Margaret Sanger The Pivot Of Civilization 
 
 
 Introduction 
 Birth control, Mrs. Sanger claims, and claims rightly, to be a question 
 of fundamental importance at the present time. I do not know how far 
 one is justified in calling it the pivot or the corner-stone of a 
 progressive civilization. These terms involve a criticism of metaphors 
 that may take us far away from the question in hand. Birth Control is no 
 new thing in human experience, and it has been practised in societies of 
 the most various types and fortunes. But there can be little doubt that 
 at the present time it is a test issue between two widely different 
 interpretations of the word civilization, and of what is good in life 
 and conduct. The way in which men and women range themselves in this 
 controversy is more simply and directly indicative of their general 
 intellectual quality than any other single indication. I do not wish to 
 imply by this that the people who oppose are more or less intellectual 
 than the people who advocate Birth Control, but only that they have 
 fundamentally contrasted general ideas,--that, mentally, they are 
 DIFFERENT. Very simple, very complex, very dull and very brilliant 
 persons may be found in either camp, but all those in either camp have 
 certain attitudes in common which they share with one another, and do 
 not share with those in the other camp. 
   
 There have been many definitions of civilization. Civilization is a 
 complexity of count less aspects, and may be validly defined in a great 
 number of relationships. A reader of James Harvey Robinson's MIND IN THE 
 MAKING will find it very reasonable to define a civilization as a system 
 of society-making ideas at issue with reality. Just so far as the system 
 of ideas meets the needs and conditions of survival or is able to 
 adapt itself to the needs and conditions of survival of the society 
 it dominates, so far will that society continue and prosper. We are 
 beginning to realize that in the past and under different conditions 
 from our own, societies have existed with systems of ideas and with 
 methods of thought very widely contrasting with what we should consider 
 right and sane to-day. The extraordinary neolithic civilizations of the 
 American continent that flourished before the coming of the Europeans, 
 seem to have got along with concepts that involved pedantries and 
 cruelties and a kind of systematic unreason, which find their closest 
 parallels to-day in the art and writings of certain types of lunatic. 
 There are collections of drawings from English and American asylums 
 extraordinarily parallel in their spirit and quality with the Maya 
 inscriptions of Central America. Yet these neolithic American societies 
 got along for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years, they respected 
 seed-time and harvest, they bred and they maintained a grotesque and 
 terrible order. And they produced quite beautiful works of art. Yet 
 their surplus of population was disposed of by an organization of 
 sacrificial slaughter unparalleled in the records of mankind. Many of 
 the institutions that seemed most normal and respectable to them, filled 
 the invading Europeans with perplexity and horror. 
   
 When we realize clearly this possibility of civilizations being based 
 on very different sets of moral ideas and upon different intellectual 
 methods, we are better able to appreciate the profound significance of 
 the schism in our modern community, which gives us side by side, honest 
 and intelligent people who regard Birth Control as something essentially 
 sweet, sane, clean, desirable and necessary, and others equally honest 
 and with as good a claim to intelligence who regard it as not merely 
 unreasonable and unwholesome, but as intolerable and abominable. We are 
 living not in a simple and complete civilization, but in a conflict 
 of at least two civilizations, based on entirely different fundamental 
 ideas, pursuing different methods and with different aims and ends. 
   
 I will call one of these civilizations our Traditional or Authoritative 
 Civilization. It rests upon the thing that is, and upon the thing that 
 has been. It insists upon respect for custom and usage; it discourages 
 criticism and enquiry. It is very ancient and conservative, or, going 
 beyond conservation, it is reactionary. The vehement hostility of many 
 Catholic priests and prelates towards new views of human origins, and 
 new views of moral questions, has led many careless thinkers to 
 identify this old traditional civilization with Christianity, but that 
 identification ignores the strongly revolutionary and initiatory 
 spirit that has always animated Christianity, and is untrue even to the 
 realities of orthodox Catholic teaching. The vituperation of individual 
 Catholics must not be confused with the deliberate doctrines of the 
 Church which have, on the whole, been conspicuously cautious and 
 balanced and sane in these matters. The ideas and practices of the Old 
 Civilization are older and more widespread than and not identifiable 
 with either Christian or Catholic culture, and it will be a great 
 misfortune if the issues between the Old Civilization and the New are 
 allowed to slip into the deep ruts of religious controversies that are 
 only accidentally and intermittently parallel. 
   
 Contrasted with the ancient civilization, with the Traditional 
 disposition, which accepts institutions and moral values as though they 
 were a part of nature, we have what I may call--with an evident bias 
 in its favour--the civilization of enquiry, of experimental knowledge, 
 Creative and Progressive Civilization. The first great outbreak of the 
 spirit of this civilization was in republican Greece; the martyrdom of 
 Socrates, the fearless Utopianism of Plato, the ambitious encyclopaedism 
 of Aristotle, mark the dawn of a new courage and a new wilfulness in 
 human affairs. The fear of set limitations, of punitive and restrictive 
 laws imposed by Fate upon human life was visibly fading in human minds. 
 These names mark the first clear realization that to a large extent, and 
 possibly to an illimitable extent, man's moral and social life and his 
 general destiny could be seized upon and controlled by man. But--he 
 must have knowledge. Said the Ancient Civilization--and it says it still 
 through a multitude of vigorous voices and harsh repressive acts: 
 "Let man learn his duty and obey." Says the New Civilization, with 
 ever-increasing confidence: "Let man know, and trust him." 
   
 For long ages, the Old Civilization kept the New subordinate, apologetic 
 and ineffective, but for the last two centuries, the New has fought its 
 way to a position of contentious equality. The two go on side by side, 
 jostling upon a thousand issues. The world changes, the conditions of 
 life change rapidly, through that development of organized science which 
 is the natural method of the New Civilization. The old tradition demands 
 that national loyalties and ancient belligerence should continue. The 
 new has produced means of communication that break down the pens and 
 separations of human life upon which nationalist emotion depends. The 
 old tradition insists upon its ancient blood-letting of war; the new 
 knowledge carries that war to undreamt of levels of destruction. The 
 ancient system needed an unrestricted breeding to meet the normal 
 waste of life through war, pestilence, and a multitude of hitherto 
 unpreventable diseases. The new knowledge sweeps away the venerable 
 checks of pestilence and disease, and confronts us with the congestions 
 and explosive dangers of an over-populated world. The old tradition 
 demands a special prolific class doomed to labor and subservience; the 
 new points to mechanism and to scientific organization as a means of 
 escape from this immemorial subjugation. Upon every main issue in life, 
 there is this quarrel between the method of submission and the method 
 of knowledge. More and more do men of science and intelligent people 
 generally realize the hopelessness of pouring new wine into old bottles. 
 More and more clearly do they grasp the significance of the Great 
 Teacher's parable. 
   
 The New Civilization is saying to the Old now: "We cannot go on making 
 power for you to spend upon international conflict. You must stop waving 
 flags and bandying insults. You must organize the Peace of the World; 
 you must subdue yourselves to the Federation of all mankind. And we 
 cannot go on giving you health, freedom, enlargement, limitless wealth, 
 if all our gifts to you are to be swamped by an indiscriminate torrent 
 of progeny. We want fewer and better children who can be reared up to 
 their full possibilities in unencumbered homes, and we cannot make the 
 social life and the world-peace we are determined to make, with the 
 ill-bred, ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens that you inflict upon 
 us." And there at the passionate and crucial question, this essential 
 and fundamental question, whether procreation is still to be a 
 superstitious and often disastrous mystery, undertaken in fear and 
 ignorance, reluctantly and under the sway of blind desires, or whether 
 it is to become a deliberate creative act, the two civilizations join 
 issue now. It is a conflict from which it is almost impossible to 
 abstain. Our acts, our way of living, our social tolerance, our very 
 silences will count in this crucial decision between the old and the 
 new. 
   
 In a plain and lucid style without any emotional appeals, Mrs. Margaret 
 Sanger sets out the case of the new order against the old. There have 
 been several able books published recently upon the question of Birth 
 Control, from the point of view of a woman's personal life, and from the 
 point of view of married happiness, but I do not think there has been 
 any book as yet, popularly accessible, which presents this matter from 
 the point of view of the public good, and as a necessary step to the 
 further improvement of human life as a whole. I am inclined to think 
 that there has hitherto been rather too much personal emotion spent upon 
 this business and far too little attention given to its broader aspects. 
 Mrs. Sanger with her extraordinary breadth of outlook and the real 
 scientific quality of her mind, has now redressed the balance. She 
 has lifted this question from out of the warm atmosphere of troubled 
 domesticity in which it has hitherto been discussed, to its proper level 
 of a predominantly important human affair. 
   
 H.G. Wells 
   
 Easton Glebe, Dunmow, 
   
 Essex., England 
   
   
   
   
 THE PIVOT OF CIVILIZATION 
 
 
 
 Chapter 1 (A New Truth Emerges) 
          Be not ashamed, women, your privilege encloses the 
              rest, and is the exit of the rest, 
          You are the gates of the body, and you are the gates of 
              the soul. 
   
          --Walt Whitman 
   
 This book aims to be neither the first word on the tangled problems of 
 human society to-day, nor the last. My aim has been to emphasize, by the 
 use of concrete and challenging examples and neglected facts, the 
 need of a new approach to individual and social problems. Its central 
 challenge is that civilization, in any true sense of the word, is based 
 upon the control and guidance of the great natural instinct of Sex. 
 Mastery of this force is possible only through the instrument of Birth 
 Control. 
   
 It may be objected that in the following pages I have rushed in 
 where academic scholars have feared to tread, and that as an active 
 propagandist I am lacking in the scholarship and documentary preparation 
 to undertake such a stupendous task. My only defense is that, from my 
 point of view at least, too many are already studying and investigating 
 social problems from without, with a sort of Olympian detachment. And on 
 the other hand, too few of those who are engaged in this endless war for 
 human betterment have found the time to give to the world those truths 
 not always hidden but practically unquarried, which may be secured only 
 after years of active service. 
   
 Of late, we have been treated to accounts written by well-meaning ladies 
 and gentlemen who have assumed clever disguises and have gone out to 
 work--for a week or a month--among the proletariat. But can we thus 
 learn anything new of the fundamental problems of working men, working 
 women, working children? Something, perhaps, but not those great central 
 problems of Hunger and Sex. We have been told that only those who 
 themselves have suffered the pangs of starvation can truly understand 
 Hunger. You might come into the closest contact with a starving man; 
 yet, if you were yourself well-fed, no amount of sympathy could give you 
 actual insight into the psychology of his suffering. This suggests an 
 objective and a subjective approach to all social problems. Whatever the 
 weakness of the subjective (or, if you prefer, the feminine) approach, 
 it has at least the virtue that its conclusions are tested by 
 experience. Observation of facts about you, intimate subjective 
 reaction to such facts, generate in your mind certain fundamental 
 convictions,--truths you can ignore no more than you can ignore such 
 truths as come as the fruit of bitter but valuable personal experience. 
   
 Regarding myself, I may say that my experience in the course of the 
 past twelve or fifteen years has been of a type to force upon me certain 
 convictions that demand expression. For years I had believed that the 
 solution of all our troubles was to be found in well-defined programmes 
 of political and legislative action. At first, I concentrated my whole 
 attention upon these, only to discover that politicians and law-makers 
 are just as confused and as much at a loss in solving fundamental 
 problems as anyone else. And I am speaking here not so much of the 
 corrupt and ignorant politician as of those idealists and reformers who 
 think that by the ballot society may be led to an earthly paradise. They 
 may honestly desire and intend to do great things. They may positively 
 glow--before election--with enthusiasm at the prospect they imagine 
 political victory may open to them. Time after time, I was struck by the 
 change in their attitude after the briefest enjoyment of this illusory 
 power. Men are elected during some wave of reform, let us say, elected 
 to legislate into practical working existence some great ideal. They 
 want to do big things; but a short time in office is enough to show the 
 political idealist that he can accomplish nothing, that his reform 
 must be debased and dragged into the dust, so that even if it becomes 
 enacted, it may be not merely of no benefit, but a positive evil. It 
 is scarcely necessary to emphasize this point. It is an accepted 
 commonplace of American politics. So much of life, so large a part of 
 all our social problems, moreover, remains untouched by political and 
 legislative action. This is an old truth too often ignored by those who 
 plan political campaigns upon the most superficial knowledge of human 
 nature. 
   
 My own eyes were opened to the limitations of political action when, as 
 an organizer for a political group in New York, I attended by chance 
 a meeting of women laundry-workers who were on strike. We believed 
 we could help these women with a legislative measure and asked their 
 support. "Oh! that stuff!" exclaimed one of these women. "Don't you know 
 that we women might be dead and buried if we waited for politicians and 
 lawmakers to right our wrongs?" This set me to thinking--not merely of 
 the immediate problem--but to asking myself how much any male politician 
 could understand of the wrongs inflicted upon poor working women. 
   
 I threw the weight of my study and activity into the economic and 
 industrial struggle. Here I discovered men and women fired with the 
 glorious vision of a new world, of a proletarian world emancipated, a 
 Utopian world,--it glowed in romantic colours for the majority of those 
 with whom I came in closest contact. The next step, the immediate step, 
 was another matter, less romantic and too often less encouraging. In 
 their ardor, some of the labor leaders of that period almost convinced 
 us that the millennium was just around the corner. Those were the 
 pre-war days of dramatic strikes. But even when most under the spell 
 of the new vision, the sight of the overburdened wives of the strikers, 
 with their puny babies and their broods of under-fed children, made us 
 stop and think of a neglected factor in the march toward our earthly 
 paradise. It was well enough to ask the poor men workers to carry on the 
 battle against economic injustice. But what results could be expected 
 when they were forced in addition to carry the burden of their 
 ever-growing families? This question loomed large to those of us who 
 came into intimate contact with the women and children. We saw that in 
 the final analysis the real burden of economic and industrial warfare 
 was thrust upon the frail, all-too-frail shoulders of the children, 
 the very babies--the coming generation. In their wan faces, in their 
 undernourished bodies, would be indelibly written the bitter defeat of 
 their parents. 
   
 The eloquence of those who led the underpaid and half-starved workers 
 could no longer, for me, at least, ring with conviction. Something 
 more than the purely economic interpretation was involved. The bitter 
 struggle for bread, for a home and material comfort, was but one phase 
 of the problem. There was another phase, perhaps even more fundamental, 
 that had been absolutely neglected by the adherents of the new dogmas. 
 That other phase was the driving power of instinct, a power uncontrolled 
 and unnoticed. The great fundamental instinct of sex was expressing 
 itself in these ever-growing broods, in the prosperity of the slum 
 midwife and her colleague the slum undertaker. In spite of all my 
 sympathy with the dream of liberated Labor, I was driven to ask whether 
 this urging power of sex, this deep instinct, was not at least partially 
 responsible, along with industrial injustice, for the widespread misery 
 of the world. 
   
 To find an answer to this problem which at that point in my experience 
 I could not solve, I determined to study conditions in Europe. Perhaps 
 there I might discover a new approach, a great illumination. Just before 
 the outbreak of the war, I visited France, Spain, Germany and Great 
 Britain. Everywhere I found the same dogmas and prejudices among labor 
 leaders, the same intense but limited vision, the same insistence upon 
 the purely economic phases of human nature, the same belief that if the 
 problem of hunger were solved, the question of the women and children 
 would take care of itself. In this attitude I discovered, then, what 
 seemed to me to be purely masculine reasoning; and because it was purely 
 masculine, it could at best be but half true. Feminine insight must be 
 brought to bear on all questions; and here, it struck me, the fallacy 
 of the masculine, the all-too-masculine, was brutally exposed. I was 
 encouraged and strengthened in this attitude by the support of certain 
 leaders who had studied human nature and who had reached the same 
 conclusion: that civilization could not solve the problem of Hunger 
 until it recognized the titanic strength of the sexual instinct. In 
 Spain, I found that Lorenzo Portet, who was carrying on the work of the 
 martyred Francisco Ferrer, had reached this same conclusion. In Italy, 
 Enrico Malatesta, the valiant leader who was after the war to play 
 so dramatic a role, was likewise combating the current dogma of the 
 orthodox Socialists. In Berlin, Rudolph Rocker was engaged in the 
 thankless task of puncturing the articles of faith of the orthodox 
 Marxian religion. It is quite needless to add that these men who had 
 probed beneath the surface of the problem and had diagnosed so much more 
 completely the complex malady of contemporary society were intensely 
 disliked by the superficial theorists of the neo-Marxian School. 
   
 The gospel of Marx had, however, been too long and too thoroughly 
 inculcated into the minds of millions of workers in Europe, to be 
 discarded. It is a flattering doctrine, since it teaches the laborer 
 that all the fault is with someone else, that he is the victim of 
 circumstances, and not even a partner in the creation of his own and his 
 child's misery. Not without significance was the additional discovery 
 that I made. I found that the Marxian influence tended to lead workers 
 to believe that, irrespective of the health of the poor mothers, the 
 earning capacity of the wage-earning fathers, or the upbringing of 
 the children, increase of the proletarian family was a benefit, not 
 a detriment to the revolutionary movement. The greater the number of 
 hungry mouths, the emptier the stomachs, the more quickly would the 
 "Class War" be precipitated. The greater the increase in population 
 among the proletariat, the greater the incentive to revolution. This 
 may not be sound Marxian theory; but it is the manner in which it is 
 popularly accepted. It is the popular belief, wherever the Marxian 
 influence is strong. This I found especially in England and Scotland. In 
 speaking to groups of dockworkers on strike in Glasgow, and before the 
 communist and co-operative guilds throughout England, I discovered 
 a prevailing opposition to the recognition of sex as a factor in the 
 perpetuation of poverty. The leaders and theorists were immovable in 
 their opposition. But when once I succeeded in breaking through the 
 surface opposition of the rank and file of the workers, I found that 
 they were willing to recognize the power of this neglected factor in 
 their lives. 
   
 So central, so fundamental in the life of every man and woman is this 
 problem that they need be taught no elaborate or imposing theory to 
 explain their troubles. To approach their problems by the avenue of sex 
 and reproduction is to reveal at once their fundamental relations to the 
 whole economic and biological structure of society. Their interest is 
 immediately and completely awakened. But always, as I soon discovered, 
 the ideas and habits of thought of these submerged masses have been 
 formed through the Press, the Church, through political institutions, 
 all of which had built up a conspiracy of silence around a subject 
 that is of no less vital importance than that of Hunger. A great wall 
 separates the masses from those imperative truths that must be known 
 and flung wide if civilization is to be saved. As currently constituted, 
 Church, Press, Education seem to-day organized to exploit the ignorance 
 and the prejudices of the masses, rather than to light their way to 
 self-salvation. 
   
 Such was the situation in 1914, when I returned to America, determined, 
 since the exclusively masculine point of view had dominated too long, 
 that the other half of the truth should be made known. The Birth 
 Control movement was launched because it was in this form that the 
 whole relation of woman and child--eternal emblem of the future of 
 society--could be more effectively dramatized. The amazing growth 
 of this movement dates from the moment when in my home a small group 
 organized the first Birth Control League. Since then we have been 
 criticized for our choice of the term "Birth Control" to express 
 the idea of modern scientific contraception. I have yet to hear 
 any criticism of this term that is not based upon some false and 
 hypocritical sense of modesty, or that does not arise out of a 
 semi-prurient misunderstanding of its aim. On the other hand: nothing 
 better expresses the idea of purposive, responsible, and self-directed 
 guidance of the reproductive powers. 
   
 Those critics who condemn Birth Control as a negative, destructive 
 idea, concerned only with self-gratification, might profitably open 
 the nearest dictionary for a definition of "control." There they would 
 discover that the verb "control" means to exercise a directing, guiding, 
 or restraining influence;--to direct, to regulate, to counteract. 
 Control is guidance, direction, foresight. It implies intelligence, 
 forethought and responsibility. They will find in the Standard 
 Dictionary a quotation from Lecky to the effect that, "The greatest of 
 all evils in politics is power without control." In what phase of life 
 is not "power without control" an evil? Birth Control, therefore, means 
 not merely the limitation of births, but the application of intelligent 
 guidance over the reproductive power. It means the substitution of 
 reason and intelligence for the blind play of instinct. 
   
 The term "Birth Control" had the immense practical advantage of 
 compressing into two short words the answer to the inarticulate demands 
 of millions of men and women in all countries. At the time this slogan 
 was formulated, I had not yet come to the complete realization of the 
 great truth that had been thus crystallized. It was the response to the 
 overwhelming, heart-breaking appeals that came by every mail for aid 
 and advice, which revealed a great truth that lay dormant, a truth that 
 seemed to spring into full vitality almost over night--that could never 
 again be crushed to earth! 
   
 Nor could I then have realized the number and the power of the enemies 
 who were to be aroused into activity by this idea. So completely was I 
 dominated by this conviction of the efficacy of "control," that I could 
 not until later realize the extent of the sacrifices that were to be 
 exacted of me and of those who supported my campaign. The very idea 
 of Birth Control resurrected the spirit of the witch-hunters of Salem. 
 Could they have usurped the power, they would have burned us at the 
 stake. Lacking that power, they used the weapon of suppression, and 
 invoked medieval statutes to send us to jail. These tactics had an 
 effect the very opposite to that intended. They demonstrated the 
 vitality of the idea of Birth Control, and acted as counter-irritant on 
 the actively intelligent sections of the American community. Nor was the 
 interest aroused confined merely to America. The neo-Malthusian movement 
 in Great Britain with its history of undaunted bravery, came to our 
 support; and I had the comfort of knowing that the finest minds of 
 England did not hesitate a moment in the expression of their sympathy 
 and support. 
   
 In America, on the other hand, I found from the beginning until very 
 recently that the so-called intellectuals exhibited a curious and almost 
 inexplicable reticence in supporting Birth Control. They even hesitated 
 to voice any public protest against the campaign to crush us which was 
 inaugurated and sustained by the most reactionary and sinister forces in 
 American life. It was not inertia or any lack of interest on the part 
 of the masses that stood in our way. It was the indifference of the 
 intellectual leaders. 
   
 Writers, teachers, ministers, editors, who form a class dictating, if 
 not creating, public opinion, are, in this country, singularly inhibited 
 or unconscious of their true function in the community. One of their 
 first duties, it is certain, should be to champion the constitutional 
 right of free speech and free press, to welcome any idea that tends to 
 awaken the critical attention of the great American public. But those 
 who reveal themselves as fully cognizant of this public duty are in 
 the minority, and must possess more than average courage to survive the 
 enmity such an attitude provokes. 
   
 One of the chief aims of the present volume is to stimulate American 
 intellectuals to abandon the mental habits which prevent them from 
 seeing human nature as a whole, instead of as something that can be 
 pigeonholed into various compartments or classes. Birth Control affords 
 an approach to the study of humanity because it cuts through 
 the limitations of current methods. It is economic, biological, 
 psychological and spiritual in its aspects. It awakens the vision of 
 mankind moving and changing, of humanity growing and developing, coming 
 to fruition, of a race creative, flowering into beautiful expression 
 through talent and genius. 
   
 As a social programme, Birth Control is not merely concerned with 
 population questions. In this respect, it is a distinct step in advance 
 of earlier Malthusian doctrines, which concerned themselves chiefly with 
 economics and population. Birth Control concerns itself with the spirit 
 no less than the body. It looks for the liberation of the spirit of 
 woman and through woman of the child. To-day motherhood is wasted, 
 penalized, tortured. Children brought into the world by unwilling mother 
 suffer an initial handicap that cannot be measured by cold statistics. 
 Their lives are blighted from the start. To substantiate this fact, I 
 have chosen to present the conclusions of reports on Child Labor and 
 records of defect and delinquency published by organizations with no 
 bias in favour of Birth Control. The evidence is before us. It crowds in 
 upon us from all sides. But prior to this new approach, no attempt had 
 been made to correlate the effects of the blind and irresponsible play 
 of the sexual instinct with its deep-rooted causes. 
   
 The duty of the educator and the intellectual creator of public opinion 
 is, in this connection, of the greatest importance. For centuries 
 official moralists, priests, clergymen and teachers, statesmen and 
 politicians have preached the doctrine of glorious and divine fertility. 
 To-day, we are confronted with the world-wide spectacle of the 
 realization of this doctrine. It is not without significance that the 
 moron and the imbecile set the pace in living up to this teaching, 
 and that the intellectuals, the educators, the archbishops, bishops, 
 priests, who are most insistent on it, are the staunchest adherents in 
 their own lives of celibacy and non-fertility. It is time to point out 
 to the champions of unceasing and indiscriminate fertility the results 
 of their teaching. 
   
 One of the greatest difficulties in giving to the public a book of this 
 type is the impossibility of keeping pace with the events and changes of 
 a movement that is now, throughout the world, striking root and growing. 
 The changed attitude of the American Press indicates that enlightened 
 public opinion no longer tolerates a policy of silence upon a question 
 of the most vital importance. Almost simultaneously in England and 
 America, two incidents have broken through the prejudice and the guarded 
 silence of centuries. At the church Congress in Birmingham, October 12, 
 1921, Lord Dawson, the king's physician, in criticizing the report of 
 the Lambeth Conference concerning Birth Control, delivered an address 
 defending this practice. Of such bravery and eloquence that it could 
 not be ignored, this address electrified the entire British public. It 
 aroused a storm of abuse, and yet succeeded, as no propaganda could, in 
 mobilizing the forces of progress and intelligence in the support of the 
 cause. 
   
 Just one month later, the First American Birth Control Conference 
 culminated in a significant and dramatic incident. At the close of the 
 conference a mass meeting was scheduled in the Town Hall, New York City, 
 to discuss the morality of Birth Control. Mr. Harold Cox, editor of the 
 Edinburgh Review, who had come to New York to attend the conference, was 
 to lead the discussion. It seemed only natural for us to call 
 together scientists, educators, members of the medical profession, 
 and theologians of all denominations, to ask their opinion upon this 
 uncertain and important phase of the controversy. Letters were sent to 
 eminent men and women in different parts of the world. In this letter we 
 asked the following questions:-- 
   
 1. Is over-population a menace to the peace of the world? 
   
 2. Would the legal dissemination of scientific Birth Control 
 information, through the medium of clinics by the medical profession, be 
 the most logical method of checking the problem of over-population? 
   
 3. Would knowledge of Birth Control change the moral attitude of men 
 and women toward the marriage bond, or lower the moral standards of the 
 youth of the country? 
   
 4. Do you believe that knowledge which enables parents to limit their 
 families will make for human happiness, and raise the moral, social and 
 intellectual standards of population? 
   
 We sent this questionnaire not only to those who we thought might agree 
 with us, but we sent it also to our known opponents. 
   
 When I arrived at the Town Hall the entrance was guarded by policemen. 
 They told me there would be no meeting. Before my arrival r executives 
 had been greeted by Monsignor Dineen, secretary of Archbishop Hayes, of 
 the Roman Catholic archdiocese, who informed them that the meeting would 
 be prohibited on the ground that it was contrary to public morals. The 
 police had closed the doors. When they opened them to permit the exit 
 of the large audience which had gathered, Mr. Cox and I entered. I 
 attempted to exercise my constitutional right of free speech, but was 
 prohibited and arrested. Miss Mary Winsor, who protested against this 
 unwarranted arrest, was likewise dragged off to the police station. The 
 case was dismissed the following morning. The ecclesiastic instigators 
 of the affair were conspicuous by their absence from the police court. 
 But the incident was enough to expose the opponents of Birth Control and 
 the extreme methods they used to combat our progress. The case was too 
 flagrant, too gross an affront, to pass unnoticed by the newspapers. The 
 progress of our movement was indicated in the changed attitude of the 
 American Press, which had perceived the danger to the public of the 
 unlawful tactics used by the enemies of Birth Control in preventing open 
 discussion of a vital question. 
   
 No social idea has inspired its advocates with more bravery, tenacity, 
 and courage than Birth Control. From the early days of Francis Place 
 and Richard Carlile, to those of the Drysdales and Edward Trulove, of 
 Bradlaugh and Mrs. Annie Besant, its advocates have faced imprisonment 
 and ostracism. In the whole history of the English movement, there has 
 been no more courageous figure than that of the venerable Alice Drysdale 
 Vickery, the undaunted torch-bearer who has bridged the silence of 
 forty-four years--since the Bradlaugh-Besant trial. She stands head and 
 shoulders above the professional feminists. Serenely has she withstood 
 jeers and jests. To-day, she continues to point out to the younger 
 generation which is devoted to newer palliatives the fundamental 
 relation between Sex and Hunger. 
   
 The First American Birth Control Conference, held at the same time 
 as the Washington Conference for the Limitation of Armaments, marks a 
 turning-point in our approach to social problems. The Conference made 
 evident the fact that in every field of scientific and social endeavour 
 the most penetrating thinkers are now turning to the consideration of 
 our problem as a fundamental necessity to American civilization. They 
 are coming to see that a QUALITATIVE factor as opposed to a QUANTITATIVE 
 one is of primary importance in dealing with the great masses of 
 humanity. 
   
 Certain fundamental convictions should be made clear here. The programme 
 for Birth. Control is not a charity. It is not aiming to interfere in 
 the private lives of poor people, to tell them how many children 
 they should have, nor to sit in judgment upon their fitness to become 
 parents. It aims, rather, to awaken responsibility, to answer the demand 
 for a scientific means by which and through which each human life may 
 be self-directed and self-controlled. The exponent of Birth Control, in 
 short, is convinced that social regeneration, no less than individual 
 regeneration, must come from within. Every potential parent, and 
 especially every potential mother, must be brought to an acute 
 realization of the primary and individual responsibility of bringing 
 children into this world. Not until the parents of this world are given 
 control over their reproductive faculties will it be possible to improve 
 the quality of the generations of the future, or even to maintain 
 civilization at its present level. Only when given intelligent mastery 
 of the procreative powers can the great mass of humanity be aroused to 
 a realization of responsibility of parenthood. We have come to the 
 conclusion, based on widespread investigation and experience, that 
 education for parenthood must be based upon the needs and demands of 
 the people themselves. An idealistic code of sexual ethics, imposed from 
 above, a set of rules devised by high-minded theorists who fail to take 
 into account the living conditions and desires of the masses, can never 
 be of the slightest value in effecting change in the customs of the 
 people. Systems so imposed in the past have revealed their woeful 
 inability to prevent the sexual and racial chaos into which the world 
 has drifted. 
   
 The universal demand for practical education in Birth Control is one 
 of the most hopeful signs that the masses themselves to-day possess 
 the divine spark of regeneration. It remains for the courageous and 
 the enlightened to answer this demand, to kindle the spark, to direct a 
 thorough education in sex hygiene based upon this intense interest. 
   
 Birth Control is thus the entering wedge for the educator. In answering 
 the needs of these thousands upon thousands of submerged mothers, it 
 is possible to use their interest as the foundation for education in 
 prophylaxis, hygiene and infant welfare. The potential mother can 
 then be shown that maternity need not be slavery but may be the most 
 effective avenue to self-development and self-realization. Upon this 
 basis only may we improve the quality of the race. 
   
 The lack of balance between the birth-rate of the "unfit" and the "fit," 
 admittedly the greatest present menace to the civilization, can never be 
 rectified by the inauguration of a cradle competition between these 
 two classes. The example of the inferior classes, the fertility of the 
 feeble-minded, the mentally defective, the poverty-stricken, should 
 not be held up for emulation to the mentally and physically fit, and 
 therefore less fertile, parents of the educated and well-to-do classes. 
 On the contrary, the most urgent problem to-day is how to limit and 
 discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective. 
 Possibly drastic and Spartan methods may be forced upon American 
 society if it continues complacently to encourage the chance and chaotic 
 breeding that has resulted from our stupid, cruel sentimentalism. 
   
 To effect the salvation of the generations of the future--nay, of the 
 generations of to-day--our greatest need, first of all, is the ability 
 to face the situation without flinching; to cooperate in the formation 
 of a code of sexual ethics based upon a thorough biological and 
 psychological understanding of human nature; and then to answer the 
 questions and the needs of the people with all the intelligence and 
 honesty at our command. If we can summon the bravery to do this, we 
 shall best be serving the pivotal interests of civilization. 
   
 To conclude this introduction: my initiation, as I have confessed, was 
 primarily an emotional one. My interest in Birth Control was awakened 
 by experience. Research and investigation have followed. Our effort has 
 been to raise our program from the plane of the emotional to the plane 
 of the scientific. Any social progress, it is my belief, must purge 
 itself of sentimentalism and pass through the crucible of science. We 
 are willing to submit Birth Control to this test. It is part of the 
 purpose of this book to appeal to the scientist for aid, to arouse that 
 interest which will result in widespread research and investigation. I 
 believe that my personal experience with this idea must be that of 
 the race at large. We must temper our emotion and enthusiasm with 
 the impersonal determination of science. We must unite in the task of 
 creating an instrument of steel, strong but supple, if we are to triumph 
 finally in the war for human emancipation. 
 
 
 
 Chapter 2 (Conscripted Motherhood) 
      "Their poor, old ravaged and stiffened faces, their poor, 
      old bodies dried up with ceaseless toil, their patient souls 
      made me weep.  They are our conscripts. They are the venerable 
      ones whom we should reverence. All the mystery of womanhood 
      seems incarnated in their ugly being--the Mothers! the Mothers! 
      Ye are all one!" 
   
      --From the Letters of William James 
   
 Motherhood, which is not only the oldest but the most important 
 profession in the world, has received few of the benefits of 
 civilization. It is a curious fact that a civilization devoted to 
 mother-worship, that publicly professes a worship of mother and child, 
 should close its eyes to the appalling waste of human life and human 
 energy resulting from those dire consequences of leaving the whole 
 problem of child-bearing to chance and blind instinct. It would be 
 untrue to say that among the civilized nations of the world to-day, the 
 profession of motherhood remains in a barbarous state. The bitter truth 
 is that motherhood, among the larger part of our population, does not 
 rise to the level of the barbarous or the primitive. Conditions of life 
 among the primitive tribes were rude enough and severe enough to 
 prevent the unhealthy growth of sentimentality, and to discourage the 
 irresponsible production of defective children. Moreover, there is ample 
 evidence to indicate that even among the most primitive peoples 
 the function of maternity was recognized as of primary and central 
 importance to the community. 
   
