THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

5

It wasn't, however, my deepening sympathy with and understanding of

the position of women in general, or the change in my ideas about

all these intimate things my fast friendship with Isabel was

bringing about, that led me to the heretical views I have in the

last five years dragged from the region of academic and timid

discussion into the field of practical politics. Those influences,

no doubt, have converged to the same end, and given me a powerful

emotional push upon my road, but it was a broader and colder view of

things that first determined me in my attempt to graft the Endowment

of Motherhood in some form or other upon British Imperialism. Now

that Iam exiled from the political world, it is possible to

estimate just how effectually that grafting has been done.

I have explained how the ideas of a trained aristocracy and a

universal education grew to paramount importance in my political

scheme. It is but a short step from this to the question of the

quantity and quality of births in the community, and from that again

to these forbidden and fear-beset topics of marriage, divorce, and

the family organisation. A sporadic discussion of these aspects had

been going on for years, a Eugenic society existed, and articles on

the Falling Birth Rate, and the Rapid Multiplication of the Unfit

were staples of the monthly magazines. But beyond an intermittent

scolding of prosperous childless people in general-one never

addressed them in particular-nothing was done towards arresting

those adverse processes. Almost against my natural inclination, I

found myself forced to go into these things. I came to the

conclusion that under modern conditions the isolated private family,

based on the existing marriage contract, was failing in its work.

It wasn't producing enough children, and children good enough and

well trained enough for the demands of the developing civilised

state. Our civilisation was growing outwardly, and decaying in its

intimate substance, and unless it was presently to collapse, some

very extensive and courageous reorganisation was needed. The old

haphazard system of pairing, qualified more and more by worldly

discretions, no longer secures a young population numerous enough or

good enough for the growing needs and possibilities of our Empire.

Statecraft sits weaving splendid garments, no doubt, but with a

puny, ugly, insufficient baby in the cradle.

No one so far has dared to take up this problem as a present

question for statecraft, but it comes unheralded, unadvocated, and

sits at every legislative board. Every improvement is provisional

except the improvement of the race, and it became more and more

doubtful to me if we were improving the race at all! Splendid and

beautiful and courageous people must come together and have

children, women with their fine senses and glorious devotion must be

freed from the net that compels them to be celibate, compels them to

be childless and useless, or to bear children ignobly to men whom

need and ignorance and the treacherous pressure of circumstances

have forced upon them. We all know that, and so few dare even to

whisper it for fear that they should seem, in seeking to save the

family, to threaten its existence. It is as if a party of pigmies

in a not too capacious room had been joined by a carnivorous giant-

and decided to go on living happily by cutting him dead…

The problem the developing civilised state has to solve is how it

can get the best possible increase under the best possible

conditions. I became more and more convinced that the independent

family unit of to-day, in which the man is master of the wife and

owner of the children, in which all are dependent upon him,

subordinated to his enterprises and liable to follow his fortunes up

or down, does not supply anything like the best conceivable

conditions. We want to modernise the family footing altogether. An

enormous premium both in pleasure and competitive efficiency is put

upon voluntary childlessness, and enormous inducements are held out

to women to subordinate instinctive and selective preferences to

social and material considerations.

The practical reaction of modern conditions upon the old tradition

of the family is this: that beneath the pretence that nothing is

changing, secretly and with all the unwholesomeness of secrecy

everything is changed. Offspring fall away, the birth rate falls

and falls most among just the most efficient and active and best

adapted classes in the community. The species is recruited from

among its failures and from among less civilised aliens.

Contemporary civilisations are in effect burning the best of their

possible babies in the furnaces that run the machinery. In the

United States the native Anglo-American strain has scarcely

increased at all since 1830, and in most Western European countries

the same is probably true of the ablest and most energetic elements

in the community. The women of these classes still remain legally

and practically dependent and protected, with the only natural

excuse for their dependence gone…

The modern world becomes an immense spectacle of unsatisfactory

groupings; here childless couples bored to death in the hopeless

effort to sustain an incessant honeymoon, here homes in which a

solitary child grows unsocially, here small two or three-child homes

that do no more than continue the culture of the parents at a great

social cost, here numbers of unhappy educated but childless married

women, here careless, decivilised fecund homes, here orphanages and

asylums for the heedlessly begotten. It is just the disorderly

proliferation of Bromstead over again, in lives instead of in

houses.

