The Book of Life Part 26

The first of these we have considered at some length. A part of the process of social revolution is personal conversion; the giving up by every individual of the worldly ideal, the surrender of luxury and self-indulgence, the consecrating of one's life to self education and the cause of social justice. And do not think that that is an easy thing, or an unimportant thing, a thing to be taken for granted. On the contrary, it is something that most of us have to struggle with at every hour of our lives, because respect for property and worldly conventions has become one of our deepest instincts; our whole society is poisoned with it, and I can count on the fingers of one hand the people I have known in my life who have completely escaped from it. It is not merely a question of refusing to marry except for love, it is a question of refusing to love except for honest and worthy qualities. It is a question of saving our children from the d.a.m.nable forces of sn.o.bbery, which lay siege to their young minds and destroy the best impulses of their hearts, while we in our blindness are still thinking of them as babies.

Of the other three topics that I have suggested, I begin with birth control, because it is the most fundamental and most important. Without birth control there can be no freedom, no happiness, no permanence in love, and there can be no mastery of life. Birth control is one of the great fundamental achievements of the human reason, as important to the life of mankind as the discovery of fire or the invention of printing.

Birth control is the deliverance of womankind, and therefore of mankind also, from the blind and insane fecundity of nature, which created us animals, and would keep us animals forever if we did not rebel.

Ever since the dawn of history, and probably for long ages before that, our race has been struggling against this blind insanity of nature.

Poor, bewildered Theodore Roosevelt stormed at what he called "race suicide," thinking it was some brand new and terrible modern corruption; but nowhere do we find a primitive tribe, nowhere in history do we find a race which did not seek to save itself from overgrowth and consequent starvation. They did not know enough to prevent conception, but they did the best they could by means of abortion and infanticide. And because today superst.i.tion keeps the priceless knowledge of contraception from the vast majority of women, these crude, savage methods still prevail, and we have our million abortions a year in the United States. a.s.suming that something near one-fourth our population consists of women capable of bearing children, we have one woman in twenty-five going through this agonizing and health-wrecking experience every year. They go through with it, you understand, regardless of everything--all the moralists and preachers and priests with their h.e.l.l fire and brimstone. They go through with it because we have both marriage without love, and love without marriage; also because we permit some ten or twenty per cent of our total population to suffer the pangs of perpetual starvation, because more than half our farms are mortgaged or occupied by tenants, and some ten or twenty per cent of our workers are out of jobs all the time.

Some of our women know about birth control. They are the rich women, who get what they want in this world. They object to the humiliations and inconveniences of child bearing, and some of them raise one or two children, and others of them raise poodle dogs. Also, our middle cla.s.ses have found out; our doctors and lawyers and college professors, and people of that sort. But we deliberately keep the knowledge from our foreign populations, by the terrors which the church has at its command.

And what is the practical consequence of this procedure? It is that while all our Anglo-Saxon stock, those who founded our country and established its inst.i.tutions, are gradually removing themselves from the face of the earth, our ignorant and helpless populations, whether in city slums or on tenant farms, are multiplying like rabbits. Read Jack London's "The Valley of the Moon" and see what is happening in California. You will find the same thing happening in any portion of the United States where you take the trouble to use your own eyes.

Now, I try to repress such impulses toward race prejudice as I find in myself. I am willing to admit for the sake of this argument that in the course of time all the races that are now swarming in America, Portuguese and j.a.panese and Mexican and French-Canadian and Polish and Hungarian and Slovakian, are capable of just as high intellectual development as our ancestors who wrote the Declaration of Independence.

But no one who sees the conditions under which they now live can deny that it will take a good deal of labor, teaching them and training them, as well as scrubbing them, to accomplish that result. And what a waste of energy, what a farce it makes of culture, to take the people who have already been scrubbed and taught and trained for self-government, and exterminate them, and raise up others in their place! It seems time that we gave thought to the fundamental question, whether or not there is something self-destroying in the very process of culture. Unless we can answer this we might as well give up our visions and our efforts to lift the race.

Theodore Roosevelt stormed at birth control for something like ten years, and it would be interesting if we could know how many Anglo-Saxon babies he succeeded in bringing into the world by his preachments. If what he wanted was to correct the balance between native and foreign births, how much more sensible to have taught birth control to those poor, pathetic, half-starved and overworked foreign mothers of our slums and tenant farms! I can wager that for every Anglo-Saxon baby that Theodore Roosevelt brought into the world by his preachings, he could have kept out ten thousand foreign slum babies, if only he had lent his aid to Margaret Sanger!

