This is the final article in a five-part series. For parts I to III see July 1923, Aug. 1923, and Sept. 1923.
Bound up with this illuminating and suggestive idea of joy and sorrow as the natural guides to the understanding of health and disease, is Drysdale's inspiring yet thoroughly well based comprehension of woman's nature and needs. His feminism is not based upon sentimental chivalry or romantic ardor. His defense of women is the logical outgrowth of his penetrating understanding of sexual science and human nature. Just as the age-long ignorance and stupidity concerning sex have held men's minds in bondage and subjected their bodies to pain and disease, so their waste of the great creative power of women has hindered their own mental and physical development. Mankind, wrote Drysdale, can never have a comprehensive view of any subject until the mind of woman, equally with that of man, has been brought to bear upon it. He foresaw the danger of attempts to lessen or minimize constitutional differences in men and women. The two sexes have different points of view, different thoughts, feeling and modes of judgement; and no theory of life, nor of any part of it, it was his contention, can be complete until the distinct views of each have been formed on it, and mutually compared. In enslaving and degrading woman, in limiting her sphere of activity, men in ages past just as surely enslaved and degraded themselves. Freedom, for Drysdale, is its own reward; and if men could only be brought to realize how much they would benefit by freeing women from ancient bondage, there could be no opposition to political, economic and psychological emancipation. " No religion, no moral or physical code, proposed by one sex for the other," Drysdale wrote, "can be really suitable; it must work out its laws for itself in every department of life." Much of our contemporary propaganda defeats itself or remains purely superficial, because it confines its activity to methods devised by men. Women, as Drysdale says, must work out the laws of their own nature in every department of life. Women continue to regard themselves and the universe through men's eyes, Drysdale pointed out. They have developed their own natures most imperfectly. The great need is for them to discover their own moral, intellectual and physical relations to all parts of nature. While there is no subject which man has conceived or shall conceive and pursue that shall not be open to woman, nevertheless into all these fields she must bring her own individual and feminine power. "Innocence, purity, chastity, delicacy–-let us rather read, ignorance, morbidity, disease and misery! How long shall these symbols of moral character hang about the neck of woman?"
Drysdale's vision of the new woman, the creature of a new and healthy race, was first of all as person in the deepest sense of this word, and individual of dignity, liberty and independence; and, as such, equal companion both of men and of children. He protested as vigorously as anyone who has since written or thought on the subject, against the terrific waste of women's lives and energy. Generations of women enslaved by education and tradition, by the crippling idea of chastity and female decorum which bound them like a chain wherever they moved, and prevented them from daring to think, feel or act freely or impulsively! "She must not do this. She must not study that. She has nothing to do with a knowledge of her own frame or its laws. She must not read the works nor acquire the knowledge that is open to men. She must not sport, not play boisterously, nor go out unattended, nor in the evening walk along the street, nor travel alone, nor make use of a thousand and one privileges which are open to the more fortunate sex." Customs have surely changed in the sixty-six years since these words were written; yet in the deepest, most important phases of women's lives, women have not yet attained the essential and all-important freedom. Drysdale at least saw that no true feminine morality could be based on an existence spent in hiding from the inevitable–which, in spite of convention, meets us at every step through life. By their enslavement to man-made conventions, he saw sorrow and mental disease blighting the young women of his time. Of the slow, wasting tortures endured for centuries by humanity there was none more painful for George Drysdale to contemplate than those endured by generation after generation of women.
He saw everywhere the same poignant tragedy; everywhere happy young girls, full of life and hope, entering womanhood–-and year after year condemned to an aimless existence without any outlet for the expression of their passions and affections. He saw their natural beauty and enjoyment of life in innumerable cases droop and fade, replaced by uneasy, discontented and unnatural restraint. He saw fretfulness and capriciousness take the place of buoyancy and health. He saw hysteria and all the gloomy train of sexual disease claim these women as their prey. He saw their short-lived dream of romance and poetic love converted into the dull reality of a monotonous and unhappy existence. He saw the iron of their invisible chains eat into their very souls.
He saw women doomed to the futile attempt of animating and making real the meaningless "virtues" imposed upon them by men, when they should have been filling their birthright of expression and creation. He wanted to substitute for this shadowy sentimentality and other-worldliness "a healthy and happy worldliness." "Here is the scene of all our human joys and sorrows, our real trials and triumphs," he was led to exclaim, "not for women only, but for all of us is Mother Earth our paradise, our everlasting abode, our heaven and our infinity! It is not by leaving it and our real humanity behind us and sighing to be anything but what we are that we can become ennobled or immortal. Is this our gratitude for all that has been done for us, for the grandeur and sublimity with which our life is surrounded?"
"We cannot be happy," Drysdale cried to the men of his time, "unless women be happy, and it is impossible for women to be so if they cannot study and reverence their relation to all the rest of nature."
The great thing for women, as well as for men, to realize was, according to this Victorian heretic, that nothing can come to us from another. Everything we have we must owe to ourselves. Our own spirit must vitalize it. Our own heart must feel it. We are not passive machines–-women any more than men–-who can be lectured, guided, molded this way or that. We are living beings with will, joys and comprehension to be exercised for ourselves at every step in life.
All the sciences, all the arts, wait at present woman's hand and thought to give them new life and impulses, and none solicits her attention more imperatively than medicine. We are just beginning to realize the deeper truth of this statement of Drysdale's. But he did not, we must emphasize, believe that woman's freedom, physical as well as mental, could ever be attained merely by political action, by the exercise of suffrage, or any of the other steps that have since been publicly taken. Women, he knew, must awaken themselves, must voice and create new demands and new interests. He saw that after the first flame of self-reliance and independence had been kindled by her intense feelings there usually ensued a period of doubt. Irresolution, long passive habits, and traditional attendance upon the opinions of others usually reassert themselves after a short and agonizing struggle. Even the woman who has asserted her freedom often falls back into the accustomed beaten tracks, and her noble aspirations for the unknown and untried are dissolved like melting vapor. Man has been for ages shaping his model of the female, physically and psychically, dwelling upon and endeavoring to elevate and perfect this ideal, as it appeared to him, instead of permitting woman to develop and express her own inherent nature.
Just as we can only arrive at a true and complete understanding of our psychic nature through a complete understanding of sex in its most unpleasant as well as its sublimest forms, so woman can only attain complete understanding of herself by facing the realities of life. Drysdale thought that the study of medicine would be of the greatest advantage to women. The mysteries of the body with its thorough study of its decays, its putrescences, all of these subjects from which woman's uncultivated imagination had hitherto shrunk in alarm or disgust, would be, he realized, with great spiritual insight, the surest and most complete way to break down the wall of restraint and inhibition which had bound her.
Woman must learn to shrink from nothing and from no human being; she must learn to regard all with love and reverence, totally irrespective of their actions, for in this consists the true character of the physician of the soul or the body–-not to hate and reproach any, but to love and succor all.
Many of Drysdale's ideals are already well on the road to becoming realities. He was one of the earliest Victorians to protest against the system of education which prevailed in those days for girls, and which was derided, as we know, by most of the great novelists. He knew that this educational system must be scrapped. The first essential, he thought, for girls and young women was that their bodies should be strengthened, just as those of boys and young men, by active sports and exercises such as all young people delight in. "They should be taught that physical strength, courage and blooming health are as excellent and desirable in women as in men, and they should learn to take as much pride in the physical as in the mental virtues. It is not for themselves alone that they love their bodily powers, but for their future offspring also. Pale and sickly mothers beget pale and sickly children." He protested against the ignorance and spurious delicacy artificially created and fostered in women, and which necessitated the same deplorable qualities in men. Freedom is the dynamic motive in everything that Drysdale advocates, and he comes back again and again to the necessity for absolute freedom in the discussion of sex. Woman, he emphasized, must be able to discuss the great central facts of life equally with man, because to her they are more essential than any other. It is imperative that woman's point of view must be considered more predominantly than man's. If girls are thus trained, in possession of a powerful and healthy frame, a healthy mind invigorated by sound knowledge for their guidance in life, they will enter upon womanhood with the fairest prospect of happiness, development and self-expression.
It is not necessary to interpret Drysdale's championship of Birth Control and neo-Malthusianism, except in so far as he reveals it as a method of individual physical and psychic emancipation. This phase of his work is full of suggestion and anticipates our modern point of view, but throughout the nineteenth century, beginning with Malthus and John Stuart Mill, men and women were thoroughly in the habit, in dealing with this subject, of thinking and speaking in the terms of politics and economics. They spoke of the "population" question that stemmed from Malthus and the Malthusian doctrine; and whatever interest they had in individual and feminine emancipation was rather with the object of making the Malthusian theory workable and adaptable than of approaching the idea of Birth Control from the point of view of inherent human needs and deep-rooted desire.
Drysdale himself was perhaps not thoroughly conscious of the immense advance he himself had made over his predecessors and contemporaries; yet throughout his book there is ample evidence that he realized the futility of purely political action or even economic and industrial action in preventing and curing widespread poverty. He fully realized the futility of organized charities or the Christian virtues in meeting this growing and complex problem of the human race. It is useless to narcotize any others with the opiate of Christian resignation. We cannot dissolve the realities of human misery, and steep ourselves in emotional idealism–-"we may form wild dreams of socialism, universal brotherhood, red republics or inexplicable revolutions. We may struggle and murder each other; we may persecute and despise those whose sexual necessities force them to break through our unnatural moral codes. . . we may break our own and our neighbors' hearts against the adamantine laws that warn us, but not one step, not one, shall we advance till we acknowledge these laws, and adopt the only possible mode in which they can be obeyed."
Drysdale foresaw the danger of the proletariat's attempt to shift the blame of its own distress to its environment or to the external industrial structure. He saw that it is useless to blame the low rate of wages, to accuse the community for its tardy and scanty assistance, to decry the avarice of the rich, and, in short, to get into the injurious habit of looking upon itself and its too numerous family as the victims of external circumstances. In this way, as Drysdale realized, the working man develops an unhealthy and debilitating spirit. "The last person he would think of accusing is himself, on whom, in fact, the principal blame rests, principally because in bringing a too numerous family into the world he is following the advice given by the very people he holds responsible for his miseries."
Drysdale foresaw as keenly as most advanced thinkers today that political efforts, however firmly based they might be upon social idealism, are inevitably foredoomed to failure if they seek to realize themselves in a milieu of over-population and fluctuating masses of humanity. It is because of this, he pointed out, that free governments tend constantly to their own destruction, that so many efforts in the cause of freedom have failed, and that almost every revolution, after a long and bloody struggle, has ended in military despotism. When an established government has been destroyed and a new political constitution has been set in operation, the poor, finding their evils unabated, turn their resentment against the new conquerors of political power. Political remedies, according to this point of view, have too often been based upon a short-sighted optimism, upon the belief that there is some self-adjusting power in nature or some merciful guiding providence by which human ills all work for good, and are ultimately, by the blind chance of evolution, to be overcome. There is hidden in our natures, a pernicious belief with which we console ourselves, that the human constitution will gradually undergo a change in our favor. These optimists bid us to wait helplessly till the stream of misery has flowed past us. Then we shall enter the promised millennium. We might as well expect, George Drysdale warned us, that the river will return to its source, or that the seas cover the mountain tops, as that the fundamental character of the human frame will alter. However little we may expect of human progress, our first necessity is to base our efforts upon an understanding of human instinct and human behavior, not as these express themselves under special and favorable conditions, but as the inherent and dynamic mainsprings of all human activity.
