," as a distinguished
authority in this field has expressed it, "is the

THE PLAY-FUNCTION OP SEX 119

reproductive metabolism." * Thus the establish-
ment of our complete activities as human beings
in the world is aided by, if not indeed ultimately
dependent upon, a perpetual and, many-sided play
with our environment.

It is thus that we arrive at the importance of
the play- function, and thus, also, we realise that
while it extends beyond the sexual sphere it yet
definitely includes that sphere. There are at
least three different ways of understanding the
biological function of play. There is the con-
ception of play, on which Groos has elaborately
insisted, as education: the cat "plays" with the
mouse and is thereby educating itself in the skill
necessary to catch mice ; all our human games are
a training in qualities that are required in life,
and that is why in England we continue to attri-
bute to the Duke of Wellington the saying that
"the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing
fields of Eton." Then there is the conception of
play as the utilisation in art of the superfluous
energies left unemployed in the practical work
of life; this enlarging and harmonising function
of play, while in the lower ranges it may be spent
trivially, leads in the higher ranges to the produc-
tion of the most magnificent human achievements.
But there is yet a third conception of play,

*W. Blair Bell, The Sex-Complex, 1920, p. 108. This book
is a cautious and precise statement of the present state of knowl-
edge on this subject, although some of the author's psychological
deductions must be treated with circumspection.

180 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

according to which it exerts a direct internal
influence — health-giving, developmental, and bal-
ancing — on the whole organism of the player
himself. This conception is related to the other
two, and yet distinct, for it is not primarily a
definite education in specific kinds of life-con-
serving skill, although it may involve the acqui-
sition of such skill, and it is not concerned with
the construction of objective works of art, al-
though — by means of contact in human relation-
ship — it attains the wholesome organic effects
which may be indirectly achieved by artistic ac-
tivities. It is in this sense that we are here
concerned with what we may perhaps best call
the play- function of sex.*

As thus understood, the play-function of sex
is at once in an inseparable way both physical
and psychic. It stimulates to wholesome activity
all the complex and inter-related systems of the
organism. At the same time it satisfies the most
profound emotional impulses, controlling in har-
monious poise the various mental instincts.
Along these lines it necessarily tends in the end
to go beyond its own sphere and to embrace and
introduce into the sphere of sex the other two
more objective fields of play, that of play as
education, and that of play as artistic creation.

* The term seems to have been devised by Professor Maurice
Parmelee, Personality and Conduct, 1918, pp. 104, 107, 113. But
it is understood by Parmelee in a much vaguer and more ex-
tended sense than I have used it

THE PLAY-FUNCTION OF SEX 121

It may not be true, as was said of old time, "most
of our arts and sciences were invented for love's
sake." But it is certainly true that, in proportion
as we truly and wisely exercise the play-function
of sex, we are at the same time training our per-
sonality on the erotic side and acquiring a mas-
tery of the art of love.

The longer I live the more I realise the im-
mense importance for the individual of the de-
velopment through the play- function of erotic
personality, and for human society of the ac-
quirement of the art of love. At the same time
T am ever more astonished at the rarity of erotic
personality and the ignorance of the art of love
even among those men and women, experienced
in the exercise of procreation, in whom we might
most confidently expect to find such development
and such art. At times one feels hopeless at the
thought that civilisation in this supremely inti-
mate field of life has yet achieved so little. For
until it is generally possible to acquire erotic per-
sonality and to master the art of loving, the de-
velopment of the individual man or woman is
marred, the acquirement of human happiness and
harmony remains impossible.

In entering this field, indeed, we not only have
to gain true knowledge but to cast off false
knowledge, and, above all, to purify our hearts
from superstitions which have no connection
with anv kind of existing knowledge. We have

122 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

to cease to regard as admirable the man who re-
gards the accomplishment of the procreative
act, with the pleasurable relief it affords to him-
self, as the whole code of love. We have to treat
with contempt the woman who abjectly accepts
the act, and her own passivity therein, as the
whole duty of love. We have to understand tha>
the art of love has nothing to do with vice, and
the acquirement of erotic personality nothing to
do with sensuality. But we have also to realise
that the art of love is far from being the attain-
ment of a refined and luxurious self-indulgence,
and the acquirement of erotic personality of little
worth unless it fortifies and enlarges the whole
personality in all its aspects. Now all this is
difficult,, and for some people even painful; to
root up is a more serious matter than to sow; it
cannot all be done in a day.

It is not easy to form a clear picture of the
erotic life of the average man in our society. To
the best informed among us knowledge in this
field only comes slowly. Even when we have
decided what may or may not be termed "aver-
age" the sources of approach to this intimate
sphere remain few and misleading; at the best
the women a man loves remain far more illumi-
nating sources of information than the man
himself. The more one knows about him, how-
ever, the more one is convinced that, quite inde-
pendently of the place we may feel inclined to

THE PLAY-FUNCTION OF SEX 1*8

afford to him in the scale of virtue, his conception
of erotic personality, his ideas on the art of love,
if they have any existence at all, are of a humble
character. As to the notion of play in the sphere
of sex, even if he makes blundering attempts to
practice it, that is for him something quite low
down, something to be ashamed of, and he would
not dream of associating it with anything he has
been taught to regard as belonging to the spirit-
ual sphere. The conception of "divine play" is
meaningless to him. His fundamental ideas, his
cherished ideals, in the erotic sphere, seem to be
reducible to two: (i) He wishes to prove that
he is "a man/' and he experiences what seems to
him the pride of virility in the successful attain-
ment of that proof; (2) he finds in the same act
the most satisfactory method of removing sexual
tension and in the ensuing relief one of the chief
pleasures of life. It cannot be said that either
of these ideals is absolutely unsound; each is part
of the truth; it is only as a complete statement of
the truth that they become pathetically inade-
quate. It is to be noted that both of them are
based solely on the physical act of sexual con-
junction, and that they are both exclusively self-
regarding. So that they are, after all, although
the nearest approach to the erotic sphere he may
be able to find, yet still not really erotic. For
love is not primarily self -regarding. It is the
intimate, harmonious, combined play — the play

1*4 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

in the wide as well as in the more narrow sense
we are here concerned with — of two personali-
ties. It would not be love if it were primarily
self -regarding, and the act of intercourse, how-
ever essential to secure the propagation of the
race, is only an incident, and not an essential in
love.

Let us turn to the average woman. Here the
picture must usually be still more unsatisfactory.
The man at least, crude as we may find his two
fundamental notions to be, has at all events at-
tained mental pride and physical satisfaction.
The woman often attains neither, and since the
man, by instinct or tradition, has maintained a
self -regarding attitude, that is not surprising.
The husband — by primitive instinct partly, cer-
tainly by ancient tradition — regards himself as
the active partner in matters of love and his own
pleasure as legitimately the prime motive for
activity. His wife consequently falls into the
complementary position, and regards herself as
the passive partner and her pleasure as negligible,
if not indeed as a thing to be rather ashamed of,
should she by chance experience it. So that,
while the husband is content with a mere simul-
acrum and pretence of the erotic life, the wife has
often had none at all.

Few people realise — few indeed have the
knowledge or the opportunity to realise — how
much women thus lose, alike in the means to

• THE PLAY-FUNCTION OF SEX 1*5

fulfill their own lives and in the power to help
others. A woman has a husband, she has marital
relationships, she has children, she has all the
usual domestic troubles — it seems to the casual
observer that she has everything that constitutes
a fully developed matron fit to play her proper
part in the home and in the world. Yet with all
these experiences, which undoubtedly are an im-
portant part of life, she may yet remain on the
emotional side — and, as a matter of fact, fre-
quently remains — quite virginal, as immature as
a school-girl. She has not acquired an erotic
personality, she has not mastered the art of love,
with the result that her whole nature remains
ill-developed and unharmonised, and that she is
incapable of bringing her personality — having
indeed no achieved personality to bring — to bear
effectively on the problems of society and the
world around her.

That alone is a great misfortune, all the more
tragic since under favourable conditions, which
it should have been natural to attain, it might so
easily be avoided. But there is this further re-
sult, full of the possibilities of domestic tragedy,
that the wife so situated, however innocent, how-
ever virtuous, may at any time find her virginally
sensitive emotional nature fertilised by the touch
of some other man than her husband.

It happens so often. A girl who has been care-
fully guarded in the home, preserved from evil

126 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

companions., preserved also from what her
friends regarded as the contamination of sexual
knowledge, a girl of high ideals, yet healthy and
robust, is married to a man of whom she probably
has little more than a conventional knowledge.
Yet he may by good chance be the masculine
counterpart of herself, well brought up, without
sexual experience and ignorant of all but the
elementary facts of sex, loyal and honourable,,
prepared to be, fitted to be, a devoted husband.
The union seems to be of the happiest kind; no
one detects that anything is lacking to this per-
fect marriage; in course of time one or more
children are born. But during all this time the
husband has never really made love to his wife;
he has not even understood what courtship in the
intimate sense means; love as an art has no ex-
istence for him ; he has loved his wife according
to his imperfect knowledge, but he has never so
much as realised that his knowledge was imper-
fect. She on her side loves her Husband; she
comes in time indeed to have a sort of tender
maternal feeling for him. Possibly she feels a
little pleasure in intercourse with him. But she
has never once been profoundly aroused, and she
has never once been utterly satisfied. The deep
fountains of her nature have never been un-
sealed; she has never been fertilised throughout
her whole nature by their liberating influence;
her erotic personality has never been developed.

