CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

“A little child shall lead them”

This book will be mere foolishness to those who repeat the inhuman and animal cry that we have to take the world as we find it--the motto of the impotent, the forgotten, the cowardly and selfish, or the merely vegetable, in all ages. The capital fact of man, as distinguished from the lower animals and from plants, is that he does not have to take the world as he finds it, that he does not merely adapt himself to his environment, but that he himself is a creator of his world. If our ancestors had taken and left the world as they found it, we should be little more than erected monkeys to-day. For none who accept the hopeless dogma is this book written. They are welcome to take and leave the world as they find it; they are of no consequence to the world; and their existence is of interest only in so far as it is another instance of that amazing wastefulness of Nature in her generations, with which this book will be so largely concerned.

Beginning, perhaps, some six million years ago, the fact which we call human life has persisted hitherto, and shows no signs of exhaustion, much less impending extinction, being indeed more abundant numerically and more dominant over other forms of life and over the inanimate world to-day than ever before. It is a continuous phenomenon. The life of every blood corpuscle or skin cell of every human being now alive is absolutely continuous with that of the living cells of the first human beings--if not, indeed, as most biologists appear to believe, of the first life upon the earth. Yet this continuous life has been and apparently always must be lived in a tissue of amazing discontinuity--amazing, at least, to those who can see the wonderful in the commonplace. For though the world-phenomenon which we call Man has been so long continuous, and is at this moment perhaps as much modified by the total past as if it were really a single undying individual, yet only a few decades ago, a mere second in the history of the earth, no human being now alive was in existence. “As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more.” Indeed, not merely are we individually as grass, but in a few years the hand that writes these words, and the tissues of eye and brain whereby they are perceived, will actually _be_ grass. Here, then, is the colossal paradox: absolute and literal continuity of life, every cell from a preceding cell throughout the ages--_omnis cellula e cellula_; yet three times in every century the living and only wealth of nations is reduced to dust, and is raised up again from helpless infancy. Where else is such catastrophic continuity?

Each individual enters the world in a fashion the dramatic and sensational character of which can be realised by none who have not witnessed it; and in a few years the individual dies, scarcely less dramatically as a rule, and sometimes more so. This continuous and apparently invincible thing, human life, which began so humbly and to the sound of no trumpets, in Southern Asia or the neighbourhood of the Caspian Sea, but which has never looked back since its birth, and is now the dominant fact of what might well be an astonished earth, depends in every age and from moment to moment upon here a baby, there a baby and there yet another; these curious little objects being of all living things, animal or vegetable, young or old, large or small, the most utterly helpless and incompetent, incapable even of finding for themselves the breasts that were made for them. If but one of all the “hungry generations” that have preceded us had failed to secure the care and love of its predecessor, the curtain would have come down and a not unpromising though hitherto sufficiently grotesque drama would have been ended for ever.

This discontinuity it is which persuades many of us to conceive human life to be not so much a mighty maze without a plan, as a mere stringing of beads on an endless cord of which one end arose in Mother Earth, whilst the other may come at any time--but goes nowhere. The beads, which we call generations, vary in size and colour, no doubt, but on no system; each one makes a fresh start; the average difference between them is merely one of position; and the result is merely to make the string longer. Or the generations might be conceived as the links of an indeterminate chain, necessarily held to each other: but suggesting not at all the idea of a living process such that its every step is fraught with eternal consequence. In a word, we incline to think that History merely goes on repeating itself, and we have to learn that History never repeats itself. Every generation is epoch-making.

It is thus to the conception of parenthood as the vital and organic link of life that we are forced: and the whole of this book is really concerned with parenthood. We shall see, in due course, that no generation, whether of men or animals or plants, determines or provides, as a whole, the future of the race. Only a percentage, as a rule a very small percentage indeed, of any species reach maturity, and fewer still become parents. Amongst ourselves, one-tenth of any generation gives birth to one-half the next. These it is who, in the long run, make History: a Kant or a Spencer, dying childless, may leave what we call immortal works; but unless the parents of each new generation are rightly chosen or “selected”--to use the technical word--a new generation may at any time arise to whom the greatest achievements of the past are nothing. The newcomers will be as swine to these pearls, the immortality of which is always conditional upon the capacity of those who come after to appreciate them. There is here expressed the distinction between two kinds of progress: the traditional progress which is dependent upon transmitted achievement, but in its turn is dependent upon racial progress--this last being the kind of progress of which the history of pre-human life upon the planet is so largely the record and of which mankind is the finest fruit hitherto.

