[wta-politics]Re: The Pivot of Civilization by Margaret Sanger

[Louis Andrews]

A newly printed paperback 306 page edition of Sanger's Pivot is available
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Subject: The Pivot of Civilization by Margaret Sanger


> The Pivot of Civilization by Margaret Sanger
> http://www.textlibrary.com/download/pivot.txt
>
> 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
>
>
>
>
> CONTENTS
>
> Introduction    By H. G. Wells
>
> Chapter
> I      A New Truth Emerges
> II     Conscripted Motherhood
> III    ``Children Troop Down from Heaven''
> IV     The Fertility of the Feeble-Minded
> V      The Cruelty of Charity
> VI     Neglected Factors of the World Problem
> VII    Is Revolution the Remedy?
> VIII   Dangers of Cradle Competition
> IX     A Moral Necessity
> X      Science the Ally
> XI     Education and Expression
> XII    Woman and the Future
>
> Appendix:  Principles and Aims of the American Birth Control League
>
>
>
> INTRODUCTION
>
> Birth control, Mrs. Sanger claims, and claims rightly, to be a
> question of fundamental importance at the present time.  I do not know
> how far one is justified in calling it the pivot or the corner-stone
> of a progressive civilization.  These terms involve a criticism of
> metaphors that may take us far away from the question in hand.  Birth
> Control is no new thing in human experience, and it has been practised
> in societies of the most various types and fortunes.  But there can be
> little doubt that at the present time it is a test issue between two
> widely different interpretations of the word civilization, and of what
> is good in life and conduct.  The way in which men and women range
> themselves in this controversy is more simply and directly indicative
> of their general intellectual quality than any other single
> indication.  I do not wish to imply by this that the people who oppose
> are more or less intellectual than the people who advocate Birth
> Control, but only that they have fundamentally contrasted general
> ideas,--that, mentally, they are DIFFERENT.  Very simple, very
> complex, very dull and very brilliant persons may be found in either
> camp, but all those in either camp have certain attitudes in common
> which they share with one another, and do not share with those in the
> other camp.
>
> There have been many definitions of civilization.  Civilization is a
> complexity of count less aspects, and may be validly defined in a
> great number of relationships.  A reader of James Harvey Robinson's
> MIND IN THE MAKING will find it very reasonable to define a
> civilization as a system of society-making ideas at issue with
> reality.  Just so far as the system of ideas meets the needs and
> conditions of survival or is able to adapt itself to the needs and
> conditions of survival of the society it dominates, so far will that
> society continue and prosper.  We are beginning to realize that in the
> past and under different conditions from our own, societies have
> existed with systems of ideas and with methods of thought very widely
> contrasting with what we should consider right and sane to-day.  The
> extraordinary neolithic civilizations of the American continent that
> flourished before the coming of the Europeans, seem to have got along
> with concepts that involved pedantries and cruelties and a kind of
> systematic unreason, which find their closest parallels to-day in the
> art and writings of certain types of lunatic.  There are collections
> of drawings from English and American asylums extraordinarily parallel
> in their spirit and quality with the Maya inscriptions of Central
> America.  Yet these neolithic American societies got along for
> hundreds and perhaps thousands of years.  they respected seed-time and
> harvest, they bred and they maintained a grotesque and terrible order.
> And they produced quite beautiful works of art.  Yet their surplus of
> population was disposed of by an organization of sacrificial slaughter
> unparalleled in the records of mankind.  Many of the institutions that
> seemed most normal and respectable to them, filled the invading
> Europeans with perplexity and horror.
>
> When we realize clearly this possibility of civilizations being based
> on very different sets of moral ideas and upon different intellectual
> methods, we are better able to appreciate the profound significance of
> the schism in our modern community, which gives us side by side,
> honest and intelligent people who regard Birth Control as something
> essentially sweet, sane, clean, desirable and necessary, and others
> equally honest and with as good a claim to intelligence who regard it
> as not merely unreasonable and unwholesome, but as intolerable and
> abominable.  We are living not in a simple and complete civilization,
> but in a conflict of at least two civilizations, based on entirely
> different fundamental ideas, pursuing different methods and with
> different aims and ends.
>
> I will call one of these civilizations our Traditional or
> Authoritative Civilization.  It rests upon the thing that is, and upon
> the thing that has been.  It insists upon respect for custom and
> usage; it discourages criticism and enquiry.  It is very ancient and
> conservative, or, going beyond conservation, it is reactionary. The
> vehement hostility of many Catholic priests and prelates towards new
> views of human origins, and new views of moral questions, has led many
> careless thinkers to identify this old traditional civilization with
> Christianity, but that identification ignores the strongly
> revolutionary and initiatory spirit that has always animated
> Christianity, and is untrue even to the realities of orthodox Catholic
> teaching.  The vituperation of individual Catholics must not be
> confused with the deliberate doctrines of the Church which have, on
> the whole, been conspicuously cautious and balanced and sane in these
> matters.  The ideas and practices of the Old Civilization are older
> and more widespread than and not identifiable with either Christian or
> Catholic culture, and it will be a great misfortune if the issues
> between the Old Civilization and the New are allowed to slip into the
> deep ruts of religious controversies that are only accidentally and
> intermittently parallel.
>
> Contrasted with the ancient civilization, with the Traditional
> disposition, which accepts institutions and moral values as though
> they were a part of nature, we have what I may call--with an evident
> bias in its favour--the civilization of enquiry, of experimental
> knowledge, Creative and Progressive Civilization.  The first great
> outbreak of the spirit of this civilization was in republican Greece;
> the martyrdom of Socrates, the fearless Utopianism of Plato, the
> ambitious encyclopaedism of Aristotle, mark the dawn of a new courage
> and a new wilfulness in human affairs.  The fear of set limitations,
> of punitive and restrictive laws imposed by Fate upon human life was
> visibly fading in human minds.  These names mark the first clear
> realization that to a large extent, and possibly to an illimitable
> extent, man's moral and social life and his general destiny could be
> seized upon and controlled by man. But--he must have knowledge.  Said
> the Ancient Civilization--and it says it still through a multitude of
> vigorous voices and harsh repressive acts: ``Let man learn his duty
> and obey.'' Says the New Civilization, with ever-increasing
> confidence: ``Let man know, and trust him.''
>
> For long ages, the Old Civilization kept the New subordinate,
> apologetic and ineffective, but for the last two centuries, the New
> has fought its way to a position of contentious equality.  The two go
> on side by side, jostling upon a thousand issues.  The world changes,
> the conditions of life change rapidly, through that development of
> organized science which is the natural method of the New Civilization.
> The old tradition demands that national loyalties and ancient
> belligerence should continue. The new has produced means of
> communication that break down the pens and separations of human life
> upon which nationalist emotion depends.  The old tradition insists
> upon its ancient blood-letting of war; the new knowledge carries that
> war to undreamt of levels of destruction.  The ancient system needed
> an unrestricted breeding to meet the normal waste of life through war,
> pestilence, and a multitude of hitherto unpreventable diseases. The
> new knowledge sweeps away the venerable checks of pestilence and
> disease, and confronts us with the congestions and explosive dangers
> of an over-populated world.  The old tradition demands a special
> prolific class doomed to labor and subservience; the new points to
> mechanism and to scientific organization as a means of escape from
> this immemorial subjugation.  Upon every main issue in life, there is
> this quarrel between the method of submission and the method of
> knowledge. More and more do men of science and intelligent people
> generally realize the hopelessness of pouring new wine into old
> bottles.  More and more clearly do they grasp the significance of the
> Great Teacher's parable.
>
> The New Civilization is saying to the Old now: ``We cannot go on
> making power for you to spend upon international conflict.  You must
> stop waving flags and bandying insults. You must organize the Peace of
> the World; you must subdue yourselves to the Federation of all
> mankind.  And we cannot go on giving you health, freedom, enlargement,
> limitless wealth, if all our gifts to you are to be swamped by an
> indiscriminate torrent of progeny.  We want fewer and better children
> who can be reared up to their full possibilities in unencumbered
> homes, and we cannot make the social life and the world-peace we are
> determined to make, with the ill-bred, ill-trained swarms of inferior
> citizens that you inflict upon us.'' And there at the passionate and
> crucial question, this essential and fundamental question, whether
> procreation is still to be a superstitious and often disastrous
> mystery, undertaken in fear and ignorance, reluctantly and under the
> sway of blind desires, or whether it is to become a deliberate
> creative act, the two civilizations join issue now.  It is a conflict
> from which it is almost impossible to abstain.  Our acts, our way of
> living, our social tolerance, our very silences will count in this
> crucial decision between the old and the new.
>
> In a plain and lucid style without any emotional appeals, Mrs.
> Margaret Sanger sets out the case of the new order against the old.
> There have been several able books published recently upon the
> question of Birth Control, from the point of view of a woman's
> personal life, and from the point of view of married happiness, but I
> do not think there has been any book as yet, popularly accessible,
> which presents this matter from the point of view of the public good,
> and as a necessary step to the further improvement of human life as a
> whole.  I am inclined to think that there has hitherto been rather too
> much personal emotion spent upon this business and far too little
> attention given to its broader aspects.  Mrs. Sanger with her
> extraordinary breadth of outlook and the real scientific quality of
> her mind, has now redressed the balance.  She has lifted this question
> from out of the warm atmosphere of troubled domesticity in which it
> has hitherto been discussed, to its proper level of a predominantly
> important human affair.
>
> H.G. Wells
> Easton Glebe,
> Dunmow,
> Essex., England
>
>
>
> THE PIVOT OF CIVILIZATION
>
>
>
> CHAPTER 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 rle, was
> likewise combating the current dogma of the orthodox Socialists.  In
> Berlin, Rudolph Rocker was engaged in the thankless task of puncturing
> the articles of faith of the orthodox Marxian religion.  It is quite
> needless to add that these men who had probed beneath the surface of
> the problem and had diagnosed so much more completely the complex
> malady of contemporary society were intensely disliked by the
> superficial theorists of the neo-Marxian School.
>
> The gospel of Marx had, however, been too long and too thoroughly
> inculcated into the minds of millions of workers in Europe, to be
> discarded.  It is a flattering doctrine, since it teaches the laborer
> that all the fault is with someone else, that he is the victim of
> circumstances, and not even a partner in the creation of his own and
> his child's misery. Not without significance was the additional
> discovery that I made.  I found that the Marxian influence tended to
> lead workers to believe that, irrespective of the health of the poor
> mothers, the earning capacity of the wage-earning fathers, or the
> upbringing of the children, increase of the proletarian family was a
> benefit, not a detriment to the revolutionary movement.  The greater
> the number of hungry mouths, the emptier the stomachs, the more
> quickly would the ``Class War'' be precipitated.  The greater the
> increase in population among the proletariat, the greater the
> incentive to revolution.  This may not be sound Marxian theory; but it
> is the manner in which it is popularly accepted.  It is the popular
> belief, wherever the Marxian influence is strong.  This I found
> especially in England and Scotland.  In speaking to groups of
> dockworkers on strike in Glasgow, and before the communist and co-
> operative guilds throughout England, I discovered a prevailing
> opposition to the recognition of sex as a factor in the perpetuation
> of poverty.  The leaders and theorists were immovable in their
> opposition.  But when once I succeeded in breaking through the surface
> opposition of the rank and file of the workers, I found that they were
> willing to recognize the power of this neglected factor in their
> lives.
>
> So central, so fundamental in the life of every man and woman is this
> problem that they need be taught no elaborate or imposing theory to
> explain their troubles.  To approach their problems by the avenue of
> sex and reproduction is to reveal at once their fundamental relations
> to the whole economic and biological structure of society.  Their
> interest is immediately and completely awakened.  But always, as I
> soon discovered, the ideas and habits of thought of these submerged
> masses have been formed through the Press, the Church, through
> political institutions, all of which had built up a conspiracy of
> silence around a subject that is of no less vital importance than that
> of Hunger.  A great wall separates the masses from those imperative
> truths that must be known and flung wide if civilization is to be
> saved. As currently constituted, Church, Press, Education seem to-day
> organized to exploit the ignorance and the prejudices of the masses,
> rather than to light their way to self-salvation.
>
> Such was the situation in 1914, when I returned to America,
> determined, since the exclusively masculine point of view had
> dominated too long, that the other half of the truth should be made
> known.  The Birth Control movement was launched because it was in this
> form that the whole relation of woman and child--eternal emblem of the
> future of society--could be more effectively dramatized.  The amazing
> growth of this movement dates from the moment when in my home a small
> group organized the first Birth Control League. Since then we have
> been criticized for our choice of the term ``Birth Control'' to
> express the idea of modern scientific contraception. I have yet to
> hear any criticism of this term that is not based upon some false and
> hypocritical sense of modesty, or that does not arise out of a semi-
> prurient misunderstanding of its aim. On the other hand: nothing
> better expresses the idea of purposive, responsible, and self-directed
> guidance of the reproductive powers.
>
> Those critics who condemn Birth Control as a negative, destructive
> idea, concerned only with self-gratification, might profitably open
> the nearest dictionary for a definition of ``control.''  There they
> would discover that the verb ``control'' means to exercise a
> directing, guiding, or restraining influence;--to direct, to regulate,
> to counteract.  Control is guidance, direction, foresight.  it implies
> intelligence, forethought and responsibility. They will find in the
> Standard Dictionary a quotation from Lecky to the effect that, ``The
> greatest of all evils in politics is power without control.''  In what
> phase of life is not ``power without control'' an evil?  Birth
> Control, therefore, means not merely the limitation of births, but the
> application of intelligent guidance over the reproductive power. It
> means the substitution of reason and intelligence for the blind play
> of instinct.
>
> The term ``Birth Control'' had the immense practical advantage of
> compressing into two short words the answer to the inarticulate
> demands of millions of men and women in all countries.  At the time
> this slogan was formulated, I had not yet come to the complete
> realization of the great truth that had been thus crystallized.  It
> was the response to the overwhelming, heart-breaking appeals that came
> by every mail for aid and advice, which revealed a great truth that
> lay dormant, a truth that seemed to spring into full vitality almost
> over night--that could never again be crushed to earth!
>
>  Nor could I then have realized the number and the power of the
> enemies who were to be aroused into activity by this idea.  So
> completely was I dominated by this conviction of the efficacy of
> ``control,'' that I could not until later realize the extent of the
> sacrifices that were to be exacted of me and of those who supported my
> campaign.  The very idea of Birth Control resurrected the spirit of
> the witch-hunters of Salem.  Could they have usurped the power, they
> would have burned us at the stake.  Lacking that power, they used the
> weapon of suppression, and invoked medieval statutes to send us to
> jail.  These tactics had an effect the very opposite to that intended.
> They demonstrated the vitality of the idea of Birth Control, and acted
> as counter-irritant on the actively intelligent sections of the
> American community.  Nor was the interest aroused confined merely to
> America.  The neo-Malthusian movement in Great Britain with its
> history of undaunted bravery, came to our support; and I had the
> comfort of knowing that the finest minds of England did not hesitate a
> moment in the expression of their sympathy and support.
>
>  In America, on the other hand, I found from the beginning until very
> recently that the so-called intellectuals exhibited a curious and
> almost inexplicable reticence in supporting Birth Control.  They even
> hesitated to voice any public protest against the campaign to crush us
> which was inaugurated and sustained by the most reactionary and
> sinister forces in American life.  It was not inertia or any lack of
> interest on the part of the masses that stood in our way.  It was the
> indifference of the intellectual leaders.
>
> Writers, teachers, ministers, editors, who form a class dictating, if
> not creating, public opinion, are, in this country, singularly
> inhibited or unconscious of their true function in the community.  One
> of their first duties, it is certain, should be to champion the
> constitutional right of free speech and free press, to welcome any
> idea that tends to awaken the critical attention of the great American
> public. But those who reveal themselves as fully cognizant of this
> public duty are in the minority, and must possess more than average
> courage to survive the enmity such an attitude provokes.
>
> One of the chief aims of the present volume is to stimulate American
> intellectuals to abandon the mental habits which prevent them from
> seeing human nature as a whole, instead of as something that can be
> pigeonholed into various compartments or classes. Birth Control
> affords an approach to the study of humanity because it cuts through
> the limitations of current methods.  It is economic, biological,
> psychological and spiritual in its aspects.  It awakens the vision of
> mankind moving and changing, of humanity growing and developing,
> coming to fruition, of a race creative, flowering into beautiful
> expression through talent and genius.
>
> As a social programme, Birth Control is not merely concerned with
> population questions. In this respect, it is a distinct step in
> advance of earlier Malthusian doctrines, which concerned themselves
> chiefly with economics and population.  Birth Control concerns itself
> with the spirit no less than the body.  It looks for the liberation of
> the spirit of woman and through woman of the child.  To-day motherhood
> is wasted, penalized, tortured.  Children brought into the world by
> unwilling mother suffer an initial handicap that cannot be measured by
> cold statistics.  Their lives are blighted from the start.  To
> substantiate this fact, I have chosen to present the conclusions of
> reports on Child Labor and records of defect and delinquency published
> by organizations with no bias in favour of Birth Control. The evidence
> is before us.  It crowds in upon us from all sides.  But prior to this
> new approach, no attempt had been made to correlate the effects of the
> blind and irresponsible play of the sexual instinct with its deep-
> rooted causes.
>
> The duty of the educator and the intellectual creator of public
> opinion is, in this connection, of the greatest importance.  For
> centuries official moralists, priests, clergymen and teachers,
> statesmen and politicians have preached the doctrine of glorious and
> divine fertility. To-day, we are confronted with the world-wide
> spectacle of the realization of this doctrine. It is not without
> significance that the moron and the imbecile set the pace in living up
> to this teaching, and that the intellectuals, the educators, the
> archbishops, bishops, priests, who are most insistent on it, are the
> staunchest adherents in their own lives of celibacy and non-fertility.
> It is time to point out to the champions of unceasing and
> indiscriminate fertility the results of their teaching.
>
> One of the greatest difficulties in giving to the public a book of
> this type is the impossibility of keeping pace with the events and
> changes of a movement that is now, throughout the world, striking root
> and growing.  The changed attitude of the American Press indicates
> that enlightened public opinion no longer tolerates a policy of
> silence upon a question of the most vital importance.  Almost
> simultaneously in England and America, two incidents have broken
> through the prejudice and the guarded silence of centuries.  At the
> church Congress in Birmingham, October 12, 1921, Lord Dawson, the
> king's physician, in criticizing the report of the Lambeth Conference
> concerning Birth Control, delivered an address defending this
> practice.  Of such bravery and eloquence that it could not be ignored,
> this address electrified the entire British public.  It aroused a
> storm of abuse, and yet succeeded, as no propaganda could, in
> mobilizing the forces of progress and intelligence in the support of
> the cause.