THE PLAY-FUNCTION OF SEX 187

Then something happens. Perhaps the husband
is called away, it may have been to take part in
the Great War. The wife, whatever her tender
solicitude for her absent partner, feels her soli-
tude and is drawn nearer to friends, perhaps her
husband's friends. Some man among them be-
comes congenial to her. There need be no con-
scious or overt love-making on either side, and if
there were the wife's loyalty might be aroused
and the friendship brought to an end. Love-
making is not indeed necessary. The wife's latent
erotic needs, while still remaining unconscious,
have come nearer to the surface; now that she
has grown mature and that they have been
stimulated yet unsatisfied for so long, they have,
tmknown to herself, become insistent and sensi-
tive to a sympathetic touch. The friends may
indeed grow into lovers, and then some sort of
solution, by divorce or intrigue — scarcely how-
ever a desirable kind of solution — becomes pos-
sible. But we are here taking the highest ground
and assuming that honourable feeling, domestic
affection, or a stern sense of moral duty, renders
such solution unacceptable. In due course the
husband returns, and then, to her utter dismay,
the wife discovers, if she has not discovered it
before, that during his absence, and for the first
time in her life, she has fallen in love. She
loyally confesses the situation to her husband,
^T^vhom her affection and attachment remain

188 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

the same as before, for what has happened to her
is the coming of a totally new kind of love and
not any change in her old love. The situation
which arises is one of torturing anxiety for all
concerned, and it is not less so when all con-
cerned are animated by noble and self-sacrificing
impulses. The husband in his devotion to his
wife may even be willing that her new impulses
should be gratified. She, on her side, will not
think of yielding to desires which seem both
unfair to her husband and opposed to all her
moral traditions. We are not here concerned to
consider the most likely, or the most desirable,
exit from this unfortunate situation. The points
to note are that it is a situation which to-day
actually occurs ; that it causes acute unhappiness
to at least two people who may be of the finest
physical and intellectual type and the noblest
character, and that it might be avoided if there
were at the outset a proper understanding of the
married state and of the part which the art of
love plays in married happiness and the develop-
ment of personality.

A woman may have been married once,, she
may have been married twice, she may have had
children by both husbands, and yet it may not be
until she is past the age of thirty and is united
to a third man that she attains the development
of erotic personality and all that it involves in
the full flowering of her whole nature. ^Kig*'"

THE PLAY-FUNCTION OF SEX 129

then she had to all appearance had all the essen-
tial experiences of life. Yet she had remained
spiritually virginal, with conventionally prim
ideas of life, narrow in her sympathies, with the
finest and noblest functions of her soul helpless
and bound, at heart unhappy even if not clearly
realising that she was unhappy. Now she has be-
come another person. The new liberated forces
from within have not only enabled her to become
sensitive to the rich complexities of intimate per-
sonal relationship, they have enlarged and har-
monised her realisation of all relationships. Her
new erotic experience has not only stimulated all
her energies, but her new knowledge has quick-
ened all her sympathies. She feels, at the same
time, more mentally alert, and she finds that she
is more alive than before to the influences of
nature and of art. Moreover, as others observe,
however they may explain it, a new beauty has
come into her face, a new radiancy into her ex-
pression, a new force into all her activities. Such
is the exquisite flowering of love which some of
us who may penetrate beneath the surface of life
are now and then privileged to see. The sad part
of it is that we see it so seldom and then often
so late.

It must not be supposed that there is any direct
or speedy way of introducing into life a wider
and deeper conception of the erotic play- function,
and all that it means for the development of the

180 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

individual, the enrichment of the marriage rela-
tionship, and the moral harmony of society.
Such a supposition would merely be to vulgarise
and to stultify the divine and elusive mystery. It
is only slowly and indirectly that we can bring
about the revolution which in this direction
would renew life. We may prepare the way for
it by undermining and destroying those degrad-
ing traditional conceptions which have persisted
so long that they are instilled into us almost from
birth, to work like a virus in the heart, and to
become almost a disease of the soul. To make
way for the true and beautiful revelation, we
can at least seek to cast out those ancient
growths, which may once have been true and
beautiful, but now are false and poisonous. By
casting out from us the conception of love as vile
and unclean we shall purify the chambers of our
hearts for the reception of love as something un-
speakably holy.

In this matter we may learn a lesson from the
psycho-analysts of to-day without any implica-
tion that psycho-analysis is necessarily a desir-
able or even possible way of attaining the
revelation of love. The wiser psycho-analysts
insist that the process of liberating the individual
from outer and inner influences that repress or
deform his energies and impulses is effected by
removing the inhibitions on the free-play of his
nature. It is a process of education in the true

THE PLAY-FUNCTION OF SEX 181

sense, not of the suppression of natural impulses
nor even of the instillation of sound rules and
maxims for their control, not of the pressing in
but of the leading out of the individual's special
tendencies.* It removes inhibitions, even inhibi-
tions that were placed upon the individual, or
that he consciously or unconsciously placed upon
himself, with the best moral intentions, and by
so doing it allows a larger and freer and more
natively spontaneous morality to come into play.
It has this influence above all in th? sphere of
sex, where such inhibitions have been most
powerfully laid on the native impulses, where
the natural tendencies have been most sur-
rounded by taboos and terrors, most tinged with
artificial stains of impurity and degradation
derived from alien and antiquated traditions.
Thus the therapeutical experience of the psycho-
analysts reinforces the lessons we learn from
physiology and psychology and the intimate ex-
periences of life.

Sexual activity, we see, is not merely a bald
propagative act, nor, when propagation is put
aside, is it merely the relief of distended vessels.
It is something more even than the foundation of
great social institutions. It is the function by
which all the finer activities of the organism,
physical and psychic, may be developed and satis-

* Sec, for instance, H. W. Frink, Morbid Fears and Compul-
sions, 1918, Ch. X.

132 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

fied. Nothing, it has been said, is so serious as
lust — to use the beautiful term which has been
degraded into the expression of the lowest forms
of sensual pleasure — and we have now to add
that nothing is so full of play as love. Play is
primarily the instinctive work of the brain, but
it is brain activity united in the subtlest way to
bodily activity. In the play- function of sex two
forms of activity, physical and psychic, are most
exquisitely and variously and harmoniously
blended. We here understand best how it is that
the brain organs and the sexual organs are, from
the physiological standpoint, of equal importance
and equal dignity. Thus the adrenal glands,
among the most influential of all the ductless
glands, are specially and intimately associated
alike with the brain and the sex organs. As we
rise in the animal series, brain and adrenal glands
march side by side in developmental increase of
size, and at the same time, sexual activity and
adrenal activity equally correspond.

Lovers in their play — when they have been
liberated from the traditions which bound them
to the trivial or the gross conception of play in
love — are thus moving amongst the highest
human activities, alike of the body and of the
soul. They are passing to each other the sacra- ■/*
mental chalice of that wine which imparts the
deepest joy that men and women can know. They
are subtly weaving the invisible cords that bind

THE PLAY-FUNCTION OF SEX 188

husband and wife together more truly and more
firmly than the priest of any church. And if in
the end — as may or may not be — they attain the
climax of free and complete union, then their
human play has become one with that divine play
of creation in which old poets fabled that, out of
the dust of the ground and in his own image,
some God of Chaos once created Man.

CHAPTER VII
THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE RACE

The relation of the individual person to the
species he belongs to is the most intimate of all
relations. It is a relation which almost amounts
to identity. Yet it somehow seems so vague, so
abstract, as scarcely to concern us at all. It is
only lately indeed that there has been formulated
even so much as a science to discuss this relation-
ship, and the duties which, when properly under-
stood, it throws upon the individual. Even yet the
word "Eugenics," the name of this science, and
this art, sometimes arouses a smile. It seems to
stand for a modern fad, which the superior per-
son, or even the ordinary plebeian democrat, may
pass by on the other side with his nose raised
towards the sky. Modern the science and art of
Eugenics certainly seem, though the term is
ancient, and the Greeks of classic days, as well as
their successors to-day, used the word Eugeneia
for nobility or good birth. It was chosen by
Francis Galton, less than fifty years ago,, to ex-
press "the effort of Man to improve his own

134

THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE RACE 185

breed." But the thing the term stands for is,
in reality, also far from modern. It is indeed
ancient and may even be nearly as old as Man
himself. Consciously or unconsciously, some-
times under pretexts that have disguised his
motives even from himself, Man has always been
attempting to improve his own quality or at least
to maintain it. When he slackens that effort,
when he allows his attention to be too exclusively
drawn to other ends, he suffers, he becomes de-
cadent, he even tends to die out.

Primitive eugenics had seldom anything to do
with what we call "birth-control." One must not
say that it never had. Even the mysterious mika
operation of so primitive a race as the Austral-
ians has been supposed to be a method of con-
trolling conception. But the usual method, even
of people highly advanced in culture, has been
simpler. They preferred to see the new-born
infant before deciding whether it was likely to
prove a credit to its parents or to the human race
generally, and if it seemed not up to the standard
they dealt with it accordingly. At one time that
was regarded as a cruel and even inhuman
method. To-day, when the most civilised nations
of the world have devoted all their best energies to
competitive slaughter, we may have learnt to
view the matter differently. If we can tolerate
the wholesale murder and mutilation of the finest
specimens of our race in the adult possession of

186 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

all their aptitudes we cannot easily find anything
to disapprove in the merciful disposal of the
poorest specimens before they have even attained
conscious possession of their senses. But in any
case, and whatever we may ourselves be pleased
to think or not to think, it is certain that some of
the most highly developed peoples of the world
have practised infanticide. It is equally certain
that the practise has not proved destructive to
the emotions of humanity and affection. Even
some of the lowest human races, — as we com-
monly estimate them, — while finding it necessary
to put aside a certain proportion of their new-
born infants, expend a degree of love and even
indulgence on the children they bring up which
is rarely found among so-called civilised nations.

