Radiant Motherhood/Chapter 20

ON parents' love for the helpless child depends the existence of our race. Human parenthood necessitates not only the desire for offspring, but the willing care of them during the long years while they are helpless and dependent. Were this desire and willingness not deeply implanted in us our race would become extinct, as in some strange way, the higher type of ancient Greeks vanished from the world.

Not only throughout the lower creatures do we find the responsibilities of parenthood increasing as we go up the scale towards the higher, but, even in the various grades of highly ​civilized man, the responsibility for the children is ever greater in proportion with the general culture and position of the parents.

Not many years ago the labourer's child could be set to work early and could very shortly earn his keep; while at the same time the young gentleman was an expense and care to his father and mother until he had passed through the University of Oxford or Cambridge, and amongst some even until he had made his "finishing" world tour. The trend of legislation has continuously extended the age of irresponsible youth in the lower and lower middle classes, until it now approaches that of the middle and upper class youth. A stride in this direction was taken by the last Education Act, which has made education compulsory throughout the whole country to an age which is nearly university age.

I need not labour the resulting effect of the ever increasing prolongation of youth. It is not only apparent but has received sufficient treatment from the hands of various authors and thinkers.

Its corollary, however, has still not received that clear and direct thought which its significance demands. Parenthood under the present régime, is not only an increasing responsibility and expense, it has become so great a strain upon the resources of those who have for them​selves and their children a high standard of living that it is tending to become a rare privilege for some who would otherwise gladly propagate large families.

As Dean Inge reminded us (Outspoken Essays, 1919), there was a stage in the high civilization of Greece when slaves were only allowed to rear a child as a reward for their good behaviour. I find a curious parallel to this in the treatment of a section of our society by our present community.

Crushed by the burden of taxation which they have not the resources to meet and to provide for children also: crushed by the national cost of the too numerous children of those who do not contribute to the public funds by taxation, yet who recklessly bring forth from an inferior stock individuals who are not self-supporting, the middle and superior artisan classes have, without perceiving it, come almost to take the position of that ancient slave population. It is only as a reward for their thrift and foresight, for their care and self-denial that they find themselves able (that is allowed by financial circumstances) to have one or perhaps two children. Hence by a strange parallel working of divers forces, the best, the thriftiest, the most serious-minded, the most desiring of parenthood are to-day those who are forced by circumstances into the position of the ancient ​slave and allowed to rear but one or two children as a result perhaps of a lifetime of valuable service and of loving union with a wife well fitted to bear more offspring. While on the other hand, society allows the diseased, the racially negligent, the thriftless, the careless, the feebleminded, the very lowest and worst members of the community, to produce innumerable tens of thousands of stunted, warped, and inferior infants. If they live, a large proportion of these are doomed from their very physical inheritance to be at the best but partly self-supporting, and thus to drain the resources of those classes above them which have a sense of responsibility. The better classes, freed from the cost of the institutions, hospitals, prisons and so on, principally filled by the inferior stock, would be able to afford to enlarge their own families, and at the same time not only to save misery but to multiply a hundredfold the contribution in human life-value to the riches of the State.

The immensity of the power of parenthood, both on the personal lives which it brings into existence, and on the community of which each individual is to form a part, is not yet perceived by our Statesmen in its true perspective.

The power of parenthood ought no longer to be exercised by all, however inferior, as an "individual right." It is profoundly a duty ​and a privilege, and it is essentially the concern of the whole community. It should be the policy of the community to encourage in every way the parenthood of those whose circumstances and conditions are such that there is a reasonable anticipation that they will give rise to healthy, well-endowed future citizens. It should be the policy of the community to discourage from parenthood all whose circumstances are such as would make probable the introduction of weakened, diseased or debased future citizens. It is the urgent duty of the community to make parenthood impossible for those whose mental and physical conditions are such that there is well-nigh a certainty that their offspring must be physically and mentally tainted, if not utterly permeated by disease. That the community should allow syphilitic parents to bring forth a sequence of blind syphilitic infants is a state of affairs so monstrous that it would be hardly credible were it not a fact.

Parenthood, with the divine gift of love in its power, with the glorious potentialities of handing on a radiant, wholesome, beautiful youth should be a sacred and preserved gift, a privilege only to be exercised by those who rationally comprehend the counter-balancing duties. But so long as parenthood is kept outside the realm of rational thought and reasoned action, so long will we as a race slide at an ever​increasing speed towards the utter deterioration of our stock through the reckless increase of the debased, which is necessarily counterbalanced by the unnatural limiting of the families of the more educated and responsible, whose sense of duty to the unborn forbids them to bring into the world children whom they cannot educate and environ at least as well as they themselves were reared.