>
> Just one month later, the First American Birth Control Conference
> culminated in a significant and dramatic incident.  At the close of
> the conference a mass meeting was scheduled in the Town Hall, New York
> City, to discuss the morality of Birth Control.  Mr. Harold Cox,
> editor of the Edinburgh Review, who had come to New York to attend the
> conference, was to lead the discussion.  It seemed only natural for us
> to call together scientists, educators, members of the medical
> profession, and theologians of all denominations, to ask their opinion
> upon this uncertain and important phase of the controversy.  Letters
> were sent to eminent men and women in different parts of the world.
> In this letter we asked the following questions:--
>
>     1.  Is over-population a menace to the peace of the world?
>     2.  Would the legal dissemination of scientific Birth Control
>         information, through the medium of clinics by the medical
>         profession, be the most logical method of checking the problem
>         of over-population?
>     3.  Would knowledge of Birth Control change the moral attitude of
>         men and women toward the marriage bond, or lower the moral
>         standards of the youth of the country?
>     4.  Do you believe that knowledge which enables parents to limit
>         their families will make for human happiness, and raise the
>         moral, social and intellectual standards of population?
>
> We sent this questionnaire not only to those who we thought might
> agree with us, but we sent it also to our known opponents.
>
> When I arrived at the Town Hall the entrance was guarded by policemen.
> They told me there would be no meeting.  Before my arrival r
> executives had been greeted by Monsignor Dineen, secretary of
> Archbishop Hayes, of the Roman Catholic archdiocese, who informed them
> that the meeting would be prohibited on the ground that it was
> contrary to public morals.  The police had closed the doors.  When
> they opened them to permit the exit of the large audience which had
> gathered, Mr. Cox and I entered.  I attempted to exercise my
> constitutional right of free speech, but was prohibited and arrested.
> Miss Mary Winsor, who protested against this unwarranted arrest, was
> likewise dragged off to the police station.  The case was dismissed
> the following morning.  The ecclesiastic instigators of the affair
> were conspicuous by their absence from the police court.  But the
> incident was enough to expose the opponents of Birth Control and the
> extreme methods they used to combat our progress.  The case was too
> flagrant, too gross an affront, to pass unnoticed by the newspapers.
> The progress of our movement was indicated in the changed attitude of
> the American Press, which had perceived the danger to the public of
> the unlawful tactics used by the enemies of Birth Control in
> preventing open discussion of a vital question.
>
> No social idea has inspired its advocates with more bravery, tenacity,
> and courage than Birth Control.  From the early days of Francis Place
> and Richard Carlile, to those of the Drysdales and Edward Trulove, of
> Bradlaugh and Mrs. Annie Besant, its advocates have faced imprisonment
> and ostracism.  In the whole history of the English movement, there
> has been no more courageous figure than that of the venerable Alice
> Drysdale Vickery, the undaunted torch-bearer who has bridged the
> silence of forty-four years--since the Bradlaugh-Besant trial.  She
> stands head and shoulders above the professional feminists. Serenely
> has she withstood jeers and jests. To-day, she continues to point out
> to the younger generation which is devoted to newer palliatives the
> fundamental relation between Sex and Hunger.
>
> The First American Birth Control Conference, held at the same time as
> the Washington Conference for the Limitation of Armaments, marks a
> turning-point in our approach to social problems.  The Conference made
> evident the fact that in every field of scientific and social
> endeavour the most penetrating thinkers are now turning to the
> consideration of our problem as a fundamental necessity to American
> civilization.  They are coming to see that a QUALITATIVE factor as
> opposed to a QUANTITATIVE one is of primary importance in dealing with
> the great masses of humanity.
>
> Certain fundamental convictions should be made clear here.  The
> programme for Birth. Control is not a charity.  It is not aiming to
> interfere in the private lives of poor people, to tell them how many
> children they should have, nor to sit in judgment upon their fitness
> to become parents.  It aims, rather, to awaken responsibility, to
> answer the demand for a scientific means by which and through which
> each human life may be self-directed and self-controlled.  The
> exponent of Birth Control, in short, is convinced that social
> regeneration, no less than individual regeneration, must come from
> within.  Every potential parent, and especially every potential
> mother, must be brought to an acute realization of the primary and
> individual responsibility of bringing children into this world.  Not
> until the parents of this world are given control over their
> reproductive faculties will it be possible to improve the quality of
> the generations of the future, or even to maintain civilization at its
> present level.  Only when given intelligent mastery of the procreative
> powers can the great mass of humanity be aroused to a realization of
> responsibility of parenthood.  We have come to the conclusion, based
> on widespread investigation and experience, that education for
> parenthood must be based upon the needs and demands of the people
> themselves.  An idealistic code of sexual ethics, imposed from above,
> a set of rules devised by high-minded theorists who fail to take into
> account the living conditions and desires of the masses, can never be
> of the slightest value in effecting change in the customs of the
> people.  Systems so imposed in the past have revealed their woeful
> inability to prevent the sexual and racial chaos into which the world
> has drifted.
>
> The universal demand for practical education in Birth Control is one
> of the most hopeful signs that the masses themselves to-day possess
> the divine spark of regeneration.  It remains for the courageous and
> the enlightened to answer this demand, to kindle the spark, to direct
> a thorough education in sex hygiene based upon this intense interest.
>
> Birth Control is thus the entering wedge for the educator.  In
> answering the needs of these thousands upon thousands of submerged
> mothers, it is possible to use their interest as the foundation for
> education in prophylaxis, hygiene and infant welfare.  The potential
> mother can then be shown that maternity need not be slavery but may be
> the most effective avenue to self-development and self-realization.
> Upon this basis only may we improve the quality of the race.
>
> The lack of balance between the birth-rate of the ``unfit'' and the
> ``fit,'' admittedly the greatest present menace to the civilization,
> can never be rectified by the inauguration of a cradle competition
> between these two classes. The example of the inferior classes, the
> fertility of the feeble-minded, the mentally defective, the poverty-
> stricken, should not be held up for emulation to the mentally and
> physically fit, and therefore less fertile, parents of the educated
> and well-to-do classes.  On the contrary, the most urgent problem to-
> day is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally
> and physically defective.  Possibly drastic and Spartan methods may be
> forced upon American society if it continues complacently to encourage
> the chance and chaotic breeding that has resulted from our stupid,
> cruel sentimentalism.
>
> To effect the salvation of the generations of the future--nay, of the
> generations of to-day--our greatest need, first of all, is the ability
> to face the situation without flinching; to cooperate in the formation
> of a code of sexual ethics based upon a thorough biological and
> psychological understanding of human nature; and then to answer the
> questions and the needs of the people with all the intelligence and
> honesty at our command.  If we can summon the bravery to do this, we
> shall best be serving the pivotal interests of civilization.
>
> To conclude this introduction: my initiation, as I have confessed, was
> primarily an emotional one.  My interest in Birth Control was awakened
> by experience.  Research and investigation have followed.  Our effort
> has been to raise our program from the plane of the emotional to the
> plane of the scientific.  Any social progress, it is my belief, must
> purge itself of sentimentalism and pass through the crucible of
> science.  We are willing to submit Birth Control to this test.  It is
> part of the purpose of this book to appeal to the scientist for aid,
> to arouse that interest which will result in widespread research and
> investigation.  I believe that my personal experience with this idea
> must be that of the race at large.  We must temper our emotion and
> enthusiasm with the impersonal determination of science.  We must
> unite in the task of creating an instrument of steel, strong but
> supple, if we are to triumph finally in the war for human
> emancipation.
>
>
>
> CHAPTER 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 on year old or under.
> There were 160 children under school-age, below six years, and 246 of
> school age.''
>
> ``A woman in ordinary circumstances,'' adds this impartial
> investigator, ``with a husband and three children, if she does her own
> work, feels that her hands are full.  How these mill-workers, many of
> them frail-looking, and many with confessedly poor health, can ever do
> two jobs is a mystery, when they are seen in their homes dragging
> about, pale, hollow-eyed and listless, often needlessly sharp and
> impatient with the children.  These children are not only not
> mothered, never cherished, they are nagged and buffeted.  The mothers
> are not superwomen, and like all human beings, they have a certain
> amount of strength and when that breaks, their nerves suffer.''
>
> We are presented with a vivid picture of one of these slave-mothers:
> a woman of thirty-eight who looks at least fifty with her worn,
> furrowed face.  Asked why she had been working at night for the past
> two years, she pointed to a six-months old baby she was carrying, to
> the five small children swarming about her, and answered laconically,
> ``Too much children!''  She volunteered the information that there had
> been two more who had died.  When asked why they had died, the poor
> mother shrugged her shoulders listlessly, and replied, ``Don't know.''
> In addition to bearing and rearing these children, her work would sap
> the vitality of any ordinary person. ``She got home soon after four in
> the morning, cooked breakfast for the family and ate hastily herself.
> At 4.30 she was in bed, staying there until eight.  But part of that
> time was disturbed for the children were noisy and the apartment was a
> tiny, dingy place in a basement.  At eight she started the three
> oldest boys to school, and cleaned up the debris of breakfast and of
> supper the night before.  At twelve she carried a hot lunch to her
> husband and had dinner ready for the three school children.  In the
> afternoon, there were again dishes and cooking, and caring for three
> babies aged five, three years, and six months.  At five, supper was
> ready for the family.  The mother ate by herself and was off to work
> at 5:45.''
>
> Another of the night-working mothers was a frail looking Frenchwoman
> of twenty-seven years, with a husband and five children ranging from
> eight years to fourteen months. Three other children had died.  When
> visited, she was doing a huge washing.  She was forced into night work
> to meet the expenses of the family.  She estimated that she succeeded
> in getting five hours' sleep during the day.  ``I take my baby to bed
> with me, but he cries, and my little four-year-old boy cries, too, and
> comes in to make me get up, so you can't call that a very good
> sleep.''
>
> The problem among unmarried women or those without family is not the
> same, this investigator points out.  ``They sleep longer by day than
> they normally would by night.'' We are also informed that pregnant
> women work at night in the mills, sometimes up to the very hour of
> delivery.  ``It's queer,'' exclaimed a woman supervisor of one of the
> Rhode Island mills, ``but some women, both on the day and the night
> shift, will stick to their work right up to the last minute, and will
> use every means to deceive you about their condition.  I go around and
> talk to them, but make little impression.  We have had several narrow
> escapes....A Polish mother with five children had worked in a mill by
> day or by night, ever since her marriage, stopping only to have her
> babies.  One little girl had died several years ago, and the youngest
> child, says Mrs. Kelley, did not look promising.  It had none of the
> charm of babyhood; its body and clothing were filthy; and its lower
> lip and chin covered with repulsive black sores.
>
> It should be remembered that the Consumers' League, which publishes
> these reports on women in industry, is not advocating Birth Control
> education, but is aiming ``to awaken responsibility for conditions
> under which goods are produced, and through investigation, education
> and legislation, to mobilize public opinion in behalf of enlightened
> standards for workers and honest products for all.''  Nevertheless, in
> Miss Agnes de Lima's report of conditions in Passaic, New Jersey, we
> find the same tale of penalized, prostrate motherhood, bearing the
> crushing burden of economic injustice and cruelty; the same blind but
> overpowering instincts of love and hunger driving young women into the
> factories to work, night in and night out, to support their procession
> of uncared for and undernourished babies.  It is the married women
> with young children who work on the inferno-like shifts.  They are
> driven to it by the low wages of their husbands. They choose night
> work in order to be with their children in the daytime.  They are
> afraid of the neglect and ill-treatment the children might receive at
> the hands of paid caretakers. Thus they condemn themselves to eighteen
> or twenty hours of daily toil.  Surely no mother with three, four,
> five or six children can secure much rest by day.
>
> ``Take almost any house''--we read in the report of conditions in New
> Jersey--``knock at almost any door and you will find a weary, tousled
> woman, half-dressed, doing her housework, or trying to snatch an hour
> or two of sleep after her long night of work in the mill. ...The facts
> are there for any one to see; the hopeless and exhausted woman, her
> cluttered three or four rooms, the swarm of sickly and neglected
> children.''
>
> These women claimed that night work was unavoidable, as their husbands
> received so little pay.  This in spite of all our vaunted ``high
> wages.''  Only three women were found who went into the drudgery of
> night work without being obliged to do so.  Two had no children, and
> their husbands' earnings were sufficient for their needs.  One of
> these was saving for a trip to Europe, and chose the night shift
> because she found it less strenuous than the day.  Only four of the
> hundred women reported upon were unmarried, and ninety-two of the
> married women had children.  Of the four childless married women, one
> had lost two children, and another was recovering from a recent
> miscarriage.  There were five widows. The average number of children
> was three in a family.  Thirty-nine of the mothers had four or more.
> Three of them had six children, and six of them had seven children
> apiece.  These women ranged between the ages of twenty-five and forty,
> and more than half the children were less than seven years of age.
> Most of them had babies of one, two and three years of age.
>
> At the risk of repetition, we quote one of the typical cases reported
> by Miss De Lima with features practically identical with the
> individual cases reported from Rhode Island. It is of a mother who
> comes home from work at 5:30 every morning, falls on the bed from
> exhaustion, arises again at eight or nine o'clock to see that the
> older children are sent off to school.  A son of five, like the rest
> of the children, is on a diet of coffee,--milk costs too much.  After
> the children have left for school, the overworked mother again tries
> to sleep, though the small son bothers her a great deal. Besides, she
> must clean the house, wash, iron, mend, sew and prepare the midday
> meal.  She tries to snatch a little sleep in the afternoon, but
> explains:  ``When you got big family, all time work.  Night-time in
> mill drag so long, so long; day-time in home go so quick.''  By five,
> this mother must get the family's supper ready, and dress for the
> night's work, which begins at seven.  The investigator further
> reports:  ``The next day was a holiday, and for a diversion, Mrs. N.
> thought she would go up to the cemetery:  `I got some children up
> there,' she explained, `and same time I get some air.  No, I don't go
> nowheres, just to the mill and then home.'''
>
> Here again, as in all reports on women in industry, we find the
> prevalence of pregnant women working on night-shifts, often to the
> very day of their delivery.  ``Oh, yes, plenty women, big bellies,
> work in the night time,'' one of the toiling mothers volunteered.
> ``Shame they go, but what can do?''  The abuse was general.  Many
> mothers confessed that owing to poverty they themselves worked up to
> the last week or even day before the birth of their children.  Births
> were even reported in one of the mills during the night shift.  A
> foreman told of permitting a night-working woman to leave at 6.30 one
> morning, and of the birth of her baby at 7.30.  Several women told of
> leaving the day-shift because of pregnancy and of securing places on
> the nightshift where their condition was less conspicuous, and the
> bosses more tolerant.  One mother defended her right to stay at work,
> says the report, claiming that as long as she could do her work, it
> was nobody's business.  In a doorway sat a sickly and bloodless woman
> in an advanced stage of pregnancy.  Her first baby had died of general
> debility.  She had worked at night in the mill until the very day of
> its birth.  This time the boss had told her she could stay if she
> wished, but reminded her of what had happened last time.  So she had
> stopped work, as the baby was expected any day.
>
> Again and again we read the same story, which varied only in detail:
> the mother in the three black rooms; the sagging porch overflowing
> with pale and sickly children; the over-worked mother of seven, still
> nursing her youngest, who is two or three months old. Worn and
> haggard, with a skeleton-like child pulling at her breast, the women
> tries to make the investigator understand.  The grandmother helps to
> interpret.  ``She never sleeps,'' explains the old woman, ``how can
> she with so many children?''  She works up to the last moment before
> her baby comes, and returns to work as soon as they are four weeks
> old.
>
> Another apartment in the same house; another of those night-working
> mothers, who had just stopped because she is pregnant.  The boss had
> kindly given her permission to stay on, but she found the reaching on
> the heavy spinning machines too hard.  Three children, ranging in age
> from five to twelve years, are all sickly and forlorn and must be
> cared for. There is a tubercular husband, who is unable to work
> steadily, and is able to bring in only $12 a week.  Two of the babies
> had died, one because the mother had returned to work too soon after
> its birth and had lost her milk. She had fed him tea and bread, ``so
> he died.''
>
> The most heartrending feature of it all--in these homes of the mothers
> who work at night--is the expression in the faces of the children;
> children of chance, dressed in rags, undernourished, underclothed, all
> predisposed to the ravages of chronic and epidemic disease.
>
> The reports on infant mortality published under the direction of the
> Children's Bureau substantiate for the United States of America the
> findings of the Galton Laboratory for Great Britain, showing that an
> abnormally high rate of fertility is usually associated with poverty,
> filth, disease, feeblemindedness and a high infant mortality rate.  It
> is a commonplace truism that a high birth-rate is accompanied by a
> high infant-mortality rate.  No longer is it necessary to dissociate
> cause and effect, to try to determine whether the high birth rate is
> the cause of the high infant mortality rate.  It is sufficient to know
> that they are organically correlated along with other anti-social
> factors detrimental to individual, national and racial welfare.  The
> figures presented by Hibbs [2] likewise reveal a much higher infant
> mortality rate for the later born children of large families.
>
> The statistics which show that the greatest number of children are
> born to parents whose earnings are the lowest,[3] that the direst
> poverty is associated with uncontrolled fecundity emphasize the
> character of the parenthood we are depending upon to create the race
> of the future.
>
> A distinguished American opponent of Birth Control some years ago
> spoke of the ``racial'' value of this high infant mortality rate among
> the ``unfit.''  He forgot, however, that the survival-rate of the
> children born of these overworked and fatigued mothers may
> nevertheless be large enough, aided and abetted by philanthropies and
> charities, to form the greater part of the population of to-morrow. As
> Dr. Karl Pearson has stated:  ``Degenerate stocks under present social
> conditions are not short-lived; they live to have more than the normal
> size of family.''
>
> Reports of charitable organizations; the famous ``one hundred neediest
> cases'' presented every year by the New York Times to arouse the
> sentimental generosity of its readers; statistics of public and
> private hospitals, charities and corrections; analyses of pauperism in
> town and country--all tell the same tale of uncontrolled and
> irresponsible fecundity. The facts, the figures, the appalling truth
> are there for all to read.  It is only in the remedy proposed, the
> effective solution, that investigators and students of the problem
> disagree.
>
> Confronted with the ``startling and disgraceful'' conditions of
> affairs indicated by the fact that a quarter of a million babies die
> every year in the United States before they are one year old, and that
> no less than 23,000 women die in childbirth, a large number of experts
> and enthusiasts have placed their hopes in maternity-benefit measures.
