Little Essays of Love and Virtue by Havelock Ellis

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[30] See especially Mathorez, _Histoire de la Formation de la Population
Francaise_, Vol. I, 1920, _Les Etrangers en France_. The fecundity of
French families, even among the aristocracy, till towards the end of the
eighteenth century, was fabulous; in the third quarter of the
seventeenth century the average number of children was five in Paris.
But the mortality was extremely high; under the age of sixteen, Mathorez
estimates, it was 51 per cent., and infant mortality was terrible in all
classes, small-pox being specially fatal. Then there were the various
diseases termed plagues, with famine sometimes added, while war,
emigration, and religious celibacy all counteracted the excessive
fecundity, so that from the thirteenth century to the third quarter of
the eighteenth the population seems to have been stationary, about
twenty-two millions. Then the size of the family fell in Paris to 3.9
and in France generally to 4.3, while also there were fewer marriages.
Therewith there was an increase of prosperity.

Thus there seems, on a wide survey of the matter, no reason whatever to
quarrel with that conviction, which is gradually over-spreading all
classes of human society in all parts of the world, and ever more widely
leading to practical action, that the welfare of the individual, the
family, the community, and the race is bound up with the purposive and
deliberate practice of birth-control, whether we advocate that policy on
the ground that we are thereby furthering Nature, or on the opposite, and
no doubt equally excellent, ground that we are thereby correcting Nature.

Along this road, as along any other road, we shall not reach Utopia; and
since the Utopia of every person who possesses one is unique that perhaps
need not be regretted. We shall not even, within any measurable period of
time, reach a sanely free and human life fit to satisfy quite moderate
aspirations. The wise birth-controller will not (like the deliciously
absurd suffragette of old-time) imagine that birth-control for all means a
New Heaven and a New Earth, but will, rather, appreciate the delightful
irony of the Biblical legend which represented a world with only four
people in it, yet one of them a murderer. Still, it may be pointed out,
that was a state of things much better than we can show now. The world
would count itself happier if, during the Great War, only twenty-five per
cent of the population of belligerent lands had been murderers, virtually
or in fact. There is something to be gained, and that something is well
worth while.

Still, whether we like it or not, the task of speeding up the decrease of
the human population becomes increasingly urgent.[31] To many of our
Undesirables it may seem, mere sentiment to trouble about the ravishing of
the world's beauty or the ravaging of the world's humanity. But certain
hard facts, even to-day, have to be faced. The process of mechanical
invention continues every day on an ever increasing scale of magnitude.
Now that process, however necessary, however beneficial, involves some of
the chief evils of our present phase of what we call civilisation, partly
because it has deteriorated the quality of all human products and partly
because it has enslaved mankind, and in so doing deteriorated also his
quality.[32] Now we cannot abolish machinery, because machinery lies in
the very essence of life and we ourselves are machines. But, as the
largest part of history shows, there is no need whatever for man to become
the slave of machinery, or even for machinery to injure the quality of his
own work; rightly used it may improve it. The greatest task before
civilisation at present is to make machines what they ought to be, the
slaves, instead of the masters of men; and if civilisation fails at the
task, then without doubt it and its makers will go down to a common
destruction. It is a task inextricably bound up with the task of moulding
the human race for which birth-control is the elected instrument. Indeed
they are but two aspects of the same task. We have to accept the rugged
fact that every step to render more nearly perfect the mechanical side of
life correspondingly abolishes the need for men. Thus it is calculated
to-day that whenever, in accordance with a growing tendency, coal is
superseded by oil in industry two men are enabled to do the work of
twelve. That is merely typical of what is taking place generally in our
modern system of civilisation. Everywhere a small number of men are being
enabled to replace a large number of men. Not to avoid looking ahead, we
may say that of every twelve millions of our population, ten millions will
be unwanted. Let them do something else! we cheerfully exclaim. But what?
No doubt there are always art and science, infinite in their possibilities
for joy and enlightenment, infinite also, as we know, in their
possibilities of mischief and shallowness and boredom. Let it only be true
science and great art, and one man is better than ten millions. To say
that is only to echo unconsciously the ancient saying of Heraclitus, "One
is ten thousand if he be the best."

