Stand Up, Ye Dead Part 1

Stand Up, Ye Dead.

by Norman Maclean.

PREFACE

Two years ago the writer published a book called _The Great Discovery_.

It seemed to him in those days, when the nation chose the ordeal of battle rather than dishonour, that the people, as if waking from sleep, discovered G.o.d once more. But, now, after an agony unparalleled in the history of the world, the vision of G.o.d has faded, and men are left groping in the darkness of a great bewilderment. The cause may not be far to seek. For every vision of G.o.d summons men to the girding of themselves that they may bring their lives more into conformity with His holy will. And when men decline the venture to which the vision beckons, then the vision fades.

It is there that we have failed. We were called to put an end to social evils {vi} which are sapping our strength and enfeebling our arm in battle, but we refused. We wanted victory over the enemy, but we deemed the price of moral surgery too great even for victory. In the rush and crowding of world-shaking cataclysms, memory is short. We have already almost forgotten the moral tragedy of April 1915. It was then that the White Paper was issued by the Government, and the nation was informed of startling facts which our statesmen knew all the time.

At last the nation was told that our armies were wellnigh paralysed for lack of munitions, while thousands of men were daily away from their work because of drunkenness; that the repairing of s.h.i.+ps was delayed and transports unable to put to sea because of drunkenness; that goods, vital to the State, could not be delivered because of drunkenness; that Admiral Jellicoe had warned the Government that the efficiency of the Fleet was threatened because of drunkenness; and that s.h.i.+pbuilders and munition manufacturers had made a strong {vii} appeal to our rulers to put an end to drunkenness. It was then that the King, by his example, called upon the people to renounce alcohol, and the nation waited for its deliverance. But the Government refused to follow the King. There is but one law for nations, as for individuals, if they would save their souls: 'If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off.' But our statesmen could not brace themselves to an act of surgery; they devised a scheme for putting the offending member into splints. And, since then, it looks as if the wheels of the chariot of victory were stuck in the bog of the national drunkenness. The vision of G.o.d has faded before the eyes of a nation that refused its beckoning.

This book deals, therefore, with those evils which now hide the face of G.o.d from us. If drunkenness be the greatest of these evils, there are others closely allied to it. Two Commissions have recently issued Reports, the one on 'The Declining Birthrate,' and the other on 'The Social Evil,' {viii} which reveal the perilous condition of degeneration into which the nation is falling. It is difficult for people, engrossed in the labours and anxieties of these days, to grasp the meaning of the facts as presented in these Reports. In these pages an effort is made to look the facts in the face and to make the danger clear, so that he who runs may read. And the writer has had but one purpose: to show that there is but one remedy for all our grievous ills, even a return to G.o.d.

As we think of the millions who have taken all that makes life dear and laid it down that we might live; who have gone down to an earthly h.e.l.l that we might not lose our heaven; who have wrestled with the powers of destruction on sea and land that these isles might continue to be the sanctuary of freedom and the home of righteousness; who in the midst of their torment never flinched; and of the fathers, mothers, and wives who have laid on the altar the sacrifice of all their love and hope--the question arises, how can {ix} we show our love and our grat.i.tude to those who have redeemed us? We can only prove our grat.i.tude by making a new world for those who have saved us--a world in which men and women shall no longer be doomed to live lives of sordidness and misery. When we shall set ourselves to that task, seeking to meet the sacrifice of heroism by the sacrifice of our service, deeming no labour too great and no effort too arduous, then the vision of G.o.d will again arise upon us and will abide.

N. M.

_October_ 7, 1916.