 If we define civilization as increased and increasing responsibility 
 based on vision and foresight, it becomes painfully evident that the 
 profession of motherhood as practised to-day is in no sense civilized. 
 Educated people derive their ideas of maternity for the most part, 
 either from the experience of their own set, or from visits to 
 impressive hospitals where women of the upper classes receive the 
 advantages of modern science and modern nursing. From these charming 
 pictures they derive their complacent views of the beauty of motherhood 
 and their confidence for the future of the race. The other side of the 
 picture is revealed only to the trained investigator, to the patient and 
 impartial observer who visits not merely one or two "homes of the poor," 
 but makes detailed studies of town after town, obtains the history of 
 each mother, and finally correlates and analyzes this evidence. Upon 
 such a basis are we able to draw conclusions concerning this strange 
 business of bringing children into the world. 
   
 Every year I receive thousands of letters from women in all parts of 
 America, desperate appeals to aid them to extricate themselves from the 
 trap of compulsory maternity. Lest I be accused of bias and exaggeration 
 in drawing my conclusions from these painful human documents, I prefer 
 to present a number of typical cases recorded in the reports of the 
 United States Government, and in the evidence of trained and impartial 
 investigators of social agencies more generally opposed to the doctrine 
 of Birth Control than biased in favor of it. 
   
 A perusal of the reports on infant mortality in widely varying 
 industrial centers of the United States, published during the past 
 decade by the Children's Bureau of the United States Department of 
 Labor, forces us to a realization of the immediate need of detailed 
 statistics concerning the practice and results of uncontrolled breeding. 
 Some such effort as this has been made by the Galton Laboratory of 
 National Eugenics in Great Britain. The Children's Bureau reports only 
 incidentally present this impressive evidence. They fail to coordinate 
 it. While there is always the danger of drawing giant conclusions from 
 pigmy premises, here is overwhelming evidence concerning irresponsible 
 parenthood that is ignored by governmental and social agencies. 
   
 I have chosen a small number of typical cases from these reports. Though 
 drawn from widely varying sources, they all emphasize the greatest crime 
 of modern civilization--that of permitting motherhood to be left to 
 blind chance, and to be mainly a function of the most abysmally ignorant 
 and irresponsible classes of the community. 
   
 Here is a fairly typical case from Johnstown, Pennsylvania. A woman 
 of thirty-eight years had undergone thirteen pregnancies in seventeen 
 years. Of eleven live births and two premature stillbirths, only two 
 children were alive at the time of the government agent's visit. The 
 second to eighth, the eleventh and the thirteenth had died of bowel 
 trouble, at ages ranging from three weeks to four months. The only cause 
 of these deaths the mother could give was that "food did not agree with 
 them." She confessed quite frankly that she believed in feeding babies, 
 and gave them everything anybody told her to give them. She began to 
 give them at the age of one month, bread, potatoes, egg, crackers, etc. 
 For the last baby that died, this mother had bought a goat and gave its 
 milk to the baby; the goat got sick, but the mother continued to give 
 her baby its milk until the goat went dry. Moreover, she directed the 
 feeding of her daughter's baby until it died at the age of three months. 
 "On account of the many children she had had, the neighbors consider her 
 an authority on baby care." 
   
 Lest this case be considered too tragically ridiculous to be accepted 
 as typical, the reader may verify it with an almost interminable list of 
 similar cases.(1) Parental irresponsibility is significantly illustrated 
 in another case: 
   
 A mother who had four live births and two stillbirths in twelve years 
 lost all of her babies during their first year. She was so anxious that 
 at least one child should live that she consulted a physician concerning 
 the care of the last one. "Upon his advice," to quote the government 
 report, "she gave up her twenty boarders immediately after the child's 
 birth, and devoted all her time to it. Thinks she did not stop her hard 
 work soon enough; says she has always worked too hard, keeping boarders 
 in this country, and cutting wood and carrying it and water on her back 
 in the old country. Also says the carrying of water and cases of beer 
 in this country is a great strain on her." But the illuminating point in 
 this case is that the father was furious because all the babies died. 
 To show his disrespect for the wife who could only give birth to babies 
 that died, he wore a red necktie to the funeral of the last. Yet this 
 woman, the government agent reports, would follow and profit by any 
 instruction that might be given her. 
   
 It is true that the cases reported from Johnstown, Pennsylvania, do not 
 represent completely "Americanized" families. This lack does not prevent 
 them, however, by their unceasing fertility from producing the Americans 
 of to-morrow. Of the more immediate conditions surrounding child-birth, 
 we are presented with this evidence, given by one woman concerning the 
 birth of her last child: 
   
 On five o'clock on Wednesday evening she went to her sister's house to 
 return a washboard, after finishing a day's washing. The baby was born 
 while she was there. Her sister was too young to aid her in any way. 
 She was not accustomed to a midwife, she confessed. She cut the cord 
 herself, washed the new-born baby at her sister's house, walked home, 
 cooked supper for her boarders, and went to bed by eight o'clock. The 
 next day she got up and ironed. This tired her out, she said, so she 
 stayed in bed for two whole days. She milked cows the day after the 
 birth of the baby and sold the milk as well. Later in the week, when 
 she became tired, she hired someone to do that portion of her work. This 
 woman, we are further informed, kept cows, chickens, and lodgers, and 
 earned additional money by doing laundry and charwork. At times her 
 husband deserted her. His earnings amounted to $1.70 a day, while a 
 fifteen-year-old son earned $1.10 in a coal mine. 
   
 One searches in vain for some picture of sacred motherhood, as depicted 
 in popular plays and motion pictures, something more normal and 
 encouraging. Then one comes to the bitter realization that these, in 
 very truth, are the "normal" cases, not the exceptions. The exceptions 
 are apt to indicate, instead, the close relationship of this 
 irresponsible and chance parenthood to the great social problems of 
 feeble-mindedness, crime and syphilis. 
   
 Nor is this type of motherhood confined to newly arrived immigrant 
 mothers, as a government report from Akron, Ohio, sufficiently 
 indicates. In this city, the government agents discovered that more than 
 five hundred mothers were ignorant of the accepted principles of 
 infant feeding, or, if familiar with them, did not practise them. "This 
 ignorance or indifference was not confined to foreign-born mothers.... A 
 native mother reported that she gave her two-weeks-old baby ice cream, 
 and that before his sixth month, he was sitting at the table `eating 
 everything."' This was in a town in which there were comparatively few 
 cases of extreme poverty. 
   
 The degradation of motherhood, the damnation of the next generation 
 before it is born, is exposed in all its catastrophic misery, in the 
 reports of the National Consumers' League. In her report of living 
 conditions among night-working mothers in thirty-nine textile mills 
 in Rhode Island, based on exhaustive studies, Mrs. Florence Kelley 
 describes the "normal" life of these women: 
   
 "When the worker, cruelly tired from ten hours' work, comes home in the 
 early morning, she usually scrambles together breakfast for the family. 
 Eating little or nothing herself, and that hastily, she tumbles into 
 bed--not the immaculate bed in an airy bed-room with dark shades, but 
 one still warm from its night occupants, in a stuffy little bed-room, 
 darkened imperfectly if at all. After sleeping exhaustedly for an hour 
 perhaps she bestirs herself to get the children off to school, or care 
 for insistent little ones, too young to appreciate that mother is tired 
 out and must sleep. Perhaps later in the forenoon, she again drops into 
 a fitful sleep, or she may have to wait until after dinner. There is 
 the midday meal to get, and, if her husband cannot come home, his 
 dinner-pail to pack with a hot lunch to be sent or carried to him. If 
 he is not at home, the lunch is rather a makeshift. The midday meal is 
 scarcely over before supper must be thought of. This has to be eaten 
 hurriedly before the family are ready, for the mother must be in the 
 mill at work, by 6, 6:30 or 7 P.M.... Many women in their inadequate 
 English, summed up their daily routine by, 'Oh, me all time tired. TOO 
 MUCH WORK, TOO MUCH BABY, TOO LITTLE SLEEP!'" 
   
 "Only sixteen of the 166 married women were without children; thirty-two 
 had three or more; twenty had children one year old or under. There were 
 160 children under school-age, below six years, and 246 of school age." 
   
 "A woman in ordinary circumstances," adds this impartial investigator, 
 "with a husband and three children, if she does her own work, feels that 
 her hands are full. How these mill-workers, many of them frail-looking, 
 and many with confessedly poor health, can ever do two jobs is a 
 mystery, when they are seen in their homes dragging about, pale, 
 hollow-eyed and listless, often needlessly sharp and impatient with the 
 children. These children are not only not mothered, never cherished, 
 they are nagged and buffeted. The mothers are not superwomen, and like 
 all human beings, they have a certain amount of strength and when that 
 breaks, their nerves suffer." 
   
 We are presented with a vivid picture of one of these slave-mothers: a 
 woman of thirty-eight who looks at least fifty with her worn, furrowed 
 face. Asked why she had been working at night for the past two years, 
 she pointed to a six-months old baby she was carrying, to the five 
 small children swarming about her, and answered laconically, "Too much 
 children!" She volunteered the information that there had been two more 
 who had died. When asked why they had died, the poor mother shrugged her 
 shoulders listlessly, and replied, "Don't know." In addition to bearing 
 and rearing these children, her work would sap the vitality of any 
 ordinary person. "She got home soon after four in the morning, cooked 
 breakfast for the family and ate hastily herself. At 4.30 she was in 
 bed, staying there until eight. But part of that time was disturbed for 
 the children were noisy and the apartment was a tiny, dingy place in 
 a basement. At eight she started the three oldest boys to school, and 
 cleaned up the debris of breakfast and of supper the night before. At 
 twelve she carried a hot lunch to her husband and had dinner ready for 
 the three school children. In the afternoon, there were again dishes 
 and cooking, and caring for three babies aged five, three years, and 
 six months. At five, supper was ready for the family. The mother ate by 
 herself and was off to work at 5:45." 
   
 Another of the night-working mothers was a frail looking Frenchwoman of 
 twenty-seven years, with a husband and five children ranging from eight 
 years to fourteen months. Three other children had died. When visited, 
 she was doing a huge washing. She was forced into night work to meet the 
 expenses of the family. She estimated that she succeeded in getting 
 five hours' sleep during the day. "I take my baby to bed with me, but he 
 cries, and my little four-year-old boy cries, too, and comes in to make 
 me get up, so you can't call that a very good sleep." 
   
 The problem among unmarried women or those without family is not the 
 same, this investigator points out. "They sleep longer by day than they 
 normally would by night." We are also informed that pregnant women work 
 at night in the mills, sometimes up to the very hour of delivery. "It's 
 queer," exclaimed a woman supervisor of one of the Rhode Island mills, 
 "but some women, both on the day and the night shift, will stick to 
 their work right up to the last minute, and will use every means to 
 deceive you about their condition. I go around and talk to them, but 
 make little impression. We have had several narrow escapes.... A Polish 
 mother with five children had worked in a mill by day or by night, ever 
 since her marriage, stopping only to have her babies. One little girl 
 had died several years ago, and the youngest child, says Mrs. Kelley, 
 did not look promising. It had none of the charm of babyhood; its 
 body and clothing were filthy; and its lower lip and chin covered with 
 repulsive black sores." 
   
 It should be remembered that the Consumers' League, which publishes 
 these reports on women in industry, is not advocating Birth Control 
 education, but is aiming "to awaken responsibility for conditions under 
 which goods are produced, and through investigation, education and 
 legislation, to mobilize public opinion in behalf of enlightened 
 standards for workers and honest products for all." Nevertheless, in 
 Miss Agnes de Lima's report of conditions in Passaic, New Jersey, we 
 find the same tale of penalized, prostrate motherhood, bearing the 
 crushing burden of economic injustice and cruelty; the same blind but 
 overpowering instincts of love and hunger driving young women into the 
 factories to work, night in and night out, to support their procession 
 of uncared for and undernourished babies. It is the married women with 
 young children who work on the inferno-like shifts. They are driven to 
 it by the low wages of their husbands. They choose night work in order 
 to be with their children in the daytime. They are afraid of the neglect 
 and ill-treatment the children might receive at the hands of paid 
 caretakers. Thus they condemn themselves to eighteen or twenty hours of 
 daily toil. Surely no mother with three, four, five or six children can 
 secure much rest by day. 
   
 "Take almost any house"--we read in the report of conditions in New 
 Jersey--"knock at almost any door and you will find a weary, tousled 
 woman, half-dressed, doing her housework, or trying to snatch an hour or 
 two of sleep after her long night of work in the mill. ... The facts 
 are there for any one to see; the hopeless and exhausted woman, her 
 cluttered three or four rooms, the swarm of sickly and neglected 
 children." 
   
 These women claimed that night work was unavoidable, as their husbands 
 received so little pay. This in spite of all our vaunted "high wages." 
 Only three women were found who went into the drudgery of night work 
 without being obliged to do so. Two had no children, and their husbands' 
 earnings were sufficient for their needs. One of these was saving for 
 a trip to Europe, and chose the night shift because she found it less 
 strenuous than the day. Only four of the hundred women reported upon 
 were unmarried, and ninety-two of the married women had children. Of the 
 four childless married women, one had lost two children, and another 
 was recovering from a recent miscarriage. There were five widows. The 
 average number of children was three in a family. Thirty-nine of the 
 mothers had four or more. Three of them had six children, and six of 
 them had seven children apiece. These women ranged between the ages of 
 twenty-five and forty, and more than half the children were less than 
 seven years of age. Most of them had babies of one, two and three years 
 of age. 
   
 At the risk of repetition, we quote one of the typical cases reported 
 by Miss De Lima with features practically identical with the individual 
 cases reported from Rhode Island. It is of a mother who comes home from 
 work at 5:30 every morning, falls on the bed from exhaustion, arises 
 again at eight or nine o'clock to see that the older children are sent 
 off to school. A son of five, like the rest of the children, is on a 
 diet of coffee,--milk costs too much. After the children have left for 
 school, the overworked mother again tries to sleep, though the small son 
 bothers her a great deal. Besides, she must clean the house, wash, iron, 
 mend, sew and prepare the midday meal. She tries to snatch a little 
 sleep in the afternoon, but explains: "When you got big family, all time 
 work. Night-time in mill drag so long, so long; day-time in home go so 
 quick." By five, this mother must get the family's supper ready, and 
 dress for the night's work, which begins at seven. The investigator 
 further reports: "The next day was a holiday, and for a diversion, Mrs. 
 N. thought she would go up to the cemetery: `I got some children up 
 there,' she explained, `and same time I get some air. No, I don't go 
 nowheres, just to the mill and then home."' 
   
 Here again, as in all reports on women in industry, we find the 
 prevalence of pregnant women working on night-shifts, often to the very 
 day of their delivery. "Oh, yes, plenty women, big bellies, work in the 
 night time," one of the toiling mothers volunteered. "Shame they go, but 
 what can do?" The abuse was general. Many mothers confessed that owing 
 to poverty they themselves worked up to the last week or even day before 
 the birth of their children. Births were even reported in one of 
 the mills during the night shift. A foreman told of permitting a 
 night-working woman to leave at 6.30 one morning, and of the birth of 
 her baby at 7.30. Several women told of leaving the day-shift because of 
 pregnancy and of securing places on the nightshift where their condition 
 was less conspicuous, and the bosses more tolerant. One mother defended 
 her right to stay at work, says the report, claiming that as long as she 
 could do her work, it was nobody's business. In a doorway sat a sickly 
 and bloodless woman in an advanced stage of pregnancy. Her first baby 
 had died of general debility. She had worked at night in the mill until 
 the very day of its birth. This time the boss had told her she could 
 stay if she wished, but reminded her of what had happened last time. So 
 she had stopped work, as the baby was expected any day. 
   
 Again and again we read the same story, which varied only in detail: the 
 mother in the three black rooms; the sagging porch overflowing with pale 
 and sickly children; the over-worked mother of seven, still nursing 
 her youngest, who is two or three months old. Worn and haggard, with a 
 skeleton-like child pulling at her breast, the women tries to make the 
 investigator understand. The grandmother helps to interpret. "She never 
 sleeps," explains the old woman, "how can she with so many children?" 
 She works up to the last moment before her baby comes, and returns to 
 work as soon as they are four weeks old. 
   
 Another apartment in the same house; another of those night-working 
 mothers, who had just stopped because she is pregnant. The boss had 
 kindly given her permission to stay on, but she found the reaching on 
 the heavy spinning machines too hard. Three children, ranging in age 
 from five to twelve years, are all sickly and forlorn and must be cared 
 for. There is a tubercular husband, who is unable to work steadily, and 
 is able to bring in only $12 a week. Two of the babies had died, one 
 because the mother had returned to work too soon after its birth and had 
 lost her milk. She had fed him tea and bread, "so he died." 
   
 The most heartrending feature of it all--in these homes of the mothers 
 who work at night--is the expression in the faces of the children; 
 children of chance, dressed in rags, undernourished, underclothed, all 
 predisposed to the ravages of chronic and epidemic disease. 
   
 The reports on infant mortality published under the direction of the 
 Children's Bureau substantiate for the United States of America the 
 findings of the Galton Laboratory for Great Britain, showing that an 
 abnormally high rate of fertility is usually associated with poverty, 
 filth, disease, feeblemindedness and a high infant mortality rate. It 
 is a commonplace truism that a high birth-rate is accompanied by a high 
 infant-mortality rate. No longer is it necessary to dissociate cause and 
 effect, to try to determine whether the high birth rate is the cause of 
 the high infant mortality rate. It is sufficient to know that they are 
 organically correlated along with other anti-social factors detrimental 
 to individual, national and racial welfare. The figures presented by 
 Hibbs (2) likewise reveal a much higher infant mortality rate for the 
 later born children of large families. 
   
 The statistics which show that the greatest number of children are born 
 to parents whose earnings are the lowest,(3) that the direst poverty is 
 associated with uncontrolled fecundity emphasize the character of the 
 parenthood we are depending upon to create the race of the future. 
   
 A distinguished American opponent of Birth Control some years ago spoke 
 of the "racial" value of this high infant mortality rate among the 
 "unfit." He forgot, however, that the survival-rate of the children 
 born of these overworked and fatigued mothers may nevertheless be large 
 enough, aided and abetted by philanthropies and charities, to form the 
 greater part of the population of to-morrow. As Dr. Karl Pearson has 
 stated: "Degenerate stocks under present social conditions are not 
 short-lived; they live to have more than the normal size of family." 
   
 Reports of charitable organizations; the famous "one hundred neediest 
 cases" presented every year by the New York Times to arouse the 
 sentimental generosity of its readers; statistics of public and private 
 hospitals, charities and corrections; analyses of pauperism in town 
 and country--all tell the same tale of uncontrolled and irresponsible 
 fecundity. The facts, the figures, the appalling truth are there for all 
 to read. It is only in the remedy proposed, the effective solution, that 
 investigators and students of the problem disagree. 
   
 Confronted with the "startling and disgraceful" conditions of affairs 
 indicated by the fact that a quarter of a million babies die every year 
 in the United States before they are one year old, and that no less 
 than 23,000 women die in childbirth, a large number of experts and 
 enthusiasts have placed their hopes in maternity-benefit measures. 
   
 Such measures sharply illustrate the superficial and fragmentary manner 
 in which the whole problem of motherhood is studied to-day. It seeks a 
 LAISSER FAIRE policy of parenthood or marriage, with an indiscriminating 
 paternalism concerning maternity. It is as though the Government were 
 to say: "Increase and multiply; we shall assume the responsibility of 
 keeping your babies alive." Even granting that the administration of 
 these measures might be made effective and effectual, which is more 
 than doubtful, we see that they are based upon a complete ignorance 
 or disregard of the most important fact in the situation--that of 
 indiscriminate and irresponsible fecundity. They tacitly assume that 
 all parenthood is desirable, that all children should be born, and 
 that infant mortality can be controlled by external aid. In the great 
 world-problem of creating the men and women of to-morrow, it is not 
 merely a question of sustaining the lives of all children, irrespective 
 of their hereditary and physical qualities, to the point where they, 
 in turn, may reproduce their kind. Advocates of Birth Control offer and 
 accept no such superficial solution. This philosophy is based upon 
 a clearer vision and a more profound comprehension of human life. Of 
 immediate relief for the crushed and enslaved motherhood of the world 
 through State aid, no better criticism has been made than that of 
 Havelock Ellis: 
   
 "To the theoretical philanthropist, eager to reform the world on paper, 
 nothing seems simpler than to cure the present evils of child-rearing 
 by setting up State nurseries which are at once to relieve mothers of 
 everything connected with the men of the future beyond the pleasure--if 
 such it happens to be--of conceiving them, and the trouble of bearing 
 them, and at the same time to rear them up independently of the home, in 
 a wholesome, economical and scientific manner. Nothing seems simpler, 
 but from the fundamental psychological point of view nothing is 
 falser.... A State which admits that the individuals composing it are 
 incompetent to perform their most sacred and intimate functions, and 
 takes it upon itself to perform them itself instead, attempts a task 
 that would be undesirable, even if it were possible of achievement.(4)" 
 It may be replied that maternity benefit measures aim merely to aid 
 mothers more adequately to fulfil their biological and social functions. 
 But from the point of view of Birth Control, that will never be possible 
 until the crushing exigencies of overcrowding are removed--overcrowding 
 of pregnancies as well as of homes. As long as the mother remains the 
 passive victim of blind instinct, instead of the conscious, responsible 
 instrument of the life-force, controlling and directing its expression, 
 there can be no solution to the intricate and complex problems that 
 confront the whole world to-day. This is, of course, impossible as long 
 as women are driven into the factories, on night as well as day shifts, 
 as long as children and girls and young women are driven into industries 
 to labor that is physically deteriorating as a preparation for the 
 supreme function of maternity. 
   
 The philosophy of Birth Control insists that motherhood, no less 
 than any other human function, must undergo scientific study, must be 
 voluntarily directed and controlled with intelligence and foresight. As 
 long as we countenance what H. G. Wells has well termed "the monstrous 
 absurdity of women discharging their supreme social function, bearing 
 and rearing children, in their spare time, as it were, while they `earn 
 their living' by contributing some half-mechanical element to some 
 trivial industrial product" any attempt to furnish "maternal education" 
 is bound to fall on stony ground. Children brought into the world as the 
 chance consequences of the blind play of uncontrolled instinct, become 
 likewise the helpless victims of their environment. It is because 
 children are cheaply conceived that the infant mortality rate is high. 
 But the greatest evil, perhaps the greatest crime, of our so-called 
 civilization of to-day, is not to be gauged by the infant-mortality 
 rate. In truth, unfortunate babies who depart during their first twelve 
 months are more fortunate in many respects than those who survive to 
 undergo punishment for their parents' cruel ignorance and complacent 
 fecundity. If motherhood is wasted under the present regime of "glorious 
 fertility," childhood is not merely wasted, but actually destroyed. 
 Let us look at this matter from the point of view of the children who 
 survive. 
   
      (1)  U.S. Department of Labor: Children's Bureau. Infant 
           Mortality Series, 
      No. 3, pp. 81, 82, 83, 84. 
   
      (2)  Henry H. Hibbs, Jr.  Infant Mortality:  Its Relation to 
           Social and 
      Industrial Conditions, p. 39.  Russell Sage Foundation, New 
           York, 1916. 
   
      (3)  Cf. U. S. Department of Labor.  Children's Bureau: 
           Infant Mortality 
      Series, No. 11. p. 36. 
   
      (4)  Havelock Ellis, Sex in Relation to Society, p. 31. 
 
 
 
 Chapter 3 (Children Troop Down From Heaven) 
 Failure of emotional, sentimental and so-called idealistic efforts, 
 based on hysterical enthusiasm, to improve social conditions, is nowhere 
 better exemplified than in the undervaluation of child-life. A few years 
 ago, the scandal of children under fourteen working in cotton mills was 
 exposed. There was muckraking and agitation. A wave of moral indignation 
 swept over America. There arose a loud cry for immediate action. Then, 
 having more or less successfully settled this particular matter, the 
 American people heaved a sigh of relief, settled back, and complacently 
 congratulated itself that the problem of child labor had been settled 
 once and for all. 
   
 Conditions are worse to-day than before. Not only is there child labor 
 in practically every State in the Union, but we are now forced to 
 realize the evils that result from child labor, of child laborers 
 now grown into manhood and womanhood. But we wish here to point out a 
 neglected aspect of this problem. Child labor shows us how cheaply we 
 value childhood. And moreover, it shows us that cheap childhood is the 
 inevitable result of chance parenthood. Child labor is organically bound 
 up with the problem of uncontrolled breeding and the large family. 
   
 The selective draft of 1917--which was designed to choose for military 
 service only those fulfiling definite requirements of physical 
 and mental fitness--showed some of the results of child labor. It 
 established the fact that the majority of American children never got 
 beyond the sixth grade, because they were forced to leave school at that 
 time. Our over-advertised compulsory education does not compel--and does 
 not educate. The selective-draft, it is our duty to emphasize this fact, 
 revealed that 38 per cent. of the young men (more than a million) were 
 rejected because of physical ill-health and defects. And 25 per cent. 
 were illiterate. 
   
 These young men were the children of yesterday. Authorities tell us that 
 75 per cent. of the school-children are defective. This means that 
 no less than fifteen million schoolchildren, out of 22,000,000 in the 
 United States, are physically or mentally below par. 
   
 This is the soil in which all sorts of serious evils strike root. It is 
 a truism that children are the chief asset of a nation. Yet while the 
 United States government allotted 92.8 per cent. of its appropriations 
 for 1920 toward war expenses, three per cent. to public works, 3.2 per 
 cent. to "primary governmental functions," no more than one per cent. 
 is appropriated to education, research and development. Of this one 
 per cent., only a small proportion is devoted to public health. The 
 conservation of childhood is a minor consideration. While three cents 
 is spent for the more or less doubtful protection of women and 
 children, fifty cents is given to the Bureau of Animal Industry, for 
 the protection of domestic animals. In 1919, the State of Kansas 
 appropriated $25,000 to protect the health of pigs, and $4,000 to 
 protect the health of children. In four years our Federal Government 
 appropriated--roughly speaking--$81,000,000 for the improvement 
 of rivers; $13,000,000 for forest conservation; $8,000,000 for the 
 experimental plant industry; $7,000,000 for the experimental animal 
 industry; $4,000,000 to combat the foot and mouth disease; and less than 
 half a million for the protection of child life. 
   
 Competent authorities tell us that no less than 75 per cent. of American 
 children leave school between the ages of fourteen and sixteen to go 
 to work. This number is increasing. According to the recently published 
 report on "The Administration of the First Child Labor Law," in five 
 states in which it was necessary for the Children's Bureau to handle 
 directly the working certificates of children, one-fifth of the 25,000 
 children who applied for certificates left school when they were in the 
 fourth grade; nearly a tenth of them had never attended school at all or 
 had not gone beyond the first grade; and only one-twenty-fifth had gone 
 as far as the eighth grade. But their educational equipment was even 
 more limited than the grade they attended would indicate. Of the 
 children applying to go to work 1,803 had not advanced further than the 
 first grade even when they had gone to school at all; 3,379 could not 
 even sign their own names legibly, and nearly 2,000 of them could not 
 write at all. The report brings automatically into view the vicious 
 circle of child-labor, illiteracy, bodily and mental defect, poverty and 
 delinquency. And like all reports on child labor, the large family and 
 reckless breeding looms large in the background as one of the chief 
 factors in the problem. 
   
 Despite all our boasting of the American public school, of the equal 
 opportunity afforded to every child in America, we have the shortest 
 school-term, and the shortest school-day of any of the civilized 
 countries. In the United States of America, there are 106 illiterates to 
 every thousand people. In England there are 58 per thousand, Sweden and 
 Norway have one per thousand. 
   
 The United States is the most illiterate country in the world--that is, 
 of the so-called civilized countries. Of the 5,000,000 illiterates 
 in the United States, 58 per cent. are white and 28 per cent. native 
 whites. Illiteracy not only is the index of inequality of opportunity. 
 It speaks as well a lack of consideration for the children. It means 
 either that children have been forced out of school to go to work, or 
 that they are mentally and physically defective.(1) 
   
 One is tempted to ask why a society, which has failed so lamentably to 
 protect the already existing child life upon which its very perpetuation 
 depends, takes upon itself the reckless encouragement of indiscriminate 
 procreation. The United States Government has recently inaugurated a 
 policy of restricting immigration from foreign countries. Until it is 
 able to protect childhood from criminal exploitation, until it has made 
 possible a reasonable hope of life, liberty and growth for American 
 children, it should likewise recognize the wisdom of voluntary 
 restriction in the production of children. 
   
 Reports on child labor published by the National Child Labor Committee 
 only incidentally reveal the correlation of this evil with that of large 
 families. Yet this is evident throughout. The investigators are more 
 bent upon regarding child labor as a cause of illiteracy. 
   
 But it is no less a consequence of irresponsibility in breeding. A 
 sinister aspect of this is revealed by Theresa Wolfson's study of 
 child-labor in the beet-fields of Michigan.(2) As one weeder put it: 
 "Poor man make no money, make plenty children--plenty children good for 
 sugar-beet business." Further illuminating details are given by Miss 
 Wolfson: 
   
 "Why did they come to the beet-fields? Most frequently families with 
 large numbers of children said that they felt that the city was no place 
 to raise children--things too expensive and children ran wild--in the 
 country all the children could work." Living conditions are abominable 
 and unspeakably wretched. An old woodshed, a long-abandoned barn, and 
 occasionally a tottering, ramshackle farmer's house are the common 
 types. "One family of eleven, the youngest child two years, the oldest 
 sixteen years, lived in an old country store which had but one window; 
 the wind and rain came through the holes in the walls, the ceiling was 
 very low and the smoke from the stove filled the room. Here the family 
 ate, slept, cooked and washed." 
   
 "In Tuscola County a family of six was found living in a one-room shack 
 with no windows. Light and ventilation was secured through the open 
 doors. Little Charles, eight years of age, was left at home to take 
 care of Dan, Annie and Pete, whose ages were five years, four years, and 
 three months, respectively. In addition, he cooked the noonday meal and 
 brought it to his parents in the field. The filth and choking odors of 
 the shack made it almost unbearable, yet the baby was sleeping in a heap 
 of rags piled up in a corner." 
   
 Social philosophers of a certain school advocate the return to the 
 land--it is only in the overcrowded city, they claim, that the evils 
 resulting from the large family are possible. There is, according to 
 this philosophy, no overcrowding, no over-population in the country, 
 where in the open air and sunlight every child has an opportunity for 
 health and growth. This idyllic conception of American country life 
 does not correspond with the picture presented by this investigator, who 
 points out: 
   
 "To promote the physical and mental development of the child, we forbid 
 his employment in factories, shops and stores. On the other hand, we are 
 prone to believe that the right kind of farm-work is healthful and the 
 best thing for children. But for a child to crawl along the ground, 
 weeding beets in the hot sun for fourteen hours a day--the average 
 workday--is far from being the best thing. The law of compensation is 
 bound to work in some way, and the immediate result of this agricultural 
 work is interference with school attendance." 
   
 How closely related this form of child-slavery is to the over-large 
 family, is definitely illustrated: "In the one hundred and thirty-three 
 families visited, there were six hundred children. A conversation held 
 with a 'Rooshian-German' woman is indicative of the size of most of the 
 families:" 
   
 "How many children have you?" inquired the investigator. 
   
 "Eight--Julius, und Rose, und Martha, dey is mine; Gottlieb und Philip, 
 und Frieda, dey is my husband's;--und Otto und Charlie--dey are ours." 
   
 Families with ten and twelve children were frequently found, while those 
 of six and eight children are the general rule. The advantage of a large 
 family in the beet fields is that it does the most work. In the one 
 hundred thirty-three families interviewed, there were one hundred 
 eighty-six children under the age of six years, ranging from eight weeks 
 up; thirty-six children between the ages of six and eight, approximately 
 twenty-five of whom had never been to school, and eleven over sixteen 
 years of age who had never been to school. One ten-year-old boy had 
 never been to school because he was a mental defective; one child of 
 nine was practically blinded by cataracts. This child was found groping 
 his way down the beet-rows pulling out weeds and feeling for the 
 beet-plants--in the glare of the sun he had lost all sense of light and 
 dark. Of the three hundred and forty children who were not going or had 
 never gone to school, only four had reached the point of graduation, and 
 only one had gone to high school. These large families migrated to the 
 beet-fields in early spring. Seventy-two per cent. of them are retarded. 
 When we realize that feeble-mindedness is arrested development and 
 retardation, we see that these "beet children" are artificially retarded 
 in their growth, and that the tendency is to reduce their intelligence 
 to the level of the congenital imbecile. 
   
 Nor must it be concluded that these large "beet" families are always the 
 "ignorant foreigner" so despised by our respectable press. The following 
 case throws some light on this matter, reported in the same pamphlet: 
 "An American family, considered a prize by the agent because of the fact 
 that there were nine children, turned out to be a `flunk.' They could 
 not work in the beet-fields, they ran up a bill at the country-store, 
 and one day the father and the eldest son, a boy of nineteen, were seen 
 running through the railroad station to catch an out-going train. The 
 grocer thought they were `jumping' their bill. He telephoned ahead 
 to the sheriff of the next town. They were taken off the train by the 
 sheriff and given the option of going back to the farm or staying in 
 jail. They preferred to stay in jail, and remained there for two weeks. 
 Meanwhile, the mother and her eight children, ranging in ages form 
 seventeen years to nine months, had to manage the best way they could. 
 At the end of two weeks, father and son were set free.... During all of 
 this period the farmers of the community sent in provisions to keep 
 the wife and children from starving." Does this case not sum up in a 
 nutshell the typical American intelligence confronted with the 
 problem of the too-large family--industrial slavery tempered with 
 sentimentality! 
   
