Little Essays of Love and Virtue by Havelock Ellis

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If, however, we wish to consider the real significance of the facts,
without regard for the wild cries of ignorant cranks, it is scarcely
necessary to point out here that neither the birth-rate taken by itself,
nor the death-rate taken by itself, will suffice to give us any measure
even of the growth of the population, to say nothing of the progress of
civilisation or the happiness of humanity. It is obvious that we must
consider both gains and losses, and put one against the other, if we wish
to ascertain the net result. We may roughly get a notion of what that
result is by deducting the death-rate from the birth-rate and calling the
remainder the survival-rate. If we are really concerned with the question
of the alleged suicide of the race, and do not wish to be befooled, we
must pay little attention to the birth-rate, for that by itself means
nothing: we must concentrate on the survival-rate. Then we may soon
convince ourselves, not only that the human race is not committing
suicide, but that not even a single one of the so-called civilised nations
of which it is mainly composed is committing suicide. Quite the contrary!
Every one of them, even France, where this peculiar "suicide" is supposed
to be most actively at work, is yearly increasing in numbers.

It is interesting to note, moreover, that the French have been increasing
faster, that is to say the survival-rate has been higher in recent years
just before the war, when the birth-rate was at its lowest, than they were
twenty years earlier, with a higher birth-rate. And if we take a wider
sweep and consider the growth of the French population towards the end of
the eighteenth century, we find the birth-rate estimated at the very high
figure of 40. But the death-rate was nearly as high, the average duration
of life was only half what it is now. So that the survival-rate in France
at that time, with widely different rates of birth and death, was not much
unlike it is now. The recent French birth-rate of 19 and less, which
automatically causes the "Race-Suicide" marionette to dance with rage, is
producing not far from the same result in growth of the population--we are
not here concerned with the enormous difference in well being and
happiness--as the extremely high rate of 40 which sends our marionettes
leaping to the sky with joy. In war-time England, in 1917, the birth-rate
sank to 17.8, yet the death-rate was at 14 and the increase of the
population continued. The more the human race commits this kind of
suicide, one is tempted to exclaim, the faster it grows!

It is, however, in the New World--as in Canada, Australia, and New
Zealand--that we find the most impressive evidence of the real criteria of
the growth in population set up for judgment on the racial suicide cranks.
Canadian statistics bring out many points instructive even in their
variation. Here we see not only unusual curves of rise and fall, but also
pronounced differences, due to the special peculiarities of the French
population, most clearly in the Province of Quebec but also in some parts
of the Province of Ontario. In Quebec the birth-rate some years ago was
35, and the death-rate 21, both rates high, and the survival-rate high at
14; recently the birth-rate has risen to 37 and the death-rate fallen to
17, with the result that the survival-rate of 20 is the highest in the
world, though it must be noted that the high birth-rate is not likely to
last long, since in Quebec, as elsewhere in the world, increasing
urbanisation causes a decreasing birth-rate. In mainly English-speaking
Ontario the birth-rate is much lower, about 24, but the death-rate is also
lower, about 14, so that the fairly considerable survival-rate of 10 is
obtained. But we note the highly significant fact that some thirty years
or more ago the birth-rate was much lower, about 19, and yet the
survival-rate was almost 9, nearly as high as to-day! The death-rate was
then at 10, and nothing could be more instructive as to the real
relationship that holds in this matter. There has been a great rise in
the birth-rate and the only result, as someone has remarked, is a great
increase in the population of the grave-yards. Equally instructive is it
to compare various cities in this same Province, living under the same
laws, and fairly similar social conditions. In the report of the
Registrar-General of Ontario for 1916 I find that highest in birth-rate of
cities in the Province stands Ottawa with a very considerable French
population. But first also stands the same city for infant mortality,
which is three times greater than in some other cities in the Province
with a low birth-rate. Sault Ste. Marie, again with an enormous
birth-rate, stands third for infant mortality. Canada shows us that, even
if we regard the crude desire for a large growth of population as
reasonable--and that is a considerable assumption--a high birth-rate is an
uncertain prop to rest on.