CHAPTER I

THE EMPTY CRADLE

The greatest disaster of these days has befallen in the streets and lanes of our cities at home, and, because it has happened in our own midst, we are blind to it. And, also, it has come upon us so gradually and so surrept.i.tiously that, though we are overwhelmed by it, we know not that we are overwhelmed. Our capital cities are leading the nation in the march to the graveyard. In London the birthrate has fallen in Hampstead from 30 to 17.55, and in the City itself to 17.4; in Edinburgh it has fallen in some districts to 10. In many places there are already more coffins than cradles. What would the city of Edinburgh say or do if suddenly one half of its children were slain in a night? What a cry of horror would rise to heaven! {2} Yet, that is exactly the calamity which has overtaken the city. In the year 1871 there were 34 children born in Edinburgh for every thousand of the population; in the year 1915 the number of births per thousand of the population was 17. Edinburgh has, compared to forty-four years ago, sacrificed half its children. And because this calamity is the slowly ripening fruit of forty years, and did not occur with dramatic swiftness in a night, there is no sound of lamentation in the streets.

I

What has happened in London and Edinburgh is only what has happened over all the British Empire, with this difference--that these cities are leading the van in the process of desiccating the fountain of the national life. While the birthrate for the whole of Scotland is 23.9, that of Edinburgh is 17.8. For the nation as a whole the policy of racial suicide has become a national policy. The marriage-rate increases, but the {3} birth-rate decreases. A birthrate of 35.6 per thousand in 1874 decreased to 33.7 in 1880, 32.9 in 1886, 30.4 in 1890, and to 23.8 in 1912. If the city of Edinburgh is sacrificing at the fountain-head half of its possible population, the rest of the English-speaking race is following hard in its wake. The facts which to-day confront us spell doom. In the year 1911 the legitimate births in England and Wales numbered 843,505, but if the birthrate had remained as it was in the years 1876-80, the number would have been 1,273,698. 'That is to say, there was a potential loss to the nation of 430,000 in that one year 1911.'[1] In the year 1914 the loss is even greater, for it amounted to 467,837. The nation as a whole is now sacrificing every year a third of its possible population. This is surely a terrible fact. The ravages of war, awful though these ravages have been, are nothing to the ravages which have been self-inflicted.

In the years that are past, the race recovered from the {4} greatest calamities of war and pestilence because there was a power mightier than these--that of the child. The abounding birthrate rapidly replaced the wastage of war. Through the greatest calamities the nation ever marched forward on the feet of little children. One generation might be overwhelmed, but

'Away down the river, A hundred miles or more, Other little children Shall bring our boats ash.o.r.e.'

But alas! when the greatest of all calamities has overtaken the race; when the young, the n.o.ble, and the brave have lain down in death that the nation might live, the feet of the little children, on which erstwhile the race marched forward, are not there. We have offered them up a sacrifice to Moloch.

II

The nation must be wakened to the dire peril in which the steadily falling birthrate has placed the race. Militarism {5} slays its thousands; this has strangled its hundreds of thousands. But no warning note has been sounded by our statesmen. They were doubtless waiting to see!

The might of every nation depends on the reservoir of its vitality.

Let that desiccate and the nation desiccates. Of this France is the proof. That France which, a hundred years ago, overran Europe, fifty years later lay prostrate under the feet of Germany. Twenty years before that national humiliation, France began to sacrifice her children. Lord Acton pointed out the inevitable result; the wise of their own number warned them--but France went on its way down the slope of moral degeneration. Its birthrate fell from 30.8 in 1821 to 26.2 in 1851, 25.4 in 1871, 22.1 in 1891, 20.6 in 1901, and to 19 in 1914. The result was inevitable. In the race of empire France fell slowly back.

The alien had to be imported to cultivate her own fair fields. She annexed territories, but she could {6} not colonise them. The prophets who prophesied doom have been abundantly justified. To-day France, risen from the dead, is wrestling for her life; she is impotent to drive back the foe without the help of Britain and Russia--she who dominated Europe a century ago! When we read of a Russian army, after a journey round half the world, landing at Ma.r.s.eilles to take their place in the trenches that Paris may be saved from the devastators of Belgium and Poland, we see the fields ripe for the harvest of that policy which sacrificed the race to the individual. The hope for France is that she will rise from the grave of her degeneration, new-born.

