CHAPTER IX.

The Problem of Over Population.

“Notwithstanding all that has been and will be accomplished by your enterprising race,” said he, “there are some things about the earth that they will never be able to control or improve. There are two in particular of essential importance. One is the area of the earth’s surface, which your race can never increase no matter what its necessities may be; the other is the slow but very certain refrigeration of the earth’s climate by which we may be sure that a time will be reached in the long distant future when the habitable surface shall gradually be reduced till at last no part of the earth’s surface will be tolerable to any living creature. So in effect while the demand of the race will be for more room it will constantly be required to put up with less.”

“But,” said I, “isn’t that a good ways off? The extreme refrigeration of the earth is a process involving millions of years according to our scientists.”

“Yes, it will be a long time before any important reduction of area can take place, but not long before the present room will become very much cramped. Only a few moments ago we reckoned that by the year 2070 there would be about two acres to each of the 12,000,000,000 of inhabitants, on which to live and move and produce the means of subsistence. If the race should then be doubling every thirty years, in 2100 there will be but one acre for each; and if they keep on increasing in 2130 a half acre; in 2160 a quarter; in 2190 an eighth, in 2220 a sixteenth; in 2250 a lot thirty-three by forty-one and one-fourth feet, which in 2280 is reduced to thirty-three by twenty feet 8 inches and this in 2292 four hundred years after the centennial of the discovery of America by Columbus that was celebrated in your day at Chicago, will be reduced to thirty-three by sixteen and one-half, or two rods by one. If the population should get to be as numerous as that the entire earth would be a city inhabited twelve times as densely as the city of Minneapolis was in your day. This of course is the average. Some places are more desirable than others and these would be more densely packed. Already at the close of the twentieth century many of the pleasanter parts of the earth have become uncomfortably populous, not from want of the means of subsistence, but from want of room to carry on the business and pleasures of life. And yet the growth of population may be said to be just fairly commenced. It is obvious from what can already be seen that it will very soon be necessary to place some artificial restriction on the increase of population or else there will be such suffering among men as will of itself operate to keep down the number of people by killing them off faster and shortening the average duration of life. These questions are already being seriously considered by the philosophers and wise men, and many plans are being discussed.

“There are some pessimists who declare there is no remedy. They say it was an egregious blunder on the part of society to attempt the banishment of suffering. It was suffering that had in all ages kept down the population, so that the world remained roomy enough to live in with some comfort. They hold that suffering is a necessary concomitant of comfort and we are bound to have it both before it, as a necessary antecedent and after it, as a necessary consequent. It is the law of nature and it is vain to try to evade it. By banishing war and want and disease, and reducing the problem of life to an easy pleasant certainty, society, they say, has caused herself to be invaded by fresh innumerable hordes of human beings that step into the arena of life from the secret caves of non-existence as if attracted by the feast of good things that she has provided for herself. When the repressive hand of suffering is lifted a little the human species breed and grow like rabbits until they feel its hard pressure again.