What is the good, what is the common sense, of rectifying

boundaries, pushing research and discovery, building cities,

improving all the facilities of life, making great fleets, waging

wars, while this aimless decadence remains the quality of the

biological outlook?…

It is difficult now to trace how I changed from my early aversion

until I faced this mass of problems. But so far back as 1910 I had

it clear in my mind that I would rather fail utterly than

participate in all the surrenders of mind and body that are implied

in Dayton's snarl of "Leave it alone; leave it all alone!" Marriage

and the begetting and care of children, is the very ground substance

in the life of the community. In a world in which everything

changes, in which fresh methods, fresh adjustments and fresh ideas

perpetually renew the circumstances of life, it is preposterous that

we should not even examine into these matters, should rest content

to be ruled by the uncriticised traditions of a barbaric age.

Now, it seems to me that the solution of this problem is also the

solution of the woman's individual problem. The two go together,

are right and left of one question. The only conceivable way out

from our IMPASSE lies in the recognition of parentage, that is to

say of adequate mothering, as no longer a chance product of

individual passions but a service rendered to the State. Women must

become less and less subordinated to individual men, since this

works out in a more or less complete limitation, waste, and

sterilisation of their essentially social function; they must become

more and more subordinated as individually independent citizens to

the collective purpose. Or, to express the thing by a familiar

phrase, the highly organised, scientific state we desire must, if it

is to exist at all, base itself not upon the irresponsible man-ruled

family, but upon the matriarchal family, the citizen-ship and

freedom of women and the public endowment of motherhood.

After two generations of confused and experimental revolt it grows

clear to modern women that a conscious, deliberate motherhood and

mothering is their special function in the State, and that a

personal subordination to an individual man with an unlimited power

of control over this intimate and supreme duty is a degradation. No

contemporary woman of education put to the test is willing to

recognise any claim a man can make upon her but the claim of her

freely-given devotion to him. She wants the reality of her choice

and she means "family" while a man too often means only possession.

This alters the spirit of the family relationships fundamentally.

Their form remains just what it was when woman was esteemed a

pretty, desirable, and incidentally a child-producing, chattel.

Against these time-honoured ideas the new spirit of womanhood

struggles in shame, astonishment, bitterness, and tears…

I confess myself altogether feminist. I have no doubts in the

matter. I want this coddling and browbeating of women to cease. I

want to see women come in, free and fearless, to a full

participation in the collective purpose of mankind. Women, Iam

convinced, are as fine as men; they can be as wise as men; they are

capable of far greater devotion than men. I want to see them

citizens, with a marriage law framed primarily for them and for

their protection and the good of the race, and not for men's

satisfactions. I want to see them bearing and rearing good children

in the State as a generously rewarded public duty and service,

choosing their husbands freely and discerningly, and in no way

enslaved by or subordinated to the men they have chosen. The social

consciousness of women seems to me an unworked, an almost untouched

mine of wealth for the constructive purpose of the world. I want to

change the respective values of the family group altogether, and

make the home indeed the women's kingdom and the mother the owner

and responsible guardian of her children.

It is no use pretending that this is not novel and revolutionary; it

is. The Endowment of Motherhood implies a new method of social

organization, a rearrangement of the social unit, untried in human

expericnce-as untried as electric traction was or flying in 1800.

Of course, it may work out to modify men's ideas of marriage

profoundly. To me that is a secondary consideration. I do not

believe that particular assertion myself, because Iam convinced

that a practical monogamy is a psychological necessity to the mass

of civilised people. But even if I did believe it I should still

keep to my present line, because it is the only line that will

prevent a highly organised civilisation from ending in biological

decay. The public Endowment of Motherhood is the only possible way

which will ensure the permanently developing civilised state at

which all constructive minds are aiming. A point is reached in the

life-history of a civilisation when either this reconstruction must

be effected or the quality and MORALE of the population prove

insufficient for the needs of the developing organisation. It is

not so much moral decadence that will destroy us as moral

inadaptability. The old code fails under the new needs. The only

alternative to this profound reconstruction is a decay in human

quality and social collapse. Either this unprecedented

rearrangement must be achieved by our civilisation, or it must

presently come upon a phase of disorder and crumble and perish, as

Rome perished, as France declines, as the strain of the Pilgrim

Fathers dwindles out of America. Whatever hope there may be in the

attempt therefore, there is no alternative to the attempt.