centuries which divide primitive savagery from high civilisation, the
demand for continuous, unbroken child-bearing on the part of the woman as
her loftiest social duty has generally been hardly less imperious.
Throughout the Middle Ages of Europe, and down almost to our own day, the
rate of infant mortality was almost as large as in a savage state; medical
ignorance destroyed innumerable lives; antiseptic surgery being unknown,
serious wounds were still almost always fatal; in the low state of sanitary
science, plagues such as those which in the reign of Justinian swept across
the civilised world from India to Northern Europe, well nigh depopulating
the globe, or the Black Death of 1349, which in England alone swept away
more than half the population of the island, were but extreme forms of the
destruction of population going on continually as the result of zymotic
disease; while wars were not merely far more common but, owing to the
famines which almost invariably followed them, were far more destructive to
human life than in our own days, and deaths by violence, whether at the
hands of the state or as the result of personal enmity, were of daily
occurrence in all lands. Under these conditions abstinence on the part of
woman from incessant child-bearing might have led to almost the same
serious diminution or even extinction of her people, as in the savage
state; while the very existence of her civilisation depended on the
production of an immense number of individuals as beasts of burden, without
the expenditure of whose crude muscular force in physical labour of
agriculture and manufacture those intermediate civilisations would, in the
absence of machinery, have been impossible. Twenty men had to be born, fed
at the breast, and reared by women to perform the crude brute labour which
is performed today by one small, well-adjusted steam crane; and the demand
for large masses of human creatures as mere reservoirs of motor force for
accomplishing the simplest processes was imperative. So strong, indeed,
was the consciousness of the importance to society of continuous child-
bearing on the part of woman, that as late as the middle of the sixteenth