Canada is an instructive example because we have some ground for believing
that the difference between the English-speaking and French-speaking
populations--the greater care of the former in procreation and the more
recklessly destructive methods of the latter in attaining the same
ends--are due to their different attitudes towards the use of methods of
birth-control. What the result of a general use of such methods is we know
from the example already mentioned of Holland, where they are taught,
officially recognised, and in general use, not only among the rich but
among the poor. The result is that the birth-rate has been falling slowly
and steadily for forty years. But the death-rate has also been falling and
at a greater rate. So that the more the birth-rate has fallen the higher
has been the rate of increase among the population.

It is perhaps in Australia and New Zealand that we find the most
satisfactory proofs of the benefits of a falling birth-rate in relation to
"Race-Suicide." The evidence may well appeal to us the more since it is
precisely here that the race-suicide fanatic finds freest scope for his
wrath. He looks gleefully at China with its prolific women, at Russia with
its magnificent birth-rate before the War of nearly 50, at Roumania with
its birth-rate of 42, at Chile and Jamaica with nearly 40. No nonsense
about birth-control there! No shirking by women of the sacred duties of
perpetual maternity! No immoral notions about claims to happiness and
desires for culture. And then he turns from, those great centres of
prosperity and civilisation to Australia, to New Zealand, and his voice is
choked and tears fill his eyes as he sees the goal of "Race-Suicide"
nearly in sight and the spectre of the Last Man rising before him. For
there is no doubt about it, Australia and New Zealand contain a population
which is gradually reaching the highest point yet known of democratic
organisation and general social well-being, and the birth-rate has been
falling with terrific speed. Sixty-years ago in the Australian
Commonwealth it was nearly 44, only forty years ago in New Zealand it was
42. Now it is only about 26 in both lands. Yet the survival-rate, the
actual growth of the population, is not so very much less with this low
birth-rate than it was with the high birth-rate. For the death-rate has
also fallen in both lands to about 10 (in New Zealand to 9) which is lower
than any other country in the world. The result is that Australia and New
Zealand, where (so it is claimed) preventives of conception are hawked
from door to door, instead of being awful examples of "Race-Suicide,"
actually present the highest rate of race-increase in the world (only
excepting Canada, where it is less firmly and less healthily based),
nearly twice that of Great Britain and able at the present rate to double
itself every 44 years. So much for "Race-Suicide."

The outcry about "Race-Suicide" is so far away from the real facts of life
that it is not easy to take it seriously, however solemn one's natural
temperament may be. We are concerned with people who arrogantly claim to
direct the moral affairs of the world, even in the most intimately private
matters, and who are yet ignorant of the most elementary facts of the
world, unable to think, not even able to count! We can only greet them
with a smile. But this question has, nevertheless, a genuinely serious
aspect, and I should be sorry even to touch on the question of
birth-control in relation to "Race-Suicide" without making that serious
aspect clear.

"Race-Suicide," we know, has no existence. Not only is the race as a whole
increasing in number, especially its White branches, but even among the
separate national groups there is not even one civilised people anywhere
in the world that is decreasing in number. On the contrary they are all,
even France, increasing at a more or less rapid rate. In England and
Wales, for example, where the birth-rate has steadily fallen during the
last forty years from 36 to 23 (I disregard the abnormal rates of
War-time) the population is still increasing, and even if the present
falls in birth-rate and death-rate continue, it will for years still go on
increasing by an excess of over 1,000 births a day. When we realise that
this is merely what goes on in one corner of the world and must be
multiplied enormously to represent the whole, we shall find it impossible
even to conceive the prodigious flow of excess babies which is being
constantly poured over the earth. If we are capable of realising all the
problems which thereby arise we must be forced to ask ourselves: _Is this
state of things desirable_?

