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The Pivot of Civilization

by Margaret Sanger · English · Gutenberg #1689 · 343,480 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Pivot of Civilization

Author: Margaret Sanger

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


        
Release date: February 22, 2006 [eBook #1689]
                Most recently updated: November 10, 2008

Language: English

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THE PIVOT OF CIVILIZATION


By Margaret Sanger




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 countless aspects, and may be validly defined in a great
number of relationships. A reader of James Harvey Robinson's MIND IN THE
MAKING will find it very reasonable to define a civilization as a system
of society-making ideas at issue with reality. Just so far as the system
of ideas meets the needs and conditions of survival or is able to
adapt itself to the needs and conditions of survival of the society
it dominates, so far will that society continue and prosper. We are
beginning to realize that in the past and under different conditions
from our own, societies have existed with systems of ideas and with
methods of thought very widely contrasting with what we should consider
right and sane to-day. The extraordinary neolithic civilizations of the
American continent that flourished before the coming of the Europeans,
seem to have got along with concepts that involved pedantries and
cruelties and a kind of systematic unreason, which find their closest
parallels to-day in the art and writings of certain types of lunatic.
There are collections of drawings from English and American asylums
extraordinarily parallel in their spirit and quality with the Maya
inscriptions of Central America. Yet these neolithic American societies
got along for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years, they respected
seed-time and harvest, they bred and they maintained a grotesque and
terrible order. And they produced quite beautiful works of art. Yet
their surplus of population was disposed of by an organization of
sacrificial slaughter unparalleled in the records of mankind. Many of
the institutions that seemed most normal and respectable to them, filled
the invading Europeans with perplexity and horror.

When we realize clearly this possibility of civilizations being based
on very different sets of moral ideas and upon different intellectual
methods, we are better able to appreciate the profound significance of
the schism in our modern community, which gives us side by side, honest
and intelligent people who regard Birth Control as something essentially
sweet, sane, clean, desirable and necessary, and others equally honest
and with as good a claim to intelligence who regard it as not merely
unreasonable and unwholesome, but as intolerable and abominable. We are
living not in a simple and complete civilization, but in a conflict
of at least two civilizations, based on entirely different fundamental
ideas, pursuing different methods and with different aims and ends.

I will call one of these civilizations our Traditional or Authoritative
Civilization. It rests upon the thing that is, and upon the thing that
has been. It insists upon respect for custom and usage; it discourages
criticism and enquiry. It is very ancient and conservative, or, going
beyond conservation, it is reactionary. The vehement hostility of many
Catholic priests and prelates towards new views of human origins, and
new views of moral questions, has led many careless thinkers to
identify this old traditional civilization with Christianity, but that
identification ignores the strongly revolutionary and initiatory
spirit that has always animated Christianity, and is untrue even to the
realities of orthodox Catholic teaching. The vituperation of individual
Catholics must not be confused with the deliberate doctrines of the
Church which have, on the whole, been conspicuously cautious and
balanced and sane in these matters. The ideas and practices of the Old
Civilization are older and more widespread than and not identifiable
with either Christian or Catholic culture, and it will be a great
misfortune if the issues between the Old Civilization and the New are
allowed to slip into the deep ruts of religious controversies that are
only accidentally and intermittently parallel.

Contrasted with the ancient civilization, with the Traditional
disposition, which accepts institutions and moral values as though they
were a part of nature, we have what I may call--with an evident bias
in its favour--the civilization of enquiry, of experimental knowledge,
Creative and Progressive Civilization. The first great outbreak of the
spirit of this civilization was in republican Greece; the martyrdom of
Socrates, the fearless Utopianism of Plato, the ambitious encyclopaedism
of Aristotle, mark the dawn of a new courage and a new wilfulness in
human affairs. The fear of set limitations, of punitive and restrictive
laws imposed by Fate upon human life was visibly fading in human minds.
These names mark the first clear realization that to a large extent, and
possibly to an illimitable extent, man's moral and social life and his
general destiny could be seized upon and controlled by man. But--he
must have knowledge. Said the Ancient Civilization--and it says it still
through a multitude of vigorous voices and harsh repressive acts:
"Let man learn his duty and obey." Says the New Civilization, with
ever-increasing confidence: "Let man know, and trust him."

