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Title: The Pivot of Civilization

Author: Margaret Sanger

Author of introduction, etc.: H. G. Wells

Release date: February 22, 2006 [eBook #1689]
Most recently updated: February 8, 2013

Language: English

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CIVILIZATION ***

THE PIVOT OF CIVILIZATION

By Margaret Sanger

Contents
INTRODUCTION

THE PIVOT OF CIVILIZATION

CHAPTER I: A New Truth Emerges
CHAPTER II: Conscripted Motherhood
CHAPTER III: "Children Troop Down From Heaven...."
CHAPTER IV: The Fertility of the Feeble-Minded
CHAPTER V: The Cruelty of Charity
CHAPTER VI: Neglected Factors of the World Problem
CHAPTER VII: Is Revolution the Remedy?
CHAPTER VIII: Dangers of Cradle Competition
CHAPTER IX: A Moral Necessity
CHAPTER X: Science the Ally
CHAPTER XI: Education and Expression
CHAPTER XII: Woman and the Future
APPENDIX

PRINCIPLES AND AIMS OF THE AMERICAN BIRTH CONTROL
LEAGUE

To Alice Drysdale Vickery
Whose prophetic vision of liberated womanhood has been an
inspiration

"I dream of a world in which the spirits of women are flames stronger
than fire, a world in which modesty has become courage and yet remains
modesty, a world in which women are as unlike men as ever they were in
the world I sought to destroy, a world in which women shine with a
loveliness of self-revelation as enchanting as ever the old legends told, and
yet a world which would immeasurably transcend the old world in the self-
sacrificing passion of human service. I have dreamed of that world ever
since I began to dream at all."
—Havelock Ellis

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 countless 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 I: 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 mothers 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 our 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 II: 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
night-shift 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 III: "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 classrooms, hallways,
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 IV: 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 be 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 V: 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 from 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 VI: 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 VII: 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 then 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 millennium.
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
fulfilled 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 VIII: 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 bring 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 dullness 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 IX: 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 for 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 death rate, 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 X: 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 XI: 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 matters
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 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 ever 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 XII: 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.

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