In ignoring the physiological and psychical aspects of life, socialism, he found, was not less short-sighted than other claims of progress. The socialism of this time, we should remember, confined itself to various methods of increasing the products of human industry and of equalizing distribution. But in ignoring the fundamental factor of overpopulation socialism failed to recognize that its aims were foredoomed to inevitable cancellation.
In short, the reader of the "Elements of Social Science" will discover that George Drysdale sought to justify the principle of Birth Control, not merely upon the ground of economics and politics, but essentially as a physiological and psychological necessity of the human race. This phase of his work has been forgotten or neglected; and even the defenders and exponents of family limitation continued practically until our own century to defend it solely in the terms and language of economic and political policy. Unlike most of those who preceded him and followed him, Drysdale possessed a keen perception of the fundamental fallacy of looking for advance upon the basis of any program which confined its endeavors to religious or political action or to economic and industrial panaceas.
Whatever amelioration or revolution we may expect or hope for, he has taught us that it must be based not upon propagation of any single doctrine in the political or economic field, but must be the outgrowth of the direction, the control, and the development of our deepest interests and desires.
The peculiar error of the socialists of Drysdale's time was that they attributed to the constitution of society and to competition (as politicians do to forms of government and theologians to man's original sin) the evils which really spring from unchecked and uncontrolled breeding. Socialism, as he saw it, fell into the inveterate and almost universal error of ascribing the chief ills of mankind to human institutions, instead of to uncontrolled instincts. "It urges the adoption of a complete change in our social fabric, but to what end? After all this trouble there would not be one of the great human difficulties removed."
Not that Drysdale was in any sense a pessimist or a reactionary. He was as intransigeant and as relentless a critic of society as any of the earlier or later sociologists, but he had a deeper and more widespread knowledge of human nature. He saw that all those celebrated Victorian poets, writers, statesmen, orators and moralists were themselves suffering and limited by the inhibitions of tradition. "We ask for bread and they give us a stone, for love and they give us a futile or religious shadow of it. Poetry, painting, architecture, fine writing, oratory, religion, to a world plunged in population worries are like music in the ears of a drowning man. They may dazzle our judgment and they may gild, but they cannot cheat our miseries. It is the necessaries of life; it is food, love and leisure that are at present for every human being, man or woman, necessaries; it is of little avail to talk of luxuries."
This article is the second in a four-part series of the same title. For Part I see July 1923; for two following articles see Sept. 1923 and Oct. 1923.
The central point in the new psychology as interpreted by Freud and his disciples is the shifting of this science away from the intellectual to the instinctive; and the derivation of the more complex activities from lower centers, closely akin to those present in other animals than man. This, as we know, represents the tremendous achievement of modern psychological thought. It means the reduction of the mental to psycho-physiological terms. It brings psychology into line with the organic sciences and establishes an actual working relationship between psychology and physiology. Thanks to Freud, we have now a purely naturalistic theory of mental evolution, free from any mixture of the theological, the metaphysical or the supernatural.
George Drysdale sought in 1854--that is nearly 70 years ago--to make the effort to free social science and economics from its traditional metaphysical and political prejudices. He attempted to substitute human values for theoretical ones. Practically fifty years before the publication of Freud's studies (notably the initial one on hysteria), George Drysdale realized that there could be no true development in psychology without a thorough knowledge of sexual instinct in the human race. This emphasis on sexual values is to be found in his consideration of physical and mental health, in his insistence upon a true feminism and his transference of social values from the remote and problematical future into the health and joy of living individuals.
Drysdale insisted upon the unity of body and mind, the identity of matter and spirit. Truly there is nothing new in the idea of the healthy mind and the healthy body; but with his peculiar and original presentation, George Drysdale revivifies this old truth and suggests the modern theories of Cannon and Crile. He did this by beginning with a plea for reverence for the human body. Practically all the sufferings of mankind, he thought, were derived from lack of reverence for the human body; mystical religions and superstitions and especially the dogmas of the Christian Church kill all human reverence for physical laws. Our life in this world was looked upon as a vale of tears, and it was useless to cherish aspirations after physical excellence. Beauty of form, that imperishable source of joy and stamp of nobility, seemed to Drysdale, under the cruel yoke of the Church, to have perished from Occidental civilization. But he held this to be one of the most glorious ideals to be perpetuated through successive generations, to be worshiped as an object for our reverence and constant endeavor. He did not look upon physical beauty from the Christian point of view, as a dangerous gift which might mislead men from the path of virtue. He thought that men had become obsessed by the intellect. Physical strength had been held in such slight estimation by those who cultivated the intellect that the race was gradually deteriorating.
This young man who said all he had to say in his twenties, this anonymous genius, looked upon bodily health as the proof of a virtuous physical life. Realizing that our bodily and mental interests are inseparably bound together and that no part of us can rise or fall without influencing the entire mental and physical organism, he nevertheless insisted that the first essential was a sound body. He claimed that our body cannot be diseased without our mind becoming so likewise. Physical evil induces moral evil. The conduct of our physical life is just as difficult as that of our moral one. To live a virtuous physical life deserves as great admiration and praise as to live a moral one. It is the basis of the only true ethics. The body is just as high an aim in man as the spirit. "If you do not wish to live a physical virtuous, that is a healthy life, you are an immoral being; if you do, there is but one way to do it--study the laws of health and obey them. Physical virtue is as lofty an aim for man as moral virtue, and no man can be called good who does not combine and aspire equally after both."
"The Elements of Social Science" circulated in many editions in the sixties and seventies, yet it is almost impossible to find any reference to it in Victorian literature. Nevertheless, when we read such remarks as these, it is impossible not to believe that Samuel Butler had absorbed some of Drysdale's wisdom as the basis of his "Erewhon." This thought comes to us especially when we discover such things as this in Drysdale's book: "To break the physical law is just as culpable as to break a moral one, and therefore all physical diseases must be regarded as sin, and as little in the one case as in the other can ignorance be received as an excuse." Or when he says, "No man whose body is diseased, whether hereditarily or individually, can be regarded as a virtuous being."
George Drysdale based his whole argument for Birth Control upon thorough knowledge and reverence for our bodies and our biological instincts. Yet he realized that physical strength and development implies as well mental strength and development. Beauty of form, physical strength and activity as well as health, he reiterated throughout this remarkable book, should be sought after and valued no less than beauty and power of mind. Is the development of the brain to be the supreme object of man's aspirations? A fuller wisdom will show us, Drysdale answers, that we must value equally all our parts, since no one can thrive alone. Ugliness and bodily imperfection and deformity are always marks of sin. This may be racial sin or eugenic crime, for morality is not limited to the individual. Imperfection and deformity are the surest signs that error has been committed, by some one, somewhere. Drysdale realized, on the other hand, that there is no royal road to health, and that health is not obtained by pouring medicine down the throat. This is as true for spiritual health as for physical.
Sexual science for Drysdale becomes the key to the door through which humanity must pass to attain mental and physical health, self-reliance, freedom and independence. There have been few things in the past from which humanity has suffered more than from the degrading, irreverent feelings of mystery and shame that have been attached to the generative and excretory organs. The former have been regarded, he tells us, like their corresponding mental passions, as something of lower and baser nature, tending to degrade man by their physical appetites. But again and again he tells us that we cannot take a debasing view of any part of our own humanity without becoming degraded in our whole being. He declares that it would be hard to enumerate all evils that have flowed from this unhappy view of our physical functions. Physical functions and influences partake of true beauty to this understanding. Most of our miseries, he declares, have been due to the neglect of their health and disease, while their misfortunes have called forth sneers and reproaches rather than that vision, pity and aid which should wait upon all error, physical as well as moral. "Before the calm eyes of nature, flimsy veils of morbid modesty and shame vanish like a dream, and when she demands penalty for broken laws, such excuses die away on the lip of the offender."
Reverence, especially physical reverence, is our great need. Surely these words are as true today as they were in that far-off Victorian age. It is this lack of physical reverence, Drysdale insists, that degrades men in their various pursuits. It is this lack of reverence for all of human and physical activity that makes us look down upon one phase of human endeavor and up to some pursuit which possesses no great dignity.
One is led to the belief, in delving into this mine of fertile suggestions and psychology, that Drysdale, writing this book in the very gold of youth and mental vigor, was singularly free from the inhibitions and mental prejudices of his period. One is again and again amazed at his curious and almost inexplicable modernity. The socialism of William Morris and his followers has today a curiously Victorian taint. The Utopias of the nineteenth century surprise us with their tinge of mental provincialism; instead of truly picturing any society of the future, they are usually curiously like the society in which other authors have lived. Few minds can project themselves out of their environment either temporally or socially. Bernard Shaw speaks of the "future-piercing" quality in the work of Samuel Butler. It is this quality we find in much purer form in the singular book of George Drysdale's. Reacting violently and vigorously from the narrow Puritanism of the social conventions of Scotland, Drysdale's mind had not been warped or prisoned by the mental and social prejudices of the eighteen-fifties. As he expressed himself in this book, he is singularly free from unconscious fears and suppressions. It is surprising, in the years following the publication of the "Elements of Social Science," in those years of theoretical discussion and Darwinian controversy, in those years of the gradual crystallization of humanitarian and social thought, in those years of the rise of the new "Science," that this book should apparently have made so little impression. Had they followed Ibsen and Nietzsche or Freud, the ideas of Drysdale might not be so worthy of attention, but in considering them, we should remember always that this book was published in 1854, when psychology, with all its new and revolutionary ideas, was hardly dreamed of.
