Essays in War-Time: Further Studies in the Task of Social Hygiene - Ellis Havelock

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that high mission we cannot have too much cannon-fodder in defending ourselves against the jealousy and aggression of other nations. Let us promote parentage by law; let us repress by law every influence which may encourage a falling birth-rate; otherwise there is nothing left to us but speedy national disaster, complete and irremediable." This is not caricature,22 though these apostles of "race-suicide" may easily arouse a smile by the verbal ardour of their procreative energy. But we have to recognise that in Germany for years past it has been difficult to take up a serious periodical without finding some anxiously statistical article about the falling birth-rate and some wild recommendations for its arrest, for it is the militaristic German who of all Europeans is most worried by this fall; indeed Germans often even refuse to recognise it. Thus to-day we find Professor Gruber declaring that if the population of the German Empire continues to grow at the rate of the first five years of the present century, at the end of the century it will have reached 250,000,000. By such a vast increase in population, the Professor complacently concludes, "Germany will be rendered invulnerable." We know what that means. The presence of an "invulnerable" nation among nations that are "vulnerable" means inevitable aggression and war, a perpetual menace to civilisation and humanity. It is not along that line that hope can be found for the world's future, or even Germany's future, and Gruber conveniently neglects to estimate what, on his basis, the population of Russia will be at the end of the century. But Gruber's estimate is altogether fallacious. German births have fallen, roughly speaking, about one per thousand of the population, every year since the beginning of the century, and it would be equally reasonable to estimate that if they continue to fall at the present rate (which we cannot, of course, anticipate) births will altogether have ceased in Germany long before the end of the century. The German birth-rate reached its climax forty years ago (1871-1880) with 40.7 per 1,000; in 1906 it was 34 per 1,000; in 1909, 31 per 1,000; in 1912, 28 per 1,000; in an almost measurable period of time, in all probability long before the end of the century, it will have reached the same low level as that of France, when there will be little difference between the "invulnerability" of France and of Germany, a consummation which, for the world's sake, is far more devoutly to be wished than that anticipated by Gruber.

      We have to remember, moreover, that this tendency is by no means, as we are sometimes tempted to suppose, a sign of degeneration or of decay; but, on the contrary, a sign of progress. When we survey broadly that course of zoological evolution of which we are pleased to regard Man as the final outcome, we note that on the whole the mighty stream has become the less productive as it has advanced. We note the same of the various lines taken separately. We note, also, that intelligence and all the qualities we admire have usually been most marked in the less prolific species. Progress, roughly speaking, has proved incompatible with high fertility. And the reason is not far to seek. If the creature produced is more evolved, it is more complex and more highly organised, and that means the need for much time and much energy. To attain this, the offspring must be few and widely spaced; it cannot be attained at all under conditions that are highly destructive. The humble herring, which evokes the despairing envy of our human apostles of fertility, is largely composed of spawn, and produces a vast number of offspring, of which few reach maturity. The higher mammals spend their lives in the production of a small number of offspring, most of whom survive. Thus, even before Man began, we see a fundamental principle established, and the relationship between the birth-rate and the death-rate in working order. All progressive evolution may be regarded as a mechanism for concentrating an ever greater amount of energy in the production of ever fewer and ever more splendid individuals. Nature is perpetually striving to replace the crude ideal of quantity by the higher ideal of quality.

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      1

      O'Dalton, Letters of Sidonius, Vol. II., p. 149.

      2

      P. Chalmers Mitchell, Evolution and the War, 1915.

      3

      On the advantages of war in primitive society, se

1

O'Dalton, Letters of Sidonius, Vol. II., p. 149.

2

P. Chalmers Mitchell, Evolution and the War, 1915.

3

On the advantages of war in primitive society, see W. MacDougal's Social Psychology, Ch. XI.

4

It is doubtless a task beset by difficulties, some of which are set forth, in no hostile spirit, by Lord Cromer, "Thinking Internationally," Nineteenth Century, July, 1916; but the statement of most of these difficulties is enough to suggest the solution.

5

D.S. Jordan, War and the Breed, 1915; also articles on "War and Manhood" in the Eugenics Review, July, 1910, and on "The Eugenics of War" in the same Review for Oct., 1913.

6

J. Arthur Thomson, "Eugenics and War," Eugenics Review, April, 1915. Major Leonard Darwin (Journal Royal Statistical Society, March, 1916) sets forth a similar view.

7

It is true that in the Gourdon cavern, in the Pyrenees, representing a very late and highly developed stage of Magdalenian culture, there are indications that human brains were eaten (Zaborowski, L'Homme Préhistorique, p. 86). It is surmised that they were the brains of enemies killed in battle, but this remains a surmise.

8

Zaborowski, L'Homme Préhistorique, pp. 121, 139; Lapouge, Les Sélections Sociales, p. 209.

9

Revue d'Anthropologie, 1876, pp. 608 and 655.

10

In France it is almost unknown except as preached by the Syndicalist philosopher, Georges Sorel, who insists, quite in the German manner, on the purifying and invigorating effects of "a great foreign war," although, very unlike the German professors, he holds that "a great extension of proletarian violence" will do just as well as war.

11

The recent expressions of the same doctrine in Germany are far too numerous to deal with. I may, however, refer to Professor Fritz Wilke's Ist der Krieg sittlich berechtigt? (1915) as being the work of a theologian and Biblical scholar of Vienna who has written a book on the politics of Isaiah and discussed the germs of historical veridity in the history of Abraham. "A world-history without war," he declares, "would be a history of materialism and degeneration"; and again: "The solution is not 'Weapons down!' but 'Weapons up!' With pure hands and calm conscience let us grasp the sword." He dwells, of course, on the supposed purifying and ennobling effects of war and insists that, in spite of its horrors, and when necessary, "War is a divine institution and a work of love." The leaders of the world's peace movement are, thank God! not Germans, but merely English and Americans, and he sums up, with Moltke, that war is a part of the moral order of the world.

12

William James, Popular Science Monthly, Oct., 1910.

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<p>22</p>

The last twelve words quoted are by Miss Ethel Elderton in an otherwise sober memoir (Report on the English Birth-rate, 1914, p. 237) which shows that the birth control movement has begun, just where we should expect it to begin, among the better instructed classes.