Chapter 6

But the absence of traditional ideas is by no means an unmixed evil. The working-man sees more clearly than the majority of educated persons the absurdity of international hatred and jealousy. He is conscious of greater solidarity with his own class in other European countries than with the wealthier class in his own; and as he approaches the whole question without prejudice, he cannot fail to realise how large a part of the product of labour is diverted from useful purposes by modern militarism. International rivalry is in his eyes one of the most serious obstacles to the abolition of want and misery. Tolstoy hardly exaggerates when he says: 'Patriotism to the peoples represents only a frightful future; the fraternity of nations seems an ideal more and more accessible to humanity, and one which humanity desires.' Military glory has very little attraction for the working-man. His humanitarian instincts appear to be actually stronger than those of the sheltered classes. To take life in any circumstances seems to him a shocking thing; and the harsh procedure of martial law and military custom is abhorrent to him. He sees no advantage and no credit in territorial aggrandisement, which he suspects to be prompted mainly by the desire to make money unjustly. He is therefore a convinced pacificist; though his doctrine of human brotherhood breaks down ignominiously when he finds his economic position threatened by the competition of cheap foreign labour. If an armed struggle ever takes place between the nations of Europe (or their colonists) and the yellow races, it will be a working-man's war. But on the whole, the best hope of getting rid of militarism may lie in the growing power of the working class. The poor, being intensely gregarious and very susceptible to all collective emotions, are still liable to fits of warlike excitement. But their real minds are at present set against an aggressive foreign policy, without being shut against the appeals of a higher patriotism.

And yet the irritation which is felt against preachers of the brotherhood of man is not without justification. Some persons who condemn patriotism are simply lacking in public spirit, or their loyalty is monopolised by some fad or 'cause,' which is a poor substitute for love of country. The man who has no prejudices in favour of his own family and his own country is generally an unamiable creature. So we need not condemn Molière for saying, 'L'ami du genre humain n'est pas du tout mon fait,' nor Brunetière for declaring that 'Ni la nature ni l'histoire n'ont en effet voulu que les hommes fussent tous frères.' But French Neo-catholicism, a bourgeois movement directed against all the 'ideas of 1789,' seems to have adopted the most ferocious kind of chauvinism. M. Paul Bourget wrote the other day in the _Écho de Paris_, 'This war must be the first of many, since we cannot exterminate sixty-five million Germans in a single campaign!' The women and children too! This is not the way to revive the religion of Christ in France.

The practical question for the future is whether there is any prospect of returning, under more favourable auspices, to the unrealised ideal of the Middle Ages--an agreement among the nations of Europe to live amicably under one system of international law and right, binding upon all, and with the consciousness of an intellectual and spiritual unity deeper than political divisions. 'The nations are the citizens of humanity,' said Mazzini; and so they ought to be. Some of the omens are favourable. Militarism has dug its own grave. The great powers increased their armaments till the burden became insupportable, and have now rushed into bankruptcy in the hope of shaking it off. In prehistoric times the lords of creation were certain gigantic lizards, protected by massive armour-plates which could only be carried by a creature thirty to sixty feet long. Then they died, when neither earth, air, nor water could support them any longer. Such must be the end of the European nations, unless they learn wisdom. The lesson will be brought home to them by Transatlantic competition. The United States of America had already, before this war, an initial advantage over the disunited states of Europe, amounting to at least 10 per cent. on every contract; after the war this advantage will be doubled. It remains to be seen whether the next generation will honour the debts which we are piling up. Disraeli used to complain of what he called 'Dutch finance,' which consists in 'mortgaging the industry of the future to protect property in the present.' Pitt paid for the great war of a hundred years ago in this manner; after a century we are still groaning under the burden of his loans. We may hear more of the iniquity of 'Dutch finance' when the democracies of the next generation have a chance of repudiating obligations which, as they will say, they did not contract. However that may be, international rivalry is plainly very bad business; and there are great possibilities in the Hague Tribunal, if, and only if, the signatories to the conference bind themselves to use force against a recalcitrant member. The conduct of Germany in this war has shown that public opinion is powerless to restrain a nation which feels strong enough to defy it.