 Let us turn to a young, possibly a more progressive state. Consider the 
 case of "California, the Golden" as it is named by Emma Duke, in her 
 study of child-labor in the Imperial Valley, "as fertile as the Valley 
 of the Nile."(3) Here, cotton is king, and rich ranchers, absentee 
 landlords and others exploit it. Less than ten years ago ranchers 
 would bring in hordes of laboring families, but refuse to assume any 
 responsibility in housing them, merely permitting them to sleep on 
 the grounds of the ranch. Conditions have been somewhat improved, but, 
 sometimes, we read, "a one roomed straw house with an area of fifteen 
 by twenty feet will serve as a home for an entire family, which not 
 only cooks but sleeps in the same room." Here, as in Michigan among the 
 beets, children are "thick as bees." All kinds of children pick, 
 Miss Duke reports, "even those as young as three years! Five-year-old 
 children pick steadily all day.... Many white American children are 
 among them--pure American stock, who have gradually moved from the 
 Carolinas, Tennessee, and other southern states to Arkansas, Texas, 
 Oklahoma, Arizona, and on into the Imperial Valley." Some of these 
 children, it seems, wanted to attend school, but their fathers did not 
 want to work; so the children were forced to become bread-winners. One 
 man whose children were working with him in the fields said, "Please, 
 lady, don't send them to school; let them pick a while longer. I ain't 
 got my new auto paid for yet." The native white American mother of 
 children working in the fields proudly remarked: "No; they ain't 
 never been to school, nor me nor their poppy, nor their granddads and 
 grandmoms. We've always been pickers!"--and she spat her tobacco over 
 the field in expert fashion. 
   
 "In the Valley one hears from townspeople," writes the investigator, 
 "that pickers make ten dollars a day, working the whole family. With 
 that qualification, the statement is ambiguous. One Mexican in the 
 Imperial Valley was the father of thirty-three children--`about thirteen 
 or fourteen living,' he said. If they all worked at cotton-picking, they 
 would doubtless altogether make more than ten dollars a day." 
   
 One of the child laborers revealed the economic advantage--to the 
 parents--in numerous progeny: "Us kids most always drag from forty to 
 fifty pounds of cotton before we take it to be weighed. Three of us 
 pick. I'm twelve years old and my bag is twelve feet long. I can drag 
 nearly a hundred pounds. My sister is ten years old, and her bag is 
 eight feet long. My little brother is seven and his bag is five feet 
 long." 
   
 Evidence abounds in the publications of the National Child Labor 
 Committee of this type of fecund parenthood.(4) It is not merely a 
 question of the large family versus the small family. Even comparatively 
 small families among migratory workers of this sort have been large 
 families. The high infant mortality rate has carried off the weaker 
 children. Those who survive are merely those who have been strong enough 
 to survive the most unfavorable living conditions. No; it is a situation 
 not unique, nor even unusual in human history, of greed and stupidity 
 and cupidity encouraging the procreative instinct toward the manufacture 
 of slaves. We hear these days of the selfishness and the degradation 
 of healthy and well-educated women who refuse motherhood; but we hear 
 little of the more sinister selfishness of men and women who bring 
 babies into the world to become child-slaves of the kind described in 
 these reports of child labor. 
   
 The history of child labor in the English factories in the nineteenth 
 century throws a suggestive light on this situation. These child-workers 
 were really called into being by the industrial situation. The 
 population grew, as Dean Inge has described it, like crops in a newly 
 irrigated desert. During the nineteenth century, the numbers were nearly 
 quadrupled. "Let those who think that the population of a country can 
 be increased at will, consider whether it is likely that any physical, 
 moral, or psychological change came over the nation co-incidentally with 
 the inventions of the spinning jenny and the steam engine. It is too 
 obvious for dispute that it was the possession of capital wanting 
 employment, and of natural advantages for using it, that called those 
 multitudes of human beings into existence, to eat the food which they 
 paid for by their labor."(5) 
   
 But when child labor in the factories became such a scandal and such a 
 disgrace that child-labor was finally forbidden by laws that possessed 
 the advantage over our own that they were enforced, the proletariat 
 ceased to supply children. Almost by magic the birth rate among the 
 workers declined. Since children were no longer of economic value to 
 the factories, they were evidently a drug in the home. This movement, it 
 should not be forgotten however, was coincident with the agitation and 
 education in Birth Control stimulated by the Besant-Bradlaugh trial. 
   
 Large families among migratory agricultural laborers in our own country 
 are likewise brought into existence in response to an industrial demand. 
 The enforcement of the child labor laws and the extension of their 
 restrictions are therefore an urgent necessity, not so much, as some of 
 our child-labor authorities believe, to enable these children to go to 
 school, as to prevent the recruiting of our next generation from the 
 least intelligent and most unskilled classes in the community. As long 
 as we officially encourage and countenance the production of large 
 families, the evils of child labor will confront us. On the other hand, 
 the prohibition of child labor may help, as in the case of English 
 factories, in the decline of the birth rate. 
   
 UNCONTROLLED BREEDING AND CHILD LABOR GO HAND IN HAND. And to-day 
 when we are confronted with the evils of the latter, in the form of 
 widespread illiteracy and defect, we should seek causes more deeply 
 rooted than the enslavement of children. The cost to society is 
 incalculable, as the National Child Labor Committee points out. "It 
 is not only through the lowered power, the stunting and the moral 
 degeneration of its individual members, but in actual expense, through 
 the necessary provision for the human junk, created by premature 
 employment, in poor-houses, hospitals, police and courts, jails and by 
 charitable organizations." 
   
 To-day we are paying for the folly of the over-production--and its 
 consequences in permanent injury to plastic childhood--of yesterday. 
 To-morrow, we shall be forced to pay for our ruthless disregard of our 
 surplus children of to-day. The child-laborer of one or two decades 
 ago has become the shifting laborer of to-day, stunted, underfed, 
 illiterate, unskilled, unorganized and unorganizable. "He is the last 
 person to be hired and the first to be fired." Boys and girls under 
 fourteen years of age are no longer permitted to work in factories, 
 mills, canneries and establishments whose products are to be shipped out 
 of the particular state, and children under sixteen can no longer work 
 in mines and quarries. But this affects only one quarter of our army of 
 child labor--work in local industries, stores, and farms, homework 
 in dark and unsanitary tenements is still permitted. Children work in 
 "homes" on artificial flowers, finishing shoddy garments, sewing their 
 very life's blood and that of the race into tawdry clothes and gewgaws 
 that are the most unanswerable comments upon our vaunted "civilization." 
 And to-day, we must not forget, the child-laborer of yesterday is 
 becoming the father or the mother of the child laborer of to-morrow. 
   
 "Any nation that works its women is damned," once wrote Woods 
 Hutchinson. The nation that works its children, one is tempted to add, 
 is committing suicide. Loud-mouthed defenders of American democracy pay 
 no attention to the strange fact that, although "the average education 
 among all American adults is only the sixth grade," every one of these 
 adults has an equal power at the polls. The American nation, with all 
 its worship of efficiency and thrift, complacently forgets that "every 
 child defective in body, education or character is a charge upon the 
 community," as Herbert Hoover declared in an address before the American 
 Child Hygiene Association (October, 1920): "The nation as a whole," he 
 added, "has the obligation of such measures toward its children... as 
 will yield to them an equal opportunity at their start in life. If we 
 could grapple with the whole child situation for one generation, our 
 public health, our economic efficiency, the moral character, sanity and 
 stability of our people would advance three generations in one." 
   
 The great irrefutable fact that is ignored or neglected is that the 
 American nation officially places a low value upon the lives of 
 its children. The brutal truth is that CHILDREN ARE CHEAP. When 
 over-production in this field is curtailed by voluntary restriction, 
 when the birth rate among the working classes takes a sharp decline, the 
 value of children will rise. Then only will the infant mortality rate 
 decline, and child labor vanish. 
   
 Investigations of child labor emphasize its evils by pointing out that 
 these children are kept out of school, and that they miss the advantages 
 of American public school education. They express the current confidence 
 in compulsory education and the magical benefits to be derived from 
 the public school. But we need to qualify our faith in education, and 
 particularly our faith in the American public school. Educators are just 
 beginning to wake up to the dangers inherent in the attempt to teach the 
 brightest child and the mentally defective child at the same time. They 
 are beginning to test the possibilities of a "vertical" classification 
 as well as a "horizontal" one. That is, each class must be divided into 
 what are termed Gifted, Bright, Average, Dull, Normal, and Defective. In 
 the past the helter-skelter crowding and over-crowding together of all 
 classes of children of approximately the same age, produced only a dull 
 leveling to mediocrity.(6) 
   
 An investigation of forty schools in New York City, typical of hundreds 
 of others, reveals deplorable conditions of overcrowding and lack of 
 sanitation.(7) The worst conditions are to be found in locations the 
 most densely populated. Thus of Public School No. 51, located almost in 
 the center of the notorious "Hell's Kitchen" section, we read: "The play 
 space which is provided is a mockery of the worst kind. The basement 
 play-room is dark, damp, poorly lighted, poorly ventilated, foul 
 smelling, unclean, and wholly unfit for children for purposes of play. 
 The drainpipes from the roof have decayed to such a degree that in some 
 instances as little as a quarter of the pipe remains. On rainy days, 
 water enters the class-rooms, hall-ways, corridors, and is thrown 
 against windows because the pipes have rotted away. The narrow stairways 
 and halls are similar to those of jails and dungeons of a century ago. 
 The classrooms are poorly lighted, inadequately equipped, and in some 
 cases so small that the desks of pupils and teachers occupy almost all 
 of the floor-space." 
   
 Another school, located a short distance from Fifth Avenue, the 
 "wealthiest street in the world," is described as an "old shell of a 
 structure, erected decades ago as a modern school building. Nearly two 
 thousand children are crowded into class-rooms having a total seating 
 capacity of scarcely one thousand. Narrow doorways, intricate hallways 
 and antiquated stairways, dark and precipitous, keep ever alive the 
 danger of disaster from fire or panic. Only the eternal vigilance 
 of exceptional supervision has served to lessen the fear of such a 
 catastrophe. Artificial light is necessary, even on the brightest days, 
 in many of the class-rooms. In most of the classrooms, it is always 
 necessary when the sky is slightly overcast." There is no ventilating 
 system. 
   
 In the crowded East Side section conditions are reported to be no 
 better. The Public Education Association's report on Public School No. 
 130 points out that the site at the corner of Hester and Baxter Streets 
 was purchased by the city years ago as a school site, but that there 
 has been so much "tweedledeeing and tweedleduming" that the new building 
 which is to replace the old, has not even yet been planned! Meanwhile, 
 year after year, thousands of children are compelled to study daily in 
 dark and dingy class-rooms. "Artificial light is continually necessary," 
 declares the report. "The ventilation is extremely poor. The fire hazard 
 is naturally great. There are no rest-rooms whatever for the teachers." 
 Other schools in the neighborhood reveal conditions even worse. In 
 two of them, for example; "In accordance with the requirements of 
 the syllabus in hygiene in the schools, the vision of the children is 
 regularly tested. In a recent test of this character, it was found in 
 Public School 108, the rate of defective vision in the various grades 
 ranged from 50 to 64 per cent.! In Public School 106, the rate ranged 
 from 43 to 94 per cent.!" 
   
 The conditions, we are assured, are no exceptions to the rule of 
 public schools in New York, where the fatal effects of overcrowding 
 in education may be observed in their most sinister but significant 
 aspects. 
   
 The forgotten fact in this case is that efforts for universal and 
 compulsory education cannot keep pace with the overproduction of 
 children. Even at the best, leaving out of consideration the public 
 school system as the inevitable prey and plundering-ground of the cheap 
 politician and job-hunter, present methods of wholesale and syndicated 
 "education" are not suited to compete with the unceasing, unthinking, 
 untiring procreative powers of our swarming, spawning populations. 
   
 Into such schools as described in the recent reports of the Public 
 Education Association, no intelligent parent would dare send his child. 
 They are not merely fire-traps and culture-grounds of infection, but of 
 moral and intellectual contamination as well. More and more are public 
 schools in America becoming institutions for subjecting children to 
 a narrow and reactionary orthodoxy, aiming to crush out all signs 
 of individuality, and to turn out boys and girls compressed into a 
 standardized pattern, with ready-made ideas on politics, religion, 
 morality, and economics. True education cannot grow out of such 
 compulsory herding of children in filthy fire-traps. 
   
 Character, ability, and reasoning power are not to be developed in 
 this fashion. Indeed, it is to be doubted whether even a completely 
 successful educational system could offset the evils of indiscriminate 
 breeding and compensate for the misfortune of being a superfluous child. 
 In recognizing the great need of education, we have failed to recognize 
 the greater need of inborn health and character. "If it were necessary 
 to choose between the task of getting children educated and getting them 
 well born and healthy," writes Havelock Ellis, "it would be better to 
 abandon education. There have been many great peoples who never dreamed 
 of national systems of education; there have been no great peoples 
 without the art of producing healthy and vigorous children. The matter 
 becomes of peculiar importance in great industrial states, like 
 England, the United States and Germany, because in such states, a tacit 
 conspiracy tends to grow up to subordinate national ends to individual 
 ends, and practically to work for the deterioration of the race."(8) 
   
 Much less can education solve the great problem of child labor. Rather, 
 under the conditions prevailing in modern society, child labor and the 
 failure of the public schools to educate are both indices of a more 
 deeply rooted evil. Both bespeak THE UNDERVALUATION OF THE CHILD. This 
 undervaluation, this cheapening of child life, is to speak crudely but 
 frankly the direct result of overproduction. "Restriction of output" is 
 an immediate necessity if we wish to regain control of the real values, 
 so that unimpeded, unhindered, and without danger of inner corruption, 
 humanity may protect its own health and powers. 
   
      (1)  I am indebted to the National Child Labor Committee for 
      these statistics, as well as for many of the facts that 
      follow. 
   
      (2)  "People Who Go to Beets" Pamphlet No. 299, National 
      Child Labor Committee. 
   
      (3)  California the Golden, by Emma Duke.  Reprinted from 
      The American Child, Vol. II, No. 3.  November 1920. 
   
      (4)  Cf. Child Welfare in Oklahoma; Child Welfare in 
      Alabama; Child Welfare in North Carolina; Child Welfare in 
      Kentucky; Child Welfare in Tennessee. Also, Children in 
      Agriculture, by Ruth McIntire, and other studies. 
   
      (5)  W. R. Inge:  Outspoken Essays: p. 92 
   
      (6)  Cf. Tredgold:  Inheritance and Educability.  Eugenics 
      Review, Vol. Xiii, No. I, pp. 839 et seq. 
   
      (7)  Cf. New York Times, June 4, 1921. 
   
      (8)  "Studies in the Psychology of Sex," Vol. VI. p. 20. 
   
 
 
 
 Chapter 4 (The Fertility Of The Feeble-Minded) 
      What vesture have you woven for my year? 
      O Man and Woman who have fashioned it 
      Together, is it fine and clean and strong, 
      Made in such reverence of holy joy, 
      Of such unsullied substance, that your hearts 
      Leap with glad awe to see it clothing me, 
      The glory of whose nakedness you know? 
   
      "The Song of the Unborn" 
      Amelia Josephine Burr 
   
 There is but one practical and feasible program in handling the great 
 problem of the feeble-minded. That is, as the best authorities are 
 agreed, to prevent the birth of those who would transmit imbecility to 
 their descendants. Feeble-mindedness as investigations and statistics 
 from every country indicate, is invariably associated with an abnormally 
 high rate of fertility. Modern conditions of civilization, as we are 
 continually being reminded, furnish the most favorable breeding-ground 
 for the mental defective, the moron, the imbecile. "We protect the 
 members of a weak strain," says Davenport, "up to the period of 
 reproduction, and then let them free upon the community, and encourage 
 them to leave a large progeny of `feeble-minded': which in turn, 
 protected from mortality and carefully nurtured up to the reproductive 
 period, are again set free to reproduce, and so the stupid work goes on 
 of preserving and increasing our socially unfit strains." 
   
 The philosophy of Birth Control points out that as long as civilized 
 communities encourage unrestrained fecundity in the "normal" members 
 of the population--always of course under the cloak of decency and 
 morality--and penalize every attempt to introduce the principle of 
 discrimination and responsibility in parenthood, they will be faced with 
 the ever-increasing problem of feeble-mindedness, that fertile parent 
 of degeneracy, crime, and pauperism. Small as the percentage of the 
 imbecile and half-witted may seem in comparison with the normal members 
 of the community, it should always be remembered that feeble-mindedness 
 is not an unrelated expression of modern civilization. Its roots strike 
 deep into the social fabric. Modern studies indicate that insanity, 
 epilepsy, criminality, prostitution, pauperism, and mental defect, are 
 all organically bound up together and that the least intelligent and the 
 thoroughly degenerate classes in every community are the most prolific. 
 Feeble-mindedness in one generation becomes pauperism or insanity in the 
 next. There is every indication that feeble-mindedness in its protean 
 forms is on the increase, that it has leaped the barriers, and that 
 there is truly, as some of the scientific eugenists have pointed out, a 
 feeble-minded peril to future generations--unless the feeble-minded are 
 prevented from reproducing their kind. To meet this emergency is the 
 immediate and peremptory duty of every State and of all communities. 
   
 The curious situation has come about that while our statesmen are 
 busy upon their propaganda of "repopulation," and are encouraging the 
 production of large families, they are ignoring the exigent problem of 
 the elimination of the feeble-minded. In this, however, the politicians 
 are at one with the traditions of a civilization which, with its 
 charities and philanthropies, has propped up the defective and 
 degenerate and relieved them of the burdens borne by the healthy 
 sections of the community, thus enabling them more easily and more 
 numerously to propagate their kind. "With the very highest motives," 
 declares Dr. Walter E. Fernald, "modern philanthropic efforts often tend 
 to foster and increase the growth of defect in the community.... The only 
 feeble-minded persons who now receive any official consideration are 
 those who have already become dependent or delinquent, many of whom have 
 already become parents. We lock the barn-door after the horse is stolen. 
 We now have state commissions for controlling the gipsy-moth and 
 the boll weevil, the foot-and-mouth disease, and for protecting the 
 shell-fish and wild game, but we have no commission which even attempts 
 to modify or to control the vast moral and economic forces represented 
 by the feeble-minded persons at large in the community." 
   
 How the feeble-minded and their always numerous progeny run the gamut 
 of police, alms-houses, courts, penal institutions, "charities and 
 corrections," tramp shelters, lying-in hospitals, and relief afforded by 
 privately endowed religious and social agencies, is shown in any 
 number of reports and studies of family histories. We find cases of 
 feeble-mindedness and mental defect in the reports on infant mortality 
 referred to in a previous chapter, as well as in other reports published 
 by the United States government. Here is a typical case showing the 
 astonishing ability to "increase and multiply," organically bound up 
 with delinquency and defect of various types: 
   
 "The parents of a feeble-minded girl, twenty years of age, who was 
 committed to the Kansas State Industrial Farm on a vagrancy charge, 
 lived in a thickly populated Negro district which was reported by 
 the police to be the headquarters for the criminal element of the 
 surrounding State.... The mother married at fourteen, and her first 
 child was born at fifteen. In rapid succession she gave birth to sixteen 
 live-born children and had one miscarriage. The first child, a girl, 
 married but separated from her husband.... The fourth, fifth and sixth, 
 all girls, died in infancy or early childhood. The seventh, a girl, 
 remarried after the death of her husband, from whom she had been 
 separated. The eighth, a boy who early in life began to exhibit criminal 
 tendencies, was in prison for highway robbery and burglary. The ninth, a 
 girl, normal mentally, was in quarantine at the Kansas State Industrial 
 Farm at the time this study was made; she had lived with a man as 
 his common-law wife, and had also been arrested several times for 
 soliciting. The tenth, a boy, was involved in several delinquencies when 
 young and was sent to the detention-house but did not remain there 
 long. The eleventh, a boy... at the age of seventeen was sentenced to the 
 penitentiary for twenty years on a charge of first-degree robbery; after 
 serving a portion of his time, he was paroled, and later was shot and 
 killed in a fight. The twelfth, a boy, was at fifteen years of age 
 implicated in a murder and sent to the industrial school, but escaped 
 from there on a bicycle which he had stolen; at eighteen, he was shot 
 and killed by a woman. The thirteenth child, feeble-minded, is the girl 
 of the study. The fourteenth, a boy was considered by police to be the 
 best member of the family; his mother reported him to be much slower 
 mentally than his sister just mentioned; he had been arrested several 
 times. Once, he was held in the detention-home and once sent to the 
 State Industrial school; at other times, he was placed on probation. 
 The fifteenth, a girl sixteen years old, has for a long time had a bad 
 reputation. Subsequent to the commitment of her sister to the Kansas 
 State Industrial Farm, she was arrested on a charge of vagrancy, found 
 to by syphilitic, and quarantined in a state other than Kansas. At the 
 time of her arrest, she stated that prostitution was her occupation. 
 The last child was a boy of thirteen years whose history was not 
 secured...."(1) 
   
 The notorious fecundity of feeble-minded women is emphasized in studies 
 and investigations of the problem, coming from all countries. "The 
 feeble-minded woman is twice as prolific as the normal one." Sir James 
 Crichton-Browne speaks of the great numbers of feeble-minded girls, 
 wholly unfit to become mothers, who return to the work-house year after 
 year to bear children, "many of whom happily die, but some of whom 
 survive to recruit our idiot establishments and to repeat their mothers' 
 performances." Tredgold points out that the number of children born to 
 the feeble-minded is abnormally high. Feeble-minded women "constitute 
 a permanent menace to the race and one which becomes serious at a time 
 when the decline of the birth-rate is... unmistakable." Dr. Tredgold 
 points out that "the average number of children born in a family is 
 four," whereas in these degenerate families, we find an average of 7.3 to 
 each. Out of this total only a little more than ONE-THIRD--456 out of 
 a total of 1,269 children--can be considered profitable members of the 
 community, and that, be it remembered, at the parents' valuation. 
   
 Another significant point is the number of mentally defective children 
 who survive. "Out of the total number of 526 mentally affected persons 
 in the 150 families, there are 245 in the present generation--an 
 unusually large survival."(2) 
   
 Speaking for Bradford, England, Dr. Helen U. Campbell touches another 
 significant and interesting point usually neglected by the advocates of 
 mothers' pensions, milk-stations, and maternity-education programs. 
   
 "We are also confronted with the problem of the actually mentally 
 deficient, of the more or less feeble-minded, and the deranged, 
 epileptic... or otherwise mentally abnormal mother," writes this 
 authority. "The `bad mothering' of these cases is quite unimprovable 
 at an infant welfare center, and a very definite if not relatively very 
 large percentage of our infants are suffering severely as a result of 
 dependence upon such `mothering."'(3) 
   
 Thus we are brought face to face with another problem of infant 
 mortality. Are we to check the infant mortality rate among the 
 feeble-minded and aid the unfortunate offspring to grow up, a menace to 
 the civilized community even when not actually certifiable as mentally 
 defective or not obviously imbecile? 
   
 Other figures and studies indicate the close relationship between 
 feeble-mindedness and the spread of venereal scourges. We are informed 
 that in Michigan, 75 per cent. of the prostitute class is infected with 
 some form of venereal disease, and that 75 per cent. of the infected 
 are mentally defective,--morons, imbeciles, or "border-line" cases 
 most dangerous to the community at large. At least 25 per cent. of the 
 inmates of our prisons, according to Dr. Fernald, are mentally defective 
 and belong either to the feeble-minded or to the defective-delinquent 
 class. Nearly 50 per cent. of the girls sent to reformatories are 
 mental defectives. To-day, society treats feeble-minded or "defective 
 delinquent" men or women as "criminals," sentences them to prison or 
 reformatory for a "term," and then releases them at the expiration 
 of their sentences. They are usually at liberty just long enough to 
 reproduce their kind, and then they return again and again to prison. 
 The truth of this statement is evident from the extremely large 
 proportion in institutions of neglected and dependent children, who are 
 the feeble-minded offspring of such feeble-minded parents. 
   
 Confronted with these shocking truths about the menace of 
 feeble-mindedness to the race, a menace acute because of the unceasing 
 and unrestrained fertility of such defectives, we are apt to become the 
 victims of a "wild panic for instant action." There is no occasion for 
 hysterical, ill-considered action, specialists tell us. They direct our 
 attention to another phase of the problem, that of the so-called "good 
 feeble-minded." We are informed that imbecility, in itself, is not 
 synonymous with badness. If it is fostered in a "suitable environment," 
 it may express itself in terms of good citizenship and useful 
 occupation. It may thus be transmuted into a docile, tractable, and 
 peaceable element of the community. The moron and the feeble-minded, 
 thus protected, so we are assured, may even marry some brighter member 
 of the community, and thus lessen the chances of procreating another 
 generation of imbeciles. We read further that some of our doctors 
 believe that "in our social scale, there is a place for the good 
 feeble-minded." 
   
 In such a reckless and thoughtless differentiation between the "bad" 
 and the "good" feeble-minded, we find new evidence of the conventional 
 middle-class bias that also finds expression among some of the 
 eugenists. We do not object to feeble-mindedness simply because it 
 leads to immorality and criminality; nor can we approve of it when it 
 expresses itself in docility, submissiveness and obedience. We object 
 because both are burdens and dangers to the intelligence of the 
 community. As a matter of fact, there is sufficient evidence to lead us 
 to believe that the so-called "borderline cases" are a greater menace 
 than the out-and-out "defective delinquents" who can be supervised, 
 controlled and prevented from procreating their kind. The advent of the 
 Binet-Simon and similar psychological tests indicates that the mental 
 defective who is glib and plausible, bright looking and attractive, but 
 with a mental vision of seven, eight or nine years, may not merely lower 
 the whole level of intelligence in a school or in a society, but may 
 be encouraged by church and state to increase and multiply until he 
 dominates and gives the prevailing "color"--culturally speaking--to an 
 entire community. 
   
 The presence in the public schools of the mentally defective children 
 of men and women who should never have been parents is a problem that 
 is becoming more and more difficult, and is one of the chief reasons for 
 lower educational standards. As one of the greatest living authorities 
 on the subject, Dr. A. Tredgold, has pointed out,(4) this has created 
 a destructive conflict of purpose. "In the case of children with a low 
 intellectual capacity, much of the education at present provided is 
 for all practical purposes a complete waste of time, money and 
 patience.... On the other hand, for children of high intellectual 
 capacity, our present system does not go far enough. I believe that 
 much innate potentiality remains undeveloped, even amongst the working 
 classes, owing to the absence of opportunity for higher education, to 
 the disadvantage of the nation. In consequence of these fundamental 
 differences, the catchword `equality of opportunity' is meaningless 
 and mere claptrap in the absence of any equality to respond to such 
 opportunity. What is wanted is not equality of opportunity, but 
 education adapted to individual potentiality; and if the time and money 
 now spent in the fruitless attempt to make silk-purses out of sows' 
 ears, were devoted to the higher education of children of good natural 
 capacity, it would contribute enormously to national efficiency." 
   
 In a much more complex manner than has been recognized even by students 
 of this problem, the destiny and the progress of civilization and of 
 human expression has been hindered and held back by this burden of the 
 imbecile and the moron. While we may admire the patience and the deep 
 human sympathy with which the great specialists in feeble-mindedness 
 have expressed the hope of drying up the sources of this evil or of 
 rendering it harmless, we should not permit sympathy or sentimentality 
 to blind us to the fact that health and vitality and human growth 
 likewise need cultivation. "A LAISSER FAIRE policy," writes one 
 investigator, "simply allows the social sore to spread. And a quasi 
 LAISSER FAIRE policy wherein we allow the defective to commit crime 
 and then interfere and imprison him, wherein we grant the defective the 
 personal liberty to do as he pleases, until he pleases to descend to a 
 plane of living below the animal level, and try to care for a few of his 
 descendants who are so helpless that they can no longer exercise that 
 personal liberty to do as they please,"--such a policy increases and 
 multiplies the dangers of the over-fertile feeble-minded.(5) 
   
 The Mental Survey of the State of Oregon recently published by the 
 United States Health Service, sets an excellent example and should be 
 followed by every state in the Union and every civilized country as 
 well. It is greatly to the credit of the Western State that it is one of 
 the first officially to recognize the primary importance of this problem 
 and to realize that facts, no matter how fatal to self-satisfaction, 
 must be faced. This survey, authorized by the state legislature, and 
 carried out by the University of Oregon, in collaboration with Dr. C. 
 L. Carlisle of the Public Health service, aided by a large number of 
 volunteers, shows that only a small percentage of mental defectives and 
 morons are in the care of institutions. The rest are widely scattered 
 and their condition unknown or neglected. They are docile and 
 submissive, they do not attract attention to themselves as do the 
 criminal delinquents and the insane. Nevertheless, it is estimated that 
 they number no less than 75,000 men, women, and children, out of a total 
 population of 783,000, or about ten per cent. Oregon, it is thought, is 
 no exception to other states. Yet under our present conditions, these 
 people are actually encouraged to increase and multiply and replenish 
 the earth. 
   
 Concerning the importance of the Oregon survey, we may quote Surgeon 
 General H. C. Cumming: "the prevention and correction of mental 
 defectives is one of the great public health problems of to-day. It 
 enters into many phases of our work and its influence continually crops 
 up unexpectedly. For instance, work of the Public Health Service in 
 connection with juvenile courts shows that a marked proportion of 
 juvenile delinquency is traceable to some degree of mental deficiency 
 in the offender. For years Public Health officials have concerned 
 themselves only with the disorders of physical health; but now they are 
 realizing the significance of mental health also. The work in Oregon 
 constitutes the first state-wide survey which even begins to disclose 
 the enormous drain on a state, caused by mental defects. One of the 
 objects of the work was to obtain for the people of Oregon an idea 
 of the problem that confronted them and the heavy annual loss, both 
 economic and industrial, that it entailed. Another was to enable the 
 legislators to devise a program that would stop much of the loss, 
 restore to health and bring to lives of industrial usefulness, many of 
 those now down and out, and above all, to save hundreds of children from 
 growing up to lives of misery." 
   
 It will be interesting to see how many of our State Legislatures have 
 the intelligence and the courage to follow in the footsteps of Oregon in 
 this respect. Nothing could more effectually stimulate discussion, and 
 awaken intelligence as to the extravagance and cost to the community of 
 our present codes of traditional morality. But we should make sure 
 in all such surveys, that mental defect is not concealed even in such 
 dignified bodies as state legislatures and among those leaders who are 
 urging men and women to reckless and irresponsible procreation. 
   
 I have touched upon these various aspects of the complex problem of the 
 feeble-minded, and the menace of the moron to human society, not merely 
 for the purpose of reiterating that it is one of the greatest and most 
 difficult social problems of modern times, demanding an immediate, stern 
 and definite policy, but because it illustrates the actual harvest of 
 reliance upon traditional morality, upon the biblical injunction to 
 increase and multiply, a policy still taught by politician, priest 
 and militarist. Motherhood has been held universally sacred; yet, as 
 Bouchacourt pointed out, "to-day, the dregs of the human species, the 
 blind, the deaf-mute, the degenerate, the nervous, the vicious, the 
 idiotic, the imbecile, the cretins and the epileptics--are better 
 protected than pregnant women." The syphilitic, the irresponsible, the 
 feeble-minded are encouraged to breed unhindered, while all the powerful 
 forces of tradition, of custom, or prejudice, have bolstered up the 
 desperate effort to block the inevitable influence of true civilization 
 in spreading the principles of independence, self-reliance, 
 discrimination and foresight upon which the great practice of 
 intelligent parenthood is based. 
   
 To-day we are confronted by the results of this official policy. There 
 is no escaping it; there is no explaining it away. Surely it is an 
 amazing and discouraging phenomenon that the very governments that have 
 seen fit to interfere in practically every phase of the normal citizen's 
 life, dare not attempt to restrain, either by force or persuasion, the 
 moron and the imbecile from producing his large family of feeble-minded 
 offspring. 
   
 In my own experience, I recall vividly the case of a feeble-minded girl 
 who every year, for a long period, received the expert attention of a 
 great specialist in one of the best-known maternity hospitals of New 
 York City. The great obstetrician, for the benefit of interns and 
 medical students, performed each year a Caesarian operation upon this 
 unfortunate creature to bring into the world her defective, and, in 
 one case at least, her syphilitic, infant. "Nelly" was then sent to a 
 special room and placed under the care of a day nurse and a night nurse, 
 with extra and special nourishment provided. Each year she returned to 
 the hospital. Such cases are not exceptions; any experienced doctor or 
 nurse can recount similar stories. In the interest of medical science 
 this practice may be justified. I am not criticising it from that 
 point of view. I realize as well as the most conservative moralist that 
 humanity requires that healthy members of the race should make certain 
 sacrifices to preserve from death those unfortunates who are born with 
 hereditary taints. But there is a point at which philanthropy may become 
 positively dysgenic, when charity is converted into injustice to the 
 self-supporting citizen, into positive injury to the future of the race. 
 Such a point, it seems obvious, is reached when the incurably defective 
 are permitted to procreate and thus increase their numbers. 
   
 The problem of the dependent, delinquent and defective elements in 
 modern society, we must repeat, cannot be minimized because of their 
 alleged small numerical proportion to the rest of the population. The 
 proportion seems small only because we accustom ourselves to the habit 
 of looking upon feeble-mindedness as a separate and distinct calamity to 
 the race, as a chance phenomenon unrelated to the sexual and biological 
 customs not only condoned but even encouraged by our so-called 
 civilization. The actual dangers can only be fully realized when we have 
 acquired definite information concerning the financial and cultural cost 
 of these classes to the community, when we become fully cognizant of the 
 burden of the imbecile upon the whole human race; when we see the funds 
 that should be available for human development, for scientific, artistic 
 and philosophic research, being diverted annually, by hundreds of 
 millions of dollars, to the care and segregation of men, women, and 
 children who never should have been born. The advocate of Birth Control 
 realizes as well as all intelligent thinkers the dangers of interfering 
 with personal liberty. Our whole philosophy is, in fact, based upon 
 the fundamental assumption that man is a self-conscious, self-governing 
 creature, that he should not be treated as a domestic animal; that he 
 must be left free, at least within certain wide limits, to follow his 
 own wishes in the matter of mating and in the procreation of children. 
 Nor do we believe that the community could or should send to the 
 lethal chamber the defective progeny resulting from irresponsible and 
 unintelligent breeding. 
   
 But modern society, which has respected the personal liberty of the 
 individual only in regard to the unrestricted and irresponsible bringing 
 into the world of filth and poverty an overcrowding procession of 
 infants foredoomed to death or hereditable disease, is now confronted 
 with the problem of protecting itself and its future generations 
 against the inevitable consequences of this long-practised policy of 
 LAISSER-FAIRE. 
   
