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Page 25
The next great law of life is the law of race preservation. This law
comprises the instinct to reproduction and the instinct of parental
love. The first and chief function of these instincts in the animal
economy is the perpetuation of the race. The preservation of self
implies and comprehends the preservation of the race.
My first duty to myself is to preserve myself in health and happiness;
but this is best fulfilled and realized in labouring for the health and
happiness of others. If this be the universal law, I also am the
recipient of others' care, therefore probably better tended and
preserved. I save my life by losing it in others.
My second duty, though nominally to Society, is in reality to myself,
and it is to preserve myself by preserving the race to which I belong.
Self-preservation therefore, is the first law of life, race preservation
the second or subsidiary law.
To fulfil this second law, nature has placed on every normal healthy man
and woman the sacred duty of reproducing their kind. Reproduction as a
physiological process promotes, both directly and indirectly, the
health, happiness and longevity of healthy men and women.
Statistics confirm the popular opinion "that the length of life, to the
enjoyment of which a married person may look forward, is greater than
that of the unmarried, both male and female at the same
age."--(Coghlan).
It is a familiar observation that the mothers of large families of ten
and even twice that number are not less healthy nor shorter lived
because of the children they have borne. Pregnancy is a stimulus to
vitality. Because another life has to be supported, all the vital
powers are invigorated and rise to the occasion--the circulation
increases, the heart enlarges in response to the extra work, and the
assimilative powers of the body are greatly accelerated. During
lactation also, the same extra vital work done is a stimulus to a
physiological activity which is favourable to health and longevity. The
expectancy of life in women is greater than in men all through life, the
difference during the child-bearing period of life being about 2.2 years
in favour of women.
Statistics and physicians from their observation agree in this, that the
bearing of children by normal women, so far from being injurious to
health, is as healthful, stimulating, and invigorating a function as the
blooming of a flower, or the shedding of fruit, and a mother is no worse
for the experience of maternity than is the plant or the tree for the
fruit it bears.
The supreme law of society is the law of race-preservation, and the
infraction of this law is a social crime. One's duty to society is a
higher duty than to one's-self, but the lower duty comes first in our
present stage of racial evolution. Instinct prompts to the one,
reason--a higher and later, but less respected, faculty--prompts to the
other.
But it can be shown that from an egoistic standpoint my duty to the
State in this regard is my highest duty to myself.
The parental sacrifice necessary in rearing the normal number of
children is infinitesimal compared with the parental advantage.
Parental love is a passion as well as an instinct in normal men and
women, and the full play of this passion in its natural state is
productive of the greatest happiness.
Vice may restrain, replace, or smother it, but nothing else can damage
or adulterate this powerful passion in the human heart.
Low level selfishness, love of low level luxury, diseased imaginings,
and unreasonable dreads and fears, are some of the forms of vice that
smother this noble passion.
The pursuit of happiness and the higher forms of selfishness would
naturally point to parentage.
The ectasy of parental love, the sweet response from little ones that
rises as the fragrance of lovely flowers, self-realization in the
comfort and joy of family life, the parental pride in the contemplation
of effulgent youth, the sympathetic partnership in success, the repose
of old age surrounded by filial manhood and womanhood, all go to make a
surplus of pleasure over pain, that no other way of life can possibly
supply.
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