The elasticity of Drysdale's mind is strikingly illustrated in his avoidance of all those threadbare clichés that creep into the writings of much more pretentious figures. In the well-balanced mind, he knows that destructive and skeptical workings must keep pace with constructive ones. Progress is not essentially a matter of the "constructive," as we are being told over and over again. Skepticism or destructiveness is likewise a great and beneficent power, which nature has given to enable us ever to preserve over the sense of infinity. "The weapons of destruction will be to those who reverence and learn to use them most powerful for the service of mankind. Skepticism and all the destructive forces are not toys for the young mind to play with, until it obtains a settled faith--but glorious privileges to be carried with us and constantly exercised for knowledge and experiment throughout life, acting in continual harmony with the constructive powers." Practically seventy years before our modern psycho-analysts, Drysdale pointed out the devastating and withering blight of mental fear upon human and social development. He realized, as well as any of us today, that fear in one sphere of human activity can poison every other sphere. Freedom in any one sphere of mental activity is dependent upon freedom in all. Under the restrictions of Christian theology and sentimental romanticism, he asserted, the mind as well as the body had deteriorated in vigor and energy. A morbid effeminacy pervaded all the moral atmosphere of the nineteenth century. "There is a want of healthy enjoyment of life, as must always be the case when the natural pleasures of the senses are disparaged, a want of self-reliance, of mental vigor, courage, in the mental character of all of us." He protested against the pervading timidity in declaring real convictions in the most important matters, especially on sexual love, which was, in that age, the most interdicted subject. "A sort of doleful spiritual whine meets our ear on every side, as if man, the mightiest and most glorious of nature's presents exists only on sufferance, and were too vile to deserve anything but sorrow and humility."
Have we made much real advance in this respect? Today, as in 1854, fear of the opinion of others is one of the most prevalent of all evils among us. This fear, as Drysdale pointed out, is perhaps more destructive than any other to sincerity and honesty of character. Today, as when they were first written by this forgotten pioneer, these words have lost none of their bitter truth: "we are afraid of departing from the beaten track of conventionalism for fear of encouraging the odium of our neighbours. How unlike is this to the manliness and self-reliance of those who have dared death and torture rather than disguise their principles."
Sorrow, self-abasement, irresolution, despondency or despair, which were the prominent marks of those early Victorian poets and writers, were ample evidence for Drysdale of a diseased state of society, especially when he compared them with the manly vigor and health, and pagan enjoyment of life which characterize the authors of the Elizabethan age. The great necessity for the mind as well as the body, he reiterated, is not piety, nor tenderness, nor humility, nor spiritual fervor, but self-reliance, energy and active enjoyment of life.
George Drysdale was one of the few idealists of his period who was not a victim to the illusion of progress so fallaciously drawn from the Darwinian hypothesis. Courageous optimist as he was, fired with the sublime vison of a healthy and expressive humanity, nevertheless he declared that there had been as yet no real progress in human society. In the first place, the long Calvary of the human race had been the unending fight against mental and physical starvation. In the second place, all individual happiness had been built upon the misery of others. He compared mankind to a forest of trees too thickly planted. All needs must suffer more or less, but the more robust struggle upward, and in so doing destroy their weaker neighbors. Any of us who have greater talents or energies, more robust minds or bodies, who are born in more comfortable circumstances, struggle on to the possession of all the contested blessings of life, and in so doing we destroy those who are weaker. We have not yet outgrown the age of mutual destruction. Our feeble and futile struggles against overpopulation, all our charities, our philanthropies, our campaigns against epidemics and famines, most of our efforts are submerged in a constantly rising flood of superfluous humanity. To George Drysdale, morality, medicine, religion, law, politics, are all solemn farces played before the eyes of men, imposing, pompous and dazzling ceremonies, serving but to divert attention from the awful tragedies behind the scenes. He was absolutely certain that unless we attain some other solution of this great social problem, world society must forever continue as it has ever been, a confusion of wrongs and misery. He knew that to the poor the progress of mankind is a hollow lie. He declared that prosperity was based upon their toil, their sufferings, their ruin, "the self-congratulations of the more fortunate part of mankind on the vast progress of civilization are a constant insult to the poor and suffering and are as foundationless as they are unfeeling. The least we can do to those suffering from the want of food, love and leisure, is not to insult their misery by vain boasts of the advances of human happiness." Readers of Dean Inge's recent Romanes address on the "Idea of Progress" and Mr. Bury's essay on the same subject, may see that Drysdale expressed similar ideas about seventy years ago.
Another suggestive idea put forward by Drysdale was in pointing out that the loudest supporters of our present system and the most persistent opponents of the idea of Birth Control are in general the most deeply ignorant on sexual matters and on the nature and laws of the sexual organs. Such people, he asserted, are most deeply infected with mental fear and that morbid delicacy which absolutely unfits anyone from handling these questions with profit. "They trust blindly to authority for the rules they blindly lay down, perfectly unaware of the awful and complicated nature of the subject they are dealing with so confidently, and of the horrible evils their unconsidered statements are attended with. They themselves break through the most fundamentally important moral laws daily in utter unconsciousness of the misery they are causing to their fellows. The clergy among us are noted for the large size of their families"--seventy years has marked a change in this respect!--"whereas the Roman Catholic clergy who err as much on the other side by the great natural sin of celibacy are usually the men who are to expound to us the natural laws of sexual morality. It is not from want of will, for the zeal and devotion of many of their members in the service of mankind is beyond all praise; but from want of knowledge."
In another way he preceded the technique of modern psycho-analysis. This was in pointing out the dangers and the menace of sexual repression and inhibition in the creation of "complexes" and psychic compulsions as the basis of "neuroses" and "psychoses." In his time, as in our own, sexual disgust was the surest evidence of that morbidity which enters as a peculiar element in our judgements upon all sexual matters. The sexual inhibition blinds and binds us, he pointed out, and deprives us of the charity and moderation we should possess on other subjects as well. He saw thus that the misery of all sexual sufferers was doubled. He saw that these victims had to endure, not only the natural burden of their disease, but also the unnatural disgust attaching to them. He saw these inhibitions constantly poisoning all relations between the sexes, creating impotence, perverting sentiments and diminishing enjoyment both in married and unmarried life. This morbidity, he pointed out, was the cause of much bitterness and destruction of the pleasures of others. Even more than religious injuries, sexual disgust, he pointed out, has made men take contemptuous and abhorrent views of their fellow creatures. Those today who are trying to fight and prevent the spread of the great venereal plagues, and who are trying to educate the rising generation in sex and social hygiene, might well go back to Drysdale for the deepest and most concise statement of their problem, especially when he says: "Verily the generative organs have been amply revenged for the neglect and irreverence with which they have been treated."
Again and again our great pioneer warns us that it is impossible for us to attain a calm and earnest investigation of the real facts of any problem until we free ourselves from sexual prejudices which are so violent and vehement in every country. He directs our attention to the state of sex woes today, when the fearful amount of prostitution and venereal disease are the most crying signals of social shipwreck. When we try to break through the impenetrable ignorance which surrounds the subject, when we try rationally to meet all the headlong and emotional sentimentality which confronts any calm discussion of a sexual nature, we must admit that there must be some great error somewhere which accounts for so much misery. Today, as in Drysdale's day, love, instead of being one of the sweetest blessings of life, seems, indeed, rather to be a curse, to such immoral evils and misery does it give rise. Drysdale directs us to review our code of sexual morality, to try it by the grand touchstone of science. He finds it a chaos of theories on which no two persons are agreed, and in which human nature itself has been almost entirely left out of sight, with authority and blind prejudice stepping in to take its place. In all the legislation, all the statutes, all the efforts which have been made to frame the codes restricting or eradicating this phase of human life, Drysdale declares that physical as well as mental health has been absolutely disregarded. The ground is strewn with the victims of our sex codes. Our morality, the inheritance of centuries in which man thought in theoretical, metaphysical and religious terms, is now morbid, suitable neither to our convictions nor to our mode of living.
Drysdale was one of the first to tell us that in the solution of social problems and social difficulties, in the reconstruction or recreation of the society of the future, we must learn to consider the infinite importance of the fate of every single individual. We do not live and die for ourselves alone, but everyone is a part of the whole of humanity, and if we could understand all the wants and requirements of our own being, we would understand those of all mankind. We are all too ready to sacrifice the interests of the individual for what is falsely called the general good. No good can be done which does not include the good of every being in the universe. The real interest of every individual will invariably be found, if we search deeply and patiently enough, to be inseparably bound up with those of all mankind.
In this day of the enactment and enforcement of every type of restrictive legislation, in the tremendous increase of the power of separate individuals over ever-increasing masses of humanity, in the religious, political and industrial fields, the argument is always put forward that certain individuals must suffer for the good of the whole. Drysdale must have foreseen the advent of this unhappy day, because some of his most impressive words bear upon this subject. "If by sacrifice, we mean the happiness of any individual," he asks, "which of us is safe? Are we not all individuals and essentially implicated in every question which involves the rights and duties of any human being? Every single case of disease is of infinite importance to one individual, viz., to the sufferer, but of no less real importance to us as also individuals liable ourselves and our children and others to the same evils. The old ideas and theories must fall if these unjustly stand in the way of his cure."
This article is the first of a five-part series of the same title. For following articles see Aug. 1923, Sep. 1923, and for art IV and V Oct. 1923.
George Drysdale is perhaps the greatest pioneer of our modern conception of Birth Control, because he was the first to approach this great problem from the point of view of individual and social psychology. He saw, more clearly than any of his predecessors, the great necessity of a new science and psychology of sex. He revitalized the theory of Malthus by lifting it out of the sphere of political economy, and vindicating Birth Control from the point of view of human and individual need. He discarded the old metaphysical preconceptions of political and theological dogma, and insisted upon the necessity of scientific and biological study of human instincts and needs. In studying this great and forgotten achievement, we must remember that it was wrought by a young man still in his twenties. Also, that "The Elements of Social Science" was first published in 1854, long before the crystallization of modern evolutionary science, in the very darkest days of the Victorian era. This explains why many of the most illuminating points in the vision of George Drysdale fell on stony ground. He was so much in advance of his day that by the time European thought had caught up to him, his great book had been discarded or forgotten. I hope to show, for instance, in the course of the present study, how closely Drysdale predicted the technique and aims of the Freudian school of psycho-analysis. Nevertheless, in spite of the neglect that Drysdale has suffered, we must not minimize the tremendous influence exerted by "The Elements of Social Science" throughout the civilized world during the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Nietzsche remarks that every philosophy is, in a certain sense, a confession or an autobiography. If this is true, the "Elements of Social Science" reveals an unusually attractive, vigorous personality, uninhibited by the restraints and repression of the harsh and Puritanical environment in which he was born and brought up. Born in Edinburgh in 1825, the son of the Treasurer of the City of Edinburgh, Drysdale revealed from childhood all those exceptional qualities that we are accustomed to associate with the term "genius." He evinced such great power of intellect that his teacher, Mr. Musgrave, in the Circus Place School, named him, for his rapid progress in elementary studies, "King." He passed seven years at the Edinburgh Royal Academy, obtaining the highest prizes in all his classes. At the time of his death, November 19, 1904, his brother, Dr. Charles R. Drysdale, declared that the medals and books given to his brother for merit formed a collection and a library in themselves. After seven years at the Edinburgh Royal Academy, George Drysdale studied at the University of Glasgow, and obtained honors equally from all the professors there. Shortly after the death of his father, George, with Charles Drysdale and their brother-in-law, made a tour through France and Switzerland. The younger brother speaks of George's pre-eminence in all physical and outdoor sports, just as he was pre-eminent in his studies. This splendid love of physical perfection and activity, combined with intellectual pursuits, is expressed throughout his book.