 The emergency problem of segregation and sterilization must be faced 
 immediately. Every feeble-minded girl or woman of the hereditary 
 type, especially of the moron class, should be segregated during the 
 reproductive period. Otherwise, she is almost certain to bear imbecile 
 children, who in turn are just as certain to breed other defectives. The 
 male defectives are no less dangerous. Segregation carried out for one 
 or two generations would give us only partial control of the problem. 
 Moreover, when we realize that each feeble-minded person is a potential 
 source of an endless progeny of defect, we prefer the policy of 
 immediate sterilization, of making sure that parenthood is absolutely 
 prohibited to the feeble-minded. 
   
 This, I say, is an emergency measure. But how are we to prevent the 
 repetition in the future of a new harvest of imbecility, the recurrence 
 of new generations of morons and defectives, as the logical and 
 inevitable consequence of the universal application of the traditional 
 and widely approved command to increase and multiply? 
   
 At the present moment, we are offered three distinct and more or less 
 mutually exclusive policies by which civilization may hope to protect 
 itself and the generations of the future from the allied dangers of 
 imbecility, defect and delinquency. No one can understand the necessity 
 for Birth control education without a complete comprehension of the 
 dangers, the inadequacies, or the limitations of the present attempts at 
 control, or the proposed programs for social reconstruction and racial 
 regeneration. It is, therefore, necessary to interpret and criticize 
 the three programs offered to meet our emergency. These may be briefly 
 summarized as follows: 
   
 (1) Philanthropy and Charity: This is the present and traditional method 
 of meeting the problems of human defect and dependence, of poverty and 
 delinquency. It is emotional, altruistic, at best ameliorative, aiming 
 to meet the individual situation as it arises and presents itself. Its 
 effect in practise is seldom, if ever, truly preventive. Concerned 
 with symptoms, with the allaying of acute and catastrophic miseries, it 
 cannot, if it would, strike at the radical causes of social misery. At 
 its worst, it is sentimental and paternalistic. 
   
 (2) Marxian Socialism: This may be considered typical of many widely 
 varying schemes of more or less revolutionary social reconstruction, 
 emphasizing the primary importance of environment, education, equal 
 opportunity, and health, in the elimination of the conditions (i. e. 
 capitalistic control of industry) which have resulted in biological 
 chaos and human waste. I shall attempt to show that the Marxian doctrine 
 is both too limited, too superficial and too fragmentary in its 
 basic analysis of human nature and in its program of revolutionary 
 reconstruction. 
   
 (3) Eugenics: Eugenics seems to me to be valuable in its critical and 
 diagnostic aspects, in emphasizing the danger of irresponsible and 
 uncontrolled fertility of the "unfit" and the feeble-minded establishing 
 a progressive unbalance in human society and lowering the birth-rate 
 among the "fit." But in its so-called "constructive" aspect, in seeking 
 to reestablish the dominance of healthy strain over the unhealthy, by 
 urging an increased birth-rate among the fit, the Eugenists really offer 
 nothing more farsighted than a "cradle competition" between the fit 
 and the unfit. They suggest in very truth, that all intelligent and 
 respectable parents should take as their example in this grave matter of 
 child-bearing the most irresponsible elements in the community. 
   
      (1)  United States Public Health Service:  Psychiatric 
      Studies of Delinquents. Reprint No. 598:  pp. 64-65. 
   
      (2)  The Problem of the Feeble-Minded:  An Abstract of the 
      Report of the Royal Commission on the Cure and Control of 
      the Feeble-Minded, London:  P. S. King & Son. 
   
      (3)  Cf.  Feeble-Minded in Ontario:  Fourteenth Report for 
      the year ending October 31st, 1919. 
   
      (4)  Eugenics Review, Vol. XIII, p. 339 et seq. 
   
      (5)  Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem:  A True Story of the 
      Social Aspect of Feeble-mindedness.  By A. C. Rogers and 
      Maud A. Merrill; Boston (1919). 
 
 
 
 Chapter 5 (The Cruelty Of Charity) 
      "Fostering the good-for-nothing at the expense of the 
      good is an extreme cruelty.  It is a deliberate storing 
      up of miseries for future generations.  There is no greater 
      curse to posterity than that of bequeathing them an increasing 
      population of imbeciles." 
   
      Herbert Spencer 
   
 The last century has witnessed the rise and development of philanthropy 
 and organized charity. Coincident with the all-conquering power of 
 machinery and capitalistic control, with the unprecedented growth 
 of great cities and industrial centers, and the creation of great 
 proletarian populations, modern civilization has been confronted, to a 
 degree hitherto unknown in human history, with the complex problem of 
 sustaining human life in surroundings and under conditions flagrantly 
 dysgenic. 
   
 The program, as I believe all competent authorities in contemporary 
 philanthropy and organized charity would agree, has been altered in aim 
 and purpose. It was first the outgrowth of humanitarian and altruistic 
 idealism, perhaps not devoid of a strain of sentimentalism, of an 
 idealism that was aroused by a desperate picture of human misery 
 intensified by the industrial revolution. It has developed in later 
 years into a program not so much aiming to succor the unfortunate 
 victims of circumstances, as to effect what we may term social 
 sanitation. Primarily, it is a program of self-protection. Contemporary 
 philanthropy, I believe, recognizes that extreme poverty and overcrowded 
 slums are veritable breeding-grounds of epidemics, disease, delinquency 
 and dependency. Its aim, therefore, is to prevent the individual family 
 from sinking to that abject condition in which it will become a much 
 heavier burden upon society. 
   
 There is no need here to criticize the obvious limitations of organized 
 charities in meeting the desperate problem of destitution. We are all 
 familiar with these criticisms: the common indictment of "inefficiency" 
 so often brought against public and privately endowed agencies. The 
 charges include the high cost of administration; the pauperization 
 of deserving poor, and the encouragement and fostering of the 
 "undeserving"; the progressive destruction of self-respect and 
 self-reliance by the paternalistic interference of social agencies; the 
 impossibility of keeping pace with the ever-increasing multiplication of 
 factors and influences responsible for the perpetuation of human misery; 
 the misdirection and misappropriation of endowments; the absence of 
 interorganization and coordination of the various agencies of church, 
 state, and privately endowed institutions; the "crimes of charity" 
 that are occasionally exposed in newspaper scandals. These and similar 
 strictures we may ignore as irrelevant to our present purpose, as 
 inevitable but not incurable faults that have been and are being 
 eliminated in the slow but certain growth of a beneficent power in 
 modern civilization. In reply to such criticisms, the protagonist of 
 modern philanthropy might justly point to the honest and sincere workers 
 and disinterested scientists it has mobilized, to the self-sacrificing 
 and hard-working executives who have awakened public attention to the 
 evils of poverty and the menace to the race engendered by misery and 
 filth. 
   
 Even if we accept organized charity at its own valuation, and grant that 
 it does the best it can, it is exposed to a more profound criticism. 
 It reveals a fundamental and irremediable defect. Its very success, its 
 very efficiency, its very necessity to the social order, are themselves 
 the most unanswerable indictment. Organized charity itself is the 
 symptom of a malignant social disease. 
   
 Those vast, complex, interrelated organizations aiming to control and to 
 diminish the spread of misery and destitution and all the menacing evils 
 that spring out of this sinisterly fertile soil, are the surest 
 sign that our civilization has bred, is breeding and is perpetuating 
 constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents and 
 dependents. My criticism, therefore, is not directed at the "failure" of 
 philanthropy, but rather at its success. 
   
 These dangers inherent in the very idea of humanitarianism and altruism, 
 dangers which have to-day produced their full harvest of human waste, of 
 inequality and inefficiency, were fully recognized in the last century 
 at the moment when such ideas were first put into practice. Readers of 
 Huxley's attack on the Salvation Army will recall his penetrating 
 and stimulating condemnation of the debauch of sentimentalism which 
 expressed itself in so uncontrolled a fashion in the Victorian era. One 
 of the most penetrating of American thinkers, Henry James, Sr., sixty or 
 seventy years ago wrote: "I have been so long accustomed to see the most 
 arrant deviltry transact itself in the name of benevolence, that the 
 moment I hear a profession of good will from almost any quarter, I 
 instinctively look around for a constable or place my hand within reach 
 of a bell-rope. My ideal of human intercourse would be a state of things 
 in which no man will ever stand in need of any other man's help, but 
 will derive all his satisfaction from the great social tides which 
 own no individual names. I am sure no man can be put in a position of 
 dependence upon another, without the other's very soon becoming--if he 
 accepts the duties of the relation--utterly degraded out of his just 
 human proportions. No man can play the Deity to his fellow man with 
 impunity--I mean, spiritual impunity, of course. For see: if I am at all 
 satisfied with that relation, if it contents me to be in a position of 
 generosity towards others, I must be remarkably indifferent at bottom to 
 the gross social inequality which permits that position, and, instead 
 of resenting the enforced humiliation of my fellow man to myself in the 
 interests of humanity, I acquiesce in it for the sake of the profit it 
 yields to my own self-complacency. I do hope the reign of benevolence 
 is over; until that event occurs, I am sure the reign of God will be 
 impossible." 
   
 To-day, we may measure the evil effects of "benevolence" of this type, 
 not merely upon those who have indulged in it, but upon the community at 
 large. These effects have been reduced to statistics and we cannot, if 
 we would, escape their significance. Look, for instance (since they are 
 close at hand, and fairly representative of conditions elsewhere) at 
 the total annual expenditures of public and private "charities and 
 corrections" for the State of New York. For the year ending June 30, 
 1919, the expenditures of public institutions and agencies amounted to 
 $33, 936,205.88. The expenditures of privately supported and endowed 
 institutions for the same year, amount to $58,100,530.98. This makes 
 a total, for public and private charities and corrections of 
 $92,036,736.86. A conservative estimate of the increase for the 
 year (1920-1921) brings this figure approximately to one-hundred and 
 twenty-five millions. These figures take on an eloquent significance if 
 we compare them to the comparatively small amounts spent upon education, 
 conservation of health and other constructive efforts. Thus, while the 
 City of New York spent $7.35 per capita on public education in the year 
 1918, it spent on public charities no less than $2.66. Add to this last 
 figure an even larger amount dispensed by private agencies, and we may 
 derive some definite sense of the heavy burden of dependency, pauperism 
 and delinquency upon the normal and healthy sections of the community. 
   
 Statistics now available also inform us that more than a million dollars 
 are spent annually to support the public and private institutions in 
 the state of New York for the segregation of the feeble-minded and 
 the epileptic. A million and a half is spent for the up-keep of state 
 prisons, those homes of the "defective delinquent." Insanity, which, we 
 should remember, is to a great extent hereditary, annually drains from 
 the state treasury no less than $11,985,695.55, and from private sources 
 and endowments another twenty millions. When we learn further that the 
 total number of inmates in public and private institutions in the State 
 of New York--in alms-houses, reformatories, schools for the blind, 
 deaf and mute, in insane asylums, in homes for the feeble-minded and 
 epileptic--amounts practically to less than sixty-five thousand, an 
 insignificant number compared to the total population, our eyes should 
 be opened to the terrific cost to the community of this dead weight of 
 human waste. 
   
 The United States Public Health Survey of the State of Oregon, recently 
 published, shows that even a young community, rich in natural resources, 
 and unusually progressive in legislative measures, is no less subject to 
 this burden. Out of a total population of 783,000 it is estimated that 
 more than 75,000 men, women and children are dependents, feeble-minded, 
 or delinquents. Thus about 10 per cent. of the population is a constant 
 drain on the finances, health, and future of that community. These 
 figures represent a more definite and precise survey than the rough one 
 indicated by the statistics of charities and correction for the State 
 of New York. The figures yielded by this Oregon survey are also 
 considerably lower than the average shown by the draft examination, a 
 fact which indicates that they are not higher than might be obtained 
 from other States. 
   
 Organized charity is thus confronted with the problem of 
 feeble-mindedness and mental defect. But just as the State has so far 
 neglected the problem of mental defect until this takes the form 
 of criminal delinquency, so the tendency of our philanthropic and 
 charitable agencies has been to pay no attention to the problem until 
 it has expressed itself in terms of pauperism and delinquency. Such 
 "benevolence" is not merely ineffectual; it is positively injurious to 
 the community and the future of the race. 
   
 But there is a special type of philanthropy or benevolence, now widely 
 advertised and advocated, both as a federal program and as worthy of 
 private endowment, which strikes me as being more insidiously injurious 
 than any other. This concerns itself directly with the function of 
 maternity, and aims to supply GRATIS medical and nursing facilities 
 to slum mothers. Such women are to be visited by nurses and to receive 
 instruction in the "hygiene of pregnancy"; to be guided in making 
 arrangements for confinements; to be invited to come to the doctor's 
 clinics for examination and supervision. They are, we are informed, to 
 "receive adequate care during pregnancy, at confinement, and for one 
 month afterward." Thus are mothers and babies to be saved. "Childbearing 
 is to be made safe." The work of the maternity centers in the various 
 American cities in which they have already been established and in which 
 they are supported by private contributions and endowment, it is hardly 
 necessary to point out, is carried on among the poor and more docile 
 sections of the city, among mothers least able, through poverty and 
 ignorance, to afford the care and attention necessary for successful 
 maternity. Now, as the findings of Tredgold and Karl Pearson and the 
 British Eugenists so conclusively show, and as the infant mortality 
 reports so thoroughly substantiate, a high rate of fecundity is always 
 associated with the direst poverty, irresponsibility, mental defect, 
 feeble-mindedness, and other transmissible taints. The effect of 
 maternity endowments and maternity centers supported by private 
 philanthropy would have, perhaps already have had, exactly the most 
 dysgenic tendency. The new government program would facilitate the 
 function of maternity among the very classes in which the absolute 
 necessity is to discourage it. 
   
 Such "benevolence" is not merely superficial and near-sighted. It 
 conceals a stupid cruelty, because it is not courageous enough to face 
 unpleasant facts. Aside from the question of the unfitness of many women 
 to become mothers, aside from the very definite deterioration in the 
 human stock that such programs would inevitably hasten, we may question 
 its value even to the normal though unfortunate mother. For it is never 
 the intention of such philanthropy to give the poor over-burdened and 
 often undernourished mother of the slum the opportunity to make the 
 choice herself, to decide whether she wishes time after to time to bring 
 children into the world. It merely says "Increase and multiply: We are 
 prepared to help you do this." Whereas the great majority of mothers 
 realize the grave responsibility they face in keeping alive and rearing 
 the children they have already brought into the world, the maternity 
 center would teach them how to have more. The poor woman is taught how 
 to have her seventh child, when what she wants to know is how to avoid 
 bringing into the world her eighth. 
   
 Such philanthropy, as Dean Inge has so unanswerably pointed out, is kind 
 only to be cruel, and unwittingly promotes precisely the results most 
 deprecated. It encourages the healthier and more normal sections of the 
 world to shoulder the burden of unthinking and indiscriminate fecundity 
 of others; which brings with it, as I think the reader must agree, 
 a dead weight of human waste. Instead of decreasing and aiming to 
 eliminate the stocks that are most detrimental to the future of the race 
 and the world, it tends to render them to a menacing degree dominant. 
   
 On the other hand, the program is an indication of a suddenly awakened 
 public recognition of the shocking conditions surrounding pregnancy, 
 maternity, and infant welfare prevailing at the very heart of our 
 boasted civilization. So terrible, so unbelievable, are these conditions 
 of child-bearing, degraded far below the level of primitive and 
 barbarian tribes, nay, even below the plane of brutes, that many 
 high-minded people, confronted with such revolting and disgraceful 
 facts, lost that calmness of vision and impartiality of judgment so 
 necessary in any serious consideration of this vital problem. Their 
 "hearts" are touched; they become hysterical; they demand immediate 
 action; and enthusiastically and generously they support the first 
 superficial program that is advanced. Immediate action may sometimes be 
 worse than no action at all. The "warm heart" needs the balance of 
 the cool head. Much harm has been done in the world by those 
 too-good-hearted folk who have always demanded that "something be done 
 at once." 
   
 They do not stop to consider that the very first thing to be done is to 
 subject the whole situation to the deepest and most rigorous thinking. 
 As the late Walter Bagehot wrote in a significant but too often 
 forgotten passage: 
   
 "The most melancholy of human reflections, perhaps, is that on the whole 
 it is a question whether the benevolence of mankind does more good or 
 harm. Great good, no doubt, philanthropy does, but then it also does 
 great evil. It augments so much vice, it multiplies so much suffering, 
 it brings to life such great populations to suffer and to be vicious, 
 that it is open to argument whether it be or be not an evil to the 
 world, and this is entirely because excellent people fancy they can do 
 much by rapid action, and that they will most benefit the world when 
 they most relieve their own feelings; that as soon as an evil is seen, 
 `something' ought to be done to stay and prevent it. One may incline to 
 hope that the balance of good over evil is in favor of benevolence; one 
 can hardly bear to think that it is not so; but anyhow it is certain 
 that there is a most heavy debt of evil, and that this burden might 
 almost all have been spared us if philanthropists as well as others 
 had not inherited form their barbarous forefathers a wild passion for 
 instant action." 
   
 It is customary, I believe, to defend philanthropy and charity upon 
 the basis of the sanctity of human life. Yet recent events in the world 
 reveal a curious contradiction in this respect. Human life is held 
 sacred, as a general Christian principle, until war is declared, when 
 humanity indulges in a universal debauch of bloodshed and barbarism, 
 inventing poison gases and every type of diabolic suggestion to 
 facilitate killing and starvation. Blockades are enforced to weaken and 
 starve civilian populations--women and children. This accomplished, the 
 pendulum of mob passion swings back to the opposite extreme, and 
 the compensatory emotions express themselves in hysterical fashion. 
 Philanthropy and charity are then unleashed. We begin to hold human life 
 sacred again. We try to save the lives of the people we formerly 
 sought to weaken by devastation, disease and starvation. We indulge in 
 "drives," in campaigns of relief, in a general orgy of international 
 charity. 
   
 We are thus witnessing to-day the inauguration of a vast system of 
 international charity. As in our more limited communities and cities, 
 where self-sustaining and self-reliant sections of the population are 
 forced to shoulder the burden of the reckless and irresponsible, so 
 in the great world community the more prosperous and incidentally less 
 populous nations are asked to relieve and succor those countries which 
 are either the victims of the wide-spread havoc of war, of militaristic 
 statesmanship, or of the age-long tradition of reckless propagation and 
 its consequent over-population. 
   
 The people of the United States have recently been called upon to 
 exercise their traditional generosity not merely to aid the European 
 Relief Council in its efforts to keep alive three million, five hundred 
 thousand starving children in Central Europe, but in addition to 
 contribute to that enormous fund to save the thirty million Chinese 
 who find themselves at the verge of starvation, owing to one of those 
 recurrent famines which strike often at that densely populated and inert 
 country, where procreative recklessness is encouraged as a matter of 
 duty. The results of this international charity have not justified the 
 effort nor repaid the generosity to which it appealed. In the first 
 place, no effort was made to prevent the recurrence of the disaster; in 
 the second place, philanthropy of this type attempts to sweep back the 
 tide of miseries created by unrestricted propagation, with the feeble 
 broom of sentiment. As one of the most observant and impartial of 
 authorities on the Far East, J. O. P. Bland, has pointed out: "So long 
 as China maintains a birth-rate that is estimated at fifty-five per 
 thousand or more, the only possible alternative to these visitations 
 would be emigration and this would have to be on such a scale as would 
 speedily overrun and overfill the habitable globe. Neither humanitarian 
 schemes, international charities nor philanthropies can prevent 
 widespread disaster to a people which habitually breeds up to and 
 beyond the maximum limits of its food supply." Upon this point, it is 
 interesting to add, Mr. Frank A. Vanderlip has likewise pointed out the 
 inefficacy and misdirection of this type of international charity.(1) 
   
 Mr. Bland further points out: "The problem presented is one with which 
 neither humanitarian nor religious zeal can ever cope, so long as we 
 fail to recognize and attack the fundamental cause of these calamities. 
 As a matter of sober fact, the benevolent activities of our missionary 
 societies to reduce the deathrate by the prevention of infanticide and 
 the checking of disease, actually serve in the end to aggravate the 
 pressure of population upon its food-supply and to increase the 
 severity of the inevitably resultant catastrophe. What is needed for 
 the prevention, or, at least, the mitigation of these scourges, is an 
 organized educational propaganda, directed first against polygamy 
 and the marriage of minors and the unfit, and, next, toward such a 
 limitation of the birth-rate as shall approximate the standard 
 of civilized countries. But so long as Bishops and well meaning 
 philanthropists in England and America continue to praise and encourage 
 `the glorious fertility of the East' there can be but little hope of 
 minimizing the penalties of the ruthless struggle for existence in 
 China, and Nature's law will therefore continue to work out its own 
 pitiless solution, weeding out every year millions of predestined 
 weaklings." 
   
 This rapid survey is enough, I hope, to indicate the manifold 
 inadequacies inherent in present policies of philanthropy and charity. 
 The most serious charge that can be brought against modern "benevolence" 
 is that it encourages the perpetuation of defectives, delinquents 
 and dependents. These are the most dangerous elements in the world 
 community, the most devastating curse on human progress and expression. 
 Philanthropy is a gesture characteristic of modern business lavishing 
 upon the unfit the profits extorted from the community at large. Looked 
 at impartially, this compensatory generosity is in its final effect 
 probably more dangerous, more dysgenic, more blighting than the initial 
 practice of profiteering and the social injustice which makes some too 
 rich and others too poor. 
   
      (1)  Birth Control Review.  Vol. V. No. 4. p. 7. 
   
 
 
 
 Chapter 6 (Neglected Factors Of The World Problem) 
 War has thrust upon us a new internationalism. To-day the world is 
 united by starvation, disease and misery. We are enjoying the ironic 
 internationalism of hatred. The victors are forced to shoulder the 
 burden of the vanquished. International philanthropies and charities are 
 organized. The great flux of immigration and emigration has recommenced. 
 Prosperity is a myth; and the rich are called upon to support huge 
 philanthropies, in the futile attempt to sweep back the tide of famine 
 and misery. In the face of this new internationalism, this tangled unity 
 of the world, all proposed political and economic programs reveal a 
 woeful common bankruptcy. They are fragmentary and superficial. None 
 of them go to the root of this unprecedented world problem. Politicians 
 offer political solutions,--like the League of Nations or the limitation 
 of navies. Militarists offer new schemes of competitive armament. 
 Marxians offer the Third Internationale and industrial revolution. 
 Sentimentalists offer charity and philanthropy. Coordination or 
 correlation is lacking. And matters go steadily from bad to worse. 
   
 The first essential in the solution of any problem is the recognition 
 and statement of the factors involved. Now in this complex problem 
 which to-day confronts us, no attempt has been made to state the primary 
 facts. The statesman believes they are all political. Militarists 
 believe they are all military and naval. Economists, including under the 
 term the various schools for Socialists, believe they are industrial and 
 financial. Churchmen look upon them as religious and ethical. What is 
 lacking is the recognition of that fundamental factor which reflects and 
 coordinates these essential but incomplete phases of the problem,--the 
 factor of reproduction. For in all problems affecting the welfare of a 
 biological species, and particularly in all problems of human welfare, 
 two fundamental forces work against each other. There is hunger as 
 the driving force of all our economic, industrial and commercial 
 organizations; and there is the reproductive impulse in continual 
 conflict with our economic, political settlements, race adjustments and 
 the like. Official moralists, statesmen, politicians, philanthropists 
 and economists display an astounding disregard of this second 
 disorganizing factor. They treat the world of men as if it were purely 
 a hunger world instead of a hunger-sex world. Yet there is no phase of 
 human society, no question of politics, economics, or industry that is 
 not tied up in almost equal measure with the expression of both of 
 these primordial impulses. You cannot sweep back overpowering dynamic 
 instincts by catchwords. You can neglect and thwart sex only at your 
 peril. You cannot solve the problem of hunger and ignore the problem of 
 sex. They are bound up together. 
   
 While the gravest attention is paid to the problem of hunger and food, 
 that of sex is neglected. Politicians and scientists are ready 
 and willing to speak of such things as a "high birth rate," infant 
 mortality, the dangers of immigration or over-population. But with few 
 exceptions they cannot bring themselves to speak of Birth Control. Until 
 they shall have broken through the traditional inhibitions concerning 
 the discussion of sexual matters, until they recognize the force of the 
 sexual instinct, and until they recognize Birth Control as the PIVOTAL 
 FACTOR in the problem confronting the world to-day, our statesmen must 
 continue to work in the dark. Political palliatives will be mocked 
 by actuality. Economic nostrums are blown willy-nilly in the unending 
 battle of human instincts. 
   
 A brief survey of the past three or four centuries of Western 
 civilization suggests the urgent need of a new science to help humanity 
 in the struggle with the vast problem of to-day's disorder and danger. 
 That problem, as we envisage it, is fundamentally a sexual problem. 
 Ethical, political, and economic avenues of approach are insufficient. 
 We must create a new instrument, a new technique to make any adequate 
 solution possible. 
   
 The history of the industrial revolution and the dominance of 
 all-conquering machinery in Western civilization show the inadequacy of 
 political and economic measures to meet the terrific rise in population. 
 The advent of the factory system, due especially to the development 
 of machinery at the beginning of the nineteenth century, upset all the 
 grandiloquent theories of the previous era. To meet the new situation 
 created by the industrial revolution arose the new science of "political 
 economy," or economics. Old political methods proved inadequate to keep 
 pace with the problem presented by the rapid rise of the new machine and 
 industrial power. The machine era very shortly and decisively exploded 
 the simple belief that "all men are born free and equal." Political 
 power was superseded by economic and industrial power. To sustain their 
 supremacy in the political field, governments and politicians allied 
 themselves to the new industrial oligarchy. Old political theories and 
 practices were totally inadequate to control the new situation or to 
 meet the complex problems that grew out of it. 
   
 Just as the eighteenth century saw the rise and proliferation 
 of political theories, the nineteenth witnessed the creation and 
 development of the science of economics, which aimed to perfect an 
 instrument for the study and analysis of an industrial society, and 
 to offer a technique for the solution of the multifold problems it 
 presented. But at the present moment, as the outcome of the machine 
 era and competitive populations, the world has been thrown into a new 
 situation, the solution of which is impossible solely by political or 
 economic weapons. 
   
 The industrial revolution and the development of machinery in Europe and 
 America called into being a new type of working-class. Machines were 
 at first termed "labor-saving devices." In reality, as we now know, 
 mechanical inventions and discoveries created unprecedented and 
 increasingly enormous demand for "labor." The omnipresent and still 
 existing scandal of child labor is ample evidence of this. Machine 
 production in its opening phases, demanded large, concentrated and 
 exploitable populations. Large production and the huge development of 
 international trade through improved methods of transport, made 
 possible the maintenance upon a low level of existence of these rapidly 
 increasing proletarian populations. With the rise and spread throughout 
 Europe and America of machine production, it is now possible to 
 correlate the expansion of the "proletariat." The working-classes bred 
 almost automatically to meet the demand for machine-serving "hands." 
   
 The rise in population, the multiplication of proletarian populations as 
 a first result of mechanical industry, the appearance of great centers 
 of population, the so-called urban drift, and the evils of overcrowding 
 still remain insufficiently studied and stated. It is a significant 
 though neglected fact that when, after long agitation in Great Britain, 
 child labor was finally forbidden by law, the supply of children dropped 
 appreciably. No longer of economic value in the factory, children were 
 evidently a drug in the "home." Yet it is doubly significant that 
 from this moment British labor began the long unending task of 
 self-organization.(1) 
   
 Nineteenth century economics had no method of studying the interrelation 
 of the biological factors with the industrial. Overcrowding, overwork, 
 the progressive destruction of responsibility by the machine discipline, 
 as is now perfectly obvious, had the most disastrous consequences upon 
 human character and human habits.(2) Paternalistic philanthropies and 
 sentimental charities, which sprang up like mushrooms, only tended to 
 increase the evils of indiscriminate breeding. From the physiological 
 and psychological point of view, the factory system has been nothing 
 less than catastrophic. 
   
 Dr. Austin Freeman has recently pointed out (3) some of the 
 physiological, psychological, and racial effects of machinery upon the 
 proletariat, the breeders of the world. Speaking for Great Britain, Dr. 
 Freeman suggests that the omnipresence of machinery tends toward the 
 production of large but inferior populations. Evidences of biological 
 and racial degeneracy are apparent to this observer. "Compared with the 
 African negro," he writes, "the British sub-man is in several respects 
 markedly inferior. He tends to be dull; he is usually quite helpless 
 and unhandy; he has, as a rule, no skill or knowledge of handicraft, 
 or indeed knowledge of any kind.... Over-population is a phenomenon 
 connected with the survival of the unfit, and it is mechanism which 
 has created conditions favorable to the survival of the unfit and the 
 elimination of the fit." The whole indictment against machinery is 
 summarized by Dr. Freeman: "Mechanism by its reactions on man and his 
 environment is antagonistic to human welfare. It has destroyed industry 
 and replaced it by mere labor; it has degraded and vulgarized the 
 works of man; it has destroyed social unity and replaced it by social 
 disintegration and class antagonism to an extent which directly 
 threatens civilization; it has injuriously affected the structural 
 type of society by developing its organization at the expense of the 
 individual; it has endowed the inferior man with political power which 
 he employs to the common disadvantage by creating political institutions 
 of a socially destructive type; and finally by its reactions on the 
 activities of war it constitutes an agent for the wholesale physical 
 destruction of man and his works and the extinction of human culture." 
   
 It is not necessary to be in absolute agreement with this diagnostician 
 to realize the menace of machinery, which tends to emphasize quantity 
 and mere number at the expense of quality and individuality. One thing 
 is certain. If machinery is detrimental to biological fitness, the 
 machine must be destroyed, as it was in Samuel Butler's "Erewhon." But 
 perhaps there is another way of mastering this problem. 
   
 Altruism, humanitarianism and philanthropy have aided and abetted 
 machinery in the destruction of responsibility and self-reliance among 
 the least desirable elements of the proletariat. In contrast with 
 the previous epoch of discovery of the New World, of exploration 
 and colonization, when a centrifugal influence was at work upon the 
 populations of Europe, the advent of machinery has brought with it a 
 counteracting centripetal effect. The result has been the accumulation 
 of large urban populations, the increase of irresponsibility, and 
 ever-widening margin of biological waste. 
   
 Just as eighteenth century politics and political theories were unable 
 to keep pace with the economic and capitalistic aggressions of the 
 nineteenth century, so also we find, if we look closely enough, that 
 nineteenth century economics is inadequate to lead the world out of the 
 catastrophic situation into which it has been thrown by the debacle 
 of the World War. Economists are coming to recognize that the purely 
 economic interpretation of contemporary events is insufficient. Too 
 long, as one of them has stated, orthodox economists have overlooked 
 the important fact that "human life is dynamic, that change, movement, 
 evolution, are its basic characteristics; that self-expression, and 
 therefore freedom of choice and movement, are prerequisites to a 
 satisfying human state".(4) 
   
 Economists themselves are breaking with the old "dismal science" of the 
 Manchester school, with its sterile study of "supply and demand," 
 of prices and exchange, of wealth and labor. Like the Chicago Vice 
 Commission, nineteenth-century economists (many of whom still survive 
 into our own day) considered sex merely as something to be legislated 
 out of existence. They had the right idea that wealth consisted solely 
 of material things used to promote the welfare of certain human beings. 
 Their idea of capital was somewhat confused. They apparently decided 
 that capital was merely that part of capital used to produce profit. 
 Prices, exchanges, commercial statistics, and financial operations 
 comprised the subject matter of these older economists. It would have 
 been considered "unscientific" to take into account the human factors 
 involved. They might study the wear-and-tear and depreciation of 
 machinery: but the depreciation or destruction of the human race did 
 not concern them. Under "wealth" they never included the vast, wasted 
 treasury of human life and human expression. 
   
 Economists to-day are awake to the imperative duty of dealing with the 
 whole of human nature, with the relation of men, women, and children to 
 their environment--physical and psychic as well as social; of dealing 
 with all those factors which contribute to human sustenance, happiness 
 and welfare. The economist, at length, investigates human motives. 
 Economics outgrows the outworn metaphysical preconceptions of nineteenth 
 century theory. To-day we witness the creation of a new "welfare" or 
 social economics, based on a fuller and more complete knowledge of the 
 human race, upon a recognition of sex as well as of hunger; in brief, of 
 physiological instincts and psychological demands. The newer economists 
 are beginning to recognize that their science heretofore failed to take 
 into account the most vital factors in modern industry--it failed 
 to foresee the inevitable consequences of compulsory motherhood; the 
 catastrophic effects of child labor upon racial health; the overwhelming 
 importance of national vitality and well-being; the international 
 ramifications of the population problem; the relation of indiscriminate 
 breeding to feeble-mindedness, and industrial inefficiency. It 
 speculated too little or not at all on human motives. Human nature riots 
 through the traditional economic structure, as Carlton Parker pointed 
 out, with ridicule and destruction; the old-fashioned economist looked 
 on helpless and aghast. 
   
 Inevitably we are driven to the conclusion that the exhaustively 
 economic interpretation of contemporary history is inadequate to 
 meet the present situation. In his suggestive book, "The Acquisitive 
 Society," R. H. Tawney, arrives at the conclusion that "obsession 
 by economic issues is as local and transitory as it is repulsive and 
 disturbing. To future generations it will appear as pitiable as the 
 obsession of the seventeenth century by religious quarrels appears 
 to-day; indeed, it is less rational, since the object with which it is 
 concerned is less important. And it is a poison which inflames every 
 wound and turns each trivial scratch into a malignant ulcer. Society 
 will not solve the particular problems of industry until that poison is 
 expelled, and it has learned to see industry in its proper perspective. 
 IF IT IS TO DO THAT IT MUST REARRANGE THE SCALE OF VALUES. It must 
 regard economic interests as one element in life, not as the whole of 
 life...."(5) 
   
 In neglecting or minimizing the great factor of sex in human society, 
 the Marxian doctrine reveals itself as no stronger than orthodox 
 economics in guiding our way to a sound civilization. It works within 
 the same intellectual limitations. Much as we are indebted to the 
 Marxians for pointing out the injustice of modern industrialism, we 
 should never close our eyes to the obvious limitations of their own 
 "economic interpretation of history." While we must recognize the great 
 historical value of Marx, it is now evident that his vision of the 
 "class struggle," of the bitter irreconcilable warfare between the 
 capitalist and working classes was based not upon historical analysis, 
 but upon on unconscious dramatization of a superficial aspect of 
 capitalistic regime. 
   
