Chapter 6

It has seemed worth while to bring this forward to show a little more clearly the complications which are set like a thick hedge around this problem. There is no easy way out, and the protection of the child's interests mean much more than provision for its bringing up and the satisfying of its physical needs. Only the parents who are sure that they are not claiming their individual right to freedom at the expense of the stronger home rights of their child or children can be held blameless in dissolving their marriage. We talk a great deal to-day about children and their welfare, but very few of us realize at all practically the change of attitude, the restrictions of the adult liberty and sacrifice that are likely to be necessary, if, under all circumstances, our theories are to be expressed in our daily conduct.

And this brings us straight back to the question we are considering at the very point at which we left it. For, if we place first the child's rights, we see at once that our existing divorce law does already in this matter fail, and fail very seriously.[110:1] A parent, either the father or the mother, may by neglect and many unkindnesses do far more injury to a child than by an act of unfaithfulness. I need not wait to prove this perfectly obvious fact. It seems to me, however, that these home-destroying acts, the result of any sort of daily indecency of living, which brings suffering, with lasting injury, to little children, are the one condition that makes divorce necessary and also right in a marriage where there are children.

I admit the difficulties of framing a law sufficiently elastic to meet this need. I do not, however, see that it would be impossible. The one who claimed the divorce--the father or the mother--or both if the dissolution of the marriage was desired by both parents, could be desired to state in the application for the divorce full answers to the following questions:--

(1) The reason or reasons on which the divorce was sought.

(2) The arrangements one or both parents propose to make for the after care of the child or children.

(3) The guarantees offered that these arrangements would be honorably fulfilled.

(4) Proof to be given by one or both parents that the continuance of the marriage would be harmful to the welfare of the children.

Perhaps you will object that such a law would limit too much the liberty of the parents. I acknowledge this, and I think such limitation is right. You see, I do not believe in the kind of liberty that makes it easy for anyone to do wrong to helpless children.

Science has now shown us how terribly the future of the child depends on its early relationships in the home: its relation to its mother, its relation to its father, to its brothers and sisters. These early home relationships assume a much deeper aspect, and are, indeed, the most important influence in the life of every human being. Parenthood is far more nearly eternal than we knew. It is this tremendous fact, from which there can be no kind of escape, that ought to decide our attitude and direct us in framing an honest and clean divorce law. This protection of those who cannot protect themselves is the one essential and right consideration. The law must take action to guard all children that the failure or folly of their parents do not fall too heavily upon them.

There is little more that I need to say. A hard and fast divorce law cannot, I am sure, meet the needs of the young people of the new generation; moreover, it cannot but act to degrade marriage. Marriage is too difficult--the needs of children, as well as the needs of men and women are too complicated for the old standards of punishments. Divorce as it exists at present is a revenge, it ought to be a help to honorable conduct; it depends now upon a committal of perjury and adultery, it ought to depend on honesty and on a right fulfilling of responsibilities.

FOOTNOTES:

[99:1] Since writing this essay the admirably courageous and honest letter of Commander Josiah Wedgewood has appeared, in which he gives the details of his own divorce suit.

[106:1] See for other examples "The Position of Women in Primitive Society."

[110:1] In this connection see the admirable essay on Divorce by Mr. H. G. Wells, in "An Englishman Looks at the World."

_Fourth Essay_

"GIVE, GIVE!"

SOME REMARKS ON PROSTITUTION, AND AN INQUIRY AS TO THE BEST MEANS OF PREVENTING THE SPREAD OF VENEREAL DISEASES.

"The horse-leach hath two daughters, crying, Give, Give!"--Pro. xxx. 15.

I

Many observers point out an increase in loose conduct during the war. In that period there were established large camps of soldiers in lonely places, who were freed from the neighbor's eye: women also were withdrawn in large numbers from the influences of the home. The war lessened restraints and increased temptation.

I will refer to two out of many newspaper cuttings which dwell on the consequent evils:--

WOMEN, WAR, AND MORALS

_Mr. Justice Darling's View_

_Mr. Justice Darling, in a case at the Old Bailey yesterday, said the harm the war had done to the morals of the people of this country was far beyond the material damage._

_In nothing had it done more harm than in the relaxation on the part of the women of this country. This had now reached a point that it could be seen in a walk along the street. Women differed by the width of Heaven from what their mothers were._

This is quite the hardest thing that has been said about women, the hardest comparison that could be made; but unhappily it cannot he denied. And a second paragraph, taken from the _Daily Telegraph_, carries us a stage further, from cause to effect. The looseness of morals has increased alarmingly the spread of venereal diseases.