There is no need, however, to consider whether
or not infanticide is humane. We are all agreed
that it is altogether unnecessary, and that it is
seldom that even that incipient form of in-
fanticide called abortion, still so popular among
us, need be resorted to. Our aim now — so far
at all events as mere ideals go — is not to destroy
life but to preserve it; we seek to improve the
conditions of life and to render unnecessary the
premature death of any human creature that
has once drawn breath.

It is indeed just here that we find a certain
clash between the modern view of life and the
view of earlier civilisations. The ancients were

THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE RACE 187

less careful than we claim to be of the individual,
but they were more careful of the race. They
cultivated eugenics after their manner, though
it was a manner which we reprobate.* We pride
ourselves, rightly or wrongly, on our care for
the individual; during all the past century we
claim to have been strenuously working for an
amelioration of the environment which will make
life healthier and pleasanter for the individual
But in the concentration of our attention on this
altogether desirable end, which we are still far
from having adequately attained, we have lost
sight of that larger end, the well-being of the
race and the amelioration of life itself, not merely
of the conditions of life. The most we hope is
that somehow the improvement of the conditions
of the individual will incidentally improve the
stock. These our practical ideals, which have
flourished for a century past, arose out of the
great French Revolution and were inspired by
the maxim of that Revolution, as formulated by
Rousseau., that "All men are born equal." That

.~ j

♦But this statement must not be left without important
qualification. Thus the ancient Greeks (as Moissides has shown
in Janus, 1913), not only their philosophers and statesmen, but
also their women, often took the most enlightened interest in
eugenics, and, moreover, showed it in practice. They were in
many respects far in advance of us. They clearly realised, for
instance, the need of a proper interval between conceptions,
not only to ensure the health of women, but also the vigour of
the offspring. It is natural that among every fine race eugenics
should be almost an instinct or they would cease to be a fine
race. It is equally natural that among our modern degenerates
eugenics is an unspeakable horror, however much, as the psycho-
analysts would put it, they rationalise that horror.

188 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

maxim was overthrown half a century ago; the
great biological movement of science, initiated
by Darwin, showed that it was untenable. All
men are not born equal. Everyone agrees about
that now, but nevertheless the momentum of the
earlier movement was so powerful that we still
go on acting as though all men are, and always
will be, born equal, and that we need not trouble
ourselves about heredity but only about the en-
vironment.

The way out of this clash of ideals — which has
compelled us to hope impossibilities from the en-
vironment because we dreaded what seemed the
only alternative — is, as we know, furnished by
birth-control. An unqualified reliance on the en-
vironment, making it ever easier and easier for
the feeblest and most defective to be born and
survive, could only, in the long run, lead to the
degeneration of the whole race. The knowledge
of the practice of birth-control gives us the mas-
tery of all that the ancients gained by infanticide,
while yet enabling us to cherish that ideal of the
sacredness of human life which we profess to
honour so highly. The main difficulty is that it
demands a degree of scientific precision which
the ancients could not possess and might dispense
with, so long as they were able to decide the
eugenic claims of the infant by actual inspection.
We have to be content to determine not what the
infant is but what it would be likelv to be, and

THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE RACE 189

that involves a knowledge of the laws of heredity
which we are only learning slowly to acquire.
We may all in our humble ways help to increase
that knowledge by giving it greater extension
and more precision through the observations we
are able to make on our own families. To such
observations Galton attached great importance
and strove in various ways to further them. De-
tailed records, physical and mental, beginning
from birth, are still far from being as common
as is desirable, although it is obvious that they
possess a permanent personal and family private
interest in addition to their more public scientific
value. We do not need, and it would indeed be
undesirable, to emulate in human breeding the
achievements of a Luther Bur bank. We have
no right to attempt to impose on any human
creature an exaggerated arid one-sided develop-
ment. But it is not only our right, it is our duty,
or rather one may say, the natural impulse of
every rational and humane person, to seek that
only such children may be born as will be able
to go through life with a reasonable prospect
that they will not be heavily handicapped by
inborn defect or special liability to some incapaci-
tating disease. What is called "positive"
eugenics — the attempt, that is, to breed special
qualities — may well be viewed with hesitation.
But so-called "negative" eugenics — the effort to
clear all inborn obstacles out of the path of the

140 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

coming generation — demands our heartiest sym-
pathy and our best co-operation, for as Galton,
the founder of modern Eugenics, wrote towards
the end of his life of this new science : "Its first
object is to check the birth-rate of the unfit,
instead of allowing them to come into being,
though doomed in large numbers to perish pre-
maturely. ,, We can seldom be absolutely sure
what stocks should not propagate, and what two
stocks should on no account be blended, but we
can attain reasonable probability, and it is on
such probabilities in every department of life that
we are always called upon to act.

It is often said — I have said it myself — that
birth-control when practised merely as a limita-
tion of the family, scarcely suffices to further the
eugenic progress of the race. If it is not de-
liberately directed towards the elimination of the
worst stocks or the worst possibilities in the
blending of stocks, it may even tend to diminish
the better stocks since it is the better stocks that
are least likely to propagate at random. This is
true if other conditions remain equal. It is
evident, however, that the other conditions will
not remain equal, for no evidence has yet been
brought forward to show that birth-control, even
when practised without regard to eugenic con-
siderations — doubtless the usual rule up to the
present — has produced any degeneration of the
race. On the contrary, the evidence seems to

THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE RACE 141

show that it has improved the race. The example
of Holland is often brought forward as evidence
in favour of such a tendency of birth-control,
since in that country the wide-spread practise of
birth-control has been accompanied by an increase
in the health and stature of the people, as well as
an increase in their numbers to a remarkable de-
gree, for the fall in the birth-rate has been far
more than compensated by the fall in the death-
rate,, while it is said that the average height of
the population has increased by four inches. It
is, indeed, quite possible to see why, although
theoretically a random application of birth-
control cannot affect the germinal possibilities of
a community, in practise it may improve the
somatic conditions under which the germinal
elements develop. There will probably be a
longer interval between the births of the children,
which has been demonstrated by Ewart and
others to be an important factor not only in
preserving the health of the mother but in in-
creasing the health and size of the child. The
diminution in the number of the children renders
it possible to bestow a greater amount of care
on each child. Moreover, the better economic
position of the father, due to the smaller number
of individuals he has to support,, makes it possible
for the family to live under improved conditions
as regards nourishment, hygiene, and comfort.
jTfte observance of birth-control is thus a far

fc

' 14* LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

more effective lever for raising the state of the
social environment and improving the conditions
of breeding, than is direct action on the part of
the community in its collective capacity to attain
the same end. For however energetic such col-
lective action may be in striving to improve
general social conditions by municipalising or
State-supporting public utilities, it can never
adequately counter-balance the excessive burden
and wasteful expenditure of force placed on a
family by undue child-production. It can only
palliate them.

When, however, we have found reason to be-
lieve that, even if practised without regard to
eugenic considerations, birth-control may yet act
beneficially to promote good breeding, we begin
to realise how great a power it may possess when
consciously and deliberately directed towards
that end. In eugenics, as already pointed out,
there are two objects that may be aimed at: one
called positive eugenics, that seeks to promote
the increase of the best stocks amongst us; the
other, called negative eugenics, which seeks to
promote the decrease of the worst stocks. Our
knowledge is still too imperfect to enable us to
pursue either of these objects with complete cer-
tainty. This is especially so as regards positive
eugenics, and since it seems highly undesirable to
attempt to breed human beings, as we do animals,
for points, when we are in the presence of whsf

THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE RACE 148

seem to us our finest human stocks, physically,
morally, and intellectually, it is our wisest course
just to leave them alone as much as we can. The
best stocks will probably be also those best able
to help themselves and in so doing to help others.
But that is obviously not so as regards the worst
stocks. It is, therefore, fortunate that the aim
here seems a little clearer. There are still many
abnormal conditions of which we cannot say
positively that they are injurious to the race and
that we should therefore seek to breed them out.
But there are other conditions so obviously of
evil import alike to the subjects themselves and
to their descendants that we cannot have any
reasonable doubt about them. There is, for
instance, epilepsy, which is known to be trans-
formed by heredity into various abnormalities
dangerous alike to their possessors and to so-
ciety. There are also the pronounced degrees of
feeble-mindedness, which are definitely heritable
and not only condemn those who reveal them to
a permanent inaptitude for full life, but consti-
tute a subtle poison working through the social
atmosphere in all directions and lowering the level
of civilisation in the community. Nowhere has
this been so thoroughly studied and so clearly
proved as in the United States. It is only neces-
sary to mention Dr. C. B. Davenport of the
Department of Experimental Evolution at Cold
Spring Harbor (New York) who has carried on

144 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

so much research in regard to the heredity of
epilepsy and other inheritable abnormal condi-
tions, and Dr. Goddard of Vineland (New Jer-
sey) whose work has illustrated so fully the
hereditary relationships of feeble-mindedness.
The United States, moreover, has seen the de-
velopment of the system of social field-work
which has rendered possible a more complete
knowledge of family heredity than has ever be-
fore been possible on a large scale.