Ah, but he wanted all the babies to be born, you say! I see before me the face of a certain devout old Christian lady, known to me, who settles the question by the Bible quotation, "Be fruitful and multiply."

But what avails it to follow this biblical advice, if we allow one out of five of the new-born infants to perish from lack of scientific care before they are two years old? What avails it if we send them to school hungry, as we do twenty-two per cent of the public school children of New York City? What avails it if we allow venereal disease to spread, so that a large percentage of the babies are deformed and miserable? What avails it if, when they are fully grown, we can think of nothing better to do with them than to take them by millions at a time and dress them up in uniforms and send them out to be destroyed by poison gases? Would it not be the part of common sense to establish universal birth control for at least a year or two--until we have learned to take care of our newly born babies, and to feed our school children, and to protect our youths from vice, and to abolish poverty and war from the earth?

These are the social aspects of birth control. There are also to be considered what I might call the personal aspects of it. Because young people do not know about it, and have no way to find out about it, they dare not marry, and so the amount of vice in the world is increased.

Because married women do not know about it, love is turned to terror, and marital happiness is wrecked. Because the harmless and proper methods are not sensibly taught, people use harmful methods, which cause nervous disorders, and wreck marital happiness, and break up homes.

Thorough and sound knowledge about birth control is just as essential to happiness in marriage as knowledge of diet is necessary to health, or as knowledge of economics is necessary to intelligent action as a voter and citizen. The suppression by law of knowledge of birth control is just as grave a crime against human life as ever was committed by religious bigotry in the blackest days of the Spanish Inquisition.

Now this law stands on the statute books of our country, and if I should so much as hint to you in this book what you need to know, or even where you can find out about it, I should be liable to five years in jail and a fine of $5,000, and every person who mailed a copy of this book, or any advertis.e.m.e.nt of this book, would be in the same plight. But there is not yet a law to prohibit agitation against the law, so the first thing I say to every reader of this book is that they should obtain a copy of the _Birth Control Review_, published at 104 Fifth Avenue, New York, and also should join the Voluntary Parenthood League, 206 Broadway, New York. Get the literature of these organizations and circulate them and help spread the light!

As to the knowledge which you need, the only advice I am allowed to give is that you should seek it. Seek it, and persist in seeking, until you find it. Ask everyone you know; and ask particularly among enlightened people, those who are willing to face the facts of human life and trust in reason and common sense. I do not know if I am violating the law in thus telling you how to find out about birth control. One of the charming features of this law, and others against the spreading of knowledge, is that they will never tell you in advance what you may say, but leave you to say it and take your chances! I believe that I am not violating any law when I tell you that there are half a dozen simple, inexpensive, and entirely harmless methods of preventing undesired parenthood without the destruction of the marital relations.h.i.+p.

I am one of those who for many years believed that the destruction of the marital relations.h.i.+p was the only proper and moral method. I was brought up to take the monkish view of love. I thought it was an animal thing which required some outside justification. I had been taught nothing else; but now I have had personal experience of other justifications of love, and I believe that love is a beautiful and joyful relations.h.i.+p, which not merely requires no other justification, but confers justification upon many other things in life.

I used to believe in that old ideal of celibacy, thinking it a fine spiritual exercise. But since then I have looked out on life, and have found so many interesting things to do, so much important work calling for attention, that I do not have to invent any artificial exercises for my spirit. I have looked at humanity, and brought myself to recognize the plain common sense fact--that whatever superfluous energy I may have to waste upon artificial spirituality, the great ma.s.s of the people have no such energy to spare. They need all their energies to get a living for themselves and for their wives and little ones. They have their s.e.x impulses, and will follow them, and the only question is, shall they follow them wisely or unwisely? The religious people decide that s.e.xual indulgence is wrong, and they impose a penalty--and what is that penalty? A poor, unwanted little waif of a soul, which never sinned, and had nothing to do with the matter, is brought into a hostile world, to suffer neglect, and perhaps starvation--in order to punish parents who did not happen to be sufficiently strong willed to practice continence in marriage!

I used to believe that there was benefit to health and increase of power, whether physical or mental, in the celibate life. I have tried both ways of life, and as a result I know that that old idea is nonsense. I know now that love is a natural function. Of course, like any other function it can be abused; just as hunger may become gluttony, sleeping may become sluggishness, getting the money to pay one's way through life may become ferocious avarice. But we do not on this account refuse ever to eat or sleep or get money to pay our debts. I do not say that I believe, I say I know, that free and happy love, guided by wisdom and sound knowledge, is not merely conducive to health, but is in the long run necessary to health.