“Nature, they affirm, is no sentimentalist. Her ways are all direct, hard, cruel and brutal. She is extravagant and wasteful of effort and parsimonious of results. She creates a thousand seeds of grain or grass or tree, only one of which will become a grown plant and reproduce its kind. She is even more prodigal with the spawn of fishes destroying millions for one she brings to maturity. There is nothing to show that she cares any more for the human race than for fishes. When men get too numerous she destroys them as ruthlessly as if they were so many herring or clams. They assert it is impossible to evade or even to improve upon the methods of nature. They point to the teeming multitudes that have swarmed upon the earth during the last century in such comparative security and comfort as to invite a still greater inundation during the century to come; and they declare it to be one of the characteristic stratagems of nature, only restraining her grim and malicious humor in order to make it the more tragic and appalling when she does give it play. And they aver that it would be better even now to drop a large part if not all of the artificial stimulations to the expansion of the population that have by insensible degrees been grafted upon state policy during the last century. Let every tub stand on its own bottom, say they, let natural selection secure the survival of the fittest, and let the unfit be quietly eliminated by whichever of the numerous methods nature finds most applicable. In opposition to these are the optimists who hold that the human race is nature’s pet. If she could be said to plan anything or to have any preferences in favor of anything, it was the human family. After making trial in succession of the Trilobite, the Orthoceras, the Shark, the Megalosaurus, the Pterodactyl, the Mastodon and others, she put them all down and brought forward man and placed him over them all, and made him master of the earth. He was a frail insignificant helpless creature without weight, power or dignity. Other animals could beat him swimming, diving, flying, running, fighting. There was only one thing he could do tolerably well and that was to climb a tree. That was his capital, his stock in trade as one might say, for it developed his hands and quickened his senses. Nature took this unprepossessing, unpromising creature, educated and developed him in her stern school and by her untender methods, put brains into him, civilized him and fitted him to control the world and finally to govern himself. This last lesson he has not yet perfectly mastered, but he is learning more of it every day. Progress, say they, never takes a back track. The pessimistic theory that nature’s plan is to let every fellow look out for himself and the devil take the hindmost, is no longer true. The race has passed that place and the new ideal is; every fellow for all the rest, and no one left behind. Until this is practically realized they say the race will not have fulfilled its destiny, and retreat is impossible. Moreover it is not necessary; for the new departure is after all as natural as the old way, and is in fact only a continuation of it; a turn in the road as it were; and it may quite as well be depended upon to rectify all the difficulties of its own creation. If the principle of mutual succor, sympathy and assistance leads to over population, the same principle must furnish the remedy. The optimists admit the contention of the pessimists that this trouble is looming up, and the philosophers of all schools are beginning to feel serious. They are discussing such figures as we had before us a few moments ago and endeavoring to fix the date at which a halt will have to be called, and the means devised by which it is to be accomplished. Some say the population is dense enough now. Others point out that with the increased means of subsistence there need not be anything uncomfortable in a population of 12,000,000,000 which they estimate will not be reached till 2070, or 70 years from the present (A. D. 2000.) And they are hopeful enough to believe that by that time, human wit will have discovered some way of controlling population without violence to human happiness. All agree that if society is to be maintained on the present scale it is high time to settle the manner in which the great question of population is to be met and handled. It is the most difficult question that has ever demanded human attention.

“In your day there was already beginning to be some discussion in regard to stirpiculture and the scientific regulation of the family and rearing of children. But it did not at that time reach a practical stage. No scientific conclusions on the subject of marriage have yet been able to displace sentiment and instinct. But soon, as I have already told you, the rearing of the children was undertaken by the state and removed from the caprice of sentiment and ignorance greatly to the advantage of the children and of course the race. But the question of marriage remains the same sentimental business it was in the days of Jacob. And with the increasing independence of women it has become even more a question of the feelings than it was in your day when women often married for a home and men sometimes for money. As the problems of life, marriage etc., have become questions of state, inviting and even requiring ample and public discussion, the squeamishness and false modesty with which they were approached in your day have entirely disappeared. The public interest and the rights of the state in the question of the perpetuation of the race are freely admitted and discussed. The public mind has been gradually prepared for this by the gradual assumption by the state of the care and education of the youth, and by its experience in the treatment of criminals. Where the treatment of all the youth is uniform and some after all, turn out to be criminals as they occasionally do, the cause is looked for in their parentage. The state is in condition to keep track of ill born children, and after leaving the schools they are still kept under the eye and guiding advice and restraint if necessary of a special department of the police service. In this way the criminally disposed are known in advance, and much crime is no doubt prevented. The criminally disposed are regarded and treated as mentally diseased.

“There has been much discussion pro and con of this mode of punishment, or—as some prefer to express it—mode of treatment. But it is now generally conceded that society is entirely justifiable in employing this mode of defense, especially since capital punishment has been abolished, and this is the maximum penalty that is corporally inflicted. The public mind having had before it the operation of this treatment as a sort of object lesson is the more ready to listen to the proposition that is now being discussed to use this same treatment for the defense of society against herself. The question is one that must be approached with the utmost consideration and tenderness as well as fairness and justice applied after the most careful and expert selection and with due regard to the character and physical and mental qualities that are due to be expected from such conditions. It is natural selection they say, artificially applied without the circumlocution and tedious delay of nature’s ordinary methods. Left to herself, nature in the long run provides for the survival of the fittest. We now propose say they to make the same provision in the short run. We are now approaching one of those crises in human affairs in which something has to be done, and if men have not the wit to do it themselves, nature takes hold and performs it in her hard way with small tenderness for anybody’s feelings or notions of propriety. If we are competent, we will find some way out of this difficulty without losing our civilization; if we are not, nature will put us back in the primer of barbarism, to learn it all over again as she has done a dozen times before. We have it in our power, and it is our obvious duty to reduce the population, or to stop its increase, and to do it in the very scientific manner that is at our disposal, by which the best blood is selected for transmission and the poorest is quietly eliminated without shock or pain to the individual or to society. Not only can the best blood in general be made exclusive, but any particular brand of best blood can be picked out to receive special encouragement. We can preserve a class of talent invaluable to civilization that nature could not be depended on to select for preservation in the hard struggle for existence—the gentle, the unselfish, the intellectual worker and the poet. Nor can she be depended on to eliminate the ruffianly, brutal, criminal and selfish members whose room is better than their company. Rather these are the very ones she would be likely to save.