Another cause which may give patriots leisure to turn their thoughts away from war's alarms is that the 'swarming' period of the European races is coming to an end. The unparalleled increase of population in the first three quarters of the 19th century has been followed by a progressive decrease in the birth-rate, which will begin to tell upon social conditions when the reduction in the death-rate, which has hitherto kept pace with it, shall have reached its natural limit. Europe with a stationary population will be in a much happier condition; and problems of social reform can then be tackled with some hope of success. Honourable emulation in the arts of life may then take the place of desperate competition and antagonism. Human lives will begin to have a positive value, and we may even think it fair to honour our saviours more than our destroyers. The effects of past follies will then soon be effaced; for nations recover much more quickly from wars than from internal disorders. External injuries are rapidly cured; but 'those wounds heal ill that men do give themselves.' The greatest obstacle to progress is not man's inherited pugnacity, but his incorrigible tendency to parasitism. The true patriot will keep his eye fixed on this, and will dread as the state's worst enemies those citizens who at the top and bottom of the social scale have no other ambition than to hang on and suck the life-blood of the nation. Great things may be hoped from the new science of eugenics, when it has passed out of its tentative and experimental stage.

In the distant future we may reasonably hope that patriotism will be a sentiment like the loyalty which binds a man to his public school and university, an affection purged of all rancour and jealousy, a stimulus to all honourable conduct and noble effort, a part of the poetry of life. It is so already to many of us, and has been so to the noblest Englishmen since we have had a literature. If Henry V's speech at Agincourt is the splendid gasconade of a royal freebooter, there is no false ring in the scene where John of Gaunt takes leave of his banished son; nor in Sir Walter Scott's 'Breathes there a man with soul so dead,' etc. 'If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.' We cannot quite manage to substitute London for Zion in singing psalms, though there are some in England--Eton, Winchester, Oxford, Cambridge--which do evoke these feelings. These emotions of loyalty and devotion are by no means to be checked or despised. They have an infinite potency for good. In spiritual things there is no conflict between intensity and expansion. The deepest sympathy is, potentially, also the widest. He who loves not his home and country which he has seen, how shall he love humanity in general which he has not seen? There are, after all, few emotions of which one has less reason to be ashamed than the little lump in the throat which the Englishman feels when he first catches sight of the white cliffs of Dover.

FOOTNOTES:

[8] In his _Introduction to Social Psychology_.

[9] The reasons of their irresistible strength have been explained in a most brilliant manner by Dr. Peisker in the first volume of the 'Cambridge Medieval History.'

THE BIRTH-RATE

(1917)

The numbers of every species are determined, not by the procreative power of its members, which always greatly exceeds the capacity of the earth to support a progeny increasing in geometrical progression, but by two factors, the activity of its enemies and the available supply of food. Those species which survive owe their success in the struggle for existence mainly to one of two qualities, enormous fertility or parental care. The female cod spawns about 6,000,000 eggs at a time, of which at most one-third--perhaps much less--are afterwards fertilised. An infinitesimal proportion of these escapes being devoured by fish or fowl. An insect-eating bird is said to require for its support about 250,000 insects a year, and the number of such birds must amount to thousands of millions. As a rule there is a kind of equilibrium between the forces of destruction and of reproduction. If a species is nearly exterminated by its enemies, those enemies lose their food-supply and perish themselves. In some sheltered spot the survivors of the victims remain and increase till they begin to send out colonies again. In some species, such as the mice in La Plata, and the beasts and birds which devour them, there is an alternation of increase and decrease, to be accounted for in this way. But permanent disturbances of equilibrium sometimes occur. The rabbit in Australia, having found a virgin soil, multiplied for some time almost up to the limit of its natural fertility and is firmly established on that continent. The brown rat (some say) has exterminated our black rat and the Maori rat in New Zealand. The microbe of the terrible disease which the crews of Columbus brought back to Europe, after causing a devastating epidemic at the end of the fifteenth century, established a kind of _modus vivendi_ with its hosts, and has remained as a permanent scourge in Europe. Other microbes, like those of cholera and plague, emigrate from the lands where they are endemic, like a horde of Tartars, and after slaying all who are susceptible disappear from inanition. The draining of the fens has driven the anopheles mosquito from England, and our countrymen no longer suffer from 'ague.' Cleanlier habits are banishing the louse and its accompaniment typhus fever.

Fertility and care for offspring seem as a rule to vary inversely. The latter is the path of biological progress, and is characteristic of all viviparous animals. That any degree of parental attention is incompatible with the immense fecundity of the lower organisms needs no demonstration. Such fertility is not necessary to keep up the numbers of the higher species, which find abundant food in the swarming progeny of the lower types, and are not themselves exposed to wholesale slaughter. Speaking of fishes, Sutherland says:

Of species that exhibit no sort of parental care, the average of forty-nine gives 1,040,000 eggs to a female each year; while among those which make nests or any apology for nests the number is only about 10,000. Among those which have any protective tricks, such as carrying the eggs in pouches or attached to the body, or in the mouth, the average number is under 1000; while among those whose care takes the form of uterine or quasi-uterine gestation which brings the young into the world alive, an average of 56 eggs is quite sufficient.