[31] Professor E.M. East, a distinguished biologist and lately President
of the American Society of Naturalists (_Nature_, 23 Sept., 1920), has
estimated that, for all the fall in the birth-rate, the present rate of
increase in the population of the world, chiefly of whites, who are
increasing most rapidly, will, in the lives of our grandchildren, lead
to a struggle for existence more terrible than imagination can conceive.

[32] This has been set forth with admirable lucidity and wealth of
illustration by Dr. Austin Freeman in his _Social Decay and
Regeneration_ (1921), already mentioned.

The vistas that are opened up when we realise the direction in which the
human race is travelling may seem to be endless; and so in a sense they
are. Man has replaced the gods he once dreamed of; he has found that he is
himself a god, who, however realistic he seeks to make his philosophy,
himself created the world as he sees it and now has even acquired the
power of creating himself, or, rather, of re-creating himself. For he
recognises that, at present, he is rather a poor sort of god, so much an
inferior god that he is hardly, if at all, to be distinguished from the
Lords of Hell.

The divine creative task of man extends into the future far beyond the
present, and we cannot too often meditate on the words of the wisest and
noblest forerunner of that future: "The whole world still lies before us
like a quarry before the master-builder, who is only then worthy of the
name when out of this casual mass of natural material he has embodied with
all his best economy, adaptability to the end, and firmness, the image
which has arisen in his mind. Everything outside us is only the means for
this constructing process, yes, I would even dare to say, also everything
inside us; deep within lies the creative force which is able to form what
it will, and gives us no rest until, without us or within us, in one or
the other way, we have finally given it representation." The future, with
all its possibilities, is still a future infinitely far away, however well
it may be to fix our eyes on the constellation towards which our solar
system may seem to be moving across the sky.

Meanwhile, every well-directed step, while it brings us but ever so little
nearer to the far goal around which our dreams may play, is at once a
beautiful process and an invigorating effort, and thereby becomes in
itself a desirable end. It is the little things of life which give us most
satisfaction and the smallest things in our path that may seem most worth
while.

INDEX

Abstinence, sexual, 59.
Acton, 110.
Adrenal glands, 132.
Anstie, 45.
Art of love, 121.
Asceticism and sexuality, 57.
Augustine, St., 58, 77.
Australian birth-rate, 162.
Auto-erotism, 46.

Bantu, marriage among the, 92.
Bateson, 166.
Bell, W. Blair, 119.
Binet-Sangle, 146.
Birth-control, 72, 138 _et seq._
Birth-rate, in France, 159, 174.
in Australia, 162.
in Canada, 160.
in England, 159, 164.
Book of the Knight of the Tour-Landry, 18, 82.
Brontes, the, 25.
Browning, Mrs., 26.
Brown-Sequard, 45.
Burbank, Luther, 139.

Canada, birth-rate in, 160.
Chastity, 57.
Chaucer, 56.
Children, to parents, relation of, 13 _et seq._
in modern life, 24 _et seq._
sex in, 48.
China, parents in, 32.
Christianity, 57, 65, 70, 76, 108, 110.
Continence, the value of, 38, 42.
Courtship in Nature, 103.
Crooks, Mrs. Will, 89.

Davenport, C.B., 143.
Darwin, Major Leonard, 166.
Davies, 51.
Drayton, 51.
Dundas, C, 92.

East, E.M., 176.
Education, 14.
in Old England, 16.
in Old France, 17, 19.
Electra-complex, 22.
Eliot, George, 31.
Ellis, Mrs. Havelock, 68, 69, 96.
English social history, 15, 16, 79, 159, 164.
Erotic claims of women, 112.
Erotic personality, 121.
Eugenics, 134 _et seq._
Ewart, 141.

