Chapter XXII: The Power to Transmit Human Life, Its Social Control

First, the limiting of population by the will of human individuals. In the beginning men stole fire from the gods; but life they allowed the Almighty to continue to dispense at his own inscrutable pleasure, while they remained his pleased but puzzled agents in its transmission. It was only in the eighties of the last century, after a hundred thousand years, that man hit upon the idea and the practice of controlling life as he had controlled fire. From the beginning, he had planted the fire-seed according to his own purpose and social need. And now at last he has come to look upon the life-seed as not simply in his keeping as a trust for another, but as his own property to control in the interest of his own future. Can human audacity reach higher? Can the assumption of divine and creative responsibility by man out-strip this latest act of self-government? From beast to citizen, did we say? But have we not found the process during the last four hundred years to be from citizenship to godship, from creature to creator? It was one of your American reformers who entitled a book _Man as Social Creator_. From beast to citizen seemed dull enough; but from citizen to God--what intoxication of zest does this thought engender! Can the creature dare it? Is this the great venture? Is this the meaning of the travail of the ages? Or is it only a process from citizen to man, from tamed beast to free spirit feeling the Soul of All at the inmost centre of himself, and finding the means at last of incarnating that soul in the community, in politics, trade, and domestic life? Howsoever the new facts and the newer outlook are to be interpreted, it becomes quite clear that if civilization was the taming of beasts, something that is not civilization has begun to assert itself. The liberating of citizens, as it moves to triumphant attainment, must scrap many an institution, many a habit, and set up the reverse of many a rule of conduct. We have indeed reached a new era, one which is not that of taming animals, when young women can--and know that they can--as war-brides strike against the labor of maternity and against the foreseen horror of a fate for one's offspring such as they would never choose for the fruit of their love.

But, secondly, close upon the invention of means for controlling the transmission of life has followed the idea that this control shall not rest with the individuals most intimately concerned, but with the will of the community--of the nation--of federated humanity. If a man has no exclusive right to do as he pleases with his power of labor, to withhold it or direct it irrespective of the general welfare and the will of the commonweal, how much less, say the advocates of eugenic marriage, shall men and women be permitted to follow their own whim and their selfish pleasure as regards the use or waste of the power to communicate life? This new doctrine that men are only trustees for the nation and posterity in their central power to control the future quantity and quality of human beings whom they may bring into existence, recognizes no division of society into the tamed and the tamers. There is no class suggested of monopolists of social power who will regulate the rest of the community, as the owner of cattle controls the breeding of them. The general will of the community, administered under diffused public opinion and through the educated judgment of the individual himself, will decide. Only in cases of what are agreed to be downright crimes will the law step in to condemn and prevent, and then only through agents who are directly accountable to an enlightened and alert public opinion. The retaining of this new mastery of man over the quantity and quality of human life, by the communal conscience against all monopolists, is the transcendent feature of the new order. But if this be so, then trade, our system of producing and distributing wealth, ceases to be merely a question of the control of labor and becomes a question of the control of the transmission of human life. Such control might have been accounted a possible privilege among Virginian breeders of slaves. But so to regard it seems monstrous, now that chattel slavery has been universally condemned, thanks to the triumphant levellers of the last hundred years. What is more, all trade is beginning to be regarded as a question ultimately, not of the manufacture of machines and their products, nor of the propagation of plants and animals, but of the begetting of spiritual agents, who in their turn are to become the makers and masters of the universe in which they are to live.

The third characteristic event of our century which is to help us to slough off civilization, as our ancestors ten thousand years ago rid themselves of the wild-beast features of barbarism and savagery, is the awakening of women. Their claim to social initiative and responsibility is the extremest possible reach of democratic self-assertion. The remarkable peculiarity of their entrance into trade is not, however, that they are women, but that they are the one half of mankind who have never worked for hire, but always from love, and who have desired the wage less than the approval of those they served. The morals of trade, as it has existed under the relation of master to wage-earner, even the ethics of trades-unionism, cannot survive the censure of women, who on other principles demand for themselves the right of maintenance by the state to protect them in the bearing and rearing of children and the making of homes, and the nursing of the wounded and the sick. Now that women no longer allow themselves as social agents to be ignored, they will insist that not only the morals of marriage and of democratic relations must become humane, but that all trade, as well as all legislation, must be guided by the eugenic motive.