LITMIR.BIZ

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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.

      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

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