CHRISTIANIT3( AND THE SOCIAL CRISIS
of propagation and renewal of life. It is the foundation of morality, the chief educational institution, and the source of nearly all the real contentment among men. To create a maximum number of happy îamilies might well be considered the end of all statesmanship. As President Roosevelt recently said, all other questions sink into insignificance when the stability of the family is at stake. The most significant part of that utterance was that such a thing had to be uttered at ail. Hard times are always marked by a downward curve in the percentage of marriages. In our country the decline has become chronic for some years past. Men marry late, and when the mating season of youth is once past, many never marry at all. In my city of Rochester, N.Y., with a population of I62,6o8, the census of I9oo showed 25,219 m¢n between the age of 25 and 44, the years during which a man ought to be enjoying a home and rearing children, and 7355 of them were still unmarried. There were 28,28 women of the saine years, relatively further along in marriageable age than the men, and 8o 9 were still unmarried. Now the attraction between men and women is just as fundamental a fact in social lire as the attraction of the earth is in physics, and the only way in which that tremendous force of desire can be prevented from wrecking lives is to make it build lives by home contentment. The existence of a large class of involuntary celibates in society is a more threatening fact even than the increase of divorces. The slums are aggregations of single men and women. If the monastic celibates of the Middle Ages, who had the powerful incentive of religious enthusiasm and all the preventives of isolation and supervision, could not keep chaste, is i
THE PRESENT CRI$IS 73
likely that the unmarried thousands in the freedom of modern life wil! mainta,_'n their own purity and respect the purity of others? They are thrust into the lonely life through no wise resolve of their own, but mainly through the fear that they will not be able to maintain a family in the standard of comfort which they deem necessary for their life. If a man and woman do marry, they do not yet constitute a true family. The little hand of a child, more than the blessing of a priest, consecrates the family. France has long been held up as furnishing the terrible example of a declining birth-rate, but the older portions of our country are saved from the same situation only by the fertility of the immigrants. The native population of New England would not reproduce itself. The chief cause for this profoundly important fact is economic fear. Whenever the economic condition of any class is hopeful and improving, there is an increase in the birth-rate. Whenever there is economic disaster or increasing pressure, there is a decline. In the West, where land is still abundant, families are large. The immigrants, who feel the relative easement of pressure, multiply. The natives, who surfer by the competition of the immigrants and who feel the tightening grip of our industrial development, refuse to bring children into a world which threatens them with poverty. Our cheerful newspaper optimists assure us that the American child makes up by quality what it lacks in numbers. They quote the reply of the lioness in the fable, "One, but a lion." But that is merely an effort to make an ugly fact look sweet. People hunting for apartments in a large city soon discover one cause. "As arrows in the hand of a mighty man, so are the children of youth," said the Psalmist. "Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them; they shall not be put to shame when they speak with their enemies in the gate." But they shall talk very humbly and beseechingly when they speak with their prospective landlords nowadays. The concentration of population in the cities through competitive necessities, the consequent increase in rents, the enforced proximity to undesirable neighbors, the rise in the standard of luxury together with the decreased purchasing power of the average income- these accotmt in the main for the declining birth-rate. When men are hardly able to keep their head above water, they fear to carry a child on their back. Fear stands where the spring of life should bubble and freezes it into subsidence. That situation raises the most serious questions in the most intimate morality of human lire. Moreover, the absence of children decreases the cohesive power of the married relation, the blithenes and youthfulness of lire, the unselfishness of character, the insight into human nature; in short, it blights much of what is really fine