>
> Such measures sharply illustrate the superficial and fragmentary
> manner in which the whole problem of motherhood is studied to-day.  It
> seeks a LAISSER FAIRE policy of parenthood or marriage, with an
> indiscriminating paternalism concerning maternity.  It is as though
> the Government were to say:  ``Increase and multiply; we shall assume
> the responsibility of keeping your babies alive.''  Even granting that
> the administration of these measures might be made effective and
> effectual, which is more than doubtful, we see that they are based
> upon a complete ignorance or disregard of the most important fact in
> the situation--that of indiscriminate and irresponsible fecundity.
> They tacitly assume that all parenthood is desirable, that all
> children should be born, and that infant mortality can be controlled
> by external aid.  In the great world-problem of creating the men and
> women of to-morrow, it is not merely a question of sustaining the
> lives of all children, irrespective of their hereditary and physical
> qualities, to the point where they, in turn, may reproduce their kind.
> Advocates of Birth Control offer and accept no such superficial
> solution.  This philosophy is based upon a clearer vision and a more
> profound comprehension of human life. Of immediate relief for the
> crushed and enslaved motherhood of the world through State aid, no
> better criticism has been made than that of Havelock Ellis:
>
> ``To the theoretical philanthropist, eager to reform the world on
> paper, nothing seems simpler than to cure the present evils of child-
> rearing by setting up State nurseries which are at once to relieve
> mothers of everything connected with the men of the future beyond the
> pleasure--if such it happens to be--of conceiving them, and the
> trouble of bearing the, 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 overadvertised compulsory education does not compel--
> and does not educate.  The selective-draft, it is our duty to
> emphasize this fact, revealed that 38 per cent. of the young men (more
> than a million) were rejected because of physical ill-health and
> defects.  And 25 per cent. were illiterate.
>
> These young men were the children of yesterday.  Authorities tell us
> that 75 per cent. of the school-children are defective.  This means
> that no less than fifteen million schoolchildren, out of 22,000,000 in
> the United States, are physically or mentally below par.
>
> This is the soil in which all sorts of serious evils strike root.  It
> is a truism that children are the chief asset of a nation.  Yet while
> the United States government allotted 92.8 per cent. of its
> appropriations for 1920 toward war expenses, three per cent. to public
> works, 3.2 per cent. to ``primary governmental functions,'' no more
> than one per cent. is appropriated to education, research and
> development. Of this one per cent., only a small proportion is devoted
> to public health.  The conservation of childhood is a minor
> consideration.  While three cents is spent for the more or less
> doubtful protection of women and children, fifty cents is given to the
> Bureau of Animal Industry, for the protection of domestic animals. In
> 1919, the State of Kansas appropriated $25,000 to protect the health
> of pigs, and $4,000 to protect the health of children. In four years
> our Federal Government appropriated--roughly speaking--$81,000,000 for
> the improvement of rivers; $13,000,000 for forest conservation;
> $8,000,000 for the experimental plant industry; $7,000,000 for the
> experimental animal industry; $4,000,000 to combat the foot and mouth
> disease; and less than half a million for the protection of child
> life.
>
> Competent authorities tell us that no less than 75 per cent. of
> American children leave school between the ages of fourteen and
> sixteen to go to work.  This number is increasing.  According to the
> recently published report on ``The Administration of the First Child
> Labor Law,'' in five states in which it was necessary for the
> Children's Bureau to handle directly the working certificates of
> children, one-fifth of the 25,000 children who applied for
> certificates left school when they were in the fourth grade; nearly a
> tenth of them had never attended school at all or had not gone beyond
> the first grade; and only one-twenty-fifth had gone as far as the
> eighth grade.  But their educational equipment was even more limited
> than the grade they attended would indicate.  Of the children applying
> to go to work 1,803 had not advanced further than the first grade even
> when they had gone to school at all; 3,379 could not even sign their
> own names legibly, and nearly 2,000 of them could not write at all.
> The report brings automatically into view the vicious circle of child-
> labor, illiteracy, bodily and mental defect, poverty and delinquency.
> And like all reports on child labor, the large family and reckless
> breeding looms large in the background as one of the chief factors in
> the problem.
>
> Despite all our boasting of the American public school, of the equal
> opportunity afforded to every child in America, we have the shortest
> school-term, and the shortest school-day of any of the civilized
> countries.  In the United States of America, there are 106 illiterates
> to every thousand people.  In England there are 58 per thousand,
> Sweden and Norway have one per thousand.
>
> The United States is the most illiterate country in the world--that
> is, of the so-called civilized countries.  Of the 5,000,000
> illiterates in the United States, 58 per cent. are white and 28 per
> cent. native whites.  Illiteracy not only is the index of inequality
> of opportunity.  It speaks as well a lack of consideration for the
> children.  It means either that children have been forced out of
> school to go to work, or that they are mentally and physically
> defective.[1]
>
> One is tempted to ask why a society, which has failed so lamentably to
> protect the already existing child life upon which its very
> perpetuation depends, takes upon itself the reckless encouragement of
> indiscriminate procreation.  The United States Government has recently
> inaugurated a policy of restricting immigration from foreign
> countries.  Until it is able to protect childhood from criminal
> exploitation, until it has made possible a reasonable hope of life,
> liberty and growth for American children, it should likewise recognize
> the wisdom of voluntary restriction in the production of children.
>
> Reports on child labor published by the National Child Labor Committee
> only incidentally reveal the correlation of this evil with that of
> large families.  Yet this is evident throughout.  The investigators
> are more bent upon regarding child labor as a cause of illiteracy.
>
> But it is no less a consequence of irresponsibility in breeding.  A
> sinister aspect of this is revealed by Theresa Wolfson's study of
> child-labor in the beet-fields of Michigan.[2]  As one weeder put it:
> ``Poor man make no money, make plenty children--plenty children good
> for sugar-beet business.''  Further illuminating details are given by
> Miss Wolfson:
>
> ``Why did they come to the beet-fields? Most frequently families with
> large numbers of children said that they felt that the city was no
> place to raise children--things too expensive and children ran wild--
> in the country all the children could work.''  Living conditions are
> abominable and unspeakably wretched. An old woodshed, a long-abandoned
> barn, and occasionally a tottering, ramshackle farmer's house are the
> common types.  ``One family of eleven, the youngest child two years,
> the oldest sixteen years, lived in an old country store which had but
> one window; the wind and rain came through the holes in the walls, the
> ceiling was very low and the smoke from the stove filled the room.
> Here the family ate, slept, cooked and washed.''
>
> ``In Tuscola County a family of six was found living in a one-room
> shack with no windows.  Light and ventilation was secured through the
> open doors.  Little Charles, eight years of age, was left at home to
> take care of Dan, Annie and Pete, whose ages were five years, four
> years, and three months, respectively.  In addition, he cooked the
> noonday meal and brought it to his parents in the field. The filth and
> choking odors of the shack made it almost unbearable, yet the baby was
> sleeping in a heap of rags piled up in a corner.''
>
> Social philosophers of a certain school advocate the return to the
> land--it is only in the overcrowded city, they claim, that the evils
> resulting from the large family are possible. There is, according to
> this philosophy, no overcrowding, no over-population in the country,
> where in the open air and sunlight every child has an opportunity for
> health and growth. This idyllic conception of American country life
> does not correspond with the picture presented by this investigator,
> who points out:
>
>  ``To promote the physical and mental development of the child, we
> forbid his employment in factories, shops and stores.  On the other
> hand, we are prone to believe that the right kind of farm-work is
> healthful and the best thing for children.  But for a child to crawl
> along the ground, weeding beets in the hot sun for fourteen hours a
> day--the average workday--is far from being the best thing. The law of
> compensation is bound to work in some way, and the immediate result of
> this agricultural work is interference with school attendance.''
>
> How closely related this form of child-slavery is to the over-large
> family, is definitely illustrated:  ``In the one hundred and thirty-
> three families visited, there were six hundred children.  A
> conversation held with a ``Rooshian-German' woman is indicative of the
> size of most of the families:
>
> ``How many children have you?'' inquired the investigator.
>
> ``Eight--Julius, und Rose, und Martha, dey is mine; Gottlieb und
> Philip, und Frieda, dey is my husband's;--und Otto und Charlie--dey
> are ours.''
>
>  Families with ten and twelve children were frequently found, while
> those of six and eight children are the general rule.  The advantage
> of a large family in the beet fields is that it does the most work.
> In the one hundred thirty-three families interviewed, there were one
> hundred eighty-six children under the age of six years, ranging from
> eight weeks up; thirty-six children between the ages of six and eight,
> approximately twenty-five of whom had never been to school, and eleven
> over sixteen years of age who had never been to school.  One ten-year-
> old boy had never been to school because he was a mental defective;
> one child of nine was practically blinded by cataracts.  This child
> was found groping his way down the beet-rows pulling out weeds and
> feeling for the beet-plants--in the glare of the sun he had lost all
> sense of light and dark.  Of the three hundred and forty children who
> were not going or had never gone to school, only four had reached the
> point of graduation, and only one had gone to high school.  These
> large families migrated to the beet-fields in early spring. Seventy-
> two per cent. of them are retarded. When we realize that feeble-
> mindedness is arrested development and retardation, we see that these
> ``beet children'' are artificially retarded in their growth, and that
> the tendency is to reduce their intelligence to the level of the
> congenital imbecile.
>
> Nor must it be concluded that these large ``beet'' families are always
> the ``ignorant foreigner'' so despised by our respectable press. The
> following case throws some light on this matter, reported in the same
> pamphlet:  ``An American family, considered a prize by the agent
> because of the fact that there were nine children, turned out to be a
> `flunk.'  They could not work in the beet-fields, they ran up a bill
> at the country-store, and one day the father and the eldest son, a boy
> of nineteen, were seen running through the railroad station to catch
> an out-going train.  The grocer thought they were `jumping' their
> bill.  He telephoned ahead to the sheriff of the next town.  They were
> taken off the train by the sheriff and given the option of going back
> to the farm or staying in jail.  They preferred to stay in jail, and
> remained there for two weeks.  Meanwhile, the mother and her eight
> children, ranging in ages form seventeen years to nine months, had to
> manage the best way they could.  At the end of two weeks, father and
> son were set free....During all of this period the farmers of the
> community sent in provisions to keep the wife and children from
> starving.''  Does this case not sum up in a nutshell the typical
> American intelligence confronted with the problem of the too-large
> family--industrial slavery tempered with sentimentality!
>
> Let us turn to a young, possibly a more progressive state.  Consider
> the case of ``California, the Golden'' as it is named by Emma Duke, in
> her study of child-labor in the Imperial Valley, ``as fertile as the
> Valley of the Nile.''[3]  Here, cotton is king, and rich ranchers,
> absentee landlords and others exploit it. Less than ten years ago
> ranchers would bring in hordes of laboring families, but refuse to
> assume any responsibility in housing them, merely permitting them to
> sleep on the grounds of the ranch.  Conditions have been somewhat
> improved, but, sometimes, we read, ``a one roomed straw house with an
> area of fifteen by twenty feet will serve as a home for an entire
> family, which not only cooks but sleeps in the same room.''  Here, as
> in Michigan among the beets, children are ``thick as bees.'' All kinds
> of children pick, Miss Duke reports, ``even those as young as three
> years!  Five-year-old children pick steadily all day.... Many white
> American children are among them--pure American stock, who have
> gradually moved from the Carolinas, Tennessee, and other southern
> states to Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma, Arizona, and on into the Imperial
> Valley.''  Some of these children, it seems, wanted to attend school,
> but their fathers did not want to work; so the children were forced to
> become bread-winners.  One man whose children were working with him in
> the fields said, ``Please, lady, don't send them to school; let them
> pick a while longer.  I ain't got my new auto paid for yet.''  The
> native white American mother of children working in the fields proudly
> remarked: ``No; they ain't never been to school, nor me nor their
> poppy, nor their granddads and grandmoms.  We've always been
> pickers!''--and she spat her tobacco over the field in expert fashion.
>
>  ``In the Valley one hears from townspeople,'' writes the
> investigator, ``that pickers make ten dollars a day, working the whole
> family. With that qualification, the statement is ambiguous.  One
> Mexican in the Imperial Valley was the father of thirty-three
> children--`about thirteen or fourteen living,' he said. If they all
> worked at cotton-picking, they would doubtless altogether make more
> than ten dollars a day.''
>
> One of the child laborers revealed the economic advantage--to the
> parents--in numerous progeny: ``Us kids most always drag from forty to
> fifty pounds of cotton before we take it to be weighed.  Three of us
> pick.  I'm twelve years old and my bag is twelve feet long.  I can
> drag nearly a hundred pounds. My sister is ten years old, and her bag
> is eight feet long.  My little brother is seven and his bag is five
> feet long.''
>
> Evidence abounds in the publications of the National Child Labor
> Committee of this type of fecund parenthood.[4]  It is not merely a
> question of the large family versus the small family.  Even
> comparatively small families among migratory workers of this sort have
> been large families.  The high infant mortality rate has carried off
> the weaker children.  Those who survive are merely those who have been
> strong enough to survive the most unfavorable living conditions.  No;
> it is a situation not unique, nor even unusual in human history, of
> greed and stupidity and cupidity encouraging the procreative instinct
> toward the manufacture of slaves.  We hear these days of the
> selfishness and the degradation of healthy and well-educated women who
> refuse motherhood; but we hear little of the more sinister selfishness
> of men and women who bring babies into the world to become child-
> slaves of the kind described in these reports of child labor.
>
> The history of child labor in the English factories in the nineteenth
> century throws a suggestive light on this situation.  These child-
> workers were really called into being by the industrial situation.
> The population grew, as Dean Inge has described it, like crops in a
> newly irrigated desert.  During the nineteenth century, the numbers
> were nearly quadrupled. ``Let those who think that the population of a
> country can be increased at will, consider whether it is likely that
> any physical, moral, or psychological change came over the nation co-
> incidentally with the inventions of the spinning jenny and the steam
> engine.  It is too obvious for dispute that it was the possession of
> capital wanting employment, and of natural advantages for using it,
> that called those multitudes of human beings into existence, to eat
> the food which they paid for by their labor.''[5]
>
> But when child labor in the factories became such a scandal and such a
> disgrace that child-labor was finally forbidden by laws that possessed
> the advantage over our own that they were enforced, the proletariat
> ceased to supply children.  Almost by magic the birth rate among the
> workers declined.  Since children were no longer of economic value to
> the factories, they were evidently a drug in the home. This movement,
> it should not be forgotten however, was coincident with the agitation
> and education in Birth Control stimulated by the Besant-Bradlaugh
> trial.
>
> Large families among migratory agricultural laborers in our own
> country are likewise brought into existence in response to an
> industrial demand.  The enforcement of the child labor laws and the
> extension of their restrictions are therefore an urgent necessity, not
> so much, as some of our child-labor authorities believe, to enable
> these children to go to school, as to prevent the recruiting of our
> next generation from the least intelligent and most unskilled classes
> in the community.  As long as we officially encourage and countenance
> the production of large families, the evils of child labor will
> confront us.  On the other hand, the prohibition of child labor may
> help, as in the case of English factories, in the decline of the birth
> rate.
>
> UNCONTROLLED BREEDING AND CHILD LABOR GO HAND IN HAND.  And to-day
> when we are confronted with the evils of the latter, in the form of
> widespread illiteracy and defect, we should seek causes more deeply
> rooted than the enslavement of children.  The cost to society is
> incalculable, as the National Child Labor Committee points out.  ``It
> is not only through the lowered power, the stunting and the moral
> degeneration of its individual members, but in actual expense, through
> the necessary provision for the human junk, created by premature
> employment, in poor-houses, hospitals, police and courts, jails and by
> charitable organizations.''
>
> To-day we are paying for the folly of the over-production--and its
> consequences in permanent injury to plastic childhood--of yesterday.
> To-morrow, we shall be forced to pay for our ruthless disregard of our
> surplus children of to-day.  the child-laborer of one or two decades
> ago has become the shifting laborer of to-day, stunted, underfed,
> illiterate, unskilled, unorganized and unorganizable.  ``He is the
> last person to be hired and the first to be fired.''  Boys and girls
> under fourteen years of age are no longer permitted to work in
> factories, mills, canneries and establishments whose products are to
> be shipped out of the particular state, and children under sixteen can
> no longer work in mines and quarries. But this affects only one
> quarter of our army of child labor--work in local industries, stores,
> and farms, homework in dark and unsanitary tenements is still
> permitted.  Children work in ``homes'' on artificial flowers,
> finishing shoddy garments, sewing their very life's blood and that of
> the race into tawdry clothes and gewgaws that are the most
> unanswerable comments upon our vaunted ``civilization.'' And to-day,
> we must not forget, the child-laborer of yesterday is becoming the
> father or the mother of the child laborer of to-morrow.
>
> ``Any nation that works its women is damned,'' once wrote Woods
> Hutchinson.  The nation that works its children, one is tempted to
> add, is committing suicide.  Loud-mouthed defenders of American
> democracy pay no attention to the strange fact that, although ``the
> average education among all American adults is only the sixth grade,''
> every one of these adults has an equal power at the polls.  The
> American nation, with all its worship of efficiency and thrift,
> complacently forgets that ``every child defective in body, education
> or character is a charge upon the community,'' as Herbert Hoover
> declared in an address before the American Child Hygiene Association
> (October, 1920): ``The nation as a whole,'' he added, ``has the
> obligation of such measures toward its children...as will yield to
> them an equal opportunity at their start in life.  If we could grapple
> with the whole child situation for one generation, our public health,
> our economic efficiency, the moral character, sanity and stability of
> our people would advance three generations in one.''
>
> The great irrefutable fact that is ignored or neglected is that the
> American nation officially places a low value upon the lives of its
> children.  The brutal truth is that CHILDREN ARE CHEAP.  When over-
> production in this field is curtailed by voluntary restriction, when
> the birth rate among the working classes takes a sharp decline, the
> value of children will rise. Then only will the infant mortality rate
> decline, and child labor vanish.
>
> Investigations of child labor emphasize its evils by pointing out that
> these children are kept out of school, and that they miss the
> advantages of American public school education. They express the
> current confidence in compulsory education and the magical benefits to
> be derived from the public school.  But we need to qualify our faith
> in education, and particularly our faith in the American public
> school.  Educators are just beginning to wake up to the dangers
> inherent in the attempt to teach the brightest child and the mentally
> defective child at the same time.  They are beginning to test the
> possibilities of a ``vertical'' classification as well as a
> ``horizontal'' one. That is, each class must be divided into what are
> termed Gifted, Bright, Average, Dull, Normal, and Defective.  In the
> past the helter-skelter crowding and over-crowding together of all
> classes of children of approximately the same age, produced only a
> dull leveling to mediocrity.[6]
>
> An investigation of forty schools in New York City, typical of
> hundreds of others, reveals deplorable conditions of overcrowding and
> lack of sanitation.[7]  The worst conditions are to be found in
> locations the most densely populated.  Thus of Public School No. 51,
> located almost in the center of the notorious ``Hell's Kitchen''
> section, we read: ``The play space which is provided is a mockery of
> the worst kind.  The basement play-room is dark, damp, poorly lighted,
> poorly ventilated, foul smelling, unclean, and wholly unfit for
> children for purposes of play.  The drainpipes from the roof have
> decayed to such a degree that in some instances as little as a quarter
> of the pipe remains.  On rainy days, water enters the class-rooms,
> hall-ways, corridors, and is thrown against windows because the pipes
> have rotted away.  The narrow stairways and halls are similar to those
> of jails and dungeons of a century ago.  The classrooms are poorly
> lighted, inadequately equipped, and in some cases so small that the
> desks of pupils and teachers occupy almost all of the floor-space.''