For long ages, the Old Civilization kept the New subordinate, apologetic
and ineffective, but for the last two centuries, the New has fought its
way to a position of contentious equality. The two go on side by side,
jostling upon a thousand issues. The world changes, the conditions of
life change rapidly, through that development of organized science which
is the natural method of the New Civilization. The old tradition demands
that national loyalties and ancient belligerence should continue. The
new has produced means of communication that break down the pens and
separations of human life upon which nationalist emotion depends. The
old tradition insists upon its ancient blood-letting of war; the new
knowledge carries that war to undreamt of levels of destruction. The
ancient system needed an unrestricted breeding to meet the normal
waste of life through war, pestilence, and a multitude of hitherto
unpreventable diseases. The new knowledge sweeps away the venerable
checks of pestilence and disease, and confronts us with the congestions
and explosive dangers of an over-populated world. The old tradition
demands a special prolific class doomed to labor and subservience; the
new points to mechanism and to scientific organization as a means of
escape from this immemorial subjugation. Upon every main issue in life,
there is this quarrel between the method of submission and the method
of knowledge. More and more do men of science and intelligent people
generally realize the hopelessness of pouring new wine into old bottles.
More and more clearly do they grasp the significance of the Great
Teacher's parable.

The New Civilization is saying to the Old now: "We cannot go on making
power for you to spend upon international conflict. You must stop waving
flags and bandying insults. You must organize the Peace of the World;
you must subdue yourselves to the Federation of all mankind. And we
cannot go on giving you health, freedom, enlargement, limitless wealth,
if all our gifts to you are to be swamped by an indiscriminate torrent
of progeny. We want fewer and better children who can be reared up to
their full possibilities in unencumbered homes, and we cannot make the
social life and the world-peace we are determined to make, with the
ill-bred, ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens that you inflict upon
us." And there at the passionate and crucial question, this essential
and fundamental question, whether procreation is still to be a
superstitious and often disastrous mystery, undertaken in fear and
ignorance, reluctantly and under the sway of blind desires, or whether
it is to become a deliberate creative act, the two civilizations join
issue now. It is a conflict from which it is almost impossible to
abstain. Our acts, our way of living, our social tolerance, our very
silences will count in this crucial decision between the old and the
new.

In a plain and lucid style without any emotional appeals, Mrs. Margaret
Sanger sets out the case of the new order against the old. There have
been several able books published recently upon the question of Birth
Control, from the point of view of a woman's personal life, and from the
point of view of married happiness, but I do not think there has been
any book as yet, popularly accessible, which presents this matter from
the point of view of the public good, and as a necessary step to the
further improvement of human life as a whole. I am inclined to think
that there has hitherto been rather too much personal emotion spent upon
this business and far too little attention given to its broader aspects.
Mrs. Sanger with her extraordinary breadth of outlook and the real
scientific quality of her mind, has now redressed the balance. She
has lifted this question from out of the warm atmosphere of troubled
domesticity in which it has hitherto been discussed, to its proper level
of a predominantly important human affair.

H.G. Wells

Easton Glebe, Dunmow,

Essex., England




THE PIVOT OF CIVILIZATION



CHAPTER I: A New Truth Emerges

         Be not ashamed, women, your privilege encloses the
             rest, and is the exit of the rest,
         You are the gates of the body, and you are the gates of
             the soul.

         --Walt Whitman

This book aims to be neither the first word on the tangled problems of
human society to-day, nor the last. My aim has been to emphasize, by the
use of concrete and challenging examples and neglected facts, the
need of a new approach to individual and social problems. Its central
challenge is that civilization, in any true sense of the word, is based
upon the control and guidance of the great natural instinct of Sex.
Mastery of this force is possible only through the instrument of Birth
Control.

