Woman and the New Race Part 9

"For some time past Germany has no longer been in the position of feeding her own population, and large quant.i.ties of food as raw-materials have to be imported, for which exports have to be exchanged.

It is doubtful whether even this can for long keep pace with the present rate of increase of population."

There were other utterances which just as frankly acknowledged that, having produced surplus population, Germany proposed to procure by means of war the expansion necessary to care for it. Adelyne More, in "Uncontrolled Breeding," a study of the birth rate in its relation to war, quoted the Berliner Post: "Can a great and rapidly growing nation like Germany always renounce all claims to further development or to the expansion of its political power? The final settlement with France and England, the expansion of our colonial possessions, in order to create new German homes for the overflow of our population--these are problems which must be faced in the near future." This was published in 1913.

Just as frank was the recognition of the true cause of international conflicts by a number of British authorities.

In "Uncontrolled Breeding," the author quotes the British National Commission's report on The Declining Birth Rate: "The pressure of population in any country brings, as a chief historic consequence, overflows and migrations not only for peaceful settlement, but for conquest and for the subjugation and exploitation of weaker peoples.

This always remains a chief cause of international disputes."

The militaristic claim for Germany's right to new territory was simply a claim to the right of life and food for the German babies--the same right that a chick claims to burst its sh.e.l.l. If there had not been other millions of people claiming the same right, there would have been no war. But there were other millions.

The German rulers and leaders pointed out the fact that expansion meant more business for German merchants, more work for German workmen at better wages, and more opportunities for Germans abroad. They also pointed out that lack of expansion meant crowding and crus.h.i.+ng at home, hard times, heavy burdens, lack of opportunity for Germans, and what not. In this way, they gave the people of the Empire a startling and true picture of what would happen from overcrowding. Once they realized the facts, the majority of Germans naturally welcomed the so-called war of defense.

The argument was sound. Once the German mothers had submitted to the plea for overbreeding, it was inevitable that imperialistic Germany should make war. Once the battalions of unwanted babies came into existence--babies whom the mothers did not want but which they bore as a "patriotic duty"--it was too late to avoid international conflict.

The great crime of imperialistic Germany was its high birth rate.

It has always been so. Behind all war has been the pressure of population. "Historians," says Huxley, "point to the greed and ambition of rulers, the reckless turbulence of the ruled, to the debasing effects of wealth and luxury, and to the devastating wars which have formed a great part of the occupation of mankind, as the causes of the decay of states and the foundering of old civilizations, and thereby point their story with a moral. But beneath all this superficial turmoil lay the deep-seated impulse given by unlimited multiplication."

Robert Thomas Malthus, formulator of the doctrine which bears his name, pointed out, in the closing years of the eighteenth century, the relation of overpopulation to war. He showed that mankind tends to increase faster than the food supply. He demonstrated that were it not for the more common diseases, for plague, famine, floods and wars, human beings would crowd each other to such an extent that the misery would be even greater than it now is. These he described as "natural checks," pointing out that as long as no other checks are employed, such disasters are unavoidable. If we do not exercise sufficient judgment to regulate the birth rate, we encounter disease, starvation and war.

Both Darwin and John Stuart Mill recognized, by inference at least, the fact that so-called "natural checks"--and among them war--will operate if some sort of limitation is not employed. In his _Origin of Species_, Darwin says: "There is no exception to the rule that every organic being naturally increases at so high a rate, if not destroyed, that the earth would soon be covered by the progeny of a single pair."

Elsewhere he observes that we do not permit helpless human beings to die off, but we create philanthropies and charities, build asylums and hospitals and keep the medical profession busy preserving those who could not otherwise survive. John Stuart Mill, supporting the views of Malthus, speaks to exactly the same effect in regard to the multiplying power of organic beings, among them humanity. In other words, let countries become overpopulated and war is inevitable. It follows as daylight follows the sunrise.

When Charles Bradlaugh and Mrs. Annie Besant were on trial in England in 1877 for publis.h.i.+ng information concerning contraceptives, Mrs.

Besant put the case bluntly to the court and the jury:

"I have no doubt that if natural checks were allowed to operate right through the human as they do in the animal world, a better result would follow. Among the brutes, the weaker are driven to the wall, the diseased fall out in the race of life. The old brutes, when feeble or sickly, are killed. If men insisted that those who were sickly should be allowed to die without help of medicine or science, if those who are weak were put upon one side and crushed, if those who were old and useless were killed, if those who were not capable of providing food for themselves were allowed to starve, if all this were done, the struggle for existence among men would be as real as it is among brutes and would doubtless result in the production of a higher race of men.

"But are you willing to do that or to allow it to be done?"

We are not willing to let it be done. Mother hearts cling to children, no matter how diseased, misshapen and miserable. Sons and daughters hold fast to parents, no matter how helpless. We do not allow the weak to depart; neither do we cease to bring more weak and helpless beings into the world. Among the dire results is war, which kills off, not the weak and the helpless, but the strong and the fit.