>
> Another school, located a short distance from Fifth Avenue, the
> ``wealthiest street in the world,'' is described as an ``old shell of
> a structure, erected decades ago as a modern school building.  Nearly
> two thousand children are crowded into class-rooms having a total
> seating capacity of scarcely one thousand. Narrow doorways, intricate
> hallways and antiquated stairways, dark and precipitous, keep ever
> alive the danger of disaster from fire or panic.  Only the eternal
> vigilance of exceptional supervision has served to lessen the fear of
> such a catastrophe.  Artificial light is necessary, even on the
> brightest days, in many of the class-rooms.  In most of the
> classrooms, it is always necessary when the sky is slightly
> overcast.''  There is no ventilating system.
>
> In the crowded East Side section conditions are reported to be no
> better.  The Public Education Association's report on Public School
> No. 130 points out that the site at the corner of Hester and Baxter
> Streets was purchased by the city years ago as a school site, but that
> there has been so much ``tweedledeeing and tweedleduming'' that the
> new building which is to replace the old, has not even yet been
> planned!  Meanwhile, year after year, thousands of children are
> compelled to study daily in dark and dingy class-rooms. ``Artificial
> light is continually necessary,'' declares the report.  ``The
> ventilation is extremely poor.  The fire hazard is naturally great.
> There are no rest-rooms whatever for the teachers.''  Other schools in
> the neighborhood reveal conditions even worse.  In two of them, for
> example; ``In accordance with the requirements of the syllabus in
> hygiene in the schools, the vision of the children is regularly
> tested.  In a recent test of this character, it was found in Public
> School 108, the rate of defective vision in the various grades ranged
> from 50 to 64 per cent.!  In Public School 106, the rate ranged from
> 43 to 94 per cent.!''
>
> The conditions, we are assured, are no exceptions to the rule of
> public schools in New York, where the fatal effects of overcrowding in
> education may be observed in their most sinister but significant
> aspects.
>
> The forgotten fact in this case is that efforts for universal and
> compulsory education cannot keep pace with the overproduction of
> children. Even at the best, leaving out of consideration the public
> school system as the inevitable prey and plundering-ground of the
> cheap politician and job-hunter, present methods of wholesale and
> syndicated ``education'' are not suited to compete with the unceasing,
> unthinking, untiring procreative powers of our swarming, spawning
> populations.
>
> Into such schools as described in the recent reports of the Public
> Education Association, no intelligent parent would dare send his
> child. They are not merely fire-traps and culture-grounds of
> infection, but of moral and intellectual contamination as well.  More
> and more are public schools in America becoming institutions for
> subjecting children to a narrow and reactionary orthodoxy, aiming to
> crush out all signs of individuality, and to turn out boys and girls
> compressed into a standardized pattern, with ready-made ideas on
> politics, religion, morality, and economics.  True education cannot
> grow out of such compulsory herding of children in filthy fire-traps.
>
> Character, ability, and reasoning power are not to be developed in
> this fashion.  Indeed, it is to be doubted whether even a completely
> successful educational system could offset the evils of indiscriminate
> breeding and compensate for the misfortune of being a superfluous
> child.  In recognizing the great need of education, we have failed to
> recognize the greater need of inborn health and character.  ``If it
> were necessary to choose between the task of getting children educated
> and getting them well born and healthy,'' writes Havelock Ellis, ``it
> would be better to abandon education. There have been many great
> peoples who never dreamed of national systems of education; there have
> been no great peoples without the art of producing healthy and
> vigorous children.  The matter becomes of peculiar importance in great
> industrial states, like England, the United States and Germany,
> because in such states, a tacit conspiracy tends to grow up to
> subordinate national ends to individual ends, and practically to work
> for the deterioration of the race.''[8]
>
> Much less can education solve the great problem of child labor.
> Rather, under the conditions prevailing in modern society, child labor
> and the failure of the public schools to educate are both indices of a
> more deeply rooted evil.  Both bespeak THE UNDERVALUATION OF THE
> CHILD.  This undervaluation, this cheapening of child life, is to
> speak crudely but frankly the direct result of overproduction.
> ``Restriction of output'' is an immediate necessity if we wish to
> regain control of the real values, so that unimpeded, unhindered, and
> without danger of inner corruption, humanity may protect its own
> health and powers.
>
> [1]  I am indebted to the National Child Labor Committee for these
statistics,
>      as well as for many of the facts that follow.
> [2]  ``People Who Go to Beets'' Pamphlet No. 299, National Child Labor
Committe
> e.
> [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 by syphilitic, and quarantined in a state other than Kansas.  At
> the time of her arrest, she stated that prostitution was her
> occupation.  The last child was a boy of thirteen years whose history
> was not secured....''[1]
>
> The notorious fecundity of feeble-minded women is emphasized in
> studies and investigations of the problem, coming from all countries.
> ``The feeble-minded woman is twice as prolific as the normal one.''
> Sir James Crichton-Browne speaks of the great numbers of feeble-minded
> girls, wholly unfit to become mothers, who return to the work-house
> year after year to bear children, ``many of whom happily die, but some
> of whom survive to recruit our idiot establishments and to repeat
> their mothers' performances.'' Tredgold points out that the number of
> children born to the feeble-minded is abnormally high. Feeble-minded
> women ``constitute a permanent menace to the race and one which
> becomes serious at a time when the decline of the birth-rate
> is...unmistakable.''  Dr. Tredgold points out that ``the average
> number of children born in a family is four, whereas in these
> degenerate families, we find an average of 7.3 to each.  Out of this
> total only a little more than ONE-THIRD--456 out of a total of 1,269
> children--can be considered profitable members of the community, and
> that, be it remembered, at the parents' valuation.
>
> Another significant point is the number of mentally defective children
> who survive. ``Out of the total number of 526 mentally affected
> persons in the 150 families, there are 245 in the present generation--
> an unusually large survival.''[2]
>
> Speaking for Bradford, England, Dr. Helen U. Campbell touches another
> significant and interesting point usually neglected by the advocates
> of mothers' pensions, milk-stations, and maternity-education programs.
>
> ``We are also confronted with the problem of the actually mentally
> deficient, of the more or less feeble-minded, and the deranged,
> epileptic...or otherwise mentally abnormal mother,'' writes this
> authority.  ``The `bad mothering' of these cases is quite unimprovable
> at an infant welfare center, and a very definite if not relatively
> very large percentage of our infants are suffering severely as a
> result of dependence upon such `mothering.'''[3]
>
> Thus we are brought face to face with another problem of infant
> mortality.  Are we to check the infant mortality rate among the
> feeble-minded and aid the unfortunate offspring to grow up, a menace
> to the civilized community even when not actually certifiable as
> mentally defective or not obviously imbecile?
>
> Other figures and studies indicate the close relationship between
> feeble-mindedness and the spread of venereal scourges.  We are
> informed that in Michigan, 75 per cent. of the prostitute class is
> infected with some form of venereal disease, and that 75 per cent. of
> the infected are mentally defective,--morons, imbeciles, or ``border-
> line'' cases most dangerous to the community at large.  At least 25
> per cent. of the inmates of our prisons, according to Dr. Fernald, are
> mentally defective and belong either to the feeble-minded or to the
> defective-delinquent class.  Nearly 50 per cent. of the girls sent to
> reformatories are mental defectives.  To-day, society treats feeble-
> minded or ``defective delinquent'' men or women as ``criminals,''
> sentences them to prison or reformatory for a ``term,'' and then
> releases them at the expiration of their sentences.  They are usually
> at liberty just long enough to reproduce their kind, and then they
> return again and again to prison.  The truth of this statement is
> evident from the extremely large proportion in institutions of
> neglected and dependent children, who are the feeble-minded offspring
> of such feeble-minded parents.
>
> Confronted with these shocking truths about the menace of feeble-
> mindedness to the race, a menace acute because of the unceasing and
> unrestrained fertility of such defectives, we are apt to become the
> victims of a ``wild panic for instant action.'' There is no occasion
> for hysterical, ill-considered action, specialists tell us.  They
> direct our attention to another phase of the problem, that of the so-
> called ``good feeble-minded.'' We are informed that imbecility, in
> itself, is not synonymous with badness.  If it is fostered in a
> ``suitable environment,'' it may express itself in terms of good
> citizenship and useful occupation.  It may thus be transmuted into a
> docile, tractable, and peaceable element of the community. The moron
> and the feeble-minded, thus protected, so we are assured, may even
> marry some brighter member of the community, and thus lessen the
> chances of procreating another generation of imbeciles.  We read
> further that some of our doctors believe that ``in our social scale,
> there is a place for the good feeble-minded.''
>
> In such a reckless and thoughtless differentiation between the ``bad''
> and the ``good'' feeble-minded, we find new evidence of the
> conventional middle-class bias that also finds expression among some
> of the eugenists.  We do not object to feeble-mindedness simply
> because it leads to immorality and criminality; nor can we approve of
> it when it expresses itself in docility, submissiveness and obedience.
> We object because both are burdens and dangers to the intelligence of
> the community. As a matter of fact, there is sufficient evidence to
> lead us to believe that the so-called ``borderline cases'' are a
> greater menace than the out-and-out ``defective delinquents'' who can
> be supervised, controlled and prevented from procreating their kind.
> The advent of the Binet-Simon and similar psychological tests
> indicates that the mental defective who is glib and plausible, bright
> looking and attractive, but with a mental vision of seven, eight or
> nine years, may not merely lower the whole level of intelligence in a
> school or in a society, but may be encouraged by church and state to
> increase and multiply until he dominates and gives the prevailing
> ``color''--culturally speaking--to an entire community.
>
> The presence in the public schools of the mentally defective children
> of men and women who should never have been parents is a problem that
> is becoming more and more difficult, and is one of the chief reasons
> for lower educational standards.  As one of the greatest living
> authorities on the subject, Dr. A. Tredgold, has pointed out,[4] this
> has created a destructive conflict of purpose.  ``In the case of
> children with a low intellectual capacity, much of the education at
> present provided is for all practical purposes a complete waste of
> time, money and patience....On the other hand, for children of high
> intellectual capacity, our present system does not go far enough. I
> believe that much innate potentiality remains undeveloped, even
> amongst the working classes, owing to the absence of opportunity for
> higher education, to the disadvantage of the nation.  In consequence
> of these fundamental differences, the catchword `equality of
> opportunity' is meaningless and mere claptrap in the absence of any
> equality to respond to such opportunity.  What is wanted is not
> equality of opportunity, but education adapted to individual
> potentiality; and if the time and money now spent in the fruitless
> attempt to make silk-purses out of sows' ears, were devoted to the
> higher education of children of good natural capacity, it would
> contribute enormously to national efficiency.''
>
> In a much more complex manner than has been recognized even by
> students of this problem, the destiny and the progress of civilization
> and of human expression has been hindered and held back by this burden
> of the imbecile and the moron.  While we may admire the patience and
> the deep human sympathy with which the great specialists in feeble-
> mindedness have expressed the hope of drying up the sources of this
> evil or of rendering it harmless, we should not permit sympathy or
> sentimentality to blind us to the fact that health and vitality and
> human growth likewise need cultivation.  ``A LAISSER FAIRE policy,''
> writes one investigator, ``simply allows the social sore to spread.
> And a quasi LAISSER FAIRE policy wherein we allow the defective to
> commit crime and then interfere and imprison him, wherein we grant the
> defective the personal liberty to do as he pleases, until he pleases
> to descend to a plane of living below the animal level, and try to
> care for a few of his descendants who are so helpless that they can no
> longer exercise that personal liberty to do as they please,''--such a
> policy increases and multiplies the dangers of the over-fertile
> feeble-minded.[5]
>
> The Mental Survey of the State of Oregon recently published by the
> United States Health Service, sets an excellent example and should be
> followed by every state in the Union and every civilized country as
> well.  It is greatly to the credit of the Western State that it is one
> of the first officially to recognize the primary importance of this
> problem and to realize that facts, no matter how fatal to self-
> satisfaction, must be faced.  This survey, authorized by the state
> legislature, and carried out by the University of Oregon, in
> collaboration with Dr. C. L. Carlisle of the Public Health service,
> aided by a large number of volunteers, shows that only a small
> percentage of mental defectives and morons are in the care of
> institutions.  The rest are widely scattered and their condition
> unknown or neglected.  They are docile and submissive.  they do not
> attract attention to themselves as do the criminal delinquents and the
> insane.  Nevertheless, it is estimated that they number no less than
> 75,000 men, women, and children, out of a total population of 783,000,
> or about ten per cent.  Oregon, it is thought, is no exception to
> other states.  Yet under our present conditions, these people are
> actually encouraged to increase and multiply and replenish the earth.
>
> Concerning the importance of the Oregon survey, we may quote Surgeon
> General H. C. Cumming:  ``the prevention and correction of mental
> defectives is one of the great public health problems of to-day.  It
> enters into many phases of our work and its influence continually
> crops up unexpectedly.  For instance, work of the Public Health
> Service in connection with juvenile courts shows that a marked
> proportion of juvenile delinquency is traceable to some degree of
> mental deficiency in the offender.  For years Public Health officials
> have concerned themselves only with the disorders of physical health;
> but now they are realizing the significance of mental health also.
> The work in Oregon constitutes the first state-wide survey which even
> begins to disclose the enormous drain on a state, caused by mental
> defects.  One of the objects of the work was to obtain for the people
> of Oregon an idea of the problem that confronted them and the heavy
> annual loss, both economic and industrial, that it entailed.  Another
> was to enable the legislators to devise a program that would stop much
> of the loss, restore to health and bring to lives of industrial
> usefulness, many of those now down and out, and above all, to save
> hundreds of children from growing up to lives of misery.''
>
> It will be interesting to see how many of our State Legislatures have
> the intelligence and the courage to follow in the footsteps of Oregon
> in this respect.  Nothing could more effectually stimulate discussion,
> and awaken intelligence as to the extravagance and cost to the
> community of our present codes of traditional morality.  But we should
> make sure in all such surveys, that mental defect is not concealed
> even in such dignified bodies as state legislatures and among those
> leaders who are urging men and women to reckless and irresponsible
> procreation.
>
> I have touched upon these various aspects of the complex problem of
> the feeble-minded, and the menace of the moron to human society, not
> merely for the purpose of reiterating that it is one of the greatest
> and most difficult social problems of modern times, demanding an
> immediate, stern and definite policy, but because it illustrates the
> actual harvest of reliance upon traditional morality, upon the
> biblical injunction to increase and multiply, a policy still taught by
> politician, priest and militarist.  Motherhood has been held
> universally sacred; yet, as Bouchacourt pointed out, ``to-day, the
> dregs of the human species, the blind, the deaf-mute, the degenerate,
> the nervous, the vicious, the idiotic, the imbecile, the cretins and
> the epileptics--are better protected than pregnant women.''  The
> syphilitic, the irresponsible, the feeble-minded are encouraged to
> breed unhindered, while all the powerful forces of tradition, of
> custom, or prejudice, have bolstered up the desperate effort to block
> the inevitable influence of true civilization in spreading the
> principles of independence, self-reliance, discrimination and
> foresight upon which the great practice of intelligent parenthood is
> based.
>
>  To-day we are confronted by the results of this official policy.
> There is no escaping it; there is no explaining it away.  Surely it is
> an amazing and discouraging phenomenon that the very governments that
> have seen fit to interfere in practically every phase of the normal
> citizen's life, dare not attempt to restrain, either by force or
> persuasion, the moron and the imbecile from producing his large family
> of feeble-minded offspring.
>
> In my own experience, I recall vividly the case of a feeble-minded
> girl who every year, for a long period, received the expert attention
> of a great specialist in one of the best-known maternity hospitals of
> New York City. The great obstetrician, for the benefit of interns and
> medical students, performed each year a Caesarian operation upon this
> unfortunate creature to bring into the world her defective, and, in
> one case at least, her syphilitic, infant.  ``Nelly'' was then sent to
> a special room and placed under the care of a day nurse and a night
> nurse, with extra and special nourishment provided.  Each year she
> returned to the hospital.  Such cases are not exceptions; any
> experienced doctor or nurse can recount similar stories.  In the
> interest of medical science this practice may be justified.  I am not
> criticising it from that point of view.  I realize as well as the most
> conservative moralist that humanity requires that healthy members of
> the race should make certain sacrifices to preserve from death those
> unfortunates who are born with hereditary taints.  But there is a
> point at which philanthropy may become positively dysgenic, when
> charity is converted into injustice to the self-supporting citizen,
> into positive injury to the future of the race. Such a point, it seems
> obvious, is reached when the incurably defective are permitted to
> procreate and thus increase their numbers.
>
> The problem of the dependent, delinquent and defective elements in
> modern society, we must repeat, cannot be minimized because of their
> alleged small numerical proportion to the rest of the population.  The
> proportion seems small only because we accustom ourselves to the habit
> of looking upon feeble-mindedness as a separate and distinct calamity
> to the race, as a chance phenomenon unrelated to the sexual and
> biological customs not only condoned but even encouraged by our so-
> called civilization.  The actual dangers can only be fully realized
> when we have acquired definite information concerning the financial
> and cultural cost of these classes to the community, when we become
> fully cognizant of the burden of the imbecile upon the whole human
> race; when we see the funds that should be available for human
> development, for scientific, artistic and philosophic research, being
> diverted annually, by hundreds of millions of dollars, to the care and
> segregation of men, women, and children who never should have been
> born.  The advocate of Birth Control realizes as well as all
> intelligent thinkers the dangers of interfering with personal liberty.
> Our whole philosophy is, in fact, based upon the fundamental
> assumption that man is a self-conscious, self-governing creature, that
> he should not be treated as a domestic animal; that he must be left
> free, at least within certain wide limits, to follow his own wishes in
> the matter of mating and in the procreation of children.  Nor do we
> believe that the community could or should send to the lethal chamber
> the defective progeny resulting from irresponsible and unintelligent
> breeding.
>
> But modern society, which has respected the personal liberty of the
> individual only in regard to the unrestricted and irresponsible
> bringing into the world of filth and poverty an overcrowding
> procession of infants foredoomed to death or hereditable disease, is
> now confronted with the problem of protecting itself and its future
> generations against the inevitable consequences of this long-practised
> policy of LAISSER-FAIRE.
