ter her
confinement. Everything that can make birth a misfortune to the parents
as well as a danger to the mother is conscientiously done. When a great
French writer, Emil Zola, alarmed at the sterilization of his nation,
wrote an eloquent and powerful book to restore the prestige of
parentage, it was at once assumed in England that a work of this
character, with such a title as Fecundity, was too abominable to be
translated, and that any attempt to deal with the relations of the sexes
from any other than the voluptuary or romantic point of view must be
sternly put down. Now if this assumption were really founded on public
opinion, it would indicate an attitude of disgust and resentment towards
the Life Force that could only arise in a diseased and moribund
community in which Ibsen's Hedda Gabler would be the typical woman. But
it has no vital foundation at all. The prudery of the newspapers is,
like the prudery of the dinner table, a mere difficulty of education and
language. We are not taught to think decently on these subjects, and
consequently we have no language for them except indecent language. We
therefore have to declare them unfit for public discussion, because the
only terms in which we can conduct the discussion are unfit for public
use. Physiologists, who have a technical vocabulary at their disposal,
find no difficulty; and masters of language who think decently can write
popular stories like Zola's Fecundity or Tolstoy's Resurrection without
giving the smallest offence to readers who can also think decently. But
the ordinary modern journalist, who has never discussed such matters
except in ribaldry, cannot write a simple comment on a divorce case
without a conscious shamefulness or a furtive facetiousness that makes
it impossible to read the comment aloud in company. All this ribaldry
and prudery (the two are the same) does not mean that people do not feel
decently on the subject: on the contrary, it is just the depth and
seriousness of our feeling that makes its desecration by vile language
and coarse humor intolerable; so that at last we cannot bear to have it
spoken of at all because only one in a thousand can speak of it without
wounding our self-respect, especially the self-respect of women. Add to
the horrors of popular language the horrors of popular poverty. In
crowded populations poverty destroys the possibility of cleanliness; and
in the absence of cleanliness many of the natural condi