What shall be done? We have our choice of one of three policies. We may abandon our science and leave the weak and diseased to die, or kill them, as the brutes do. Or we may go on overpopulating the earth and have our famines and our wars while the earth exists. Or we can accept the third, sane, sensible, moral and practicable plan of birth control. We can refuse to bring weak, the helpless and the unwanted children into the world. We can refuse to overcrowd families, nations and the earth. There are these ways to meet the situation, and only these three ways.

The world will never abandon its preventive and curative science; it may be expected to elevate and extend it beyond our present imagination. The efforts to do away with famine and the opposition to war are growing by leaps and bounds. Upon these efforts are largely based our modern social revolutions.

There remains only the third expedient--birth control, the real cure for war. This fact was called to the attention of the Peace Conference in Paris, in 1919, by the Malthusian League, which adopted the following resolution at its annual general meeting in London in June of that year:

"The Malthusian League desires to point out that the proposed scheme for the League of Nations has neglected to take account of the important questions of _the pressure of population_, which _causes the great international economic compet.i.tion_ and rivalry, and of the _increase of population_, which is put forward as a justification for _claiming increase of territory_. It, therefore, wishes to put on record its belief that the League of Nations will only be able to fulfill its aim _when it adds a clause_ to the following effect:

"'That each Nation desiring to enter into the League of Nations shall pledge itself _so to restrict its birth rate_ that its people shall be able to live in comfort _in their own dominions without need_ for territorial expansion, and that it shall recognize that _increase of population shall not justify_ a demand either for increase of territory or for the compulsion of other Nations to admit its emigrants; so that when all Nations in the League have shown their ability to live on their own resources without international rivalry, they will be in a position to fuse into an international federation, and territorial boundaries will then have little significance.'"

As a matter of course, the Peace Conference paid no attention to the resolution, for, as pointed out by Frank A. Vanderlip, the American financier, that conference not only ignored the economic factors of the world situation, but seemed unaware that Europe had produced more people than its fields could feed. So the resolution amounted to so much propaganda and nothing more.

This remedy can be applied only by woman and she will apply it. She must and will see past the call of pretended patriotism and of glory of empire and perceive what is true and what is false in these things.

She will discover what base uses the militarist and the exploiter make of the idealism of peoples. Under the clamor of the press, permeating the ravings of the jingoes, she will hear the voice of Napoleon, the archtype of the militarists of all nations, calling for "fodder for cannon."

"Woman is given to us that she may bear children," said he. "Woman is our property, we are not hers, because she produces children for us--we do not yield any to her. She is, therefore, our possession as the fruit tree is that of the gardener."

That is what the imperialist is _thinking_ when he speaks of the glory of the empire and the prestige of the nation. Every country has its appeal--its s.h.i.+bboleth--ready for the lips of the imperialist. German rulers pointed to the comfort of the workers, to old-age pensions, maternal benefits and minimum wage regulations, and other material benefits, when they wished to inspire soldiers for the Fatherland.

England's strongest argument, perhaps, was a certain phase of liberty which she guarantees her subjects, and the protection afforded them wherever they may go. France and the United States, too, have their appeals to the idealism of democracy--appeals which the politicians of both countries know well how to use, though the peoples of both lands are beginning to awake to the fact that their countries have been living on the glories of their revolutions and traditions, rather than the substance of freedom. Behind the boast of old-age pensions, material benefits and wage regulations, behind the bombast concerning liberty in this country and tyranny in that, behind all the slogans and s.h.i.+bboleths coined out of the ideals of the peoples for the uses of imperialism, woman must and will see the iron hand of that same imperialism, condemning women to breed and men to die for the will of the rulers.

Upon woman the burden and the horrors of war are heaviest. Her heart is the hardest wrung when the husband or the son comes home to be buried or to live a shattered wreck. Upon her devolve the extra tasks of filling out the ranks of workers in the war industries, in addition to caring for the children and replenis.h.i.+ng the war-diminished population. Hers is the crus.h.i.+ng weight and the sickening of soul. And it is out of her womb that those things proceed. When she sees what lies behind the glory and the horror, the boasting and the burden, and gets the vision, the human perspective, she will end war. She will kill war by the simple process of starving it to death. For she will refuse longer to produce the human food upon which the monster feeds.

CHAPTER XIV

WOMAN AND THE NEW MORALITY

Upon the shoulders of the woman conscious of her freedom rests the responsibility of creating a new s.e.x morality. The vital difference between a morality thus created by women and the so-called morality of to-day, is that the new standard will be based upon knowledge and freedom while the old is founded upon ignorance and submission.

What part will birth control play in bringing forth this new standard?

What effect will its practice have upon woman's moral development?

Will it lift her to heights that she has not yet achieved, and if so, how? Why is the question of morality always raised by the objector to birth control? All these questions must be answered if we are to get a true picture of the relation of the feminine spirit to morals. They can best be answered by considering, first, the source of our present standard of s.e.x morals and the reasons why those standards are what they are; and, second, the source and probable nature of the new morality.

