Stand Up, Ye Dead. Norman Maclean

It is only when this disease, which is threatening the life of the body-politic, is probed, that the full extent of its ravages is manifest. For it is the educated, the cultured, and the rich who are eluding the responsibility of parentage, while the poor and the diseased are still continuing to multiply. In inverse ratio to the income and the size of house is the number of the children. It is the same sad story in every city. In London, the birthrate of Hampstead, a suburb mainly inhabited by the rich, fell from 30.01 in 1881 to 17.55 in 1911, while that of Shoreditch, a working-class district, only fell in the same period from 31.32 to 30.16. In his evidence before the Birthrate Commission, Dr. Chalmers, the Medical Officer of Health for the city of Glasgow, contrasted the birthrate in two of the poor districts of the city with that in two of the best districts. In the two worst wards the birthrate was equal to 161 per thousand married women between the ages of 15 and 45 years, whereas in the two well-to-do wards it was only 34.[2] In the city of Aberdeen, the birthrate in the poor and congested district of Greyfriars is almost double that of Rubislaw which includes the best housing in the city. In no city is this grim contrast more marked than in the city of Edinburgh.

      When the different districts of Edinburgh are considered, it is apparent that in the poor districts the birthrate maintains still some vitality, but among the well-to-do and the rich it is rapidly diminishing. In the Canongate district there is a birthrate per thousand of 24; in Gorgie, 23.9; in St. Leonard's, 22.4; in Merchiston, 12.6; in Haymarket, 11.5; and in Morningside, 10.9. In the three districts of Edinburgh where the wealthy, the cultured, and the well-to-do abound, there the birthrate is but half of those districts where the poor, the miserable, and the criminal are congregated in noisome slums. In Morningside and Haymarket the birthrate is only a third of what it was in Scotland in 1871. These districts of the city have sacrificed two-thirds of their children to their ease. It is among the terraces and squares of the West Ends of great cities, and among the gardened villas of suburbs that this degeneration has evinced the fulness of its power. Where children could grow in health and happiness, thence selfishness has banished them; where, amid squalor, filth, and vice they are almost doomed from birth, there they are multiplied. Degeneration always begins at the top, and works downward. At the top only one-fourth are left; at the bottom, two-thirds are still left. But the dry-rot is creeping downward. The lower middle class is following its betters; and the artisan is following hard after. Only in the Canongate is the shouting of children at play still to be heard, and there the State surrounds the last survivors of the race with every temptation to evil and ruin.

      This is a grim fact when the future of the race is considered; and of its grimness there can be no doubt. The vital statistics do not lie, and they are the proof. There are other proofs. The statistics of baptisms are steadily falling. In many West End congregations the sacrament of baptism has become a rarity! Sunday schools are getting smaller and smaller. The records of seven years (1908–14) showed the appalling fact that fourteen of the chief Free Church denominations of Britain have lost 257,952 scholars. The materials out of which the Church was formerly built are crumbling away. Empty cradles mean empty Sunday schools, empty classes, and, ere long, empty pews. The strangest thing is that in face of the forces that threaten destruction the Churches are silent—as if mesmerised! In these last years even the church-going population of this country was rapidly reverting to the base conditions in which Christianity found humanity, and from which the Cross in a measure rescued it. And the Church has lost the power of sounding the trumpet and warning the people of coming judgment.

      IV

      When we inquire into the causes of this parlous state to which the race has been brought, we find that the greatest is self-deception. If men and women realised what they were doing, they would be horrified. But they don't realise it. They are acting on noble principles! They can provide for and educate two children better than six; therefore, in the interests of the race, they will only have two! One parent wrote to the Press recently that he could only give a public-school education to one boy, and therefore he had no more! They have the idea that by coddling the few they will usher in the super-race. In short, they murder the race, but they do it on noble principles, in conformity with the sanctions of religion, and in the name of the most high God! Their lives are a direct reversal of the elementary canons of morality; but they themselves imagine that they are the most perfect products of evolution, and that they are, by a process of racial suicide, bringing the race to its perfection—ushering in the super-race and the super-man.

      What a false education must that be to which the race is thus sacrificed. Education is not a matter of money or accomplishments, but of wonder, reverence, imagination, and awe. Heaven and earth are waiting, without money or price, to thrill the young heart with glory and loveliness; but the poor soul must not be born because he cannot go to Eton. And the great wide world is calling for men; provinces added yearly to the Empire demand men; great plains wait the spade and the plough; the realms of King George have as yet only their fringes occupied, and the race must produce the men who will go in and possess, or other races, not yet tired of life, will enter in. And yet, in the name of the race, the race is being sacrificed.

The real root of the evil is selfishness. A generation that sought only its own pleasure refused the burden of parentage. They nursed lap-dogs and preferred bridge to babies. They could not have the luxuries they craved and also nurseries ringing with the joyous voices of children; and they made their choice. There were found those who called them fashionable; but nobody will ever call them blessed. And because of that choice families whose names were great in the land are to-day extinct. Names which in other days raised those who bore them into the fellowship of high ideals and noble service, have disappeared for ever, because a generation which knew no altar at which to worship save the altar of self, sacrificed even the generations to come at that altar. But there is found some saving grace among them. Having silenced the voices of children in their own houses, they organise societies to care for the children in the slums, and preserve their precarious lives. 'In communities like Letchworth or the Hampstead Garden Suburb, families of more than two children are rare among the educated classes, but nearly every one is giving time, energy, and money to the reform movements which they believe to be urgently needed in the interests of the community.'[3] They themselves decline to bear the burden of parentage, but they are ready to teach the poor the best way of bearing the burden. Unconscious that they themselves, the victims of race-weariness and of selfishness, are in direst need of some mission among them that would quicken them to life, they organise missions to quicken others. The dead in the valley of the Dry Bones organise to reform Jerusalem! Not all the earth can present a stranger spectacle than this—the citizens of the West Ends, who have sacrificed the race to their own ease, solicitous over keeping alive the children of the miserable in the slums! Their own gardens and nurseries are empty; but they would keep the children alive in airless, foetid closes. Thus would they condone. But it is no boon to the race to keep alive the children of the diseased and of the unfit; nor is it a kindness to these children to ensure that they shall grow into the consciousness of the misery into which they are born. The generations of the healthy and the clean have been sacrificed on the altar of selfishness, and no service at any other altar can ever atone.

      V

      But it might have been worse with the race than it is even to-day, for this obsession of racial suicide might have possessed the nation sooner than it did; and if it had, then we would truly have been poor indeed. For Sir Walter Scott was the seventh child of his parents; and it is as certain as most human surmisings, that if the ideal of life which to-day dominates the professional classes in Scotland, had, in the year 1771, found sway in the College Wynd of Edinburgh, Walter Scott would never have been born. John Wesley was one of nineteen children: fortunately for the race, the gospel of the salvation of men through racial limitation had not yet gained devotees in that vicarage where the children were taught to cry quietly! Alfred Tennyson was the third of seven sons, and if yesterday were as to-day, then 'In Memoriam' would never have been written. But now, alas! the door is shut against the Walter Scotts and Wesleys of the future.

It is unnecessary to multiply instances.