as we learn to see how close is the connection of that which we call the soul with our external conditions, how the moral sense and the behavior of man are modified by the environment, we must of course look for marked results in psychic development arising from so important a condition as our sexuo-economic relation.
the relation of the sexes, in whatever form, has always been observed to affect strongly the moral nature of mankind; and this is one reason why we have placed such disproportionate stress upon the special virtues of that relation. the word “moral” in common use means “chaste”; and, in the case of women, the word “virtue” itself simply implies the one virtue of chastity. large, popular conceptions are never baseless. they are rooted in deep truths, felt rather than seen, and, however false and silly in external interpretation, may be trusted in their general trend. it is not that the virtue of chastity is so much more important to the race than the virtue of honesty, the virtue of courage, the virtues of cheerfulness, of courtesy, of kindness, but that upon the sex-relation in which we live depends so much of the further development and arrangement of our whole moral nature.
319what we call the moral sense is an intellectual recognition of the relative importance of certain acts and their consequences. this appears vaguely and weakly among early savages, and was for long mainly applied to a few clearly defined and arbitrary rites and ceremonies, set rules in a game of priest-and-people. but the habit of associating a sense of worthiness with certain acts by which came praise and profit grew in the childish soul, and the range of moral deeds widened. it has been widening ever since, growing deeper and higher and far more subtle, developing with the other social qualities.
no human distinction is more absolutely and exclusively social than the moral sense. ethics is a social science. there is no ethics for the individual. taken by himself, man is but an animal; and his conduct bears relation only to the needs of the animal,—self-preservation and race-preservation. every virtue, and the power to see and strive for it, is a social quality. the highest virtues are those wherein we best serve the most people, and their development in us keeps pace with the development of society. it is the social relation which calls for our virtues, and which maintains them.
a simple instance of this is in the prompt 320lapse to barbarism of a man cut off from his kind, and forced to live in conditions of savagery. even a brief and partial change in condition changes conduct at once, as is shown by the behavior of the most pious new englanders when in mining camps. it is shown, also, by the different scale of virtue in the different classes and industries.
every social relation has its ethics; and the general needs of society, as a whole, are the basis of ethics. in every age and race this may be studied, and a clear connection established always between the virtues and vices of a given people and their local conditions. the principal governing condition in the development of ethics is the economic environment. this may seem strange to one accustomed to consider moral laws as not of this world, and to see how often virtue costs its possessor dear. the relative behavior of a given number of people depends, first, upon the existence of those people. such conduct as should tend to exterminate them would exterminate their ethics. such conduct as should tend to preserve and increase them is the only conduct of which ethical value can be predicated. ethics is, therefore, absolutely conditioned upon life and the maintenance thereof. from the lowest and narrowest 321view which calls an act right or wrong, according to its immediate effects upon one’s present life, to the clear vision of ultimate results which calls a course of conduct right or wrong, according to its final effects upon one’s eternal life, our ethics, small and great, is the science of human conduct measured by its results.
it is inevitable, then, that in all races we should find those acts whereby men live considered right, and should see a high degree of approval awarded to him who best performs them. in the hunting and fighting period the best hunter and fighter was the best man, praised and honored by his tribe. the virtues cultivated were such as enabled the possessor to hunt and kill most successfully, to maintain himself and be a credit and a help to his friends. savage virtues are the simple reflection of savage conditions. to be patient and self-controlled was an economic necessity to the hunter: to bear pain and arduous exertion easily was a necessity to the fighter. therefore, the savage, by precept and example, cultivated these virtues.
in the long agricultural and military periods we see the same thing. in the peasant the virtues of industry and patience were extolled: it takes industry and patience to raise corn. 322in the soldier the virtues of courage and obedience were extolled, and in every one the virtue of faith was the prime requisite of the existing religion. it took a great deal of faith to accept the religions of those times. the importance of faith as a virtue declines as religion grows more intelligible and applicable to life. it requires no effort to believe what you can understand and do. slowly the industrial era dawned and grew, from the weak, sporadic efforts of the cringing packman and craftsman, the common prey of the dominant fighting class, to our colossal industrial organization, in which the soldier is ruthlessly exploited to some financial interests. with this change in economic conditions has changed the scale of virtues.