"Be ye fruitful and multiply." That command was, according to the old
story, delivered to a world inhabited by eight people. It has been handed
down to a world in which it has long been ridiculously out of place, and
has become merely the excuse for criminal recklessness among a race which
has chosen to forget that the command was qualified by a solemn
admonition: "At the hand of man, even at the hand of every man's brother,
will I require the life of man." The high birth-rate has meant a vast
slaughter of infants, it has meant, moreover, a perpetual oppression of
the workers, disease, starvation, and death among the adult population; it
has meant, further, a blood-thirsty economic competition, militarism,
warfare. It has meant that all civilisation has from time to time become a
thin crust over a volcano of revolution, and the human race has gone on
lightly dancing there, striving to forget that ancient warning from a soul
of things even deeper than the voice of Jehovah: "At the hand of man will
I require the life of man." Men have recklessly followed the Will o' the
Wisp which represented mere multiplication of their inefficient selves as
the ideal of progress, quantity before quality, the notion that in an orgy
of universal procreation could consist the highest good of humanity.

The Great War, that is scarcely yet merged into an only less war-like
Peace, has brought at least the small compensation that it has led men to
look in the face this insane ideal of human progress. We see to-day what
has come of it, and the further evils yet to come of it are being embodied
beneath our eyes. So that at last the voice of Jehovah has here and there
been faintly heard, even where nowadays we had grown least accustomed to
hear it, in the Churches. It is Dr. Inge, the Dean of London's Cathedral
of St. Paul's, a distinguished Churchman and at the same time a foremost
champion of eugenics, who lately expressed the hope that the world,
especially the European world, would one day realise the advantages of a
stationary population.[25] Such a recognition, such an aspiration,
indicates that a new hope is dawning on the world's horizon, and a higher
ideal growing within the human soul. The mad competition of the industrial
world during the past century, with the sordid gloom and wretchedness of
it for all who were able to see beneath the surface, has shown for ever
what comes of the effort to produce a growing population by high
birth-rates in peace-time. The Great War of a later day has shown, let us
hope in an equally decisive manner, what comes to a world where men have
been for long generations produced so copiously and so cheaply that it is
natural to regard them as only fit to sweep off the earth with machine
guns. And the whole world of to-day--with its starving millions struggling
in vain to feed themselves, with most of its natural beauty swept away by
the ravages of man, and many of its most exquisite animals finally
exterminated--is likely to become merely the monument to an ideal that
failed. It was time, however late in the day, for a return to
common-sense. It was time to realise that the ideal of mere propagation
could lead us nowhere but to destruction. On that level we cannot compete
even with the lowest of organised things, not even with the bacteria,
which in number and in rapidity of multiplication are inconceivable to us.
"All hope abandon, ye that enter here" is written over the portal of this
path of "Progress."

[25] This has long been recognised by men of science. Even anyone with
the slightest knowledge of biology, Professor Bateson remarked in a
British Association Presidential address in 1914, is aware that a
population need not be declining because it is not increasing; "in
normal stable conditions population is stationary." Major Leonard
Darwin, the thoughtful and cautious President of the Eugenics Education
Society, has lately stated his considered belief ("Population and
Civilisation," _Economic Journal_, June, 1921) that increase in numbers
means, ultimately, relative reduction of wealth per head, with
consequent lowering of the standard of civilisation; that it also, under
existing conditions, involves the production of a smaller proportion of
men of ability; and, further, a depreciation of our traditions; he
concludes that, whatever element in civilisation we regard--wealth, or
stock, or traditions--"any increase in the population _such as that now
taking place_ will be accompanied by a lowering in the standard of our
civilisation."

There are definite reasons why real progress in the supreme tasks of
civilisation can best be made by a more or less stationary population,
whether the population is large or small, and it need scarcely be added
that, so far as the history of mankind is yet legible, the great advances
in civilisation have been made by small, even very small populations.
Where the population is rapidly growing, even if it is growing under the
favourable conditions that hardly ever accompany such growth, all its
energy is absorbed in adjusting its perpetually shifting equilibrium. It
cannot succeed in securing the right conditions of growth, because its
growth is never ceasing to demand new conditions. The structure of its
civilisation never rises above the foundations because these foundations
have perpetually to be laid afresh, and there is never time to get
further. It is a process, moreover, accompanied by unending friction and
disorder, by strains and stresses of all kinds, which are fatal to any
full, harmonious, and democratic civilisation. The "population question,"
with the endlessly mischievous readjustment it demands, must be eliminated
before the great House of Life can be built up on a strong solid human
foundation, to lift its soaring pinnacles towards the skies. That is what
many bitter experiences are beginning to teach us. In the future we are
likely to be much less concerned about "race-suicide," though we can never
be too concerned about race-murder.