Like all of the young thinkers of the early half of the nineteenth century, the Drysdales became interested in the study of political economy, which had become the center of most of the intellectual activity of that time. George Drysdale took copious notes of the works of Adam Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, Chalmers, Whately and the two and Mills. Returning from the continent he resumed his residence in Edinburgh, where he graduated in medicine.
"The Elements of Social Science," written at the age of twenty-seven, is the living monument of his exceptional youth and joyous vitality. It has been criticized as being, from our modern point of view, unscientific. Yet in spirit it is truly not lacking in this quality. We must not forget that scientific details and discoveries keep changing our point of view; and we must at least credit Drysdale with an illuminating foresight into the discoveries and scientific interests of our own century.
The young man hurried down to London in the hope of immediately finding a publisher. It was not so much personality and egotistical pride in his own book that made him do this; he did it in a truly visionary spirit. He felt he had expressed the truths of which humanity was in dire need. Perhaps he did not realize the extent of his own iconoclasm. He felt that he was truly following in the footsteps of the great Malthus and the two Mills. A good deal of the "Elements of Social Science," it is true, is a restatement of the principles and convictions of those early pioneers in social reform. But imbedded in the closely printed pages of this astonishing book there is ample evidence of George Drysdale's realization of the great fundamental and central truths of human nature.
Needless to say, he found great difficulty in finding a publisher for his book. In 1853 Great Britain was laying the foundations of Victorian prudery; and it is not surprising that such a book as the "The Elements of Social Science" was refused by all reputable publishers. But at length, by a lucky chance, Drysdale discovered Edward Truelove, a free-thought bookseller, living at that time near Temple Bar. Mr. Truelove undertook the printing of the work. Edward Truelove, we may note in passing, possessed scarcely less courage and bravery in his own particular field than the Drysdales themselves. He was vitally interested in the neo-Malthusian movement. He suffered imprisonment for publishing, not the "Elements of Social Science," but other works of the same character. The dauntless courage of the early English Malthusians opens a fascinating chapter in the history of human thought.
The "Elements of Social Science" was published anonymously, not merely in its first edition, but in all the editions printed during George Drysdale's lifetime. An edition appeared in 1905 with George Drysdale's name in parenthesis under the pen-name of the author--"A Doctor of Medicine." In his preface to the first edition, Drysdale confessed that "Had it not been from fear of causing pain to a relation, I should have felt it my duty to put my name to this work; in order that any censure passed upon it should fall upon myself alone." The "relation," as we may guess, was his mother. Charles R. Drysdale, who inserted a brief memoir of his brother in the posthumous edition, tells us that George wrote anonymously, at first on account of his dislike to give pain to his mother by his avowal of heretical opinions in theology and traditional morality, and finally because, his health becoming weaker, he disliked those wordy disputes which interfered with "that philosophic tranquility so necessary for thinking out the different problems of social life."
George Drysdale devoted all the remaining years of his life (he died at the age of seventy-eight, November 19, 1904) to the translation of his book and its publication in the other European countries. To do so, he made himself familiar with most of the Continental tongues, even with Russian, a feat which was rendered possible only by his deep studies in language and science. He was thus enabled to criticize the style and expression made use of by his translators, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish and Danish. In later years, with the appearance of each successive edition, he added much material to the book, but the great fundamental truths remained unchanged. With his characteristic, challenging boldness, Drysdale confessed that he did not make the slightest pretention to have offered any comprehensive or adequate exposition of social science. He aimed instead to be suggestive and stimulating. He acknowledged his indebtedness to Mill's "Logic" and to Comte's "Positive Philosophy." He dissented from Comte on most of the vital points of moral and social doctrine, but he expressed the profoundest admiration for the manner in which the French Positivist carried out the leading ideas of his great work. He agreed that the first need was to emancipate the human mind from supernaturalism, to prepare the way for a great intellectual regeneration, when human life might be governed by sincere and openly expressed convictions.
In the years following its first appearance, this anonymously published book gained a wide European reputation; but due perhaps to its anonymous publication, this reputation became mostly an underground one. We find little reference to it in the revolutionary literature in which the great spiritual heretics of the latter half of the nineteenth century found expression. Drysdale, nevertheless, was a true precursor of the dynamic Dionysianism of Nietzsche, and of all our modern multiform striving for intellectual and psychological freedom.
By 1880, six German editions had appeared; by 1881 four Italian editions; while in France the book was published both in its entirety and in parts. Paul Robin spoke of it as one of the "bibles of humanity," while M. Robin's son-in-law, G. Hardy, himself made a translation of that section entitled, "Poverty, Its Only Cause and Its Only Cure." In Great Britain, the British colonies and America, more than 19,000 copies were sold. The great virtue of the book, according to Havelock Ellis, is that it brought to the attention of many, who had no means of intelligent information, the importance of sexual science.
Charles Bradlaugh recommended it to the members of the International Workingmen's Association (the first Internationale). The
Examiner spoke of it as "the only book that has fully, honestly and in a scientific spirit recognized all the elements in the problem--How are mankind to triumph over poverty, with its train of attendant evils?--and fearlessly endeavored to find a practical solution." The British Journal of Homeopathy in 1860 spoke of Drysdale's book as the most remarkable one in many respects the writer had ever read. This conservative editor thought that some of Drysdale's remedies tended rather to a dissolution than a reconstruction of society; but nevertheless admitted the benevolence and philanthropy of its motives.One of the great admirers of the book who was undoubtedly influenced and stimulated by its ideas was the distinguished Paolo Montegazza of Florence. Montegazza wrote of Drysdale in the Medico Di Casa, 1874: "A foe to all hypocrisy and prejudice, the author of the 'Elements of Social Science' calls things by their real names, and shrinks only from the excessive sufferings and privations to which the poor children of Adam are condemned. He is firmly convinced that to measure human fecundity in accordance with the economical production of families and nations is the most certain means of destroying pauperism and all forms of want; and in this perhaps he is in error, for the evils of modern society have many sources, and with the drying up of one (perhaps even the most fruitful), another and another would present themselves, which only the combined and constant labours of future generations will, perhaps, be able to overcome. However this may be, the courage with which the author faces one of the most formidable problems of human society is most praiseworthy. Human morality is gradually changing its centre of gravity to rest upon a more solid and durable basis. In this new morality, the doctrines of Malthus and those of the author of the 'Elements of Social Science' must also have a large share. In the place of the alms-giving which humiliates, in the place of that charity which caresses an evil that it does not know how to cure, there will be substituted preventive philanthropy, which by studying want and suffering in their most hidden and deep-seated springs, will be able radically to remove them. Jurisprudence, medicine and morality follow the same movement, are aiming at the same end--to prevent rather than to cure."
In Germany and Holland likewise, the book aroused much discussion, praise as well as adverse comment. Though little spoken of in public, it was, nevertheless, to produce a quiet, lasting effect. The Konigsberger Hartungsche Zeitung (December 4, 1871) confessed that "whatever may be said against this fearless laying bare of the most intimate relations of social life, and against his whole theory--purely and undisguisedly materialistic as it is--even the opponent of Dr. Drysdale will be unable to deny him the merit of scientific closeness of reasoning; and what is quite as important, of warm and zealous philanthropy. He will rather honor the moral courage and mental energy with which the author must have had to work his way out of the bewildering maze of hitherto unsolved problems and conflicts to a conviction so logically consistent, so luminous and yet so opposed to established institutions and to the moral sentiments in which men have been brought up."
In probing into the deepest causes of human misery and unhappiness, in pointing the way to a new emancipation, a truly spiritual and physical freedom, Drysdale is never irritated, never fault-finding, never seeking to blame individuals or classes. This is a point well worth remembering, when we compare his work with that of other leaders who use the weapons of invective and angry attack against their enemies.
Further evidence that this remarkable mind was truly "future piercing" is to be found in his essay on war, published in 1881. George Drysdale was fully conscious that the great principle of restrictive fecundity might give, if put to practice, new orientation to individual and social activity. The intensive culture of the human race, as opposed to nationalistic and racial imperialism, eliminating the need and controlling the cry of national expansion and territorial aggression, might do much to wipe out war as a fearful remnant of barbarism. He saw that international relations were then in an essentially chaotic state, and that war was the natural and inevitable result of competitive armament and of international relations based on secret agreements. He discussed the question of the general reduction of armaments, of a league of nations or confederation of states and of the place of international armies. He saw that disarmament could be only a palliative, and not a cure, for present evils, which today, as we know, are even more aggravated than in the days when he was writing.
After ten years of incessant agitation and activity the much-discussed question of birth control has invaded the legislative halls of Albany. A bill intended to amend existing laws so that New York physicians may be authorized to disseminate contraceptive advice has been introduced. There will be a hearing on that matter in the Assembly Chamber on April 10. If enacted, we may hope for the beginning of a new era of social welfare and racial hygiene. But whatever the outcome, this bill means that birth control is no longer looked upon, even in the judicial and legislative field, as a topic "obscene and indecent," worthy only of ribald jest and suggestive leer.
No other great problem affecting the welfare of nation and race has been more misinterpreted and misunderstood, even by Americans who consider themselves well informed. Advocates of this doctrine do not beg for mere assent or approval. They ask for investigation and understanding, as the initial step toward support and adherence to their doctrines.
Much of the opposition to birth control has had its source among clergymen and other professional moralists. This ecclesiastic opposition is amazing in view of the fact that the "only true begetter" of the whole birth control movement, Robert Malthus, was himself a clergyman of the Church of England. He advocated "prudential checks" on the grounds of austere morality. Our clerical opponents also ignore the fact that many of the most noted champions of birth control today are clergymen. The most noteworthy example is that of the distinguished Dean of St. Paul’s, London, William Ralph Inge.
There is a confusion in the public mind concerning the origin of the present movement, which must be distinguished from the so-called Neo-Malthusian movement of Great Britain and the Continent. The Neo-Malthusian League was the direct outcome of the celebrated trial in London in 1877 of Charles Bradlaugh and Mrs.Annie Besant, who had frankly admitted distributing among the English poor thousands upon thousands of copies of the pamphlet of a Boston physician, Dr. Knowlton, entitled “Fruits of Philosophy,” originally published in this country in 1833. The Neo-Malthusian League, sponsored by those valiant pioneers, Charles and George Drysdale and Dr. Alice Vickery, soon spread to all countries of the continent, and its doctrines were put into practice in Holland, where fifty-three birth control clinics, approved by the Dutch Government, have been conducted with great success for forty years.
The birth control movement, which has now absorbed the earlier Neo-Malthusian movement, originated right here in New York just a decade ago. While the Neo-Malthusians based their propaganda on the broad general basis of Malthus’s theory of population, the expression “birth control” was devised in my little paper of advance feminism, The Woman Rebel, as one of the fundamental rights of the emancipation of working women. The response to this idea of birth control was so immediate and so overwhelming that a league was formed--the first birth control league in the world.