“This is all in our hands, say they, and if we have the nerve to carry it out, we can make the earth a perpetual paradise. All we have to do is to disqualify in their infancy the stirps whose posterity we prefer not to see.”

The Professor paused here and changed the profile to his ‘jokers’ or middle pair of hands and proceeded to roll up the 20th century and expose the 21st.

“I believe,” he resumed, “that we had better step forward another century, take our stand at the year 2100 and survey the century retrospectively, as we have done the 20th. It seems more natural to speak of it in the past tense since we have become accustomed to that way.”

“All right,” I answered, “consider it done. I am already there.”

“Do you not remember,” he went on, “that a little while ago you expressed a wish that it might have been your lot to live say 200 years later than you did, so as to share and experience the glory your race would have attained by that time? Well you are in effect now there, and while you shall never experience it in your own person, you shall have a close glimpse of it and be able to compare your anticipation with the reality.

“We are now celebrating January 1, 2100. As you look around, you see very much that is unfamiliar and miss many things you used to see. Take a map of the world and examine it. You will find only three general governments on earth. First is the “Great Union of Free States”, which you have heard of, but now comprising all America, the Pacific Islands, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, The West Indies, Ireland and Great Britain, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, New Guinea and the Philippines. Thus you see the principal change in this government during the century consists in the full annexation of all the South American States north of Chili and Argentine, and the Annexation of England, Scotland and Wales and the Scandinavian states. The language of this great empire is almost exclusively English, which however, has been greatly corrupted, some say, or enriched according to others, by the incorporation of a large number of foreign words, mostly Spanish, due to the intimate relations between the English speaking peoples and those who used the Spanish and Portuguese. South America has been settled and cultivated and is the most productive county on earth; a fairy land, a paradise. Nothing can compare with it except some of the finest portions of the Sahara desert, which has been developed by the French; and some of the East India Islands.

“Next is the Russo-Asiatic empire that comprises Russia in Europe and all Asia except Arabia. It is styled the ‘Russasia.’ The government is a limited monarchy, very much like that of Great Britain in your day. The Russians in Europe and Siberia are represented by a parliament, which is the supreme legislative authority for the entire empire. The Asiatic States are governed by governors appointed by the emperor at St. Petersburg and most of them have local legislatures that regulate their local affairs. All China and parts of India, Persia and Tartary, and Afghanistan are divided into convenient sized states possessing this local autonomy. All of this territory is being developed by the combined enterprise of the Russians and the Chinese, the latter scarcely second to the former. Mongolia and Mantchooria have been supplied with railroads and settled by both Chinese and Russians. The Chinese have also migrated in great numbers into Tartary and settled up what used to be the western end of the Chinese empire. They have even settled in great numbers in Russia and in western Asia. A great change came over the Chinese after their war with Japan in 1894-5. They perceived that they were beaten by western methods, and they suddenly conceived a respect for the ways of the foreign devils as extreme as their contempt for them had been before. They had always been on good terms with the Russians while they disliked the English, French and Americans. Having determined to adopt western ways, they selected the Russians for their instructors and welcomed their capital and enterprise in the introduction of railways, opening mines, improving their water ways, introducing western machinery and manufactures. When the Russians in order to protect their interests began a military occupation of the country, they were not opposed, but rather welcomed by the progressive party. The Chinese were not a military people, and were really in need of a coalition that would enable them to resist the aggressions of the nations of western Europe, and the Japanese. The remodeling of Chinese institutions under the tutelage of the Russians advanced rapidly. Probably the most radical and important innovation was the introduction of the Russian alphabet and the phonetic spelling of the Chinese language by its use. This enabled the Chinese youth to learn their own language much more easily, and it led directly to the study of the Russian which became very necessary to a large extent, on account of the intimate intercourse between the two people, and on account of the new ideas, processes and things, the names of which were Russian without Chinese equivalents. This finally led to the universal use of Russian by the educated Chinese.

