Essays in War-Time: Further Studies in the Task of Social HygieneEllis, Havelock
Philosophy
Essays in War-Time: Further Studies in the Task of Social Hygiene
Ellis, Havelock
Eugenics; Sex; War
No doubt the element of human nature in the manifestations we are
concerned with will still be at work, an obscure instinct often acting
differently in each sex, but tending to drive both into the same risks.
Here we need even more fundamental social changes. It is sheer
foolishness to suppose that when we raise our little dams in the path of
a great stream of human impulse that stream will forthwith flow calmly
back to its source. We must make our new channels concurrently with our
dams. If we wish to influence prostitution we must re-make our marriage
laws and modify our whole conception of the sexual relationships. In the
meanwhile, we can at least begin to-day a task of education which must
slowly though surely undermine the White Slave trader's stronghold. Such
an education needs to be not merely instruction in the facts of sex and
wise guidance concerning all the dangers and risks of the sexual life;
it must also involve a training of the will, a development of the sense
of responsibility, such as can never be secured by shutting our young
people up in a hot-house, sheltered from every fortifying breath of the
outside world. Certainly there are many among us--and precisely the most
hopeless persons from our present point of view--who can never grow into
really responsible persons.[8] Neither should they ever have been born.
It is our business to see that they are not born; and that, if they are,
they are at least placed under due social guardianship, so that we may
not be tempted to make laws for society in general which are only needed
by this feeble and infirm folk. Thus it is that when we seek to deal
with the White Slave Trader and his victims and his patrons we have to
realise that they are all very much, as we have made them, moulded by
their parents before birth, nourished on their mothers' knees. The task
of making them over again next time, and making them better, is a
revolutionary task, but it begins at home, and there is no home in which
some part of the task cannot be carried out.
It is possible that at some period in the world's history, not only will
the White Slave Traffic disappear, but even prostitution itself, and it
is for us to work towards that day. But we may be quite sure that the
social state which sees the last of the "social evil" will be a social
state very unlike ours.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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