and high in the souls and relations of men. The luxury and culture ruade possible by the absence of children is a glittering varnish to cover decaying wood. The menace to the future of out nation is still om-eater through the fact that sterility is most marked among the able and educated familles. The shiftless, and all those with whom natural passion is least restrained, will breed most freely. The prudent consider and shrink. The poor bave little to lose. Children are their form of old-age pensions. The well-to-do see the possible depth to which they or their children may descend, and are afraid. Thus the reproduction of the race is left to the poor and ignorant. Unusual ability îs hot transmitted. The benefits of intellectual environment fMI to be prolonged by heredity. The vital statistics of Harvard and Columbia graduates show a rapidly declining birth-rate and complete failure to repro.duce their own number. I sat at a table with seven of the best and ablest men I know. We talked of children and round that only two had a child; one of the two was a Swede, the other the son of German immigrants. In a previous chapter we referred to the loss suffered by mankind through the sterility of its most idem individuals while monasticism and priestly celibacy prevailed. 2 Here we have a fact of equal historical significance, but unrelieved by the idealism of the monastic vow. Education can only train the gifts with which a child is endowed at birth. The intellectual standard of humanity can be raised only by the propagation of the capable. Our social system causes an unnatural selection of the weak for breeding, and the result is the survival of the unfittest. When the family is small, the influence of brothers and sisters on the formation of character is lacking. When the father has to work long hours and then spend additional time in travelling between his home and his work, the element of fatherhood in the home is reduced to a minimum. If the mother, too, goes out to work, the children are left to "the street," which is an educator of rather doubtful value. If boarders and roomers are taken in to help in paying the rent,
' President Eliot, in the annual report of Harvard, 19o3, gives the vital tatistics of six classes more than twenty-five years out of college. They fell about twenty-eight per cent short of reproducing themelves. Professor Thorndike of Columbîa University nds that there has been a steady decline of the average number of children from 5.6 in the classes graduafing 18o 3- i8o 9 down to 1.8 in the classes graduating x875-x879. p. I74- an alien and often a demoralizing element enters the family. Thus the economic situation everywhere saps family life. One family to one house is the only normal condition. When twenty familles live in one tenement, twenty souls inhabit one body. That was the condition of the demoniac of Gadara, in whom dwelt a legion. He was crazy. To be a home in the fullest sense, it must be loved with the sense of proprietorship. As cities grow, home ownership declines. A semi-vagrancy from ene fiat to the next grows up. In the borough of Manhattan only six per cent of the homes are owned by those who lire in them; in Philadelphia, a city of small houses, only twenty-two per cent own their homes. Rochester is an almost ideal city for the developinent of homes, and the popular assumption is that nearly everybody owns his home. Yet the census of 9oo showed that of the 33,964 homes in the city only 2,290 were owned by the tenants, and hall of these were mortgaged. The condition of the home determines the condition of woman. If girls are eagerly sought in marriage, they can choose the best. If few men can afford a good home, girls must take what offers or go without. If a man can easily make a living for a family, he can afford to be indifferent to anything but the person of the woman he loves. As the economic pressure tightens and social classes grow more clearly defined, American men, too, will begin to inquire what property cornes to them with their bride. We shall have love modified by the "dot." Our optimists treat it as a sign of progress that "so many professions are now open to women." But it is not choice, but grim necessity, that drives woman into new ways of getting bread and clothing. The great majority of girls heartily prefer the independence and the satisfaction of the heart which are offered to a woman only in a comfortable and happy home. Some educated girls think they prefer the practice of a profession because the dream of unusual success lures them; but when they have had a taste of the wearing routine that prevails in most