It may be objected that in the following pages I have rushed in
where academic scholars have feared to tread, and that as an active
propagandist I am lacking in the scholarship and documentary preparation
to undertake such a stupendous task. My only defense is that, from my
point of view at least, too many are already studying and investigating
social problems from without, with a sort of Olympian detachment. And on
the other hand, too few of those who are engaged in this endless war for
human betterment have found the time to give to the world those truths
not always hidden but practically unquarried, which may be secured only
after years of active service.

Of late, we have been treated to accounts written by well-meaning ladies
and gentlemen who have assumed clever disguises and have gone out to
work--for a week or a month--among the proletariat. But can we thus
learn anything new of the fundamental problems of working men, working
women, working children? Something, perhaps, but not those great central
problems of Hunger and Sex. We have been told that only those who
themselves have suffered the pangs of starvation can truly understand
Hunger. You might come into the closest contact with a starving man;
yet, if you were yourself well-fed, no amount of sympathy could give you
actual insight into the psychology of his suffering. This suggests an
objective and a subjective approach to all social problems. Whatever the
weakness of the subjective (or, if you prefer, the feminine) approach,
it has at least the virtue that its conclusions are tested by
experience. Observation of facts about you, intimate subjective
reaction to such facts, generate in your mind certain fundamental
convictions,--truths you can ignore no more than you can ignore such
truths as come as the fruit of bitter but valuable personal experience.

Regarding myself, I may say that my experience in the course of the
past twelve or fifteen years has been of a type to force upon me certain
convictions that demand expression. For years I had believed that the
solution of all our troubles was to be found in well-defined programmes
of political and legislative action. At first, I concentrated my whole
attention upon these, only to discover that politicians and law-makers
are just as confused and as much at a loss in solving fundamental
problems as anyone else. And I am speaking here not so much of the
corrupt and ignorant politician as of those idealists and reformers who
think that by the ballot society may be led to an earthly paradise. They
may honestly desire and intend to do great things. They may positively
glow--before election--with enthusiasm at the prospect they imagine
political victory may open to them. Time after time, I was struck by the
change in their attitude after the briefest enjoyment of this illusory
power. Men are elected during some wave of reform, let us say, elected
to legislate into practical working existence some great ideal. They
want to do big things; but a short time in office is enough to show the
political idealist that he can accomplish nothing, that his reform
must be debased and dragged into the dust, so that even if it becomes
enacted, it may be not merely of no benefit, but a positive evil. It
is scarcely necessary to emphasize this point. It is an accepted
commonplace of American politics. So much of life, so large a part of
all our social problems, moreover, remains untouched by political and
legislative action. This is an old truth too often ignored by those who
plan political campaigns upon the most superficial knowledge of human
nature.

My own eyes were opened to the limitations of political action when, as
an organizer for a political group in New York, I attended by chance
a meeting of women laundry-workers who were on strike. We believed
we could help these women with a legislative measure and asked their
support. "Oh! that stuff!" exclaimed one of these women. "Don't you know
that we women might be dead and buried if we waited for politicians and
lawmakers to right our wrongs?" This set me to thinking--not merely of
the immediate problem--but to asking myself how much any male politician
could understand of the wrongs inflicted upon poor working women.

I threw the weight of my study and activity into the economic and
industrial struggle. Here I discovered men and women fired with the
glorious vision of a new world, of a proletarian world emancipated, a
Utopian world,--it glowed in romantic colours for the majority of those
with whom I came in closest contact. The next step, the immediate step,
was another matter, less romantic and too often less encouraging. In
their ardor, some of the labor leaders of that period almost convinced
us that the millennium was just around the corner. Those were the
pre-war days of dramatic strikes. But even when most under the spell
of the new vision, the sight of the overburdened wives of the strikers,
with their puny babies and their broods of under-fed children, made us
stop and think of a neglected factor in the march toward our earthly
paradise. It was well enough to ask the poor men workers to carry on the
battle against economic injustice. But what results could be expected
when they were forced in addition to carry the burden of their
ever-growing families? This question loomed large to those of us who
came into intimate contact with the women and children. We saw that in
the final analysis the real burden of economic and industrial warfare
was thrust upon the frail, all-too-frail shoulders of the children,
the very babies--the coming generation. In their wan faces, in their
undernourished bodies, would be indelibly written the bitter defeat of
their parents.