When we think, however, of the desirability of a more or less stationary
population, in order to insure real social progress, as distinct from that
vain struggle of meaningless movement to and fro which the history of the
past reveals, we have to be clear in our minds that it may be far from
desirable that the present overgrown population of the world should be
stationary. That might indeed be better than further increase in numbers,
it would arrest the growth of our present evils; it might open the way to
methods by which they would be diminished or eliminated. But the process
would be infinitely difficult, and almost infinitely slow, as we may
easily realise when we consider that, with a population even smaller than
at present, the human race has not only ravished the world's beauty almost
out of existence, but so ravaged its own vital spirit that, as was found
with some consternation during the Great War, a large proportion of the
male population of every country is unfit for military service.

So often we hear it assumed, or even asserted, that greatness means
quantity, so that to look forward to the replacement of the present
teeming insignificant human myriads by a rarer and more truly greater race
is to be a pessimist! Oh, these "optimists"! To revel in a world which
more and more closely resembles all that the poets ever imagined of Hell,
is to be an "optimist"! One wonders how it is that in no brief moment of
lucidity it occurs to these people that the lower we descend in the scale
of life the greater the quantity in a species and the poorer the quality,
so that to reach what such people should really regard as the world's
period of supreme greatness in life we must go back to the days, before
animal life appeared, when the earth was merely a teeming mass of
bacteria.[26]

[26] See, for instance, H.F. Osborn, _The Origin and Evolution of Life_,
1918, Chapter III.

To-day, we are often told, the majority of human beings belong either to
the Undesired Class or the Undesirable Class. To realise that this is so,
we are bidden to read the newspapers or to walk along the streets of the
cities--whichever they may be--wherein dwell the highest products of our
civilisation. In the better class quarters it is indeed the Undesirable
Class that seems to predominate, and in the poor quarters, the Undesired.
Yet, viewing our species as a whole, the two classes may be seen to walk
hand in hand along the same road, and in proportion as our nobler
instincts germinate and develop, we must doubtless admit that it ought to
be our active aim to make that road for both of them--socially though not
individually--the Road to Destruction.

To stem the devastating tide of human procreativeness, however, easy as it
may seem in theory, is by no means so easy as some think, especially as
those think who believe that the human race stands on the brink of
suicide. For there is this about it that we must never forget: the
majority of those born to-day die before their time, so that by
diminishing the production of the unfit, as well as by the progressive
improvement of the environment that automatically accompanies such
diminution, we may make an imposing difference in the appearance of the
birth-rate, whilst yet the population goes on increasing rapidly, probably
even more rapidly than before. It needs a most radical and thorough attack
on the birth-rate before we can make any real impression on the rate of
increase of the population, to say nothing of its real reduction. There is
still an arduous road before us.

True it is that we have two opposing schools of thought which both say
that we need not, or that we cannot, make any difference by our efforts to
regulate the earth's human population. According to one view the
development of population, together with the necessity for war which is
inextricably mixed up with a developing population, cannot be effected
without, as one champion of the doctrine is pleased to put it, "shattering
both the structure of Euclidean space and the psychological laws upon
which the existence of self-consciousness and human society are
conditional."[27] In simpler words, populations tend to become too large
for their territories, so that war ensues, and birth-control can do
nothing because "it is doubtful whether a group in the plenitude of vigour
and self-consciousness can deliberately stop its own growth." The other
school proclaims human impotence on exactly opposite grounds. There is not
the slightest reason, it declares, to believe that birth-control has had
any but a completely negligible influence on population. This is a natural
process and fertility is automatically adjusted to the death-rate.
Whenever a population reaches a certain stage of civilisation and nervous
development its procreativeness, quite apart from any effort of the will,
tends to diminish. The seeming effect of birth-control is illusory. It is
Nature, not human effort, which is at work.[28]

[27] B.A.G. Fuller, "The Mechanical Basis of War," _Hibbert Journal_,
1921.

