C. W. Saleeby

“ The real politics, the real economy, the real political economy, are the questions of the birth-rate and the wheat supply—the relations not between man and man, or class and class, or sex and sex, but mankind, living and dying and being born, and the world in which he has to live. The time is near at hand when the first conditions of national life will be recognized as they have never been since the dawn of modern industrialism. The products of men's labour and women's labour will be appraised and paid for in proportion to their real value, their strength or availableness for life. ”

“ Here, then, is the colossal paradox: absolute and literal continuity of life, every cell from a preceding cell throughout the ages—omnis cellula e cellula; yet three times in every century the living and only wealth of nations is reduced to dust, and is raised up again from helpless infancy. Where else is such catastrophic continuity?
Each individual enters the world in a fashion the dramatic and sensational character of which can be realised by none who have not witnessed it; and in a few years the individual dies, scarcely less dramatically as a rule, and sometimes more so. ”

“ Are we willing to consider motherhood as a business, a form of commercial exchange? Are the cares and duties of the mother, her travail and her love, commodities to be exchanged for bread?
"It is revolting so to consider them; and if we dare face our own thoughts, and force them to their logical conclusion, we shall see that nothing could be more repugnant to human feeling, or more socially and individually injurious, than to make motherhood a trade." ”

“ If society be organised so that these are factors of more survival-value than the disinterested search for truth, or mother-love, or the power to create great poetry or music—then, according to the inevitable and universal law of the survival of the fittest, our parasites will oust our poets and our poisoners our philosophers. These things have happened and may happen again at any time. It does not matter that the good thing, in virtue of survival-value then superior, has been evolved. Nature never gives a final verdict in favour of good or bad but only and always in favour of the fit. ”

“ Who will question that, according to this conception of education, such a thing as the higher education of women must be condemned as inadequate? No more than a man is woman a mere intellect incarnate. Her emotional nature is all-important; it is indeed the highest thing in the Universe so far as we know. The scheme of education which ignores its existence, and much more than fails to provide the best environment for it, is condemnable. ”

“ If the race degenerates—through, say, the selection of the worst for parenthood—the time will come when its heritage is too much for it. The pearls of the ancestral art are now cast before swine, and are trampled on: statues, temples, books are destroyed or burnt or lost. If an Empire has been built, the degenerate race cannot sustain it. There is no wealth but life: and if the quality of the life fails, neither battleships nor libraries nor symphonies nor anything else will save a nation. ”

“ The greater the seniority of the husband, the more widowhood will there be in a society. Every economic tendency, every demand for a higher standard of life, every aggravation for the struggle for existence, every increment of the burden of the defective-minded, tending to increase the man's age at marriage, which, on the whole, involves also increasing his seniority—contributes to the amount of widowhood in a nation. ”

“ Need one apologise for declaring again, that we require a new political economy which teaches that gold is for the purchase of life, and not life for the purchase of gold. For the public outrage under discussion, whereby an untold measure of life, present and to come, “breathing and to be,” is to be destroyed and defiled for a squabble over shillings, one can adequately quote only the words of Romeo to the apothecary: “There is thy gold; worse poison to men's souls, doing more murders in this loathsome world, than those poor compounds that thou may'st not sell.” ”

“ At any rate, to those who worship and live for the past, we may offer this alternative: let them work for what will be. Perhaps the reward will be as real as any that the worship of what is not can offer. And, reward or no reward, it is something to have an ideal, something to believe that earth may become heavenly, and that, in some real sense which we can dimly perceive, we may be part—must be part, indeed—of that great day which is in our keeping, and which it is our privilege to have some share in shaping. ”

“ Do you regard the safeguarding and the ennoblement of motherhood as the proximate end of all political action, the end through which the ultimate ends, the production and recognition of human worth, can alone be attained; do you realise that marriage is invaluable because it makes for the enthronement of motherhood as nothing else ever did or can; do you realise that, metaphors about State maternity notwithstanding, the State has neither womb nor breasts, these most reverend and divine of all vital organs being the appanage of the individual mother alone? ”

“ But when motherhood is concerned the monetary question becomes worthy of the adjective economic, so often prostituted, for the making of future life depends upon the provision of adequate means. The whole essence of motherhood is that it is a dedication of the present to the future. Every mother is in the position of the inventor or the poet or the musician for whose work the present makes no demand and no payment. The future is being served, but the future is not there to pay. The rights of mothers are the rights of the future, and its claims upon the present. ”

“ We shall raise a generation which looks upon the ordinary money-changing politician as an impudent public nuisance, and the brutal, blood-stained Imperialist, shouting about the Empire which his very existence almost suffices to condemn, whilst he battens on the cannibal sale of alcoholic poison to babies and the mothers of future babies, as the very type of those traitors—they of its own household—who have helped to destroy every Empire in history. ”

“ Men are to be heard who say that this is all nonsense; that it is natural for women to surrender themselves, that motherhood is a splendid reward, and that they are handsomely paid as well in material things. But how many men would be willing to marry on the conditions with which marriage is offered to a woman? How many men would be willing to surrender their possession of themselves to an owner for life, so that at no future hour can they have the right to privacy? ”

“ They outnumber us as the ocean outweighs a raindrop; to avert evil from one of them is as much as to relieve evil in one of us,—how much more to prevent the misery of five in the next generation, fifty in the next and unnumbered hosts beyond? To serve the future of the race is not to benefit a fiction: the men and women of a hundred and a thousand years hence will be as real as we. ”

“ Gilman is on the other. Man's apparent economic independence of women is as complete a myth as women's projected economic independence of men. In the last resort, when we come down to realities, and remember that both men and women are mortal, and that unless they are replaced, everything ends, we see that the introduction of the word economic into this question simply serves to confuse thought, just as the older political economy confused thought and laid itself open to the mercilessly magnificent attacks of Ruskin. Economy is literally the law of the house or the home—where life begins. ”

“ The doctrine of organic evolution, and of the age-long ascent of man through the selection of the fittest (who have, on the whole, been the best) for parenthood, is one not of despair but of hope. Exactly half a century ago it struck horror into the minds of our predecessors. Man, then, is only an erected ape, they thought—as if any historical doctrine, however true, could shorten the dizzy distance to which man has climbed since he was simian: and man being an ape, they thought his high dreams palpably vain. ”