In earlier generations the child was taught to speak of its parents in a respectful and grateful tone as the "august authors of its being," but this right and proper instruction in reverence was coupled with an arbitrary disposal of the child, and a certain harshness in its training against which the later generations have revolted. As is usual the reformers have deviated from rectitude in the opposite direction, so that today to find children with deep respect for their parents is uncommon. Reverence is being exacted by some rather from the parent towards the child as a fresh, new and unspoilt being. This too often results in spoiling the child, which is an equally foolish and hampering proceeding. The child should be taught from its earliest days profound respect, reverence and gratitude towards its parents, and in particular towards its mother, for of her very life she gave it the incomparable gift of life. True parents give the child the best and freshest and most beautiful ​impulses of their lives, and, at the cost of bodily anguish the mother bears it, and its parents for long years nurture it, sacrificing many enjoyments which they might have but for the cost and care of rearing it. This should be realized by the child, who then cannot but feel gratitude to and reverence for the authors of its being.

The sheer beauty of the world, were there no other gain from living, is so great that the gift of eyes and a mind to perceive it should place the recipient of that gift for ever in a reverential debt towards the pair who gave.

But the value of the beauty of life, and a just appreciation of the immense gift which parenthood confers cannot be realized by all. To-day alas, millions are born into circumstances so wretched that life can scarcely involve a perception of beauty, or a probability of moral action and social service. Also many myriads of children are born of parents to whom they can feel that they owe nothing, because they know or inwardly perceive that they were not desired, that they were not profoundly and nobly loved throughout their coming, that they were hurled into this existence through accident, self-indulgence or stupidity. Yet parenthood which grants life even on these terms is a wonderful power, a cruel and relentless force perverted from its divine possibilities.

Youth tends ever to right itself if it but ​escape the taint of the profound racial diseases, and the gift of a well-conditioned body is the creation of an incomparable set of co-ordinated powers in a world in which the potentialities for the use of those powers is magical.

Innumerable are the efforts at present being made by countless different societies, official bodies and individual reformers to diminish the ever increasing ill-health and deterioration of our race, but their efforts are a fight on the losing side unless the fundamental and hitherto uncontrollable factors which make for health are there.

Doctors may cure every disease known to humanity, but while they are so doing, fresh diseases, further modifications of destructive germs, may spring into existence, the possibility of which has recently been demonstrated by French scientists who have experimented on the rapid changes which may be induced in "germs."

Prisons and reformatories, municipal milk, the feeding of school children, improvement in housing, reform of our marriage laws, schools for mothers, even schools for fathers, garden cities—not all these useful and necessary things together and many more added to them will ever touch the really profound sources of our race, will ever cause freedom from degeneracy and ill-health, will ever create that fine, glorious ​and beautiful race of men and women which hovers in the dreams of our reformers. Is then this dream out of reach and impossible; are then all our efforts wasted? No, the dream is not impossible of fulfilment; but, at present, our efforts are almost entirely wasted because they are built upon the shifting sand and not upon the steady rock.

The reform, the one central reform, which will make all the others of avail and make their work successful is the endowing of motherhood, not with money but with the knowledge of her own power.

For the power of a mother, consciously exerted in the voluntary procreation and joyous bearing of her children is the greatest power in the world. It is through its conscious and deliberate exercise, and through that alone, that the race may step from its present entanglements on to a higher plane, where bodies will be not only a delight to their possessors, but efficient tools in the service of the souls which temporarily inhabit them.

I maintain that this wonderful rejuvenescence and reform of the race need not be a dim and distant dream of the future. It is hovering so close at hand that it is actually within reach of those who to-day are in their young maturity; we, at present in the flesh may link hands with grandchildren belonging to a generation so ​wonderful, so endowed, and so improved out of recognition that the miseries and the depravity of human nature, to-day so wide-spread, may appear like a black and hideous memory of the past, as incredible to them as the habits of cannibals are to us.

An ideal too distant, too remote, may interest the dreamer and the reformer possibly, but it cannot inspire a whole nation. An ideal within the range of possibility, that each one of us who lives a full lifetime may actually perceive, such an ideal can spur and fire the imagination, not only of our own nation, but of the world. It is my prayer that I may present such a racial ideal, not only to my own people but to humanity. It is my prayer that I may live to see in the generation of my grandchildren a humanity from which almost all the most blackening and distressing elements have been eliminated, and in which the vernal bodily beauty and unsullied spiritual power of those then growing up will surpass anything that we know to-day except among the rare and gifted few. This is not a wild dream; it is a real potentiality almost within reach. The materialization of this vital racial vision is in the hands of the mothers for the next twenty or thirty years.