>
> The emergency problem of segregation and sterilization must be faced
> immediately. Every feeble-minded girl or woman of the hereditary type,
> especially of the moron class, should be segregated during the
> reproductive period.  Otherwise, she is almost certain to bear
> imbecile children, who in turn are just as certain to breed other
> defectives.  The male defectives are no less dangerous.  Segregation
> carried out for one or two generations would give us only partial
> control of the problem.  Moreover, when we realize that each feeble-
> minded person is a potential source of an endless progeny of defect,
> we prefer the policy of immediate sterilization, of making sure that
> parenthood is absolutely prohibited to the feeble-minded.
>
> This, I say, is an emergency measure.  But how are we to prevent the
> repetition in the future of a new harvest of imbecility, the
> recurrence of new generations of morons and defectives, as the logical
> and inevitable consequence of the universal application of the
> traditional and widely approved command to increase and multiply?
>
> At the present moment, we are offered three distinct and more or less
> mutually exclusive policies by which civilization may hope to protect
> itself and the generations of the future from the allied dangers of
> imbecility, defect and delinquency.  No one can understand the
> necessity for Birth control education without a complete comprehension
> of the dangers, the inadequacies, or the limitations of the present
> attempts at control, or the proposed programs for social
> reconstruction and racial regeneration.  It is, therefore, necessary
> to interpret and criticize the three programs offered to meet our
> emergency.  These may be briefly summarized as follows:
>
> (1)  Philanthropy and Charity:  This is the present and traditional
> method of meeting the problems of human defect and dependence, of
> poverty and delinquency.  It is emotional, altruistic, at best
> ameliorative, aiming to meet the individual situation as it arises and
> presents itself.  Its effect in practise is seldom, if ever, truly
> preventive.  Concerned with symptoms, with the allaying of acute and
> catastrophic miseries, it cannot, if it would, strike at the radical
> causes of social misery.  At its worst, it is sentimental and
> paternalistic.
>
> (2)  Marxian Socialism:  This may be considered typical of many widely
> varying schemes of more or less revolutionary social reconstruction,
> emphasizing the primary importance of environment, education, equal
> opportunity, and health, in the elimination of the conditions (i. e.
> capitalistic control of industry) which have resulted in biological
> chaos and human waste.  I shall attempt to show that the Marxian
> doctrine is both too limited, too superficial and too fragmentary in
> its basic analysis of human nature and in its program of revolutionary
> reconstruction.
>
> (3)  Eugenics:  Eugenics seems to me to be valuable in its critical
> and diagnostic aspects, in emphasizing the danger of irresponsible and
> uncontrolled fertility of the ``unfit'' and the feeble-minded
> establishing a progressive unbalance in human society and lowering the
> birth-rate among the ``fit.'' But in its so-called ``constructive''
> aspect, in seeking to reestablish the dominance of healthy strain over
> the unhealthy, by urging an increased birth-rate among the fit, the
> Eugenists really offer nothing more farsighted than a ``cradle
> competition'' between the fit and the unfit.  They suggest in very
> truth, that all intelligent and respectable parents should take as
> their example in this grave matter of child-bearing the most
> irresponsible elements in the community.
>
> [1]  United States Public Health Service:  Psychiatric Studies of
Delinquents.
>      Reprint No. 598:  pp. 64-65.
> [2]  The Problem of the Feeble-Minded:  An Abstract of the Report of
>      the Royal Commission on the Cure and Control of the Feeble-Minded,
>      London:  P. S. King & Son.
> [3]  Cf.  Feeble-Minded in Ontario:  Fourteenth Report for the year ending
>      October 31st, 1919.
> [4]  Eugenics Review, Vol. XIII, p. 339 et seq.
> [5]  Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem:  A True Story of the Social Aspect of
>      Feeble-mindedness.  By A. C. Rogers and Maud A. Merrill; Boston
(1919).
>
>
>
> CHAPTER 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 form their barbarous forefathers a
> wild passion for instant action.''
>
> It is customary, I believe, to defend philanthropy and charity upon
> the basis of the sanctity of human life.  Yet recent events in the
> world reveal a curious contradiction in this respect.  Human life is
> held sacred, as a general Christian principle, until war is declared,
> when humanity indulges in a universal debauch of bloodshed and
> barbarism, inventing poison gases and every type of diabolic
> suggestion to facilitate killing and starvation. Blockades are
> enforced to weaken and starve civilian populations--women and
> children. This accomplished, the pendulum of mob passion swings back
> to the opposite extreme, and the compensatory emotions express
> themselves in hysterical fashion.  Philanthropy and charity are then
> unleashed.  We begin to hold human life sacred again.  We try to save
> the lives of the people we formerly sought to weaken by devastation,
> disease and starvation. We indulge in ``drives,'' in campaigns of
> relief, in a general orgy of international charity.
>
> We are thus witnessing to-day the inauguration of a vast system of
> international charity. As in our more limited communities and cities,
> where self-sustaining and self-reliant sections of the population are
> forced to shoulder the burden of the reckless and irresponsible, so in
> the great world community the more prosperous and incidentally less
> populous nations are asked to relieve and succor those countries which
> are either the victims of the wide-spread havoc of war, of
> militaristic statesmanship, or of the age-long tradition of reckless
> propagation and its consequent over-population.
>
> The people of the United States have recently been called upon to
> exercise their traditional generosity not merely to aid the European
> Relief Council in its efforts to keep alive three million, five
> hundred thousand starving children in Central Europe, but in addition
> to contribute to that enormous fund to save the thirty million Chinese
> who find themselves at the verge of starvation, owing to one of those
> recurrent famines which strike often at that densely populated and
> inert country, where procreative recklessness is encouraged as a
> matter of duty.  The results of this international charity have not
> justified the effort nor repaid the generosity to which it appealed.
> In the first place, no effort was made to prevent the recurrence of
> the disaster; in the second place, philanthropy of this type attempts
> to sweep back the tide of miseries created by unrestricted
> propagation, with the feeble broom of sentiment.  As one of the most
> observant and impartial of authorities on the Far East, J. O. P.
> Bland, has pointed out:  ``So long as China maintains a birth-rate
> that is estimated at fifty-five per thousand or more, the only
> possible alternative to these visitations would be emigration and this
> would have to be on such a scale as would speedily overrun and
> overfill the habitable globe.  Neither humanitarian schemes,
> international charities nor philanthropies can prevent widespread
> disaster to a people which habitually breeds up to and beyond the
> maximum limits of its food supply.'' Upon this point, it is
> interesting to add, Mr. Frank A. Vanderlip has likewise pointed out
> the inefficacy and misdirection of this type of international
> charity.[1]
>
> Mr. Bland further points out:  ``The problem presented is one with
> which neither humanitarian nor religious zeal can ever cope, so long
> as we fail to recognize and attack the fundamental cause of these
> calamities.  As a matter of sober fact, the benevolent activities of
> our missionary societies to reduce the deathrate by the prevention of
> infanticide and the checking of disease, actually serve in the end to
> aggravate the pressure of population upon its food-supply and to
> increase the severity of the inevitably resultant catastrophe.  What
> is needed for the prevention, or, at least, the mitigation of these
> scourges, is an organized educational propaganda, directed first
> against polygamy and the marriage of minors and the unfit, and, next,
> toward such a limitation of the birth-rate as shall approximate the
> standard of civilized countries.  But so long as Bishops and well
> meaning philanthropists in England and America continue to praise and
> encourage `the glorious fertility of the East' there can be but little
> hope of minimizing the penalties of the ruthless struggle for
> existence in China, and Nature's law will therefore continue to work
> out its own pitiless solution, weeding out every year millions of
> predestined weaklings.''
>
> This rapid survey is enough, I hope, to indicate the manifold
> inadequacies inherent in present policies of philanthropy and charity.
> The most serious charge that can be brought against modern
> ``benevolence'' is that it encourages the perpetuation of defectives,
> delinquents and dependents.  These are the most dangerous elements in
> the world community, the most devastating curse on human progress and
> expression.  Philanthropy is a gesture characteristic of modern
> business lavishing upon the unfit the profits extorted from the
> community at large.  Looked at impartially, this compensatory
> generosity is in its final effect probably more dangerous, more
> dysgenic, more blighting than the initial practice of profiteering and
> the social injustice which makes some too rich and others too poor.
>
> [1]  Birth Control Review.  Vol. V. No. 4. p. 7.
>
>
>
> CHAPTER 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 fromt 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 the proceeds to berate parsons as
> philosophers and economists, using this method of escape from the very
> pertinent question of surplus population and surplus proletariat in
> its relation to labor organization and unemployment.  It is true that
> elsewhere [2] he goes so far as to admit that ``even Malthus recognized
> over-population as a necessity of modern industry, though, after his
> narrow fashion, he explains it by the absolute over-growth of the
> laboring population, not by their becoming relatively supernumerary.''
> A few pages later, however, Marx comes back again to the question of
> over-population, failing to realize that it is to the capitalists'
> advantage that the working classes are unceasingly prolific.  ``The
> folly is now patent,'' writes the unsuspecting Marx, ``of the economic
> wisdom that preaches to the laborers the accommodation of their
> numbers to the requirements of capital.  The mechanism of capitalist
> production and accumulation constantly affects this adjustment.  The
> first work of this adaptation is the creation of a relatively surplus
> population or industrial reserve army.  Its last work is the misery of
> constantly extending strata of the army of labor, and the dead weight
> of pauperism.'' A little later he ventures again in the direction of
> Malthusianism so far as to admit that ``the accumulation of wealth at
> one pole is...at the same time the accumulation of misery, agony of
> toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality and mental degradation at the
> opposite pole.'' Nevertheless, there is no indication that Marx
> permitted himself to see that the proletariat accommodates its numbers
> to the ``requirements of capital'' precisely by breeding a large,
> docile, submissive and easily exploitable population.
>
> Had the purpose of Marx been impartial and scientific, this trifling
> difference might easily have been overcome and the dangers of reckless
> breeding insisted upon.  But beneath all this wordy pretension and
> economic jargon, we detect another aim.  That is the unconscious
> dramatization of human society into the ``class conflict.'' Nothing
> was overlooked that might sharpen and accentuate this ``conflict.''
> Marx depicted a great melodramatic conflict, in which all the virtues
> were embodied in the proletariat and all the villainies in the
> capitalist.  In the end, as always in such dramas, virtue was to be
> rewarded and villainy punished.  The working class was the temporary
> victim of a subtle but thorough conspiracy of tyranny and repression.
> Capitalists, intellectuals and the BOURGEOISIE were all ``in on'' this
> diabolic conspiracy, all thoroughly familiar with the plot, which Marx
> was so sure he had uncovered.  In the last act was to occur that
> catastrophic revolution, with the final transformation scene of the
> Socialist millenium. Presented in ``scientific'' phraseology, with all
> the authority of economic terms, ``Capital'' appeared at the
> psychological moment.  The heaven of the traditional theology had been
> shattered by Darwinian science, and here, dressed up in all the
> authority of the new science, appeared a new theology, the promise of
> a new heaven, an earthly paradise, with an impressive scale of rewards
> for the faithful and ignominious punishments for the capitalists.
>
> Critics have often been puzzled by the tremendous vitality of this
> work.  Its prediction s have never, despite the claims of the
> faithful, been fulfilled.  Instead of diminishing, the spirit of
> nationalism has been intensified tenfold.  In nearly every respect
> Marx's predictions concerning the evolution of historical and economic
> forces have been contradicted by events, culminating in the great war.
> Most of his followers, the ``revolutionary'' Socialists, were swept
> into the whirlpool of nationalistic militarism.  Nevertheless, this
> ``Bible of the working classes'' still enjoys a tremendous authority
> as a scientific work.  By some it is regarded as an economic treatise;
> by others as a philosophy of history; by others as a collection of
> sociological laws; and finally by others as a moral and political book
> of reference. Criticized, refuted, repudiated and demolished by
> specialists, it nevertheless exerts its influences and retains its
> mysterious vitality.
>
> We must seek the explanation of this secret elsewhere.  Modern
> psychology has taught us that human nature has a tendency to place the
> cause of its own deficiencies and weaknesses outside of itself, to
> attribute to some external agency, to some enemy or group of enemies,
> the blame for its own misery.  In his great work Marx unconsciously
> strengthens and encourages this tendency.  The immediate effect of his
> teaching, vulgarized and popularized in a hundred different forms, is
> to relieve the proletariat of all responsibility for the effects of
> its reckless breeding, and even to encourage it in the perpetuation of
> misery.
>
> The inherent truth in the Marxian teachings was, moreover, immediately
> subordinated to their emotional and religious appeal.  A book that
> could so influence European thought could not be without merit.  But
> in the process of becoming the ``Bible of the working classes,''
> ``Capital'' suffered the fate of all such ``Bibles.''  The spirit of
> ecclesiastical dogmatism was transfused into the religion of
> revolutionary Socialism.  This dogmatic religious quality has been
> noted by many of the most observant critics of Socialism.  Marx was
> too readily accepted as the father of the church, and ``Capital'' as
> the sacred gospel of the social revolution.  All questions of tactics,
> of propaganda, of class warfare, of political policy, were to be
> solved by apt quotations from the ``good book.'' New thoughts, new
> schemes, new programs, based upon tested fact and experience, the
> outgrowth of newer discoveries concerning the nature of men, upon the
> recognition of the mistakes of the master, could only be approved or
> admitted according as they could or could not be tested by some bit of
> text quoted from Marx.  His followers assumed that Karl Marx had
> completed the philosophy of Socialism, and that the duty of the
> proletariat thenceforth was not to think for itself, but merely to
> mobilize itself under competent Marxian leaders for the realization of
> his ideas.
>
> >From the day of this apotheosis of Marx until our own, the
> ``orthodox'' Socialist of any shade is of the belief that the first
> essential for social salvation lies in unquestioning belief in the
> dogmas of Marx.
>
> The curious and persistent antagonism to Birth Control that began with
> Marx and continues to our own day can be explained only as the utter
> refusal or inability to consider humanity in its physiological and
> psychological aspects--these aspects, apparently, having no place in
> the ``economic interpretation of history.''  It has remained for
> George Bernard Shaw, a Socialist with a keener spiritual insight than
> the ordinary Marxist, to point out the disastrous consequences of
> rapid multiplication which are obvious to the small cultivator, the
> peasant proprietor, the lowest farmhand himself, but which seem to
> arouse the orthodox, intellectual Marxian to inordinate fury.  ``But
> indeed the more you degrade the workers,'' Shaw once wrote,[3]
> ``robbing them of all artistic enjoyment, and all chance of respect
> and admiration from their fellows, the more you throw them back,
> reckless, upon the one pleasure and the one human tie left to them--
> the gratification of their instinct for producing fresh supplies of
> men. You will applaud this instinct as divine until at last the
> excessive supply becomes a nuisance: there comes a plague of men; and
> you suddenly discover that the instinct is diabolic, and set up a cry
> of `over-population.'  But your slaves are beyond caring for your
> cries:  they breed like rabbits:  and their poverty breeds filth,
> ugliness, dishonesty, disease, obscenity, drunkenness.''
>
> Lack of insight into fundamental truths of human nature is evident
> throughout  the writings of the Marxians.  The Marxian Socialists,
> according to Kautsky, defended women in industry:  it was right for
> woman to work in factories in order to preserve her equality with man!
> Man must not support woman, declared the great French Socialist
> Guesde, because that would make her the PROLETAIRE of man!  Bebel, the
> great authority on woman, famous for his erudition, having critically
> studied the problem of population, suggested as a remedy for too
> excessive fecundity the consumption of a certain lard soup reputed to
> have an ``anti-generative'' effect upon the agricultural population of
> Upper Bavaria!  Such are the results of the literal and uncritical
> acceptance of Marx's static and mechanical conception of human
> society, a society perfectly automatic; in which competition is always
> operating at maximum efficiency; one vast and unending conspiracy
> against the blameless proletariat.
>
> This lack of insight of the orthodox Marxians, long represented by the
> German Social-Democrats, is nowhere better illustrated than in Dr.
> Robinson's account of a mass meeting of the Social-Democrat party to
> organize public opinion against the doctrine of Birth Control among
> the poor.[4]  ``Another meeting had taken place the week before, at
> which several eminent Socialist women, among them Rosa Luxemburg and
> Clara Zetkin, spoke very strongly against limitation of offspring
> among the poor--in fact the title of the discussion was GEGEN DEN
> GEBURTSTREIK!  `Against the birth strike!'  The interest of the
> audience was intense.  One could see that with them it was not merely
> a dialectic question, as it was with their leaders, but a matter of
> life and death.  I came to attend a meeting AGAINST the limitation of
> offspring; it soon proved to be a meeting very decidedly FOR the
> limitation of offspring, for every speaker who spoke in favor of the
> artificial prevention of conception or undesired pregnancies, was
> greeted with vociferous, long-lasting applause; while those who tried
> to persuade the people that a limited number of children is not a
> proletarian weapon, and would not improve their lot, were so hissed
> that they had difficulty going on.  The speakers who were against
> the...idea soon felt that their audience was against them....Why was
> there such small attendance at the regular Socialistic meetings, while
> the meetings of this character were packed to suffocation?  It did not
> apparently penetrate the leaders' heads that the reason was a simple
> one.  Those meetings were evidently of no interest to them, while
> those which dealt with the limitation of offspring were of personal,
> vital, present interest....What particularly amused me--and pained me-
> -in the anti-limitationists was the ease and equanimity with which
> they advised the poor women to keep on bearing children.  The woman
> herself was not taken into consideration, as if she was not a human
> being, but a machine.  What are her sufferings, her labor pains, her
> inability to read, to attend meetings, to have a taste of life?  What
> does she amount to?  The proletariat needs fighters.  Go on, females,
> and breed like animals. Maybe of the thousands you bear a few will
> become party members....''
