The Task of Social Hygiene

The Task of Social Hygiene, by
Havelock Ellis

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Havelock Ellis
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Title: The Task of Social Hygiene
Author: Havelock Ellis

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Language: English
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THE TASK OF SOCIAL HYGIENE
* * * * *
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
STUDIES IN THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SEX. SIX VOLS.
THE NEW SPIRIT
AFFIRMATIONS
MAN AND WOMAN
THE CRIMINAL
THE WORLD OF DREAMS
THE SOUL OF SPAIN
IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS
ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME. ETC.
* * * * *
THE TASK OF SOCIAL HYGIENE
by
HAVELOCK ELLIS
Author of "The Soul of Spain"; "The World of Dreams"; etc.

Boston and New York Houghton Mifflin Company 1916
Printed in Great Britain.

PREFACE
The study of social hygiene means the study of those things which
concern the welfare of human beings living in societies. There can,
therefore, be no study more widely important or more generally
interesting. I fear, however, that by many persons social hygiene is
vaguely regarded either as a mere extension of sanitary science, or else
as an effort to set up an intolerable bureaucracy to oversee every action
of our lives, and perhaps even to breed us as cattle are bred.
That is certainly not the point of view from which this book has been
written. Plato and Rabelais, Campanella and More, have been among
those who announced the principles of social hygiene here set forth.
There must be a social order, all these great pioneers recognized, but
the health of society, like the health of the body, is marked by
expansion as much as by restriction, and, the striving for order is only
justified because without order there can be no freedom. If it were not
the mission of social hygiene to bring a new joy and a new freedom
into life I should not have concerned myself with the writing of this
book.
When we thus contemplate the process of social hygiene, we are no
longer in danger of looking upon it as an artificial interference with
Nature. It is in the Book of Nature, as Campanella put it, that the laws
of life and of government are to be read. Or, as Quesnel said two
centuries ago, more precisely for our present purpose, "Nature is
universal hygiene." All animals are scrupulous in hygiene; the
elaboration of hygiene moves pari passu with the rank of a species in
intelligence. Even the cockroach, which lives on what we call filth,
spends the greater part of its time in the cultivation of personal
cleanliness. And all social hygiene, in its fullest sense, is but an
increasingly complex and extended method of purification--the
purification of the conditions of life by sound legislation, the
purification of our own minds by better knowledge, the purification of
our hearts by a growing sense of responsibility, the purification of the
race itself by an enlightened eugenics, consciously aiding Nature in her

manifest effort to embody new ideals of life. It was not Man, but
Nature, who realized the daring and splendid idea--risky as it was--of
placing the higher anthropoids on their hind limbs and so liberating
their fore-limbs in the service of their nimble and aspiring brains. We
may humbly follow in the same path, liberating latent forces of life and
suppressing those which no longer serve the present ends of life. For, as
Shakespeare said, when in The Winter's Tale he set forth a luminous
philosophy of social hygiene and applied it to eugenics,
"Nature is made better by no mean But Nature makes that mean ... This
is an art Which does mend Nature, change it rather, but The art itself is
Nature."
In whatever way it may be understood, however, social hygiene is now
very much to the front of people's minds. The present volume, I wish to
make clear, has not been hastily written to meet any real or supposed
demand. It has slowly grown during a period of nearly twenty-five
years, and it expresses an attitude which is implicit or explicit in the
whole of my work. By some readers, doubtless, it will be seen to
constitute an extension in various directions of the arguments
developed in the larger work on "Sex in Relation to Society," which is
the final volume of my Studies in the Psychology of Sex. The book I