physical courage has sunk: obedience, patience, faith, and the rest do not stand as they did. we praise and value to-day, as always, the virtues whereby we live. every animal developes the virtues of his conditions: our human distinction is that we add the power of conscious perception and personal volition to the action of natural force. not only in our own race, but in others, do we call “good” and “bad” those qualities which profit us; and the beasts that we train and use develope, of necessity, the qualities that profit them,—as, 323for instance, in our well-known friend, the dog.
the dog is an animal long since cut off from his natural means of support, and depending absolutely on man for food. as a free, wild dog, he was profited by a daring initiative, courage, ferocity. as a tame, slave dog, he is profited by abject submission, by a crawling will-lessness that grovels at a blow, and licks the foot that kicks it. we have quite made over the original dog; and his moral nature, his spirit, shows the change even more than his body. the force which has accomplished this is economic,—a change of base in the source of supplies and the processes of obtaining them.
let us briefly examine the distinctive virtues of humanity, their order of introduction and development, and see how this one peculiar relation has affected them.
the main distinction of human virtue is in what we roughly describe as altruism,—“otherness.” to love and serve one another, to care for one another, to feel for and with one another,—our racial adjective, “humane,” implies these qualities. the very existence of humanity implies these qualities in some degree, and the development of humanity is commensurate with their development.
324our one great blunder in studying these things lies in our failure to appreciate the organic necessity of such moral qualities in human life. we have assumed that the practice of these social virtues involved a personal effort and sacrifice, and that there is an irreconcilable contest between the cosmic process of development and the ethical process, as huxley puts it. social evolution brings with it the essential qualities of social relation, and these are our much boasted virtues. the natural processes of human intercourse and interrelation develope the qualities without which such intercourse would be impossible; and this development is as orderly, as natural, as “cosmic,” as the processes of organic activity within the individual body. it is as natural for an industrial society to live in peace as for a hunting society to live in war; and this peace is not the result of heroic and self-sacrificing effort on the part of the industrial society; it is the necessity of their condition.
the course of evolution in human ethics is marked by a gradual extension of our perception of common good and evil as distinct from our initial perception of individual good and evil. this becomes very keen in the more socialized natures among us, as in the far-seeing devotion of statesmanship, patriotism, 325and philanthropy. each of these words shows in its construction that the quality described is social,—the statesman, one who thinks and works for the state; the patriot, one who loves and labors for his country; the philanthropist, one who loves mankind. all these qualities, in their extreme and in their first beginnings, are a mere recognition of the equal right of the next man, common “fair play” and courtesy; they are but the natural product of social conditions acting on the individual through primal laws of economic necessity. the individual, in the absolute economic isolation of the beast, is profited by pure egoism, and he developes it. the individual, in the increasing economic interdependence of social relation, is profited by altruism; and he developes it.
all our virtues can be so traced and accounted for. the great main stem of them all, what we call “love,” is merely the first condition of social existence. it is cohesion, working among us as the constituent particles of society. without some attraction to hold us together, we should not be able to hold together; and this attraction, as perceived by our consciousness, we call love. the virtue of obedience consists in the surrender of the individual will, so often necessary to the common 326good; and it stands highest in military organization, wherein great numbers of men must act together against their personal interests, even to the sacrifice of life, in the service of the community.
as we have grown into fuller social life, we have slowly and experimentally, painfully and expensively, discovered what kind of man was the best social factor. the type of a satisfactory member of society to-day is a man self-controlled, kind, gentle, strong, wise, brave, courteous, cheerful, true. in the middle ages, strong, brave, and true would have satisfied the demands of the time. we now require for our common good a larger range of qualities, a more elaborate moral organization. all this is a simple, evolutionary process of social life, and should have involved no more confusion, effort, and pain than any other natural process.
but the moral development of humanity is a most tempestuous and contradictory field of study. some virtues we have developed in orderly fashion, hardly recognizing that they were virtues, because they came so easily into use. accuracy and punctuality are qualities which were unknown to the savage, because they were not needed in his business. they have been developed in us, because they 327were required, and so have been gradually assumed under pressure of economic necessity. obedience, even in its extreme form of self-sacrifice, has been produced in the soldier; and no quality is more altruistic, more unnatural, or more difficult of adoption by the sturdy individual will. the common, law-abiding citizen does not consider himself a hero; yet he is manifesting a high degree of social virtue, often at great personal sacrifice.