>
> The militant organization of the Marxian Socialists suggests that
> their campaign must assume the tactics of militarism of the familiar
> type.  As represented by militaristic governments, militarism like
> Socialism has always encouraged the proletariat to increase and
> multiply.  Imperial Germany was the outstanding and awful example of
> this attitude. Before the war the fall in the birth-rate was viewed by
> the Junker party with the gravest misgivings.  Bernhardi and the
> protagonists of DEUTSCHLAND-UBER-ALLES condemned it in the strongest
> terms.  The Marxians unconsciously repeat the words of the government
> representative, Krohne, who, in a debate on the subject in the
> Prussian Diet, February 1916, asserted: ``Unfortunately this view has
> gained followers amongst the German women....These women, in refusing
> to rear strong and able children to continue the race, drag into the
> dust that which is the highest end of women--motherhood.  It is to be
> hoped that the willingness to bear sacrifices will lead to a change
> for the better....We need an increase in human beings to guard against
> the attacks of envious neighbors as well as to fulfil our cultural
> mission.  Our whole economic development depends on increase of our
> people.''  Today we are fully aware of how imperial Germany fulfiled
> that cultural mission of hers; nor can we overlook the fact that the
> countries with a smaller birth-rate survived the ordeal.  Even from
> the traditional militaristic standpoint, strength does not reside in
> numbers, though the Caesars, the Napoleons and the Kaisers of the world
> have always believed that large exploitable populations were necessary
> for their own individual power.  If Marxian dictatorship means the
> dictatorship of a small minority wielding power in the interest of the
> proletariat, a high-birth rate may be necessary, though we may here
> recall the answer of the lamented Dr. Alfred Fried to the German
> imperialists:  ``It is madness, the apotheosis of unreason, to wish to
> breed and care for human beings in order that in the flower of their
> youth they may be sent in millions to be slaughtered wholesale by
> machinery.  We need no wholesale production of men, have no need of
> the `fruitful fertility of women,' no need of wholesale wares,
> fattened and dressed for slaughter What we do need is careful
> maintenance of those already born.  If the bearing of children is a
> moral and religious duty, then it is a much higher duty to secure the
> sacredness and security of human life, so that children born and bred
> with trouble and sacrifice may not be offered up in the bloom of youth
> to a political dogma at the bidding of secret diplomacy.''
>
> Marxism has developed a patriotism of its own, if indeed it has not
> yet been completely crystallized into a religion.  Like the
> ``capitalistic'' governments it so vehemently attacks, it demands
> self-sacrifice and even martyrdom from the faithful comrades.  But
> since its strength depends to so great a degree upon ``conversion,''
> upon docile acceptance of the doctrines of the ``Master'' as
> interpreted by the popes and bishops of this new church, it fails to
> arouse the irreligious proletariat.  The Marxian Socialist boasts of
> his understanding of ``working class psychology'' and criticizes the
> lack of this understanding on the part of all dissenters. But, as the
> Socialists' meetings against the ``birth strike'' indicate, the
> working class is not interested in such generalities as the Marxian
> ``theory of value,'' the ``iron law'' of wages, ``the value of
> commodities'' and the rest of the hazy articles of faith.  Marx
> inherited the rigid nationalistic psychology of the eighteenth
> century, and his followers, for the most part, have accepted his
> mechanical and superficial treatment of instinct.[5]  Discontented
> workers may rally to Marxism because it places the blame for their
> misery outside of themselves and depicts their conditions as the
> result of a capitalistic conspiracy, thereby satisfying that innate
> tendency of every human being to shift the blame to some living person
> outside himself, and because it strengthens his belief that his
> sufferings and difficulties may be overcome by the immediate
> amelioration of his economic environment.  In this manner,
> psychologists tell us, neuroses and inner compulsions are fostered.
> No true solution is possible, to continue this analogy, until the
> worker is awakened to the realization that the roots of his malady lie
> deep in his own nature, his own organism, his own habits.  To blame
> everything upon the capitalist and the environment produced by
> capitalism is to focus attention upon merely one of the elements of
> the problem.  The Marxian too often forgets that before there was a
> capitalist there was exercised the unlimited reproductive activity of
> mankind, which produced the first overcrowding, the first want.  This
> goaded humanity into its industrial frenzy, into warfare and theft and
> slavery.  Capitalism has not created the lamentable state of affairs
> in which the world now finds itself.  It has grown out of them, armed
> with the inevitable power to take advantage of our swarming, spawning
> millions.  As that valiant thinker Monsieur G. Hardy has pointed out [6]
> the proletariat may be looked upon, not as the antagonist of
> capitalism, but as its accomplice.  Labor surplus, or the ``army of
> reserve'' which as for decades and centuries furnished the industrial
> background of human misery, which so invariably defeats strikes and
> labor revolts, cannot honestly be blamed upon capitalism.  It is, as
> M. Hardy points out, of SEXUAL and proletarian origin.  In bringing
> too many children into the world, in adding to the total of misery, in
> intensifying the evils of overcrowding, the proletariat itself
> increases the burden of organized labor; even of the Socialist and
> Syndicalist organizations themselves with a surplus of the docilely
> inefficient, with those great uneducable and unorganizable masses.
> With surprisingly few exceptions, Marxians of all countries have
> docilely followed their master in rejecting, with bitterness and
> vindictiveness that is difficult to explain, the principles and
> teachings of Birth Control.
>
> Hunger alone is not responsible for the bitter struggle for existence
> we witness to-day in our over-advertised civilization.  Sex,
> uncontrolled, misdirected, over-stimulated and misunderstood, has run
> riot at the instigation of priest, militarist and exploiter.
> Uncontrolled sex has rendered the proletariat prostrate, the
> capitalist powerful.  In this continuous, unceasing alliance of sexual
> instinct and hunger we find the reason for the decline of all the
> finer sentiments.  These instincts tear asunder the thin veils of
> culture and hypocrisy and expose to our gaze the dark sufferings of
> gaunt humanity.  So have we become familiar with the everyday
> spectacle of distorted bodies, of harsh and frightful diseases
> stalking abroad in the light of day; of misshapen heads and visages of
> moron and imbecile; of starving children in city streets and schools.
> This is the true soil of unspeakable crimes.  Defect and delinquency
> join hands with disease, and accounts of inconceivable and revolting
> vices are dished up in the daily press.  When the majority of men and
> women are driven by the grim lash of sex and hunger in the unending
> struggle to feed themselves and to carry the dead-weight of dead and
> dying progeny, when little children are forced into factories,
> streets, and shops, education--including even education in the Marxian
> dogmas--is quite impossible; and civilization is more completely
> threatened than it ever could be by pestilence or war.
>
> But, it will be pointed out, the working class has advanced.  Power
> has been acquired by labor unions and syndicates.  In the beginning
> power was won by the principle of the restriction of numbers.  The
> device of refusing to admit more than a fixed number of new members to
> the unions of the various trades has been justified as necessary for
> the upholding of the standard of wages and of working conditions.
> This has been the practice in precisely those unions which have been
> able through years of growth and development to attain tangible
> strength and power.  Such a principle of restriction is necessary in
> the creation of a firmly and deeply rooted trunk or central
> organization furnishing a local center for more extended organization.
> It is upon this great principle of restricted number that the labor
> unions have generated and developed power.  They have acquired this
> power without any religious emotionalism, without subscribing to
> metaphysical or economic theology. For the millenium and the earthly
> paradise to be enjoyed at some indefinitely future date, the union
> member substitutes the very real politics of organization with its
> resultant benefits. He increases his own independence and comfort and
> that of his family.  He is immune to superstitious belief in and
> respect for the mysterious power of political or economic nostrums to
> reconstruct human society according to the Marxian formula.
>
> In rejecting the Marxian hypothesis as superficial and fragmentary, we
> do so not because of its so-called revolutionary character, its threat
> to the existing order of things, but rather because of its
> superficial, emotional and religious character and its deleterious
> effect upon the life of reason.  Like other schemes advanced by the
> alarmed and the indignant, it relies too much upon moral fervor and
> enthusiasm.  To build any social program upon the shifting sands of
> sentiment and feeling, of indignation or enthusiasm, is a dangerous
> and foolish task.  On the other hand, we should not minimize the
> importance of the Socialist movement in so valiantly and so
> courageously battling against the stagnating complacency of our
> conservatives and reactionaries, under whose benign imbecility the
> defective and diseased elements of humanity are encouraged ``full
> speed ahead'' in their reckless and irresponsible swarming and
> spawning. Nevertheless, as George Drysdale pointed out nearly seventy
> years ago;
>
> ``...If we ignore this and other sexual subjects, we may do whatever
> else we like: we may bully, we may bluster, we may rage, We may foam
> at the mouth; we may tear down Heaven with our prayers, we may exhaust
> ourselves with weeping over the sorrows of the poor; we may narcotize
> ourselves and others with the opiate of Christian resignation; we may
> dissolve the realities of human woe in a delusive mirage of poetry and
> ideal philosophy; we may lavish our substance in charity, and labor
> over possible or impossible Poor Laws; we may form wild dreams of
> Socialism, industrial regiments, universal brotherhood, red republics,
> or unexampled revolutions; we may strangle and murder each other, we
> may persecute and despise those whose sexual necessities force them to
> break through our unnatural moral codes; we may burn alive if we
> please the prostitutes and the adulterers; we may break our own and
> our neighbor's hearts against the adamantine laws that surround us,
> but not one step, not one shall we advance, till we acknowledge these
> laws, and adopt the only possible mode in which they can be obeyed.''
> These words were written in 1854.  Recent events have accentuated
> their stinging truth.
>
> [1]  Marx: ``Capital.''  Vol. I, p. 675.
> [2]  Op. cit. pp, 695, 707, 709.
> [3]  Fabian Essays in Socialism.  p. 21.
> [4]  Uncontrolled Breeding, By Adelyne More.  p. 84.
> [5]  For a sympathetic treatment of modern psychological research as
>      bearing on Communism, by two convinced Communists see ``Creative
>      Revolution,'' by Eden and Cedar Paul.
> [6]  Neo-Malthusianisme et Socialisme, p. 22.
>
>
>
> CHAPTER 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 ring all the
> changes possible on ``Nurture'' or environment, the Eugenist may say
> to the Socialist, but comparatively little can be effected until you
> control biological and hereditary elements of the problem. Eugenics
> thus aims to seek out the root of our trouble, to study humanity as a
> kinetic, dynamic, evolutionary organism, shifting and changing with
> the successive generations, rising and falling, cleansing itself of
> inherent defects, or under adverse and dysgenic influences, sinking
> into degeneration and deterioration.
>
> ``Eugenics'' was first defined by Sir Francis Galton in his ``Human
> Faculty'' in 1884, and was subsequently developed into a science and
> into an educational effort.  Galton's ideal was the rational breeding
> of human beings.  The aim of Eugenics, as defined by its founder, is
> to bring as many influences as can be reasonably employed, to cause
> the useful classes of the community to contribute MORE than their
> proportion to the next generation.  Eugenics thus concerns itself with
> all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race; also with
> those that develop them to the utmost advantage.  It is, in short, the
> attempt to bring reason and intelligence to bear upon HEREDITY.  But
> Galton, in spite of the immense value of this approach and his great
> stimulation to criticism, was completely unable to formulate a
> definite and practical working program.  He hoped at length to
> introduce Eugenics ``into the national conscience like a new
> religion....I see no impossibility in Eugenics becoming a religious
> dogma among mankind, but its details must first be worked out
> sedulously in the study. Over-zeal leading to hasty action, would do
> harm by holding out expectations of a new golden age, which will
> certainly be falsified and cause the science to be discredited.  The
> first and main point is to secure the general intellectual acceptance
> of Eugenics as a hopeful and most important study.  Then, let its
> principles work into the heart of the nation, who will gradually give
> practical effect to them in ways that we may not wholly foresee.''[1]
>
> Galton formulated a general law of inheritance which declared that an
> individual receives one-half of his inheritance from his two parents,
> one-fourth from his four grandparents, one-eighth from his great-
> grandparents, one-sixteenth from his great-great grandparents, and so
> on by diminishing fractions to his primordial ancestors, the sum of
> all these fractions added together contributing to the whole of the
> inherited make-up.  The trouble with this generalization, from the
> modern Mendelian point of view, is that it fails to define what
> ``characters'' one would get in the one-half that came from one's
> parents, or the one-fourth from one's grandparents.  The whole of our
> inheritance is not composed of these indefinitely made up fractional
> parts.  We are interested rather in those more specific traits or
> characters, mental or physical, which, in the Mendelian view, are
> structural and functional units, making up a mosaic rather than a
> blend.  The laws of heredity are concerned with the precise behavior,
> during a series of generations, of these specific unit characters.
> This behavior, as the study of Genetics shows, may be determined in
> lesser organisms by experiment. Once determined, they are subject to
> prophecy.
>
> The problem of human heredity is now seen to be infinitely more
> complex than imagined by Galton and his followers, and the optimistic
> hope of elevating Eugenics to the level of a religion is a futile one.
> Most of the Eugenists, including Professor Karl Pearson and his
> colleagues of the Eugenics Laboratory of the University of London and
> of the biometric laboratory in University College, have retained the
> age-old point of view of ``Nature vs. Nurture'' and have attempted to
> show the predominating influence of Heredity AS OPPOSED TO
> Environment.  This may be true; but demonstrated and repeated in
> investigation after investigation, it nevertheless remains fruitless
> and unprofitable from the practical point of view.
>
> We should not minimize the great outstanding service of Eugenics for
> critical and diagnostic investigations.  It demonstrates, not in terms
> of glittering generalization but in statistical studies of
> investigations reduced to measurement and number, that uncontrolled
> fertility is universally correlated with disease, poverty,
> overcrowding and the transmission of hereditable taints.  Professor
> Pearson and his associates show us that ``if fertility be correlated
> with anti-social hereditary characters, a population will inevitably
> degenerate.''
>
> This degeneration has already begun. Eugenists demonstrate that two-
> thirds of our manhood of military age are physically too unfit to
> shoulder a rifle; that the feeble-minded, the syphilitic, the
> irresponsible and the defective breed unhindered; that women are
> driven into factories and shops on day-shift and night-shift; that
> children, frail carriers of the torch of life, are put to work at an
> early age; that society at large is breeding an ever-increasing army
> of under-sized, stunted and dehumanized slaves; that the vicious
> circle of mental and physical defect, delinquency and beggary is
> encouraged, by the unseeing and unthinking sentimentality of our age,
> to populate asylum, hospital and prison.
>
> All these things the Eugenists sees and points out with a courage
> entirely admirable.  But as a positive program of redemption, orthodox
> Eugenics can offer nothing more ``constructive'' than a renewed
> ``cradle competition'' between the ``fit'' and the ``unfit.'' It sees
> that the most responsible and most intelligent members of society are
> the less fertile; that the feeble-minded are the more fertile.  Herein
> lies the unbalance, the great biological menace to the future of
> civilization. Are we heading to biological destruction, toward the
> gradual but certain attack upon the stocks of intelligence and racial
> health by the sinister forces of the hordes of irresponsibility and
> imbecility?  This is not such a remote danger as the optimistic
> Eugenist might suppose.  The mating of the moron with a person of
> sound stock may, as Dr. Tredgold points out, gradually disseminate
> this trait far and wide until it undermines the vigor and efficiency
> of an entire nation and an entire race.  This is no idle fancy.  We
> must take it into account if we wish to escape the fate that has
> befallen so many civilizations in the past.
>
> ``It is, indeed, more than likely that the presence of this impairment
> in a mitigated form is responsible for no little of the defective
> character, the diminution of mental and moral fiber at the present
> day,'' states Dr. Tredgold.[2] Such populations, this distinguished
> authority might have added, form the veritable ``cultures'' not only
> for contagious physical diseases but for mental instability and
> irresponsibility also. They are susceptible, exploitable, hysterical,
> non-resistant to external suggestion.  Devoid of stamina, such folk
> become mere units in a mob.  ``The habit of crowd-making is daily
> becoming a more serious menace to civilization,'' writes Everett Dean
> Martin.  ``Our society is becoming a veritable babel of gibbering
> crowds.''[3]  It would be only the incorrigible optimist who refused to
> see the integral relation between this phenomenon and the
> indiscriminate breeding by which we recruit our large populations.
>
> The danger of recruiting our numbers from the most ``fertile stocks''
> is further emphasized when we recall that in a democracy like that of
> the United States every man and woman is permitted a vote in the
> government, and that it is the representatives of this grade of
> intelligence who may destroy our liberties, and who may thus be the
> most far-reaching peril to the future of civilization.
>
> ``It is a pathological worship of mere number,'' writes Alleyne
> Ireland, ``which has inspired all the efforts--the primary, the direct
> election of Senators, the initiative, the recall and the referendum--
> to cure the evils of mob rule by increasing the size of the mob and
> extending its powers.''[4]
>
> Equality of political power has thus been bestowed upon the lowest
> elements of our population.  We must not be surprised, therefore, at
> the spectacle of political scandal and graft, of the notorious and
> universally ridiculed low level of intelligence and flagrant stupidity
> exhibited by our legislative bodies. The Congressional Record mirrors
> our political imbecility.
>
> All of these dangers and menaces are acutely realized by the
> Eugenists; it is to them that we are most indebted for the proof that
> reckless spawning carries with it the seeds of destruction.  But
> whereas the Galtonians reveal themselves as unflinching in their
> investigation and in their exhibition of fact and diagnoses of
> symptoms, they do not on the other hand show much power in suggesting
> practical and feasible remedies.
>
> On its scientific side, Eugenics suggests the reestabilishment of the
> balance between the fertility of the ``fit'' and the ``unfit.''  The
> birth-rate among the normal and healthier and finer stocks of
> humanity, is to be increased by awakening among the ``fit'' the
> realization of the dangers of a lessened birth-rate in proportion to
> the reckless breeding among the ``unfit.''  By education, by
> persuasion, by appeals to racial ethics and religious motives, the
> ardent Eugenist hopes to increase the fertility of the ``fit.''
> Professor Pearson thinks that it is especially necessary to awaken the
> hardiest stocks to this duty.  These stocks, he says, are to be found
> chiefly among the skilled artisan class, the intelligent working
> class.  Here is a fine combination of health and hardy vigor, of sound
> body and sound mind.
>
> Professor Pearson and his school of biometrics here ignore or at least
> fail to record one of those significant ``correlations'' which form
> the basis of his method.  The publications of the Eugenics Laboratory
> all tend to show that a high rate of fertility is correlated with
> extreme poverty, recklessness, deficiency and delinquency; similarly,
> that among the more intelligent, this rate of fertility decreases. But
> the scientific Eugenists fail to recognize that this restraint of
> fecundity is due to a deliberate foresight and is a conscious effort
> to elevate standards of living for the family and the children of the
> responsible--and possibly more selfish--sections of the community.
> The appeal to enter again into competitive child-bearing, for the
> benefit of the nation or the race, or any other abstraction, will fall
> on deaf ears.
>
> Pearson has done invaluable work in pointing out the fallacies and the
> false conclusions of the ordinary statisticians.  But when he attempts
> to show by the methods of biometrics that not only the first child but
> also the second, are especially liable to suffer from transmissible
> pathological defects, such as insanity, criminality and tuberculosis,
> he fails to recognize that this tendency is counterbalanced by the
> high mortality rate among later children.  If first and second
> children reveal a greater percentage of heritable defect, it is
> because the later born children are less liable to survive the
> conditions produced by a large family.
