The Chief Enemy of Women : Part 9

Woman and Womanhood: A Search for Principles
by C. W. Saleeby, M.D.

(Page 29 of 30)

The particular causes under consideration have been having their effects for a very long time. It begins to be more and more clear that they have played a great part in the history of mankind. As the "history" we learned at school is more and more discredited, there is slowly coming into being a real kind of history which deals with the essentials of national life and death, and is based upon the principles of organic evolution. This is a thesis which one has attempted to justify in a previous book, but one aspect of it must be recurred to here. Our modern study of various diseases and poisons is throwing a light on the life of nations. Take for instance the modern theories as to the influence of malarial poison upon Greece. In the case of alcohol, we now have evidence which is real and unchallengeable. The properties which it displays when we study it today have always been and always will be its properties.

We find that it has certain actions on living protoplasm in the twentieth century; we know enough of the uniformity of nature to realize that it had those actions in the tenth century, and will have them in the thirtieth. As we study under the microscope the influence of alcohol upon the racial tissues in the individual, and therein find confirmation of experimental study and observation by all the other means available to science, we begin to see that the greatest facts of history are those of which historians have no word, and not least amongst these has ever been the influence of alcohol upon parenthood. It is possible to adduce arguments in favor of the view that the practically complete immunity of their parenthood from alcohol is one of the great factors that explain the all but unexampled persistence of the Jews and their present status in the van of the world's thought and work. For history it is the parents that matter as against the non-parents, and of the parents it is the mothers even more than the fathers. The freedom of the Jews as a whole from alcoholism is more marked than ever in the case of their women; that is to say, in the case of their mothers.

We see the part-results of this in our own time when we compare the infant mortality amongst the Jews with that of their Gentile neighbors in a great city such as London or Leeds. As everyone should know, there is a huge disparity between the figures in the two cases, and in some records it has been found that under equal conditions two Gentile babies will die for each Jewish baby. The conditions are of course not equal, because the Jewish babies have Jewish motherhood, splendidly backed up as it usually is by Jewish fatherhood; whereas the Gentile babies have a very inferior parental care. Now if it were that infant mortality, as most people suppose, simply meant the death of a certain number of babies, the foregoing facts would have no particular bearing upon the questions of racial survival, except in so far as those questions depend upon mere numbers.

But the advocates of the great campaign against infant mortality have always maintained that the actual mortality is only one effect of the causes which produce it. When people have said that the loss of a certain number of babies mattered little, we have always replied that for every baby killed many were damaged. This contention has now been proved up to the hilt in the remarkable official inquiry, the first of its kind, made by Dr. Newsholme, now Chief Medical Officer of the Local Government Board. He studied infant mortality in relation to the mortality of children and young people at all subsequent ages, and he proved, once and for all, that infant mortality is what we have always maintained it to be, not merely a disaster in itself but an evidence of causes which injure the health and vigor of the survivors at all ages. Wherever infant mortality is highest, there child mortality is highest, and the mortality of boys and girls at puberty and during the early years of adolescence when the body is preparing for and becoming capable of parenthood. The evil conditions that cause infant mortality ar. Therefore proved to be far-reaching and much wider in their effects than any but the students of the subject have yet realized.

This chapter must be brought to a close, but it may be added that the emergence of sober nations, such as Japan and Turkey, into contemporary history, and the possibilities latent in China, - to mention none other of the "dying nations," so very much alive, at whom glass-eyed politicians used to sneer - constitutes one of the major facts of contemporary history. No one can yet say whether these nations will have the wisdom to retain their ancient habits or whether they will accept our whiskey along with our parliamentary institutions and motor-cars. Much future history rests upon this issue.

But I have little doubt that whatever happens in the case of Japan and Turkey, Jewish parenthood will retain the quality which has long ago become fixed as a racial characteristic, and that the race which has survived so much oppression and so many of its oppressors will survive contemporary abuse and the abusers. Its women nurse their own babies and have retained the power to do so. Neither before birth nor after do they feed the life that is to be on alcohol; they lay rightly the foundations of the future, where alone those foundations can be durably laid. The reader is not necessarily asked to admire them or to like them or to speak well of them, but if he desires the strength and continuance of whatever race or nation he belongs to, he will do well to imitate them.

It seems necessary to believe in the yellow peril, though not, of course, in its absurd form of a military nightmare. The pressure of population is the irresistible force of history. It depends, of course, upon parenthood, and more especially upon motherhood and therefore upon womanhood. At present the motherhood of the yellow races is sober. If it remains so, and if the motherhood of Western races takes the course which motherhood has taken for many years past in England, it is very sure that in the Armageddon of the future, those ancient races, Semitic and Mongol, which had achieved civilization when Europe was in the Stone Age, will be in a position of immense advantage as against our own race, which is threatening, at any rate in England, to follow the example of many races of which little record, or none, now remains, and drink itself to death.

Press of J. J. Little & Ives Co., New York.
Copyright 1911 by Mitchell Kennerley.