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THE TASK OF SOCIAL HYGIENE
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
STUDIES IN THE PSYCHOLOGYOF 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 OFSOCIAL 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 ofthose things which concern the welfare of humanbeings living in societies. There can, therefore,be no study more widely important or more generally interesting.I fear, however, that by many persons socialhygiene is vaguely regarded either as a mere extensionof sanitary science, or else as an effort to set up an intolerablebureaucracy to oversee every action of ourlives, and perhaps even to breed us as cattle are bred.
That is certainly not the point of view from which thisbook has been written. Plato and Rabelais, Campanellaand More, have been among those who announcedthe principles of social hygiene here set forth. Theremust 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 withoutorder there can be no freedom. If it were not the missionof social hygiene to bring a new joy and a new freedominto life I should not have concerned myself with thewriting of this book.
When we thus contemplate the process of socialhygiene, we are no longer in danger of looking upon it asan artificial interference with Nature. It is in the[vi]Book of Nature, as Campanella put it, that the laws oflife and of government are to be read. Or, as Quesnelsaid two centuries ago, more precisely for our presentpurpose, "Nature is universal hygiene." All animals arescrupulous in hygiene; the elaboration of hygiene movespari 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 ofpersonal cleanliness. And all social hygiene, in its fullestsense, is but an increasingly complex and extendedmethod of purification—the purification of the conditionsof life by sound legislation, the purification of our ownminds by better knowledge, the purification of ourhearts by a growing sense of responsibility, the purificationof the race itself by an enlightened eugenics, consciouslyaiding Nature in her manifest effort to embodynew ideals of life. It was not Man, but Nature, whorealized the daring and splendid idea—risky as it was—ofplacing the higher anthropoids on their hind limbsand so liberating their fore-limbs in the service of theirnimble and aspiring brains. We may humbly followin the same path, liberating latent forces of life andsuppressing those which no longer serve the present endsof life. For, as Shakespeare said, when in The Winter'sTale he set forth a luminous philosophy of social hygieneand applied it to eugenics,