>
> In passing, we should here recognize the difficulties presented by the
> idea of ``fit'' and ``unfit.'' Who is to decide this question?  The
> grosser, the more obvious, the undeniably feeble-minded should,
> indeed, not only be discouraged but prevented from propagating their
> kind.  But among the writings of the representative Eugenists one
> cannot ignore the distinct middle-class bias that prevails.  As that
> penetrating critic, F. W. Stella Browne, has said in another
> connection, ``The Eugenics Education Society has among its numbers
> many most open-minded and truly progressive individuals but the
> official policy it has pursued for years has been inspired by class-
> bias and sex bias.  The society laments with increasing vehemence the
> multiplication of the less fortunate classes at a more rapid rate than
> the possessors of leisure and opportunity. (I do not think it relevant
> here to discuss whether the innate superiority of endowment in the
> governing class really is so overwhelming as to justify the Eugenics
> Education Society's peculiar use of the terms `fit' and `unfit'!) Yet
> it has persistently refused to give any help toward extending the
> knowledge of contraceptives to the exploited classes.  Similarly,
> though the Eugenics Review, the organ of the society, frequently
> laments the `selfishness' of the refusal of maternity by healthy and
> educated women of the professional classes, I have yet to learn that
> it has made any official pronouncement on the English illegitimacy
> laws or any organized effort toward defending the unmarried mother.''
>
> This peculiarly Victorian reticence may be inherited from the founder
> of Eugenics. Galton declared that the ``Bohemian'' element in the
> Anglo-Saxon race is destined to perish, and ``the sooner it goes, the
> happier for mankind.''  The trouble with any effort of trying to
> divide humanity into the ``fit'' and the ``unfit,'' is that we do not
> want, as H. G. Wells recently pointed out,[5] to breed for uniformity
> but for variety.  ``We want statesmen and poets and musicians and
> philosophers and strong men and delicate men and brave men. The
> qualities of one would be the weaknesses of the other.''  We want,
> most of all, genius.
>
> Proscription on Galtonian lines would tend to eliminate many of the
> great geniuses of the world who were not only ``Bohemian,'' but
> actually and pathologically abnormal--men like Rousseau, Dostoevsky,
> Chopin, Poe, Schumann, Nietzsche, Comte, Guy de Maupassant,--and how
> many others?  But such considerations should not lead us into error of
> concluding that such men were geniuses merely because  they were
> pathological specimens, and that the only way to produce a genius is
> to breed disease and defect.  It only emphasizes the dangers of
> external standards of ``fit'' and ``unfit.''
>
> These limitations are more strikingly shown in the types of so-called
> ``eugenic'' legislation passed or proposed by certain enthusiasts.
> Regulation, compulsion and prohibitions affected and enacted by
> political bodies are the surest methods of driving the whole problem
> under-ground.  As Havelock Ellis has pointed out, the absurdity and
> even hopelessness of effecting Eugenic improvement by placing on the
> statute books prohibitions of legal matrimony to certain classes of
> people, reveal the weakness of those Eugenists who minimize or
> undervalue the importance of environment as a determining factor.
> They affirm that heredity is everything and environment nothing, yet
> forget that it is precisely those who are most universally subject to
> bad environment who procreate most copiously, most recklessly and most
> disastrously.  Such marriage laws are based for the most part on the
> infantile assumption that procreation is absolutely dependent upon the
> marriage ceremony, an assumption usually coupled with the
> complementary one that the only purpose in marriage is procreation.
> Yet it is a fact so obvious that it is hardly worth stating that the
> most fertile classes who indulge in the most dysgenic type of
> procreating--the feeble-minded--are almost totally unaffected by
> marriage laws and marriage-ceremonies.
>
> As for the sterilization of habitual criminals, not merely must we
> know more of heredity and genetics in general, but also acquire more
> certainty of the justice of our laws and the honesty of their
> administration before we can make rulings of fitness or unfitness
> merely upon the basis of a respect for law.  On this point the eminent
> William Bateson writes:[6]  ``Criminals are often feeble-minded, but as
> regards those that are not, the fact that a man is for the purposes of
> Society classified as a criminal, tells me little as to his value,
> still less as to the possible value of his offspring.  It is a fault
> inherent in criminal jurisprudence, based on non-biological data, that
> the law must needs take the nature of the offenses rather than that of
> the offenders as the basis of classification.  A change in the right
> direction has begun, but the problem is difficult and progress will be
> very slow....We all know of persons convicted, perhaps even
> habitually, whom the world could ill spare.  Therefore I hesitate to
> proscribe the criminal.  Proscription...is a weapon with a very nasty
> recoil.  Might not some with equal cogency proscribe army contractors
> and their accomplices, the newspaper patriots?  The crimes of the
> prison population are petty offenses by comparison, and the
> significance we attach to them is a survival of other days.  Felonies
> may be great events, locally, but they do not induce catastrophies.
> The proclivities of the war-makers are infinitely more dangerous than
> those of the aberrant beings whom from time to time the law may dub as
> criminal.  Consistent and potentous selfishness, combined with dulness
> of imagination is probably just as transmissible as want of self-
> control, though destitute of the amiable qualities not rarely
> associated with the genetic composition of persons of unstable mind.''
>
> In this connection, we should note another type of ``respectable''
> criminality noted by Havelock Ellis:  ``If those persons who raise the
> cry of `race-suicide' in face of the decline of the birth-rate really
> had the knowledge and the intelligence to realize the manifold evils
> which they are invoking, they would deserve to be treated as
> criminals.''
>
> Our debt to the science of Eugenics is great in that it directs our
> attention to the biological nature of humanity.  Yet there is too
> great a tendency among the thinkers of this school, to restrict their
> ideas of sex to its expression as a purely procreative function.
> Compulsory legislation which would make the inevitably futile attempt
> to prohibit one of the most beneficent and necessary of human
> expressions, or regulate it into the channels of preconceived
> philosophies, would reduce us to the unpleasant days predicted by
> William Blake, when
>
> ``Priests in black gowns will be walking their rounds And binding
> with briars our joys and desires.''
>
> Eugenics is chiefly valuable in its negative aspects.  It is
> ``negative Eugenics'' that has studied the histories of such families
> as the Jukeses and the Kallikaks, that has pointed out the network of
> imbecility and feeble-mindedness that has been sedulously spread
> through all strata of society.  On its so-called positive or
> constructive side, it fails to awaken any permanent interest.
> ``Constructive'' Eugenics aims to arouse the enthusiasm or the
> interest of the people in the welfare of the world fifteen or twenty
> generations in the future.  On its negative side it shows us that we
> are paying for and even submitting to the dictates of an ever
> increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never
> should have been born at all--that the wealth of individuals and of
> states is being diverted from the development and the progress of
> human expression and civilization.
>
> While it is necessary to point out the importance of ``heredity'' as a
> determining factor in human life, it is fatal to elevate it to the
> position of an absolute.  As with environment, the concept of heredity
> derives its value and its meaning only in so far as it is embodied and
> made concrete in generations of living organisms.  Environment and
> heredity are not antagonistic.  Our problem is not that of ``Nature
> vs. Nurture,'' but rather of Nature x  Nurture, of heredity multiplied
> by environment, if we may express it thus.  The Eugenist who overlooks
> the importance of environment as a determining factor in human life,
> is as short-sighted as the Socialist who neglects the biological
> nature of man.  We cannot disentangle these two forces, except in
> theory.  To the child in the womb, said Samuel Butler, the mother is
> ``environment.'' She is, of course, likewise ``heredity.''  The age-
> old discussion of ``Nature vs. Nurture'' has been threshed out time
> after time, usually fruitlessly, because of a failure to recognize the
> indivisibility of these biological factors. The opposition or
> antagonism between them is an artificial and academic one, having no
> basis in the living organism.
>
> The great principle of Birth Control offers the means whereby the
> individual may adapt himself to and even control the forces of
> environment and heredity.  Entirely apart from its Malthusian aspect
> or that of the population question, Birth Control must be recognized,
> as the Neo-Malthusians pointed out long ago, not ``merely as the key
> of the social position,'' and the only possible and practical method
> of human generation, but as the very pivot of civilization.  Birth
> Control which has been criticized as negative and destructive, is
> really the greatest and most truly eugenic method, and its adoption as
> part of the program of Eugenics would immediately give a concrete and
> realistic power to that science.  As a matter of fact, Birth Control
> has been accepted by the most clear thinking and far seeing of the
> Eugenists themselves as the most constructive and necessary of the
> means to racial health.[7]
>
> [1]  Galton.  Essays in Eugenics, p. 43.
> [2]  Eugenics Review, Vol. XIII, p. 349.
> [3]  Cf. Martin, The Behavior of Crowds, p. 6.
> [4]  Cf. Democracy and the Human Equation.  E. P. Dutton & Co., 1921.
> [5]  Cf. The Salvaging of Civilization.
> [6]  Common Sense in Racial Problems.  By W. Bateson, M. A. A., F. R. S.
> [7]  Among these are Dean W. R. Inge, Professor J. Arthur Thomson,
>      Dr. Havelock Ellis, Professor William Bateson, Major Leonard Darwin
>      and Miss Norah March.
>
>
>
> CHAPTER 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 fore a time successful not merely
> in influencing the conduct of their adherents but in checking freedom
> of thought and discussion.  To this, with all the vehemence of
> emphasis at our command, we object.  From what Archbishop Hayes
> believes concerning the future blessedness in Heaven of the souls of
> those who are born into this world as hideous and misshapen beings he
> has a right to seek such consolation as may be obtained; but we who
> are trying to better the conditions of this world believe that a
> healthy, happy human race is more in keeping with the laws of God,
> than disease, misery and poverty perpetuating itself generation after
> generation.  Furthermore, while conceding to Catholic or other
> churchmen full freedom to preach their own doctrines, whether of
> theology or morals, nevertheless when they attempt to carry these
> ideas into legislative acts and force their opinions and codes upon
> the non-Catholics, we consider such action an interference with the
> principles of democracy and we have a right to protest.
>
> Religious propaganda against Birth Control is crammed with
> contradiction and fallacy. It refutes itself.  Yet it brings the
> opposing views into vivid contrast.  In stating these differences we
> should make clear that advocates of Birth Control are not seeking to
> attack the Catholic church.  We quarrel with that church, however,
> when it seeks to assume authority over non-Catholics and to dub their
> behavior immoral because they do not conform to the dictatorship of
> Rome.  The question of bearing and rearing children we hold is the
> concern of the mother and the potential mother.  If she delegates the
> responsibility, the ethical education, to an external authority, that
> is her affair.  We object, however, to the State or the Church which
> appoints itself as arbiter and dictator in this sphere and attempts to
> force unwilling women into compulsory maternity.
>
> When Catholics declare that ``The authorities at Rome have again and
> again declared that all positive methods of this nature are immoral
> and forbidden,'' they do so upon the assumption that morality consists
> in conforming to laws laid down and enforced by external authority, in
> submission to decrees and dicta imposed from without.  In this case,
> they decide in a wholesale manner the conduct of millions, demanding
> of them not the intelligent exercise of their own individual judgment
> and discrimination, but unquestioning submission and conformity to
> dogma.  The Church thus takes the place of all-powerful parents, and
> demands of its children merely that they should obey.  In my belief
> such a philosophy hampers the development of individual intelligence.
> Morality then becomes a more or less successful attempt to conform to
> a code, instead of an attempt to bring reason and intelligence to bear
> upon the solution of each individual human problem.
>
> But, we read on, Birth Control methods are not merely contrary to
> ``moral law,'' but forbidden because they are ``unnatural,'' being
> ``the perversion of a natural function.'' This, of course, is the
> weakest link in the whole chain.  Yet ``there is no question of the
> lawfulness of birth restriction through abstinence''--as though
> abstinence itself were not unnatural!  For more than a thousand years
> the Church was occupied with the problem of imposing abstinence on its
> priesthood, its most educated and trained body of men, educated to
> look upon asceticism as the finest ideal; it took one thousand years
> to convince the Catholic priesthood that abstinence was ``natural'' or
> practicable.[3]  Nevertheless, there is still this talk of abstinence,
> self-control, and self-denial, almost in the same breath with the
> condemnation of Birth Control as ``unnatural.''
>
> If it is our duty to act as ``cooperators with the Creator'' to bring
> children into the world, it is difficult to say at what point our
> behavior is ``unnatural.''  If it is immoral and ``unnatural'' to
> prevent an unwanted life from coming into existence, is it not immoral
> and ``unnatural'' to remain unmarried from the age of puberty?  Such
> casuistry is unconvincing and feeble.  We need only point out that
> rational intelligence is also a ``natural'' function, and that it is
> as imperative for us to use the faculties of judgment, criticism,
> discrimination of choice, selection and control, all the faculties of
> the intelligence, as it is to use those of reproduction.  It is
> certainly dangerous ``to frustrate the natural ends for which these
> faculties were created.''  This also, is always intrinsically wrong--
> as wrong as lying and blasphemy--and infinitely more devastating.
> Intelligence is as natural to us as any other faculty, and it is fatal
> to moral development and growth to refuse to use it and to delegate to
> others the solution of our individual problems. The evil will not be
> that one's conduct is divergent from current and conventional moral
> codes.  There may be every outward evidence of conformity, but this
> agreement may be arrived at, by the restriction and suppression of
> subjective desires, and the more or less successful attempt at mere
> conformity.  Such ``morality'' would conceal an inner conflict. The
> fruits of this conflict would be neurosis and hysteria on the one
> hand; or concealed gratification of suppressed desires on the other,
> with a resultant hypocrisy and cant.  True morality cannot be based on
> conformity. There must be no conflict between subjective desire and
> outward behavior.
>
> To object to these traditional and churchly ideas does not by any
> means imply that the doctrine of Birth Control is anti-Christian. On
> the contrary, it may be profoundly in accordance with the Sermon on
> the Mount.  One of the greatest living theologians and most
> penetrating students of the problems of civilization is of this
> opinion.  In an address delivered before the Eugenics Education
> Society of London,[4] William Ralph Inge, the Very Reverend Dean of
> St. Paul's Cathedral, London, pointed out that the doctrine of Birth
> Control was to be interpreted as of the very essence of Christianity.
>
> ``We should be ready to give up all our theories,'' he asserted, ``if
> science proved that we were on the wrong lines.  And we can
> understand, though we profoundly disagree with, those who oppose us on
> the grounds of authority....We know where we are with a man who says,
> `Birth Control is forbidden by God; we prefer poverty, unemployment,
> war, the physical, intellectual and moral degeneration of the people,
> and a high deathrate to any interference with the universal command to
> be fruitful and multiply'; but we have no patience with those who say
> that we can have unrestricted and unregulated propagation without
> those consequences.  It is a great part of our work to press home to
> the public mind the alternative that lies before us.  Either rational
> selection must take the place of the natural selection which the
> modern State will not allow to act, or we must go on deteriorating.
> When we can convince the public of this, the opposition of organized
> religion will soon collapse or become ineffective.''  Dean Inge
> effectively answers those who have objected to the methods of Birth
> Control as ``immoral'' and in contradiction and inimical to the
> teachings of Christ.  Incidentally he claims that those who are not
> blinded by prejudices recognize that ``Christianity aims at saving the
> soul--the personality, the nature, of man, not his body or his
> environment.  According to Christianity, a man is saved, not by what
> he has, or knows, or does, but by what he is.  It treats all the
> apparatus of life with a disdain as great as that of the biologist; so
> long as a man is inwardly healthy, it cares very little whether he is
> rich or poor, learned or simple, and even whether he is happy, or
> unhappy.  It attaches no importance to quantitative measurements of
> any kind.  The Christian does not gloat over favorable trade-
> statistics, nor congratulate himself on the disparity between the
> number of births and deaths.  For him...the test of the welfare of a
> country is the quality of human beings whom it produces.  Quality is
> everything, quantity is nothing.  And besides this, the Christian
> conception of a kingdom of God upon the earth teaches us to turn our
> eyes to the future, and to think of the welfare of posterity as a
> thing which concerns us as much as that of our own generation.  This
> welfare, as conceived by Christianity, is of course something
> different from external prosperity; it is to be the victory of
> intrinsic worth and healthiness over all the false ideals and deep-
> seated diseases which at present spoil civilization.''
>
> ``It is not political religion with which I am concerned,'' Dean Inge
> explained, ``but the convictions of really religious persons; and I do
> not think that we need despair of converting them to our views.''
>
> Dean Inge believes Birth Control is an essential part of Eugenics, and
> an essential part of Christian morality.  On this point he asserts:
> ``We do wish to remind our orthodox and conservative friends that the
> Sermon on the Mount contains some admirably clear and unmistakable
> eugenic precepts.  `Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of
> thistles?  A corrupt tree cannot bring forth good fruit, neither can a
> good tree bring forth evil fruit.  Every tree which bringeth not forth
> good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.'  We wish to apply
> these words not only to the actions of individuals, which spring from
> their characters, but to the character of individuals, which spring
> from their inherited qualities.  This extension of the scope of the
> maxim seems to me quite legitimate.  Men do not gather grapes of
> thorns. As our proverb says, you cannot make a silk purse out of a
> sow's ear.  If we believe this, and do not act upon it by trying to
> move public opinion towards giving social reform, education and
> religion a better material to work upon, we are sinning against the
> light, and not doing our best to bring in the Kingdom of God upon
> earth.''
>
> As long as sexual activity is regarded in a dualistic and
> contradictory light,--in which it is revealed either as the instrument
> by which men and women ``cooperate with the Creator'' to bring
> children into the world, on the one hand; and on the other, as the
> sinful instrument of self-gratification, lust and sensuality, there is
> bound to be an endless conflict in human conduct, producing ever
> increasing misery, pain and injustice.  In crystallizing and codifying
> this contradiction, the Church not only solidified its own power over
> men but reduced women to the most abject and prostrate slavery.  It
> was essentially a morality that would not ``work.''  The sex instinct
> in the human race is too strong to be bound by the dictates of any
> church. The church's failure, its century after century of failure, is
> now evident on every side:  for, having convinced men and women that
> only in its baldly propagative phase is sexual expression legitimate,
> the teachings of the Church have driven sex under-ground, into secret
> channels, strengthened the conspiracy of silence, concentrated men's
> thoughts upon the ``lusts of the body,'' have sown, cultivated and
> reaped a crop of bodily and mental diseases, and developed a society
> congenitally and almost hopelessly unbalanced.  How is any progress to
> be made, how is any human expression or education possible when women
> and men are taught to combat and resist their natural impulses and to
> despise their bodily functions?
>
> Humanity, we are glad to realize, is rapidly freeing itself from this
> ``morality'' imposed upon it by its self-appointed and self-
> perpetuating masters.  From a hundred different points the imposing
> edifice of this ``morality'' has been and is being attacked.  Sincere
> and thoughtful defenders and exponents of the teachings of Christ now
> acknowledge the falsity of the traditional codes and their malignant
> influence upon the moral and physical well-being of humanity.