“After the formal annexation of China, the Russian became the official language, and the Chinese language has gradually fallen into disuse and is now almost extinct. The Chinese say of their ancient tongue and the bug marks and turkey tracks that constituted its written expression, “we were little children when we used that language.”

“The Russian has also to a great extent superseded the Tartar, Turkish, Persian and other tongues current in Central Asia. In doing this, however, it has become considerably corrupted itself.

“The third great empire comprises all the territory not included in the other two, and embraces all of Continental Europe except Russia and the Scandinavian States, and all of Africa except that part south of the 10th parallel of S. Lat. and Arabia. It is called the Euro-Afric Confederacy. Tremendous activity has been displayed by the Europeans in the settlement and improvement of Africa during the past two centuries. The whole continent has been gridironed with railroads, all of it has been civilized and the most unpromising part—the Sahara desert has been made a vast garden.

“The French have been most active in the northern part, the Italians in the eastern part, the Portuguese and Germans in the central portions, the English in the southern. The Congo and German States being open to free trade, they came to be frequented by merchants from all Europe and these were soon followed by permanent settlers. After a time these people became tired of being governed from Europe, and set up for themselves, declaring themselves independent, much as the United States did in 1776. But in this case there was no opposition for the principle of free intercourse and unrestricted trade having been firmly established, the mother countries did not care to superintend the internal affairs of the young states, and readily consented to their independence. But this independence proved to be the forerunner of a more extensive union namely the Euro-Afric Confederacy. It was the last to be formed of the three great empires that now cover the world. The states comprising it are mostly republics. But a few in middle Africa, Guinea and the Sondan, are limited monarchies. The native races of Africa are rapidly being displaced by the Europeans and will totally disappear in a few generations as the North American Indians did in your day. A large migration of Negroes took place from the United States to Africa during the 20th century, but they did not thrive, and the race is vastly reduced both in Africa and America.”

“That is strange,” said I, “for in my day the negroes were very numerous in the southern states—a majority in some places—and the question how they were to be disposed of constituted one of the questions of state of that period.”

“True,” he replied, “but up to that time there had been no very severe competition for the means of living. But it became more and more difficult from that time on to make a living, and wherever there is strong competition between men, the strong positive, vigorous and hard, are sure to crowd the softer and weaker out, and take the prize they are struggling for. In your day the negroes were generally content, in fact were compelled to be content, with such humble employments as the whites did not care to engage in because there was enough of a more ambitious sort to employ them. But when the whites found it necessary to compete with the negroes for the work they had before monopolized, they easily beat them. The defeat of men in the struggle for life affects them in two ways; it discourages, worries and exhausts them mentally; and it destroys their vigor through want and starvation, physically. The latter of these effects tells at once in shortening the existence of the present generation, and both of them tell on the general force and vigor, the deterioration of which is seen in the reduced numbers and virility of the succeeding generations. Wild animals newly domesticated, fail to breed through mental strain and worry. The same is true of savages when the mental burdens of civilization are too suddenly laid upon them, and the same principle holds in civil life when from any cause the burden of life becomes too heavy—as, to the poor man when he struggles against odds for bread for his family, and to the rich when he struggles doubtfully for the superfluities required by fashion. The negro race is not extinct by any means even in the United States, but its extinction is only a question of comparatively short time easily estimated from the advance in that direction already made.”

“But it seems to me,” said I, “that there can no longer be such a desperate struggle for existence since the means of livelihood are within the reach of all, and the exertion required has been so much lessened by the state’s care of the young etc.”

“The means of mere existence,” he said, “are, in most of the states of the “Great Union,” within the reach of all, and no one need go hungry or naked. If he is able to work, the state will give him employment if no one else will, and if he is not able he will be cared for anyhow. But the style in which a man lives depends altogether on his ambition and ability. If his ability is equal to his ambition, he obtains what he wants and is happy and contented; unless, as often happens his ambition grows by what it feeds on and excites him to fresh exertions by a new allurement after every success. And so the wearing struggle may go on forever. People are mimics and none of them more so than the negroes. In imitating a stronger race they give out and gradually succumb. While they were slaves they were free from this competition, and rapidly increased. The African tribes were also free from it. But both have now been exposed to it for six generations and it has told on them heavily.”

“It would appear then that competition and selection go on under the present conditions of life almost as much as ever, for the law must apply to the weaker whites as well as to the negroes.”