"_Giving evidence before the National Birth Rate Commission in London, Dr. E. B. Turner, after advocating early marriage and urging the necessity for a higher moral standard, without which venereal diseases would never be kept down, made this statement:_

"_These diseases were now being spread not only by professional prostitutes. People had gone wrong through the wave of sentimental patriotism which had swept over the country. Out of 112 soldiers taken to the Rochester Road Institution, only fourteen had contracted disease from professionals. The others had contracted it from flappers._"

The condition of the streets is such that it is not safe to let any young man or boy walk about, not so much because of prostitutes, men may learn to avoid them, but because of dressed-up, flighty girls, who have earned big wages during the past four years, and now are feeling the want of money to spend upon dress and pleasure. Almost for the first time girls have had money, and it has enabled them to do what they want; they have learned more than their mothers know and, therefore, they despise their mothers' ideas of what is fitting and natural. Modern girls are out to get all they can, and by any means. It is, I know, easy to exaggerate the situation. I have, however, taken pains to gain all possible information on the subject. I find it the opinion of those who are best qualified to know that the most alarming feature of the problem now is the greatly increased danger of spreading the diseases, caused by the shifting of infection from the professional prostitute to young girls out for larks and presents. I was told by one worker in the Police Court Mission, for instance, of a club for girls, aged from fourteen to twenty-six years, among whom _there was probably not a single pure girl_. A woman rescue worker said that "South London was swamped by these larking girls," so many cases come up that "no one knows what to do with them." In the Police courts, while the number of women charged had lessened considerably, the number of girls charged has increased three-fold. Many of these girls are very young; some of them hardly more than children. In almost all cases the charge made is the same--disorderly conduct with soldiers. Of the number of girls convicted and sent to prison or to rescue homes, _at least three parts are found to be infected_, the greater number with gonorrhoea, but some with syphilis.

Now, it is no part of my purpose to blame women. The great majority of these girls are ill-trained, and have been worked beyond care for decency. The question is, what it is best to do. The answer is not easy. For while everyone is agreed about the need for action, disagreement as to what form the action shall take hinders the adoption of any wider course of prevention. Here again there is no unity of purpose, no humility to accept what is right.

II

For myself, I shall try to avoid a purely moral and idealistic treatment of the subject. At the same time, before explaining what practical measures should, in my opinion, be taken to lessen the evils, I should like to refer briefly, and I know inadequately, to the deeper causes, which are rooted in our attitude of life, as well as dependent on our hidden desires. Man, and of course I include woman, as a whole is estimated at too low a value. It is a paradoxical consequence that the _parts of man_, I mean his separate organs, rise in value. His brain, his sex, his stomach--each strives for mastery in attention; a faithless age has manias of sexuality, of intellect, of gastronomy.[117:1] These manias are the result of low values really placed on man himself. How do we discover that low value? It is not so much a matter of opinion; far more important than the opinion of the public is the wide-spread, always-acting, fundamental public feeling, expressed in the atmosphere of our society. Every smallest detail of life, our aims and hourly habits, everything that makes up the secret imaginations and the un-willed purposes of life--all have a part to play in deciding what our estimations of life will be, the things we shall seek as desirable, what avoid as unpleasant. If our estimations and hidden desires in actual fact rise in goodness, if we find better aims to satisfy our lives than the excitements of sexual satisfaction, then this department of morality will rise.

The question is one of great complexity, and the surest means of improvement are very difficult to decide; not to be settled in a spirit of Sunday-school optimism. The bad boy does not always come to harm, or the good boy gain the reward that he ought to have. It is not so simple as that. Even if all vulgar and evil desires could by some magician's wand be transformed into their opposites, so that all of us bubbled and seethed with virtues, I do not believe we could count on the results. Our very virtues might hasten us to perdition: both higher and lower aims, if ill-adjusted to form a complete life, may lead astray. The savage in us all has to be reckoned with as the angel, and the dreamer who ever looks to heaven often stumbles over a tiny stone. Thus a helpless romanticizing, a too ideal as well as a too low view of love, may lead easily to a self-deceiving resort to prostitution.

All forcing of goodness, in my opinion, is dangerous. Often the cause of virtue is injured, like the cause of religion, not only when virtue is allied with routine, dullness and narrowness, but also when appeal is made to aspirations, which the young rarely feel spontaneously, aspirations ill-adapted and too high for their immature characters and the needs at the stage of virtue that has been reached. Certainly they _appear_ to respond, fall in with our plans of salvation and often accept them with seeming joy; I venture, however, to think that very often this external attitude does not in any way correspond with the internal one, that very often there has been disturbance and shock, to be followed later by increased need for excitement, with an impulse to more perilous adventure to cover the unconscious feeling of frustration and disappointment; while another result is a sense of unreality, a state always unfavorable to moral health.

