The Task of Social Hygiene | Page 2

need for vast and complex changes in social organization. In these changes the welfare of individuals and the welfare of communities are alike concerned. Moreover, they are matters which are not confined to the affairs of this nation or of that nation, but of the whole family of nations participating in the fraternity of modern progress.
The word "progress," indeed, which falls so easily from our lips is not a word which any serious writer should use without precaution. The conception of "progress" is a useful conception in so far as it binds together those who are working for common ends, and stimulates that perpetual slight movement in which life consists. But there is no general progress in Nature, nor any unqualified progress; that is to say, that there is no progress for all groups along the line, and that even those groups which progress pay the price of their progress. It was so even when our anthropoid ancestors rose to the erect position; that was "progress," and it gained us the use of hands. But it lost us our tails, and much else that is more regrettable than we are always able to realize. There is no general and ever-increasing evolution towards perfection. "Existence is realized in its perfection under whatever aspect it is manifested," says Jules de Gaultier. Or, as Whitman put it, "There will never be any more perfection than there is now." We cannot expect an increased power of growth and realization in existence, as a whole, leading to any general perfection; we can only expect to see the triumph of individuals, or of groups of individuals, carrying out their own conceptions along special lines, every perfection so attained involving, on its reverse side, the acquirement of an imperfection. It is in this sense, and in this sense only, that progress is possible. We need not fear that we shall ever achieve the stagnant immobility of a general perfection.
The problems of progress we are here concerned with are such as the civilized world, as represented by some of its foremost individuals or groups of individuals, is just now waking up to grapple with. No doubt other problems might be added, and the addition give a greater semblance of completion to this book. I have selected those which seem to me very essential, very fundamental. The questions of social hygiene, as here understood, go to the heart of life. It is the task of this hygiene not only to make sewers, but to re-make love, and to do both in the same large spirit of human fellowship, to ensure finer individual development and a larger social organization. At the one end social hygiene may be regarded as simply the extension of an elementary sanitary code; at the other end it seems to some to have in it the glorious freedom of a new religion. The majority of people, probably, will be content to admit that we have here a scheme of serious social reform which every man and woman will soon be called upon to take some share in.
HAVELOCK ELLIS.

CONTENTS
I.--INTRODUCTION PAGE The aim of Social Hygiene--Social Reform--The Rise of Social Reform out of English Industrialism--The Four Stages of Social Reform--(1) The Stage of Sanitation--(2) Factory Legislation--(3) The Extension of the Scope of Education--(4) Puericulture--The Scientific Evolution corresponding to these Stages--Social Reform only Touched the Conditions of Life--Yet Social Reform Remains highly Necessary--The Question of Infantile Mortality and the Quality of the Race--The Better Organization of Life Involved by Social Hygiene--Its Insistence on the Quality rather than on the Conditions of Life--The Control of Reproduction--The Fall of the Birth-rate in Relation to the Quality of the Population--The Rejuvenation of a Society--The Influence of Culture and Refinement on a Race--Eugenics--The Regeneration of the Race--The Problem of Feeble-mindedness--The Methods of Eugenics--Some of the Problems which Face us 1
II.--THE CHANGING STATUS OF WOMEN
The Origin of the Woman Movement--Mary Wollstonecraft--George Sand--Robert Owen--William Thompson--John Stuart Mill--The Modern Growth of Social Cohesion--The Growth of Industrialism--Its Influence in Woman's Sphere of Work--The Education of Women--Co-education--The Woman Question and Sexual Selection--Significance of Economic Independence--The State Regulation of Marriage--The Future of Marriage--Wilhelm von Humboldt--Social Equality of Women--The Reproduction of the Race as a Function of Society--Women and the Future of Civilization 49
III.--THE NEW ASPECT OF THE WOMAN'S MOVEMENT
Eighteenth-Century France--Pioneers of the Woman's Movement--The Growth of the Woman's Suffrage Movement--The Militant Activities of the Suffragettes--Their Services and Disservices to the Cause--Advantages of Women's Suffrage--Sex Questions in Germany--Bebel--The Woman's Rights Movement in Germany--The Development of Sexual Science in Germany--The Movement for the Protection of Motherhood--Ellen Key--The Question of Illegitimacy--Eugenics--Women as Law-makers in the Home 67
IV.--THE EMANCIPATION OF WOMEN IN RELATION TO ROMANTIC LOVE
The Absence of Romantic Love in Classic Civilization--Marriage as a Duty--The Rise of Romantic Love in the Roman Empire--The Influence of Christianity--The Attitude of Chivalry--The Troubadours--The Courts of