With all the flame-like ardor of pioneers we did not at first realize the full scope of this fundamental discovery. At that time I knew nothing of Malthus, nothing of the courageous and desperate battle waged by the Drysdales in England, Rutgers in Holland, of G. Hardy and Paul Robin in France, for this century-old doctrine. I was merely thinking of the poor mothers of congested districts of the East Side who had so poignantly begged me for relief, in order that the children they had already brought into the world might have a chance to grow into strong and stalwart Americans. It was almost impossible to believe that the dissemination of knowledge easily available to the intelligent and thoughtful parents of the well-to-do-classes was actually a criminal act, proscribed not only by State laws but by Federal as well.
My paper was suppressed. I was arrested and indicted by the Federal authorities. But owing to the vigorous protests of the public and an appeal sent by a number of distinguished English writers and thinkers, the case against me was finally abandoned. Meanwhile “birth control” became the slogan of the idea and not only spread through the American press from coast to coast, but immediately gained currency in Great Britain. Succinctly and with telling brevity and precision “birth control” summed up our whole philosophy. Birth control is not contraception indiscriminately and thoughtlessly practiced. It means the release and cultivation of the better racial elements in our society, and the gradual suppression, elimination and eventual extirpation of defective stocks--those human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization.
In our efforts to effect the repeal of the existing laws which declare the use of contraceptive methods indecent and obscene, birth control advocated have been forced to battle every inch of the way. To get the matter before the Legislature of New York my path has led completely around the earth. Our effort has been to enlist the support of the best minds of every country, an object we have achieved even beyond our fondest expectations.
The backbone of the birth control movement has been from the time Malthus first published his epoch-making “Principles of Population” essentially Anglo-Saxon. John Stuart Mill, Francis Place, Matthew Arnold, Thomas Huxley and our own Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Robert G. Ingersoll spoke openly in favor of control of the population. Today such thinkers and writers as H. G. Wells, Harold Cox (editor of The Edinburgh Review), Arnold Bennett, Dean Inge, William Archer, Havelock Ellis, Gilbert Murray, Bertram Russell, John Maynard Keynes (editor of The Nation), and Lord Dawson, one of the King’s physicians, and innumerable others in Great Britain speak openly and valiantly for birth control.
It is not without significance that since the inauguration of our agitation in 1913 there has been an immense recrudescence of interest in the persistent problem of population; and a number of new efforts, notably that of A. M. Carr-Saunders, to reinterpret the thesis so brilliantly advanced by that obscure clergyman, Malthus.
Most gratifying to the battle-scarred propagandist for birth control has been the awakening of the Orient. China and Japan
for ages have been the notoriously overpopulated countries of the earth, the high birth rate, as always, accompanied by a high death rate, a high infant
mortality rate and even acceptance of the widespread practice of infanticide. Famine, pestilence and flood have been the only checks to overpopulation in China,
and these have been regarded even as a blessing by the yellow races. “Yang to meng ping” is a well known exclamation in
China-- “Many men, life cheap!”
Following my sojourn in China last year, the Ladies’ Journal of China, the most influential women’s publication there, devoted a special edition of more than one hundred pages to the problem of birth control. In this paper Tzi Sang wrote: “Since Mrs. Sanger’s visit public opinion has been greatly influenced, and I understand that some educators are planning to propagate the doctrine in the interior so that our women will no longer be mere machines for breeding children. When the majority of our people know the benefits of birth control and believe that it is the remedy for plague, famine and war in China, then we can adopt the method of asking doctors to pass on their knowledge to women poor in health.”
Set Lu, another writer in the same paper, points out that “if we study the actual situation in China we find that unconsciously the Chinese have attempted to practice birth control in a different way. Do we not throw away our babies?” frankly asks this writer of his compatriots. His answer is interesting: “Savages practice infanticide, but civilized people use scientific methods of prevention. Herein lies the difference between a barbarous and a civilized people. No wonder that our civilization fails to make any noticeable advance.”
Both in Japan and China, as a result of my visit, and especially as the effect of the attempt upon the part of the Imperial Japanese Government to suppress birth control and to shut its door in my face, the subject of birth control has aroused the deepest and most widespread interest among all classes. In both these great Oriental empires the roots of a permanent birth control movement have struck deep in popular interest, and undoubtedly will exert a great influence toward bringing down the alarmingly high birth rates to the level of those of Western civilization. The importance, the immediate necessity of an autonomous control of the birth rate by the races of the Orient is by no one more emphatically stated than by that eloquent and picturesque writer and traveler, J. O. P. Bland.
Since the first birth control clinic established in this country was raided by the New York Police in Brownsville, some years ago, and its founders sentenced to jail as petty miscreants, the whole current of opinion has advanced, not merely in this country but throughout the world. The results of the intelligence tests, the menace of indiscriminate immigration, the fertility of the unfit and the increasing burden upon the healthful and vigorous members of American society of the delinquent and dependent classes, together with the growing danger of the abnormal fecundity of the feeble-minded, all emphasize the necessity of clear-sightedness and courageously facing the problem and the possibilities of birth control as a practical and feasible weapon against national and racial decadence.
With the invasion of the New York Legislature exponents of this challenging doctrine may well congratulate themelves that they have won another victory against their opponents. Whatever the outcome of the hearing on April 10, birth control in any event will have compelled serious attention from our legislators. If we can convince the Assemblymen and State Senators that this is a matter which concerns not merely a group of "well-meaning” feminists, but is organically bound up with the biological welfare of the whole community, we shall consider that our efforts have not been entirely in vain.
Margaret Sanger gave this speech to open the Sixth International Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conference at the Hotel McAlpin in New York City. For a draft version see Margaret Sanger Papers Microfilm, Library of Congress, LCM 128:267.
Mr. President and Delegates:
In the name of the American Birth Control League I welcome you to America and to the Sixth International Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conference. I am proud of this privilege. For the first time in the history of these United States men and women have come from other countries to these shores to consider the population problem. Such a conference as we now inaugurate is unique in our experience and in our national history. It is, moreover, fitting that it should meet here in the center of our greatest city. For almost a century ago- just ninety- five years, to be exact- Robert Dale Owen published in this city his brief and plain treatise on the population question and birth control, entitled "Moral Physiology." And only two years afterward, in 1832, Dr. Charles Knowlton published in Boston his epoch- making "Fruits of Philosophy." His little book wandered for forty years around the world. It was translated into several languages. It was reprinted again and again. Its circulation was at first unmolested. In 1857, it was edited and revised Mr. President, by your courageous uncle,George R. Drysdale. Its circulation in Great Britain led finally to the historic trial of Mrs. Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh. This was just a little less than half a century ago. This little book, written by a courageous American, republished by courageous Englishmen, became internationally famous, and was instrumental in the founding of the first Neo-Malthusian leagues, by Charles R. Drysdale and Alice Drysdale Vickery, our honorary president, and the illustrious, courageous parents of the president of this conference, whom we welcome here today.
We welcome you to the presidency of this Conference, Dr. Drysdale, fully aware of the honor you confer upon us. You come here as the living representative of a family of indomitable heroes and founders of the Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control movement. Your presence links this gathering with that great historic movement for racial salvation which began with Thomas Malthus himself. Without the unselfish, disinterested courage of your father and mother, and your self-effacing uncle, we would not be gathered here to-night. I wish to thank you for the honor you have conferred upon us, in crossing the Atlantic, to act as president of this Conference. We look upon this act of generosity as a sign that you consider us worthy to keep alive and to carry on the torch of Neo-Malthusian truth, which for three quarters of a century has so nobly been held aloft by the heroic Drysdale family. May we in America show ourselves worthy of the Drysdale tradition!
To delegates from all foreign countries, I wish to extend a welcome no less grateful. I want also to apologize-- if I may do so without any disrespect–- for the obstacles you have had to meet, the obstructions placed in your way by some of the rules and regulations of our American government. Not being familiar with all our customs, perhaps you do not know that the government of the United States has enacted laws aiming to exclude from this country all "undesirable" foreigners. These laws, like all such restrictive legislation, make it difficult for all foreigners to pass unmolested our famous Statue of Liberty. There is a Quota restriction. Only so many foreigners from each country are allowed to enter each month. No: this is not Birth Control, though it is a crude method adopted by the United States to control our population. It is the latest method adopted by our Government to solve the population problem. And so you delegates from foreign countries have been made the innocent victims of an unsuccessful attempt of the American Government to cut down the number of "undesirable" citizens. I am glad that you have overcome these obstacles. As convinced Neo-Malthusians I knew you would. I welcome you to this Conference.
While the United States shuts her gates to foreigners, and is less hospitable than other countries in welcoming visitors to this land no attempt whatever is made to discourage the rapid multiplication of undesirable aliens--and natives--within our own borders. On the contrary: the Government of the United States deliberately encourages and even makes necessary by its laws the breeding--with a breakneck rapidity--of idiots, defectives, diseased, feeble minded and criminal classes.
Billions of dollars are expended by our state and federal governments and by private charities and philanthropies for the care, the maintenance, and the perpetuation of these classes. Year by year their numbers are mounting. Year by year more money is expended. The American public is taxed- heavily taxed- to maintain an increasing race of morons which threatens the very foundations of our civilization. More than one-quarter of the total incomes of our States is spent upon the maintenance of asylums, prisons and other institutions for the care of the defective, the diseased and the delinquent. Do not conclude, however, that all of our feeble-minded and mentally defective are segregated in institutions. No, indeed! This is a free country, a democratic country, a country of universal suffrage. We can all vote, even the mentally arrested. And so it is no surprise to find the moron's vote as good as the geniuses. The outlook is not a cheerful one.
You, friends from foreign countries who have come here to our greatest city, must have noticed the intricate systems of signals which regulates the crowded traffic in our streets and thoroughfares. By this system, the pedestrian is assured some degree of safety. But while the congestion of population in our American cities has forced upon us a system to regulate traffic in city streets and country roads, America as a nation refuses to open her eyes to the problem of biological traffic and racial roads. Biologically this country is "joy-riding" with reckless carelessness to an inevitable smash-up. Is it too late to prevent national destruction? This question we must face- and answer.
France is making a vain attempt to increase her population by awarding bonuses to those parents who will produce large families. The day is here when the Government of the United States should award bonuses to discourage large families. If the United States were to expand some of its vast appropriations on a system of bonuses to decrease or to restrict the incessant and uninterrupted advent of the hordes of the unfit, we might look forward to the future of this country with less pessimism. If the millions upon millions of dollars which are now expended in the care and maintenance of those who in all kindness should never have been brought into this world were converted to a system of bonuses to unfit parents, paying them to refrain from further parenthood, and continuing to pay them while they controlled their procreative faculties, this would not only be a profitable investment, but the salvation of American civilizations. If we could, by such a system of awards or bribes or whatever you choose to call it, discourage the reproduction of the obviously unfit, we would be lightening the economic and social burden now hindering the progress of the fit, and taking the first sensible step toward the solution of one of the most menacing problems of the American democracy. It is not too late to begin.