[28] Sir Shirley Murphy some years ago (_Lancet_, 10 Aug. 1912) argued
that the fall of the birth-rate, as also that of the death-rate, has
been largely effected by natural causes, independent of man's action.
Mr. G. Udney Yule (_The Fall in the Birth-rate_, 1920) also believes
that birth-control counts for little, the chief factor being natural
fluctuations, probably of economic nature. Recently Mr. C.E. Pell, in
his book, _The Law of Births and Deaths_ (1921), has made a more
elaborate and systematic attempt to show that the rise and fall of the
birth-rate has hitherto been independent of human effort.

These two opposing councils of despair, each proclaiming, though in a
contrary sense, the vanity of human wishes in the matter of procreation,
might well, some may think, be left to neutralise each other and evaporate
in air. But it seems worth while to point out that, with proper
limitations and qualifications, there is an element of truth in each of
them, while, without such limitations and qualifications, both are alike
obviously absurd and wrong-headed. Undoubtedly, as the one school holds,
in certain stages of civilisation, even at a fairly advanced stage,
nations tend to break out over their frontiers with resulting war; but the
period when they reach "the plenitude of vigour and self-consciousness" is
exactly the period when the birth-rate begins to decline, and the
population, deliberately or instinctively, controls its own increase. That
has, for instance, been the history of France since the great expansion of
population, roughly associated with the Napoleonic epopee,--which
doubtless covered a web of causes, sanitary, political, industrial,
favourable to a real numerical increase of the nation--had died down
slowly to the level we witness to-day.[29] Similarly, with regard to the
opposing school, we must undoubtedly accept a natural fall in the
birth-rate with a rising civilisation; that has always been visible in
highly civilised individual couples, and it is an easily ascertainable
zoological fact that throughout the evolution of life procreativeness has
decreased with the increased development of species. We may agree that a
natural factor comes into the recent fall in the human birth-rate. But to
argue that because a natural decline in birth-rate is the essential factor
in the slowing down of procreative activity with all higher evolution,
therefore deliberate birth-control counts for nothing, since exactly the
same result follows when voluntary prevention is adopted and when it is
not, seems highly absurd. We must at least admit that voluntary
birth-control is an important contributory cause, in some sense indeed, of
supreme importance, because it is within man's own power and because man
is thus enabled to guide and mould processes of Nature which might
otherwise work disastrously. How disastrously is shown by the history of
Europe, and in a notable degree France, during the four or five centuries
preceding the end of the eighteenth century when various new influences
began to operate. During all these centuries there was undoubtedly a very
high birth-rate, yet infant mortality, war, famine, insanitation,
contagious diseases of many and virulent kinds, tended, as far as we can
see, to keep the population almost or quite stationary,[30] and so ruinous
a method of maintaining a stationary population necessarily used up most
of the energy which might otherwise have been available for social
progress, although the stationary population, even thus maintained, still
placed France at the head of European civilisation. The more firmly we
believe that the diminution of the population is a natural process, the
more strenuously, surely, we ought to guide it, so that it shall work
without friction, and, so far as possible, tend to eliminate the
undesirable stocks of man and preserve the desirable. Clearly, the theory
itself calls for much effort, since it is obvious that along natural lines
the decline, if it is the result of high evolution, will affect the fit
more easily than the unfit.

[29] The reader may point to the renewal of Militarism and Imperialism
in France since the Great War. That, however, has been an artificial
product (in so far as it exists among the people themselves) directly
fostered from outside by the policy of England and the United States,
just as the same spirit in Germany before the war, in the face of a
falling birth-rate, was artificially fostered from above by a military
and Imperialistic caste.

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