If morality is seen as something overbeautiful for daily use, even more than as something dull, inactive, over-prudent; if vice, on the other hand, is conceived as easy, brilliant, gay, gallantly reckless, in opposition to the too ethereal or merely stupid and prosaic aspects of life (though in reality seldom do the dissipated and those who prey on the vices of mankind possess any brilliance or originality), then beauty and virtue will aid vice, through the stimulus of contradiction it will provide. Vice will gain by the brilliance, wit and beauty, which the artists and creators of the world ought to be induced, were the world's cause properly cared for, to connect with virtue.

The popular view of our common motives still inclines to reduce everything to a single impulse--the young are moved exclusively by self-interest and the search for pleasure. But surely this view is false. Hazlitt, the English essayist most interested in psychology, in his essay on "Mind and Motive," correctly observes that, "love of strong excitement both in thought and action" has much more influence on our ideas, passions and pursuits than mere desire for the agreeable. Curiosity itself, also the love of truth, "our teasing ourselves to recollect the names of persons and places we have forgotten, the love of riddles and of abstruse philosophy," he holds these to be illustrations of "the love of intellectual excitement," and, with respect to this curiosity, he holds that our vices are more due to it than to sexual gratifications, saying with regard to vicious habits, "curiosity makes more votaries than inclination."

We find, then, that the difficult problem we are considering, like other social problems, has a material aspect, that is a medical aspect, an intellectual aspect, and a spiritual aspect concerning the aims of life: and of these the last is the most fundamental; it is obviously also the most difficult. To attack the situation fully it would be necessary to change most of our contemporary life. We are, however, bound to realize that, if we are to succeed, our attention must shift from saving the fallen, to removing the hindrances and the temptations that are the causes of falling. In other words, we have to provide a society in which the young will find virtue and goodness as serviceable to their needs and as attractive as vice and doing evil.

III

If we turn now to the practical consideration of the problem before us, we find the situation, difficult as it is, is not without hope. We have to face as the result of the war a task greatly enlarged and growing in difficulties, but if we do so face it--and the very increase in the danger is urging us like spurs in the flesh of a tired horse--we have an exceptionally favorable opportunity for correction and amendment. For one thing, we have become more used to being interfered with, also, I think we have come to understand in a new and more profound way that each man "is his brother's keeper." Again the real difficulty arises now, not so much from our want of good will, as from our failure to act unitedly, and formulate and carry out a wide-reaching program of reform.

If for the sake of clarity, we try by classifying motives to form a rough grouping, we find that, as with most political subjects, there are three opinions with regard to proposals for State interference to stay the peril and prevent the spread of venereal disease.

The first school favors extreme State interference. Persons suspected of disseminating disease (or "denounced by one of the opposite sex" as having done so) are liable to be arrested, medically examined, and, if necessary, detained for re-examination and for treatment until cured: habitual prostitutes can be sentenced to imprisonment. Possibly State-inspected brothels will be established; all street solicitation treated as an offense. Compulsory medical certificates of freedom from infectious venereal diseases will be made a legal prerequisite of marriage; all wishing to be married, when found infected, to be registered and treated until certified free from infection. State provision of hygienic preventative and curative means are to be given free to those in danger from infection as well as to all suffering from venereal diseases. Finally, severe police action is urged against agents, landlords, publicans, restaurant and hotel-keepers, theater, music-hall and cinema owners, fortune-tellers--and everyone directly or indirectly profiteering by prostitution. This is not a description of any one national treatment, or proposed treatment of the problem, but rather a composite hotch-potch, intended to include the main features of the new and old schemes based on State interference and regulation of vice.

The opposite school of thought produces an opposite scheme; one that I may, perhaps, call an ethical Sunday-school plan of salvation by means of guidance and gentle persuasions. They would educate people in the fact that all _promiscuous intercourse is likely to be dangerous_, and recommend only an alteration of the laws of marriage and divorce to meet cases of marital infection and to protect children who are infected by negligence. Such a course of mild action is widely supported by bishops and by "sheltered" women, who reveal to us curiously the psychology of the class, which, throughout the Victorian period, practiced idealism on the easiest methods.