professions, they turn with longing to the thought of a home of their own. Out industrial machine has absorbed the functions which women formerly fulfilled in the home, and has drawn them into its hopper because female labor is unorganized and cheap labor. They are ruade to compete with the very men who ought to marry them, and thus they further diminish their own chance of marriage. If any one has a sound reason for taking the competiti'e system by the throat in righteous wrath, it is the unmarried woman and the mother with girls. Girls go to work at the very age when their developing body ought to be shielded from physical and mental strain. Many are kept standing for long hours at a rime. During rush seasons they are pushed to exhaustion. In few cases can they permit themselves that periodical easement which is essential to the continued health of most women. Many of them enter marriage with organic troubles that develop their full import only in later years. Girls pass from school to shop or store and never learn housekeeping well. If they marry, they assume charge of a manufacturing establishment in which all the 'aried functions are performed by one woman. They have to learn the work at an age when the body no longer acquires new habits readily. If the burden of maternity is added at the saine time, the strain is immense, and is likely to affect the retaper and the happiness of the home. It is thus out civilization prepares its women for the all- important function of motherhood, for on the women of the working class tests the function of be..rng and rearing the future citizens of the republic. Individually Amerlcans are more tender of women than any othe_r, nation. Collectively we treat them with cruelty and fol]i,:. A large proportion of working women are not paid wages suflïcient to support themselves in comfort and to dress as the requirements of their position and of modern taste demand. In that case they must either surfer want or supplement their earnings. They are fortunate if fathers and brothers support the home. In that case they are able to underbid those who are dependent on their own labor alone. If the home does not thus shield them, what are they to do? There are numbers of unmarried and married men about them looking for transient love. The girls themselves have the womanly desire for the company and love of men. Satisfaction by marriage may not be in sight. They crave for the clothing, the trinkets, the pleasures that glitter about them. Itis so easy to get a share. When I reflect on the unstained virtue and nobility of the great majority of working girls whom I have known, I feel the deepest respect for them. But some are always on the edge of danger. As the crocodile takes toll of the Hindu women at the river lord, so every now and then one of the girls throws up her hands and goes under. Those who are strong by personal vigor, or by religious training, can escape, and blessed is he who strenhens their hands. But that does not satisfy the situation. If a ship were wrecked and the passengers clinging to the tilted deck, the strongest would hold on best. If some one cheered their failing strength and showed them how best to cling, it would be a great service. But if the deck kept on tilting at a steeper angle, more still would go. There are employers in European cities who expect as a rnatter of course that their fernale clerks will give thern more than the working capacity of their bodies. There are stores in New York and elsewhere where some girls get the easy positions and some are ruade uncornfortable for reasons well understooà. That sort of oppression will be successful in the measure in which the girls fear to lose their positions. Woe to the weal! They are like biràs fluttering in the hot hand of the pursuer. The most serious danger is hot the increase of professional prostitutes, but the frequency with which women supplement their wages and secure their pleasures by occasional immorality. Prostitutes are ostracizeà by their class. Itis worse if girls are tainteà, but retain their standing and spreaà the cotagion. The freedom of rnovement in American life and the growing -knowleàge of preventives makes sin easy and safe. To any one who realizes the value of womanly purity, it is appalling to think that the standard of purity for their whole sex may drop and approximate the standard prevailing among men. The health of society rests on the welfare of the home. What, then, will be the outcome if the unmarrieà multiply; if homes remain chilàless; if familles are homeless; if girls do hot "know housework; and if men corne to àistrust the purity of wornen?
