Havelock Ellis

“ France, the land of reason, echoed, only forty years ago, with the mad cry, "À Berlin!" England, the friend of the small nationalities, jubilantly, with even an air of heroism, crushed under foot the little South African Republics, and hounded down every Englishman who withstood the madness of the crowd. The great, free intelligent people of the United States went to war against Spain with a childlike faith in the preposterous legend of the blowing up of the Maine. ”

“ All the sacred citadels, the glories of humanity,—Jerusalem and Athens, Rome and Constantinople,—have been ravaged by war, and, in every case, their ruin has been a disaster that can never be repaired. If we turn to the minor glories of more modern ages, the special treasure of England has been its parish churches, a treasure of unique charm in the [337] world and the embodiment of the people's spirit: to-day in their battered and irreparable condition they are the monuments of a Civil War waged all over the country with ruthless religious ferocity. ”

“ At the present stage of civilization we are somewhat nearer to Shakespeare and Goethe than to the salmon. We must set our ideals towards a very different direction from that which commends itself to our Salmonidian sciolists. "Increase and multiply" was the legendary injunction uttered on the threshold of an empty world. It is singularly out of place in an age in which the earth and the sea, if not indeed the very air, swarm with countless myriads of undistinguished and indistinguishable human creatures, until the beauty of the world is befouled and the glory of the Heavens bedimmed. ”

“ Socialism has inherited the maxim, which Rousseau, the uncompromising Individualist, placed at the front of his Social Contract: "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." There is nothing to be done but to strike off the chains and organize society on a social basis. Men are not this or that; they are what they have been made. Make the social conditions right, says the thorough-going Socialist, and individuals will be all that we could desire them to be. Not poverty alone, but disease, lunacy, prostitution, criminality are all the results of bad social and economic conditions. ”

“ It is said by some who disclaim any tendency to Socialism, that what they desire is not the State-ownership of the means of production, but State-regulation. Let the State, in the interests of the community, keep a firm control over the individualistic exploitation of capital, let it tax capital as far as may be desirable in the interests of the community. But beyond this, capital, as well as land, is sacred. The distinction thus assumed is not, however, valid. The very people who make this distinction are often enthusiastic advocates of an enlarged navy and a more powerful army. ”

“ One suspects that these people are themselves of those stocks over whose fate they grieve. Let us, therefore, mercifully leave them to manure their dead roses in peace. They will soon be forgotten. The world is for ever dying. The world is also for ever bursting with life. The spring song of Sursum corda easily overwhelms the dying autumnal wails of the Dies Iræ.
It would thus appear that, even apart from any deliberate restraint from procreation, as a family attains the highest culture and refinement which civilization can yield, that family tends to die out, at all events in the male line. ”

“ But what is the use, unless side by side with the introduction of such methods, corresponding reforms are not introduced in legislation, in religion, in public opinion? The only object of education is to conform the child's reason to that of the community. But if there is no corresponding reform in the community, by training the child to reason you are merely training him to see the absurdity of opinions and customs consecrated by the seal of sacred authority, public or legislative, and you are inspiring him with contempt of them. ”

“ Only in such spacious and pure air is it possible for the individual to perfect himself, as a rose becomes perfect, according to Dante's beautiful simile, [261] in order that he may spread abroad for others the fragrance that has been generated within him. If one thinks of it, that seems a truism, yet, even in this twentieth century, how few, how very few, there are who know it!
This is why we cannot have too much Individualism, we cannot have too much Socialism. They play into each other's hands. To strengthen one is to give force to the other. ”

“ It is abhorrent to the English mind that even the most degraded specimens of humanity should be compulsorily deprived of rights over their own persons, even when it is claimed that the deprivation of such rights might be for the benefit of the community. In no country, perhaps, is the prostitute so free to parade the streets in the exercise of her profession as in England, and in no country is public opinion so intolerant of even the suspicion of a mistake by the police in the exercise of that very limited control over prostitutes which they possess. ”

“ The child, we thus have to realize, is, from the educational point of view of social hygiene, a being of dual nature, who needs ministering to on both sides. On the one hand he demands the key to an imaginative paradise which one day he must leave, bearing away with him, at the best, only a dim and haunting memory of its beauty. On the other hand he possesses eager aptitudes on which may be built up concrete knowledge and the sense of human relationships, to serve as a firm foundation when the period of adolescent development and discipline at length arrives. ”

“ Japan, entering on the road we have nearly passed through, in which the perpetual clash of a high birth-rate and a high death-rate involves social disorder and misery, has flung to the winds the loftier ideals it once pursued so successfully and has lost its fine æsthetic perceptions, its insight into the most delicate secrets of the soul. ”

“ Hunger—that is to say, what we call "economic causes"—has, because it is the more widespread and constant, though not necessarily the more imperious instinct, produced nearly all the great zoological revolutions, including, as we have seen, the rise and fall of that phase of human evolution dominated by mother-law. Yet love has, in the form of sexual selection, even before we reach the vertebrates, moulded races to the ideal of the female; and reproduction is always the chief end of nutrition which hunger waits on, the supreme aim of life everywhere. ”

