Lysistrata

It has been a great pleasure for me to read Lysistrata—it is so stimulating. Whether one agrees with your views or not (and I disagree with many of them), the book impels one to re-examine one’s standards of value, and that is the highest function a book can perform.

Perhaps I am prejudiced, but to me you seem very hard on the medical profession. With the present idiotic system of paying the doctor better for illness than for health the wonder is, not that we doctors have so many faults, but that we have so few. In a saner age we shall get a retaining fee for keeping each person or group of persons well, and so, in order to avoid excessive work, if for no higher motive, we shall aim at preventing disease rather than at alleviating it. To a large extent we do that now, in spite of the fact that it takes money out of our pockets.

Your exhortation to breast-feed babies is backed by all but a few cranks, and I find your suggestion to make confinement easier by proper diet during pregnancy very interesting. I remember that at the obstetric hospital at which I was trained we used to notice that patients who had been on special treatment for albuminuria had, in general, easy confinements. It is very significant, from the standpoint of your suggestions, that in the diet of these patients the protein element had been very greatly reduced. I shall follow up your idea and let you know the result.

I am sure you are right when you say “Sound and desirable women cannot be happy unmated.” The fact that there are some women who can does not invalidate the general truth—they are atypical.

Another of your phrases I would that you should trumpet forth in a voice that should reach to the uttermost ends of the earth: “Strictly speaking, moral depravity is no more voluntary than physiological depravity.” I am confident that as Science advances the former will be found always to depend on the latter.

In speaking of the unfit, infanticide, and concubinage, your frankness is splendid, though on my pet subject, Birth-Control, I disagree with you. There can be no doubt that much of our present-day “humanitarianism” only results in wasting on the hopelessly unfit money and care which might be spent very profitably on the fit, and in keeping alive those who should never have been born. With the decay of sentimentalism, infanticide must come to be practised on those who at birth are obviously below a (variable) minimum standard, and sterilization (destruction of fertility without interference with sexual potency or pleasure) on those whose deficiency becomes unmistakable only at a more advanced age. Contraception will be used mainly to ensure an optimum interval between births in the interest of both mother and child, and to limit the offspring to a (variable) number most suitable in the individual, financial, and social circumstances of each family.

Some modification of our present marriage-arrangement is inevitable, and concubinage seems quite a probable solution. At present we pretend to be a monogamous people in spite of widespread fornication and adultery, overtly with prostitutes and covertly with “amateurs.” But sooner or later we shall have to drop the pretence and admit that men are polygamous. (A few men are monogamous, and a few women polyandrous, but both are exceptions.) Surely it would be better to allow every woman to have half a husband, if she wants to, and remain respectable, than to give half the women a whole husband and the others no share in a husband at all.

For this book you will probably be denounced as a daring and fantastic visionary, and I shall be blamed as an aider and abettor, but that doesn’t matter. It will have stimulated many unthinking people to a re-examination of their table of values.

Ever yours,

NORMAN HAIRE

90, Harley Street, W.

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INTRODUCTION

VALUES DIRECT SCIENCE