It is along such lines as these that our knowl-
edge of the eugenic conditions of life will grow
adequate and precise enough to form an effective
guide to social conduct. Nature, and a due at-
tention to laws of heredity in life, will then rank
in equal honour to our eyes with nurture or that
attention to the environmental conditions of life
which we already regard as so important. A
regard to nurture has led us to spend the greatest
care on the preservation not only of the fit but
the unfit, while meantime it has wisely suggested
to us the desirability of segregating or even of
sterilising the unfit. But the study of Nature
leads us further and, as Galton said, "Eugenics
rests on bringing no more individuals into the
world than can be properly cared for, and these
only of the best stocks." That is to say that the
only instrument by which eugenics can be made
practically effective in the modern world is birth-
control.

i

THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE RACE 145

It is not scientific research alone, nor even the
wide popular diffusion of knowledge, that will
suffice to bring eugenics and birth-control,, singly
or in their due combination, into the course of
our daily lives. They need to be embodied in our
instinctive impulses. Galton considered that
eugenics must become a factor of religion and
be regarded as a sacred and virile creed, while
Ellen Key holds that the religions of the past
must be superseded by a new religion which will
be the awakening of the whole of humanity to
a consciousness of the "holiness of generation."
For my own part, I scarcely consider that either
eugenics or birth-control can be regarded as
properly a part of religion. Being of virtue and
not of grace they belong more naturally to the
sphere of morals. But here they certainly need
to go far deeper than the mere intelligence of the
mind can take them. They cannot become guides
to conduct until their injunctions have been
printed on the fleshy tablets of our hearts. The
demands of the race must speak from within us,
in the voice of conscience which we disobey at
our peril. When that happens with regard to
ascertained laws of racial well-being we may
know that we are truly following, even though not
in the letter, those great spirits, like Galton with
his intellectual vision and Ellen Key with her
inspired enthusiasm, who have pointed out new
roads for the ennoblement of the race.

146 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND TIRTUE

II

It may be well, before we go further, to look
a little more closely into the suspicion and dis-
like which eugenics still arouses in many worthy
old-fashioned people. To some extent that atti-
tude is excused, not only by the mistakes which
in a new and complex science must inevitably be
made even by painstaking students, but also by
the rash and extravagant proposals of irrespon-
sible and eccentric persons claiming without
warrant to speak in the name of eugenics. Two
thousand years ago the' wild excesses of some
early Christians furnished an excuse for the
ancient world to view Christianity with con-
tempt, although the extreme absence of such
excesses has furnished still better ground for the
modern world to maintain the same view. To-day
such a work as Le Haras Humain ("The Human
Stud- farm") of Dr. Binet-Sangle, putting for-
ward proposals which, whether beneficial or not,
will certainly find no one to carry them out,,
similarly furnishes an excuse to those who would
reject eugenics altogether. Utopian schemes
have their value; we should be able to find in-
spiration in the most modern of them, just as we
still do in Plato's immortal Republic. But in this,
as in other matters, we must exercise a little
intelligence. We must not confuse the brilliant
excursion of some solitary thinker with the well-

THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE RACE 147

grounded proposals of those who are concerned
with the sober possibilities of actual life in our
own time. People who are incapable of exercis-
ing a little shrewd commonsense in the affairs
of life, and are in the habit of emptying out the
baby with the bath, had better avoid touching the
delicate problems connected ^ith practical eu-
genics.

There is one prejudice already mentioned, due
to lack of clear thinking, which deserves more
special consideration because it is widespread
among the socialistic democracy of several coun-
tries as well as among social reformers, and is
directed alike against eugenics and birth-control.
This prejudice is based on the ground that bad
economic conditions and an unwholesome en-
vironment are the source of all social evils, and
that a better distribution of wealth, or a vast
scheme of social welfare, is the one thing neces-
sary, when that is achieved all other things being
added unto us, without any further trouble on
our part. It is certainly impossible to over-rate
the importance of the economic factor in society,
or of a good environment. And it is true that
eugenics alone, like birth-control alone, can effect
little if the economic basis of society is unsound.
But it is equally certain that the economic factor
can never in itself suffice for fine living or even
as a cure-all of social and racial diseases. Its
value is not that it can effect these things but that

148 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

it furnishes the favourable conditions for effect-
ing them. He would be foolish indeed who went
to the rich to find the example of good breeding
and, as is well known, it is not with the rich that
the future of the race lies. The fact is that
under any economic system the responsible per-
sonal direction of the individual and the family
remain equally necessary, and no progress is
possible so long as the individual casts all re-
sponsibility away from himself on to the social
group he forms part of. The social group, after
all, is merely himself and the likes of himself.
He is merely shifting the burden from his in-
dividual self to his collective self,, and in so doing
he loses more than he gains.

Thus there is always a sound core in that In-
dividualism which has been preached so long and
practised so energetically, especially in English-
speaking lands, however great the abuse involved
in its excesses. It is still in the name of Indi-
vidualism that the most brilliant antagonists of
eugenics and of birth-control are wont to direct
their attacks. The counsel of self-cpntrol and
foresight in procreation, the restriction necessary
to purify and raise the standard of the race, seem
to the narrow and short-sighted advocates of a
great principle an unwarrantable violation of the
sacred rights of their individual liberty. They
have not yet grasped the elementary fact that
the rights of the individual are the rights of aH

THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE RACE 149

individuals, and that Individualism itself calls
for a limitation of the freedom of the individual.
That is why even the most uncompromising
Individualist must recognise an element of altru-
ism, call it whatever name you will, Collectivism,,
Socialism, Communism, or merely the vague and
long-suffering term, Democracy. One cannot
assume Individualism for oneself unless one
assumes it for the many. That is a great truth
which goes to the heart of the whole complex
problem of eugenics and birth-control. As
Perrycoste has well argued,* biology is alto-
gether against the narrow Individualism which
seeks to oppose Collective Individualism. For
if, in accordance with the most careful modern
investigations,, we recognise that heredity is
supreme, that the qualities we have inherited
from our ancestors count for more in our lives
than anything we have acquired by our own
personal efforts, then we have to admit that the
capable man's wealth is more the community's
property than his own, and, similarly, the in-
capable man's poverty is more the community's
concern than his own. So that neither the capable
nor the incapable are entitled to an unqualified
power of freedom, and neither, likewise., are
justly liable to be burdened by an unqualified re-
sponsibility. It is the duty of the community to

*F. H. Perrycoste, "Politics and Science," Science Progress,
Jan., 192a

150 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

draw on the powers of the fit and equally its
duty to care for the unfit. In this way, Perry-
coste, whose attitude is that of the Rationalist, is
led by science to a conclusion which is that of the
Christian. We are all members each of the
other, and still more are we members of those
who went before us. The generations preceding
us have not died to themselves but live in us, and
we, whom they produced, live in each other and in
those who will come after us. The problems of
eugenics and of birth-control affect us all. In
the face of these problems it is the voice of Man
that speaks : "Inasmuch as ye did it not unto the
least of these my brethren, ye did it not unto me."
However firmly we base ourselves on the prin-
ciples of Individualism we are inevitably brought
to the fundamental facts of eugenics which, if we
fail to recognise, our Individualism becomes of
no effect.

But it is the same with Socialism, or by what-
ever name we chose to call the Collectivist
activities of the community in social reform.
Socialism also brings us up against the hard rock
of eugenic fact which, if we neglect it, will dash
our most beautiful social construction to frag-
ments. It is the more necessary to point this out
since it is on the Socialist and Democratic side,
much more frequently than on the Individualist
side,, that we find an indifferent or positively hos-
tile attitude towards eugenic considerations. Put

THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE RACE 151

social conditions on a sound basis, the people on
this side often say, let all receive an adequate
economic return for their work and be recognised
as having a claim for an adequate share in the
products of society, and there is no need to worry
about the race or about the need for birth-control,
all will go well of itself. There is not the slightest
ground for any such comfortable belief.

This has been well shown by Dr. Eden Paul,
himself a Socialist and even in sympathy • with
the extreme Left.* After setting forth the
present conditions, with our excessive elimination
of higher types, and undue multiplication of
lower types., the racial degeneration caused by
the faulty and anti-selective working of the mar-
riage system in modern capitalist society, so that
in our existing civilisation unconscious natural
selection has largely ceased to work towards the
improvement of the human breed, he proceeds
to consider the possible remedies. The frequent*
impatience of the Socialist, and Social Reform-
ers generally, with eugenic proposals has a cer-
tain degree of justification in the fact that many
evils thoughtlessly attributed to inferiority of
stock are really due to bad environment. But
when the environment has been so far improved
that all defects due to its badness are removed,

* In an essay on "Eugenics, Birth Control, and Socialism" in
Population and Birth-Control: A Symposium, edited by Eden
and Cedar Paul.