From the moment this gathering was planned, it has been my deepest desire that this Sixth International Conference, brief as it must necessarily be, might be made a real turning point in the never ending battle for human emancipation. Let us, all of us from other countries and from other fields, aim to convert these few crowded hours into an assembly of world importance. Let us aim to carry on the great tradition of honesty, courage, and bravery which is so nobly personified for us in the figure of our president,Charles Vickery Drysdale. Let us express our innermost convictions. Let us not fear opposition, nor the sharp clash of opinion. Apathy, not opposition, is the only real enemy of truth. And it is truth that has brought all of us here together. Let none of us be afraid to express his truth, to bring it in to play in this Conference, for we must not forget that it is the truth which is going to set us free. I hope we do arouse opposition. For in arousing opposition, we are killing apathy and lethargy. It is my hope that this Conference will be instrumental in lighting and spreading the fire of truths so illuminating they cannot be extinguished.
You, Dr. Drysdale, and you--delegates from older and wiser countries than this; you do not wear decorations or medals. But I know that all of you hide the scars of wounds won in our never-ending warfare for the emancipation of the human race. I welcome you. And to all of you, my fellow citizens, who have so generously responded to our call and have co-operated with us in our effort to make this conference of international as well as national significance I extend the warmest welcome of the American Birth Control League. And I know that all of you join me in welcoming to the presidency of the Sixth International Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conference our President, Charles Vickery Drysdale.
This is the first of a six-part series. Only five articles have been located. For the second article, see "A Better Race Through Birth Control," Nov. 1923; for the third article see "Woman and Birth Control,", Dec. 1923; for the fifth article see "Birth Control in China and Japan,", Feb. 1924 and for the sixth and last, see "The Birth Control Movement in 1923," Apr. 1924.
No great problem affecting the welfare of nations and races has been so misinterpreted and misunderstood, even by men who consider themselves well informed, as that of population and Birth Control. Advocates of Birth Control do not ask merely for assent and approval. They demand investigation and understanding as the initial steps toward support of and adherence to their doctrine.
Much of the opposition to Birth Control has had its source among clergymen and other professional moralists. This ecclesiastic opposition is the more surprising in view of the fact that the only true begetter of the whole Birth Control movement was Robert Malthus, himself a clergyman of the Church of England. He advocated prudential checks which called for the most austere morality. Our clerical opponents also ignore the fact that many of the most noted champions of Birth Control today are clergymen. The most distinguished example is the Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral, London, the Very Reverend William Ralph Inge.
The backbone of the Birth Control movement, from the time that Malthus first published his epoch-making An Essay on Population, has been essentially Anglo-Saxon. John Stuart Mill, Francis Place, Matthew Arnold, Thomas Huxley and our own great men-- Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Robert G. Ingersoll, all spoke openly in favor of the control of population. Today such thinkers and writers as H. G. Wells, Harold Cox (Editor of the Edinburgh Review) Arnold Bennett, Dean Inge, William Archer, Havelock Ellis, Gilbert Murray, Bertrand Russell, John Maynard Keynes (Editor of the The Nation and Athenaeum,> E. W. McBride, and Lord Dawson (the King’s Physician) and innumerable others in Great Britain speak openly and valiantly for Birth Control.
The present movement in this country must not be confused with the Neo-Malthusian movement in Great Britain and on the Continent of Europe. In England the Neo-Malthusian League was the direct outcome of the celebrated trial of Charles Bradlaugh and Mrs. Annie Besant, who had openly and in the face of the authorities distributed among the English poor thousands upon thousands of copies of pamphlet by a Boston physician, Dr. Knowlton, entitled “The Fruits of Philosophy”--a pamphlet originally published in 1833 in this country. The Neo-Malthusian League, sponsored by those valiant pioneers, Charles and George Drysdale and Dr. Alice Vickery, soon spread its influence to all parts of the Continent. In Holland its doctrines were openly put into practice, and fifty-three Birth Control clinics, approved by the Dutch Government, have been conducted there with great success for forty years.
The Birth Control movement, which has now absorbed the earlier Neo-Malthusian movement, originated in New York, just a decade ago. While the Neo-Malthusians based their propaganda on Malthus’s theory of Population and earnestly discussed the scientific aspects of the question, the slogan “Birth Control” was put forward in my little paper of advanced feminism, Woman Rebel, and was used as the battle cry of fundamental rights in the fight for the emancipation of the working woman. The response was so immediate and overwhelming that a league was formed--the first Birth Control League in the world.
With the flame-like ardor of pioneers we did not at first realize the full scope of our campaign. At that time I knew nothing of Malthus, nothing of the courageous and desperate battle waged by the Drysdales in England, Rutgers in Holland, G. Hardy and Paul Robin in France, for this century-old doctrine. I was merely thinking of the poor mothers of the East side who had so poignantly begged me for relief, in order that the children they already had brought into the world might have a chance to grow into strong and stalwart Americans. It was almost impossible to believe that the dissemination of knowledge easily available to intelligent and thoughtful parents of the well-to-do classes was actually a criminal act, proscribed not only by State laws but by Federal laws as well.
My paper was suppressed. I was arrested and indicted in the Federal court. But, owing to the vigorous protests of the public and to an appeal sent by a number of distinguished English writers and thinkers, the case against me was finally dismissed.
Meanwhile Birth Control, as the slogan of the movement, not only spread through the American press from coast to coast, but immediately gained currency in Great Britain. Succinctly and with telling brevity these two words sum up our whole philosophy. Birth Control does not mean contraception indiscriminately practised. It means the release and cultivation of the better elements in our society, and the gradual suppression, elimination and eventual extinction, of defective stocks--those human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization.
Birth Control aims to introduce into the creation of the next generation of American citizens the sound and scientific principles observed by the gardener and the agriculturist. We must cultivate the human garden by proper spacing, by improving the quality of our precious crop of children by methods of intensive cultivation and not by the production of mere numbers. As long as we wilfully, as a nation, waste the most precious resources we have--our child life-- let us hold our tongues about the dangers of Birth Control. The advocates of Birth Control place a higher value on the life of a child than do its opponents. We want every child born in this country to bring with it the heritage of health and fine vitality. This is the true wealth of our United States.
The first Birth Control clinic in this country was established in Brownsville, Brooklyn, in 1916. It had but a brief existence. It was raided by the police and its founders sentenced to jail as petty miscreants but it is not without significance that, since then, there has been an immense recrudescence of interest in the persistent problem of population, and that a number of new efforts have been made--notably by A. M. Carr-Sanders, to reinterpret the thesis for which so massive a foundation was laid by that obscure clergyman, Thomas Malthus. The whole current of opinion in regard to the question has advanced, not merely in this country and in England, but all over the world. The results of the intelligence tests, the menace of indiscriminate immigration, the fertility of the unfit, and the increasing burden upon the healthful and vigorous members of American society of the delinquent and dependent classes, together with the growing danger of the abnormal fecundity of the feeble-minded, all emphasize the necessity of clear-sightedness and courage in facing the problem, and throw new light on the possibilities of Birth Control as a practical and powerful weapon against national and racial decadence.
We are not, I must repeat, trying to force this doctrine upon the American public. Every day thousands of poor mothers are begging us for help, fully conscious that their sacred duty to the children they have already brought into the world demands that they shall not assume further parental responsibilities which they cannot fulfil. It is in answer to those unfortunate and conscripted mothers that we have banded ourselves together in the American Birth Control League.
(To be continued)In that “open letter to biographers” which he dashed off upon the completion of his Study of British Genius, Havelock Ellis pointed out that many biographies were often merely "slices of misplaced history,", and warned all future biographers to study the roots of the lives they recorded. "After the age of twenty, your task becomes easier and more obvious; after thirty, if so far you have fulfilled that task, what is there further left to tell? The rest is but the liberation of a mighty spring, the slow running down of energy. The man recedes to give place to his deeds, whether such deeds be the assault of great fortresses, or the escalade of mighty sentences."
Houston Peterson, who has valiantly undertaken to write the life of Havelock Ellis* who at sixty-nine is still keenly sensitive to the dangers of this difficult art, has evidently taken to heart this warning. The result is that, intentionally or not, the first chapters, dealing with the hereditary background, with the childhood, youth and early manhood of his subject are far more important to our fuller understanding of this life-giving spirit than, say, the final five chapters, which, in our humble opinion, seem to rely too completely upon quotations from the works of Ellis himself--quotations significant in themselves, but revealing nothing new to any of us who have drunk deep at the spring of wisdom which Havelock Ellis has liberated to irrigate the arid wastes of our Anglo-Saxon world.
But before proffering even these tentative criticisms of Mr. Peterson’s significant biography, we must first express unqualified admiration for the thoroughness which he has documented himself, and for the keen incisive scholarship which has gone into the creation of this book. Instead of carping on its limitations, let us rejoice in the painstaking preparation, the indefatigable research, and the skilful reconstruction of a life, fascinating and unique in every phase, which this volume reveals to us.
The heredity, the birth, the development of the boy and his early blossoming into a grave maturity, are all recounted with a distinct narrative gift, and practically never with any slurring of the significant steps onward. The excerpts from the early notebooks and diaries, which Havelock Ellis began at the age of ten, are especially interesting. They reveal the remarkable precocity of genius. His admirations and his enthusiasms during his adolescence were indeed immature, but already he was able to articulate and express his thoughts with unclouded clearness.
Mr. Peterson makes us realize that this son of a British sea-captain inherited much of the valiant courage of a race of mariners. Resolutely he dared to voyage alone through uncharted seas of forbidden research. With the uncanny self-reliance of genius, he decided upon this life-voyage when he was a lad scarcely past sixteen. “He would explore the dangerous ocean of sex and perhaps find for humanity an Earthly Paradise!” So exclaims Mr. Peterson, in relating that early decision of young Henry Havelock Ellis, adding Ellis’s own testimony to the effect that he never deviated form this adolescent resolution: “ . . . in all that I have done, that resolve has never been very far from my thoughts.” In 1926 Ellis commented further: “I am sure that I never for a moment anticipated that my efforts in that direction would arouse so wide an echo in the world.”
The far-flung schemes of adolescence, the biographer sagely point out, are often little more than laughable, but here was the decision of a sixteen-year-old, destined to be carried out through a long lifetime. The only satisfactory explanation, I believe, can be discovered when we realize that, like all authentic geniuses, the lonely sixteen-year-old youth, strolling under the feathery eucalyptuses of an Australian village, had developed intellectually and spiritually far beyond what is ordinary considered normal.