“So it does, and always must, as long as men are competent to discriminate between the costly and the cheap, and continue to prefer the former, to the latter.”

“The reason for such preference,” I infer, “must be that more enjoyment of life is found in the possession of the more costly things. Is that your view?”

“It does not follow at all,” he replied. “Costly things give a fictitious enjoyment in anticipation while they are being pursued, but after they are obtained they give no more enjoyment than if they had been cheap. The possession of many things that have cost great worry and exertion frequently leads to nothing more than a perception of their vanity, and the uncovering of a new perspective of something bright and equally illusory beyond. From time immemorial your philosophers have sounded the praises of contentment. Contentment is nothing more nor less than happiness, and it is little to the purpose to ask a man to be happy unless the suggestion is backed up by the conditions of his environment. When people have absolutely nothing better to look forward to, they can almost always settle down to a comparative degree of contentment with what they have. But with an environment constantly showing chances of preferment, wealth, distinction, etc., and examples of the attainment of these things by others, contentment is constantly being unsettled and happiness always deferred to the future. A guest taking his dinner ‘out’ will reserve part of his appetite for the unseen, but commonly expected, desert of pudding and pie, but if he is informed that he “sees his dinner” before him, he will make himself quite satisfied without the desert.

“The fact is, the absolute contentment or happiness that your poets dream for you, and your priests sell to you in their heavens and nirvanas, is absolute satisfaction with whatever is. It can only come to an instinct in perfect harmony with its environment. People can never be perfectly happy except in a finished unchangeable state of existence. They may approach it under conditions in which change is very slow and slight.”

“Is our race likely to attain it or anything like it on earth?”

“Things on earth to-day look far more unsettled than ever before, and yet they are getting into a shape that promises peace and permanence in the not very distant future. When the earth gets as full of people as it will hold and they learn how to live by moderate exertion and above the fear of failure and want, the millennium will have come to the extent that it can come.”

“Well from what you said a while ago, I suppose the world must already be as full of people as it ought to be, and if everything is in equilibrium, the millennium ought to have already dawned. But you have not told me whether this equilibrium has been made secure and stable. For evidently if means have not been found to keep the population uniform and steady at its maximum limit of comfort, even a perfect equilibrium would soon be disturbed by its increase and the millennium set back again.

“You told me the stirpiculturists in the 20th century proposed to accomplish the two objects of restricting the race and at the same time improving it, by select limitation. How did the plan succeed?”

“It did not succeed at all,” he replied. “The population increased more rapidly than before. A state of society something like a corrupt and clandestine polygamy supervened. The tone of society instead of being elevated was distinctively lowered. Thus both of the objects they so hopefully set out to accomplish, disastrously failed. When it was definitely given up by the progressive party that they were defeated and obliged to confess they were on the wrong track there was a fearful revulsion and upheaval of society, as there always is when opinion is forced to fly from one extreme to another. Many persons felt they had been wronged—treated as criminals when they were only unfortunates.

“The danger from this class was now imminent, and they had the sympathy of many in the better walks of life. But the time soon rolled round that drove people to think of nothing but themselves. But this was one of those deliberate movements that nature seems to delight in dealing out to us. She dangles it over us like the sword of Damocles. There was time to think; before the thread snapped, if there was only the wit. It was a time of common danger, and there was no inclination nor profit in recriminations between the parties. In the presence of an appalling calamity they were both awed. They no longer contended with each other, they were both at their wits ends, and in fright they rushed into each others presence to consult not to fight; and trembled alike at the disaster that overwhelmed them both; like tigers slinking into the presence of their human enemies when threatened by a common danger; as an earthquake.

“All admitted, the disappointment and failure were complete.”

“It seems to me that might have been foreseen,” said I,—“what did they do next?”

“They were in a great quandary, and did not know what to do, many wild propositions were offered and discussed. The pessimists although as largely interested as anybody in the success of any plan aiming at the public welfare, were really pleased at the failure of this, because it fulfilled their evil predictions. They now said there was nothing to be done but to return to the ancient plan of nature in which every one looked after himself and his children.