“ As we learn to look on the facts from the only sound standpoint of heredity, our anger or contempt for a failing and erring individual has to give way to the kindly but firm control of a weakling. If the children's teeth have been set on edge it is because the parents have eaten sour grapes.
If, however, we certainly cannot bring legal or even moral force to compel everyone to maintain such detailed registers of himself, his ancestral stocks, and his offspring—to say nothing of inducing him to make them public—there is something that we can do. ”

“ At the present time two great tendencies are visible in our social organization. On the one hand, the threads of social life are growing closer, and organization, as regards the simple and common means of subsistence, is increasing. On the other hand, as regards the things that most closely concern the individual person, the sphere of freedom is being perpetually enlarged. Instead of every man digging a well for his own use and at his own free pleasure, perhaps in a graveyard or a cesspool, we consent to the distribution of water by a central executive. ”

“ At the centre of every social agglomeration, however vast, however small, lies the social unit of the family of which each individual is by himself either unable to live or unable to reproduce, unable, that is to say, to gratify the two fundamental needs of hunger and love.
There are many people who, while willing to admit that the family is, in a sense, a composite social unit to which each part has need of the other parts, so that all are mutually bound together, seek to draw a firm line of distinction between the family and society. ”

“ The impulses of Individualism and of Socialism alike prompt us to gain self-control and to learn the vast extent of our responsibility. The whole of humanity is working for each of us; each of us must live worthy of that great responsibility to humanity. By how fine a flash of insight Jesus declared that few could enter the Kingdom of Heaven! Not until the earth is purified of untold millions of its population will it ever become the Heaven of old dreamers, in which the elect walk spaciously and nobly, loving one another. ”

“ Under these circumstances it was to be expected that a new ideal should begin to flash before men's eyes. If the ideal of quantity is lost to us, why not seek the ideal of quality? We know that the old rule: "Increase and multiply" meant a vast amount of infant mortality, of starvation, of chronic disease, of widespread misery. In abandoning that rule, as we have been forced to do, are we not left free to seek that our children, though few, should be at all events fit, the finest, alike in physical and psychical constitution, that the world has seen? ”

“ Man can only be bred upwards from within through the medium of his intelligence and will, working together under the control of a high sense of responsibility. The infinite cunning of men and women is fully equal to the defeat of any attempt to touch life at this intimate point against the wish of those to whom the creation of life is entrusted. The laws of marriage even among savages have often been complex and strenuous in the highest degree. But it has been easy to bear them, for they have been part of the sacred and inviolable traditions of the race; religion lay behind them. ”

“ Even the cockroach, which lives on what we call filth, spends the greater part of its time in the cultivation of personal cleanliness. And all social hygiene, in its fullest sense, is but an increasingly complex and extended method of purification—the purification of the conditions of life by sound legislation, the purification of our own minds by better knowledge, the purification of our hearts by a growing sense of responsibility, the purification of the race itself by an enlightened eugenics, consciously aiding Nature in her manifest effort to embody new ideals of life. ”

“ But Nature is not only the producer. Given a fair field and no favour, natural selection would leave no problem of the unfit to perplex the mind of man who looks before and after. This we know cannot be, and we know, too, that we have no longer the excuse of ignorance to cover the neglect of the new duties which belong to the present epoch of civilization. We know now that we have to deal with a growing group in our community who demand permanent care and control as well for their own sakes as for the welfare of the community. ”

“ Luther, for good and for evil, is the most typical of Germans, and the Luther who made his mark in the world—the shrewd, coarse, superstitious peasant who blossomed into genius—was an avalanche of emotion, a great mass of natural human instincts irresistible in their impetuosity. When we bear in mind this general tendency to emotional expansiveness in the manifestations [95] of the Teutonic soul we need feel no surprise that the present movement among German women should be, to a much greater extent than the corresponding movements in other countries, an emotional renaissance. ”

“ It was in these conditions that the Women's Social and Political Union was formed in London. It was not an offshoot from any existing woman's suffrage society, but represented a crystallization of new elements. For the most part, even its leaders had not previously taken any active part in the movement for woman's suffrage. The suffrage movement had need of exactly such an infusion of fresh and ardent blood; so that the new society was warmly welcomed, and met with immediate success, finding recruits alike among the rich and the poor. ”

“ Marriage, therefore, instead of being, as it is to-day, the last thing to be thought of in education, becomes the central point of life. In Ellen Key's conception, "those who love each other are man and wife," and by love she means not a temporary inclination, but "a synthesis of desire and friendship," just as the air is a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen. It must be this for both sexes alike, and Ellen Key sees a real progress in what seems to her the modern tendency for men to realize that the soul has its erotic side, and for women to realize that the senses have. ”