Particularly interesting is Mr. Peterson’s account of Ellis’s early perusal of George Drysdale’s Elements of Social Science, and the support the youth found in that anonymous book for his own grave convictions regarding the importance of sex, and his conversion, before his twentieth year, to the doctrine of contraception.
Without wasting space to go further into the many fascinating details unearthed by this industrious biographer, let us recommend Houston Peterson’s book at once as a sine qua non to everyone who looks upon Havelock Ellis as one of the outstanding heroes of western civilization. Having done this, and having thanked Mr. Peterson for his generous recognition of ourselves and the BIRTH CONTROL REVIEW as a source of certain materials, we may turn to a consideration of certain phases of this biography which please us less than the specific chapters we have noted.
Our criticism is not directed specifically toward this book; it is to all biographers which seek to portray a living man. Evidently in the preparation of such an interpretation as the present, the biographer finds himself brought into much closer personal contact with his subject than when, in the first flush of enthusiasm, his decision to undertake a biography comes upon him. As he prepares his literary portrait, he is like a painter who must study the anatomy of his sitter, who must approach so closely that he sees details and defects and finally, as so often happens, temporarily loses his vision fo the inner animating spirit--of the movement behind that “liberation of a mighty spring.” The successful biographer must regain the thrill of his initial inspiration--he must not only study every phase of his subject, but must master his own relation to that subject.
With all his competence, and masterly scholarship, I cannot escape the feeling that somehow or other Houston Peterson has failed to sustain the stability of his relationship to Havelock Ellis. Facts he gives us in abundance--details of his life, his friends, his predilections. But after all, we are not so much interested in the elderly literary man who lives in Brixton, and does his own cooking, as we are in that living and eternal spirit who seems to dwell serenely above the limitations of time and space, whose radiance, like that of the life-giving sun, has penetrated beyond oceans and continents, and has performed miracles in creating hope and joy where despair and melancholy had existed before. I am not trying to indulge in poetic fancy. Before the advent of the radio, before the achievements of aviation, the message of Havelock Ellis--“broadcasted” despite the many obstacles put in its way--has been “picked up” in far-away corners of the earth, as innumerable letters from obscure people have testified. It is almost as though--to continue our analogy- provided with a receiving set, these sensitive minds had “picked up” a distant station, and from it had received a deep and beneficent message of human salvation. Those who have had this experience can never look upon Havelock Ellis as a mere mortal. Through him, as through Saint Francis, is irradiated the wisdom of divinity.
Houston Peterson will undoubtedly laugh at this “pseudo-mysticism.” But those of us who find in Ellis a god can never be quite satisfied with a realistic portrait, which, from a distance, slightly diminishes his true stature.
*Havelock Ellis: Philosopher of Love. By Houston Peterson. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1928.
This article was reprinted by the American Birth Control League in a flyer with two other newspaper articles as "Real Facts About Birth Control," ca. April 1923 (Margaret Sanger Papers Microfim,Library of Congress LCM 129:580).
After ten years of incessant agitation and activity the much-discussed question of Birth Control has invaded the legislative halls of Albany. A bill intended to amend existing laws so that New York physicians may be authorized to disseminate contraceptive advice has been introduced. There will be a hearing on the matter in the Assembly Chamber on April 10. If enacted, we may hope for the beginning of a new era of social welfare and racial hygiene. But whatever the outcome, this bill means that Birth Control is no longer looked upon, even in the judicial and legislative field, as a topic "obscene and indecent," worthy only of ribald jest and suggestive leer.
No other great problem affecting the welfare of nation and race has been more misinterpreted and misunderstood, even by Americans who consider themselves well informed. Advocates of this doctrine do not beg for mere assent or approval. They ask for investigation and understanding, as the initial step toward support and adherence to their doctrines.
Much of the opposition to Birth Control has had its source among clergymen and other professional moralists. This ecclesiastic opposition is amazing in view of the fact that the "onlie true begetter" of the whole Birth Control movement, Robert Malthus, was himself a clergyman of the Church of England. He advocated " prudential checks" on the grounds of austere morality. Our clerical opponents also ignore the fact that many of the most noted champions of Birth Control today are clergymen. The most noteworthy example is that of the distinguished Dean of St. Paul's, London, William Ralph Inge.
There is a confusion in the public mind concerning the origin of the present movement, which must be distinguished from the so-called Neo-Malthusian movement of Great Britain and the Continent. The Neo-Malthusian League was the direct outcome of the celebrated trial in London in 1877 of Charles Bradlaugh and Mrs. Annie Besant, who had frankly admitted distributing among the English poor thousands upon thousands of copies of the pamphlet of a Boston physician, Dr. Knowlton, entitled "Fruits of Philosophy," originally published in this country in 1833. The Neo-Malthusian League, sponsored by those valiant pioneers, Charles and George Drysdale and Dr. Alice Vickery, soon spread to all countries of the Continent, and its doctrines were put into practice in Holland, where fifty-three Birth Control clinics, approved by the Dutch Government, have been conducted with great success for forty years.
The Birth Control movement, which has now absorbed the earlier Neo-Malthusian movement, originated right here in New York just a decade ago. While the Neo-Malthusians based their propaganda on the broad general basis of Malthus's theory of population, the expression "Birth Control" was devised in my little paper of advance feminism, The Woman Rebel, as one of the fundamental rights of the emancipation of working women. The response to this idea of Birth Control was so immediate and so overwhelming that a league was formed--the first Birth Control league in the world.
With all the flame-like ardor of pioneers we did not at first realize the full scope of this fundamental discovery. At that time I knew nothing of Malthus, nothing of the courageous and desperate battle waged by the Drysdales in England, Rutgers in Holland, of G. Hardy and Paul Robin in France, for this century-old doctrine. I was merely thinking of the poor mothers of congested districts of the East Side who had so poignantly begged me for relief, in order that the children they had already brought into the world might have a chance to grow into strong and stalwart Americans. It was almost impossible to believe that the dissemination of knowledge easily available to the intelligent and thoughtful parents of the well-to-do classes was actually a criminal act, proscribed not only by State laws but by Federal as well.
My paper was suppressed. I was arrested and indicted by the Federal authorities. But owing to the vigorous protests of the public and an appeal sent by a number of distinguished English writers and thinkers, the case against me was finally abandoned. Meanwhile "Birth Control" became the slogan of the idea and not only spread through the American press from coast to coast, but immediately gained currency in Great Britain. Succinctly and with telling brevity and precision "Birth Control" summed up our whole philosophy. Birth Control is not contraception indiscriminately and thoughtlessly practiced. It means the release and cultivation of the better racial elements in our society, and the gradual suppression, elimination and eventual extirpation of defective stocks--those human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization.
In our efforts to effect the repeal of the existing laws which declare the use of contraceptive methods indecent and obscene, Birth Control advocates have been forced to battle every inch of the way. To get the matter before the Legislature of New York my path has led completely around the earth. Our effort has been to enlist the support of the best minds of every country, an object we have achieved even beyond our fondest expectations.
The backbone of the Birth Control movement has been from the time Malthus first published his epoch-making "An Essay on the Principle of Population">Principles of Population" essentially Anglo-Saxon. John Stuart Mill, Francis Place, Matthew Arnold, Thomas Huxley and our own Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Robert G. Ingersoll spoke openly in favor of control of the population. Today such thinkers and writers as H. G. Wells, Harold Cox (editor of The Edinburgh Review), Arnold Bennett, Dean Inge, William Archer, Havelock Ellis, Gilbert Murray, Bertrand Russell, John Maynard Keynes (editor of The Nation, and Lord Dawson, one of the King's physicians, and innumerable others in Great Britain speak openly and valiantly for Birth Control.
It is not without significance that since the inauguration of our agitation in 1913 there has been an immense recrudescence of interest in the persistent problem of population; and a number of new efforts, notably that of A. M. Carr-Saunders, to reinterpret the thesis so brilliantly advanced by that obscure clergyman, Malthus.
Most gratifying to the battle-scarred propagandist for Birth Control has been the awakening of the Orient. China and Japan for ages have been the notoriously overpopulated countries of the earth, the high birth rate, as always, accompanied by a high death rate, a high infant mortality rate and even acceptance of the widespread practice of infanticide. Famine, pestilence and flood have been the only checks to overpopulation in China, and these have been regarded even as a blessing by the yellow races. "Yang to meng ping" is a well-known exclamation in China--"Many men, life cheap!"
Following my sojourn in China last year, the Ladies' Journal of China, the most influential women's publication there, devoted a special edition of more than one hundred pages to the problem of Birth Control. In this paper Tzi Sang wrote: " Since Mrs. Sanger's visit, public opinion has been greatly influenced, and I understand that some educators are planning to propagate the doctrine in the interior so that our women will no longer be mere machines for breeding children. When the majority of our people know the benefits of Birth Control and believe that it is the remedy for plague, famine and war in China, then we can adopt the method of asking doctors to pass on their knowledge to women poor in health."
Set Lu, another writer in the same paper, points out that "If we study the actual situation in China we find that unconsciously the Chinese have attempted to practice Birth Control in a different way. Do we not throw away our babies?" frankly asks this writer of his compatriots. His answer is interesting: "Savages practice infanticide, but civilized people use scientific methods of prevention. Herein lies the difference between a barbarous and a civilized people. No wonder that our civilization fails to make any noticeable advance."
Both in Japan and China, as a result of my visit, and especially as the effect of the attempt upon the part of the Imperial Japanese Government to suppress Birth Control and to shut its door in my face, the subject of birth control has aroused the deepest and most widespread interest among all classes. In both these great Oriental empires the roots of a permanent Birth Control movement have struck deep in popular interest, and undoubtedly will exert a great influence toward bringing down the alarmingly high birth rates to the level of those of Western civilization. The importance, the immediate necessity of an autonomous control of the birth rate by the races of the Orient is by no one more emphatically stated than by that eloquent and picturesque writer and traveler, J. O. P. Bland.
Since the first Birth Control clinic established in this country was raided by the New York police in Brownsville some years ago, and its founders sentenced to jail as petty miscreants, the whole current of opinion has advanced, not merely in this country but throughout the world. The results of the intelligence tests, the menace of indiscriminate immigration, the fertility of the unfit and the increasing burden upon the healthful and vigorous members of American society of the delinquent and dependent classes, together with the growing danger of the abnormal fecundity of the feeble-minded, all emphasize the necessity of clear-sightedness and courageously facing the problem and the possibilities of Birth Control as a practical and feasible weapon against national and racial decadence.
With the invasion of the New York Legislature exponents of this challenging doctrine may well congratulate themselves that they have won another victory against their opponents. Whatever the outcome of the hearing on April 10, Birth Control in any event will have compelled serious attention from our legislators. If we can convince the Assemblymen and State Senators that this is a matter which concerns not merely a group of "well-meaning" feminists, but is organically bound up with the biological welfare of the whole community, we shall consider that our efforts have not been entirely in vain.