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It is possible that a concrete case, common enough, and thus the more significant, may appeal to the reader, and help us to realise afresh the conditions under which human life actually persists.

Forced inside a motor-omnibus one evening, for lack of room outside, I found myself opposite a woman, poorly-clothed, with a wedding-ring upon her finger and a baby in her arms. The child was covered with a black shawl and its face could not be seen. It was evidently asleep. It should have been in its cot at that hour. The mother's face roused feelings which a sonnet of Wordsworth's might have expressed, or a painting by some artist with a soul, a Rembrandt or a Watts, such as we may look for in vain amongst the be-lettered to-day. Here was the spectacle of mother and child, which all the great historic religions, from Buddhism to Christianity, have rightly worshipped; the spectacle which more nearly symbolises the sublime than any other upon which the eye of a man, himself once such a child, can rest; the spectacle which alone epitomises the life of mankind and the unalterable conditions of all human life and all human societies, reminding us at once of our individual mortality, and the immortality of our race--

“While we, the brave, the mighty and the wise, We Men, who in our morn of youth defied The Elements, must vanish;--be it so! Enough, if something from our hands have power To live, and act, and serve the future hour:”

--the spectacle which alone, if any can, may reconcile us to death; the spectacle of that which alone can sanctify the love of the sexes; the spectacle of motherhood in being, the supreme duty and supreme privilege of womanhood--“a mother is a mother still, the holiest thing alive.”

This woman, utterly unconscious of the dignity of her attitude and of the contrast between herself and the imitation of a woman, elegantly clothed, who sat next her, giving her not a thought nor a glance, nor yet room for the elbow bent in its divine office, was probably some thirty-two or three years old, as time is measured by the revolutions of the earth around the sun. Measured by some more relevant gauge, she was evidently aged, her face grey and drawn, desperately tired, yet placid--not with due exultation but with the calm of one who has no hope. She was too weary to draw the child to her bosom, and her arms lay upon her knees; but instead she bent her body downwards to her baby. She looked straight out in front of her, not at me nor at the passing phantasms beyond, but at nothing. The eyes were open but they were too tired to see. The face had no beauty of feature nor of colour nor of intelligence, but it was wholly beautiful, made so by motherhood; and I think she must have held some faith. The tint of her skin and of her eyeballs spoke of the impoverishment of her blood, her need of sleep and rest and ease of mind. She will probably be killed by consumption within five years and will certainly never hold a grand-child in her arms. The pathologist may lay this crime at the door of the tubercle bacillus; but a prophet would lay it at the reader's door and mine.

While we read and write, play at politics or ping-pong, this woman and myriads like her are doing the essential work of the world. _The worm waits for us as well as for her and them: and in a few years her children and theirs will be Mankind._ We need a prophet to cry aloud and spare not; to tell us that if this is the fate of mothers in the ranks which supply the overwhelming proportion of our children, our nation may number Shakespeare and Newton amongst the glories of its past, and the lands of ancient empires amongst its present possessions, but it can have no future; that if, worshipping what it is pleased to call success, it has no tears nor even eyes for such failures as these, it may walk in the ways of its insensible heart and in the sight of its blind eyes, yet it is walking not in its sleep but in its death, is already doomed and damned almost past recall; and that, if it is to be saved, there will avail not “broadening the basis of taxation,” nor teaching in churches the worship of the Holy Mother and Holy Child, whilst Motherhood is blasphemed at their very doors, but this and this only--the establishment, not in statutes but in the consciences of men and women, of a true religion based upon these perdurable and evident dogmas--that all human life is holy, all mothers and all children, that history is made in the nursery, that the individual dies, that therefore children determine the destinies of all civilisations, that the race or society which succeeds with its mammoth ships and its manufactures but fails to produce men and women, is on the brink of irretrievable doom; that the body of man is an animal, endowed with the inherited animal instincts necessary for self-preservation and the perpetuation of the race, but that, if the possession of this body by a conscious spirit, “looking before and after,” is anything more than a “sport” of the evolutionary forces, it demands that, the blind animal instincts notwithstanding, the desecration of motherhood, the perennial slaughter and injury of children, the casual unconsidered birth of children for whom there is no room or light or air or food, and of children whose inheritance condemns them to misery, insanity or crime, must cease; and that the recurrent drama of human love and struggle reaches its happy ending not when the protagonists are married, but when they join hands over a little child that promises to be a worthy heir of all the ages. This religion must teach that the spectacle of a prematurely aged and weary and hopeless mother, which he who runs or rides may see, produced by our rude foreshadowings of civilisation, is an affront to all honest and thoughtful eyes: that where there are no mothers, such as mothers should be, the people will assuredly perish, though everything they touch should turn to gold, though science and art and philosophy should flourish as never before. I believe that history, rightly read, teaches these tremendous lessons.