but in other virtues we have not progressed so smoothly. in the ordinary economic relations of life, and in our sex-relations, we are distinguished by peculiar and injurious qualities. our condition may be described as consisting of a tenacious survival of qualities which we ought, on every ground of social good, to have long since outgrown; and an incessant struggle between these rudimentary survivals and the normal growth. this it is which has so forcibly assailed our consciousness since its awakening, and which we call the contest between good and evil. we have felt within ourselves the pull of diverse tendencies,—the impulse to do what was immediately good for ourselves, but which our growing social sense knew was bad for the community, and therefore wrong; and the impulse to do what might be immediately bad 328for ourselves, but which the same social sense knew was good for the community, and therefore right. this we felt, and cast about in our minds for an explanation of the way we behaved: we knew it was peculiar. the human brain is an organ that must have an explanation, if it has to make one. we made one.
the belated impulses of the individual beast—good in him because he needed them, bad in us because we were becoming human and had other needs—we lumped together, and, with our facile, dramatic, personifying tendency, called them “the devil.” and, as these evil promptings were usually along the lines of physical impulse, we considered our own bodies, and nature in general, as part and parcel of the wrong,—“the world, the flesh, and the devil.” we felt, also, within us the mighty stirrings of new powers and strange tendencies, that led us out of ourselves and toward each other, new loves and hopes and wishes, new desires to give instead of to take, to serve instead of to fight; and, realizing, with true social instinct, that this impulse tended to help us most, was really good for us, we called it the will of god, the voice of god, the way to god. the tearing contest between these ill-adjusted impulses and 329tendencies, with our growing power of self-conscious decision and voluntary adoption of one or another course of action,—this process in psychic evolution has given us the greatest world-drama ever conceived, the struggle between good and evil.
and, fumbling vaguely at the sources of our pain so far as we could trace them, judging always by persons, and not by conditions,—as a child strikes the chair he bumps his head upon,—race after race has located the cause of the trouble in woman. not that she primarily invented all the evil, and brought it upon us,—our vague devil was the remoter cause,—but that woman let the trouble in. pandora did not make the mischief-box; but she perversely opened it, even against the wise man’s advice. eve did not plant that apple-tree; but she ate of it, and tempted the superior man. it seems a childish and clumsy guess, but there is something in it. nothing of the unspeakable blame and shame with which man has blackened the face of his mother through all these centuries, but a sociological truth for all that.
not woman, but the condition of woman, has always been a doorway of evil. the sexuo-economic relation has debarred her from the social activities in which, and in which 330alone, are developed the social virtues. she was not allowed to acquire the qualities needed in our racial advance; and, in her position of arrested development, she has maintained the virtues and the vices of the period of human evolution at which she was imprisoned. at a period of isolated economic activity,—mere animal individualism,—at a period when social ties ceased with the ties of blood, woman was cut off from personal activity in social economics, and confined to the functional activities of her sex.
in keeping her on this primitive basis of economic life, we have kept half humanity tied to the starting-post, while the other half ran. we have trained and bred one kind of qualities into one-half the species, and another kind into the other half. and then we wonder at the contradictions of human nature! for instance, we have done all we could, in addition to natural forces, to make men brave. we have done all we could, in addition to natural forces, to make women cowards. and, since every human creature is born of two parents, it is not surprising that we are a little mixed.
we have trained in men the large qualities of social usefulness which the pressure of their economic conditions was also developing; 331and we have done this by means of conscious praise and blame, reward and punishment, and with the aid of law and custom. we have trained in women, by the same means, the small qualities of personal usefulness which the pressure of their economic conditions was also developing. we have made a creature who is not homogeneous, whose life is fed by two currents of inheritance as dissimilar and opposed as could be well imagined. we have bred a race of psychic hybrids, and the moral qualities of hybrids are well known.
away back in that early beginning, by dividing the economic conditions of women and men, we have divided their psychic development, and built into the constitution of the race the irreconcilable elements of these diverse characters. the incongruous behavior of this cross-bred product is the riddle of human life. we ourselves, by maintaining this artificial diversity between the sexes, have constantly kept before us the enigma which we found so hard to solve, and have preserved in our own characters the confusion and contradiction which is our greatest difficulty in life.