Family, sex in life of, 22 _et seq._, 78.
Feeblemindedness, 143.
Feudal education, 19.
Francis of Assisi, St., 58.
Freeman, Austin, 99, 177.
French social history, 17, 19, 81, 159, 173.
Freud, 33, 46, 52.
Frink, H.W., 131.
Fuller, B.A.G., 171.

Galton, Sir Francis, 134, 139, 140, 144, 145.
Girls, emancipated, 27.
Goddard, 143.
Goethe, 179.
Gratian, 79.
Greeks, eugenics amongst ancient, 137.
Groos, 119.

Hadfield, Mrs., 32.
Heraclitus, 178.
Hinton, James, 29, 45, 67, 68, 69, 98.
Home, revolution in the, 93.
Hormones, 40, 117.
Husbands, 75 _et seq._

Individualism and eugenics, 148.
Infanticide, ancient, 135.
Infantile arrest, 33.
Inge, Dr., 166.
Internal secretions, 40, 117.

Jonson, Ben, 51.
Juries, women on, 16.

Key, Ellen, 13, 14, 15, 145.
Lasco, John a, 70.
Loewenfeld, 52.
Luchaire, 19.
Luther, 109.

Machinery and civilisation, 177.
Magic and sex, 39.
Marriage, 63 _et seq._, 76 _et seq._, 108 _et seq._, 117 _et seq._
Martineau, Harriet, 27.
Mathorez, 174.
Matsumato, 48.
McDougall, W., 99.
Meirowsky, 42.
Milton, 77.
Moissides, 137.
Monogamy, 106.
Montaigne, 17, 21, 37, 108, 109.
Morality, and nature, 55.
in marriage, 109.
More, Sir Thomas, 37, 109.
Murphy, Sir Shirley, 172.

Naecke, 59.
Nature and morality, 55.
New Caledonia, treatment of parents in, 32.
Northcote, H., 71.

Oedipus-complex, 22.
Osborn, H.F., 170.

Palladius, 57.
Parasitism in the home, 90.
Parents, merciful destruction of, 32.
relation of children to, 13 _et seq._, 24.
training of, 34.
veneration of, 32.
Parmelee, 120.
Paston Letters, 16, 79.
Paul, Eden & Cedar, 18, 151.
Paul, St., 77.
Peacock, 51.
Pell, C.E., 172.
Perrycoste, F.H., 149, 153.
Perseigne, Adam de, 20.
Pituitary gland, 118.
Play-function of sex, 116 _et seq._
Pleasure, the function of, 67.
Polonius, 31.
Powell, Dr., 81.
Protestantism and marriage, 77.
Psycho-analysis, 22, 130.
Purity, 37 _et seq._

Race-suicide, 155 _et seq._
Ring in marriage, 84.
Rite, the marriage, 83.
Robert of Arbrissel, 58.
Rohleder, 43.
Rolland, Romain, 67.

Sacrament, sex as a, 69.
Salle, Antoine de la, 17.
Sanger, Margaret, 152.
Schreiner, Olive, 69, 90.
and asceticism, 57.
Sex, and magic, 39.
as a sacrament, 69.
evolution in, 66.
nature of impulse of, 44.
play-function of, 116 _et seq._
spiritual element in, 66.
sublimation of, 47, 50.
Shaftesbury, 51.
Socialism and eugenics, 150.
_Stonor Letters_, 81.
Stopes, Marie, 152.
Suarez, 62.
Sublimation, 47, 50.

Theognis, 65.

Wells, H.G., 152.
Westermarck, 32.
Wives, 75 _et seq._
love rights of, 102 _et seq._
Wollstonecraft, Mary, 25.
Women, erotic claims of, 112.
erotic ideas of average, 124,
in Crusades, 20.
in marriage, 75, 78.
in old France, 19 _et seq._
in subjection to men, 111.
love rights of, 102 _et seq._
on juries, 16.

Yule, G. Udney, 172.

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Transcriber's Notes:

in the index, Wollstonecroft was changed to Wollstonecraft
also in the index, a was changed to a in: Lasco, John a
some punctuation normalized
everything else was left as found in the original

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