If every woman will but consciously and deliberately exercise the powers of her motherhood after learning of those powers; if she bear ​only those children which she and her mate ardently desire; if she refuse to bear any but these, and if she so space these children that she herself rests and recovers vitality between their births, and during their coming she lives in such a way as I have indicated in the preceding chapters, and if at the same time the deadly and horrible scourges of the venereal diseases and the multitude of ramifications of racial baseness are eliminated as they can be, then with a comparatively small percentage of accidents and unforeseeable errors, the quality of those born will enormously improve, and by a second generation all should be already far on the highway to new and wonderful powers, which are to-day almost unsuspected.

What are the greatest dangers which jeopardize the materialization of this glorious dream of a human stock represented only by wellformed, desired, well-endowed beautiful men and women? Two main dangers are in the way of its consummation; the first is ignorance It is difficult to reach the untutored mind, to teach a public hardened and deadened to callousness and the lack of dreams of their own; even though if one could but reach them it would be possible to make them understand.

A second and almost greater danger is not a simple ignorance, but the inborn incapacity which lies in the vast and ever increasing stock ​of degenerate, feeble-minded and unbalanced who are now in our midst and who devastate social customs. These populate most rapidly, these tend proportionately to increase, and these are like the parasite upon the healthy tree sapping its vitality. These produce less than they consume and are able only to flourish and reproduce so long as the healthier produce food for them; but by ever weakening the human stock, in the end they will succumb with the fine structure which they have destroyed.

There appear then two obstacles which might block the materialization of my racial vision; on the one hand the ignorance of those who have latent powers. This only needs to be stirred by knowledge and the inspiration of an ideal, to become potent. This obstacle is not unsurmountable. If one but speaks in sufficiently burning words, if one but writes sufficiently contagiously, the ideas must spread with ever increasing acceleration. Ignorance must be vanquished by winged knowledge. I hold it to be the duty of the dreamer of great dreams not only to express them in such a way that cognate souls may also perceive them. It is the duty of a seer to embody his message in such a form that its beauty is apparent and the vision can be seen by all the people. The infectiousness of disease, the contagion of destructive and horrible bacterial germs have be​come a commonplace in our social consciousness, and we have forgotten, and our artists have in recent years tended ever more and more to forget that the highest form of art should also be infectious. Goodness, beauty and prophetic vision have as strong a contagious quality as disease if they are embodied in a form rendered vital by the mating of truth and beauty.

To overcome mere ignorance in others is, therefore, by no means a hopeless task, and it is the valiant work of the artist-prophet. Youth is the time to catch the contagion of goodness. To youth I appeal.

The other obstacle presents a deeper and more difficult task. It must deal with the terrible debasing power of the inferior, the depraved and feeble-minded, to whom reason means nothing and can mean nothing, who are thriftless, unmanageable and appallingly prolific. Yet if the good in our race is not to be swamped and destroyed by the debased as the fine tree by the parasite, this prolific depravity must be curbed. How shall this be done? A very few quite simple Acts of Parliament could deal with it.

Three short and concise Bills would be sufficient to afford the most urgent social service for the preservation of our race. They should be simply worded and based on possibilities well within the grasp of modern science.

The idea of sterilization has not yet been very ​generally understood or accepted, although it is an idea which our civilization urgently needs to assimilate. I think that a large part of the objections to it, often made passionately and eloquently by those from whom one would otherwise have expected a more intelligent attitude, is due to complete ignorance of the facts. Even otherwise instructed persons confuse sterilization with castration. The arguments which to-day in a chance discussion of the subject are always brought forward against sterilization have been, in my experience, only those which apply to castration. To castrate any male is, of course, not only to deprive him of his manhood and thus to injure his personal consciousness, but to remove bodily organs, the loss of which adversely affects his mentality and which will also affect the internal secretions which have a profound influence on his whole organization. I fully endorse the views of the opponents of this process.

It is, however, neither necessary to castrate nor is it suggested by those who, like myself, would like to see the sterilization of those totally unfit for parenthood made an immediate possibility, indeed made compulsory. As Dr. Havelock Ellis stated in an article in the Eugenics Review, Vol. I, No. 3, October 1909, pp. 203-206, sterilization under proper conditions is a very different and much simpler matter and ​one which has no deleterious and far reaching effects on the whole system. The operation is trivial, scarcely painful, and does not debar the subject from experiencing all his normal reaction in ordinary union; it only prevents the procreation of children.