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In our own day the bounds of imagination are undoubtedly widening. Means of communication, the press, the camera, the decadence of obsolete dogmas, making room for the simple daily truths of morality which have “the dignity of dateless age” and are too hard for the teeth of time--these account in large measure for the fact that the happier half of the world is at last beginning to realise how the other half lives. There is perhaps more divine discontent with things as they are than ever heretofore: this being due, as has been suggested, perhaps as much to the modern aids of imagination as to any inherent increase of sympathy. Science, too, in the form of sociology and economics, adds warrant to the demand for some radical reform of the conditions of life. It teaches that all forms of life are interdependent; that society is thus an organism in more than merely loose analogy; that the classes pay abundantly for the state of the masses: whilst medicine teaches that the tuberculosis, for instance, which slays so many members of the middle and upper classes, is bred by and in the overcrowding of the lower classes, this and many other diseases promising to resist all measures less radical than the abolition of half our current social practice.

Hence it is that we hear so much of social reform; and the promises of representatives of many political -isms jostle one another at the gates of our ears. The Anarchist at one extreme, and the Collectivist at the other, with the Individualist and the Socialist somewhere between, offer their panaceas. To me, I confess, they seem little better than the scholastic metaphysicians of old days, like them mistaking words for things, incapable of understanding each other, evading precise definition and using terms which never mean the same thing twice as missiles and weapons of abuse: and, above all, mistaking means for ends.

But the leading error common to them all, as I seem to see it, is their conception of society as a stable thing--a piece of machinery which must be properly “assembled,” as the engineers say; forgetful of the extraordinary discontinuity which inheres in the swift-approaching death of all its parts, and their replacement by helpless immaturity. The first fact of society really is that all its individuals are mortal. This we all know, but I question whether even Herbert Spencer fully reckoned with it; and certainly the common run of social speculators have not begun to realise what it means. Human life is made up of generations, and the key to all progress lies in the nature of the relation between one generation and another. Spencer records the case of an Oxford graduate, desirous to be his secretary, who did not know that the population of Great Britain is increasing. Here is a capital present fact of the--merely quantitative--relation between successive generations. So far as any influence on their theory or practice is concerned, it is still unknown to nearly all our advisers. Yet this fact of the ceaseless multiplication of man, which has distinguished him from the first, and is absolutely peculiar to him of all living species, animal or vegetable, as Sir E. Ray Lankester has lately pointed out, is the source of the major facts of history and the besetting condition of every social problem that can be named at this hour.

The professional and dedicated teachers of morality seem to be in little better case. They believe in babies, perhaps, as the prime and only really valid source of the weal and wealth and strength of nations, and as the great moralisers and humanisers of the generation that gives them birth. They are beginning to join in that public outcry against infant mortality which will yet abolish this abominable stain upon our time. But they are lamentably uninformed. They do not know, for instance, that a high infant mortality habitually goes with a high birth-rate, not only in human society but in all living species; and they have yet to appreciate the proposition which I have so often advanced and which, to me at any rate, seems absolutely self-evident, that until we have learnt how to keep alive all the healthy babies now born--that is to say, not less than ninety per cent. of all, the babies in the slums included--it is monstrous to cry for more, _to be similarly slain_. These bewailings about our mercifully falling birth-rate, uncoupled with any attention to the slaughter of the children actually born, are pitiable in their blindness and would be lamentable if they had any effect--of which there is fortunately no sign whatever, but indeed the contrary.