The eloquence of those who led the underpaid and half-starved workers
could no longer, for me, at least, ring with conviction. Something
more than the purely economic interpretation was involved. The bitter
struggle for bread, for a home and material comfort, was but one phase
of the problem. There was another phase, perhaps even more fundamental,
that had been absolutely neglected by the adherents of the new dogmas.
That other phase was the driving power of instinct, a power uncontrolled
and unnoticed. The great fundamental instinct of sex was expressing
itself in these ever-growing broods, in the prosperity of the slum
midwife and her colleague the slum undertaker. In spite of all my
sympathy with the dream of liberated Labor, I was driven to ask whether
this urging power of sex, this deep instinct, was not at least partially
responsible, along with industrial injustice, for the widespread misery
of the world.

To find an answer to this problem which at that point in my experience
I could not solve, I determined to study conditions in Europe. Perhaps
there I might discover a new approach, a great illumination. Just before
the outbreak of the war, I visited France, Spain, Germany and Great
Britain. Everywhere I found the same dogmas and prejudices among labor
leaders, the same intense but limited vision, the same insistence upon
the purely economic phases of human nature, the same belief that if the
problem of hunger were solved, the question of the women and children
would take care of itself. In this attitude I discovered, then, what
seemed to me to be purely masculine reasoning; and because it was purely
masculine, it could at best be but half true. Feminine insight must be
brought to bear on all questions; and here, it struck me, the fallacy
of the masculine, the all-too-masculine, was brutally exposed. I was
encouraged and strengthened in this attitude by the support of certain
leaders who had studied human nature and who had reached the same
conclusion: that civilization could not solve the problem of Hunger
until it recognized the titanic strength of the sexual instinct. In
Spain, I found that Lorenzo Portet, who was carrying on the work of the
martyred Francisco Ferrer, had reached this same conclusion. In Italy,
Enrico Malatesta, the valiant leader who was after the war to play
so dramatic a role, was likewise combating the current dogma of the
orthodox Socialists. In Berlin, Rudolph Rocker was engaged in the
thankless task of puncturing the articles of faith of the orthodox
Marxian religion. It is quite needless to add that these men who had
probed beneath the surface of the problem and had diagnosed so much more
completely the complex malady of contemporary society were intensely
disliked by the superficial theorists of the neo-Marxian School.

The gospel of Marx had, however, been too long and too thoroughly
inculcated into the minds of millions of workers in Europe, to be
discarded. It is a flattering doctrine, since it teaches the laborer
that all the fault is with someone else, that he is the victim of
circumstances, and not even a partner in the creation of his own and his
child's misery. Not without significance was the additional discovery
that I made. I found that the Marxian influence tended to lead workers
to believe that, irrespective of the health of the poor mothers, the
earning capacity of the wage-earning fathers, or the upbringing of
the children, increase of the proletarian family was a benefit, not
a detriment to the revolutionary movement. The greater the number of
hungry mouths, the emptier the stomachs, the more quickly would the
"Class War" be precipitated. The greater the increase in population
among the proletariat, the greater the incentive to revolution. This
may not be sound Marxian theory; but it is the manner in which it is
popularly accepted. It is the popular belief, wherever the Marxian
influence is strong. This I found especially in England and Scotland. In
speaking to groups of dockworkers on strike in Glasgow, and before the
communist and co-operative guilds throughout England, I discovered
a prevailing opposition to the recognition of sex as a factor in the
perpetuation of poverty. The leaders and theorists were immovable in
their opposition. But when once I succeeded in breaking through the
surface opposition of the rank and file of the workers, I found that
they were willing to recognize the power of this neglected factor in
their lives.