“If one failed, it was nature’s sign that he was not wanted, and he had no business to have children. But the optimists declared it to be impossible to return to the barbarous conditions that prevailed in ancient times among savages. Nature, said they, has evolved civilization and altruism, and these are therefore as natural as barbarism. But nature preserves a certain congruity of relationship between things, that we cannot easily set aside, and so if we are going backward in regard to the care of our young we shall lose the advantages that we have gained in the improved quality of the citizens, we have made out of them. For if we throw all the responsibility on the parents, while we cannot depend on a reduction in the number of the children, we may be sure of a deterioration in their bringing up and education. If we go back to barbarism we must take all that barbarism imposes. The human race they said was born to luck. Whenever it got into a tight place, some lucky turn of fortune’s wheel always supplied its need and brought it out of its troubles, and they avowed their faith that something would yet turn up to tide the race over the present crisis. In the midst of these discussions, a great discovery was made or accidentally stumbled upon that gave confirmation to this hopeful philosophy, and relieved the fears of those philosophers who were in the habit of taking the destiny of the race very much to heart and who felt more or less responsibility for its future. That was a discovery of nature’s secret of the determination of sex. It enabled people to control the sex of their children, a power that had been ardently wished for ever since the days of Adam and scientifically sought after, at least as far back as the time of Aristotle. They thought that in this “option of sex,” as they styled it, they at last possessed the infinitely important power of the control of population. They had seen before this, that no restriction could succeed, not founded on the support of all. All discussion in this direction was brought to a sudden termination, by this timely discovery. All felt as if the great problem was solved in the most acceptable manner, not only in accordance with refined sentiment, but with the pressing requirements of society, because this vital condition that so intimately concerns us all is taken up by the state and administered for the benefit of the whole race.

“In your day you doubtless remember that generally boys were in greater request and more welcome by parents than girls. And there continued to be such a feeling until quite lately—for no very good reason, except the habit of heredity—since men could hardly be said to have had any advantage over women for the last 100 years. At any rate this prejudice assisted the state in the policy it adopted of reducing the proportion of females, and within two generations the census showed a reduction of fifty per cent in the number of females while the _total population remained the same without increase_. This result was peculiarly gratifying to the political economists and philosophers, for as they declared the state had now complete control of the population and could on a tolerably short notice increase or diminish it as the comfort of the race might demand.”

I interrupted the Professor here to express with some pardonable enthusiasm my congratulations that this vital question had been so successfully and thoroughly met. I said I always had confidence in my race and now more than ever. I felt proud of the honor of being an humble member of it; and more to the same effect; to which he listened with some impatience and then proceeded.

“There were some results that were not anticipated, that followed from the practical operation of the “option of sex.” One was the very rapid elevation, almost deification of women. As there was now but one woman to three men her value and importance rose in the inverse ratio; and it became the habit to say that women were worth three times as much as men. They were in fact worth a good deal more than that, for they soon perceived that they held the key of power and the destiny of the race and were able to construct the conditions of life to suit their own whims and caprices. They became in fact the ruling sex. They demanded for themselves and easily obtained all the easy and profitable positions in business and official life, and remanded men to those least desirable. The wholesome civil service principles that had become pretty well settled in the law, thought, and practice of the country were now habitually evaded or openly set aside in favor of the sex. Nothing they asked for was denied them and hardly anything was good enough for them. In your day the women in America were extravagantly petted and coddled, but the attention and reverence they received then was nothing compared with the adulation and servility that has of late been rendered to them. Such a condition of things could not fail to encourage tyranny and arrogance, and to create them where they had not been before. Sentiment and favoritism became the controlling forces and business principles were ignored.

“There were three candidates for every woman’s hand, two of whom were bound to be disappointed, and so one-half the population—two-thirds of the masculine part—were doomed to a life of single misery. They did not accept the situation with fortitude or resignation. There was no end to quarreling and personal antagonisms and violence between rivals, and there arose what there had not been for several generations, and that was a “dangerous class.” It became unsafe for married people of either sex to appear on the streets unguarded. The “social evil” that in your day was so sore a question had long since under the conditions of universal matrimony, died out, and had practically ceased for a century and a half, now came again into existence in a more virulent form than ever. All classes felt the relaxation of the former restraints, and immorality became frightfully prevalent. Divorce which had become almost obsolete, now came to be an every day occurrence, not often, however, upon the complaint of the comparatively helpless husband, but upon that of the fickle wife who had succumbed to the superior attractions of a newer affinity. Divorce was now practically in the hands of the wife, and she dismissed her husband when he failed to please her, or when a more eligible mate presented himself. All women of course were not like that, but they all had the power to be, and a frightfully large proportion of them were.”