What has happened in France is what happened in Rome long before. It was not because of the inrush of barbaric hosts that Rome perished, but because Rome sacrificed its children. In its golden age, when luxury clouded the heart, Rome began to avoid the responsibilities of family life, and so sounded the death-knell of its empire. Here is ever the source of human {7} decay. The most perfect intellectual and aesthetic civilisation ever developed on earth was that of the ancient Greeks.

'We know and may guess something more of the reason why this marvellously gifted race declined,' says Francis Galton. 'Social morality grew exceedingly lax, marriage became unfas.h.i.+onable and was avoided; many of the more ambitious and accomplished women were avowed courtesans and consequently infertile, and the mothers of the incoming population were of a heterogeneous cla.s.s.' And the misery which lay so heavily on the heart of Hosea was that Israel was rus.h.i.+ng to destruction because children ceased to be born. National licentiousness produced a diminis.h.i.+ng population. 'And there are no more births,' cries the prophet beholding the coming doom. Over us the skies are darkening with the portents of the same doom. For we also have given ourselves to the same degeneration. To Puritanic Scotland, a generation ago, France was oft quoted as a solemn {8} warning of the depths to which atheism and materialism bring a nation. To-day Scotland as a whole is only four points behind France in the matter of this degeneration, and the city of Edinburgh has outstripped even France. And though this policy of the silent nursery and the empty cradle is a policy of racial doom, the land of the Covenanters and the capital of Presbyterianism have made it their own. They have out-Heroded Herod.

III

It is only when this disease, which is threatening the life of the body-politic, is probed, that the full extent of its ravages is manifest. For it is the educated, the cultured, and the rich who are eluding the responsibility of parentage, while the poor and the diseased are still continuing to multiply. In inverse ratio to the income and the size of house is the number of the children. It is the same sad story in every city. In London, the birthrate of Hampstead, a suburb mainly inhabited {9} by the rich, fell from 30.01 in 1881 to 17.55 in 1911, while that of Sh.o.r.editch, a working-cla.s.s district, only fell in the same period from 31.32 to 30.16. In his evidence before the Birthrate Commission, Dr. Chalmers, the Medical Officer of Health for the city of Glasgow, contrasted the birthrate in two of the poor districts of the city with that in two of the best districts. In the two worst wards the birthrate was equal to 161 per thousand married women between the ages of 15 and 45 years, whereas in the two well-to-do wards it was only 34.[2] In the city of Aberdeen, the birthrate in the poor and congested district of Greyfriars is almost double that of Rubislaw which includes the best housing in the city.

In no city is this grim contrast more marked than in the city of Edinburgh.

When the different districts of Edinburgh are considered, it is apparent that in the poor districts the birthrate maintains still some vitality, but among the {10} well-to-do and the rich it is rapidly diminis.h.i.+ng. In the Canongate district there is a birthrate per thousand of 24; in Gorgie, 23.9; in St. Leonard's, 22.4; in Merchiston, 12.6; in Haymarket, 11.5; and in Morningside, 10.9. In the three districts of Edinburgh where the wealthy, the cultured, and the well-to-do abound, there the birthrate is but half of those districts where the poor, the miserable, and the criminal are congregated in noisome slums. In Morningside and Haymarket the birthrate is only a third of what it was in Scotland in 1871. These districts of the city have sacrificed two-thirds of their children to their ease. It is among the terraces and squares of the West Ends of great cities, and among the gardened villas of suburbs that this degeneration has evinced the fulness of its power. Where children could grow in health and happiness, thence selfishness has banished them; where, amid squalor, filth, and vice they are almost doomed from birth, there they are multiplied. Degeneration always {11} begins at the top, and works downward. At the top only one-fourth are left; at the bottom, two-thirds are still left. But the dry-rot is creeping downward. The lower middle cla.s.s is following its betters; and the artisan is following hard after. Only in the Canongate is the shouting of children at play still to be heard, and there the State surrounds the last survivors of the race with every temptation to evil and ruin.