 In emphasizing the conflict between the classes, Marx failed to 
 recognize the deeper unity of the proletariat and the capitalist. 
 Nineteenth century capitalism had in reality engendered and cultivated 
 the very type of working class best suited to its own purpose--an inert, 
 docile, irresponsible and submissive class, progressively incapable 
 of effective and aggressive organization. Like the economists of the 
 Manchester school, Marx failed to recognize the interplay of human 
 instincts in the world of industry. All the virtues were embodied in the 
 beloved proletariat; all the villainies in the capitalists. The greatest 
 asset of the capitalism of that age was, as a matter of fact, the 
 uncontrolled breeding among the laboring classes. The intelligent and 
 self-conscious section of the workers was forced to bear the burden of 
 the unemployed and the poverty-stricken. 
   
 Marx was fully aware of the consequences of this condition of things, 
 but shut his eyes tightly to the cause. He pointed out that capitalistic 
 power was dependent upon "the reserve army of labor," surplus labor, 
 and a wide margin of unemployment. He practically admitted that 
 over-population was the inevitable soil of predatory capitalism. But he 
 disregarded the most obvious consequence of that admission. It was all 
 very dramatic and grandiloquent to tell the workingmen of the world to 
 unite, that they had "nothing but their chains to lose and the world 
 to gain." Cohesion of any sort, united and voluntary organization, as 
 events have proved, is impossible in populations bereft of intelligence, 
 self-discipline and even the material necessities of life, and cheated 
 by their desires and ignorance into unrestrained and uncontrolled 
 fertility. 
   
 In pointing out the limitations and fallacies of the orthodox Marxian 
 opinion, my purpose is not to depreciate the efforts of the Socialists 
 aiming to create a new society, but rather to emphasize what seems to me 
 the greatest and most neglected truth of our day:--Unless sexual science 
 is incorporated as an integral part of world-statesmanship and the 
 pivotal importance of Birth Control is recognized in any program of 
 reconstruction, all efforts to create a new world and a new civilization 
 are foredoomed to failure. 
   
 We can hope for no advance until we attain a new conception of sex, not 
 as a merely propagative act, not merely as a biological necessity for 
 the perpetuation of the race, but as a psychic and spiritual avenue of 
 expression. It is the limited, inhibited conception of sex that vitiates 
 so much of the thought and ideation of the Eugenists. 
   
 Like most of our social idealists, statesmen, politicians and 
 economists, some of the Eugenists suffer intellectually from a 
 restricted and inhibited understanding of the function of sex. This 
 limited understanding, this narrowness of vision, which gives rise to 
 most of the misconceptions and condemnations of the doctrine of Birth 
 Control, is responsible or the failure of politicians and legislators to 
 enact practical statutes or to remove traditional obscenities from the 
 law books. The most encouraging sign at present is the recognition by 
 modern psychology of the central importance of the sexual instinct in 
 human society, and the rapid spread of this new concept among the more 
 enlightened sections of the civilized communities. The new conception 
 of sex has been well stated by one to whom the debt of contemporary 
 civilization is well-nigh immeasurable. "Sexual activity," Havelock 
 Ellis has written, "is not merely a baldly propagative act, nor, when 
 propagation is put aside, is it merely the relief of distended 
 vessels. It is something more even than the foundation of great social 
 institutions. It is the function by which all the finer activities of 
 the organism, physical and psychic, may be developed and satisfied."(6) 
   
 No less than seventy years ago, a profound but neglected thinker, George 
 Drysdale, emphasized the necessity of a thorough understanding of man's 
 sexual nature in approaching economic, political and social problems. 
 "Before we can undertake the calm and impartial investigation of any 
 social problem, we must first of all free ourselves from all those 
 sexual prejudices which are so vehement and violent and which so 
 completely distort our vision of the external world. Society as a whole 
 has yet to fight its way through an almost impenetrable forest of sexual 
 taboos." Drysdale's words have lost none of their truth even to-day: 
 "There are few things from which humanity has suffered more than the 
 degraded and irreverent feelings of mystery and shame that have been 
 attached to the genital and excretory organs. The former have been 
 regarded, like their corresponding mental passions, as something of a 
 lower and baser nature, tending to degrade and carnalize man by their 
 physical appetites. But we cannot take a debasing view of any part of 
 our humanity without becoming degraded in our whole being."(7) 
   
 Drysdale moreover clearly recognized the social crime of entrusting to 
 sexual barbarians the duty of legislating and enforcing laws detrimental 
 to the welfare of all future generations. "They trust blindly to 
 authority for the rules they blindly lay down," he wrote, "perfectly 
 unaware of the awful and complicated nature of the subject they are 
 dealing with so confidently and of the horrible evils their unconsidered 
 statements are attended with. They themselves break through the most 
 fundamentally important laws daily in utter unconsciousness of the 
 misery they are causing to their fellows...." 
   
 Psychologists to-day courageously emphasize the integral relationship 
 of the expression of the sexual instinct with every phase of human 
 activity. Until we recognize this central fact, we cannot understand the 
 implications and the sinister significance of superficial attempts 
 to apply rosewater remedies to social evils,--by the enactment of 
 restrictive and superficial legislation, by wholesale philanthropies and 
 charities, by publicly burying our heads in the sands of sentimentality. 
 Self-appointed censors, grossly immoral "moralists," makeshift 
 legislators, all face a heavy responsibility for the miseries, diseases, 
 and social evils they perpetuate or intensify by enforcing the primitive 
 taboos of aboriginal customs, traditions, and outworn laws, which 
 at every step hinder the education of the people in the scientific 
 knowledge of their sexual nature. Puritanic and academic taboo of sex in 
 education and religion is as disastrous to human welfare as prostitution 
 or the venereal scourges. "We are compelled squarely to face the 
 distorting influences of biologically aborted reformers as well as the 
 wastefulness of seducers," Dr. Edward A. Kempf recently declared. "Man 
 arose from the ape and inherited his passions, which he can only refine 
 but dare not attempt to castrate unless he would destroy the fountains 
 of energy that maintain civilization and make life worth living and the 
 world worth beautifying.... We do not have a problem that is to be solved 
 by making repressive laws and executing them. Nothing will be more 
 disastrous. Society must make life worth the living and the refining for 
 the individual by conditioning him to love and to seek the love-object 
 in a manner that reflects a constructive effect upon his fellow-men 
 and by giving him suitable opportunities. The virility of the automatic 
 apparatus is destroyed by excessive gormandizing or hunger, by excessive 
 wealth or poverty, by excessive work or idleness, by sexual abuse or 
 intolerant prudishness. The noblest and most difficult art of all is the 
 raising of human thoroughbreds."(8) 
   
      (1)  It may be well to note, in this connection, that the 
      decline in the birth rate among the more intelligent classes 
      of British labor followed upon the famous Bradlaugh-Besant 
      trial of 1878, the outcome of the attempt of these two 
      courageous Birth Control pioneers to circulate among the 
      workers the work of an American physician, Dr. Knowlton's 
      "The Fruits of Philosophy," advocating Birth Control, and 
      the widespread publicity resulting from his trial. 
   
      (2)  Cf. The Creative Impulse in Industry, by Helen Marot. 
      The Instinct of Workmanship, by Thorstein Veblen. 
   
      (3)  Social Decay and Regeneration.  By R. Austin Freeman. 
      London 1921. 
   
      (4)  Carlton H. Parker:  The Casual Laborer and other 
      essays: p. 30. 
   
      (5)  R. H. Tawney.  The Acquisitive Society, p. 184. 
   
      (6)  Medical Review of Reviews:  Vol. XXVI, p. 116. 
   
      (7)  The Elements of Social Science:  London, 1854. 
   
      (8)  Proceedings of the International Conference of Women 
      Physicians. Vol. IV, pp. 66-67.  New York, 1920. 
   
 
 
 
 Chapter 7 (Is Revolution The Remedy?) 
 Marxian Socialism, which seeks to solve the complex problem of human 
 misery by economic and proletarian revolution, has manifested a new 
 vitality. Every shade of Socialistic thought and philosophy acknowledges 
 its indebtedness to the vision of Karl Marx and his conception of the 
 class struggle. Yet the relation of Marxian Socialism to the philosophy 
 of Birth Control, especially in the minds of most Socialists, remains 
 hazy and confused. No thorough understanding of Birth Control, its aims 
 and purposes, is possible until this confusion has been cleared 
 away, and we come to a realization that Birth Control is not merely 
 independent of, but even antagonistic to the Marxian dogma. In recent 
 years many Socialists have embraced the doctrine of Birth Control, and 
 have generously promised us that "under Socialism" voluntary motherhood 
 will be adopted and popularized as part of a general educational system. 
 We might more logically reply that no Socialism will ever be possible 
 until the problem of responsible parenthood has been solved. 
   
 Many Socialists to-day remain ignorant of the inherent conflict between 
 the idea of Birth Control and the philosophy of Marx. The earlier 
 Marxians, including Karl Marx himself, expressed the bitterest 
 antagonism to Malthusian and neo-Malthusian theories. A remarkable 
 feature of early Marxian propaganda has been the almost complete 
 unanimity with which the implications of the Malthusian doctrine have 
 been derided, denounced and repudiated. Any defense of the so-called 
 "law of population" was enough to stamp one, in the eyes of the orthodox 
 Marxians, as a "tool of the capitalistic class," seeking to dampen the 
 ardor of those who expressed the belief that men might create a better 
 world for themselves. Malthus, they claimed, was actuated by selfish 
 class motives. He was not merely a hidebound aristocrat, but a pessimist 
 who was trying to kill all hope of human progress. By Marx, Engels, 
 Bebel, Karl Kautsky, and all the celebrated leaders and interpreters 
 of Marx's great "Bible of the working class," down to the martyred Rosa 
 Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, Birth Control has been looked upon as a 
 subtle, Machiavellian sophistry created for the purpose of placing the 
 blame for human misery elsewhere than at the door of the capitalist 
 class. Upon this point the orthodox Marxian mind has been universally 
 and sternly uncompromising. 
   
 Marxian vituperation of Malthus and his followers is illuminating. It 
 reveals not the weakness of the thinker attacked, but of the aggressor. 
 This is nowhere more evident than in Marx's "Capital" itself. In that 
 monumental effort, it is impossible to discover any adequate refutation 
 or even calm discussion of the dangers of irresponsible parenthood 
 and reckless breeding, any suspicion that this recklessness and 
 irresponsibility is even remotely related to the miseries of the 
 proletariat. Poor Malthus is there relegated to the humble level of 
 a footnote. "If the reader reminds me of Malthus, whose essay on 
 Population appeared in 1798," Marx remarks somewhat tartly, "I 
 remind him that this work in its first form is nothing more than 
 a schoolboyish, superficial plagiary of De Foe, Sir James Steuart, 
 Townsend, Franklin, Wallace, etc., and does not contain a single 
 sentence thought out by himself. The great sensation this pamphlet 
 caused was due solely to party interest. The French Revolution had 
 passionate defenders in the United Kingdom.... `The Principles of 
 Population' was quoted with jubilance by the English oligarchy as the 
 great destroyer of all hankerings after human development."(1) 
   
 The only attempt that Marx makes here toward answering the theory of 
 Malthus is to declare that most of the population theory teachers were 
 merely Protestant parsons.--"Parson Wallace, Parson Townsend, Parson 
 Malthus and his pupil the Arch-Parson Thomas Chalmers, to say nothing 
 of the lesser reverend scribblers in this line." The great pioneer of 
 "scientific" Socialism the proceeds to berate parsons as philosophers 
 and economists, using this method of escape from the very pertinent 
 question of surplus population and surplus proletariat in its relation 
 to labor organization and unemployment. It is true that elsewhere (2) he 
 goes so far as to admit that "even Malthus recognized over-population 
 as a necessity of modern industry, though, after his narrow fashion, he 
 explains it by the absolute over-growth of the laboring population, not 
 by their becoming relatively supernumerary." A few pages later, however, 
 Marx comes back again to the question of over-population, failing 
 to realize that it is to the capitalists' advantage that the working 
 classes are unceasingly prolific. "The folly is now patent," writes the 
 unsuspecting Marx, "of the economic wisdom that preaches to the laborers 
 the accommodation of their numbers to the requirements of capital. The 
 mechanism of capitalist production and accumulation constantly affects 
 this adjustment. The first work of this adaptation is the creation of a 
 relatively surplus population or industrial reserve army. Its last work 
 is the misery of constantly extending strata of the army of labor, and 
 the dead weight of pauperism." A little later he ventures again in the 
 direction of Malthusianism so far as to admit that "the accumulation 
 of wealth at one pole is... at the same time the accumulation of misery, 
 agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality and mental degradation 
 at the opposite pole." Nevertheless, there is no indication that Marx 
 permitted himself to see that the proletariat accommodates its numbers 
 to the "requirements of capital" precisely by breeding a large, docile, 
 submissive and easily exploitable population. 
   
 Had the purpose of Marx been impartial and scientific, this trifling 
 difference might easily have been overcome and the dangers of reckless 
 breeding insisted upon. But beneath all this wordy pretension and 
 economic jargon, we detect another aim. That is the unconscious 
 dramatization of human society into the "class conflict." Nothing was 
 overlooked that might sharpen and accentuate this "conflict." Marx 
 depicted a great melodramatic conflict, in which all the virtues were 
 embodied in the proletariat and all the villainies in the capitalist. 
 In the end, as always in such dramas, virtue was to be rewarded and 
 villainy punished. The working class was the temporary victim of a 
 subtle but thorough conspiracy of tyranny and repression. Capitalists, 
 intellectuals and the BOURGEOISIE were all "in on" this diabolic 
 conspiracy, all thoroughly familiar with the plot, which Marx was so 
 sure he had uncovered. In the last act was to occur that catastrophic 
 revolution, with the final transformation scene of the Socialist 
 millenium. Presented in "scientific" phraseology, with all the authority 
 of economic terms, "Capital" appeared at the psychological moment. 
 The heaven of the traditional theology had been shattered by Darwinian 
 science, and here, dressed up in all the authority of the new science, 
 appeared a new theology, the promise of a new heaven, an earthly 
 paradise, with an impressive scale of rewards for the faithful and 
 ignominious punishments for the capitalists. 
   
 Critics have often been puzzled by the tremendous vitality of this work. 
 Its predictions have never, despite the claims of the faithful, been 
 fulfilled. Instead of diminishing, the spirit of nationalism has 
 been intensified tenfold. In nearly every respect Marx's predictions 
 concerning the evolution of historical and economic forces have been 
 contradicted by events, culminating in the great war. Most of his 
 followers, the "revolutionary" Socialists, were swept into the whirlpool 
 of nationalistic militarism. Nevertheless, this "Bible of the working 
 classes" still enjoys a tremendous authority as a scientific work. By 
 some it is regarded as an economic treatise; by others as a philosophy 
 of history; by others as a collection of sociological laws; and finally 
 by others as a moral and political book of reference. Criticized, 
 refuted, repudiated and demolished by specialists, it nevertheless 
 exerts its influences and retains its mysterious vitality. 
   
 We must seek the explanation of this secret elsewhere. Modern psychology 
 has taught us that human nature has a tendency to place the cause of its 
 own deficiencies and weaknesses outside of itself, to attribute to some 
 external agency, to some enemy or group of enemies, the blame for 
 its own misery. In his great work Marx unconsciously strengthens 
 and encourages this tendency. The immediate effect of his teaching, 
 vulgarized and popularized in a hundred different forms, is to relieve 
 the proletariat of all responsibility for the effects of its reckless 
 breeding, and even to encourage it in the perpetuation of misery. 
   
 The inherent truth in the Marxian teachings was, moreover, immediately 
 subordinated to their emotional and religious appeal. A book that could 
 so influence European thought could not be without merit. But in the 
 process of becoming the "Bible of the working classes," "Capital" 
 suffered the fate of all such "Bibles." The spirit of ecclesiastical 
 dogmatism was transfused into the religion of revolutionary Socialism. 
 This dogmatic religious quality has been noted by many of the most 
 observant critics of Socialism. Marx was too readily accepted as the 
 father of the church, and "Capital" as the sacred gospel of the social 
 revolution. All questions of tactics, of propaganda, of class warfare, 
 of political policy, were to be solved by apt quotations from the "good 
 book." New thoughts, new schemes, new programs, based upon tested fact 
 and experience, the outgrowth of newer discoveries concerning the nature 
 of men, upon the recognition of the mistakes of the master, could only 
 be approved or admitted according as they could or could not be tested 
 by some bit of text quoted from Marx. His followers assumed that Karl 
 Marx had completed the philosophy of Socialism, and that the duty of 
 the proletariat thenceforth was not to think for itself, but merely to 
 mobilize itself under competent Marxian leaders for the realization of 
 his ideas. 
   
 From the day of this apotheosis of Marx until our own, the "orthodox" 
 Socialist of any shade is of the belief that the first essential for 
 social salvation lies in unquestioning belief in the dogmas of Marx. 
   
 The curious and persistent antagonism to Birth Control that began with 
 Marx and continues to our own day can be explained only as the utter 
 refusal or inability to consider humanity in its physiological and 
 psychological aspects--these aspects, apparently, having no place in the 
 "economic interpretation of history." It has remained for George Bernard 
 Shaw, a Socialist with a keener spiritual insight than the 
 ordinary Marxist, to point out the disastrous consequences of rapid 
 multiplication which are obvious to the small cultivator, the peasant 
 proprietor, the lowest farmhand himself, but which seem to arouse the 
 orthodox, intellectual Marxian to inordinate fury. "But indeed the 
 more you degrade the workers," Shaw once wrote,(3) "robbing them of all 
 artistic enjoyment, and all chance of respect and admiration from their 
 fellows, the more you throw them back, reckless, upon the one pleasure 
 and the one human tie left to them--the gratification of their instinct 
 for producing fresh supplies of men. You will applaud this instinct 
 as divine until at last the excessive supply becomes a nuisance: there 
 comes a plague of men; and you suddenly discover that the instinct is 
 diabolic, and set up a cry of `over-population.' But your slaves are 
 beyond caring for your cries: they breed like rabbits: and their poverty 
 breeds filth, ugliness, dishonesty, disease, obscenity, drunkenness." 
   
 Lack of insight into fundamental truths of human nature is evident 
 throughout the writings of the Marxians. The Marxian Socialists, 
 according to Kautsky, defended women in industry: it was right for woman 
 to work in factories in order to preserve her equality with man! Man 
 must not support woman, declared the great French Socialist Guesde, 
 because that would make her the PROLETAIRE of man! Bebel, the great 
 authority on woman, famous for his erudition, having critically studied 
 the problem of population, suggested as a remedy for too excessive 
 fecundity the consumption of a certain lard soup reputed to have an 
 "anti-generative" effect upon the agricultural population of Upper 
 Bavaria! Such are the results of the literal and uncritical acceptance 
 of Marx's static and mechanical conception of human society, a society 
 perfectly automatic; in which competition is always operating at maximum 
 efficiency; one vast and unending conspiracy against the blameless 
 proletariat. 
   
 This lack of insight of the orthodox Marxians, long represented by 
 the German Social-Democrats, is nowhere better illustrated than in Dr. 
 Robinson's account of a mass meeting of the Social-Democrat party to 
 organize public opinion against the doctrine of Birth Control among 
 the poor.(4) "Another meeting had taken place the week before, at which 
 several eminent Socialist women, among them Rosa Luxemburg and Clara 
 Zetkin, spoke very strongly against limitation of offspring among the 
 poor--in fact the title of the discussion was GEGEN DEN GEBURTSTREIK! 
 `Against the birth strike!' The interest of the audience was intense. 
 One could see that with them it was not merely a dialectic question, 
 as it was with their leaders, but a matter of life and death. I came to 
 attend a meeting AGAINST the limitation of offspring; it soon proved to 
 be a meeting very decidedly FOR the limitation of offspring, for every 
 speaker who spoke in favor of the artificial prevention of conception 
 or undesired pregnancies, was greeted with vociferous, long-lasting 
 applause; while those who tried to persuade the people that a limited 
 number of children is not a proletarian weapon, and would not improve 
 their lot, were so hissed that they had difficulty going on. The 
 speakers who were against the... idea soon felt that their audience 
 was against them.... Why was there such small attendance at the regular 
 Socialistic meetings, while the meetings of this character were packed 
 to suffocation? It did not apparently penetrate the leaders' heads 
 that the reason was a simple one. Those meetings were evidently of 
 no interest to them, while those which dealt with the limitation of 
 offspring were of personal, vital, present interest.... What particularly 
 amused me--and pained me--in the anti-limitationists was the ease and 
 equanimity with which they advised the poor women to keep on bearing 
 children. The woman herself was not taken into consideration, as if she 
 was not a human being, but a machine. What are her sufferings, her labor 
 pains, her inability to read, to attend meetings, to have a taste of 
 life? What does she amount to? The proletariat needs fighters. Go on, 
 females, and breed like animals. Maybe of the thousands you bear a few 
 will become party members...." 
   
 The militant organization of the Marxian Socialists suggests that their 
 campaign must assume the tactics of militarism of the familiar type. As 
 represented by militaristic governments, militarism like Socialism has 
 always encouraged the proletariat to increase and multiply. Imperial 
 Germany was the outstanding and awful example of this attitude. Before 
 the war the fall in the birth-rate was viewed by the Junker party 
 with the gravest misgivings. Bernhardi and the protagonists of 
 DEUTSCHLAND-UBER-ALLES condemned it in the strongest terms. The Marxians 
 unconsciously repeat the words of the government representative, Krohne, 
 who, in a debate on the subject in the Prussian Diet, February 1916, 
 asserted: "Unfortunately this view has gained followers amongst the 
 German women.... These women, in refusing to rear strong and able 
 children to continue the race, drag into the dust that which is the 
 highest end of women--motherhood. It is to be hoped that the willingness 
 to bear sacrifices will lead to a change for the better.... We need 
 an increase in human beings to guard against the attacks of envious 
 neighbors as well as to fulfil our cultural mission. Our whole economic 
 development depends on increase of our people." Today we are fully aware 
 of how imperial Germany fulfiled that cultural mission of hers; nor 
 can we overlook the fact that the countries with a smaller birth-rate 
 survived the ordeal. Even from the traditional militaristic standpoint, 
 strength does not reside in numbers, though the Caesars, the Napoleons 
 and the Kaisers of the world have always believed that large exploitable 
 populations were necessary for their own individual power. If Marxian 
 dictatorship means the dictatorship of a small minority wielding power 
 in the interest of the proletariat, a high-birth rate may be necessary, 
 though we may here recall the answer of the lamented Dr. Alfred Fried to 
 the German imperialists: "It is madness, the apotheosis of unreason, to 
 wish to breed and care for human beings in order that in the flower of 
 their youth they may be sent in millions to be slaughtered wholesale by 
 machinery. We need no wholesale production of men, have no need of the 
 `fruitful fertility of women,' no need of wholesale wares, fattened and 
 dressed for slaughter What we do need is careful maintenance of those 
 already born. If the bearing of children is a moral and religious duty, 
 then it is a much higher duty to secure the sacredness and security of 
 human life, so that children born and bred with trouble and sacrifice 
 may not be offered up in the bloom of youth to a political dogma at the 
 bidding of secret diplomacy." 
   
 Marxism has developed a patriotism of its own, if indeed it has not yet 
 been completely crystallized into a religion. Like the "capitalistic" 
 governments it so vehemently attacks, it demands self-sacrifice and even 
 martyrdom from the faithful comrades. But since its strength depends 
 to so great a degree upon "conversion," upon docile acceptance of the 
 doctrines of the "Master" as interpreted by the popes and bishops of 
 this new church, it fails to arouse the irreligious proletariat. 
 The Marxian Socialist boasts of his understanding of "working class 
 psychology" and criticizes the lack of this understanding on the part 
 of all dissenters. But, as the Socialists' meetings against the 
 "birth strike" indicate, the working class is not interested in such 
 generalities as the Marxian "theory of value," the "iron law" of wages, 
 "the value of commodities" and the rest of the hazy articles of faith. 
 Marx inherited the rigid nationalistic psychology of the eighteenth 
 century, and his followers, for the most part, have accepted his 
 mechanical and superficial treatment of instinct.(5) Discontented 
 workers may rally to Marxism because it places the blame for their 
 misery outside of themselves and depicts their conditions as the result 
 of a capitalistic conspiracy, thereby satisfying that innate tendency 
 of every human being to shift the blame to some living person outside 
 himself, and because it strengthens his belief that his sufferings 
 and difficulties may be overcome by the immediate amelioration of his 
 economic environment. In this manner, psychologists tell us, neuroses 
 and inner compulsions are fostered. No true solution is possible, to 
 continue this analogy, until the worker is awakened to the realization 
 that the roots of his malady lie deep in his own nature, his own 
 organism, his own habits. To blame everything upon the capitalist and 
 the environment produced by capitalism is to focus attention upon merely 
 one of the elements of the problem. The Marxian too often forgets 
 that before there was a capitalist there was exercised the unlimited 
 reproductive activity of mankind, which produced the first overcrowding, 
 the first want. This goaded humanity into its industrial frenzy, into 
 warfare and theft and slavery. Capitalism has not created the lamentable 
 state of affairs in which the world now finds itself. It has grown 
 out of them, armed with the inevitable power to take advantage of our 
 swarming, spawning millions. As that valiant thinker Monsieur G. Hardy 
 has pointed out (6) the proletariat may be looked upon, not as the 
 antagonist of capitalism, but as its accomplice. Labor surplus, or 
 the "army of reserve" which as for decades and centuries furnished 
 the industrial background of human misery, which so invariably defeats 
 strikes and labor revolts, cannot honestly be blamed upon capitalism. 
 It is, as M. Hardy points out, of SEXUAL and proletarian origin. In 
 bringing too many children into the world, in adding to the total of 
 misery, in intensifying the evils of overcrowding, the proletariat 
 itself increases the burden of organized labor; even of the Socialist 
 and Syndicalist organizations themselves with a surplus of the docilely 
 inefficient, with those great uneducable and unorganizable masses. With 
 surprisingly few exceptions, Marxians of all countries have docilely 
 followed their master in rejecting, with bitterness and vindictiveness 
 that is difficult to explain, the principles and teachings of Birth 
 Control. 
   
 Hunger alone is not responsible for the bitter struggle for existence we 
 witness to-day in our over-advertised civilization. Sex, uncontrolled, 
 misdirected, over-stimulated and misunderstood, has run riot at the 
 instigation of priest, militarist and exploiter. Uncontrolled sex has 
 rendered the proletariat prostrate, the capitalist powerful. In this 
 continuous, unceasing alliance of sexual instinct and hunger we find the 
 reason for the decline of all the finer sentiments. These instincts tear 
 asunder the thin veils of culture and hypocrisy and expose to our gaze 
 the dark sufferings of gaunt humanity. So have we become familiar with 
 the everyday spectacle of distorted bodies, of harsh and frightful 
 diseases stalking abroad in the light of day; of misshapen heads and 
 visages of moron and imbecile; of starving children in city streets 
 and schools. This is the true soil of unspeakable crimes. Defect and 
 delinquency join hands with disease, and accounts of inconceivable and 
 revolting vices are dished up in the daily press. When the majority 
 of men and women are driven by the grim lash of sex and hunger in the 
 unending struggle to feed themselves and to carry the dead-weight of 
 dead and dying progeny, when little children are forced into factories, 
 streets, and shops, education--including even education in the Marxian 
 dogmas--is quite impossible; and civilization is more completely 
 threatened than it ever could be by pestilence or war. 
   
 But, it will be pointed out, the working class has advanced. Power has 
 been acquired by labor unions and syndicates. In the beginning power 
 was won by the principle of the restriction of numbers. The device of 
 refusing to admit more than a fixed number of new members to the unions 
 of the various trades has been justified as necessary for the upholding 
 of the standard of wages and of working conditions. This has been the 
 practice in precisely those unions which have been able through years 
 of growth and development to attain tangible strength and power. Such 
 a principle of restriction is necessary in the creation of a firmly and 
 deeply rooted trunk or central organization furnishing a local center 
 for more extended organization. It is upon this great principle of 
 restricted number that the labor unions have generated and developed 
 power. They have acquired this power without any religious emotionalism, 
 without subscribing to metaphysical or economic theology. For the 
 millenium and the earthly paradise to be enjoyed at some indefinitely 
 future date, the union member substitutes the very real politics 
 of organization with its resultant benefits. He increases his own 
 independence and comfort and that of his family. He is immune to 
 superstitious belief in and respect for the mysterious power of 
 political or economic nostrums to reconstruct human society according to 
 the Marxian formula. 
   
 In rejecting the Marxian hypothesis as superficial and fragmentary, we 
 do so not because of its so-called revolutionary character, its threat 
 to the existing order of things, but rather because of its superficial, 
 emotional and religious character and its deleterious effect upon the 
 life of reason. Like other schemes advanced by the alarmed and the 
 indignant, it relies too much upon moral fervor and enthusiasm. To build 
 any social program upon the shifting sands of sentiment and feeling, of 
 indignation or enthusiasm, is a dangerous and foolish task. On the other 
 hand, we should not minimize the importance of the Socialist movement 
 in so valiantly and so courageously battling against the stagnating 
 complacency of our conservatives and reactionaries, under whose 
 benign imbecility the defective and diseased elements of humanity 
 are encouraged "full speed ahead" in their reckless and irresponsible 
 swarming and spawning. Nevertheless, as George Drysdale pointed out 
 nearly seventy years ago; 
   
 "... If we ignore this and other sexual subjects, we may do whatever else 
 we like: we may bully, we may bluster, we may rage, We may foam at 
 the mouth; we may tear down Heaven with our prayers, we may exhaust 
 ourselves with weeping over the sorrows of the poor; we may narcotize 
 ourselves and others with the opiate of Christian resignation; we may 
 dissolve the realities of human woe in a delusive mirage of poetry and 
 ideal philosophy; we may lavish our substance in charity, and labor over 
 possible or impossible Poor Laws; we may form wild dreams of Socialism, 
 industrial regiments, universal brotherhood, red republics, or 
 unexampled revolutions; we may strangle and murder each other, we may 
 persecute and despise those whose sexual necessities force them to break 
 through our unnatural moral codes; we may burn alive if we please the 
 prostitutes and the adulterers; we may break our own and our neighbor's 
 hearts against the adamantine laws that surround us, but not one step, 
 not one shall we advance, till we acknowledge these laws, and adopt 
 the only possible mode in which they can be obeyed." These words were 
 written in 1854. Recent events have accentuated their stinging truth. 
   
      (1)  Marx: "Capital."  Vol. I, p. 675. 
   
      (2)  Op. cit. pp, 695, 707, 709. 
   
      (3)  Fabian Essays in Socialism.  p. 21. 
   
      (4)  Uncontrolled Breeding, By Adelyne More.  p. 84. 
   
      (5)  For a sympathetic treatment of modern psychological 
      research as bearing on Communism, by two convinced 
      Communists see "Creative Revolution," by Eden and Cedar 
      Paul. 
   
      (6)  Neo-Malthusianisme et Socialisme, p. 22. 
 
 
 
 Chapter 8 (Dangers Of Cradle Competition) 
   
 Eugenics has been defined as "the study of agencies under social control 
 that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations, 
 either mentally or physically." While there is no inherent conflict 
 between Socialism and Eugenics, the latter is, broadly, the antithesis 
 of the former. In its propaganda, Socialism emphasizes the evil effects 
 of our industrial and economic system. It insists upon the necessity of 
 satisfying material needs, upon sanitation, hygiene, and education to 
 effect the transformation of society. The Socialist insists that healthy 
 humanity is impossible without a radical improvement of the social--and 
 therefore of the economic and industrial--environment. The Eugenist 
 points out that heredity is the great determining factor in the lives 
 of men and women. Eugenics is the attempt to solve the problem from the 
 biological and evolutionary point of view. You may ring all the changes 
 possible on "Nurture" or environment, the Eugenist may say to the 
 Socialist, but comparatively little can be effected until you control 
 biological and hereditary elements of the problem. Eugenics thus aims 
 to seek out the root of our trouble, to study humanity as a kinetic, 
 dynamic, evolutionary organism, shifting and changing with the 
 successive generations, rising and falling, cleansing itself of 
 inherent defects, or under adverse and dysgenic influences, sinking into 
 degeneration and deterioration. 
   
 "Eugenics" was first defined by Sir Francis Galton in his "Human 
 Faculty" in 1884, and was subsequently developed into a science and into 
 an educational effort. Galton's ideal was the rational breeding of human 
 beings. The aim of Eugenics, as defined by its founder, is to bring 
 as many influences as can be reasonably employed, to cause the useful 
 classes of the community to contribute MORE than their proportion to the 
 next generation. Eugenics thus concerns itself with all influences that 
 improve the inborn qualities of a race; also with those that develop 
 them to the utmost advantage. It is, in short, the attempt to bring 
 reason and intelligence to bear upon HEREDITY. But Galton, in spite 
 of the immense value of this approach and his great stimulation to 
 criticism, was completely unable to formulate a definite and practical 
 working program. He hoped at length to introduce Eugenics "into the 
 national conscience like a new religion.... I see no impossibility in 
 Eugenics becoming a religious dogma among mankind, but its details must 
 first be worked out sedulously in the study. Over-zeal leading to hasty 
 action, would do harm by holding out expectations of a new golden 
 age, which will certainly be falsified and cause the science to 
 be discredited. The first and main point is to secure the general 
 intellectual acceptance of Eugenics as a hopeful and most important 
 study. Then, let its principles work into the heart of the nation, who 
 will gradually give practical effect to them in ways that we may not 
 wholly foresee."(1) 
   
 Galton formulated a general law of inheritance which declared that an 
 individual receives one-half of his inheritance from his two 
 parents, one-fourth from his four grandparents, one-eighth from his 
 great-grandparents, one-sixteenth from his great-great grandparents, and 
 so on by diminishing fractions to his primordial ancestors, the sum 
 of all these fractions added together contributing to the whole of the 
 inherited make-up. The trouble with this generalization, from the modern 
 Mendelian point of view, is that it fails to define what "characters" 
 one would get in the one-half that came from one's parents, or the 
 one-fourth from one's grandparents. The whole of our inheritance is 
 not composed of these indefinitely made up fractional parts. We are 
 interested rather in those more specific traits or characters, mental 
 or physical, which, in the Mendelian view, are structural and functional 
 units, making up a mosaic rather than a blend. The laws of heredity are 
 concerned with the precise behavior, during a series of generations, of 
 these specific unit characters. This behavior, as the study of Genetics 
 shows, may be determined in lesser organisms by experiment. Once 
 determined, they are subject to prophecy. 
   