the largest and most radical effect of restoring women to economic independence 332will be in its result in clarifying and harmonizing the human soul. with a homogeneous nature bred of two parents in the same degree of social development, we shall be able to feel simply, to see clearly, to agree with ourselves, to be one person and master of our own lives, instead of wrestling in such hopeless perplexity with what we have called “man’s dual nature.” marry a civilized man to a primitive savage, and their child will naturally have a dual nature. marry an anglo-saxon to an african or oriental, and their child has a dual nature. marry any man of a highly developed nation, full of the specialized activities of his race and their accompanying moral qualities, to the carefully preserved, rudimentary female creature he has so religiously maintained by his side, and you have as result what we all know so well,—the human soul in its pitiful, well-meaning efforts, its cross-eyed, purblind errors, its baby fits of passion, and its beautiful and ceaseless upward impulse through all this wavering.
we are quite familiar with this result, but we have not so far accurately located the cause. we have had our glimmering perception that woman had something to do with it; and she has been treated accordingly, by many simple races, to her further injury, and 333to that of the whole people. what we need to see is that it is not woman as a sex who is responsible for this mis-mothered world, but the economic position of woman which makes her what she is. if men were so placed, it would have the same effect. not the sex-relation, but the economic relation of the sexes, has so tangled the skein of human life.
besides the essential evils of an unbalanced nature, many harmful qualities have been developed in human characters by these conditions. for countless centuries we have sought to develope, by selection and education, a timid submission in woman. when there did appear “a curst shrew,” she was left unmarried; and her temper perished with her, or she was “tamed” by some petruchio. the dependence of women on the personal favor of men has produced an exceeding cleverness in the adaptation of the dependent one to the source of her supplies. under the necessity of pleasing, whether she wished or no, of interceding for a child’s pardon or of suing for new pleasures for herself, “the vices of the slave” have been forever maintained in this housemaid of the world.
another discord introduced by the condition of servitude is that between will and action. a servant places his time and strength at the 334disposal of another will. he must hold himself in readiness to do what he is told; and the mere physical law of conservation of energy, to say nothing of his own conscious judgment, forbids wasting nerve-force in planning and undertaking what he may not be able to accomplish. this produces a condition of inactivity, save under compulsion, and, on the other side, a perverse, capricious wilfulness in little things,—the reaction from a forced submission.
a more insidious, disintegrating force to offset the evolution of human character could hardly be imagined than this steady training of the habits of servitude into half the human race,—the mother of all of it. these results have been modified, of course, by the different education and environment of men, developing in them opposite qualities, and transmitting the contradictory traits to the children indiscriminately.
heredity has no salic law. the boy inherits from his mother, as well as from his father; the girl from her father, as well as from her mother. this has prevented the full evil of the results that plight have ensued, but has also added to the personal difficulties of each of us, and retarded the general progress of the race.
335worse than the check set upon the physical activities of women has been the restriction of their power to think and judge for themselves. the extended use of the human will and its decisions is conditioned upon free, voluntary action. in her rudimentary position, woman was denied the physical freedom which underlies all knowledge, she was denied the mental freedom which is the path to further wisdom, she was denied the moral freedom of being mistress of her own action and of learning by the merciful law of consequences what was right and what was wrong; and she has remained, perforce, undeveloped in the larger judgment of ethics.
her moral sense is large enough, morbidly large, because in this tutelage she is always being praised or blamed for her conduct. she lives in a forcing-bed of sensitiveness to moral distinctions, but the broad judgment that alone can guide and govern this sensitiveness she has not. her contribution to moral progress has added to the anguish of the world the fierce sense of sin and shame, the desperate desire to do right, the fear of wrong; without giving it the essential help of a practical wisdom and a regulated will. inheriting with each generation the accumulating forces of our social nature, set back in each generation by 336the conditions of the primitive human female, women have become vividly self-conscious centres of moral impulse, but poor guides as to the conduct which alone can make that impulse useful and build the habit of morality into the constitution of the race.