This is a grim fact when the future of the race is considered; and of its grimness there can be no doubt. The vital statistics do not lie, and they are the proof. There are other proofs. The statistics of baptisms are steadily falling. In many West End congregations the sacrament of baptism has become a rarity! Sunday schools are getting smaller and smaller. The records of seven years (1908-14) showed the appalling fact that fourteen of the chief Free Church denominations of Britain have lost 257,952 scholars. The materials out of which the Church {12} was formerly built are crumbling away. Empty cradles mean empty Sunday schools, empty cla.s.ses, and, ere long, empty pews. The strangest thing is that in face of the forces that threaten destruction the Churches are silent--as if mesmerised! In these last years even the church-going population of this country was rapidly reverting to the base conditions in which Christianity found humanity, and from which the Cross in a measure rescued it. And the Church has lost the power of sounding the trumpet and warning the people of coming judgment.

IV

When we inquire into the causes of this parlous state to which the race has been brought, we find that the greatest is self-deception. If men and women realised what they were doing, they would be horrified. But they don't realise it. They are acting on n.o.ble principles! They can provide for and educate two children {13} better than six; therefore, in the interests of the race, they will only have two! One parent wrote to the Press recently that he could only give a public-school education to one boy, and therefore he had no more! They have the idea that by coddling the few they will usher in the super-race. In short, they murder the race, but they do it on n.o.ble principles, in conformity with the sanctions of religion, and in the name of the most high G.o.d!

Their lives are a direct reversal of the elementary canons of morality; but they themselves imagine that they are the most perfect products of evolution, and that they are, by a process of racial suicide, bringing the race to its perfection--ushering in the super-race and the super-man.

What a false education must that be to which the race is thus sacrificed. Education is not a matter of money or accomplishments, but of wonder, reverence, imagination, and awe. Heaven and earth are waiting, without money or price, to {14} thrill the young heart with glory and loveliness; but the poor soul must not be born because he cannot go to Eton. And the great wide world is calling for men; provinces added yearly to the Empire demand men; great plains wait the spade and the plough; the realms of King George have as yet only their fringes occupied, and the race must produce the men who will go in and possess, or other races, not yet tired of life, will enter in. And yet, in the name of the race, the race is being sacrificed.

The real root of the evil is selfishness. A generation that sought only its own pleasure refused the burden of parentage. They nursed lap-dogs and preferred bridge to babies. They could not have the luxuries they craved and also nurseries ringing with the joyous voices of children; and they made their choice. There were found those who called them fas.h.i.+onable; but n.o.body will ever call them blessed. And because of that choice families whose names were great in the land are to-day {15} extinct. Names which in other days raised those who bore them into the fellows.h.i.+p of high ideals and n.o.ble service, have disappeared for ever, because a generation which knew no altar at which to wors.h.i.+p save the altar of self, sacrificed even the generations to come at that altar. But there is found some saving grace among them.

Having silenced the voices of children in their own houses, they organise societies to care for the children in the slums, and preserve their precarious lives. 'In communities like Letchworth or the Hampstead Garden Suburb, families of more than two children are rare among the educated cla.s.ses, but nearly every one is giving time, energy, and money to the reform movements which they believe to be urgently needed in the interests of the community.'[3] They themselves decline to bear the burden of parentage, but they are ready to teach the poor the best way of bearing the burden. Unconscious that they themselves, the victims of {16} race-weariness and of selfishness, are in direst need of some mission among them that would quicken them to life, they organise missions to quicken others. The dead in the valley of the Dry Bones organise to reform Jerusalem! Not all the earth can present a stranger spectacle than this--the citizens of the West Ends, who have sacrificed the race to their own ease, solicitous over keeping alive the children of the miserable in the slums! Their own gardens and nurseries are empty; but they would keep the children alive in airless, foetid closes. Thus would they condone. But it is no boon to the race to keep alive the children of the diseased and of the unfit; nor is it a kindness to these children to ensure that they shall grow into the consciousness of the misery into which they are born. The generations of the healthy and the clean have been sacrificed on the altar of selfishness, and no service at any other altar can ever atone.