We get most of our notions of s.e.x morality from the Christian church--more particularly from the oldest existing Christian church, known as the Roman Catholic. The church has generally defined the "immoral woman" as one who mates out of wedlock. Virtually, it lets it go at that. In its practical workings, there is nothing in the church code of morals to protect the woman, either from unwilling submission to the wishes of her husband, from undesired pregnancy, nor from any other of the outrages only too familiar to many married women. Nothing is said about the crime of bringing an unwanted child into the world, where often it cannot be adequately cared for and is, therefore, condemned to a life of misery. The church's one point of insistence is upon the right of itself to legalize marriage and to compel the woman to submit to whatever such marriage may bring. It is true that there are remedies of divorce in the case of the state, but the church has adhered strictly to the principle that marriage, once consummated, is indissoluble. Thus, in its operation, the church's code of s.e.x morals has nothing to do with the basic s.e.x rights of the woman, but enforces, rather, the a.s.sumed property rights of the man to the body and the services of his wife. They are man-made codes; their vital factor, as they apply to woman, is submission to the man.

Closely a.s.sociated with and underlying the principle of submission, has been the doctrine that the s.e.x life is in itself unclean. It follows, therefore, that all knowledge of the s.e.x physiology or s.e.x functions is also unclean and taboo. Upon this teaching has been founded woman's subjection by the church and, largely through the influence of the church, her subjection by the state to the needs of the man.

Let us see how these principles have affected the development of the present moral codes and some of their s.h.i.+fting standards. When we have finished this a.n.a.lysis, we shall know why objectors to birth control raise the "morality" question.

The church has sought to keep women ignorant upon the plea of keeping them "pure." To this end it has used the state as its moral policeman.

Men have largely broken the grip of the ecclesiastics upon masculine education. The ban upon geology and astronomy, because they refute the biblical version of the creation of the world, are no longer effective. Medicine, biology and the doctrine of evolution have won their way to recognition in spite of the united opposition of the clerics. So, too, has the right of woman to go unveiled, to be educated, and to speak from public platforms, been a.s.serted in spite of the condemnations of the church, which denounced them as destructive of feminine purity. Only in s.e.x matters has it succeeded in keeping the bugaboo alive.

It clings to this last stronghold of ignorance, knowing that woman free from s.e.xual domination would produce a race spiritually free and strong enough to break the last of the bonds of intellectual darkness.

It is within the marriage bonds, rather than outside them, that the greatest immorality of men has been perpetrated. Church and state, through their canons and their laws, have encouraged this immorality.

It is here that the woman who is to win her way to the new morality will meet the most difficult part of her task of moral house cleaning.

In the days when the church was striving for supremacy, when it needed single-minded preachers, proselyters and teachers, it fastened upon its people the idea that all s.e.xual union, in marriage or out of it, is sinful. That idea colors the doctrines of the Church of Rome and many other Christian denominations to this hour. "Marriage, even for the sake of children was a carnal indulgence" in earlier times, as Princ.i.p.al Donaldson points out in "_The Position of Women Among the Early Christians._" [Footnote: Contemporary Review, 1889.] It was held that the child was "conceived in sin," and that as the result of the s.e.x act, an unclean spirit had possession of it. This spirit can be removed only by baptism, and the Roman Catholic baptismal service even yet contains these words: "Go out of him, thou unclean spirit, and give place unto the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete."

In the _Intellectual Development of Europe_, John William Draper, speaking of the teaching of celibacy among the Early Fathers, [Footnote: 2-Vol. 1, page 426.] says: "The sinfulness of the marriage relation and the preeminent value of chast.i.ty followed from their principles. If it was objected to such practices that by their universal adoption the human species would soon be extinguished and no man would remain to offer praises to G.o.d, these zealots, remembering the temptations from which they had escaped, with truth replied that there would always be sinners enough in the world to avoid that disaster, and that out of their evil work, good would be brought.

Saint Jerome offers us the pregnant reflection that though it may be marriage that fills the earth, it is virginity that replenishes heaven."

The early church taught that there were enough children on earth. It needed missionaries more than it needed babies, and impressed upon its followers the idea that the birth wails of the infant were a protest against being born into so sordid a world.

Thus are we presented with one of the enormous inconsistencies of the church in s.e.x matters. The teachings of the "Early Fathers" were effect the advocacy of an attempt to enforce birth control through absolute continence, while later it reverted, as it reverts to-day, to the Mosaic injunction to "be fruitful and multiply."

The very force of the s.e.x urge in humanity compelled the church to abandon the teaching of celibacy for its general members.h.i.+p. Paul, who preferred to see Christians unmarried rather than married, had recognized the power of this force. In the seventh chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians (according to the Douay translation of the Vulgate, which is accepted by the Church of Rome), he said:

"8--But I say unto you the unmarried and the widows; it is good if they continue even as I.

"9--But if they do not contain themselves, let them marry, for it is better to marry than to be burnt."

When the church became a political power rather than a strictly religious inst.i.tution, it needed a high birth rate to provide laymen to support its increasingly expensive organization. It then began to exploit the s.e.x force for its own interest. It reversed its position in regard to children. It encouraged marriage under its own control and exhorted women to bear as many children as possible. The world was just as sordid and the birth wails of the infants were just as piteous, but the needs of the hierarchy had changed. So it modified the standard of s.e.x morality to suit its own requirements--marriage now became a sacrament.