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Essays in War-Time Further Studies in the Task of Social Hygiene By: Havelock Ellis (1859-1939) |
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FURTHER STUDIES IN THE
TASK OF SOCIAL HYGIENE
BY HAVELOCK ELLIS
CONTENTS I. INTRODUCTION
II. EVOLUTION AND WAR
III. WAR AND EUGENICS
IV. MORALITY IN WARFARE
V. IS WAR DIMINISHING
VI. WAR AND THE BIRTH RATE
VII. WAR AND DEMOCRACY
VIII. FEMINISM AND MASCULINISM
IX. THE MENTAL DIFFERENCES OF MEN AND WOMEN
X. THE WHITE SLAVE CRUSADE
XI. THE CONQUEST OF VENEREAL DISEASE
XII. THE NATIONALISATION OF HEALTH
XIII. EUGENICS AND GENIUS
XIV. THE PRODUCTION OF ABILITY
XV. MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE
XVI. THE MEANING OF THE BIRTH RATE
XVII. CIVILISATION AND THE BIRTH RATE
XVIII. BIRTH CONTROL
INDEX
I
INTRODUCTION From the point of view of literature, the Great War of to day has
brought us into a new and closer sympathy with the England of the past.
Dr. Woods and Mr. Baltzly in their recent careful study of European
Warfare, Is War Diminishing? come to the conclusion that England
during the period of her great activity in the world has been "fighting
about half the time." We had begun to look on war as belonging to the
past and insensibly fallen into the view of Buckle that in England "a
love of war is, as a national taste, utterly extinct." Now we have
awakened to realise that we belong to a people who have been "fighting
about half the time." Thus it is, for instance, that we witness a revival of interest in
Wordsworth, not that Wordsworth, the high priest of Nature among the
solitary Lakes, whom we have never forsaken, but the Wordsworth who
sang exultantly of Carnage as God's Daughter. To day we turn to the
war like Wordsworth, the stern patriot hurling defiance at the enemies
who threatened our island fortress, as the authentic voice of England. But this new sense of community with the past comes to us again and
again on every hand when to day we look back to the records of the past.
I chance to take down the Epistles of Erasmus, and turn to the letters
which the great Humanist of Rotterdam wrote from Cambridge and London
four hundred years ago when young Henry VIII had just suddenly (in 1514)
plunged into war. One reads them to day with vivid interest, for here
in the supple and sensitive brain of the old scholar we see mirrored
precisely the same thoughts and the same problems which exercise the
more scholarly brains of to day. Erasmus, as his Pan German friends
liked to remind him, was a sort of German, but he was, nevertheless,
what we should now call a Pacifist. He can see nothing good in war and
he eloquently sets forth what he regards as its evils. It is interesting
to observe, how, even in its small details as well as in its great
calamities, war brought precisely the same experiences four centuries
ago as to day. Prices are rising every day, Erasmus declares, taxation
has become so heavy that no one can afford to be liberal, imports are
hampered and wine is scarce, it is difficult even to get one's foreign
letters. In fact the preparations of war are rapidly changing "the
genius of the Island." Thereupon Erasmus launches into more general
considerations on war. Even animals, he points out, do not fight, save
rarely, and then with only those of other species, and, moreover, not,
like us, "with machines upon which we expend the ingenuity of devils."
In every war also it is the non combatants who suffer most, the people
build cities and the folly of their rulers destroys them, the most
righteous, the most victorious war brings more evil than good, and even
when a real issue is in dispute, it could better have been settled by
arbitration. The moral contagion of a war, moreover, lasts long after
the war is over, and Erasmus proceeds to express himself freely on the
crimes of fighters and fighting. Erasmus was a cosmopolitan scholar who habitually dwelt in the world of
the spirit and in no wise expressed the general feelings either of his
own time or ours. It is interesting to turn to a very ordinary, it may
be typical, Englishman who lived a century later, again in a period of
war and also of quite ordinary and but moderately glorious war... Continue reading book >>
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