The continents are strewn with the ruins of dead nations The f the ri,. and civilizations. History laughs at the optirnistic illusion Chris that "nothing can stand in the way of hurnan progress." It dviliz would be safer to assert that progress is always for a rime only, and then succumbs to the inevitable decay. One by one the ancient peoples rose to wealth and civilization, extended their sway as far as geographical conditions would permit, and then began to decay within and to crumble away with. out, until the mausoleums of their kings were the haunt of jackals, and the descendants of their conquering warriors were abject peasants slaving for some alien lord. What guarantee have we, then, that our modern civilization with its pomp will not be "one with Nineveh and Tyre"? The most important question which humanity ought to address toits historical scholars is this: "Why did these others die, and what can we do to escape their rate?" For death is not an inevitable and welcome necessity for a nation, as it is for the individual. Its strength and bloom could be indefinitely prolonged if the people were wise and just enough to avert the causes of decay. There is no inherent cause why a great group of nations, such as that which is now united in Western civilization, should not live on in perpetual youth, overcoming by a series of rejuvenations every social evil as it arises, and using every attainment as a stepping-stone to a still higher culture of individual and social lire. It has never yet been done. Can it be done in a civilization in which Christianity is the salt of the earth, the social preservative? Of all the other dead civilizations we have only scattered relics and fragmentary information, as of some fossil creature of a past geological era. We can only guess at their fate. But the rise and fall of one happened in the full light of day, and we have historical material enough to watch every step of the process. That was the Groeco-Roman civilization which clustered about the Mediterranean Sea. Its golden age, which immediately preceded its rapid decline, had a striking re..semblance to our own rime. In both cases there was a swift increase in wealth. The Empire policed the seas and built roads. The safety of commerce and the ease of travel and transportation did for the Empire what steam transportation did for the nineteenth century. The mass of slaves secured by the wars of conquest, and organized for production in the factories and on the great estates, furnished that increase in cheap productive force which the invention of steam machinery and the division and organization of labor furnished to the modern world. No new civilization was created by these improved conditions; but the forces latent in existing civilization were stimulated and set free, and their application resulted in a rapid efflorescence of the economic and intellectual life. Just as the nations about the Seven Seas are draving together to-day and are sharing their spiritual possessions in a common civilization, so the Empire broke down the barriers of the nations about the Mediterranean, gathered them in a certain unity of life, and poured their capacities and thoughts into a coinmon fund. The result was a breakdown of the old faiths and a wonderful fertilization of intellectual life. Wealth- to use a homely illustration- is to a nation what manure is to a farm. If the fariner spreads it evenly over the soil, it will enrich tke whole. If he should leave it in heaps, the land would be impoverished and under the rich heaps the vegetation would be killed. The new wealth created in the Roman Empire was hot justly distributed, but fell a prey to a minority who were in a position to seize it. A new money aristocracy arose which financed the commerci'al undertakings and shouldered the old aristocratic families aside, just as the feudal aristocracies were superseded in consequence of the modern industrial revolution. A few gained immense wealth, while below them was a mass of slaves and free proletarians. The independent middle class disappeared. The cities grew abnormally at the expense of the country and its sturdy population. Great fortunes were ruade and yet there was constant distress and frequent hard rimes. The poor had no rights in the means of production, so they used the political power still remaining to them to secure state grants of land, money, grain, and pleasures. There was widespread reluctance to marry and to rear children. Education became common, and yet culture declined. There were plenty of universities, great libraries, well-paid professors, and yet a growing coarseness of taste and a decline in creative artistic and literary ability. If the yellow newspaper could have been printed, it would bave "filled a long-felt want." The social conditions involved a readjustment of political power. A strong centralized government was necessary to keep the provinces quiet while Rome taxed them and the bureaucracy grew rich on them. Government was hot based broadly on the just consent of the governed, but on the swords of the legions, and especially of the proetorian guard. The old republican forms were long maintained, but Rome verged more and more toward despotic autocracy. In a hundred ways the second century of our era seemed tobe the splendid culmination of all the past. The Empire seemed imperishable in the glory of almost a thousand years of power. To prophesy its fall would have seemed like predicting the failure of civilization and humanity. The reverses which began with the death of Marcus Aurelius in A.D. 180 seemed mere temporary misfortunes. Yet they vere the beginning of the end.
