Essays in War-Time

Essays in War-Time

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Title: Essays in War-Time Further Studies In The Task Of Social
Hygiene
Author: Havelock Ellis

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one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on October 28,
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WAR-TIME ***

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ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME
FURTHER STUDIES IN THE TASK OF SOCIAL HYGIENE
BY HAVELOCK ELLIS

CONTENTS
I. INTRODUCTION II. EVOLUTION AND WAR III. WAR AND
EUGENICS IV. MORALITY IN WARFARE V. IS WAR
DIMINISHING VI. WAR AND THE BIRTH-RATE VII. WAR AND
DEMOCRACY VIII. FEMINISM AND MASCULINISM IX. THE
MENTAL DIFFERENCES OF MEN AND WOMEN X. THE WHITE
SLAVE CRUSADE XI. THE CONQUEST OF VENEREAL
DISEASE XII. THE NATIONALISATION OF HEALTH XIII.
EUGENICS AND GENIUS XIV. THE PRODUCTION OF ABILITY
XV. MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE XVI. THE MEANING OF THE
BIRTH-RATE XVII. CIVILISATION AND THE BIRTH-RATE

XVIII. BIRTH CONTROL INDEX

I
INTRODUCTION
From the point of view of literature, the Great War of to-day has
brought us into a new and closer sympathy with the England of the past.
Dr. Woods and Mr. Baltzly in their recent careful study of European
Warfare, _Is War Diminishing?_ come to the conclusion that England
during the period of her great activity in the world has been "fighting
about half the time." We had begun to look on war as belonging to the
past and insensibly fallen into the view of Buckle that in England "a
love of war is, as a national taste, utterly extinct." Now we have
awakened to realise that we belong to a people who have been "fighting
about half the time."
Thus it is, for instance, that we witness a revival of interest in
Wordsworth, not that Wordsworth, the high-priest of Nature among the
solitary Lakes, whom we have never forsaken, but the Wordsworth
who sang exultantly of Carnage as God's Daughter. To-day we turn to
the war-like Wordsworth, the stern patriot hurling defiance at the
enemies who threatened our island fortress, as the authentic voice of
England.
But this new sense of community with the past comes to us again and
again on every hand when to-day we look back to the records of the
past. I chance to take down the Epistles of Erasmus, and turn to the
letters which the great Humanist of Rotterdam wrote from Cambridge
and London four hundred years ago when young Henry VIII had just
suddenly (in 1514) plunged into war. One reads them to-day with vivid
interest, for here in the supple and sensitive brain of the old scholar we
see mirrored precisely the same thoughts and the same problems which
exercise the more scholarly brains of to-day. Erasmus, as his
Pan-German friends liked to remind him, was a sort of German, but he
was, nevertheless, what we should now call a Pacifist. He can see

nothing good in war and he eloquently sets forth what he regards as its
evils. It is interesting to observe, how, even in its small details as well
as in its great calamities, war brought precisely the same experiences
four centuries ago as to-day. Prices are rising every day, Erasmus
declares, taxation has become so heavy that no one can afford to be
liberal, imports are hampered and wine is scarce, it is difficult even to
get one's foreign letters. In fact the preparations of war are rapidly
changing "the genius of the Island." Thereupon Erasmus launches into
more general considerations on war. Even animals, he points out, do
not fight, save rarely, and then with only those of other species, and,
moreover, not, like us, "with machines upon which we expend the
ingenuity of devils." In every war also it is