Humanitarian sentiment, also, is terribly misguided. “Why always the benefit of the future, has the present no claim upon us?” I have been asked. Assuredly all sentient life, and therefore pre-eminently all human life, in which sentiency is so incommensurably intensified by self-consciousness, the power of “looking before and after,” has a claim upon us: but the question could have been asked by no one whose imagination had been worthily employed. Our posterity will in due course be as actual and present as we, their deeds and sufferings and hopes as actual and present as ours. They outnumber us as the ocean outweighs a raindrop; to avert evil from one of them is as much as to relieve evil in one of us,--how much more to prevent the misery of five in the next generation, fifty in the next and unnumbered hosts beyond? To serve the future of the race is not to benefit a fiction: the men and women of a hundred and a thousand years hence will be as real as we. And to serve the future is to put out our talent at compound interest a thousand-fold compounded. The weak imagination would rather build a sanatorium for consumptives and see it filled with grateful patients. This is a palpable, sensible good, for which the meanest visual faculty suffices: but the strong imagination would rather open the closed windows of nurseries or work at the mechanical problems of ventilation, aye, or even at the structure of the bacteriological microscope--finding the spectacle, in the mind's eye, of healthy men and women fifty years hence as grateful and as real a reward as the sight of a sanatorium in the present. The pace of progress will be incalculably hastened when men, whether workers or bequeathers or administrators, enlarge their imaginations so as to perceive that the future will be, and therefore indeed is, as real as the present.[1] I appeal to the reason of the kind-hearted reader. Would you rather make one man or child happy now, or two or a thousand a century hence?

It is, in a word, the idea of continuous causation or evolution that explains the remarkable contrast between our outlook on the future and our fathers'. In older--that is to say, younger--days, men's interest in posterity was most naïvely and quaintly selfish. If they raised a monument or did any piece of work which obviously would endure beyond the span of their own lives, their chief motive seems to have been that we should think well of them, nor forget how well they thought of themselves. They were not concerned with us, but with our opinion of them. They were anxious about the verdict of posterity; and the verdict is that they little realised their responsibility for us, or betrayed it if they did. There is also the frank attitude of Sir Boyle Roche's famous bull, “What has posterity done for us?” This is a quite familiar and conspicuous sentiment--as familiar as any other form of selfishness: but it is as if a father should say, “What have my children done for me?” and is open to the same condemnation. We are assuredly responsible for posterity as any parent for any child. Before the nineteenth century this fact could be realised by very few. To-day, when the truth of organic evolution is a commonplace, and when the plasticity of the forces of evolution is slowly becoming realised, we must face our tremendous responsibility and privilege in a spirit worthy of those to whom such mighty truths have been revealed.

Parenthood and birth--in these the whole is summed. At the mercy of these are all past discovery, all past achievement in art or science, in action or in thought. The human species, secure though it be, is only a race after all; only a sequence of runners who _quasi cursores, vitaï lampada tradunt_--like runners, hand on the lamp of life, as Lucretius said. This it is which, to the thoughtful observer, makes each birth such an overwhelming event. It is a great event for the mother and the father, but how much greater if its consequences be only half realised. Education in its full sense, “the provision of an environment,” as I would define it, is a mighty and necessary force, for nothing but potentiality is given at birth: but no education, no influence of traditional progress, can avail, unless the potentialities which these must unfold are worthy. The baby comes tumbling headlong into the world. The fate of all the to-morrows depends upon it. Hitherto its happening has depended upon factors animal and casual enough, utterly improvident, concerned but rarely with this tremendous consequence. Fate may be mistress, but she works only too often by Chance, as Goethe remarked. Fate and Chance hitherto have never failed to keep up the supply which the death of the individual makes imperative: and forces have been at work determining for progress, to some extent, but most imperfectly, the parentage of these headlong babies. Yet the human intelligence cannot remain satisfied with their working--and much less so when it realises how they can be controlled, how effectively, and to what high ends. The physician may and must concern himself, on these occasions, with the immediate needs of the mother and the child, and when these are satisfied he may feel that his duty has been done; but, as he journeys homewards, he must surely reflect--that this astonishing thing, then, has happened again, as indeed it has happened many times this very day; that whilst this baby is to become an individual man or woman, an end in himself or herself, in its young loins and in those of its like are the hosts of all the unborn who are yet to be. If, then, these babies differ widely from each other, as they do; if these differences are, on the whole, capable of prediction in terms of heredity; if the future state of mankind is involved in these differences, which will in their turn be transmitted to the children of such as themselves become parents; and if this business of parenthood will be confined to only a _small_ proportion of these babies, _of whom one-half will never reach puberty_; if these things be so, as they are, cannot these babies be chosen in anticipation, there being thus effected an enormous vital economy, Nature being commanded to the highest ends by the only method, which is to obey her, as Bacon said; and the human intelligence thus making its supreme achievement--the ethical direction and vast acceleration of racial progress? What man can do for animals and plants, can he not do for himself? Give imagination its fleetest and strongest wing, it can never conceive a task so worth the doing.