152 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

we shall be face to face, without possibility of
doubt, with bad inheritance as the sole remaining
factor in the production of inefficient and anti-
social members of the community. A socialist
community must recognise the right to work and
to maintenance of all its members,, Eden Paul
points out, but, he adds, a community which
allowed this right to all defectives without im-
posing any restrictions in their perpetuation of
themselves would deserve all the evils that would
fall upon it. It is quite clear how intolerable the
burden of these evils would be. A State that
provided an adequate subsistence for all alike, the
inefficient as well as the efficient, would encour-
age a racial degeneration, from excessive multi-
plication of the unfit, far more dangerous even
than that of to-day.* Ability to earn the mini-
mum wage, Eden Paul argues in agreement with
H. G. Wells, must be the condition of the right
to become a parent. "Unless the socialist is a
eugenist as well, the socialist state will speedily
perish from racial degradation. ,,

♦This is here and there beginning to be recognised. Thus,
not long ago, the Hereford War Pensions Committee resolved
not to issue a maternal grant for children born during a pro-
longed period of treatment allowance. Such a measure of
course fails to meet the situation, for it is obvious that, when
born, the children must be cared for. But it shows a glimmer-
ing recognition of the facts, and the people capable of such a
recognition will, in time, come to see that the right way of
meeting the situation is, not to neglect the children, but to pre-
vent their conception. Mothers' Clinics for instruction in such
prevention are now being established in England, through the
advocacy of Mrs. Margaret Sanger and the actual initiative of
Dr. Marie Stopes.

THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE RACE 158

Thus it is essential that the eugenist, dealing
with the hereditary factor of life, and the social
reformer or socialist, dealing with the environ-
mental factor, should supplement each other's
work. Neither can attain his end without the
other's help, for the eugenist alone cannot over-
come the environmental factor,, even perhaps
increases it if he is an individualist in the narrow
sense, and "the socialist alone cannot overcome
the bad hereditary factor, and will even increase
it if he is no more than a socialist. The more
socialist our State becomes the more essential
becomes at the same time the adoption of eugenic
practices as a working part of the State. "So-
cialism and eugenics must go hand. in hand."

Perrycoste from his own point of view has
independently reached the same conclusions. He
is not, indeed, concerned with any "Socialist"
community of the future but with the dangerous
results which must inevitably follow the already
established methods of social reform in our
modern civilised States unless they are speedily
checked by effective action based on eugenic
knowledge. "If," he observes, "the community
is to shoulder half or three-quarters of the
burden of sustaining those degenerates who,
through no fault of their own, are congenitally
incompetent to maintain themselves in decent
comfort, and is to render the life-pilgrimage of
these unfortunates tolerable instead of a dreary

154 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

nightmare, if it is to assume paternal charge of
all the tens or hundreds of thousands of children
whose parents cannot or will not provide ade-
quately for them and is to guarantee to all such
children as much education as they are capable
of receiving, and a really fair start in life: then
in sheer self-preservation the community must
insist on, and rigidly enforce, its absolute claim
to secure that no degeneracy or inheritable con-
genital defects shall persist beyond the present
generation of degenerates, and that the com-
munity of fifty or seventy years hence shall have
no incubus of mentally, or morally, or even
physically, degenerate members — none but a few
occasional sporadic morbid 'sports' from the for-
mal, which it, in turn, may effectively prevent
from handing on their like." Unless the problem
is squarely faced, Perrycoste concludes, national
deterioration must increase and a permanently
successful collectivist society is inherently im-
possible.

We are not now concerned with the details of
any policy of eugenics and of birth-control, which
I couple together because although a random
birth-control by no means involves much, if any,
eugenic progress, it is. not easy under modern
conditions to conceive any practical or effective
policy of eugenics except through the instru-
mentation of birth-control. We here take it for
granted that in this field the slow progress of

THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE RACE 155

scientific knowledge must be our guide. Prema-
ture legislation, rash and uninstructed action,
will not lead to progress but are more likely to
delay it. Yet even with imperfect knowledge, it
is already of the first importance to evoke interest
in the great issue here at stake and to do all that
we can to arouse the individual conscience of
every man and woman to his or her personal
responsibility in this matter. That is here all
taken for granted.

It seems necessary to consider the political
aspect of eugenics because that aspect is fre-
quently invoked, and a man's attitude towards
this question is frequently determined before-
hand by what he considers that Individualism or
Socialism demands. We see that when the
question is driven home our political attitude
makes no difference. It is only a shallow Indi-
vidualism,, it is only a still more shallow Social-
ism, which imagines that under modern social
conditions the fundamental racial questions can
be left to answer themselves.

m

Many years before the Great War, in all the
most civilised countries of the World, there were
those who raised the cry of "Race-Suicide !" In
America this cry was more especially popularised
by the powerful voice of Theodore Roosevelt, but
in European countries there were similar voices

166 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

raised in tones of virtuous indignation to de-
nounce the same crime. Since the war other
voices have been raised in even more high-
pitched and feverish tones, but now they are less
weighty and responsible voices, since to those
who realise that at present there is not food
enough to keep the population of the world from
starvation it seems hardly compatible with sanity
to advocate an increased rate of human pro-
duction.

Now, though it is easy to do so., we must not
belittle this cry of "Race-Suicide !" It is not
usually accompanied by definite argument, but it
assumes that birth-control is the method of such
suicide, and that the first and most immediately
dangerous result is that one's own nation, which-
ever that may be, is placed in a position of alarm-
ing military inferiority to other nations, as a
step towards the final extinction. It is useless to
deny that it really is a serious matter if there is
danger of the speedy disappearance of the human
race from the earth by its own voluntary and
deliberate action, and that within a measurable
period of time — for if it were an immeasurable
period there would be no occasion for any acute
anxiety — the last man will perish from the world.
This is what "Race-Suicide" means, and we must
face the fact squarely.

It can scarcely be said, however, that the mean-
ing of "Race-Suicide' ' has actually been squarely

THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE RACE 157

faced by those who have most vehemently raised
that cry. Translated into more definite and
precise terms this cry means, and is intended to
mean: "We want more births." That is what
it definitely means, and sometimes in the minds
of those who make this demand it seems also to
imply nothing more. Yet it implies a great num-
ber of other things. It implies certain strain and
probable ill-health on the mothers, it implies
distress and disorder in the family, it implies,
even if the additional child survives, a more acute
industrial struggle, and it further involves in this
case, by the stimulus it gives to over-population,
the perpetual menace of militarism and war.
What, however, even at the outset, piore births
most distinctly and most unquestionably imply
is more deaths. It is nowadays so well known
that a high birth-rate is accompanied by a high
death-rate — the exceptions are too few to need
attention — that it is unnecessary to adduce fur-
ther evidence. It is only the intoxicated en-
thusiasts of the "Race-Suicide" cry who are able
to overlook a fact of which they can hardly be
ignorant. The model which they hold up for
the public's inspiration has on the obverse "More
Births!" But on the reverse it bears "More
Deaths!" It would be helpful to the public, and
might even be wholesome for our enthusiasts'
own enlightenment,, if they would occasionally
turn the medal round and slightly vary the

158 LITTLE ESSAYS OP LOVE AND VIRTUE

monotony of their propaganda by changing its
form and crying out for "More Deaths I" "It is
a hard thing/' said Johnny Dunn, "for a man
that has a house full of children to be left to the
mercy of Almighty God."

If, however, we wish to consider the real sig-
nificance of the facts, without regard for the
wild cries of ignorant cranks, it is scarcely neces-
sary to point out here that neither the birth-rate
taken by itself, nor the death-rate taken by itself,,
will suffice to give us any measure even of the
growth of the population, to say nothing of the
progress of civilisation or the happiness of hu-
manity. It is obvious that we must consider both
gains and losses, and put one against the other,
if we wish to ascertain the net result. We may
roughly get a notion of what that result is by
deducting the death-rate from the birth-rate and
calling the remainder the survival-rate. If we
are really concerned with the question of the
alleged suicide of the race, and do not wish to be
befooled, we must pay little attention to the
birth-rate, for that by itself means nothing: we
must concentrate on the survival-rate. Then we
may soon convince ourselves, not only that the
human race is not committing suicide, but that
not even a single one of the so-called civilised
nations of which it is mainly composed is com-
mitting suicide. Quite the contrary ! Every one
of them, even France, where this peculiar "sui-

THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE RACE 159

cide" is supposed to be most actively at work, is
yearly increasing in numbers.

It is interesting to note, moreover, that the
French have been increasing faster, that is to
say the survival-rate has been higher in recent
years just before the war,, when the birth-rate
was at its lowest, than they were twenty years
earlier, with a higher birth-rate. And if we take
a wider sweep and consider the growth of the
French population towards the end of the eight-
eenth century, we find the birth-rate estimated
at the very high figure of 40. But the death-rate
was nearly as high, the average duration of life
was only half what it is now. So that the
survival-rate in France at that time, with widely
different rates of birth and death, was not much
unlike it is now. The recent French birth-rate
of 19 and less, which automatically causes
the "Race-Suicide" marionette to dance with
rage,, is producing not far from the same result
in growth of the population — we are not here
concerned with the enormous difference in well
being and happiness — as the extremely high rate
of 40 which sends our marionettes leaping to the
sky with joy. In war-time England, in 19 17,
the birth-rate sank to 17.8, yet the death-rate
was at 14 and the increase of the population con-
tinued. The more the human race commits this
kind of suicide, one is tempted to exclaim, the
faster it grows !