Man is no exception to these laws. His evolution has been steadily in the direction of diminishing fertility and increasing parental care. This does not necessarily imply that the modern European loves his children better than the savage loves his. It is grim necessity, not want of affection, which determines the treatment of children by their parents over a great part of the world, and through the greater part of human history. The homeless hunters, who represent the lowest stage of savagery, are now almost extinct. In these tribes the woman has to follow the man carrying her baby. Under such conditions the chances of rearing a large family are small indeed. Very different is the life of the grassland nomads, who roam over the Arabian plateau and the steppes of Central Asia. These tribes, who really live as the parasites of their flocks and herds, depending on them entirely for subsistence, often multiply rapidly. Their typical unit is the great patriarchal family, in which the _sheikh_ may have scores of children by different mothers. These children soon begin to earn their keep, and are taken care of. If, however, the patriarch so chooses, Hagar with her child is cast adrift, to find her way back to her own people, if she can. The grasslands are usually almost as full as they can hold. A period of drought, or pressure by rivals, in former times sent a horde of these hardy shepherds on a raid into the nearest settled province; and if, like the Tartars, they were mounted, they usually killed, plundered, and conquered wherever they went, until the discovery of gunpowder saved civilisation from the recurrent peril of barbarian inroads. Barbarians of another type, hunters with fixed homes, seldom increase rapidly, partly because the dangers of forest-life for young children are much greater than on the steppe.

In the primitive river-valley civilisations, such as Egypt and Babylonia, the conditions of increase were so favourable that a dense population soon began to press upon the means of subsistence. In Egypt the remedy was a centralised government which could undertake great irrigation works and intensive cultivation. In Babylonia, for the first time in history, foreign trade was made to support a larger population than the land itself could maintain. There was little or no infanticide in Babylonia, but the death-rate in these steaming alluvial plains has always been very high.

When we turn to poor and mountainous countries like Greece, the conditions are very different. It was an old belief among the Hellenes that in the days before the Trojan War 'the world was too full of people.' The increase was doubtless made possible by the trade which developed in the Minoan period, but the sources of food-supply were liable to be interfered with. Hence came the necessity for active colonisation, which lasted from the eighth to the sixth century B.C. This period of expansion came to an end when all the available sites were occupied. In the sixth century the Greeks found themselves headed off, in the west by Phoenicians and Etruscans, in the east by the Persian Empire. The problem of over-population was again pressing upon them. Incessant civil wars between Hellenes kept the numbers down to some extent; but Greek battles were not as a rule very bloody, and every healthy nation has a surprising capacity of making good the losses caused by war. The first effect of the check to emigration was that the old ideal of the 'self-sufficient life,' which meant the practice of mixed farming, had to be partially abandoned. The most flourishing States, and especially Athens, had to take to manufactures, which they exchanged for the food-products of the Balkan States and South Russia. The result was an increasing urbanisation, and a new population of free 'resident aliens.' Conservatives hated this change and wished to revive the old ideal of a small self-supporting State, with a maximum of 20,000 or 30,000 citizens. Plato, in his latest work, the 'Laws,' wishes his model city to be not too near the sea, the proximity of which 'fills the streets with merchants and shopkeepers, and begets dishonesty in the souls of men.' On the other side Isocrates, the most far-seeing of Athenian politicians, realised that the day of small city-states was over, and that the limited, 'self-sufficient' community would not long maintain its independence. He urged his countrymen to pursue a policy of peaceful penetration in Western Asia, as the Greeks were soon to do under the successors of Alexander. But the prejudice against industrialism was very strong. Greece in the fifth century remained a poor country; her exports were not more than enough to pay for the food of her existing population; and that population had to be artificially restricted. The Greeks were an exceptionally healthy and long-lived race; their great men for the most part lived to ages which have no parallel until the nineteenth century. The infant death-rate from natural causes may have been rather high, as it is in modern Greece, but it was augmented by systematic infanticide. The Greek father had an absolute right to decide whether a new-comer was to be admitted to the family. In Ephesus alone of Greek cities a parent was compelled to prove that he was too poor to rear a child before he was allowed to get rid of it.[10] Even Hesiod, centuries earlier, advises a father not to bring up more than one son, and daughters were sacrificed more frequently than sons. The usual practice was to expose the infant in a jar; anyone who thought it worth while might rescue the baby and bring it up as a slave. But this was not often done. At Gela, in Sicily, there are 233 'potted' burials in an excavated graveyard, out of a total of 570.[11] The proportion of female infants exposed must have been very large. The evidence of literature is supported by such letters as this from a husband at Oxyrhynchus: 'When--good luck to you--your child is born, if it is a male, let it live; if a female, expose it.'[12] Besides infanticide, abortion was freely practised, and without blame.[13] The Greek citizen married rather late; but as his bride was usually in her 'teens this would not affect the birth-rate. Nor need we attach much importance, as a factor in checking population, to the characteristic Greek vice, nor to prostitution, which throughout antiquity was incredibly cheap and visited by no physical penalty. As for slaves, Xenophon recommends that they should be allowed to have children as a reward for good conduct.[14]

