The Task of Social Hygiene

To get to the bottom of the matter, we thus find it is necessary to look into it more closely than is usually attempted. When we ask ourselves why prosperity fails permanently to remove the restraints on fertility the answer is, that it speedily creates new restraints. Prosperity and civilization are far from being synonymous terms. The savage who is able to glut himself with the whale that has just been stranded on his coast, is more prosperous than he was the day before, but he is not more civilized, perhaps a trifle less so. The working community that is suddenly glutted by an afflux of work and wages is in exactly the same position as the savage who is suddenly enabled to fill himself with a rich mass of decaying blubber. It is prosperity; it is not civilization. [140] But, while prosperity leads at first to the reckless and unrestrained gratification of the simplest animal instincts of nutrition and reproduction, it tends, when it is prolonged, to evolve more complex instincts. Aspirations become less crude, the needs and appetites engendered by prosperity take on a more social character, and are sharpened by social rivalries. In place of the earlier easy and reckless gratification of animal impulses, a peaceful and organized struggle is established for securing in ever fuller degree the gratification of increasingly insistent and increasingly complex desires. Such a struggle involves a deliberate calculation and forethought, which, sooner or later, cannot fail to be applied to the question of offspring.

Thus it is that affluence, in the long run, itself imposes a check on reproduction. Prosperity, under the stress of the urban conditions with which it tends to be associated, has been transformed into that calculated forethought, that deliberate self-restraint for the attainment of ever more manifold ends, which in its outcome we term "civilization."

It is frequently assumed, as we have seen, that the process by which civilization is thus evolved is a selfish and immoral process. To procreate large families, it is said, is unselfish and moral, as well as a patriotic, even a religious duty. This assumption, we now find, is a little too hasty and is even the reverse of the truth; it is necessary to take into consideration the totality of the social phenomena accompanying a high birth-rate, more especially under the conditions of town life. A community in which children are born rapidly is necessarily in an unstable position; it is growing so quickly that there is insufficient time for the conditions of life to be equalized. The state of ill-adjustment is chronic; the pressure is lifted from off the natural impulse of procreation, but is increased on all the conditions under which the impulse is exerted. There is increased overcrowding, increased filth, increased disease, increased death. It can never happen, in modern times, that the readjustment of the conditions of life can be made to keep pace with a high birth-rate. It is sufficient if we consider the case of English towns, of London in particular, during the period when British prosperity was most rapidly increasing, and the birth-rate nearing its maximum, in the middle of the great Victorian epoch, of which Englishmen are, for many reasons, so proud.

It was certainly not an age lacking in either energy or philanthropy; yet, when we read the memorable report which Chadwick wrote in 1842, on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain, or the minute study of Bethnal Green which Gavin published in 1848 as a type of the conditions prevailing in English towns, we realize that the magnificence of this epoch was built up over circles of Hell to which the imagination of Dante never attained.

As reproductive activity dies down, social conditions become more stable, a comparatively balanced state of adjustment tends to be established, insanitary surroundings can be bettered, disease diminished, and the death-rate lowered. How much may thus be accomplished we realize when we compare the admirably precise and balanced pages in which Charles Booth, in the concluding volumes of his great work, has summarized his survey of London, with the picture presented by Chadwick and Gavin half a century earlier. Ugly and painful as are many of the features of this modern London, the vision which is, on the whole, evoked is that of a community which has attained self-consciousness, which is growing into some faint degree of harmony with its environment, and is seeking to gain the full amount of the satisfaction which an organized urban life can yield. Booth, who appears to have realized the significance of a decreased fertility in the attainment of this progress, hopes for a still greater fall in the birth-rate; and those who seek to restore the birth-rate of half a century ago are engaged on a task which would be criminal if it were not based on ignorance, and which is, in any case, fatuous.