160 LITTLE ESSAYS OP LOVE AND VIRTUE

It is, however, in the New World — as in Can-
ada, Australia, and New Zealand — that we find
the most impressive evidence of the real criteria
of the growth in population set up for judgment
on the racial suicide cranks. Canadian statistics
bring out many points instructive even in their
variation. Here we see not only unusual curves
of rise and fall, but also pronounced differences,
due to the special peculiarities of the French
population, most clearly in the Province of
Quebec but also in some parts of the Province of
Ontario. In Quebec the birth-rate some years
ago was 35,, and the death-rate 21, both rates
high, and the survival-rate high at 14; recently
the birth-rate has risen to 37 and the death-rate
fallen to 17, with the result that the survival-rate
of 20 is the highest in the world, though it must
be noted that the high birth-rate is not likely to
last long, since in Quebec, as elsewhere in the
world, increasing urbanisation causes a decreas-
ing birth-rate. In mainly English-speaking
Ontario the birth-rate is much lower, about 24,
but the death-rate is also lower, about 14, so that
the fairly considerable survival-rate of 10 is ob-
tained. But we note the highly significant fact
that some thirty years or more ago the birth-rate
was much lower, about 19, and yet the sur-
vival-rate was almost 9, nearly as high as to-day !
The death-rate was then at 10, and nothing could
be more instructive as to the real relationship

THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE RACE 161

that holds in this matter. There has been a great
rise in the birth-rate and the only result, as
someone has remarked, is a great increase in the
population of the grave-yards. Equally instruc-
tive is it to compare various cities in this same
Province, living under the same laws, and fairly
similar social conditions. In the report of the
Registrar-General of Ontario for 191 6 I find that
highest in birth-rate of cities in the Province
stands Ottawa with a very considerable French
population. But first also stands the same city
for infant mortality, which is three times
greater than in some other cities in the Province
with a low birth-rate. Sault Ste. Marie, again
with an enormous birth-rate, stands third for
infant mortality. Canada shows us that, even
if we regard the crude desire for a large growth
of population as reasonable — and that is a con-
siderable assumption — a high birth-rate is an
uncertain prop to rest on.

Canada is an instructive example because we
have some ground for believing that the differ-
ence between the English-speaking and French-
speaking populations — the greater care of the
former in procreation and the more recklessly
destructive methods of the latter in attaining the
same ends — are due to their different attitudes
towards the use of methods of birth-control.
What the result of a general use of such methods
is we know from the example already mentioned

162 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

of Holland, where they are taught, officially rec-
ognised, and in general use, not only among the
rich but among the poor. The result is that the
birth-rate has been falling slowly and steadily
for forty years. But the death-rate has also
been falling and at a greater rate. So that the
more the birth-rate has fallen the higher has
been the rate of increase among the population.

It is perhaps in Australia and New Zealand
that we find the most satisfactory proofs of the
benefits of a falling birth-rate in relation to
"Race-Suicide." The evidence may well appeal
to us the more since it is precisely here that the
race-suicide fanatic finds freest scope for his
wrath. He looks gleefully at China with its
prolific women, at Russia with its magnificent
birth-rate before the War of nearly 50, at
Roumania with its birth-rate of 42, at Chile and
Jamaica with nearly 40. No nonsense about
birth-control there! No shirking by women of
the sacred duties of perpetual maternity! No
immoral notions about claims to happiness and
desires for culture. And then he turns from
those great centres of prosperity and civilisation
to Australia, to New Zealand, and his voice is
choked and tears fill his eyes as he sees the goal
of "Race-Suicide" nearly in sight and the spectre
of the Last Man rising before him. For there is
no doubt about it, Australia and New Zealand con-
tain a population which is gradually reaching the

THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE RACE 16S

highest point yet known of democratic organisa-
tion and general social well-being, and the birth-
rate has been falling with terrific speed. Sixty-
years ago in the Australian Commonwealth it
was nearly 44, only forty years ago in New
Zealand it was 42. Now it is only about 26 in
both lands. Yet the survival-rate, the actual
growth of the population, is not so very much
less with this low birth-rate than it was with the
high birth-rate. For the death-rate has also
fallen in both lands to about 10 (in New Zealand
to 9) which is lower than any other country in
the world. The result is that Australia and New
Zealand, where (so it is claimed) preventives of
conception are hawked from door to door, in-
stead of being awful examples of "Race-Suicide,"
actually present the highest rate of race-increase
in the world (only excepting Canada, where it is
less firmly and less healthily based), nearly twice
that of Great Britain and able at the present rate
to double itself every 44 years. So much for
"Race-Suicide/*

The outcry about "Race-Suicide" is so far
away from the real facts of life that it is not easy
to take it seriously, however solemn one's natural
temperament may be. We are concerned with
people who arrogantly claim to direct the moral
affairs of the world, even in the most intimately
private matters, and who are yet ignorant of the
most elementary facts of the world, unable to

164 LITTLE ESSAYS OP LOVE AND VIRTUE

think, not even able to count I We can only greet
them with a smile. But this question has, never-
theless, a genuinely serious aspect, and I should
be sorry even to touch on the question of birth-
control in relation to "Race-Suicide" without
making that serious aspect clear.

"Race-Suicide, " we know, has no existence.
Not only is the race as a whole increasing in
number, especially its White branches, but even
among the separate national groups there is not
even one civilised people anywhere in the world
that is decreasing in number. On the contrary
they are all, even France, increasing at a more
or less rapid rate. In England and Wales, for
example, where the birth-rate has steadily fallen
during the last forty years from 36 to 23 (I dis-
regard the abnormal rates of War-time) the pop-
ulation is still increasing, and even if the present
falls in birth-rate and death-rate continue^ it will
for years still go on increasing by an excess of
over 1,000 births a day. When we realise that
this is merely what goes on in one corner of the
world and must be multiplied enormously to rep-
resent the whole, we shall find it impossible even
to conceive the prodigious flow of excess babies
which is being constantly poured over the earth.
If we are capable of realising all the problems
which thereby arise we must be forced to ask
ourselves: Is this state of things desirable?

"Be ye fruitful and multiDhr." That command

THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE RACE 166

was, according to the old story, delivered to a
world inhabited by eight people. It has been
handed down to a world in which it has long been
ridiculously out of place, and has become merely
the excuse for criminal recklessness among a
race which has chosen to forget that the com-
mand was qualified by a solemn admonition : "At
the hand of nian, even at the hand of every
man's brother, will I require the life of man."
The high birth-rate has meant a vast slaughter
of infants, it has meant, moreover, a perpetual
oppression of the workers, disease, starvation,
and death among the adult population; it has
meant, further, a blood-thirsty economic com-
petition, militarism, warfare. It has meant that
all civilisation has from time to time become a
thin crust over a volcano of revolution,, and the
human race has gone on lightly dancing there,
striving to forget that ancient warning from a
soul of things even deeper than the voice of
Jehovah: "At the hand of man will I require
the life of man." Men have recklessly followed
the Will o' the Wisp which represented mere mul-
tiplication of their inefficient selves as the ideal
of progress, quantity before quality, the notion
that in an orgy of universal procreation could
consist the highest good of humanity.

The Great War, that is scarcely yet merged
into an only less war-like Peace, has brought at
least the small compensation that it has led men

166 LITTLE ESSAYS OP LOVE AND VIRTUE

to look in the face this insane ideal of human
progress. We see to-day what has come of it, and
the further evils yet to come of it are being em-
bodied beneath our eyes. So that at last the
voice of Jehovah has here and there been faintly
heard, even where nowadays we had grown least
accustomed to hear it., in the Churches. It is
Dr. Inge, the Dean of London's Cathedral of St.
Paul's, a distinguished Churchman and at the
same time a foremost champion of eugenics, who
lately expressed the hope that the world, espe-
cially the European world, would one day realise
the advantages of a stationary population.*
Such a recognition, such an aspiration, indicates
that a new hope is dawning on the world's hori-
zon, and a higher ideal growing within the hu-
man soul. The mad competition of the industrial
world during the past century,, with the sordid
gloom and wretchedness of it for all who were
able to see beneath the surface, has shown for

'"This has long been recognised by men of science. Even
anyone with the slightest (knowledge of biology, Professor
Bateson remarked in a British Association Presidential address
in 1914, is aware that a population need not be declining because
it is not increasing; "in normal stable conditions population is
stationary." Major Leonard Darwin, the thoughtful and
cautious President of the Eugenics Education Society, has lately
stated his considered belief ("Population and Civilisation,
Economic Journal, June, 1921) that increase in numbers means,
ultimately, relative reduction of wealth per head, with conse-
quent lowering of the standard of civilisation; that it also, under
existing conditions, involves the production of a smaller pro-
portion of men of ability; and, further, a depreciation of our
traditions ; he concludes that, whatever element in civilisation
we regard — wealth, or stock, or traditions — "any increase in the
population such as that now taking place will be accompanied
by a lowering in the standard of our civilisation."

THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE RACE 167

ever what comes of the effort to produce a grow-
ing population by high birth-rates in peace-time.
The Great War of a later day has shown, let us
hope in an equally decisive manner, what comes
to a world where men have been for long gener-
ations produced so copiously and so cheaply that
it is natural to regard them as only fit to sweep
off the earth with machine guns. And the whole
world of to-day — with its starving millions strug-
gling in vain to feed themselves, with most of its
natural beauty swept away by the ravages of
man, and many of its most exquisite animals
finally exterminated — is likely to become merely
the monument to an ideal that failed. It was
time, however late in the day, for a return to
common-sense. It was time to realise that the
ideal of mere propagation could lead us nowhere
but to destruction. On that level we cannot
compete even with the lowest of organised
things, not even with the bacteria, which in num-
ber and in rapidity of multiplication are incon-
ceivable to us. "All hope abandon, ye that enter
here" is written over the portal of this path of
"Progress."