It has been found in some States of America, and as I know from private correspondents in this country, there are men who would welcome the relief from the ever present anxiety of potential parenthood which they know full well would be ruinous to the future generation.

There is also the possibility of sterilization by the direct action of "X" rays. At present sterility is known as an unfortunate danger to those engaged in scientific research with radium, but it might, under control, be wisely used as a painless method of sterilization. This may prove of particular value for women in whom the operation corresponding to the severance of the ducts of the man is more serious. It appears however, not always to be permanent in its effect. In some circumstances this may be an advantage, in others a disadvantage.

With reference to the sterilizing effect of "X"-rays, the following quotation from F. H. Marshall, The Physiology of Reproduction, 1910, is pertinent:—

A more special cause of sterility in men is one which operates in the case of workers with radium or the Röntgen rays. Several ​years ago Albers-Schönberg noticed that the X-rays induced sterility in guinea pigs and rabbits, but without interfering with the sexual potency. These observations have been confirmed by other investigators, who have shown, further, that the azoospermia is due to the degeneration of the cells lining the seminal canals. In men it has been proved that mere presence in an X-ray atmosphere incidental to radiography sooner or later causes a condition of complete sterility, but without any apparent diminution of sexual potency. As Gordon observes, for those working in an X-ray atmosphere adequate protection for all parts of the body not directly exposed for examination or treatment is indispensable, but, on the other hand, the X-rays afford a convenient, painless and harmless method of inducing sterility, in cases in which it is desirable to effect this result.

When Bills are passed to ensure the sterility of the hopelessly rotten and racially diseased, and to provide for the education of the child-bearing woman so that she spaces her children healthily, our race will rapidly quell the stream of depraved, hopeless and wretched lives which are at present ever increasing in proportion in our midst. Before this stream at present the thoughtful shrink but do nothing. Such action as will be possible when these bills are passed will not only increase the relative proportion of the sound and healthy among us who may consciously contribute to the higher and more beautiful forms of the human race, but by the elimination of wasteful lives which ​are to-day seldom self-supporting, and which are so largely the cause of the cost and outlay of public money in their institutional treatment and their partial relief, will check an increasing drain on our national resources. The setting free of this public money would make it possible for those now too heavily taxed to reproduce their own and more valuable kinds.

The miserable, the degenerate, the utterly wretched in body and mind, who when reproducing multiply the misery and evil of the world, would be the first to be thankful for the escape such legislation would offer from the wretchedness entailed not only on their offspring but on themselves. The Labour Party, all Progressives, and all Conservatives who desire to conserve the good can unite to support measures so directly calculated to improve the physical condition, the mental happiness and the general well-being of the human race.

Even to-day almost all the thriftiest and better of the working class, and the artisan class in particular, are already in the ranks of those who are sponged upon, and to some extent taxed, for the upkeep of the incompetent, and it is just from among the best artisan and from the middle class that the most serious minded parents and those who recognize their racial responsibilities are principally to be found. There is throughout the whole Labour move​ment, as throughout the less vocal but deeper feeling of the middle class, a passionate desire to eliminate the misery and human degradation which on every hand to-day saddens the tender conscience. The limiting of their own families to meet the pressure of circumstances will never achieve their desires. The best to-day are making less and less headway, and the inferior are increasing more and more in proportion to them.

Directly, however, the need for such legislation as I have outlined above is realized, and such legislation is passed, then the tide will be turned. Then, at last, we shall begin to see the elimination of the horror and degradation of humanity, which at present is apparently so hopeless and permanent a blot upon the world. And then, and then at once, will the positive effects of the conscious working of love and beauty and desired motherhood begin to take effect. The evolution of humanity will take a leap forward when we have around us only fine and beautiful young people, all of whom have been conceived, carried and born in true homes by conscious, powerful and voluntary mothers.

Meanwhile the prison reformers, psychoanalysts, doctors, teachers and reformers of all sorts will be going on with their reforms, and will be claiming this and that wonderful improvement in the school children, and they will ​probably never realize that it will not be their reforms which have worked these apparent miracles; it will be the change in the attitude of the mother, the return to the position of power of the mother, her voluntary motherhood, the conscious and deliberate creation by the mother and her mate of the fine and splendid race which to-day, as God's prophet, I see in a vision and which might so speedily be materialized on earth.