So central, so fundamental in the life of every man and woman is this
problem that they need be taught no elaborate or imposing theory to
explain their troubles. To approach their problems by the avenue of sex
and reproduction is to reveal at once their fundamental relations to the
whole economic and biological structure of society. Their interest is
immediately and completely awakened. But always, as I soon discovered,
the ideas and habits of thought of these submerged masses have been
formed through the Press, the Church, through political institutions,
all of which had built up a conspiracy of silence around a subject
that is of no less vital importance than that of Hunger. A great wall
separates the masses from those imperative truths that must be known
and flung wide if civilization is to be saved. As currently constituted,
Church, Press, Education seem to-day organized to exploit the ignorance
and the prejudices of the masses, rather than to light their way to
self-salvation.

Such was the situation in 1914, when I returned to America, determined,
since the exclusively masculine point of view had dominated too long,
that the other half of the truth should be made known. The Birth
Control movement was launched because it was in this form that the
whole relation of woman and child--eternal emblem of the future of
society--could be more effectively dramatized. The amazing growth
of this movement dates from the moment when in my home a small group
organized the first Birth Control League. Since then we have been
criticized for our choice of the term "Birth Control" to express
the idea of modern scientific contraception. I have yet to hear
any criticism of this term that is not based upon some false and
hypocritical sense of modesty, or that does not arise out of a
semi-prurient misunderstanding of its aim. On the other hand: nothing
better expresses the idea of purposive, responsible, and self-directed
guidance of the reproductive powers.

Those critics who condemn Birth Control as a negative, destructive
idea, concerned only with self-gratification, might profitably open
the nearest dictionary for a definition of "control." There they would
discover that the verb "control" means to exercise a directing, guiding,
or restraining influence;--to direct, to regulate, to counteract.
Control is guidance, direction, foresight. It implies intelligence,
forethought and responsibility. They will find in the Standard
Dictionary a quotation from Lecky to the effect that, "The greatest of
all evils in politics is power without control." In what phase of life
is not "power without control" an evil? Birth Control, therefore, means
not merely the limitation of births, but the application of intelligent
guidance over the reproductive power. It means the substitution of
reason and intelligence for the blind play of instinct.

The term "Birth Control" had the immense practical advantage of
compressing into two short words the answer to the inarticulate demands
of millions of men and women in all countries. At the time this slogan
was formulated, I had not yet come to the complete realization of the
great truth that had been thus crystallized. It was the response to the
overwhelming, heart-breaking appeals that came by every mail for aid
and advice, which revealed a great truth that lay dormant, a truth that
seemed to spring into full vitality almost over night--that could never
again be crushed to earth!

Nor could I then have realized the number and the power of the enemies
who were to be aroused into activity by this idea. So completely was I
dominated by this conviction of the efficacy of "control," that I could
not until later realize the extent of the sacrifices that were to be
exacted of me and of those who supported my campaign. The very idea
of Birth Control resurrected the spirit of the witch-hunters of Salem.
Could they have usurped the power, they would have burned us at the
stake. Lacking that power, they used the weapon of suppression, and
invoked medieval statutes to send us to jail. These tactics had an
effect the very opposite to that intended. They demonstrated the
vitality of the idea of Birth Control, and acted as counter-irritant on
the actively intelligent sections of the American community. Nor was the
interest aroused confined merely to America. The neo-Malthusian movement
in Great Britain with its history of undaunted bravery, came to our
support; and I had the comfort of knowing that the finest minds of
England did not hesitate a moment in the expression of their sympathy
and support.

In America, on the other hand, I found from the beginning until very
recently that the so-called intellectuals exhibited a curious and almost
inexplicable reticence in supporting Birth Control. They even hesitated
to voice any public protest against the campaign to crush us which was
inaugurated and sustained by the most reactionary and sinister forces in
American life. It was not inertia or any lack of interest on the part
of the masses that stood in our way. It was the indifference of the
intellectual leaders.