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V

But it might have been worse with the race than it is even to-day, for this obsession of racial suicide might have possessed the nation sooner than it did; and if it had, then we would truly have been poor indeed.

For Sir Walter Scott was the seventh child of his parents; and it is as certain as most human surmisings, that if the ideal of life which to-day dominates the professional cla.s.ses in Scotland, had, in the year 1771, found sway in the College Wynd of Edinburgh, Walter Scott would never have been born. John Wesley was one of nineteen children: fortunately for the race, the gospel of the salvation of men through racial limitation had not yet gained devotees in that vicarage where the children were taught to cry quietly! Alfred Tennyson was the third of seven sons, and if yesterday were as to-day, then 'In Memoriam'

would never have been written. But now, alas! the door {18} is shut against the Walter Scotts and Wesleys of the future.

It is unnecessary to multiply instances. Any one can see how impoverished the race would have been, and how different the history of the world, if the door by which mighty souls become incarnate had been shut by the generations of the past. One has but to think of the world with Luther, Knox, Carlyle, and the prophets shut out. In France to-day Napoleon would never have been born! We can already trace the tracks of the withering blight that has seared humanity. In Germany idealism is dead, and there is no prophet either of Christian love or of self-sacrifice. France trampled upon the Church because the Church fought resolutely against the policy of racial suicide and used all its power to save the womanhood of France from submitting to degeneration.

Because the Church persisted, France 'extinguished the light of heaven,' and no man was found who could rouse the nation to realise its sin and to repent. {19} The prophet who could have done so was doubtless shut out. And among ourselves we can mark the slow ebbing of vision, of genius, and of prophetic might. Two generations ago one voice could rouse the whole nation and kindle the fire of fierce indignation against the tale of Balkan atrocities. In our day we beheld the Armenians ma.s.sacred again and again; but there was no voice to rouse the nation to indignation or to action. We could not send the fleet to the mountains of Ararat, declared our statesmen, and we acquiesced. One by one the great leaders, the poets, the writers pa.s.sed into the silence, and the day of the politician and the time-server had come. Did a prophet arise, we no longer stoned him; we only meted out to him contumely and neglect. In vain did Lord Roberts summon a nation sinking on its lees to arise and quit themselves like men. When the judgment throne of G.o.d blazed forth in the heavens, and our startled eyes beheld the sword emerge from the mists that hid heaven {20} from our eyes, we were engaged in preparations for civil war, and listening to the low murmur of the toiling ma.s.ses who threatened social chaos. And there was no man found equal to the task of saving us from ourselves. The men who could have saved us were, doubtless, shut out. It is manifest that the richest elements must be lost to any race that limits its own growth. If the sixth and seventh children in a family be the healthiest, as has been established by investigation,[4] then there is no place for the strongest in a family limited to two! Thus it comes that we are left to-day without a Wesley who could kindle the pa.s.sion of righteousness in the nation's soul; without a Scott who could glorify our patriotism; and without a Tennyson who could set the hearts athrob. We have as yet produced neither a Pitt nor a Wellington. They have been shut out. That is our impoverishment. For great souls will no longer come aboard a world such as this.

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VI

And yet there were those who would have given all they had if to them there were given what these others spurned. They knew that the only abiding joy of life is the joy of little children. But that was denied them. They had boundless capacities of love and of sacrifice, but the opportunity of development came not to them. Few cries can pull at the heartstrings like the cry of the old maid:

'All day long I sit by the window and wait, While the spring winds fling their roses everywhere, And I hear the voice of my husband cry at the gate, And the feet of my children tremulous on the stair.

'Hour by hour I dream at the window here, While footsteps trip and falter adown the street, And I hear my children murmuring, "Mother, dear!"

And the voice of my husband crying, "Sweet, oh sweet!"'

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