The practical objections usually advanced to "the interference school" are that laws of regulation create an illusory sense of security which encourages vice and increases the spread of disease. No inspection, however widely and well regulated, can guarantee that it will detect _all_ infected persons, but the idea will prevail that all infected at any time are "locked up." A still stronger objection as urged by women, arises from the fact that the law will not be equal in its treatment of the two sexes: the man on the spree after his day's work will seek his pleasure without danger of the law's hand, while a woman, _in a similar position, in work and not asking for money_, will be liable to arrest for soliciting, and detention and imprisonment, if affected. I shall have more to say soon on this question; here I will remark only that in bringing forward these objections I am not stating opinions of my own, but trying to be fair to objections, which, I know, are strong in the minds of the majority of women. But I diverge a little in these comments from my present work of classifying schemes.

The third type of treatment pursues, of course, a moderate, middle course. Registration and treatment of disease should not be compulsory, because, as opinion at present is, this course will lead merely to concealment on the part of the sufferers, whereas medical treatment at the earliest possible hour is what is aimed at; but free treatment and provision of curative safeguards should be provided to all who apply for them, and always with secrecy. (There is much opposing opinion as to which of these two preventative plans--providing of disinfectants to be used _before_ or of remedies to be used _as soon as possible after the act_--is the more effective.) No wide-spread schemes for examination and detention are recommended, rather are they discouraged; nor is there any firm regulation for ending street soliciting. Certificates of health should _not_ be made a legal pre-requisite to marriage, but the existence of venereal disease should _annul_ marriage without expense, making the law applicable to the poor as well as to the rich. Also, medical men should be specially authorized, without risk of libel, slander or other legal attack, to inform parents or guardians or others directly interested, that anyone contemplating marriage, a man or a woman--is in an infectious state.

It may be pointed out here that military authorities seem to lay stress on one thing that some people will say has nothing to do with the subject--the provision of proper means of recreation. Personally, I would emphasize this aspect of the question to which I have but just now referred. If the amusement is to fulfill the purpose required, and be really a strong counter attraction from vice, it must be the kind of recreation desired and liked by the young people for whom it is provided, not merely the recreation that is considered good for them by the adults who provide it. This opens up, of course, a whole welter of questions. I am not advocating bad and low class entertainments; I hate them and think their suggestive influence a curse among us. Yet, I do fear the adverse action of any kind of amusement that takes the form of an unliked and moral-forcing hot-house.

The fluttering about, the glitter and glare of dissipation, is always, I think, at first the fierce striving of a sickly life towards the only attractive and visible light. Certainly the providing of wholesome amusement is necessary, but, in relation to all the change that is really called for, this is just about as important as the giving of packets of sweets. What is wanted is a wiser understanding of the many and conflicting needs of the young; the provision of the opportunities and outlets which their bodies' and souls' growth demand; needs which must be gratified, or the body, driven by dissatisfaction and curiosity, seeks the gratification that has been taken away from the creative soul.

IV

But to return to plans of action for fighting this scourge. The fight has to be made, and to be begun at once. It is stated that there were, at the beginning of the year, in the neighborhood of 20,000 infected men receiving treatment in our Army and Navy Hospitals. According to the estimate of the Royal Commission on Venereal Diseases published in 1916 there were, at that time, something like 3,000,000 syphilitic persons in the Kingdom, 450,000 in London alone. Since 1916 the number must have greatly increased. Many diseases are more immediately fatal to mankind than are these diseases, but none are so disastrous in their effects. To take but two examples of their destructive incidence; it is known that to them more than half of both the blindness and the lunacy in this country is directly due. But I need not trouble you with facts and figures that to-day are known to almost everyone.

What is needed now is a world-wide, organized plan of defense, modified possibly to meet the special requirements of different countries, but, as far as is possible, the same for the whole world. A first step has been taken, at the meeting of the Red Cross Societies of the world, which was held at Cannes, in April, 1919. No man can tell how far-reaching its work will prove: an International Health Bureau was instituted and arrangements made for a further great conference to be held at Geneva after the signing of peace.

I would like to wait and write of the Cannes Conference, which to me was an event more serious even than the other world conference, where some were thoughtlessly and selfishly juggling with human affairs. Here was no pretending, no hiding of motives, just a facing of the real situation. The great events of life are almost always quiet. I picture the great ball-room,[129:1] where usually jazzes and one-steps were indulged in by the officers of the Allied Armies and bright girl W.A.A.C.S. and W.R.E.N.S., occupied now with grave men; a group of some of the greatest scientists ever assembled together. United they seek for the first time how best an end may be made to this tragic scourge of our civilization;[129:2] their fervent purpose should light a flame to blaze in action in every civilized country.