 The problem of human heredity is now seen to be infinitely more complex 
 than imagined by Galton and his followers, and the optimistic hope of 
 elevating Eugenics to the level of a religion is a futile one. Most of 
 the Eugenists, including Professor Karl Pearson and his colleagues of 
 the Eugenics Laboratory of the University of London and of the biometric 
 laboratory in University College, have retained the age-old point 
 of view of "Nature vs. Nurture" and have attempted to show the 
 predominating influence of Heredity AS OPPOSED TO Environment. This 
 may be true; but demonstrated and repeated in investigation after 
 investigation, it nevertheless remains fruitless and unprofitable from 
 the practical point of view. 
   
 We should not minimize the great outstanding service of Eugenics for 
 critical and diagnostic investigations. It demonstrates, not in terms of 
 glittering generalization but in statistical studies of investigations 
 reduced to measurement and number, that uncontrolled fertility is 
 universally correlated with disease, poverty, overcrowding and the 
 transmission of hereditable taints. Professor Pearson and his associates 
 show us that "if fertility be correlated with anti-social hereditary 
 characters, a population will inevitably degenerate." 
   
 This degeneration has already begun. Eugenists demonstrate that 
 two-thirds of our manhood of military age are physically too unfit 
 to shoulder a rifle; that the feeble-minded, the syphilitic, the 
 irresponsible and the defective breed unhindered; that women are driven 
 into factories and shops on day-shift and night-shift; that children, 
 frail carriers of the torch of life, are put to work at an early 
 age; that society at large is breeding an ever-increasing army of 
 under-sized, stunted and dehumanized slaves; that the vicious circle of 
 mental and physical defect, delinquency and beggary is encouraged, 
 by the unseeing and unthinking sentimentality of our age, to populate 
 asylum, hospital and prison. 
   
 All these things the Eugenists sees and points out with a courage 
 entirely admirable. But as a positive program of redemption, orthodox 
 Eugenics can offer nothing more "constructive" than a renewed "cradle 
 competition" between the "fit" and the "unfit." It sees that the 
 most responsible and most intelligent members of society are the less 
 fertile; that the feeble-minded are the more fertile. Herein lies the 
 unbalance, the great biological menace to the future of civilization. 
 Are we heading to biological destruction, toward the gradual but certain 
 attack upon the stocks of intelligence and racial health by the sinister 
 forces of the hordes of irresponsibility and imbecility? This is not 
 such a remote danger as the optimistic Eugenist might suppose. The 
 mating of the moron with a person of sound stock may, as Dr. Tredgold 
 points out, gradually disseminate this trait far and wide until it 
 undermines the vigor and efficiency of an entire nation and an entire 
 race. This is no idle fancy. We must take it into account if we wish to 
 escape the fate that has befallen so many civilizations in the past. 
   
 "It is, indeed, more than likely that the presence of this impairment 
 in a mitigated form is responsible for no little of the defective 
 character, the diminution of mental and moral fiber at the present day," 
 states Dr. Tredgold.(2) Such populations, this distinguished authority 
 might have added, form the veritable "cultures" not only for contagious 
 physical diseases but for mental instability and irresponsibility also. 
 They are susceptible, exploitable, hysterical, non-resistant to external 
 suggestion. Devoid of stamina, such folk become mere units in a mob. 
 "The habit of crowd-making is daily becoming a more serious menace to 
 civilization," writes Everett Dean Martin. "Our society is becoming 
 a veritable babel of gibbering crowds."(3) It would be only the 
 incorrigible optimist who refused to see the integral relation between 
 this phenomenon and the indiscriminate breeding by which we recruit our 
 large populations. 
   
 The danger of recruiting our numbers from the most "fertile stocks" is 
 further emphasized when we recall that in a democracy like that of the 
 United States every man and woman is permitted a vote in the government, 
 and that it is the representatives of this grade of intelligence who may 
 destroy our liberties, and who may thus be the most far-reaching peril 
 to the future of civilization. 
   
 "It is a pathological worship of mere number," writes Alleyne Ireland, 
 "which has inspired all the efforts--the primary, the direct election 
 of Senators, the initiative, the recall and the referendum--to cure the 
 evils of mob rule by increasing the size of the mob and extending its 
 powers."(4) 
   
 Equality of political power has thus been bestowed upon the lowest 
 elements of our population. We must not be surprised, therefore, at 
 the spectacle of political scandal and graft, of the notorious and 
 universally ridiculed low level of intelligence and flagrant stupidity 
 exhibited by our legislative bodies. The Congressional Record mirrors 
 our political imbecility. 
   
 All of these dangers and menaces are acutely realized by the Eugenists; 
 it is to them that we are most indebted for the proof that reckless 
 spawning carries with it the seeds of destruction. But whereas the 
 Galtonians reveal themselves as unflinching in their investigation and 
 in their exhibition of fact and diagnoses of symptoms, they do not on 
 the other hand show much power in suggesting practical and feasible 
 remedies. 
   
 On its scientific side, Eugenics suggests the reestabilishment of 
 the balance between the fertility of the "fit" and the "unfit." The 
 birth-rate among the normal and healthier and finer stocks of humanity, 
 is to be increased by awakening among the "fit" the realization of the 
 dangers of a lessened birth-rate in proportion to the reckless breeding 
 among the "unfit." By education, by persuasion, by appeals to racial 
 ethics and religious motives, the ardent Eugenist hopes to increase the 
 fertility of the "fit." Professor Pearson thinks that it is especially 
 necessary to awaken the hardiest stocks to this duty. These stocks, 
 he says, are to be found chiefly among the skilled artisan class, the 
 intelligent working class. Here is a fine combination of health and 
 hardy vigor, of sound body and sound mind. 
   
 Professor Pearson and his school of biometrics here ignore or at least 
 fail to record one of those significant "correlations" which form the 
 basis of his method. The publications of the Eugenics Laboratory all 
 tend to show that a high rate of fertility is correlated with extreme 
 poverty, recklessness, deficiency and delinquency; similarly, that 
 among the more intelligent, this rate of fertility decreases. But the 
 scientific Eugenists fail to recognize that this restraint of fecundity 
 is due to a deliberate foresight and is a conscious effort to 
 elevate standards of living for the family and the children of the 
 responsible--and possibly more selfish--sections of the community. The 
 appeal to enter again into competitive child-bearing, for the benefit 
 of the nation or the race, or any other abstraction, will fall on deaf 
 ears. 
   
 Pearson has done invaluable work in pointing out the fallacies and the 
 false conclusions of the ordinary statisticians. But when he attempts to 
 show by the methods of biometrics that not only the first child but 
 also the second, are especially liable to suffer from transmissible 
 pathological defects, such as insanity, criminality and tuberculosis, 
 he fails to recognize that this tendency is counterbalanced by the high 
 mortality rate among later children. If first and second children reveal 
 a greater percentage of heritable defect, it is because the later born 
 children are less liable to survive the conditions produced by a large 
 family. 
   
 In passing, we should here recognize the difficulties presented by the 
 idea of "fit" and "unfit." Who is to decide this question? The grosser, 
 the more obvious, the undeniably feeble-minded should, indeed, not only 
 be discouraged but prevented from propagating their kind. But among the 
 writings of the representative Eugenists one cannot ignore the distinct 
 middle-class bias that prevails. As that penetrating critic, F. W. 
 Stella Browne, has said in another connection, "The Eugenics Education 
 Society has among its numbers many most open-minded and truly 
 progressive individuals but the official policy it has pursued for years 
 has been inspired by class-bias and sex bias. The society laments with 
 increasing vehemence the multiplication of the less fortunate classes at 
 a more rapid rate than the possessors of leisure and opportunity. (I do 
 not think it relevant here to discuss whether the innate superiority of 
 endowment in the governing class really is so overwhelming as to justify 
 the Eugenics Education Society's peculiar use of the terms `fit' and 
 `unfit'!) Yet it has persistently refused to give any help toward 
 extending the knowledge of contraceptives to the exploited classes. 
 Similarly, though the Eugenics Review, the organ of the society, 
 frequently laments the `selfishness' of the refusal of maternity by 
 healthy and educated women of the professional classes, I have yet 
 to learn that it has made any official pronouncement on the English 
 illegitimacy laws or any organized effort toward defending the unmarried 
 mother." 
   
 This peculiarly Victorian reticence may be inherited from the founder of 
 Eugenics. Galton declared that the "Bohemian" element in the Anglo-Saxon 
 race is destined to perish, and "the sooner it goes, the happier for 
 mankind." The trouble with any effort of trying to divide humanity 
 into the "fit" and the "unfit," is that we do not want, as H. G. Wells 
 recently pointed out,(5) to breed for uniformity but for variety. "We 
 want statesmen and poets and musicians and philosophers and strong 
 men and delicate men and brave men. The qualities of one would be the 
 weaknesses of the other." We want, most of all, genius. 
   
 Proscription on Galtonian lines would tend to eliminate many of the 
 great geniuses of the world who were not only "Bohemian," but actually 
 and pathologically abnormal--men like Rousseau, Dostoevsky, Chopin, Poe, 
 Schumann, Nietzsche, Comte, Guy de Maupassant,--and how many others? 
 But such considerations should not lead us into error of concluding that 
 such men were geniuses merely because they were pathological specimens, 
 and that the only way to produce a genius is to breed disease and 
 defect. It only emphasizes the dangers of external standards of "fit" 
 and "unfit." 
   
 These limitations are more strikingly shown in the types of so-called 
 "eugenic" legislation passed or proposed by certain enthusiasts. 
 Regulation, compulsion and prohibitions affected and enacted by 
 political bodies are the surest methods of driving the whole problem 
 under-ground. As Havelock Ellis has pointed out, the absurdity and even 
 hopelessness of effecting Eugenic improvement by placing on the statute 
 books prohibitions of legal matrimony to certain classes of people, 
 reveal the weakness of those Eugenists who minimize or undervalue the 
 importance of environment as a determining factor. They affirm that 
 heredity is everything and environment nothing, yet forget that it is 
 precisely those who are most universally subject to bad environment who 
 procreate most copiously, most recklessly and most disastrously. Such 
 marriage laws are based for the most part on the infantile assumption 
 that procreation is absolutely dependent upon the marriage ceremony, 
 an assumption usually coupled with the complementary one that the only 
 purpose in marriage is procreation. Yet it is a fact so obvious that it 
 is hardly worth stating that the most fertile classes who indulge in the 
 most dysgenic type of procreating--the feeble-minded--are almost totally 
 unaffected by marriage laws and marriage-ceremonies. 
   
 As for the sterilization of habitual criminals, not merely must we 
 know more of heredity and genetics in general, but also acquire 
 more certainty of the justice of our laws and the honesty of their 
 administration before we can make rulings of fitness or unfitness merely 
 upon the basis of a respect for law. On this point the eminent William 
 Bateson writes:(6) "Criminals are often feeble-minded, but as regards 
 those that are not, the fact that a man is for the purposes of Society 
 classified as a criminal, tells me little as to his value, still less 
 as to the possible value of his offspring. It is a fault inherent in 
 criminal jurisprudence, based on non-biological data, that the law must 
 needs take the nature of the offenses rather than that of the offenders 
 as the basis of classification. A change in the right direction has 
 begun, but the problem is difficult and progress will be very slow.... We 
 all know of persons convicted, perhaps even habitually, whom the 
 world could ill spare. Therefore I hesitate to proscribe the criminal. 
 Proscription... is a weapon with a very nasty recoil. Might not some 
 with equal cogency proscribe army contractors and their accomplices, 
 the newspaper patriots? The crimes of the prison population are petty 
 offenses by comparison, and the significance we attach to them is a 
 survival of other days. Felonies may be great events, locally, but they 
 do not induce catastrophies. The proclivities of the war-makers are 
 infinitely more dangerous than those of the aberrant beings whom from 
 time to time the law may dub as criminal. Consistent and portentous 
 selfishness, combined with dulness of imagination is probably just as 
 transmissible as want of self-control, though destitute of the amiable 
 qualities not rarely associated with the genetic composition of persons 
 of unstable mind." 
   
 In this connection, we should note another type of "respectable" 
 criminality noted by Havelock Ellis: "If those persons who raise the cry 
 of `race-suicide' in face of the decline of the birth-rate really had 
 the knowledge and the intelligence to realize the manifold evils which 
 they are invoking, they would deserve to be treated as criminals." 
   
 Our debt to the science of Eugenics is great in that it directs our 
 attention to the biological nature of humanity. Yet there is too great 
 a tendency among the thinkers of this school, to restrict their ideas 
 of sex to its expression as a purely procreative function. Compulsory 
 legislation which would make the inevitably futile attempt to prohibit 
 one of the most beneficent and necessary of human expressions, or 
 regulate it into the channels of preconceived philosophies, would reduce 
 us to the unpleasant days predicted by William Blake, when 
   
 "Priests in black gowns will be walking their rounds And binding with 
 briars our joys and desires." 
   
 Eugenics is chiefly valuable in its negative aspects. It is "negative 
 Eugenics" that has studied the histories of such families as the Jukeses 
 and the Kallikaks, that has pointed out the network of imbecility and 
 feeble-mindedness that has been sedulously spread through all strata 
 of society. On its so-called positive or constructive side, it fails to 
 awaken any permanent interest. "Constructive" Eugenics aims to arouse 
 the enthusiasm or the interest of the people in the welfare of the world 
 fifteen or twenty generations in the future. On its negative side it 
 shows us that we are paying for and even submitting to the dictates of 
 an ever increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never 
 should have been born at all--that the wealth of individuals and of 
 states is being diverted from the development and the progress of human 
 expression and civilization. 
   
 While it is necessary to point out the importance of "heredity" as 
 a determining factor in human life, it is fatal to elevate it to the 
 position of an absolute. As with environment, the concept of heredity 
 derives its value and its meaning only in so far as it is embodied 
 and made concrete in generations of living organisms. Environment and 
 heredity are not antagonistic. Our problem is not that of "Nature vs. 
 Nurture," but rather of Nature x Nurture, of heredity multiplied by 
 environment, if we may express it thus. The Eugenist who overlooks the 
 importance of environment as a determining factor in human life, is as 
 short-sighted as the Socialist who neglects the biological nature of 
 man. We cannot disentangle these two forces, except in theory. To the 
 child in the womb, said Samuel Butler, the mother is "environment." She 
 is, of course, likewise "heredity." The age-old discussion of "Nature 
 vs. Nurture" has been threshed out time after time, usually fruitlessly, 
 because of a failure to recognize the indivisibility of these biological 
 factors. The opposition or antagonism between them is an artificial and 
 academic one, having no basis in the living organism. 
   
 The great principle of Birth Control offers the means whereby the 
 individual may adapt himself to and even control the forces of 
 environment and heredity. Entirely apart from its Malthusian aspect or 
 that of the population question, Birth Control must be recognized, as 
 the Neo-Malthusians pointed out long ago, not "merely as the key of the 
 social position," and the only possible and practical method of human 
 generation, but as the very pivot of civilization. Birth Control which 
 has been criticized as negative and destructive, is really the greatest 
 and most truly eugenic method, and its adoption as part of the program 
 of Eugenics would immediately give a concrete and realistic power to 
 that science. As a matter of fact, Birth Control has been accepted by 
 the most clear thinking and far seeing of the Eugenists themselves as 
 the most constructive and necessary of the means to racial health.(7) 
   
      (1)  Galton.  Essays in Eugenics, p. 43. 
   
      (2)  Eugenics Review, Vol. XIII, p. 349. 
   
      (3)  Cf. Martin, The Behavior of Crowds, p. 6. 
   
      (4)  Cf. Democracy and the Human Equation.  E. P. Dutton & 
      Co., 1921. 
   
      (5)  Cf. The Salvaging of Civilization. 
   
      (6)  Common Sense in Racial Problems.  By W. Bateson, M. A. 
      A., F. R. S. 
   
      (7)  Among these are Dean W. R. Inge, Professor J. Arthur 
      Thomson, Dr. Havelock Ellis, Professor William Bateson, 
      Major Leonard Darwin and Miss Norah March. 
 
 
 
 Chapter 9 (A Moral Necessity) 
          I went to the Garden of Love, 
              And saw what I never had seen; 
          A Chapel was built in the midst, 
              Where I used to play on the green. 
   
          And the gates of this Chapel were shut, 
              And "Thou shalt not" writ over the door; 
          So I turned to the Garden of Love 
              That so many sweet flowers bore. 
   
          And I saw it was filled with graves, 
              And tombstones where flowers should be; 
          And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds, 
              And binding with briars my joys and desires. 
   
          --William Blake 
   
 Orthodox opposition to Birth Control is formulated in the official 
 protest of the National Council of Catholic Women against the resolution 
 passed by the New York State Federation of Women's Clubs which favored 
 the removal of all obstacles to the spread of information regarding 
 practical methods of Birth Control. The Catholic statement completely 
 embodies traditional opposition to Birth Control. It affords a striking 
 contrast by which we may clarify and justify the ethical necessity for 
 this new instrument of civilization as the most effective basis for 
 practical and scientific morality. "The authorities at Rome have again 
 and again declared that all positive methods of this nature are immoral 
 and forbidden," states the National Council of Catholic Women. "There 
 is no question of the lawfulness of birth restriction through abstinence 
 from the relations which result in conception. The immorality of Birth 
 Control as it is practised and commonly understood, consists in the 
 evils of the particular method employed. These are all contrary to the 
 moral law because they are unnatural, being a perversion of a natural 
 function. Human faculties are used in such a way as to frustrate the 
 natural end for which these faculties were created. This is always 
 intrinsically wrong--as wrong as lying and blasphemy. No supposed 
 beneficial consequence can make good a practice which is, in itself, 
 immoral.... 
   
 "The evil results of the practice of Birth Control are numerous. 
 Attention will be called here to only three. The first is the 
 degradation of the marital relation itself, since the husband and wife 
 who indulge in any form of this practice come to have a lower idea of 
 married life. They cannot help coming to regard each other to a great 
 extent as mutual instruments of sensual gratification, rather than as 
 cooperators with the Creating in bringing children into the world. This 
 consideration may be subtle but it undoubtedly represents the facts. 
   
 "In the second place, the deliberate restriction of the family through 
 these immoral practices deliberately weakens self-control and the 
 capacity for self-denial, and increases the love of ease and luxury. The 
 best indication of this is that the small family is much more prevalent 
 in the classes that are comfortable and well-to-do than among those 
 whose material advantages are moderate or small. The theory of the 
 advocates of Birth Control is that those parents who are comfortably 
 situated should have a large number of children (SIC!) while the poor 
 should restrict their offspring to a much smaller number. This theory 
 does not work, for the reason that each married couple have their own 
 idea of what constitutes unreasonable hardship in the matter of bearing 
 and rearing children. A large proportion of the parents who are addicted 
 to Birth Control practices are sufficiently provided with worldly goods 
 to be free from apprehension on the economic side; nevertheless, they 
 have small families because they are disinclined to undertake the other 
 burdens involved in bringing up a more numerous family. A practice which 
 tends to produce such exaggerated notions of what constitutes hardship, 
 which leads men and women to cherish such a degree of ease, makes 
 inevitably for inefficiency, a decline in the capacity to endure and to 
 achieve, and for a general social decadence. 
   
 "Finally, Birth Control leads sooner or later to a decline in 
 population...." (The case of France is instanced.) But it is essentially 
 the moral question that alarms the Catholic women, for the statement 
 concludes: "The further effect of such proposed legislation will 
 inevitably be a lowering both of public and private morals. What the 
 fathers of this country termed indecent and forbade the mails to carry, 
 will, if such legislation is carried through, be legally decent. The 
 purveyors of sexual license and immorality will have the opportunity to 
 send almost anything they care to write through the mails on the plea 
 that it is sex information. Not only the married but also the unmarried 
 will be thus affected; the ideals of the young contaminated and lowered. 
 The morals of the entire nation will suffer. 
   
 "The proper attitude of Catholics... is clear. They should watch and 
 oppose all attempts in state legislatures and in Congress to repeal 
 the laws which now prohibit the dissemination of information concerning 
 Birth Control. Such information will be spread only too rapidly despite 
 existing laws. To repeal these would greatly accelerate this deplorable 
 movement.(1)" 
   
 The Catholic position has been stated in an even more extreme form 
 by Archbishop Patrick J. Hayes of the archdiocese of New York. In a 
 "Christmas Pastoral" this dignitary even went to the extent of declaring 
 that "even though some little angels in the flesh, through the physical 
 or mental deformities of their parents, may appear to human eyes 
 hideous, misshapen, a blot on civilized society, we must not lose 
 sight of this Christian thought that under and within such visible 
 malformation, lives an immortal soul to be saved and glorified for all 
 eternity among the blessed in heaven."(2) 
   
 With the type of moral philosophy expressed in this utterance, we 
 need not argue. It is based upon traditional ideas that have had the 
 practical effect of making this world a vale of tears. Fortunately such 
 words carry no weight with those who can bring free and keen as well as 
 noble minds to the consideration of the matter. To them the idealism of 
 such an utterance appears crude and cruel. The menace to civilization of 
 such orthodoxy, if it be orthodoxy, lies in the fact that its powerful 
 exponents may be fore a time successful not merely in influencing 
 the conduct of their adherents but in checking freedom of thought and 
 discussion. To this, with all the vehemence of emphasis at our command, 
 we object. From what Archbishop Hayes believes concerning the future 
 blessedness in Heaven of the souls of those who are born into this world 
 as hideous and misshapen beings he has a right to seek such consolation 
 as may be obtained; but we who are trying to better the conditions of 
 this world believe that a healthy, happy human race is more in keeping 
 with the laws of God, than disease, misery and poverty perpetuating 
 itself generation after generation. Furthermore, while conceding to 
 Catholic or other churchmen full freedom to preach their own doctrines, 
 whether of theology or morals, nevertheless when they attempt to carry 
 these ideas into legislative acts and force their opinions and codes 
 upon the non-Catholics, we consider such action an interference with the 
 principles of democracy and we have a right to protest. 
   
 Religious propaganda against Birth Control is crammed with contradiction 
 and fallacy. It refutes itself. Yet it brings the opposing views into 
 vivid contrast. In stating these differences we should make clear 
 that advocates of Birth Control are not seeking to attack the Catholic 
 church. We quarrel with that church, however, when it seeks to assume 
 authority over non-Catholics and to dub their behavior immoral because 
 they do not conform to the dictatorship of Rome. The question of bearing 
 and rearing children we hold is the concern of the mother and the 
 potential mother. If she delegates the responsibility, the ethical 
 education, to an external authority, that is her affair. We object, 
 however, to the State or the Church which appoints itself as arbiter 
 and dictator in this sphere and attempts to force unwilling women into 
 compulsory maternity. 
   
 When Catholics declare that "The authorities at Rome have again and 
 again declared that all positive methods of this nature are immoral and 
 forbidden," they do so upon the assumption that morality consists in 
 conforming to laws laid down and enforced by external authority, in 
 submission to decrees and dicta imposed from without. In this case, they 
 decide in a wholesale manner the conduct of millions, demanding of 
 them not the intelligent exercise of their own individual judgment and 
 discrimination, but unquestioning submission and conformity to dogma. 
 The Church thus takes the place of all-powerful parents, and demands 
 of its children merely that they should obey. In my belief such a 
 philosophy hampers the development of individual intelligence. Morality 
 then becomes a more or less successful attempt to conform to a code, 
 instead of an attempt to bring reason and intelligence to bear upon the 
 solution of each individual human problem. 
   
 But, we read on, Birth Control methods are not merely contrary to "moral 
 law," but forbidden because they are "unnatural," being "the perversion 
 of a natural function." This, of course, is the weakest link in the 
 whole chain. Yet "there is no question of the lawfulness of birth 
 restriction through abstinence"--as though abstinence itself were not 
 unnatural! For more than a thousand years the Church was occupied with 
 the problem of imposing abstinence on its priesthood, its most educated 
 and trained body of men, educated to look upon asceticism as the finest 
 ideal; it took one thousand years to convince the Catholic priesthood 
 that abstinence was "natural" or practicable.(3) Nevertheless, there is 
 still this talk of abstinence, self-control, and self-denial, almost in 
 the same breath with the condemnation of Birth Control as "unnatural." 
   
 If it is our duty to act as "cooperators with the Creator" to bring 
 children into the world, it is difficult to say at what point our 
 behavior is "unnatural." If it is immoral and "unnatural" to prevent 
 an unwanted life from coming into existence, is it not immoral and 
 "unnatural" to remain unmarried from the age of puberty? Such casuistry 
 is unconvincing and feeble. We need only point out that rational 
 intelligence is also a "natural" function, and that it is as imperative 
 for us to use the faculties of judgment, criticism, discrimination of 
 choice, selection and control, all the faculties of the intelligence, 
 as it is to use those of reproduction. It is certainly dangerous "to 
 frustrate the natural ends for which these faculties were created." 
 This also, is always intrinsically wrong--as wrong as lying and 
 blasphemy--and infinitely more devastating. Intelligence is as natural 
 to us as any other faculty, and it is fatal to moral development and 
 growth to refuse to use it and to delegate to others the solution of 
 our individual problems. The evil will not be that one's conduct is 
 divergent from current and conventional moral codes. There may be every 
 outward evidence of conformity, but this agreement may be arrived at, by 
 the restriction and suppression of subjective desires, and the more 
 or less successful attempt at mere conformity. Such "morality" would 
 conceal an inner conflict. The fruits of this conflict would be neurosis 
 and hysteria on the one hand; or concealed gratification of suppressed 
 desires on the other, with a resultant hypocrisy and cant. True morality 
 cannot be based on conformity. There must be no conflict between 
 subjective desire and outward behavior. 
   
 To object to these traditional and churchly ideas does not by any means 
 imply that the doctrine of Birth Control is anti-Christian. On the 
 contrary, it may be profoundly in accordance with the Sermon on the 
 Mount. One of the greatest living theologians and most penetrating 
 students of the problems of civilization is of this opinion. In an 
 address delivered before the Eugenics Education Society of London,(4) 
 William Ralph Inge, the Very Reverend Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral, 
 London, pointed out that the doctrine of Birth Control was to be 
 interpreted as of the very essence of Christianity. 
   
 "We should be ready to give up all our theories," he asserted, "if 
 science proved that we were on the wrong lines. And we can understand, 
 though we profoundly disagree with, those who oppose us on the grounds 
 of authority.... We know where we are with a man who says, `Birth Control 
 is forbidden by God; we prefer poverty, unemployment, war, the physical, 
 intellectual and moral degeneration of the people, and a high deathrate 
 to any interference with the universal command to be fruitful and 
 multiply'; but we have no patience with those who say that we can have 
 unrestricted and unregulated propagation without those consequences. 
 It is a great part of our work to press home to the public mind the 
 alternative that lies before us. Either rational selection must take the 
 place of the natural selection which the modern State will not allow to 
 act, or we must go on deteriorating. When we can convince the public of 
 this, the opposition of organized religion will soon collapse or become 
 ineffective." Dean Inge effectively answers those who have objected 
 to the methods of Birth Control as "immoral" and in contradiction and 
 inimical to the teachings of Christ. Incidentally he claims that those 
 who are not blinded by prejudices recognize that "Christianity aims at 
 saving the soul--the personality, the nature, of man, not his body or 
 his environment. According to Christianity, a man is saved, not by 
 what he has, or knows, or does, but by what he is. It treats all the 
 apparatus of life with a disdain as great as that of the biologist; so 
 long as a man is inwardly healthy, it cares very little whether he 
 is rich or poor, learned or simple, and even whether he is happy, or 
 unhappy. It attaches no importance to quantitative measurements of any 
 kind. The Christian does not gloat over favorable trade-statistics, nor 
 congratulate himself on the disparity between the number of births and 
 deaths. For him... the test of the welfare of a country is the quality 
 of human beings whom it produces. Quality is everything, quantity is 
 nothing. And besides this, the Christian conception of a kingdom of God 
 upon the earth teaches us to turn our eyes to the future, and to think 
 of the welfare of posterity as a thing which concerns us as much as that 
 of our own generation. This welfare, as conceived by Christianity, is 
 of course something different from external prosperity; it is to be the 
 victory of intrinsic worth and healthiness over all the false ideals and 
 deep-seated diseases which at present spoil civilization." 
   
 "It is not political religion with which I am concerned," Dean Inge 
 explained, "but the convictions of really religious persons; and I do 
 not think that we need despair of converting them to our views." 
   
 Dean Inge believes Birth Control is an essential part of Eugenics, and 
 an essential part of Christian morality. On this point he asserts: "We 
 do wish to remind our orthodox and conservative friends that the Sermon 
 on the Mount contains some admirably clear and unmistakable eugenic 
 precepts. `Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? A 
 corrupt tree cannot bring forth good fruit, neither can a good tree 
 bring forth evil fruit. Every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit 
 is hewn down, and cast into the fire.' We wish to apply these words not 
 only to the actions of individuals, which spring from their characters, 
 but to the character of individuals, which spring from their inherited 
 qualities. This extension of the scope of the maxim seems to me quite 
 legitimate. Men do not gather grapes of thorns. As our proverb says, you 
 cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. If we believe this, and do 
 not act upon it by trying to move public opinion towards giving social 
 reform, education and religion a better material to work upon, we 
 are sinning against the light, and not doing our best to bring in the 
 Kingdom of God upon earth." 
   
 As long as sexual activity is regarded in a dualistic and contradictory 
 light,--in which it is revealed either as the instrument by which men 
 and women "cooperate with the Creator" to bring children into the 
 world, on the one hand; and on the other, as the sinful instrument of 
 self-gratification, lust and sensuality, there is bound to be an endless 
 conflict in human conduct, producing ever increasing misery, pain and 
 injustice. In crystallizing and codifying this contradiction, the Church 
 not only solidified its own power over men but reduced women to the most 
 abject and prostrate slavery. It was essentially a morality that would 
 not "work." The sex instinct in the human race is too strong to be bound 
 by the dictates of any church. The church's failure, its century after 
 century of failure, is now evident on every side: for, having convinced 
 men and women that only in its baldly propagative phase is sexual 
 expression legitimate, the teachings of the Church have driven sex 
 under-ground, into secret channels, strengthened the conspiracy of 
 silence, concentrated men's thoughts upon the "lusts of the body," have 
 sown, cultivated and reaped a crop of bodily and mental diseases, and 
 developed a society congenitally and almost hopelessly unbalanced. How 
 is any progress to be made, how is any human expression or education 
 possible when women and men are taught to combat and resist their 
 natural impulses and to despise their bodily functions? 
   
 Humanity, we are glad to realize, is rapidly freeing itself from this 
 "morality" imposed upon it by its self-appointed and self-perpetuating 
 masters. From a hundred different points the imposing edifice of this 
 "morality" has been and is being attacked. Sincere and thoughtful 
 defenders and exponents of the teachings of Christ now acknowledge the 
 falsity of the traditional codes and their malignant influence upon the 
 moral and physical well-being of humanity. 
   
 Ecclesiastical opposition to Birth Control on the part of certain 
 representatives of the Protestant churches, based usually on quotations 
 from the Bible, is equally invalid, and for the same reason. The 
 attitude of the more intelligent and enlightened clergy has been well 
 and succinctly expressed by Dean Inge, who, referring to the ethics of 
 Birth Control, writes: "THIS IS EMPHATICALLY A MATTER IN WHICH EVERY 
 MAN AND WOMAN MUST JUDGE FOR THEMSELVES, AND MUST REFRAIN FROM JUDGING 
 OTHERS." We must not neglect the important fact that it is not merely 
 in the practical results of such a decision, not in the small number of 
 children, not even in the healthier and better cared for children, not 
 in the possibility of elevating the living conditions of the individual 
 family, that the ethical value of Birth Control alone lies. Precisely 
 because the practice of Birth Control does demand the exercise of 
 decision, the making of choice, the use of the reasoning powers, is 
 it an instrument of moral education as well as of hygienic and racial 
 advance. It awakens the attention of parents to their potential 
 children. It forces upon the individual consciousness the question of 
 the standards of living. In a profound manner it protects and reasserts 
 the inalienable rights of the child-to-be. 
   
 Psychology and the outlook of modern life are stressing the growth 
 of independent responsibility and discrimination as the true basis of 
 ethics. The old traditional morality, with its train of vice, disease, 
 promiscuity and prostitution, is in reality dying out, killing itself 
 off because it is too irresponsible and too dangerous to individual 
 and social well-being. The transition from the old to the new, like 
 all fundamental changes, is fraught with many dangers. But it is a 
 revolution that cannot be stopped. 
   
 The smaller family, with its lower infant mortality rate, is, in more 
 definite and concrete manner than many actions outwardly deemed "moral," 
 the expression of moral judgment and responsibility. It is the assertion 
 of a standard of living, inspired by the wish to obtain a fuller and 
 more expressive life for the children than the parents have enjoyed. If 
 the morality or immorality of any course of conduct is to be determined 
 by the motives which inspire it, there is evidently at the present day 
 no higher morality than the intelligent practice of Birth Control. 
   
 The immorality of many who practise Birth Control lies in not daring to 
 preach what they practise. What is the secret of the hypocrisy of the 
 well-to-do, who are willing to contribute generously to charities 
 and philanthropies, who spend thousands annually in the upkeep and 
 sustenance of the delinquent, the defective and the dependent; and yet 
 join the conspiracy of silence that prevents the poorer classes from 
 learning how to improve their conditions, and elevate their standards 
 of living? It is as though they were to cry: "We'll give you anything 
 except the thing you ask for--the means whereby you may become 
 responsible and self-reliant in your own lives." 
   