“The wise men of our race,” said I, “especially those of ancient times have generally regarded women as being not merely inferior to men physically and mentally, but as being essentially depraved and incapable of being good except under the stimulation and wise and pious discipline and example of men. Does the state of society you have described to me bear out this opinion? It seems that the women have broken loose from the wholesome restraints that were imposed on them in the former constitution of society in which men were supreme; and like a runaway team they are about to smash the wagon and dash out their own brains.”

“No,” he replied, “the state of affairs I have described does not at all confirm the opinion of the old blockheads you call your wise men. If they had been really wise they would have known that both women and men are created, formed, moulded and finished by their environment. Now woman constitutes a part of the environment of man and man constitutes a part, but in old times he constituted a relatively much larger part of the environment of woman. So it might be said, that if man was better than woman, it was because her influence on him was better or at least less harmful than his influence on her.

“But the fact is that under equal conditions the influence that each exerts on the other is equal, and they are mutually benefitted. The nearest to a golden age your race has ever come was during the one hundred years from the middle of the 20th to the middle of the 21st century, and that is the period of the most complete equality of the sexes in all respects—numbers, liberty, similarity of occupations and equal duties and responsibilities, and the total ignoring and rejection of the notion of any difference of ‘spheres’ for the activities of the two. The reciprocal and essentially exclusive functions involved are peculiar to each, but these do not essentially, and at the present, do not really interfere in any of the active employments people choose to engage in.”

“Nursing the children is essentially the woman’s business is it not?” I inquired.

“Not at all,” he answered. “Mammary glands belong to the male as well as the female.”

“Functionless ones,” said I.

“Only functionless,” he replied, “because they are not used. In your day there were occasional cases of well developed male mammae and professional male wet nurses, now they are common and it is doubtful if there are as many female as male nurses. There are and always were women who could not nurse their children, and these are more numerous now than ever. It is simply because there are other things they prefer to do, and so the accommodating function suppresses itself just as it did in the male because he for ages suppressed its use. So you see that even in nursing and rearing the children there is no exclusive female “sphere” any more than a male “sphere.” In the golden age I have just spoken of there was greater harmony and happiness than ever before, one of the essential conditions of which was the almost perfect equality of the sexes. But the termination of this golden age and the beginning of the social anarchy that commenced about the middle of the 21st century was traceable chiefly to the disparity in numbers between the sexes brought about by the operation of the “Option of Sex.” If we are to charge it to the corrupt influence of one sex on the other it was the corrupt assault of the unavoidably unmarried of the male sex on the institution of wedlock. If the women were willful arrogant and naughty, it was only because there were men about them in the proportion of three to one—for which they were not to blame—nor the men either, but the limited capacity of this globe, and nobody was to blame for that. Thus whatever they are or do in either sex is traceable to their environment.”

“Well,” said I, “since there has been such a failure, I am glad after all that my day was ended long before these evil times came. But what is to become of the race now! Will they discover a way to hold their own?”

“There never was,” said he, “a lack of wise doctors amongst men who were always ready with a sure cure for the ills that beset the race. Some of them now proposed as a remedy for the social maladies a plan of life that was not new nor original, but which differed as far as possible from the hereditary notions of the western nations. This was nothing less than polyandry or the plurality of husbands. They said, let every woman have three husbands and harmony and peace will be restored, and vice be deprived of excuse. They said this was no experiment, but had been practiced successfully amongst some of the eastern nations from time immemorial. They referred to the case of the Ladaks, a highly civilized, steady and religious people of the Buddhist faith, who inhabit the lofty and circumscribed valley at the head waters of the Indus. The place will support only so many people. If too many were born they could not emigrate to a lower country on account of the oppression of the heavier air. For a converse reason no immigrants ever attempt to settle there. But the population is kept uniform and steady by the simple plan of giving each wife three husbands. This has been successful for a thousand years on a small scale and there seemed no reason why it would not work on a large scale. But this scheme was promptly and emphatically rejected by the women of influence and authority, the moment it was proposed. They asserted there was no civilized relationship except Monogamy. That alone brought equality of the sexes and equality alone stood between the race and barbarism.

“It was true that polyandry was already practiced surreptitiously to a certain extent in America, but it was the disreputable exception and they did not propose to make it the honorable rule. They denounced the plan as being scarcely one remove from the “social evil” itself. Polygamy, they said, is natural, made so by immemorial usage. The race was brought up on that and is built with reference to it. But polyandry, No! nothing in nature so repulsive and revolting. That settled it.”