recognizing her intense feeling on moral lines, and seeing in her the rigidly preserved virtues of faith, submission, and self-sacrifice,—qualities which in the dark ages were held to be the first of virtues,—we have agreed of late years to call woman the moral superior of man. but the ceaseless growth of human life, social life, has developed in him new virtues, later, higher, more needful; and the moral nature of woman, as maintained in this rudimentary stage by her economic dependence, is a continual check to the progress of the human soul. the main feature of her life—the restriction of her range of duty to the love and service of her own immediate family—acts upon us continually as a retarding influence, hindering the expansion of the spirit of social love and service on which our very lives depend. it keeps the moral standard of the patriarchal era still before us, and blinds our eyes to the full duty of man.
an intense self-consciousness, born of the ceaseless contact of close personal relation; 337an inordinate self-interest, bred by the constant personal attention and service of this relation; a feverish, torturing, moral sensitiveness, without the width and clarity of vision of a full-grown moral sense; a thwarted will, used to meek surrender, cunning evasion, or futile rebellion; a childish, wavering, short-range judgment, handicapped by emotion; a measureless devotion to one’s own sex relatives, and a maternal passion swollen with the full strength of the great social heart, but denied social expression,—such psychic qualities as these, born in us all, are the inevitable result of the sexuo-economic relation.
it is not alone upon woman, and, through her, upon the race, that the ill-effects may be observed. man, as master, has suffered from his position also. the lust for power and conquest, natural to the male of any species, has been fostered in him to an enormous degree by this cheap and easy lordship. his dominance is not that of one chosen as best fitted to rule or of one ruling by successful competition with “foemen worthy of his steel”; but it is a sovereignty based on the accident of sex, and holding over such helpless and inferior dependants as could not question or oppose. the easy superiority that needs no striving to maintain it; the temptation 338to cruelty always begotten by irresponsible power; the pride and self-will which surely accompany it,—these qualities have been bred into the souls of men by their side of the relation. when man’s place was maintained by brute force, it made him more brutal: when his place was maintained by purchase, by the power of economic necessity, then he grew into the merciless use of such power as distinguishes him to-day.
another giant evil engendered by this relation is what we call selfishness. social life tends to reduce this feeling, which is but a belated individualism; but the sexuo-economic relation fosters and developes it. to have a whole human creature consecrated to his direct personal service, to pleasing and satisfying him in every way possible,—this has kept man selfish beyond the degree incidental to our stage of social growth. even in our artificial society life men are more forbearing and considerate, more polite and kind, than they are at home. pride, cruelty, and selfishness are the vices of the master; and these have been kept strong in the bosom of the family through the false position of woman. and every human soul is born, an impressionable child, into the close presence of these conditions. our men must live in 339the ethics of a civilized, free, industrial, democratic age; but they are born and trained in the moral atmosphere of a primitive patriarchate. no wonder that we are all somewhat slow to rise to the full powers and privileges of democracy, to feel full social honor and social duty, while every soul of us is reared in this stronghold of ancient and outgrown emotions,—the economically related family.
so we may trace from the sexuo-economic relation of our species not only definite evils in psychic development, bred severally in men and women, and transmitted indifferently to their offspring, but the innate perversion of character resultant from the moral miscegenation of two so diverse souls,—the unfailing shadow and distortion which has darkened and twisted the spirit of man from its beginnings. we have been injured in body and in mind by the too dissimilar traits inherited from our widely separated parents, but nowhere is the injury more apparent than in its ill effects upon the moral nature of the race.
yet here, as in the other evil results of the sexuo-economic relation, we can see the accompanying good that made the condition necessary in its time; and we can follow the beautiful results of our present changes with 340comforting assurance. a healthy, normal moral sense will be ours, freed from its exaggerations and contradictions; and, with that clear perception, we shall no longer conceive of the ethical process as something outside of and against nature, but as the most natural thing in the world.
where now we strive and agonize after impossible virtues, we shall then grow naturally and easily into those very qualities; and we shall not even think of them as especially commendable. where our progress hitherto has been warped and hindered by the retarding influence of surviving rudimentary forces, it will flow on smoothly and rapidly when both men and women stand equal in economic relation. when the mother of the race is free, we shall have a better world, by the easy right of birth and by the calm, slow, friendly forces of social evolution.