 The brunt of this injustice falls on women, because the old traditional 
 morality is the invention of men. "No religion, no physical or moral 
 code," wrote the clear-sighted George Drysdale, "proposed by one sex 
 for the other, can be really suitable. Each must work out its laws for 
 itself in every department of life." In the moral code developed by the 
 Church, women have been so degraded that they have been habituated to 
 look upon themselves through the eyes of men. Very imperfectly have 
 women developed their own self-consciousness, the realization of their 
 tremendous and supreme position in civilization. Women can develop 
 this power only in one way; by the exercise of responsibility, by the 
 exercise of judgment, reason or discrimination. They need ask for 
 no "rights." They need only assert power. Only by the exercise of 
 self-guidance and intelligent self-direction can that inalienable, 
 supreme, pivotal power be expressed. More than ever in history 
 women need to realize that nothing can ever come to us from another. 
 Everything we attain we must owe to ourselves. Our own spirit must 
 vitalize it. Our own heart must feel it. For we are not passive 
 machines. We are not to be lectured, guided and molded this way or that. 
 We are alive and intelligent, we women, no less than men, and we must 
 awaken to the essential realization that we are living beings, endowed 
 with will, choice, comprehension, and that every step in life must be 
 taken at our own initiative. 
   
 Moral and sexual balance in civilization will only be established by the 
 assertion and expression of power on the part of women. This power will 
 not be found in any futile seeking for economic independence or in the 
 aping of men in industrial and business pursuits, nor by joining battle 
 for the so-called "single standard." Woman's power can only be expressed 
 and make itself felt when she refuses the task of bringing unwanted 
 children into the world to be exploited in industry and slaughtered in 
 wars. When we refuse to produce battalions of babies to be exploited; 
 when we declare to the nation; "Show us that the best possible chance in 
 life is given to every child now brought into the world, before you cry 
 for more! At present our children are a glut on the market. You hold 
 infant life cheap. Help us to make the world a fit place for children. 
 When you have done this, we will bear you children,--then we shall be 
 true women." The new morality will express this power and responsibility 
 on the part of women. 
   
 "With the realization of the moral responsibility of women," writes 
 Havelock Ellis, "the natural relations of life spring back to their due 
 biological adjustment. Motherhood is restored to its natural sacredness. 
 It becomes the concern of the woman herself, and not of society nor any 
 individual, to determine the conditions under which the child shall be 
 conceived...." 
   
 Moreover, woman shall further assert her power by refusing to remain 
 the passive instrument of sensual self-gratification on the part of 
 men. Birth Control, in philosophy and practice, is the destroyer of 
 that dualism of the old sexual code. It denies that the sole purpose 
 of sexual activity is procreation; it also denies that sex should 
 be reduced to the level of sensual lust, or that woman should permit 
 herself to be the instrument of its satisfaction. In increasing and 
 differentiating her love demands, woman must elevate sex into another 
 sphere, whereby it may subserve and enhance the possibility of 
 individual and human expression. Man will gain in this no less than 
 woman; for in the age-old enslavement of woman he has enslaved himself; 
 and in the liberation of womankind, all of humanity will experience the 
 joys of a new and fuller freedom. 
   
 On this great fundamental and pivotal point new light has been thrown 
 by Lord Bertrand Dawson, the physician of the King of England. In the 
 remarkable and epoch-making address at the Birmingham Church Congress 
 (referred to in my introduction), he spoke of the supreme morality of 
 the mutual and reciprocal joy in the most intimate relation between man 
 and woman. Without this reciprocity there can be no civilization worthy 
 of the name. Lord Dawson suggested that there should be added to the 
 clauses of marriage in the Prayer Book "the complete realization of the 
 love of this man and this woman one for another," and in support of his 
 contention declared that sex love between husband and wife--apart from 
 parenthood--was something to prize and cherish for its own sake. The 
 Lambeth Conference, he remarked, "envisaged a love invertebrate and 
 joyless," whereas, in his view, natural passion in wedlock was not a 
 thing to be ashamed of or unduly repressed. The pronouncement of 
 the Church of England, as set forth in Resolution 68 of the Lambeth 
 Conference seems to imply condemnation of sex love as such, and to imply 
 sanction of sex love only as a means to an end,--namely, procreation. 
 The Lambeth Resolution stated: 
   
 "In opposition to the teaching which under the name of science and 
 religion encourages married people in the deliberate cultivation of 
 sexual union as an end in itself, we steadfastly uphold what must always 
 be regarded as the governing considerations of Christian marriage. 
 One is the primary purpose for which marriage exists--namely, the 
 continuation of the race through the gift and heritage of children; 
 the other is the paramount importance in married life of deliberate and 
 thoughtful self-control." 
   
 In answer to this point of view Lord Dawson asserted: 
   
 "Sex love has, apart from parenthood, a purport of its own. It is 
 something to prize and to cherish for its own sake. It is an essential 
 part of health and happiness in marriage. And now, if you will allow me, 
 I will carry this argument a step further. If sexual union is a gift of 
 God it is worth learning how to use it. Within its own sphere it should 
 be cultivated so as to bring physical satisfaction to both, not merely 
 to one.... The real problems before us are those of sex love and child 
 love; and by sex love I mean that love which involves intercourse or the 
 desire for such. It is necessary to my argument to emphasize that sex 
 love is one of the dominating forces of the world. Not only does history 
 show the destinies of nations and dynasties determined by its sway--but 
 here in our every-day life we see its influence, direct or indirect, 
 forceful and ubiquitous beyond aught else. Any statesmanlike view, 
 therefore, will recognize that here we have an instinct so fundamental, 
 so imperious, that its influence is a fact which has to be accepted; 
 suppress it you cannot. You may guide it into healthy channels, but 
 an outlet it will have, and if that outlet is inadequate and unduly 
 obstructed irregular channels will be forced.... 
   
 "The attainment of mutual and reciprocal joy in their relations 
 constitutes a firm bond between two people, and makes for durability of 
 the marriage tie. Reciprocity in sex love is the physical counterpart of 
 sympathy. More marriages fail from inadequate and clumsy sex love than 
 from too much sex love. The lack of proper understanding is in no small 
 measure responsible for the unfulfillment of connubial happiness, and 
 every degree of discontent and unhappiness may, from this cause, occur, 
 leading to rupture of the marriage bond itself. How often do medical 
 men have to deal with these difficulties, and how fortunate if such 
 difficulties are disclosed early enough in married life to be rectified. 
 Otherwise how tragic may be their consequences, and many a case in the 
 Divorce Court has thus had its origin. To the foregoing contentions, 
 it might be objected, you are encouraging passion. My reply would be, 
 passion is a worthy possession--most men, who are any good, are 
 capable of passion. You all enjoy ardent and passionate love in art and 
 literature. Why not give it a place in real life? Why some people look 
 askance at passion is because they are confusing it with sensuality. Sex 
 love without passion is a poor, lifeless thing. Sensuality, on the other 
 hand, is on a level with gluttony--a physical excess--detached from 
 sentiment, chivalry, or tenderness. It is just as important to give sex 
 love its place as to avoid its over-emphasis. Its real and effective 
 restraints are those imposed by a loving and sympathetic companionship, 
 by the privileges of parenthood, the exacting claims of career and 
 that civic sense which prompts men to do social service. Now that the 
 revision of the Prayer Book is receiving consideration, I should like to 
 suggest with great respect an addition made to the objects of marriage 
 in the Marriage Service, in these terms, 'The complete realization of 
 the love of this man and this woman, the one for the other.'" 
   
 Turning to the specific problem of Birth Control, Lord Dawson declared, 
 "that Birth Control is here to stay. It is an established fact, and for 
 good or evil has to be accepted. Although the extent of its application 
 can be and is being modified, no denunciations will abolish it. Despite 
 the influence and condemnations of the Church, it has been practised 
 in France for well over half a century, and in Belgium and other Roman 
 Catholic countries is extending. And if the Roman Catholic Church, with 
 its compact organization, its power of authority, and its disciplines, 
 cannot check this procedure, it is not likely that Protestant Churches 
 will be able to do so, for Protestant religions depend for their 
 strength on the conviction and esteem they establish in the heads and 
 hearts of their people. The reasons which lead parents to limit their 
 offspring are sometimes selfish, but more often honorable and cogent." 
   
 A report of the Fabian Society (5) on the morality of Birth Control, 
 based upon a census conducted under the chairmanship of Sidney Webb, 
 concludes: "These facts--which we are bound to face whether we like them 
 or not--will appear in different lights to different people. In 
 some quarters it seems to be sufficient to dismiss them with moral 
 indignation, real or simulated. Such a judgment appears both irrelevant 
 and futile.... If a course of conduct is habitually and deliberately 
 pursued by vast multitudes of otherwise well-conducted people, forming 
 probably a majority of the whole educated class of the nation, we must 
 assume that it does not conflict with their actual code of morality. 
 They may be intellectually mistaken, but they are not doing what they 
 feel to be wrong." 
   
 The moral justification and ethical necessity of Birth Control need not 
 be empirically based upon the mere approval of experience and custom. 
 Its morality is more profound. Birth Control is an ethical necessity 
 for humanity to-day because it places in our hands a new instrument of 
 self-expression and self-realization. It gives us control over one of 
 the primordial forces of nature, to which in the past the majority 
 of mankind have been enslaved, and by which it has been cheapened and 
 debased. It arouses us to the possibility of newer and greater freedom. 
 It develops the power, the responsibility and intelligence to use this 
 freedom in living a liberated and abundant life. It permits us to enjoy 
 this liberty without danger of infringing upon the similar liberty of 
 our fellow men, or of injuring and curtailing the freedom of the next 
 generation. It shows us that we need not seek in the amassing of worldly 
 wealth, not in the illusion of some extra-terrestrial Heaven or earthly 
 Utopia of a remote future the road to human development. The Kingdom of 
 Heaven is in a very definite sense within us. Not by leaving our body 
 and our fundamental humanity behind us, not by aiming to be anything but 
 what we are, shall we become ennobled or immortal. By knowing ourselves, 
 by expressing ourselves, by realizing ourselves more completely than 
 has ever before been possible, not only shall we attain the kingdom 
 ourselves but we shall hand on the torch of life undimmed to our 
 children and the children of our children. 
   
      (1)  Quoted in the National Catholic Welfare Council 
      Bulletin: Vol. II, No. 5, p. 21 (January, 1921). 
   
      (2)  Quoted in daily press, December 19, 1921. 
   
      (3)  H. C. Lea:  History of Sacerdotal Celibacy 
      (Philadelphia, 1967). 
   
      (4)  Eugenics Review, January 1921. 
   
      (5)  Fabian Tract No. 131. 
 
 
 
 Chapter 10 (Science The Ally) 
      "There is but one hope.  Ignorance, poverty, and vice 
      must stop populating the world.  This cannot be done by 
      moral suasion.  This cannot be done by talk or example. 
      This cannot be done by religion or by law, by priest 
      or by hangman.  This cannot be done by force, physical 
      or moral.  To accomplish this there is but one way. 
      Science must make woman the owner, the mistress of herself. 
      Science, the only possible savior of mankind, must put it 
      in the power of woman to decide for herself whether she will 
      or will not become a mother." 
   
      Robert G. Ingersoll 
   
 "Science is the great instrument of social change," wrote A. J. 
 Balfour in 1908; "all the greater because its object is not change but 
 knowledge, and its silent appropriation of this dominant function, amid 
 the din of religious and political strife, is the most vital of all 
 revolutions which have marked the development of modern civilization." 
 The Birth Control movement has allied itself with science, and no small 
 part of its present propaganda is to awaken the interest of scientists 
 to the pivotal importance to civilization of this instrument. Only with 
 the aid of science is it possible to perfect a practical method that 
 may be universally taught. As Dean Inge recently admitted: "We should be 
 ready to give up all our theories if science proved that we were on the 
 wrong lines." 
   
 One of the principal aims of the American Birth Control League has been 
 to awaken the interest of scientific investigators and to point out 
 the rich field for original research opened up by this problem. The 
 correlation of reckless breeding with defective and delinquent strains, 
 has not, strangely enough, been subjected to close scientific scrutiny, 
 nor has the present biological unbalance been traced to its root. This 
 is a crying necessity of our day, and it cannot be accomplished without 
 the aid of science. 
   
 Secondary only to the response of women themselves is the awakened 
 interest of scientists, statisticians, and research workers in every 
 field. If the clergy and the defenders of traditional morality have 
 opposed the movement for Birth Control, the response of enlightened 
 scientists and physicians has been one of the most encouraging aids in 
 our battle. 
   
 Recent developments in the realm of science,--in psychology, in 
 physiology, in chemistry and physics--all tend to emphasize the 
 immediate necessity for human control over the great forces of nature. 
 The new ideas published by contemporary science are of the utmost 
 fascination and illumination even to the layman. They perform the 
 invaluable task of making us look at life in a new light, of searching 
 close at hand for the solution to heretofore closed mysteries of life. 
 In this brief chapter, I can touch these ideas only as they have proved 
 valuable to me. Professor Soddy's "Science and Life" is one of the most 
 inspiring of recent publications in this field; for this great authority 
 shows us how closely bound up is science with the whole of Society, how 
 science must help to solve the great and disastrous unbalance in human 
 society. 
   
 As an example: a whole literature has sprung into being around the 
 glands, the most striking being "The Sex Complex" by Blair Bell. This 
 author advances the idea of the glandular system as an integral whole, 
 the glands forming a unity which might be termed the generative system. 
 Thus is reasserted the radical importance of sexual health to every 
 individual. The whole tendency of modern physiology and psychology, in a 
 word, seems gradually coming to the truth that seemed intuitively to be 
 revealed to that great woman, Olive Schreiner, who, in "Woman and Labor" 
 wrote: "... Noble is the function of physical reproduction of humanity by 
 the union of man and woman. Rightly viewed, that union has in it latent, 
 other and even higher forms of creative energy and life-dispensing 
 power, and... its history on earth has only begun; as the first wild rose 
 when it hung from its stem with its center of stamens and pistils and 
 its single whorl of pale petals had only begun its course, and was 
 destined, as the ages passed, to develop stamen upon stamen and petal 
 upon petal, till it assumed a hundred forms of joy and beauty. 
   
 "And it would indeed almost seem, that, on the path toward the higher 
 development of sexual life on earth, as man has so often had to lead 
 in other paths, that here it is perhaps woman, by reason of those very 
 sexual conditions which in the past have crushed and trammeled her, who 
 is bound to lead the way and man to follow. So that it may be at last 
 that sexual love--that tired angel who through the ages has presided 
 over the march of humanity, with distraught eyes, and feather-shafts 
 broken and wings drabbled in the mires of lust and greed, and golden 
 locks caked over with the dust of injustice and oppression--till those 
 looking at him have sometimes cried in terror, `He is the Evil and 
 not the Good of life': and have sought if it were not possible, to 
 exterminate him--shall yet, at last, bathed from the mire and dust of 
 ages in the streams of friendship and freedom, leap upwards, with white 
 wings spread, resplendent in the sunshine of a distant future--the 
 essentially Good and Beautiful of human existence." 
   
 To-day science is verifying the truth of this inspiring vision. Certain 
 fundamental truths concerning the basic facts of Nature and humanity 
 especially impress us. A rapid survey may indicate the main features of 
 this mysterious identity and antagonism. 
   
 Mankind has gone forward by the capture and control of the forces of 
 Nature. This upward struggle began with the kindling of the first fire. 
 The domestication of animal life marked another great step in the long 
 ascent. The capture of the great physical forces, the discovery of coal 
 and mineral oil, of gas, steam and electricity, and their adaptation to 
 the everyday uses of mankind, wrought the greatest changes in the course 
 of civilization. With the discovery of radium and radioactivity, with 
 the recognition of the vast stores of physical energy concealed in the 
 atom, humanity is now on the eve of a new conquest. But, on the other 
 side, humanity has been compelled to combat continuously those great 
 forces of Nature which have opposed it at every moment of this long 
 indomitable march out of barbarism. Humanity has had to wage war against 
 insects, germs, bacteria, which have spread disease and epidemics and 
 devastation. Humanity has had to adapt itself to those natural forces 
 it could not conquer but could only adroitly turn to its own ends. 
 Nevertheless, all along the line, in colonization, in agriculture, in 
 medicine and in industry, mankind has triumphed over Nature. 
   
 But lest the recognition of this victory lead us to self-satisfaction 
 and complacency, we should never forget that this mastery consists to 
 a great extent in a recognition of the power of those blind forces, and 
 our adroit control over them. It has been truly said that we attain 
 no power over Nature until we learn natural laws and conform and adapt 
 ourselves to them. 
   
 The strength of the human race has been its ability not merely to 
 subjugate the forces of Nature, but to adapt itself to those it could 
 not conquer. And even this subjugation, science tells us, has not 
 resulted from any attempt to suppress, prohibit, or eradicate these 
 forces, but rather to transform blind and undirected energies to our own 
 purposes. 
   
 These great natural forces, science now asserts, are not all external. 
 They are surely concealed within the complex organism of the human being 
 no less than outside of it. These inner forces are no less imperative, 
 no less driving and compelling than the external forces of Nature. As 
 the old conception of the antagonism between body and soul is broken 
 down, as psychology becomes an ally of physiology and biology, and 
 biology joins hands with physics and chemistry, we are taught to see 
 that there is a mysterious unity between these inner and outer forces. 
 They express themselves in accordance with the same structural, physical 
 and chemical laws. The development of civilization in the subjective 
 world, in the sphere of behavior, conduct and morality, has been 
 precisely the gradual accumulation and popularization of methods which 
 teach people how to direct, transform and transmute the driving power of 
 the great natural forces. 
   
 Psychology is now recognizing the forces concealed in the human 
 organism. In the long process of adaptation to social life, men have 
 had to harness the wishes and desires born of these inner energies, 
 the greatest and most imperative of which are Sex and Hunger. From 
 the beginning of time, men have been driven by Hunger into a thousand 
 activities. It is Hunger that has created "the struggle for existence." 
 Hunger has spurred men to the discovery and invention of methods and 
 ways of avoiding starvation, of storing and exchanging foods. It has 
 developed primitive barter into our contemporary Wall Streets. It has 
 developed thrift and economy,--expedients whereby humanity avoids the 
 lash of King Hunger. The true "economic interpretation of history" might 
 be termed the History of Hunger. 
   
 But no less fundamental, no less imperative, no less ceaseless in its 
 dynamic energy, has been the great force of Sex. We do not yet know the 
 intricate but certainly organic relationship between these two forces. 
 It is obvious that they oppose yet reinforce each other,--driving, 
 lashing, spurring mankind on to new conquests or to certain ruin. 
 Perhaps Hunger and Sex are merely opposite poles of a single great 
 life force. In the past we have made the mistake of separating them 
 and attempting to study one of them without the other. Birth Control 
 emphasizes the need of re-investigation and of knowledge of their 
 integral relationship, and aims at the solution of the great problem of 
 Hunger and Sex at one and the same time. 
   
 In the more recent past the effort has been made to control, civilize, 
 and sublimate the great primordial natural force of sex, mainly by 
 futile efforts at prohibition, suppression, restraint, and extirpation. 
 Its revenge, as the psychoanalysts are showing us every day, has been 
 great. Insanity, hysteria, neuroses, morbid fears and compulsions, 
 weaken and render useless and unhappy thousands of humans who are 
 unconscious victims of the attempt to pit individual powers against this 
 great natural force. In the solution of the problem of sex, we should 
 bear in mind what the successful method of humanity has been in its 
 conquest, or rather its control of the great physical and chemical 
 forces of the external world. Like all other energy, that of sex is 
 indestructible. By adaptation, control and conscious direction, we may 
 transmute and sublimate it. Without irreparable injury to ourselves we 
 cannot attempt to eradicate it or extirpate it. 
   
 The study of atomic energy, the discovery of radioactivity, and the 
 recognition of potential and latent energies stored in inanimate matter, 
 throw a brilliant illumination upon the whole problem of sex and 
 the inner energies of mankind. Speaking of the discovery of radium, 
 Professor Soddy writes: "Tracked to earth the clew to a great secret 
 for which a thousand telescopes might have swept the sky forever and 
 in vain, lay in a scrap of matter, dowered with something of the same 
 inexhaustible radiance that hitherto has been the sole prerogative of 
 the distant stars and sun." Radium, this distinguished authority tells 
 us, has clothed with its own dignity the whole empire of common matter. 
   
 Much as the atomic theory, with its revelations of the vast treasure 
 house of radiant energy that lies all about us, offers new hope in the 
 material world, so the new psychology throws a new light upon human 
 energies and possibilities of individual expression. Social reformers, 
 like those scientists of a bygone era who were sweeping the skies 
 with their telescopes, have likewise been seeking far and wide for 
 the solution of our social problems in remote and wholesale panaceas, 
 whereas the true solution is close at hand,--in the human individual. 
 Buried within each human being lies concealed a vast store of energy, 
 which awaits release, expression and sublimation. The individual may 
 profitably be considered as the "atom" of society. And the solution of 
 the problems of society and of civilization will be brought about when 
 we release the energies now latent and undeveloped in the individual. 
 Professor Edwin Grant Conklin expresses the problem in another form; 
 though his analogy, it seems to me, is open to serious criticism. "The 
 freedom of the individual man," he writes,(1) "is to that of society as 
 the freedom of the single cell is to that of the human being. It is this 
 large freedom of society, rather than the freedom of the individual, 
 which democracy offers to the world, free societies, free states, free 
 nations rather than absolutely free individuals. In all organisms and in 
 all social organizations, the freedom of the minor units must be limited 
 in order that the larger unit may achieve a new and greater freedom, and 
 in social evolution the freedom of individuals must be merged more and 
 more into the larger freedom of society." 
   
 This analogy does not bear analysis. Restraint and constraint of 
 individual expression, suppression of individual freedom "for the good 
 of society" has been practised from time immemorial; and its failure 
 is all too evident. There is no antagonism between the good of the 
 individual and the good of society. The moment civilization is wise 
 enough to remove the constraints and prohibitions which now hinder the 
 release of inner energies, most of the larger evils of society will 
 perish of inanition and malnutrition. Remove the moral taboos that now 
 bind the human body and spirit, free the individual from the slavery 
 of tradition, remove the chains of fear from men and women, above all 
 answer their unceasing cries for knowledge that would make possible 
 their self-direction and salvation, and in so doing, you best serve 
 the interests of society at large. Free, rational and self-ruling 
 personality would then take the place of self-made slaves, who are 
 the victims both of external constraints and the playthings of the 
 uncontrolled forces of their own instincts. 
   
 Science likewise illuminates the whole problem of genius. Hidden in 
 the common stuff of humanity lies buried this power of self-expression. 
 Modern science is teaching us that genius is not some mysterious gift of 
 the gods, some treasure conferred upon individuals chosen by chance. Nor 
 is it, as Lombroso believed, the result of a pathological and degenerate 
 condition, allied to criminality and madness. Rather is it due to the 
 removal of physiological and psychological inhibitions and constraints 
 which makes possible the release and the channeling of the primordial 
 inner energies of man into full and divine expression. The removal of 
 these inhibitions, so scientists assure us, makes possible more rapid 
 and profound perceptions,--so rapid indeed that they seem to the 
 ordinary human being, practically instantaneous, or intuitive. The 
 qualities of genius are not, therefore, qualities lacking in the common 
 reservoir of humanity, but rather the unimpeded release and direction 
 of powers latent in all of us. This process of course is not necessarily 
 conscious. 
   
 This view is substantiated by the opposite problem of feeble-mindedness. 
 Recent researches throw a new light on this problem and the contrasting 
 one of human genius. Mental defect and feeble-mindedness are conceived 
 essentially as retardation, arrest of development, differing in degree 
 so that the victim is either an idiot, an imbecile, feeble-minded or 
 a moron, according to the relative period at which mental development 
 ceases. 
   
 Scientific research into the functioning of the ductless glands and 
 their secretions throws a new light on this problem. Not long ago these 
 glands were a complete enigma, owing to the fact that they are not 
 provided with excretory ducts. It has just recently been shown that 
 these organs, such as the thyroid, the pituitary, the suprarenal, 
 the parathyroid and the reproductive glands, exercise an all-powerful 
 influence upon the course of individual development or deficiency. Gley, 
 to whom we owe much of our knowledge of glandular action, has asserted 
 that "the genesis and exercise of the higher faculties of men are 
 conditioned by the purely chemical action of the product of these 
 secretions. Let psychologists consider these facts." 
   
 These internal secretions or endocrines pass directly into the blood 
 stream, and exercise a dominating power over health and personality. 
 Deficiency in the thyroid secretion, especially during the years 
 of infancy and early childhood, creates disorders of nutrition and 
 inactivity of the nervous system. The particular form of idiocy known as 
 cretinism is the result of this deficiency, which produces an arrest 
 of the development of the brain cells. The other glands and their 
 secretions likewise exercise the most profound influence upon 
 development, growth and assimilation. Most of these glands are of 
 very small size, none of them larger than a walnut, and some--the 
 parathyroids--almost microscopic. Nevertheless, they are essential to 
 the proper maintenance of life in the body, and no less organically 
 related to mental and psychic development as well. 
   
 The reproductive glands, it should not be forgotten, belong to this 
 group, and besides their ordinary products, the germ and sperm cells 
 (ova and spermatozoa) form HORMONES which circulate in the blood and 
 effect changes in the cells of distant parts of the body. Through these 
 HORMONES the secondary sexual characters are produced, including the 
 many differences in the form and structure of the body which are 
 the characteristics of the sexes. Only in recent years has science 
 discovered that these secondary sexual characters are brought about by 
 the agency of these internal secretions or hormones, passed from 
 the reproductive glands into the circulating blood. These so-called 
 secondary characters which are the sign of full and healthy development, 
 are dependent, science tells us, upon the state of development of the 
 reproductive organs. 
   
 For a clear and illuminating account of the creative and dynamic power 
 of the endocrine glands, the layman is referred to a recently published 
 book by Dr. Louis Berman.(2) This authority reveals anew how body and 
 soul are bound up together in a complex unity. Our spiritual and psychic 
 difficulties cannot be solved until we have mastered the knowledge of 
 the wellsprings of our being. "The chemistry of the soul! Magnificent 
 phrase!" exclaims Dr. Berman. "It's a long, long way to that goal. The 
 exact formula is as yet far beyond our reach. But we have started upon 
 the long journey, and we shall get there. 
   
 "The internal secretions constitute and determine much of the inherited 
 powers of the individual and their development. They control physical 
 and mental growth, and all the metabolic processes of fundamental 
 importance. They dominate all the vital functions of man during the 
 three cycles of life. They cooperate in an intimate relationship which 
 may be compared to an interlocking directorate. A derangement of 
 their functions, causing an insufficiency of them, an excess, or 
 an abnormality, upsets the entire equilibrium of the body, with 
 transforming effects upon the mind and the organs. In short, they 
 control human nature, and whoever controls them, controls human 
 nature.... 
   
 "Blood chemistry of our time is a marvel, undreamed of a generation ago. 
 Also, these achievements are a perfect example of the accomplished fact 
 contradicting a prior prediction and criticism. For it was one of the 
 accepted dogmas of the nineteenth century that the phenomena of living 
 could never be subjected to accurate quantitative analysis." But the 
 ethical dogmas of the past, no less than the scientific, may block the 
 way to true civilization. 
   
 Physiologically as well as psychologically the development of the human 
 being, the sane mind in the sound body, is absolutely dependent upon the 
 functioning and exercise of all the organs in the body. The "moralists" 
 who preach abstinence, self-denial, and suppression are relegated by 
 these findings of impartial and disinterested science to the class of 
 those educators of the past who taught that it was improper for young 
 ladies to indulge in sports and athletics and who produced generations 
 of feeble, undeveloped invalids, bound up by stays and addicted to 
 swooning and hysterics. One need only go out on the street of any 
 American city to-day to be confronted with the victims of the cruel 
 morality of self-denial and "sin." This fiendish "morality" is stamped 
 upon those emaciated bodies, indelibly written in those emasculated, 
 underdeveloped, undernourished figures of men and women, in the nervous 
 tension and unrelaxed muscles denoting the ceaseless vigilance in 
 restraining and suppressing the expression of natural impulses. 
   
 Birth Control is no negative philosophy concerned solely with the number 
 of children brought into this world. It is not merely a question of 
 population. Primarily it is the instrument of liberation and of human 
 development. 
   
 It points the way to a morality in which sexual expression and human 
 development will not be in conflict with the interest and well-being of 
 the race nor of contemporary society at large. Not only is it the most 
 effective, in fact the only lever by which the value of the child can be 
 raised to a civilized point; but it is likewise the only method by which 
 the life of the individual can be deepened and strengthened, by which 
 an inner peace and security and beauty may be substituted for the 
 inner conflict that is at present so fatal to self-expression and 
 self-realization. 
   
 Sublimation of the sexual instinct cannot take place by denying it 
 expression, nor by reducing it to the plane of the purely physiological. 
 Sexual experience, to be of contributory value, must be integrated and 
 assimilated. Asceticism defeats its own purpose because it develops the 
 obsession of licentious and obscene thoughts, the victim alternating 
 between temporary victory over "sin" and the remorse of defeat. But 
 the seeker of purely physical pleasure, the libertine or the average 
 sensualist, is no less a pathological case, living as one-sided and 
 unbalanced a life as the ascetic, for his conduct is likewise based on 
 ignorance and lack of understanding. In seeking pleasure without the 
 exercise of responsibility, in trying to get something for nothing, he 
 is not merely cheating others but himself as well. 
   
 In still another field science and scientific method now emphasize the 
 pivotal importance of Birth Control. The Binet-Simon intelligence tests 
 which have been developed, expanded, and applied to large groups of 
 children and adults present positive statistical data concerning the 
 mental equipment of the type of children brought into the world under 
 the influence of indiscriminate fecundity and of those fortunate 
 children who have been brought into the world because they are wanted, 
 the children of conscious, voluntary procreation, well nourished, 
 properly clothed, the recipients of all that proper care and love can 
 accomplish. 
   
 In considering the data furnished by these intelligence tests we should 
 remember several factors that should be taken into consideration. 
 Irrespective of other considerations, children who are underfed, 
 undernourished, crowded into badly ventilated and unsanitary homes and 
 chronically hungry cannot be expected to attain the mental development 
 of children upon whom every advantage of intelligent and scientific 
 care is bestowed. Furthermore, public school methods of dealing with 
 children, the course of studies prescribed, may quite completely fail to 
 awaken and develop the intelligence. 
   
 The statistics indicate at any rate a surprisingly low rate of 
 intelligence among the classes in which large families and uncontrolled 
 procreation predominate. Those of the lowest grade in intelligence 
 are born of unskilled laborers (with the highest birth rate in the 
 community); the next high among the skilled laborers, and so on to the 
 families of professional people, among whom it is now admitted that the 
 birth rate is voluntarily controlled.(3) 
   
 But scientific investigations of this type cannot be complete 
 until statistics are accurately obtained concerning the relation of 
 unrestrained fecundity and the quality, mental and physical, of the 
 children produced. The philosophy of Birth Control therefore seeks and 
 asks the cooperation of science and scientists, not to strengthen its 
 own "case," but because this sexual factor in the determination of 
 human history has so long been ignored by historians and scientists. 
 If science in recent years has contributed enormously to strengthen 
 the conviction of all intelligent people of the necessity and wisdom 
 of Birth Control, this philosophy in its turn opens to science in its 
 various fields a suggestive avenue of approach to many of those problems 
 of humanity and society which at present seem to enigmatical and 
 insoluble. 
   
      (1)  Conklin, The Direction of Human Evolution, pp. 125, 
      126. 
   
      (2)  The Glands Regulating Personality: A study of the 
      glands of internal secretion in relation to the types of 
      human nature. By Louis Berman, M. D., Associate in 
      Biological Chemistry, Columbia University; Physician to the 
      Special Health Clinic. Lenox Hill Hospital.  New York: 
      1921. 
   
      (3)  Cf Terman:  Intelligence of School Children.  New York 
      1919. p. 56.  Also, "Is America Safe for Democracy?" Six 
      lectures given at the Lowell Institute of Boston, by William 
      McDougall, Professor of Psychology in Harvard College.  New 
      York, 1921. 
 
 
 
 Chapter 11 (Education And Expression) 
      "Civilization is bound up with the success of that movement. 
      The man who rejoices in it and strives to further it is alive; 
      the man who shudders and raises impotent hands against it is 
      merely dead, even though the grave yet yawns for him in vain. 
      He may make dead laws and preach dead sermons and his sermons 
      may be great and his laws may be rigid.  But as the wisest of 
      men saw twenty-five centuries ago, the things that are great 
      and strong and rigid are the things that stay below in the grave. 
      It is the things that are delicate and tender and supple that 
      stay above.  At no point is life so tender and delicate and 
      supple as at the point of sex.  There is the triumph of life." 
   
      Havelock Ellis 
   
 Our approach opens to us a fresh scale of values, a new and effective 
 method of testing the merits and demerits of current policies 
 and programs. It redirects our attention to the great source and 
 fountainhead of human life. It offers us the most strategic point 
 of view from which to observe and study the unending drama of 
 humanity,--how the past, the present and the future of the human race 
 are all organically bound up together. It coordinates heredity and 
 environment. Most important of all, it frees the mind of sexual 
 prejudice and taboo, by demanding the frankest and most unflinching 
 reexamination of sex in its relation to human nature and the bases of 
 human society. In aiding to establish this mental liberation, 
 quite apart from any of the tangible results that might please the 
 statistically-minded, the study of Birth Control is performing an 
 invaluable task. Without complete mental freedom, it is impossible 
 to approach any fundamental human problem. Failure to face the great 
 central facts of sex in an impartial and scientific spirit lies at the 
 root of the blind opposition to Birth Control. 
   