People who condemn birth control always argue as if one wished to teach this knowledge indiscriminately to the young. Perhaps it is natural that those who oppose the use of reason should a.s.sume that others are as irrational as themselves. All I can say is that I no more believe in teaching birth control to the young than I believe in feeding beefsteak to nursing infants. There is a period in life for beefsteaks--or, if my vegetarian friends prefer, for lentil hash and peanut b.u.t.ter sandwiches; in exactly the same way there is a time for teaching the fundamentals of s.e.x, and another time for teaching the art of happiness in marriage, which includes birth control. That brings me, by a very pleasant transition, to the other two subjects which I have promised to discuss: early marriage and education for marriage.

CHAPTER XL

EARLY MARRIAGE

(Discusses love marriages, how they can be made, and the duty of parents in respect to them.)

I have shown how economic forces in our society make for later and later marriage; and at the present time economic forces are so overwhelming that all other forces are hardly worth mentioning in comparison. You are, let us say, the mother of a boy of eighteen, and you have what you call "common sense"--meaning thereby a grasp of the money facts of life.

If your darling boy of eighteen should come to you with a grave face and announce, "Mother dear, I have met the girl I love, and we have decided that we want to get married"--you would consider that the most absurd thing you had ever heard in all your born days, and you would tell the lad that he was a baby, and to run along and play. If he persisted in his crazy notion, you and your husband and all the brothers and sisters and relatives and friends both of the boy and the girl would set to work, by scolding and ridiculing, to make life a misery for them, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred you would break down the young couple's marital intention.

But now, let us try another supposition. Let us suppose that your darling boy of eighteen should come to you again and say, "Mother dear, some of the boys are going to spend this evening in a brothel, and I have decided to go along." Would you think that was the most absurd thing you had ever heard in all your born days? Or would you answer, "Yes, of course, my boy; that is what I had in mind when I made you give up the girl you loved"? No, you would not answer that. But here is the vital fact--it doesn't matter what you would answer, for you would never have a chance to answer. When a mother's darling wants to get married, he comes and asks his mother's blessing; but never does a mother's darling ask a blessing before he goes with the other boys to a brothel.

He just goes. Maybe he borrows the money from some other fellow, and next day tells you he went to a theater. Or maybe he picks up some poor man's daughter on the street, and takes her into the park, or up on the roof of a tenement. Some such thing he does, to find satisfaction for an instinct which you in your worldly wisdom or your heavenly piety spurn and ridicule.

I do not wish to exaggerate. If you are an exceptionally wise and tactful mother, you may keep the confidence of your boy, and guide him day by day through his temptations and miseries, and keep him chaste.

But the more you try that, the more apt you will be to come to my conclusion, that late marriage is a crime against the race; the more aware you will be of the danger, either that his boy friends may break him down, or that some lewd woman may come to his bedroom in the night-time. Never will you be able to be quite sure that he is not lying to you, because of his shame, and the pain he cannot bear to inflict upon you. Never will you be quite sure that he is not hiding some cruel disease, sneaking off to some quack who takes his money and leaves him worse than before--until finally he shoots off his head, as happened to a nephew of an old and dear friend of mine.

Such is the problem of the mother of a son; and now, what about the mother of a daughter? This seems much simpler; because your daughter is not generally troubled with s.e.x cravings, and if you teach her the proprieties, and see that she is carefully chaperoned, you may reasonably hope that she will be chaste. But some day you expect that she will marry; and then comes your problem. If you are the usual mother, you are looking for some one who can maintain her in the state of life to which she is accustomed. If a fairy prince would come along, or a plaster saint, you would be pleased; but failing that, you will take a successful business man, one who has made his way in the world and secured himself a position. But turn back to the figures I gave you a while ago. If this man is thirty years of age, there is at least a fifty-fifty chance that he has had some venereal disease; and while the doctors claim to cure these diseases absolutely, we must bear in mind that doctors are human, and sometimes claim more than they perform.

Every doctor will admit, if you pin him down, that these diseases burrow deeply into the tissues, and many times are supposed to be cured when they are only hidden.

Here is, in a nutsh.e.l.l, the problem of the mother of a daughter. If you marry your daughter at seventeen to a lad of her own age, you have a very good chance of marrying her to a person who is chaste. If you marry her to a man of twenty-five, you have perhaps one chance in a hundred.

If you marry her to a man of thirty-five, you have perhaps one chance in ten thousand. You may not like these facts; I do not like them myself; but I have learned that facts are none the less facts on that account.

