It reacts upon the private life of every one who attempts it.And at any particular time only a small minority have a personal interest in changing the established state of affairs.Habit and interest are in a constantly recruited majority against conscious change and adjustment in these matters.Drift rules us.The great mass of people, and an overwhelming proportion of influential people, are people who have banished their dreams and made their compromise.Wonderful and beautiful possibilities are no longer to be thought about.They have given up any aspirations for intense love, their splendid offspring, for keen delights, have accepted a cultivated kindliness and an uncritical sense of righteousness as their compensation.It's a settled affair with them, a settled, dangerous affair.Most of them fear, and many hate, the slightest reminder of those abandoned dreams.As Dayton once said to the Pentagram Circle, when we were discussing the problem of a universal marriage and divorce law throughout the Empire, "I am for leaving all these things alone." And then, with a groan in his voice, "Leave them alone! Leave them all alone!"That was his whole speech for the evening, in a note of suppressed passion, and presently, against all our etiquette, he got up and went out.
For some years after my marriage, I too was for leaving them alone.
I developed a dread and dislike for romance, for emotional music, for the human figure in art--turning my heart to landscape.Iwanted to sneer at lovers and their ecstasies, and was uncomfortable until I found the effective sneer.In matters of private morals these were my most uncharitable years.I didn't want to think of these things any more for ever.I hated the people whose talk or practice showed they were not of my opinion.I wanted to believe that their views were immoral and objectionable and contemptible, because I had decided to treat them as at that level.I was, in fact, falling into the attitude of the normal decent man.
And yet one cannot help thinking! The sensible moralised man finds it hard to escape the stream of suggestion that there are still dreams beyond these commonplace acquiescences,--the appeal of beauty suddenly shining upon one, the mothlike stirrings of serene summer nights, the sweetness of distant music....
It is one of the paradoxical factors in our public life at the present time, which penalises abandonment to love so abundantly and so heavily, that power, influence and control fall largely to unencumbered people and sterile people and people who have married for passionless purposes, people whose very deficiency in feeling has left them free to follow ambition, people beautyblind, who don't understand what it is to fall in love, what it is to desire children or have them, what it is to feel in their blood and bodies the supreme claim of good births and selective births above all other affairs in life, people almost of necessity averse from this most fundamental aspect of existence....
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 I am 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, Ifound 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.