 Our bitterest opponents must agree that the problem of Birth Control 
 is one of the most important that humanity to-day has to face. The 
 interests of the entire world, of humanity, of the future of mankind 
 itself are more at stake in this than wars, political institutions, or 
 industrial reorganization. All other projects of reform, of revolution 
 or reconstruction, are of secondary importance, even trivial, when we 
 compare them to the wholesale regeneration--or disintegration--that is 
 bound up with the control, the direction and the release of one of the 
 greatest forces in nature. The great danger at present does not lie with 
 the bitter opponents of the idea of Birth Control, nor with those who 
 are attempting to suppress our program of enlightenment and education. 
 Such opposition is always stimulating. It wins new adherents. It reveals 
 its own weakness and lack of insight. The greater danger is to be found 
 in the flaccid, undiscriminating interest of "sympathizers" who are "for 
 it"--as an accessory to their own particular panacea. "It even seems, 
 sometimes," wrote the late William Graham Sumner, "as if the primitive 
 people were working along better lines of effort in this direction than 
 we are... when our public organs of instruction taboo all that pertains 
 to reproduction as improper; and when public authority, ready enough to 
 interfere with personal liberty everywhere else, feels bound to act as 
 if there were no societal interest at stake in the begetting of the next 
 generation."(1) 
   
 Slowly but surely we are breaking down the taboos that surround sex; but 
 we are breaking them down out of sheer necessity. The codes that have 
 surrounded sexual behavior in the so-called Christian communities, the 
 teachings of the churches concerning chastity and sexual purity, the 
 prohibitions of the laws, and the hypocritical conventions of society, 
 have all demonstrated their failure as safeguards against the chaos 
 produced and the havoc wrought by the failure to recognize sex as a 
 driving force in human nature,--as great as, if indeed not greater than, 
 hunger. Its dynamic energy is indestructible. It may be transmuted, 
 refined, directed, even sublimated, but to ignore, to neglect, to refuse 
 to recognize this great elemental force is nothing less than foolhardy. 
   
 Out of the unchallenged policies of continence, abstinence, "chastity" 
 and "purity," we have reaped the harvests of prostitution, venereal 
 scourges and innumerable other evils. Traditional moralists have failed 
 to recognize that chastity and purity must be the outward symptoms of 
 awakened intelligence, of satisfied desires, and fulfilled love. They 
 cannot be taught by "sex education." They cannot be imposed from 
 without by a denial of the might and the right of sexual expression. 
 Nevertheless, even in the contemporary teaching of sex hygiene and 
 social prophylaxis, nothing constructive is offered to young men and 
 young women who seek aid through the trying period of adolescence. 
   
 At the Lambeth Conference of 1920, the Bishops of the Church of England 
 stated in their report on their considerations of sexual morality: 
 "Men should regard all women as they do their mothers, sisters, and 
 daughters; and women should dress only in such a manner as to command 
 respect from every man. All right-minded persons should unite in the 
 suppression of pernicious literature, plays and films...." Could lack 
 of psychological insight and understanding be more completely indicated? 
 Yet, like these bishops, most of those who are undertaking the education 
 of the young are as ignorant themselves of psychology and physiology. 
 Indeed, those who are speaking belatedly of the need of "sexual hygiene" 
 seem to be unaware that they themselves are most in need of it. "We must 
 give up the futile attempt to keep young people in the dark," cries Rev. 
 James Marchant in "Birth-Rate and Empire," "and the assumption that they 
 are ignorant of notorious facts. We cannot, if we would, stop the spread 
 of sexual knowledge; and if we could do so, we would only make matters 
 infinitely worse. This is the second decade of the twentieth century, 
 not the early Victorian period.... It is no longer a question of knowing 
 or not knowing. We have to disabuse our middle-aged minds of that fond 
 delusion. Our young people know more than we did when we began our 
 married lives, and sometimes as much as we know, ourselves, even now. So 
 that we need not continue to shake our few remaining hairs in simulating 
 feelings of surprise or horror. It might have been better for us if we 
 had been more enlightened. And if our discussion of this problem is to 
 be of any real use, we must at the outset reconcile ourselves to the 
 fact that the birth-rate is voluntarily controlled.... Certain persons 
 who instruct us in these matter, hold up their pious hands and whiten 
 their frightened faces as they cry out in the public squares against 
 `this vice,' but they can only make themselves ridiculous." 
   
 Taught upon the basis of conventional and traditional morality and 
 middle-class respectability, based on current dogma, and handed down to 
 the populace with benign condescension, sex education is a waste of time 
 and effort. Such education cannot in any true sense set up as a standard 
 the ideal morality and behavior of the respectable middle-class and then 
 make the effort to induce all other members of society, especially the 
 working classes, to conform to their taboos. Such a method is not only 
 confusing, but, in the creation of strain and hysteria and an unhealthy 
 concentration upon moral conduct, results in positive injury. To preach 
 a negative and colorless ideal of chastity to young men and women is 
 to neglect the primary duty of awakening their intelligence, their 
 responsibility, their self-reliance and independence. Once this is 
 accomplished, the matter of chastity will take care of itself. The 
 teaching of "etiquette" must be superseded by the teaching of hygiene. 
 Hygienic habits are built up upon a sound knowledge of bodily needs 
 and functions. It is only in the sphere of sex that there remains an 
 unfounded fear of presenting without the gratuitous introduction of 
 non-essential taboos and prejudice, unbiased and unvarnished facts. 
   
 As an instrument of education, the doctrine of Birth Control approaches 
 the whole problem in another manner. Instead of laying down hard and 
 fast laws of sexual conduct, instead of attempting to inculcate rules 
 and regulations, of pointing out the rewards of virtue and the penalties 
 of "sin" (as is usually attempted in relation to the venereal diseases), 
 the teacher of Birth Control seeks to meet the needs of the people. 
 Upon the basis of their interests, their demands, their problems, Birth 
 Control education attempts to develop their intelligence and show them 
 how they may help themselves; how to guide and control this deep-rooted 
 instinct. 
   
 The objection has been raised that Birth Control only reaches the 
 already enlightened, the men and women who have already attained a 
 degree of self-respect and self-reliance. Such an objection could not be 
 based on fact. Even in the most unenlightened sections of the community, 
 among mothers crushed by poverty and economic enslavement, there is 
 the realization of the evils of the too-large family, of the rapid 
 succession of pregnancy after pregnancy, of the hopelessness of bringing 
 too many children into the world. Not merely in the evidence presented 
 in an earlier chapter but in other ways, is this crying need expressed. 
 The investigators of the Children's Bureau who collected the data of the 
 infant mortality reports, noted the willingness and the eagerness with 
 which these down-trodden mothers told the truth about themselves. 
 So great is their hope of relief from that meaningless and deadening 
 submission to unproductive reproduction, that only a society pruriently 
 devoted to hypocrisy could refuse to listen to the voices of these 
 mothers. Respectfully we lend our ears to dithyrambs about the 
 sacredness of motherhood and the value of "better babies"--but we shut 
 our eyes and our ears to the unpleasant reality and the cries of pain 
 that come from women who are to-day dying by the thousands because this 
 power is withheld from them. 
   
 This situation is rendered more bitterly ironic because the 
 self-righteous opponents of Birth Control practise themselves the 
 doctrine they condemn. The birth-rate among conservative opponents 
 indicates that they restrict the numbers of their own children by the 
 methods of Birth Control, or are of such feeble procreative energy as to 
 be thereby unfitted to dictate moral laws for other people. They prefer 
 that we should think their small number of children is accidental, 
 rather than publicly admit the successful practice of intelligent 
 foresight. Or else they hold themselves up as paragons of virtue and 
 self-control, and would have us believe that they have brought their 
 children into the world solely from a high, stern sense of public 
 duty--an attitude which is about as convincing as it would be to declare 
 that they found them under gooseberry bushes. How else can we explain 
 the widespread tolerance and smug approval of the clerical idea of 
 sex, now reenforced by floods of crude and vulgar sentiment, which is 
 promulgated by the press, motion-pictures and popular plays? 
   
 Like all other education, that of sex can be rendered effective and 
 valuable only as it meets and satisfies the interests and demands of 
 the pupil himself. It cannot be imposed from without, handed down from 
 above, superimposed upon the intelligence of the person taught. It 
 must find a response within him, give him the power and the instrument 
 wherewith he may exercise his own growing intelligence, bring into 
 action his own judgment and discrimination and thus contribute to the 
 growth of his intelligence. The civilized world is coming to see 
 that education cannot consist merely in the assimilation of external 
 information and knowledge, but rather in the awakening and development 
 of innate powers of discrimination and judgment. The great disaster of 
 "sex education" lies in the fact that it fails to direct the awakened 
 interests of the pupils into the proper channels of exercise and 
 development. Instead, it blunts them, restricts them, hinders them, and 
 even attempts to eradicate them. 
   
 This has been the great defect of sex education as it has been practised 
 in recent years. Based on a superficial and shameful view of the sexual 
 instinct, it has sought the inculcation of negative virtues by pointing 
 out the sinister penalties of promiscuity, and by advocating strict 
 adherence to virtue and morality, not on the basis of intelligence or 
 the outcome of experience, not even for the attainment of rewards, but 
 merely to avoid punishment in the form of painful and malignant 
 disease. Education so conceived carries with it its own refutation. True 
 education cannot tolerate the inculcation of fear. Fear is the soil in 
 which are implanted inhibitions and morbid compulsions. Fear restrains, 
 restricts, hinders human expression. It strikes at the very roots of joy 
 and happiness. It should therefore be the aim of sex education to avoid 
 above all the implanting of fear in the mind of the pupil. 
   
 Restriction means placing in the hands of external authority the power 
 over behavior. Birth Control, on the contrary, implies voluntary action, 
 the decision for one's self how many children one shall or shall not 
 bring into the world. Birth Control is educational in the real sense 
 of the word, in that it asserts this power of decision, reinstates this 
 power in the people themselves. 
   
 We are not seeking to introduce new restrictions but greater freedom. As 
 far as sex is concerned, the impulse has been more thoroughly subject to 
 restriction than any other human instinct. "Thou shalt not!" meets us at 
 every turn. Some of these restrictions are justified; some of them are 
 not. We may have but one wife or one husband at a time; we must attain a 
 certain age before we may marry. Children born out of wedlock are deemed 
 "illegitimate"--even healthy children. The newspapers every day are 
 filled with the scandals of those who have leaped over the restrictions 
 or limitations society has written in her sexual code. Yet the voluntary 
 control of the procreative powers, the rational regulation of the number 
 of children we bring into the world--this is the one type of restriction 
 frowned upon and prohibited by law! 
   
 In a more definite, a much more realistic and concrete manner, Birth 
 Control reveals itself as the most effective weapon in the spread of 
 hygienic and prophylactic knowledge among women of the less fortunate 
 classes. It carries with it a thorough training in bodily cleanliness 
 and physiology, a definite knowledge of the physiology and function 
 of sex. In refusing to teach both sides of the subject, in failing to 
 respond to the universal demand among women for such instruction and 
 information, maternity centers limit their own efforts and fail to 
 fulfil what should be their true mission. They are concerned merely with 
 pregnancy, maternity, child-bearing, the problem of keeping the baby 
 alive. But any effective work in this field must go further back. We 
 have gradually come to see, as Havelock Ellis has pointed out, that 
 comparatively little can be done by improving merely the living 
 conditions of adults; that improving conditions for children and babies 
 is not enough. To combat the evils of infant mortality, natal and 
 pre-natal care is not sufficient. Even to improve the conditions for the 
 pregnant woman, is insufficient. Necessarily and inevitably, we are led 
 further and further back, to the point of procreation; beyond that, into 
 the regulation of sexual selection. The problem becomes a circle. We 
 cannot solve one part of it without a consideration of the entirety. But 
 it is especially at the point of creation where all the various 
 forces are concentrated. Conception must be controlled by reason, by 
 intelligence, by science, or we lose control of all its consequences. 
   
 Birth Control is essentially an education for women. It is women who, 
 directly and by their very nature, bear the burden of that blindness, 
 ignorance and lack of foresight concerning sex which is now enforced 
 by law and custom. Birth Control places in the hands of women the 
 only effective instrument whereby they may reestablish the balance in 
 society, and assert, not only theoretically but practically as well, the 
 primary importance of the woman and the child in civilization. 
   
 Birth Control is thus the stimulus to education. Its exercise awakens 
 and develops the sense of self-reliance and responsibility, and 
 illuminates the relation of the individual to society and to the race in 
 a manner that otherwise remains vague and academic. It reveals sex not 
 merely as an untamed and insatiable natural force to which men and women 
 must submit hopelessly and inertly, as it sweeps through them, and then 
 accept it with abject humility the hopeless and heavy consequences. 
 Instead, it places in their hands the power to control this great force; 
 to use it, to direct it into channels in which it becomes the 
 energy enhancing their lives and increasing self-expression and 
 self-development. It awakens in women the consciousness of new glories 
 and new possibilities in motherhood. No longer the prostrate victim of 
 the blind play of instinct but the self-reliant mistress of her body and 
 her own will, the new mother finds in her child the fulfilment of her 
 own desires. In free instead of compulsory motherhood she finds the 
 avenue of her own development and expression. No longer bound by an 
 unending series of pregnancies, at liberty to safeguard the development 
 of her own children, she may now extend her beneficent influence beyond 
 her own home. In becoming thus intensified, motherhood may also broaden 
 and become more extensive as well. The mother sees that the welfare of 
 her own children is bound up with the welfare of all others. Not upon 
 the basis of sentimental charity or gratuitous "welfare-work" but upon 
 that of enlightened self-interest, such a mother may exert her influence 
 among the less fortunate and less enlightened. 
   
 Unless based upon this central knowledge of and power over her own body 
 and her own instincts, education for woman is valueless. As long as she 
 remains the plaything of strong, uncontrolled natural forces, as long as 
 she must docilely and humbly submit to the decisions of others, how 
 can woman every lay the foundations of self-respect, self-reliance 
 and independence? How can she make her own choice, exercise her own 
 discrimination, her own foresight? 
   
 In the exercise of these powers, in the building up and integration of 
 her own experience, in mastering her own environment the true education 
 of woman must be sought. And in the sphere of sex, the great source and 
 root of all human experience, it is upon the basis of Birth Control--the 
 voluntary direction of her own sexual expression--that woman must take 
 her first step in the assertion of freedom and self-respect. 
   
      (1)  Folkways, p. 492. 
 
 
 
 Chapter 12 (Woman And The Future) 
      I saw a woman sleeping.  In her sleep she dreamed Life stood 
      before her, and held in each hand a gift--in the one Love, in 
      the other Freedom.  And she said to the woman, "Choose!" 
   
      And the woman waited long:  and she said, "Freedom!" 
   
      And Life said, "Thou has well chosen.  If thou hadst said, 
      `Love,' I would have given thee that thou didst ask for; and 
      I would have gone from thee, and returned to thee no more. 
      Now, the day will come when I shall return.  In that day I 
      shall bear both gifts in one hand." 
   
      I heard the woman laugh in her sleep. 
   
      Olive Schreiner 
   
 By no means is it necessary to look forward to some vague and distant 
 date of the future to test the benefits which the human race derives 
 from the program I have suggested in the preceding pages. The results to 
 the individual woman, to the family, and to the State, particularly in 
 the case of Holland, have already been investigated and recorded. Our 
 philosophy is no doctrine of escape from the immediate and pressing 
 realities of life, on the contrary, we say to men and women, and 
 particularly to the latter: face the realities of your own soul and 
 body; know thyself! And in this last admonition, we mean that this 
 knowledge should not consist of some vague shopworn generalities about 
 the nature of woman--woman as created in the minds of men, nor woman 
 putting herself on a romantic pedestal above the harsh facts of this 
 workaday world. Women can attain freedom only by concrete, definite 
 knowledge of themselves, a knowledge based on biology, physiology and 
 psychology. 
   
 Nevertheless it would be wrong to shut our eyes to the vision of a 
 world of free men and women, a world which would more closely resemble 
 a garden than the present jungle of chaotic conflicts and fears. One of 
 the greatest dangers of social idealists, to all of us who hope to make 
 a better world, is to seek refuge in highly colored fantasies of the 
 future rather than to face and combat the bitter and evil realities 
 which to-day on all sides confront us. I believe that the reader of 
 my preceding chapters will not accuse me of shirking these realities; 
 indeed, he may think that I have overemphasized the great biological 
 problems of defect, delinquency and bad breeding. It is in the hope that 
 others too may glimpse my vision of a world regenerated that I submit 
 the following suggestions. They are based on the belief that we must 
 seek individual and racial health not by great political or social 
 reconstruction, but, turning to a recognition of our own inherent powers 
 and development, by the release of our inner energies. It is thus that 
 all of us can best aid in making of this world, instead of a vale of 
 tears, a garden. 
   
 Let us first of all consider merely from the viewpoint of business and 
 "efficiency" the biological or racial problems which confront us. 
 As Americans, we have of late made much of "efficiency" and business 
 organization. Yet would any corporation for one moment conduct its 
 affairs as we conduct the infinitely more important affairs of our 
 civilization? Would any modern stockbreeder permit the deterioration 
 of his livestock as we not only permit but positively encourage the 
 destruction and deterioration of the most precious, the most essential 
 elements in our world community--the mothers and children. With the 
 mothers and children thus cheapened, the next generation of men and 
 women is inevitably below par. The tendency of the human elements, under 
 present conditions, is constantly downward. 
   
 Turn to Robert M. Yerkes's "Psychological Examining in the United States 
 Army"(1) in which we are informed that the psychological examination 
 of the drafted men indicated that nearly half--47.3 per cent.--of the 
 population had the mentality of twelve-year-old children or less--in 
 other words that they are morons. Professor Conklin, in his recently 
 published volume "The Direction of Human Evolution"(2) is led, on the 
 findings of Mr. Yerkes's report, to assert: "Assuming that these 
 drafted men are a fair sample of the entire population of approximately 
 100,000,000, this means that 45,000,000 or nearly one-half the entire 
 population, will never develop mental capacity beyond the stage 
 represented by a normal twelve-year-old child, and that only 13,500,000 
 will ever show superior intelligence." 
   
 Making all due allowances for the errors and discrepancies of the 
 psychological examination, we are nevertheless face to face with a 
 serious and destructive practice. Our "overhead" expense in segregating 
 the delinquent, the defective and the dependent, in prisons, asylums and 
 permanent homes, our failure to segregate morons who are increasing 
 and multiplying--I have sufficiently indicated, though in truth I have 
 merely scratched the surface of this international menace--demonstrate 
 our foolhardy and extravagant sentimentalism. No industrial corporation 
 could maintain its existence upon such a foundation. Yet hardheaded 
 "captains of industry," financiers who pride themselves upon their 
 cool-headed and keen-sighted business ability are dropping millions 
 into rosewater philanthropies and charities that are silly at best and 
 vicious at worst. In our dealings with such elements there is a 
 bland maladministration and misuse of huge sums that should in all 
 righteousness be used for the development and education of the healthy 
 elements of the community. 
   
 At the present time, civilized nations are penalizing talent and genius, 
 the bearers of the torch of civilization, to coddle and perpetuate 
 the choking human undergrowth, which, as all authorities tell us, is 
 escaping control and threatens to overrun the whole garden of humanity. 
 Yet men continue to drug themselves with the opiate of optimism, or 
 sink back upon the cushions of Christian resignation, their intellectual 
 powers anaesthetized by cheerful platitudes. Or else, even those, who 
 are fully cognizant of the chaos and conflict, seek an escape in those 
 pretentious but fundamentally fallacious social philosophies which place 
 the blame for contemporary world misery upon anybody or anything except 
 the indomitable but uncontrolled instincts of living organisms. These 
 men fight with shadows and forget the realities of existence. Too many 
 centuries have we sought to hide from the inevitable, which confronts us 
 at every step throughout life. 
   
 Let us conceive for the moment at least, a world not burdened by the 
 weight of dependent and delinquent classes, a total population of 
 mature, intelligent, critical and expressive men and women. Instead 
 of the inert, exploitable, mentally passive class which now forms the 
 barren substratum of our civilization, try to imagine a population 
 active, resistant, passing individual and social lives of the most 
 contented and healthy sort. Would such men and women, liberated from 
 our endless, unceasing struggle against mass prejudice and inertia, be 
 deprived in any way of the stimulating zest of life? Would they sink 
 into a slough of complacency and fatuity? 
   
 No! Life for them would be enriched, intensified and ennobled in a 
 fashion it is difficult for us in our spiritual and physical squalor 
 even to imagine. There would be a new renaissance of the arts and 
 sciences. Awakened at last to the proximity of the treasures of life 
 lying all about them, the children of that age would be inspired by a 
 spirit of adventure and romance that would indeed produce a terrestrial 
 paradise. 
   
 Let us look forward to this great release of creative and constructive 
 energy, not as an idle, vacuous mirage, but as a promise which we, as 
 the whole human race, have it in our power, in the very conduct of our 
 lives from day to day, to transmute into a glorious reality. Let us 
 look forward to that era, perhaps not so distant as we believe, when the 
 great adventures in the enchanted realm of the arts and sciences may no 
 longer be the privilege of a gifted few, but the rightful heritage of 
 a race of genius. In such a world men and women would no longer seek 
 escape from themselves by the fantastic and the faraway. They would be 
 awakened to the realization that the source of life, of happiness, is to 
 be found not outside themselves, but within, in the healthful exercise 
 of their God-given functions. The treasures of life are not hidden; they 
 are close at hand, so close that we overlook them. We cheat ourselves 
 with a pitiful fear of ourselves. Men and women of the future will not 
 seek happiness; they will have gone beyond it. Mere happiness would 
 produce monotony. And their lives shall be lives of change and variety 
 with the thrills produced by experiment and research. 
   
 Fear will have been abolished: first of all, the fear of outside things 
 and other people; finally the fear of oneself. And with these fears 
 must disappear forever all those poisons of hatreds, individual and 
 international. For the realization would come that there would be no 
 reason for, no value in encroaching upon, the freedom of one another. 
 To-day we are living in a world which is like a forest of trees too 
 thickly planted. Hence the ferocious, unending struggle for existence. 
 Like innumerable ages past, the present age is one of mutual 
 destruction. Our aim is to substitute cooperation, equity, and amity for 
 antagonism and conflict. If the aim of our country or our civilization 
 is to attain a hollow, meaningless superiority over others in aggregate 
 wealth and population, it may be sound policy to shut our eyes to 
 the sacrifice of human life,--unregarded life and suffering--and to 
 stimulate rapid procreation. But even so, such a policy is bound in 
 the long run to defeat itself, as the decline and fall of great 
 civilizations of the past emphatically indicate. Even the bitterest 
 opponent of our ideals would refuse to subscribe to a philosophy of mere 
 quantity, of wealth and population lacking in spiritual direction or 
 significance. All of us hope for and look forward to the fine flowering 
 of human genius--of genius not expending and dissipating its energy 
 in the bitter struggle for mere existence, but developing to a fine 
 maturity, sustained and nourished by the soil of active appreciation, 
 criticism, and recognition. 
   
 Not by denying the central and basic biological facts of our nature, not 
 by subscribing to the glittering but false values of any philosophy or 
 program of escape, not by wild Utopian dreams of the brotherhood of men, 
 not by any sanctimonious debauch of sentimentality or religiosity, may 
 we accomplish the first feeble step toward liberation. On the contrary, 
 only by firmly planting our feet on the solid ground of scientific fact 
 may we even stand erect--may we even rise from the servile stooping 
 posture of the slave, borne down by the weight of age-old oppression. 
   
 In looking forward to this radiant release of the inner energies of 
 a regenerated humanity, I am not thinking merely of inventions and 
 discoveries and the application of these to the perfecting of the 
 external and mechanical details of social life. This external and 
 scientific perfecting of the mechanism of external life is a phenomenon 
 we are to a great extent witnessing today. But in a deeper sense this 
 tendency can be of no true or lasting value if it cannot be made to 
 subserve the biological and spiritual development of the human organism, 
 individual and collective. Our great problem is not merely to perfect 
 machinery, to produce superb ships, motor cars or great buildings, but 
 to remodel the race so that it may equal the amazing progress we see 
 now making in the externals of life. We must first free our bodies from 
 disease and predisposition to disease. We must perfect these bodies and 
 make them fine instruments of the mind and the spirit. Only thus, when 
 the body becomes an aid instead of a hindrance to human expression may 
 we attain any civilization worthy of the name. Only thus may we create 
 our bodies a fitting temple for the soul, which is nothing but a vague 
 unreality except insofar as it is able to manifest itself in the beauty 
 of the concrete. 
   
 Once we have accomplished the first tentative steps toward the creation 
 of a real civilization, the task of freeing the spirit of mankind from 
 the bondage of ignorance, prejudice and mental passivity which is more 
 fettering now than ever in the history of humanity, will be facilitated 
 a thousand-fold. The great central problem, and one which must be taken 
 first is the abolition of the shame and fear of sex. We must teach 
 men the overwhelming power of this radiant force. We must make them 
 understand that uncontrolled, it is a cruel tyrant, but that controlled 
 and directed, it may be used to transmute and sublimate the everyday 
 world into a realm of beauty and joy. Through sex, mankind may attain 
 the great spiritual illumination which will transform the world, 
 which will light up the only path to an earthly paradise. So must we 
 necessarily and inevitably conceive of sex-expression. The instinct is 
 here. None of us can avoid it. It is in our power to make it a thing 
 of beauty and a joy forever: or to deny it, as have the ascetics of the 
 past, to revile this expression and then to pay the penalty, the bitter 
 penalty that Society to-day is paying in innumerable ways. 
   
 If I am criticized for the seeming "selfishness" of this conception it 
 will be through a misunderstanding. The individual is fulfiling his duty 
 to society as a whole by not self-sacrifice but by self-development. He 
 does his best for the world not by dying for it, not by increasing the 
 sum total of misery, disease and unhappiness, but by increasing his 
 own stature, by releasing a greater energy, by being active instead 
 of passive, creative instead of destructive. This is fundamentally the 
 greatest truth to be discovered by womankind at large. And until 
 women are awakened to their pivotal function in the creation of a new 
 civilization, that new era will remain an impossible and fantastic 
 dream. The new civilization can become a glorious reality only with the 
 awakening of woman's now dormant qualities of strength, courage, and 
 vigor. As a great thinker of the last century pointed out, not only 
 to her own health and happiness is the physical degeneracy of woman 
 destructive, but to our whole race. The physical and psychic power of 
 woman is more indispensable to the well-being and power of the human 
 race than that even of man, for the strength and happiness of the child 
 is more organically united with that of the mother. 
   
 Parallel with the awakening of woman's interest in her own fundamental 
 nature, in her realization that her greatest duty to society lies 
 in self-realization, will come a greater and deeper love for all of 
 humanity. For in attaining a true individuality of her own she will 
 understand that we are all individuals, that each human being is 
 essentially implicated in every question or problem which involves the 
 well-being of the humblest of us. So to-day we are not to meet the 
 great problems of defect and delinquency in any merely sentimental or 
 superficial manner, but with the firmest and most unflinching attitude 
 toward the true interest of our fellow beings. It is from no mere 
 feeling of brotherly love or sentimental philanthropy that we women must 
 insist upon enhancing the value of child life. It is because we know 
 that, if our children are to develop to their full capabilities, all 
 children must be assured a similar opportunity. Every single case of 
 inherited defect, every malformed child, every congenitally tainted 
 human being brought into this world is of infinite importance to that 
 poor individual; but it is of scarcely less importance to the rest of us 
 and to all of our children who must pay in one way or another for these 
 biological and racial mistakes. We look forward in our vision of the 
 future to children brought into the world because they are desired, 
 called from the unknown by a fearless and conscious passion, because 
 women and men need children to complete the symmetry of their own 
 development, no less than to perpetuate the race. They shall be called 
 into a world enhanced and made beautiful by the spirit of freedom and 
 romance--into a world wherein the creatures of our new day, unhampered 
 and unbound by the sinister forces of prejudice and immovable habit, may 
 work out their own destinies. Perhaps we may catch fragmentary glimpses 
 of this new life in certain societies of the past, in Greece perhaps; 
 but in all of these past civilizations these happy groups formed but a 
 small exclusive section of the population. To-day our task is greater; 
 for we realize that no section of humanity can be reclaimed without the 
 regeneration of the whole. 
   
 I look, therefore, into a Future when men and women will not dissipate 
 their energy in the vain and fruitless search for content outside of 
 themselves, in far-away places or people. Perfect masters of their own 
 inherent powers, controlled with a fine understanding of the art of life 
 and of love, adapting themselves with pliancy and intelligence to the 
 milieu in which they find themselves, they will unafraid enjoy life to 
 the utmost. Women will for the first time in the unhappy history of 
 this globe establish a true equilibrium and "balance of power" in the 
 relation of the sexes. The old antagonism will have disappeared, the old 
 ill-concealed warfare between men and women. For the men themselves will 
 comprehend that in this cultivation of the human garden they will be 
 rewarded a thousand times. Interest in the vague sentimental fantasies 
 of extra-mundane existence, in pathological or hysterical flights from 
 the realities of our earthliness, will have through atrophy disappeared, 
 for in that dawn men and women will have come to the realization, 
 already suggested, that here close at hand is our paradise, our 
 everlasting abode, our Heaven and our eternity. Not by leaving it and 
 our essential humanity behind us, nor by sighing to be anything but what 
 we are, shall we ever become ennobled or immortal. Not for woman only, 
 but for all of humanity is this the field where we must seek the secret 
 of eternal life. 
   
   
      (1)  Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences.  Volume 
      XV. 
   
      (2)  Conklin, The Direction of Human Evolution.  "When it is 
      remembered that mental capacity is inherited, that parents 
      of low intelligence generally produce children of low 
      intelligence, and that on the average they have more 
      children than persons of high intelligence, and furthermore, 
      when we consider that the intellectual capacity or `mental 
      age' can be changed very little by education, we are in a 
      position to appreciate the very serious condition which 
      confronts us as a nation."  p. 108. 
 
 
 
 Appendix 
 PRINCIPLES AND AIMS OF THE AMERICAN BIRTH CONTROL LEAGUE 
   
   
 PRINCIPLES: 
   
 The complex problems now confronting America as the result of the 
 practice of reckless procreation are fast threatening to grow beyond 
 human control. 
   
 Everywhere we see poverty and large families going hand in hand. Those 
 least fit to carry on the race are increasing most rapidly. People who 
 cannot support their own offspring are encouraged by Church and State to 
 produce large families. Many of the children thus begotten are diseased 
 or feeble-minded; many become criminals. The burden of supporting these 
 unwanted types has to be bourne by the healthy elements of the nation. 
 Funds that should be used to raise the standard of our civilization are 
 diverted to the maintenance of those who should never have been born. 
   
 In addition to this grave evil we witness the appalling waste of women's 
 health and women's lives by too frequent pregnancies. These unwanted 
 pregnancies often provoke the crime of abortion, or alternatively 
 multiply the number of child-workers and lower the standard of living. 
   
 To create a race of well born children it is essential that the function 
 of motherhood should be elevated to a position of dignity, and this is 
 impossible as long as conception remains a matter of chance. 
   
 We hold that children should be 
   
 1. Conceived in love; 
   
 2. Born of the mother's conscious desire; 
   
 3. And only begotten under conditions which render possible the heritage 
 of health. 
   
 Therefore we hold that every woman must possess the power and freedom to 
 prevent conception except when these conditions can be satisfied. 
   
 Every mother must realize her basic position in human society. She must 
 be conscious of her responsibility to the race in bringing children into 
 the world. 
   
 Instead of being a blind and haphazard consequence of uncontrolled 
 instinct, motherhood must be made the responsible and self-directed 
 means of human expression and regeneration. 
   
 These purposes, which are of fundamental importance to the whole of our 
 nation and to the future of mankind, can only be attained if women first 
 receive practical scientific education in the means of Birth Control. 
 That, therefore, is the first object to which the efforts of this League 
 will be directed. 
   
   
 AIMS: 
   
 The American Birth Control League aims to enlighten and educate all 
 sections of the American public in the various aspects of the dangers of 
 uncontrolled procreation and the imperative necessity of a world program 
 of Birth Control. 
   
 The League aims to correlate the findings of scientists, statisticians, 
 investigators, and social agencies in all fields. To make this possible, 
 it is necessary to organize various departments: 
   
 RESEARCH: To collect the findings of scientists, concerning the relation 
 of reckless breeding to the evils of delinquency, defect and dependence. 
   
 INVESTIGATION: To derive from these scientifically ascertained facts and 
 figures, conclusions which may aid all public health and social agencies 
 in the study of problems of maternal and infant mortality, child-labor, 
 mental and physical defects and delinquence in relation to the practice 
 of reckless parentage. 
   
 HYGIENIC AND PHYSIOLOGICAL instruction by the Medical profession to 
 mothers and potential mothers in harmless and reliable methods of Birth 
 Control in answer to their requests for such knowledge. 
   
 STERILIZATION of the insane and feebleminded and the encouragement of 
 this operation upon those afflicted with inherited or transmissible 
 diseases, with the understanding that sterilization does not deprive 
 the individual of his or her sex expression, but merely renders him 
 incapable of producing children. 
   
 EDUCATIONAL: The program of education includes: The enlightenment of the 
 public at large, mainly through the education of leaders of thought 
 and opinion--teachers, ministers, editors and writers--to the moral 
 and scientific soundness of the principles of Birth Control and the 
 imperative necessity of its adoption as the basis of national and racial 
 progress. 
   
 POLITICAL AND LEGISLATIVE: To enlist the support and cooperation of 
 legal advisers, statesmen and legislators in effecting the removal of 
 state and federal statutes which encourage dysgenic breeding, 
 increase the sum total of disease, misery and poverty and prevent the 
 establishment of a policy of national health and strength. 
   
 ORGANIZATION: To send into the various States of the Union field workers 
 to enlist the support and arouse the interest of the masses, to 
 the importance of Birth Control so that laws may be changed and the 
 establishment of clinics made possible in every State. 
   
 INTERNATIONAL: This department aims to cooperate with similar 
 organizations in other countries to study Birth Control in its relations 
 to the world population problem, food supplies, national and racial 
 conflicts, and to urge upon all international bodies organized to 
 promote world peace, the consideration of these aspects of international 
 amity. 
   
 THE AMERICAN BIRTH CONTROL LEAGUE proposes to publish in its 
 official organ "The Birth Control Review," reports and studies on the 
 relationship of controlled and uncontrolled populations to national and 
 world problems. 
   
 The American Birth Control League also proposes to hold an annual 
 Conference to bring together the workers of the various departments so 
 that each worker may realize the inter-relationship of all the various 
 phases of the problem to the end that National education will tend to 
 encourage and develop the powers of self-direction, self-reliance, and 
 independence in the individuals of the community instead of dependence 
 for relief upon public or private charities. 
 
 
 Publication Date: April 24th 2014 https://www.bookrix.com/-co4c755f3957535