You know the average society bud of eighteen, and her att.i.tude to a boy of the same age. She regards him as a child; and you think, perhaps, that it is natural for a girl to be interested in men of thirty-five and even forty-five. But I tell you that it is not natural, it is simply one of the perversions of pecuniary s.e.x. The girl is interested in such men, because all her young life she has been carefully coached for the marriage market; because she is dressed for it, and solemnly brought out, and introduced to other players of this exciting game of marriage for money, with its incredible prizes of automobiles and jewels and palaces full of servants, and magic check-books that never grow empty.

But suppose that, instead of regarding her as a prize in a lottery, you let her grow up naturally, and taught her the truth about herself, both body and mind; suppose that, instead of dressing her in ways deliberately contrived to emphasize her s.e.x, you put her in a simple uniform, and taught her to be honest and straightforward, instead of mincing and coy; suppose she played athletic games with boys of her own age, and invited them to her home, not for "jazz" dancing and stuffing cake and candy, but for the sharing of good music and literature and art--don't you think that maybe this girl might become interested in a lad of her own age, and choose him with some understanding of his real self?

You take it for granted that young people should not marry until they can "afford it." But stop and consider, is not this a relic of old days?

Always it takes time, and deliberate effort of the reason, to adjust our conventions to new facts; so face this fact--marriage today does not necessarily mean children, it may just mean love. It involves little more expense, because the young people need cost no more together than they cost in the separate homes of their parents. If they are children of the poor, they are already taking care of themselves. If they are children of the moderately well off, their parents expect to support them while they are getting an education; and why can they not just as well live together, and the parents of each contribute their share? Let the parents of the boy give him, not merely what it costs to keep him at home, but also the sums which otherwise the boy would pay to the brothels. By this argument I do not mean that I favor keeping young people financially dependent upon their parents. My own son is working his own way through college, and I should be glad to see every young man doing the same. All that I am saying is that if parents are going to support their children while they are getting an education, they might just as well support them married as single, instead of penalizing matrimony by making all allowances cease at that point.

I know a certain ardent feminist, who is all for late marriage for women, and abhors my ideas on this subject. She wants women to get a chance to develop their personalities; whereas I want to sacrifice them to the frantic exigencies of the male animal! Young things of seventeen and eighteen have no idea what they are, or what they want from life; the mating impulse is a blind frenzy in them, and they must be taught to control it, just as they are taught not to kill when they are angry!

In the first place, I point out that young ladies in colleges and in ballrooms give a lot of time and thought to s.e.x, even though they do not call it by that inelegant term. I very much question whether, if we should apply our wisdom to the task of getting our young people happily mated before we sent them off to college, we should not get a lot more serious study out of them than we now do, with all their "fussing" and flirting and dancing.

Second, I am willing to make heroic moral efforts, where I see any chance of adequate results, but I have examined the facts, and definitely made up my mind that it is not worth while, in our present stage of culture, to preach to the ma.s.s of men the doctrine that they should abstain from s.e.x experience until they are twenty-five or thirty years of age. You may storm at them, but they only laugh at you; you may pa.s.s laws, and try to put them in jail, but you only provide a harvest for blackmailers and grafters. As to sacrificing the girl, my answer is simply that I believe in love; and in this I think the girl will agree with me, if you will let her! I have never heard any qualified person maintain that it hurts a girl to respond to love at the age of seventeen or eighteen; nor do I think that it hurts a boy, provided that he is taught the virtues of moderation and self-restraint. Without these, it will hurt him to eat; but that is no argument for starving him. As for the question of his maturity and power to judge, we are able at present to keep him from marrying anybody, so I think we might reasonably hope to keep him from marrying a wanton or a s.l.u.t. Certainly we might find somebody better than the peroxide blonde he now picks up in front of the moving picture palace.

The question, at what ages we shall advise our young couple to have children, is a separate one, depending upon many circ.u.mstances. First, of course, they should not have any until they are able financially to maintain them. As to the age at which it is physically advisable, that is a question to be settled by physicians and physiologists. I myself had the idea that the proper age would be when the woman had attained her full stature; but my friend Dr. William J. Robinson sends me some statistics from the Johns Hopkins Hospital _Bulletin_, which startle me.

This publication for January, 1922, gives the results in five hundred childbirths, in which the mother's age was from twelve to sixteen years inclusive. It appears that pregnancy and labor at these ages are no more dangerous than in older women; but on the other hand, the duration of the labor is actually shorter, and the size of the children is not inferior. These facts are so contrary to the general impression that I content myself with calling attention to them, and leave the commenting to be done by feminists and others who oppose themselves to the idea of early marriage.