This article is the third in a four-part series of the same title. For the preceding articles, see July 1923 and August 1923; for fourth and final article see October 1923.
The revelation in modern psychology, for which we are mostly indebted to Sigmund Freud, is marked by the shifting emphasis and interest from the intellectual to the instinctive, from the descriptive to the behavioristic. It is based upon the application of scientific determination to the mental sphere. It tends to become more and more physiological and biological. It reveals the human mind as subject to natural automatic processes, with sex as the unconscious dynamic and motivating force in all the more important phases of human behavior. Drysdale was not merely a vague precursor of this modern point of view. Though his contribution in this field is slight, he realized the absolute interdependence of bodily and mental health, and cried out for a creative and illuminating psychology which might free individuals from their invisible chains. It was because of his insistence that this realm must be studied as scientifically as the human body, and his belief that mental science must be free of all theoretical and metaphysical tradition, that he may be called one of the true founders of the new psychology.
The spiritual and the physical life of man, he pointed out, are organically united. The one cannot be understood without the other. The physical enters equally with the psychic element in every human question. Insanity and all mental disease, of which there is a particular diseased bodily state to correspond with each one; should all come, he felt, under the patient investigation of the scientist. Drysdale foresaw the present development in psychology in indicating that the true analyst must be familiar not only with physical habits, but with mental habits also. Just as psycho-analysts are able to substantiate and illuminate their discoveries by examples drawn from literature and art, history and biography, so Drysdale pointed out that in studying human nature the scientists, to understand the general cause of health and disease, must become acquainted with the world of creative expression. True scientists "should seek to enter into the thoughts of religious and moral thinkers; for all of them are in their own sphere physicians, and their every thought has a physical and moral import." To make any advance in this field, he pointed out, perseverance and the combined effort of many workers are needed. Medicine must be combined with other sciences, and, until the public is as well informed on physical as on psychic subjects and as thoroughly conversant with their paramount importance, we cannot expect any true progress.
He also saw the advance of the method of analysis, in encouraging the patient to reveal himself. Any true understanding of mental disease or unbalance, he felt would be barren and incomplete without this self-revelation, just as morality and religion were barren and incomplete before men began to think on these subjects for themselves. He deplored the fact that very few medical men had ever thought of allowing their patients to speak for themselves in their diagnoses. Intent on arriving at physical facts and physical conclusions, physicians of his day paid apparently little attention to the mental state of the patient, which, as he pointed out, forms no less a part of the disease. In questioning a patient they sought to bring him as soon as possible to the physical point, "checking his digressions and the out-pouring of his suffering heart." On the other hand, the psychology of that artificial era was as barren and unfruitful, as we could well expect it to be. It limited itself, as any reader of the old textbooks remembers, to descriptive analysis of intellectual and mental processes, with no reference to the unconscious physical or instinctive behavior of the individual.
Drysdale was one of the first to see that these two things, to be of any real benefit to humanity, must be united and synthesized into a new science. The modern analyst has to base his therapy upon the ever-increasing revelations the individual is able to make. Drysdale foresaw some such method as this by speaking of the value of the patient's digressions, confessions and outpourings. He realized that the physician and science were losing in a great degree not only by the silencing of the feelings, but also by their lack of insight into the psychology of health and disease. This, he insisted, is as valuable a part of medical knowledge as any other, and as important for the prevention and treatment of disease and the advancement of health. Every physical state has its peculiar mental one, and to discover what this is, and the influence on the mind of all bodily states, such as hysteria and insanity, is a most essential branch of medicinal science. This psychology of health and disease is to be obtained only by a study of every individual's mind compared with his bodily condition, and a full knowledge of this can be arrived at only by his own revelations. We want a whole man to sympathize with, not merely a body or a soul.
"How few subjective records of physical life are to be found in history!" he exclaimed. "Among the numerous autobiographies that have been written by so many noble human beings, who has given us any but the most meager details of his physical life, even though its history may have been the most extraordinary, the most sadly eventful of the twin parts of his nature? Hence do all these men present to us most imperfect pictures. Through all the tissues of their loves we do not know what physical threads have been interwoven, and therefore we can pass no satisfactory judgment on themselves or their actions. But how immensely does the world lose by not having the fruits of their physical as well as their moral experiences! Had their penetrating minds been as keenly directed to the physical goods and evils they encountered as to the mental ones, had they used, each in his own case, the subtle insight which personal experience alone gives, would the world have been in as wretched state as it is, with so low a physical standard that health is not health, that there is a skeleton in every house, and a disease, secret or open, gnawing at the vitals of almost every one of us! Would we still be stumbling on from age to age in the same erroneous tracks, and falling one after the other, like sheep, into the same physical pitfalls? . . .
"If we will not remain thus ignorant, we must imbue our minds equally with physical knowledge. We must study the language of the body, a language not confined to an age or a nation, but wide and universal as humanity, in order that we may attain to a higher self-consciousness."
He reverts time after time, in the "Elements of Social Science," to this necessity of a new psychology. One chapter is entitled "Subjective Medicine," another "Mental Disease," while another chapter on hysteria seems to me to be fundamentally in agreement with the epoch-making study of Freud, published in 1895, the first book of the great Viennese pioneer. In his chapter on "Mental Disease," George Drysdale points out that the mind, exactly like the body, operates according to fixed natural laws. Sorrow in the mind corresponds to pain in the body. In Freud's first book "Studien über Hysterie" the point was made that "sexuality plays a leading part in the causation of hysteria." When we recall that Charcot was indifferent to the psychic side of his cases, that he regarded the recognition of a sex element in the causation of disease as degrading, and that Freud and Breuer in 1895 first launched the doctrine of sexual suppression, which is now the foundation pier upon which the whole structure of the new psychology rests, we can gain some sense of Drysdale's importance as the true pioneer of the whole modern outlook.
Verification of this fact is to be strikingly found in his chapter on mental disease and hysteria. He makes the unqualified statement that a morbid sexual state--both physical and mental--lies at the root of hysteria. Compare this with the statement made by Freud in his first book that "the great majority of serious neuroses in women arise from the marriage bed." With none of the equipment of modern psychology and modern science at his command. Drysdale nevertheless reveals a definite and concrete insight, stated in unequivocal terms, concerning the hysterical and neurotic character. He asks us to analyse the peculiar mental and physical phenomena of hysteria, and to consider the disturbing influences which the systematic denial and repression of natural desire must have on the delicate and susceptible girl. He says it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that this suppression is the main cause of the disease: "The natural emotions are checked and thrown back upon themselves, and it is inevitable that they should become disordered and their disorder gradually implicate the whole nervous system." How closely he anticipates the very phraseology of the twentieth century psychology is indicated in this striking statement: "The stream of feeling, instead of being allowed to flow onward in its natural channel in the light of day, gladdening and fertilizing all around, is pent up in the gloomy secret caverns of the mind, to cause there a deluge and desolation. That, which should have been the young girl's pride and delight, becomes her shame and torture; she must conceal and studiously repress her eager and beautiful emotions; and can we wonder that bewilderment and timidity and impotence result? Nature cannot bear this constant state of slavery, and ever and anon she shows in the hysterical convulsions, in the wild delirious excitement of nymphomania, that she will not be repressed." He realized that an age of spiritual Puritanism and repression was responsible for the inevitable spread of hysteria and the increasing numbers of neurotic women. He saw that rank and morbid growth of sexual passions was the outgrowth of these suppressions. Happiness is a sign of moral health; joy and sorrow, according to Drysdale, are our guides to truth showing us where we are right and where wrong in the exploration of our being. He saw long before the advance of modern psychology that the mental element plays as important a part as any other in the causation of physical disease; and to cure the latter, it is just as requisite to apply remedies to the mental as to the bodily state. To do this, he said, we must first be able to recognize what is the mental disease and then to treat it according to the principles of mental health. Our ignorance of the laws of our minds has involved us, body and soul, in ruin. People pride themselves on their woes, and glory in their contempt of health. Even to-day we have not outgrown this pride in sorrow and disease.
But Drysdale insisted, like the most advanced of modern psycho-biologists, that the human body in its interacting mental and physical aspects is the touchstone of moral truth; that its health or disease is "tangible and demonstrable." We see that joy and all the allied feelings are linked most closely with the physical health and wellbeing, whereas sorrow and all its miseries cause derangement and ill-health of the bodily functions in a measure exactly proportional to their intensity and continuance." He saw that the great need of his time, as it is still of our own, was to attain a true idea of what is health and what is disease. The physician of mind and body cannot effect a cure if there is lurking in the physical or mental system, a disease or derangement which is not recognized, and which may be at the bottom of all the symptoms. He saw that the true origin of a great many physical diseases is in reality to be found in depressed or anxious state of mind. In this way he preceded the modern theories of complexes and suppressions, of morbid fears and compulsions. Thus he urged upon physicians to pay equal attention to mental disorder and to seek the true roots of physical and mental unbalance.
How wide-spread the action of conventional sexual suppression and repression as restrictive and enslaving agencies upon human nature, was fully realized by Drysdale. He saw this expressed in a morbid curiosity caused by the dense ignorance and inhibitions, which gave rise to the demand for prurient and stupid books published to gratify the sexually starved; in the degradation and corruption of minds; in the infantilism and underdevelopment of men and women. Because of this childish curiosity and ignorant imagination; because of the degraded feeling of mystery, shame or disgust, varied only by vulgar pretences of knowingness, the society of his time was grossly perverted on all sexual matters.
Drysdale insisted that the laws of mind are not one whit less definite and invaluable than those of the body. He saw that if psychology was to make any advance it must give up its metaphysical and supernatural assumptions. There is no thought, no emotion, no instinct within us that is not subject to definite mechanisms, as certain and invariable as physical or chemical reactions. He realized that the psychology of his day was still in a rudimentary and even stagnant state. "Its very first fundamental axioms are not admitted, but all is involved in a paradoxical mystic supernatural obscurity."
It was his idea that the two great natural guides to the understanding of mental health and disease are joy and sorrow, corresponding to the feelings of pain and pleasure in the body. The ordinary standards of moral excellence were obviously unhealthy, according to Drysdale. Many of the characters most admired by Victorian moralists were to him infected with disease. The great crying need in mind as well as body, he insisted, is not humility nor spiritual sentiment, but self-reliance, expressive energy and an active enjoyment of life--in a word, health. A true enjoyment of moral and spiritual nature, Drysdale claimed, could only be obtained by the comparative examination of the minds of all living beings and by tracing our faculties upward from their simple expressions in the lowest animals to the very most complicated state in humans. Until this is done, he was convinced that there could be no real psychology. "The science of comparative psychology," he wrote, "though it has yet scarcely an existence, opposed as it has been by our narrow conception of the human mind, will ultimately be recognized as equally indispensable with comparative anatomy in order to attain a true knowledge of our nature." In this statement we find in Drysdale a striking anticipation of the new psychology with its studies of myth, folk-lore and primitive man.