There are definite reasons why real progress
in the supreme tasks of civilisation can best be
made by a more or less stationary population,
whether the population is large or small, and it
need scarcely be added that, so far as the history
of mankind is yet legible, the great advances in

168 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

civilisation have been made by small, even very
small populations. Where the population is
rapidly growing, even if it is growing under the
favourable conditions that hardly ever accom-
pany such growth, all its energy is absorbed in
adjusting its perpetually shifting equilibrium. It
cannot succeed in securing the right conditions
of growth, because its growth is never ceasing
to demand new conditions. The structure of its
civilisation never rises above the foundations
because these foundations have perpetually to be
laid afresh, and there is never time to get further.
It is a process, moreover, accompanied by unend-
ing friction and disorder, by strains and stresses
of all kinds, which are fatal to any full, har-
monious, and democratic civilisation. The "pop-
ulation question," with the endlessly mischievous
readjustment it demands, must be eliminated be-
fore the great House of Life can be built up on a
strong solid human foundation, to lift its soaring
pinnacles towards the skies. That is what many
bitter experiences are beginning to teach us. In
the future we are likely to be much less con-
cerned about "race-suicide," though we can
never be too concerned about race-murder.

When we think, however, of the desirability of
a more or less stationary population, in order to
insure real social progress, as distinct from that
vain struggle of meaningless movement to and
fro which the history of the past reveals, we

THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE RACE 169

have to be clear in our minds that it may be far
from desirable that the present overgrown popu-
lation of the world should be stationary. That
might indeed be better than further increase in
numbers ; it would arrest the growth of our pres-
ent evils; it might open the way to methods by
which they would be diminished or eliminated.
But the process would be infinitely difficult, and
almost infinitely slow, as we may easily realise
when we consider that, with a population even
smaller than at present, the human race has not
only ravished the world's beauty almost out of
existence, but so ravaged its own vital spirit that,
as was found with some consternation during the
Great War, a large proportion of the male popula-
tion of every country is unfit for military service.
So often we hear it assumed, or even asserted,
that greatness means quantity, so that to look
forward to the replacement of the present teem-
ing insignificant human myriads by a rarer and
more truly greater race is to be a pessimist ! Oh,
these "optimists"! To revel in a world which
more and more closely resembles all that the poets
ever imagined of Hell, is to be an "optimist"!
One wonders how it is that in no brief moment
of lucidity it occurs to these people that the lower
we descend in the scale of life the greater the
quantity in a species and the poorer the quality,
so that to reach what such people should really
regard as the world's period of supreme great-

170 LITTLE ESSAYS OP LOVE AND VIRTUE

ness in life we must go back to the days, before
animal life appeared, when the earth was merely
a teeming mass of bacteria.*

To-day, we are often told, the majority of hu-
man beings belong either to the Undesired Class
or the Undesirable Class. To realise that this
is so, we are bidden to read the newspapers or
to walk along the streets of the cities — which-
ever they may be — wherein dwell the highest
products of our civilisation. In the better class
quarters it is indeed the Undesirable Class that
seems to predominate, and in the poor quarters,
the Undesired. Yet, viewing our species as a
whole, the two classes may be seen to walk hand
in hand along the same road, and in proportion
as our nobler instincts germinate and develop,
we must doubtless admit that it ought to be our
active aim to make that road for both of them —
socially though not individually — the Road to De-
struction.

To stem the devastating tide of human pro-
creativeness, however, easy as it may seem in
theory,, is by no means so easy as some think,
especially as those think who believe that the
human race stands on the brink of suicide. For
there is this about it that we must never forget :
the majority of those born to-day die before their
time, so that by diminishing the production of

* See, for instance, H. F. Osborn, The Origin and Evolution
of Life, 1918, Chapter III.

THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE RACE 171

the unfit, as well as by the progressive improve-
ment of the environment that automatically ac-
companies such diminution, we may make an
imposing difference in the appearance of the
birth-rate, whilst yet the population goes on in-
creasing rapidly, probably even more rapidly
than before. It needs a most radical and thor-
ough attack on the birth-rate before we can make
any real impression on the rate of increase of the
population,, to say nothing of its real reduction.
There is still an arduous road before us.

True it is that we have two opposing schools
of thought which both say that we need not, or
that we cannot, make any difference by our ef-
forts to regulate the earth's human population.
According to one view the development of popu-
lation, together with the necessity for war which
is inextricably mixed up with a developing popu-
lation., cannot be effected without, as one cham-
pion of the doctrine is pleased to put it, "shat-
tering both the structure of Euclidean space and
the psychological laws upon which the existence
of self -consciousness and human society are con-
ditional." * In simpler words, populations tend
to become too large for their territories, so that
war ensues, and birth-control can do nothing be-
cause "it is doubtful whether a group in the
plenitude of vigour and self -consciousness can

*B. A. G. Fuller, "The Mechanical Basis of War," Hibbert
Journal, 1921.

17* LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

deliberately stop its own growth." The other
school proclaims human impotence on exactly op-
posite grounds. There is not the slightest reason,
it declares, to believe that birth-control has had
any but a completely negligible influence on pop-
ulation. This is a natural process and fertility
is automatically adjusted to the death-rate.
Whenever a population reaches a certain stage of
civilisation and nervous development its pro-
creativeness, quite apart from any effort of the
will, tends to diminish. The seeming effect of
birth-control is illusory. It is Nature, not human
effort, which is at work.*

These two opposing councils of despair, each
proclaiming, though in a contrary sense, the van-
ity of human wishes in the matter of procreation,
might well, some may think, be left to neutralise
each other and evaporate in air. But it seems
worth while to point out that, with proper limita-
tions and qualifications, there is an element of
truth in each of them, while, without such limita-
tions and qualifications., both are alike obviously
absurd and wrong-headed. Undoubtedly, as the
one school holds, in certain stages of civilisa-

* Sir Shirley Murphy some years ago (Lancet, 10 Aug. 1912)
argued that the fall of the birth-rate, as also that of the death-
rate, has been largely effected by natural causes, independent of
man's action. Mr. G. Udney Yule (The Fall in the Birth-rate,
1920) also believes that birth-control counts for little, the chief
factor being natural fluctuations, probably of economic nature.
Recently Mr. C. E. Pell, in his book, The Law of Births and
Deaths (1921), has made a more elaborate and systematic at-
tempt to show that the rise and fall of the birth-rate has hitherto
been independent of human effort.

THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE RACE 173

tion, even at a fairly advanced stage, nations tend
to break out over their frontiers with resulting
war; but the period when they reach "the pleni-
tude of vigour and self-consciousness" is exactly
the period when the birth-rate begins to decline,
and the population, deliberately or instinctively,
controls its own increase. That has,, for instance,
been the history of France since the great expan-
sion of population, roughly associated with the
Napoleonic epopee, — which doubtless covered a
web of causes, sanitary, political, industrial, fav-
ourable to a real numerical increase of the nation
— had died down slowly to the level we witness
to-day.* Similarly, with regard to the opposing
school, we must undoubtedly accept a natural
fall in the birth-rate with a rising civilisation;
that has always been visible in highly civilised
individual couples, and it is an easily ascertainable
zoological fact that throughout the evolution of
life procreativeness has decreased with the in-
creased development of species. We may agree
that a natural factor comes into the recent fall
in the human birth-rate. But to argue that be-
cause a natural decline in birth-rate is the essen-
tial factor in the slowing down of procreative

* The reader may point to the renewal of Militarism and
Imperialism in France since the Great War. That, however,
has been an artificial product (in so far as it exists among the
people themselves) directly fostered from outside by the policy
of England and the United States, just as the same spirit in
Germany before the war, in the face of a falling birth-rate, was
artificially fostered from above by a military and Imperialistic
caste.

174 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

activity with all higher evolution, therefore de-
liberate birth-control counts for nothing, since
exactly the same result follows when voluntary
prevention is adopted and when it is not, seems
highly absurd. We must at least admit that vol-
untary birth-control is an important contributory
cause, in some sense indeed, of supreme import-
ance, because it is within man's own power and
because man is thus enabled to guide and mould
processes of Nature which might otherwise work
disastrously. How disastrously is shown by the
history of Europe, and in a notable degree
France, during the four or five centuries preced-
ing the end of the eighteenth century when vari-
ous new influences began to operate. During all
these centuries there was undoubtedly a very high
birth-rate, yet infant mortality, war, famine, in-
sanitation, contagious diseases of many and viru-
lent kinds, tended, as far as we can see, to keep
the population almost or quits stationary,* and
so ruinous a method of maintaining a stationary
population necessarily used up most of the energy
which might otherwise have been 'available for

'"See especially Mathorez, Hisfoire de la Formation de la
Population Frangaise, Vol. i, 1920, Les Strangers en France*
The fecundity of French families, even 'among the aristocracy, till
towards the end of the eighteenth century, was fabulous; in
the third quarter of the seventeenth century the average number
of children was five in Paris. But the mortality was extremely
high ; under the age of sixteen, Mathorez estimates, it was 51 per
cent, and infant mortality was terrible in all classes, small-pox
being specially fatal. Then there were the various diseases termed
plagues, with famine sometimes added, while war, emigration,
and religious celibacy all counteracted the excessive fecundity,

THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE RACE 175

social progress, although the stationary popula-
tion, even thus maintained, still placed France at
the head of European civilisation. The more
firmly we believe that the diminution of the pop-
ulation is a natural process, the more strenuously,
surely, we ought to guide it,, so that it shall work
without friction, and, so far as possible, tend to
eliminate the undesirable stocks of man and pre-
serve the desirable. Clearly, the theory itself
calls for much effort, since it is obvious that along
natural lines the decline, if it is the result of high
evolution, will affect the fit more easily than the
unfit.