A rapid decline in population set in under the successors of Alexander. Polybius ascribes it to selfishness and a high standard of comfort, which is doubtless true of the upper and middle classes;[15] but the depopulation of rural Greece can hardly be so accounted for. Perhaps the forests were cut down, and the rainfall diminished. It was the general impression that the soil was far less productive than formerly. The decay of the Hellenic race was accelerated after the Roman conquest, until the old stock became almost extinct. This disappearance of the most gifted race that ever inhabited our planet is one of the strangest catastrophes of history, and is full of warnings for the modern sociologist. Industrial slavery, indifference to parenthood, and addiction to club-life were certainly three of the main causes, unless we prefer to regard the two last as symptoms of hopelessness about the future.

The same disease fell upon Italy, and was coincident not with the murderous war against Hannibal and the subsequent campaigns, costly though they were, in Spain, Syria, and Macedonia, but with the Hellenisation of social life. Lucan, under Nero, complains that the towns have lost more than half their inhabitants, and that the country-side lies waste. Under Titus it was estimated that, whereas Italy under the Republic could raise nearly 800,000 soldiers, that number was now reduced by one-half. Marcus Aurelius planted a large tribe of Marcomanni on unoccupied land in Italy. In the fourth century Bologna, Modena, Piacenza, and many other towns in North Italy were in ruins. The land of the Volscians and Aequians, once densely populated, was a desert even in Livy's time. Samnium remained the wilderness that Sulla had left it; and Apulia was a lonely sheep-walk.

The causes of this depopulation have been often discussed, both in antiquity and in our own day. Slavery, infanticide, celibacy, wars and massacres, large estates, and pestilence have all been named as causes; but I am inclined to think that all these influences together are insufficient to account for so rapid a decline. The toll of war was lighter by far than in periods when the population was rising; infectious disease (unless we suppose, as some have suggested, that malaria became for the first time endemic under the Roman domination) invaded the empire in occasional and destructive epidemics, but a healthy population recovers from pestilence, as from war, with great rapidity. The large grazing ranches displaced farms because corn-growing in Italy was unprofitable, but there was a large supply of grain from Sicily, Africa, and other districts. Slavery undoubtedly accounts for a great deal. This institution is excessively wasteful of human life; it is never possible to keep up the numbers of slaves without slave-hunting in the countries from which they come. And we must remember that ancient civilisation was almost entirely urban. The barbarians found ample waste lands between the towns, which they did not as a rule care to visit, probably because those who did so soon fell victims to microbic diseases. The sanitary condition of ancient cities was better than in the Middle Ages; but the death-rate was probably too high to permit of any increase in the population. But after admitting that all these causes were operative, it may be that we shall be obliged to acknowledge also a psychological factor. If a nation has no hopes for the future, if it is even doubtful whether life is worth living, if it is disposed to withdraw from the struggle for existence and to meet the problems of life in a temper of passive resignation, it will not regard children as a heritage and gift that cometh from the Lord, but rather as an encumbrance. That such was the temper of the later Roman Empire may be gathered not only from the literature, which is singularly devoid of hopefulness and enterprise, but from the rapid spread of monasticism and eremitism in this period. The prevalence of this world-weariness of course needs explanation, and the cause is rather obscure. It does not seem to be connected with unfavourable external conditions, but rather with a racial exhaustion akin to senile decay in the individual. But there is no real analogy between the life of an individual and that of a nation, and it would be very rash to insist on the hypothesis of racial decay, which perhaps has no biological basis.