>
> Ecclesiastical opposition to Birth Control on the part of certain
> representatives of the Protestant churches, based usually on
> quotations from the Bible, is equally invalid, and for the same
> reason.  The attitude of the more intelligent and enlightened clergy
> has been well and succinctly expressed by Dean Inge, who, referring to
> the ethics of Birth Control, writes: ``THIS IS EMPHATICALLY A MATTER
> IN WHICH EVERY MAN AND WOMAN MUST JUDGE FOR THEMSELVES, AND MUST
> REFRAIN FROM JUDGING OTHERS.''  We must not neglect the important fact
> that it is not merely in the practical results of such a decision, not
> in the small number of children, not even in the healthier and better
> cared for children, not in the possibility of elevating the living
> conditions of the individual family, that the ethical value of Birth
> Control alone lies. Precisely because the practice of Birth Control
> does demand the exercise of decision, the making of choice, the use of
> the reasoning powers, is it an instrument of moral education as well
> as of hygienic and racial advance.  It awakens the attention of
> parents to their potential children.  It forces upon the individual
> consciousness the question of the standards of living.  In a profound
> manner it protects and reasserts the inalienable rights of the child-
> to-be.
>
> Psychology and the outlook of modern life are stressing the growth of
> independent responsibility and discrimination as the true basis of
> ethics.  The old traditional morality, with its train of vice,
> disease, promiscuity and prostitution, is in reality dying out,
> killing itself off because it is too irresponsible and too dangerous
> to individual and social well-being. The transition from the old to
> the new, like all fundamental changes, is fraught with many dangers.
> But it is a revolution that cannot be stopped.
>
> The smaller family, with its lower infant mortality rate, is, in more
> definite and concrete manner than many actions outwardly deemed
> ``moral,'' the expression of moral judgment and responsibility.  It is
> the assertion of a standard of living, inspired by the wish to obtain
> a fuller and more expressive life for the children than the parents
> have enjoyed.  If the morality or immorality of any course of conduct
> is to be determined by the motives which inspire it, there is
> evidently at the present day no higher morality than the intelligent
> practice of Birth Control.
>
> The immorality of many who practise Birth Control lies in not daring
> to preach what they practise.  What is the secret of the hypocrisy of
> the well-to-do, who are willing to contribute generously to charities
> and philanthropies, who spend thousands annually in the upkeep and
> sustenance of the delinquent, the defective and the dependent; and yet
> join the conspiracy of silence that prevents the poorer classes from
> learning how to improve their conditions, and elevate their standards
> of living?  It is as though they were to cry:  ``We'll give you
> anything except the thing you ask for--the means whereby you may
> become responsible and self-reliant in your own lives.''
>
> The brunt of this injustice falls on women, because the old
> traditional morality is the invention of men.  ``No religion, no
> physical or moral code,'' wrote the clear-sighted George Drysdale,
> ``proposed by one sex for the other, can be really suitable.  Each
> must work out its laws for itself in every department of life.'' In
> the moral code developed by the Church, women have been so degraded
> that they have been habituated to look upon themselves through the
> eyes of men.  Very imperfectly have women developed their own self-
> consciousness, the realization of their tremendous and supreme
> position in civilization.  Women can develop this power only in one
> way; by the exercise of responsibility, by the exercise of judgment,
> reason or discrimination.  They need ask for no ``rights.''  They need
> only assert power.  Only by the exercise of self-guidance and
> intelligent self-direction can that inalienable, supreme, pivotal
> power be expressed.  More than ever in history women need to realize
> that nothing can ever come to us from another.  Everything we attain
> we must owe to ourselves.  Our own spirit must vitalize it.  Our own
> heart must feel it.  For we are not passive machines.  We are not to
> be lectured, guided and molded this way or that.  We are alive and
> intelligent, we women, no less than men, and we must awaken to the
> essential realization that we are living beings, endowed with will,
> choice, comprehension, and that every step in life must be taken at
> our own initiative.
>
> Moral and sexual balance in civilization will only be established by
> the assertion and expression of power on the part of women. This power
> will not be found in any futile seeking for economic independence or
> in the aping of men in industrial and business pursuits, nor by
> joining battle for the so-called ``single standard.''  Woman's power
> can only be expressed and make itself felt when she refuses the task
> of bringing unwanted children into the world to be exploited in
> industry and slaughtered in wars.  When we refuse to produce
> battalions of babies to be exploited; when we declare to the nation;
> ``Show us that the best possible chance in life is given to every
> child now brought into the world, before you cry for more!  At present
> our children are a glut on the market.  You hold infant life cheap.
> Help us to make the world a fit place for children.  When you have
> done this, we will bear you children,--then we shall be true women.''
> The new morality will express this power and responsibility on the
> part of women.
>
> ``With the realization of the moral responsibility of women,'' writes
> Havelock Ellis, ``the natural relations of life spring back to their
> due biological adjustment.  Motherhood is restored to its natural
> sacredness.  It becomes the concern of the woman herself, and not of
> society nor any individual, to determine the conditions under which
> the child shall be conceived....''
>
> Moreover, woman shall further assert her power by refusing to remain
> the passive instrument of sensual self-gratification on the part of
> men.  Birth Control, in philosophy and practice, is the destroyer of
> that dualism of the old sexual code.  It denies that the sole purpose
> of sexual activity is procreation; it also denies that sex should be
> reduced to the level of sensual lust, or that woman should permit
> herself to be the instrument of its satisfaction. In increasing and
> differentiating her love demands, woman must elevate sex into another
> sphere, whereby it may subserve and enhance the possibility of
> individual and human expression.  Man will gain in this no less than
> woman; for in the age-old enslavement of woman he has enslaved
> himself; and in the liberation of womankind, all of humanity will
> experience the joys of a new and fuller freedom.
>
> On this great fundamental and pivotal point new light has been thrown
> by Lord Bertrand Dawson, the physician of the King of England. In the
> remarkable and epoch-making address at the Birmingham Church Congress
> (referred to in my introduction), he spoke of the supreme morality of
> the mutual and reciprocal joy in the most intimate relation between
> man and woman.  Without this reciprocity there can be no civilization
> worthy of the name. Lord Dawson suggested that there should be added
> to the clauses of marriage in the Prayer Book ``the complete
> realization of the love of this man and this woman one for another,''
> and in support of his contention declared that sex love between
> husband and wife--apart from parenthood--was something to prize and
> cherish for its own sake.  The Lambeth Conference, he remarked,
> ``envisaged a love invertebrate and joyless,'' whereas, in his view,
> natural passion in wedlock was not a thing to be ashamed of or unduly
> repressed.  The pronouncement of the Church of England, as set forth
> in Resolution 68 of the Lambeth Conference seems to imply condemnation
> of sex love as such, and to imply sanction of sex love only as a means
> to an end,--namely, procreation.  The Lambeth Resolution stated:
>
> ``In opposition to the teaching which under the name of science and
> religion encourages married people in the deliberate cultivation of
> sexual union as an end in itself, we steadfastly uphold what must
> always be regarded as the governing considerations of Christian
> marriage.  One is the primary purpose for which marriage exists--
> namely, the continuation of the race through the gift and heritage of
> children; the other is the paramount importance in married life of
> deliberate and thoughtful self-control.''
>
> In answer to this point of view Lord Dawson asserted:
>
> ``Sex love has, apart from parenthood, a purport of its own.  It is
> something to prize and to cherish for its own sake.  It is an
> essential part of health and happiness in marriage. And now, if you
> will allow me, I will carry this argument a step further.  If sexual
> union is a gift of God it is worth learning how to use it. Within its
> own sphere it should be cultivated so as to bring physical
> satisfaction to both, not merely to one....The real problems before us
> are those of sex love and child love; and by sex love I mean that love
> which involves intercourse or the desire for such.  It is necessary to
> my argument to emphasize that sex love is one of the dominating forces
> of the world. Not only does history show the destinies of nations and
> dynasties determined by its sway--but here in our every-day life we
> see its influence, direct or indirect, forceful and ubiquitous beyond
> aught else.  Any statesmanlike view, therefore, will recognize that
> here we have an instinct so fundamental, so imperious, that its
> influence is a fact which has to be accepted; suppress it you cannot.
> You may guide it into healthy channels, but an outlet it will have,
> and if that outlet is inadequate and unduly obstructed irregular
> channels will be forced....
>
> ``The attainment of mutual and reciprocal joy in their relations
> constitutes a firm bond between two people, and makes for durability
> of the marriage tie.  Reciprocity in sex love is the physical
> counterpart of sympathy.  More marriages fail from inadequate and
> clumsy sex love than from too much sex love.  The lack of proper
> understanding is in no small measure responsible for the unfulfilment
> 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
> matter, hold up their pious hands and whiten their frightened faces as
> they cry out in the public squares against `this vice,' but they can
> only make themselves ridiculous.''
>
> Taught upon the basis of conventional and traditional morality and
> middle-class respectability, based on current dogma, and handed down
> to the populace with benign condescension, sex education is a waste of
> time and effort. Such education cannot in any true sense set up as a
> standard the ideal morality and behavior of the respectable middle-
> class and then make the effort to induce all other members of society,
> especially the working classes, to conform to their taboos.  Such a
> method is not only confusing, but, in the creation of strain and
> hysteria and an unhealthy concentration upon moral conduct, results in
> positive injury.  To preach a negative and colorless ideal of chastity
> to young men and women is to neglect the primary duty of awakening
> their intelligence, their responsibility, their self-reliance and
> independence.  Once this is accomplished, the matter of chastity will
> take care of itself.  The teaching of ``etiquette''  must be
> superseded by the teaching of hygiene. Hygienic habits are built up
> upon a sound knowledge of bodily needs and functions.  It is only in
> the sphere of sex that there remains an unfounded fear of presenting
> without the gratuitous introduction of non-essential taboos and
> prejudice, unbiased and unvarnished facts.
>
> As an instrument of education, the doctrine of Birth Control
> approaches the whole problem in another manner.  Instead of laying
> down hard and fast laws of sexual conduct, instead of attempting to
> inculcate rules and regulations, of pointing out the rewards of virtue
> and the penalties of ``sin'' (as is usually attempted in relation to
> the venereal diseases), the teacher of Birth Control seeks to meet the
> needs of the people.  Upon the basis of their interests, their
> demands, their problems, Birth Control education attempts to develop
> their intelligence and show them how they may help themselves; how to
> guide and control this deep-rooted instinct.
>
> The objection has been raised that Birth Control only reaches the
> already enlightened, the men and women who have already attained  a
> degree of self-respect and self-reliance. Such an objection could not
> be based on fact. Even in the most unenlightened sections of the
> community, among mothers crushed by poverty and economic enslavement,
> there is the realization of the evils of the too-large family, of the
> rapid succession of pregnancy after pregnancy, of the hopelessness of
> bringing too many children into the world.  Not merely in the evidence
> presented in an earlier chapter but in other ways, is this crying need
> expressed.  The investigators of the Children's Bureau who collected
> the data of the infant mortality reports, noted the willingness and
> the eagerness with which these down-trodden mothers told the truth
> about themselves.  So great is their hope of relief from that
> meaningless and deadening submission to unproductive reproduction,
> that only a society pruriently devoted to hypocrisy could refuse to
> listen to the voices of these mothers.  Respectfully we lend our ears
> to dithyrambs about the sacredness of motherhood and the value of
> ``better babies''--but we shut our eyes and our ears to the unpleasant
> reality and the  cries of pain that come from women who are to-day
> dying by the thousands because this power is withheld from them.
>
> This situation is rendered more bitterly ironic because the self-
> righteous opponents of Birth Control practise themselves the doctrine
> they condemn.  The birth-rate among conservative opponents indicates
> that they restrict the numbers of their own children by the methods of
> Birth Control, or are of such feeble procreative energy as to be
> thereby unfitted to dictate moral laws for other people. They prefer
> that we should think their small number of children is accidental,
> rather than publicly admit the successful practice of intelligent
> foresight.  Or else they hold themselves up as paragons of virtue and
> self-control, and would have us believe that they have brought their
> children into the world solely from a high, stern sense of public
> duty--an attitude which is about as convincing as it would be to
> declare that they found them under gooseberry bushes.  How else can we
> explain the widespread tolerance and smug approval of the clerical
> idea of sex,  now reenforced by floods of crude and vulgar sentiment,
> which is  promulgated by the press, motion-pictures and popular plays?
>
> Like all other education, that of sex can be rendered effective and
> valuable only as it meets and satisfies the interests and demands of
> the pupil himself.  It cannot be imposed from without, handed down
> from above, superimposed upon the intelligence of the person taught.
> It must find a response within him, give him the power and the
> instrument wherewith he may exercise his own growing intelligence,
> bring into action his own judgment and discrimination and thus
> contribute to the growth of his intelligence.  The civilized world is
> coming to see that education cannot consist merely in the assimilation
> of external information and knowledge, but rather in the awakening and
> development of innate powers of discrimination and judgment.  The
> great disaster of ``sex education'' lies in the fact that it fails to
> direct the awakened interests of the pupils into the proper channels
> of exercise and development.  Instead, it blunts them, restricts them,
> hinders them, and even attempts to eradicate them.
>
> This has been the great defect of sex education as it has been
> practised in recent years. Based on a superficial and shameful view of
> the sexual instinct, it has sought the inculcation of negative virtues
> by pointing out the sinister penalties of promiscuity, and by
> advocating strict adherence to virtue and morality, not on the basis
> of intelligence or the outcome of experience, not even for the
> attainment of rewards, but merely to avoid punishment in the form of
> painful and malignant disease. Education so conceived carries with it
> its own refutation.  True education cannot tolerate the inculcation of
> fear.  Fear is the soil in which are implanted inhibitions and morbid
> compulsions.  Fear restrains, restricts, hinders human expression.  It
> strikes at the very roots of joy and happiness.  It should therefore
> be the aim of sex education to avoid above all the implanting of fear
> in the mind of the pupil.
>
> Restriction means placing in the hands of external authority the power
> over behavior. Birth Control, on the contrary, implies voluntary
> action, the decision for one's self how many children one shall or
> shall not bring into the world.  Birth Control is educational in the
> real sense of the word, in that it asserts this  power of decision,
> reinstates this power in the people themselves.
>
> We are not seeking to introduce new restrictions but greater freedom.
> As far as sex is concerned, the impulse has been more thoroughly
> subject to restriction than any other human instinct.  ``Thou shalt
> not!'' meets us at every turn.  Some of these restrictions are
> justified; some of them are not.  We may have but one wife or one
> husband at a time; we must attain a certain age before we may marry.
> Children born out of wedlock are deemed ``illegitimate''--even healthy
> children.  The newspapers every day are filled with the scandals of
> those who have leaped over the restrictions or limitations society has
> written in her sexual code.  Yet the voluntary control of the
> procreative powers, the rational regulation of the number of children
> we bring into the world--this is the one type of restriction frowned
> upon and prohibited by law!
>
> In a more definite, a much more realistic and concrete manner, Birth
> Control reveals itself as the most effective weapon in the spread of
> hygienic and prophylactic knowledge among women of the less fortunate
> classes.  It carries  with it a thorough training in bodily
> cleanliness and physiology, a definite knowledge of the physiology and
> function of sex.  In refusing to teach both sides of the subject, in
> failing to respond to the universal demand among women for such
> instruction and information, maternity centers limit their own efforts
> and fail to fulfil what should be their true mission.  They are
> concerned merely with pregnancy, maternity, child-bearing, the problem
> of keeping the baby alive.  But any effective work in this field must
> go further back. We have gradually come to see, as Havelock Ellis has
> pointed out, that comparatively little can be done by improving merely
> the living conditions of adults; that improving conditions for
> children and babies is not enough.  To combat the evils of infant
> mortality, natal and pre-natal care is not sufficient.  Even to
> improve the conditions for the pregnant woman, is insufficient.
> Necessarily and inevitably, we are led further and further back, to
> the point of procreation; beyond that, into the regulation of sexual
> selection.  The problem becomes a circle.  We cannot solve one part of
> it without a consideration of the entirety.  But it is especially at
> the point of creation where all the various forces are concentrated.
> Conception must be controlled by reason, by intelligence, by science,
> or we lose control of all its consequences.
>
> Birth Control is essentially an education for women.  It is women who,
> directly and by their very nature, bear the burden of that blindness,
> ignorance and lack of foresight concerning sex which is now enforced
> by law and custom.  Birth Control places in the hands of women the
> only effective instrument whereby they may reestablish the balance in
> society, and assert, not only theoretically but practically as well,
> the primary importance of the woman and the child in civilization.
>
> Birth Control is thus the stimulus to education.  Its exercise awakens
> and develops the sense of self-reliance and responsibility, and
> illuminates the relation of the individual to society and to the race
> in a manner that otherwise remains vague and academic.  It reveals sex
> not merely as an untamed and insatiable natural force to which men and
> women must submit hopelessly and inertly, as it sweeps through them,
> and then accept it with abject humility the hopeless and heavy
> consequences. Instead, it places in their hands the power to control
> this great force; to use it, to direct it into channels in which it
> becomes the energy enhancing their lives and increasing self-
> expression and self-development.  It awakens in women the
> consciousness of new glories and new possibilities in motherhood.  No
> longer the prostrate victim of the blind play of instinct but the
> self-reliant mistress of her body and her own will, the new mother
> finds in her child the fulfilment of her own desires.  In free instead
> of compulsory motherhood she finds the avenue of her own development
> and expression.  No longer bound by an unending series of pregnancies,
> at liberty to safeguard the development of her own children, she may
> now extend her beneficent influence beyond her own home.  In becoming
> thus intensified, motherhood may also broaden and become more
> extensive as well.  The mother sees that the welfare of her own
> children is bound up with the welfare of all others.  Not upon the
> basis of sentimental charity or gratuitous ``welfare-work'' but upon
> that of enlightened self-interest, such a mother may exert her
> influence among the less fortunate and less enlightened.
>
> Unless based upon this central knowledge of and power over her own
> body and her own instincts, education for woman is valueless.  As long
> as she remains the plaything of strong, uncontrolled natural forces,
> as long as she must docilely and humbly submit to the decisions of
> others, how can woman every lay the foundations of self-respect, self-
> reliance and independence?  How can she make her own choice, exercise
> her own discrimination, her own foresight?
>
> In the exercise of these powers, in the building up and integration of
> her own experience, in mastering her own environment the true
> education of woman must be sought.  And in the sphere of sex, the
> great source and root of all human experience, it is upon the basis of
> Birth Control--the voluntary direction of her own sexual expression--
> that woman must take her first step in the assertion of freedom and
> self-respect.
>
> [1]  Folkways, p. 492.
>
>
>
> CHAPTER 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.
>
>                         The End
>