This, and this alone, is what requires to be brought home to the general reader and the reformer alike. Says Mr. H. G. Wells: “It seemed to me then that to prevent the multiplication of people below a certain standard, and to encourage the multiplication of exceptionally superior people, was the only real and permanent way of mending the ills of the world. I think that still.” And then, in a few sketchy pages, Mr. Wells discredits, as with one glance of great eyes, the very proposal which he thinks to be the only real and permanent way of mending the ills of the world. Not one man in thousands has got so far as to hold this opinion; and it is the more lamentable that Mr. Wells, having reached it, should hold it in the loose, formal, and inoperative fashion in which the man in the street or the woman in the pew holds the dogmas of orthodox theology. We need to educate public opinion--that “chaos of prejudices”--up to Mr. Wells' standard, and then we need to accomplish the much harder task of converting a mere intellectual speculation into a living belief.

But so surely as this belief, the crowning and practical conclusion to which all the teachings of modern biology converge, comes to life in men's minds, so surely the difficulties will be met, not only on paper but also in practice. “Where there's a will there's a way.” Meanwhile men are content to work at the impermanent, if not indeed at measures which directly war against the selection of the best for parenthood: they do not realise the stern necessity of obeying Nature in this respect--for it is Her selection of parents that alone has raised us from the beast and the worm--and since necessity alone, whether inner or outer, whether of character or circumstance, is the mother of invention, they fail to find the methods by which our ideal can be carried out. There is nothing, either in the character of the individual man and woman, or in the structure of society, that makes the ideal of race-culture impossible to-day: nor must action wait for further knowledge of heredity. Little though we surely know so far, we have abundance of assured knowledge for immediate action in many directions--knowledge which is agreed upon by Lamarckians and neo-Lamarckians, Darwinians and Weismannians, Mendelians and biometricians alike. All of these agree, for instance, as to the fact that the insane tendency is transmissible and is transmitted by heredity. We need only public opinion to say, “Then most surely those who have such a tendency must forgo parenthood.”

For it is public opinion that governs the world. If it were, as it will be one day--which may these pages hasten--an elementary and radical truth, as familiar and as cogent to all, man in the House or man in the public-house, as the fact of the earth's gravitation--that racial maintenance, much more racial progress, depends absolutely upon the selection of parents; if the establishment of this selective process in the best and widest manner were the admitted goal of all legislation and all social and political speculation--who can question that the thing would be practicable and indeed easy? Without the formation of public opinion this is as hopelessly Utopian and inaccessible an ideal as words ever framed; public opinion once formed, nothing could be more palpably feasible. Hence Mr. Galton's wisdom in demanding that, before we dictate courses of procedure, and even before we can expect profit from scientific investigation, whether by the biometric method of which he is the founder, or by any other, _public opinion must be formed_; that the idea of eugenics or good-breeding must be instilled into the conscience of civilisation like a new religion--a religion of the most lofty and austere, because the most unselfish, morality, a religion which sets before it a sublime ideal, terrestrial indeed in its chosen theatre, but celestial in its theme, human in its means, but literally superhuman in its goal. If the intrinsic ennoblement of mankind does not answer to this eulogy, where is the ideal that does?