Thus there seems, on a wide survey of the
matter, no reason whatever to quarrel with that
conviction, which is gradually over-spreading all
classes of human society in all parts of the world,
and ever more widely leading to practical action,
that the welfare of the individual, the family,
the community, and the race is bound up with
the purposive and deliberate practice of birth-
control,, whether we advocate that policy on the
ground that we are thereby furthering Nature, or
on the opposite, and no doubt equally excellent,
ground that we are thereby correcting Nature.

Along this road, as along any other road, we

so that from the thirteenth century to the third quarter of the
eighteenth the population seems to have been stationary, about
twenty-two millions. Then the size of the family fell in Paris
to 3.9 and in France generally to 4.3, while also there were
fewer marriages. Therewith there was an increase of pros-
perity.

176 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

shall not reach Utopia ; and since the Utopia of
every person who possesses one is unique that
perhaps need not be regretted. We shall not
even, within any measurable period of time, reach
a sanely free and human life fit to satisfy quite
moderate aspirations. The wise birth-controller
will not (like the deliriously absurd suffragette
of old-time) imagine that birth-control for all
means a New Heaven and a New Earth, but will,
rather, appreciate the delightful irony of the
Biblical legend which represented a world with
only four people in it, yet one of them a mur-
derer. Still, it may be pointed out, that was a
state of things much better than we can show
now. The world would count itself happier if,
during the Great War, only twenty-five per cent
of the population of belligerent lands had been
murderers, virtually or in fact There is some-
thing to be gained, and that something is well
worth while.

Still, whether we like it or not, the task of
speeding up the decrease of the human popu-
lation becomes increasingly urgent.* To many
of our Undesirables it may seem mere senti-
ment to trouble about the ravishing of the

♦Professor E. M. East, a distinguished biologist and lately
President of the American Society of Naturalists {Nature, 33
Sept, 1920), has estimated that, for all the fall in the birth-
rate, the present rate of increase in the population of die world*
chiefly of whites, who are increasing most rapidly, will, in the
lives of our grandchildren, lead to a straggle for eristrncf more
terrible than imagination can conceive.

THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE RACE 177

worlds beauty or the ravaging of the world's
humanity. But certain hard facts, even to-day f
have to be faced. The process of mechanical in-
vention continues every day on an ever increas-
ing scale of magnitude. Now that process, how*
ever necessary, however beneficial, involves some
of the chief evils of our present phase of what
we call civilisation, partly because it has deteri-
orated the quality of all human products and
partly because it has enslaved mankind, and in
so doing deteriorated also his quality.* Now we
cannot abolish machinery, because machinery lies
in the very essence of life and we ourselves are
machines. But, as the largest part of history
shows, there is no need whatever for man to be-
come the slave of machinery, or even for ma-
chinery to injure the quality of his own work;
rightly used it may improve it. The greatest
task before civilisation at present is to make ma-
chines what they ought to be, the slaves, instead
of the masters of men; and if civilisation fails at
the task* then without doubt it and its makers
will go down to a common destruction. It is a
task inextricably bound up with the task of
moulding the human race for which birth-control
is the elected instrument. Indeed they are but
two aspects of the same task. We have to accept
the rugged fact that every step to render more

♦This hat been set forth with admirable lucidity and wealth
of illustration by Dr. Austin Freeman in his Social Decay and
Regeneration (1921), already mentioned.

178 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

nearly perfect the mechanical side of life cor-
respondingly abolishes the need for men. Thus
it is calculated to-day that whenever, in accord-
ance with a growing tendency,, coal is superseded
by oil in industry two men are enabled to do the
work of twelve. That is merely typical of what
is taking place generally in our modern system
of civilisation. Everywhere a small number of
men are being enabled to replace a large number
of men. Not to avoid looking ahead, we may
say that of every twelve millions of our popula-
tion, ten millions will be unwanted. Let them do
something else! we cheerfully exclaim. But
what? No doubt there are always art and
science, infinite in their possibilities for joy and
enlightenment, infinite also, as we know, in their
possibilities of mischief and shallowness and
boredom. Let it only be true science and great
art, and one man is better than ten millions. To
say that is only to echo unconsciously the ancient
saying of Heraclitus, "One is ten thousand if he
be the best."

The vistas that are opened up when we realise
the direction in which the human race is travel-
ling may seem to be endless; and so in a sense
they are. Man has replaced the gods he once
dreamed of; he has found that he is himself a
god, who, however realistic he seeks to make his
philosophy, himself created the world as he sees
it and now has even acquired the power of creat-

THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE RACE 179

ing himself, or, rather, of re-creating himself.
For he recognises that, at present, he is rather a
poor sort of god, so much an inferior god that
he is hardly, if at all, to be distinguished from
the Lords of Hell.

The divine creative task of man extends into
the future far beyond the present,, and* we can-
not too often meditate on the words of the wisest
and noblest forerunner of that future: "The
whole world still lies before us like a quarry be-
fore the master-builder, who is only then worthy
of the name when out of this casual mass of
natural material he has embodied with all his best
economy, adaptability to the end, and firmness,
the image which has arisen in his mind. Every-
thing outside us is only the means for this con-
structing process, yes, I would even dare to say,
also everything inside us; deep within lies the
creative force which is able to form what it will*
and gives us no rest until, without us or within
us, in one or the other way, we have finally given
it representation." The future, with all its pos-
sibilities, is still a future infinitely far away, how-
ever well it may be to fix our eyes on the con-
stellation towards which our solar system may
seem to be moving across the sky.

Meanwhile, every well-directed step, while it
brings us but ever so little nearer to the far goal
around which our dreams may play, is at once a
beautiful process and an invigorating effort, and

180 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

thereby becomes in itself a desirable end. It is
the little things of life which give us most satis-
faction and the smallest things in our path that
may seem most worth while.

INDEX

INDEX

Abstinence, sexual, 59.
Acton, no.
Adrenal glands, 132.
Anstie, 45.
Art of love, 121.
Asceticism and sexuality, 57.
Augustine, St., 58, 77.
Australian birth-rate, 162,
Auto-erotism, 46.

Bantu, marriage among the, 93.
Bateson, 166.
Bell, W. Blair, 119.
Binet-Sangle, 146.
Birth-control, 72, 138 el seq.
Birth-rate, in France, 159, 174.

in Australia, 162.

in Canada, 160.

in England, 159, 164.
Book of the Knight of the Tour-Landry, 18, 82.
Brontes, the, 25.
Browning, Mrs., 26.
Brown-Sequard, 45.
Burbank, Luther, 139.

Canada, birth-rate in, 160.

Chastity, 57.

Chaucer, 56.

Children, to parents, relation of, 13 el seq.

in modern life, 24 el seq.

sex in, 48.
China, parents in, 32.
Christianity, 57, 65, 70, 76, 108, no.
Continence, the value of, 38, 42.

183

186 LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

CEdipus-complex, 22.
Osborn, H. R, 170.

Palladius, 57.

Parasitism in the home, 90.

Parents, merciful destruction of, 32.

relation of children to, 13 et seq., 24.

training of, 34.

veneration of, 32.
Parmelee, 120.
Paston Letters, 16, 79.
Paul, Eden & Cedar, 18, 151.
Paul, St., yy.
Peacock, 51.
Pell, C. E., 172.
Perrycoste, F. H., 149, 153.
Perseigne, Adam de, 20.
Pituitary gland, 1 18.
Play- function of sex, 116 et seq»
Pleasure, the function of, 67.
Polonius, 31.
Powell, Dr., 81.

Protestantism and marriage, JJ*
Psycho-analysis, 22, 130.
Purity, 37 et seq.

Race-suicide, 155 et seq.
Ring in marriage, 84.
Rite, the marriage, 83.
Robert of Arbrissd, 58.
Rohleder, 43.
Rolland, Romain, 67.

Sacrament, sex as a, 69.
Salle, Antoine de la, 17.
Sanger, Margaret, 152.
Schreiner, Qlive, 69, 90.

and asceticism, 57.
Sex, and magic, 39.

as a sacrament, 69.

evolution in, 66.

INDEX 18T

Sex, nature of impulse of, 44.
play- function of, 116 et seq m
spiritual element in, 66.
sublimation of, 47, 50.

Shaftesbury, 51.

Socialism and eugenics, 150*

Stonor Letters, 81.

Stopes, Marie, 152.

Suarez, 62.

Sublimation, 47, 50.

Theognis, 65.

Wells, H. G., 152.
Westermarck, 32.
Wives, 75 et seq.

love rights of, 102 et seq.
Wollstonecroft, Mary, 25.
Women, erotic claims of, 112*

erotic ideas of average, 124.

in Crusades, 20.

in marriage, 75, 78.

in old France, 19 et seq.

in subjection to men, HI S

love rights of, 102 et seq*

on juries, 16.

Yule, G. Udney, 172.

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