The whole course of zoological evolution reveals a constantly diminishing reproductive activity and a constantly increasing expenditure of care on the offspring thus diminished in number. [141] Fish spawn their ova by the million, and it is a happy chance if they become fertilized, a highly unlikely chance that more than a very small proportion will ever attain maturity. Among the mammals, however, the female may produce but half a dozen or fewer offspring at a time, but she lavishes so much care upon them that they have a very fair chance of all reaching maturity. In man, in so far as he refrains from returning to the beast and is true to the impulse which in him becomes a conscious process of civilization, the same movement is carried forward. He even seeks to decrease still further the number of his offspring by voluntary effort, and at the same time to increase their quality and magnify their importance. [142]

When in human families, especially under civilized conditions, we see large families we are in the presence of a reversion to the tendencies that prevail among lower organisms. Such large families may probably be regarded, as Näcke suggests, as constituting a symptom of degeneration. It is noteworthy that they usually occur in the pathological and abnormal classes, among the insane, the feeble-minded, the criminal, the consumptive, the alcoholic, etc. [143]

This tendency of the birth-rate to fall with the growth of social stability is thus a tendency which is of the very essence of civilization. It represents an impulse which, however deliberate it may be in the individual, may, in the community, be looked upon as an instinctive effort to gain more complete control of the conditions of life, and to grapple more efficiently with the problems of misery and disease and death. It is not only, as is sometimes supposed, during the past century that the phenomena may be studied. We have a remarkable example some centuries earlier, an example which very clearly illustrates the real nature of the phenomena. The city of Geneva, perhaps first of European cities, began to register its births, deaths, and marriages from the middle of the sixteenth century. This alone indicates a high degree of civilization; and at that time, and for some succeeding centuries, Geneva was undoubtedly a very highly civilized city. Its inhabitants really were the "elect," morally and intellectually, of French Protestantism. In many respects it was a model city, as Gray noted when he reached it in the course of his travels in the middle of the eighteenth century. These registers of Geneva show, in a most illuminating manner, how extreme fertility at the outset, gradually gave place, as civilization progressed, to a very low fertility, with fewer and later marriages, a very low death-rate, and a state of general well-being in which the births barely replaced the deaths.

After Protestant Geneva had lost her pioneering place in civilization, it was in France, the land which above all others may in modern times claim to represent the social aspects of civilization, that the same tendency most conspicuously appeared. But all Europe, as well as all the English-speaking lands outside Europe, is now following the lead of France. In a paper read before the Paris Society of Anthropology a few years ago, Emile Macquart showed clearly, by a series of ingenious diagrams, that whereas, fifty years ago, the condition of the birth-rate in France diverged widely from that prevailing in the other chief countries of Europe, the other countries are now rapidly following in the same road along which France has for a century been proceeding slowly, and are constantly coming closer to her, England closest of all. In the past, proposals have from time to time been made in France to interfere with the progress of this downward movement of the birth-rate—proposals that were sufficiently foolish, for neither in France nor elsewhere will the individual allow the statistician to interfere officiously in a matter which he regards as purely intimate and private. But the real character of this tendency of the birth-rate, as an essential phenomenon of civilization, with which neither moralist nor politician can successfully hope to interfere, is beginning to be realized in France.

Azoulay, in summing up the discussion after Macquart's paper [144] had been read at the Society of Anthropology, pointed out that "nations must inevitably follow the same course as social classes, and the more the mass of these social classes becomes civilized, the more the nation's birth-rate falls; therefore there is nothing to be done legally and administratively." And another member added: "Except to applaud."

It is probably too much to hope that so sagacious a view will at once be universally adopted. The United States and the great English colonies, for instance, find it difficult to realize that they are not really new countries, but branches of old countries, and already nearing maturity when they began their separate lives. They are not at the beginning of two thousand years of slow development, such as we have passed through, but at the end of it, with us, and sometimes even a little ahead of us. It is therefore natural and inevitable that, in a matter in which we are moving rapidly, Massachusetts and Ontario and New South Wales and New Zealand should have moved still more rapidly, so rapidly indeed, that they have themselves failed to perceive that their real natural increase and the manner in which it is attained place them in this matter at the van of civilization. These things are, however, only learnt slowly. We may be sure that the fundamental and complex character of the phenomena will never be obvious to our fussy little politicians, so apt to advocate panaceas which have effects quite opposite to those they desire. But, whatever politicians may wish to do or to leave undone, it is well to remember that, of the various ideals the world holds, there are some that lie on the path of our social progress, and others that do not there lie.

We may properly exercise such wisdom as we possess by utilizing the ideals which are before us, serenely neglecting many others which however precious they may once have seemed, no longer form part of the stage of civilization we are now moving towards.