The German and Celtic tribes had long swirled and eddied about the northern boundary of the Empire, like the ocean about the dikes of Holland. The little Rome of Marius a hundred years before Christ had successfully beaten back the Cimbrians and Teutons. For two centuries the strong arm of the legions had dammed the flood behind the Rhine and Danube. Rome was so much superior in numbers, in wealth, in the science of war and ail the resources of civilization, that it might have continued to hold them in check and to turn their forward movements in other directions. But the decay at the centre now weakened the capacity for resistance at the borders. The farmers who had ruade the legions of the Republic invincible had been ruined by the competition of slave labor, crowded out by land monopoly, and sucked into the ragged proletariat of the cities. The armies had to be recruited from the conquered provinces and fiuaily from barbarian mercenaries. The moral enthusiasm of a citizen soldiery fighting for their homes was gone. The impoverished and overtaxed provinces were unable to respond to additional financial needs. Slowly the barbarians filtered into the Northern provinces by mass immigration. The civilized population did hOt have vitality enough to assimilate the foreign immigrants. Slowly, by gradual stages, hardly fast enough for men to realize what was going on, the ancient civilization retreated, and the flood of barbarism covered the provinces, with ordy some islands of culture rising above the yellow flood. And how will it be with us? Will that vaster civilization which began in Europe and is now spreading along the shores of ail the oceans, as Rome grew from Italy outward around the great inland sea, run through the saine stages?
If the rime of out weakness cornes, the barbarians will not be wanting to take possession. Where the carcass is, the vultures will gather. Nations do hot die by wealth, but by injustice. The fo_._.rward impetus cornes through some great historical opportunity which stimulates the production of wealth, breaks up the caked and rigid order of the past, sets free the energies of new classes, calls creative leaders to the front, quicken.s the intellectual lire, intensifies the sense of duty and the ideal devotion to the common weal, and awakens in thc strong individuals the large ambition of patriotic service. Progress slackens when a single class appropriates the social results of the common labor, fortifies its evil rights by unfair laws, throttles the masses by political centralization and suppression, and consumes in luxury what it has taken in covetousness. Then there is a gradual loss of productive energy, an increasing bitterness and distrust, a waning sense of duty and devotion to country, a paralysis of the moral springs of noble action. Men no longer love the Commonwealth, because it does not stand for the common wealth. Force has to supply the cohesive power which love fails to furnish. Exploitation creates poverty, and poverty is followed by physical degeneration. Education, art, wealth, and culture may continue to advance and may even ripen to their mellowest perfection when the worm of death is already at the heart of the nation. Internal convulsions or external catastrophes will finally reveal the state of decay. It is always a process extending through generations or even centuries. It is possible that with the closely -knit nations of the present era the resistive vitality is greater than in former ages, and it will take much longer for them to breal up. The mobility of modern intellectual life will make it harder for the stagnation of mind and the crystallization of institutions to make headway. But unless the causes of social wrong are removed, it will be a slow process of strangulation and asphyxiation. In the last resort the only hope is in the moral forces which can be summoned to the rescue. If there are statesmen, prophets, and apostles who set truth and justice above selfish advancement; if their call finds a response in the great body of the people; if a new ride of religious faith and moral enthusiasm creates new standards of duty and a new capacity for self-sacrifice; if the strong learn to direct their love of power to the uplifling of the people and see the highest selfassertion in self-sacrifice- then the intrenchments of vested wrong will melt away; the stifled energy of the people will leap forward; the atrophied members of the social body will be filled with a fresh flow of blood; and a regenerate nation will look with the eyes of youth across the fields of the future. The cry of "Crisis! crisis!" has become a weariness. Every age and every year are critical and fraught with destiny. Yet in the widest survey of history Western civilization is now at a decisive point in its development. Will some Gibbon of Mongol race sit by the shore of the Pacific in the year A.D. 3000 and write on the "Decline and Fall of the Christian Empire"? If so, he will probably describe the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the golden age when outwardly lire flourished as never before, but when that decay, which resulted in the gradual collapse of the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries, was already far advanced. Or will the twentieth century mark for the future historfan the rem adolescence of humanity, the great emancipatiort from barbarism and from the paralysis of injustice, and the beginning of a progress in the intellectual, social, and moral life of mankind to which all past history bas no parallel? It will depend almost wholly on the moral forces which the Christian nations can bring to the fighting line against wrong, and the fighting energy of those moral forces will again depend on the degree to which they are inspired by religious faith and enthusiasm. It is either a revival of social religion or the deluge.