CHAPTER XLI

THE MARRIAGE CLUB

(Discusses how parents and elders may help the young to avoid unhappy marriages.)

I will make the a.s.sumption that you would like to have a trial of my cure for prost.i.tution. You would like to do something right here and now, without waiting for the social revolution. Very well: I propose that you shall find a few other parents of boys and girls who are in revolt against our system of hidden vice, and that you will meet and form a modern marriage club. Only you won't call it that, of course; you will tactfully describe it as a literary society, or a social circle, or an Epworth League. The parents who run it will know what it is for, just as they do today; the only difference being that it will exist to promote love matches instead of money matches. It happens that I am myself a tactless sort of a person, not skillful at avoiding saying what I mean. So, in this chapter, I shall content myself with setting forth exactly what this marriage club will do, and leaving it to more clever people to supply the necessary camouflage.

This club will begin by correcting the most stupid of all our educational blunders, the a.s.sumption of the necessary immaturity of the young. Our young people nowadays have ten times as much chance to learn and ten times as much stimulus to learn as we had; and it is a generally safe a.s.sumption that they know much more than we think they do, and are ready to learn every sensible and interesting thing. I am carrying on an epistolary acquaintance with a little miss of twelve, who has read half a dozen of my books--among the "worst" of them--and writes me letters of grave appreciation. I have talked on Socialism to a thousand school children, and had them question me for an hour, and heard just as worth while questions as I have heard from an audience of bankers. Never in my life have I talked about real things with children that I did not find them proud to be treated seriously, and eager to show that they were worthy of that honor. A great part of our foolishness with children is due to the emptiness of our own heads.

These parents will delegate one man and one woman to make a thorough study of the s.e.x education of the young. Of course, there is knowledge about s.e.x which has to be given to the very youngest child, and more and more must be given as they grow older and ask more questions. But what I have in mind here is that detailed and precise knowledge which must be given to the young when they approach the period of p.u.b.erty. At this age of fourteen or fifteen the man will take each of the boys apart, and the woman will take each of the girls, and will explain to them what they need to know. This duty will not be trusted to parents, for parents have an imbecile fear of talking straight to their children, and try to get by with rubbish about bees and flowers. Let every child know that the days of the hole-and-corner s.e.x business is forever past, and that here is an instructed person, who talks real American, and knows what he is talking about, and will deal with facts, instead of with evasions.

This club will help to educate the youngsters, and also to give them a good time, developing both their minds and bodies, and learning to know them thoroughly. When they are sixteen each one will have another talk, this time about marriage and what it means; learning that it is not merely flirtations and delicious thrills, but a business partners.h.i.+p, and the deepest and best of all friends.h.i.+ps. So when John finds that he likes Mary best of all the girls he knows, this won't be a subject for "kidding" and sly innuendo, and blushes and simpering on Mary's part, but an occasion for decent and sensible talk about what each of them really is, and what each thinks the other to be. If they think they are in love, then there will be a council of the elder statesmen, to consider that case, and what are the chances of happiness in that love.

This may sound forbidding, but it is exactly what is done at present--only it is not done honestly and frankly, and therefore does not carry proper weight with the young people.

I am an opponent of long engagements, but I am also an opponent of no engagements at all; I know no truer proverb than "Marry in haste and repent at leisure." It would be my idea that a very young couple should announce their engagement, and then wait six months, and be consulted again about the matter, and have a chance to withdraw with no hard feelings, if either party thought best. If they wished to go on, they might be asked to wait another six months, if their elders felt very certain there were reasons to doubt the wisdom of the match.

There are, of course, people who, because of disease or physical defect, should never be allowed to marry; and others who might marry, but should not be allowed to have children. There should be laws providing for such cases, requiring physical examination before marriage, and in extreme cases providing for a simple and harmless surgical operation to prevent the hopelessly unfit from pa.s.sing on their defects to the future. But dealing for the moment with normal young persons, members of our modern marriage club, I should say that if, after they have listened to the warning of their elders, and have waited for a decent interval to think things over, they still remain of the opinion that they can make a successful marriage, then it is up to the elders to wish them luck. I have known of young couples who have refused to heed warnings, and regretted it; but I have known of others who went ahead and had their own way and proved they were right. There is a form of wisdom called experience and there is another form called love.

I hear the worldly and cynical rail at the blindness of "young love,"