Writers, teachers, ministers, editors, who form a class dictating, if
not creating, public opinion, are, in this country, singularly inhibited
or unconscious of their true function in the community. One of their
first duties, it is certain, should be to champion the constitutional
right of free speech and free press, to welcome any idea that tends to
awaken the critical attention of the great American public. But those
who reveal themselves as fully cognizant of this public duty are in
the minority, and must possess more than average courage to survive the
enmity such an attitude provokes.

One of the chief aims of the present volume is to stimulate American
intellectuals to abandon the mental habits which prevent them from
seeing human nature as a whole, instead of as something that can be
pigeonholed into various compartments or classes. Birth Control affords
an approach to the study of humanity because it cuts through
the limitations of current methods. It is economic, biological,
psychological and spiritual in its aspects. It awakens the vision of
mankind moving and changing, of humanity growing and developing, coming
to fruition, of a race creative, flowering into beautiful expression
through talent and genius.

As a social programme, Birth Control is not merely concerned with
population questions. In this respect, it is a distinct step in advance
of earlier Malthusian doctrines, which concerned themselves chiefly with
economics and population. Birth Control concerns itself with the spirit
no less than the body. It looks for the liberation of the spirit of
woman and through woman of the child. To-day motherhood is wasted,
penalized, tortured. Children brought into the world by unwilling mothers
suffer an initial handicap that cannot be measured by cold statistics.
Their lives are blighted from the start. To substantiate this fact, I
have chosen to present the conclusions of reports on Child Labor and
records of defect and delinquency published by organizations with no
bias in favour of Birth Control. The evidence is before us. It crowds in
upon us from all sides. But prior to this new approach, no attempt had
been made to correlate the effects of the blind and irresponsible play
of the sexual instinct with its deep-rooted causes.

The duty of the educator and the intellectual creator of public opinion
is, in this connection, of the greatest importance. For centuries
official moralists, priests, clergymen and teachers, statesmen and
politicians have preached the doctrine of glorious and divine fertility.
To-day, we are confronted with the world-wide spectacle of the
realization of this doctrine. It is not without significance that the
moron and the imbecile set the pace in living up to this teaching,
and that the intellectuals, the educators, the archbishops, bishops,
priests, who are most insistent on it, are the staunchest adherents in
their own lives of celibacy and non-fertility. It is time to point out
to the champions of unceasing and indiscriminate fertility the results
of their teaching.

One of the greatest difficulties in giving to the public a book of this
type is the impossibility of keeping pace with the events and changes of
a movement that is now, throughout the world, striking root and growing.
The changed attitude of the American Press indicates that enlightened
public opinion no longer tolerates a policy of silence upon a question
of the most vital importance. Almost simultaneously in England and
America, two incidents have broken through the prejudice and the guarded
silence of centuries. At the church Congress in Birmingham, October 12,
1921, Lord Dawson, the king's physician, in criticizing the report of
the Lambeth Conference concerning Birth Control, delivered an address
defending this practice. Of such bravery and eloquence that it could
not be ignored, this address electrified the entire British public. It
aroused a storm of abuse, and yet succeeded, as no propaganda could, in
mobilizing the forces of progress and intelligence in the support of the
cause.

Just one month later, the First American Birth Control Conference
culminated in a significant and dramatic incident. At the close of the
conference a mass meeting was scheduled in the Town Hall, New York City,
to discuss the morality of Birth Control. Mr. Harold Cox, editor of the
Edinburgh Review, who had come to New York to attend the conference, was
to lead the discussion. It seemed only natural for us to call
together scientists, educators, members of the medical profession,
and theologians of all denominations, to ask their opinion upon this
uncertain and important phase of the controversy. Letters were sent to
eminent men and women in different parts of the world. In this letter we
asked the following questions:--

1. Is over-population a menace to the peace of the world?

2. Would the legal dissemination of scientific Birth Control
information, through the medium of clinics by the medical profession, be
the most logical method of checking the problem of over-population?

3. Would knowledge of Birth Control change the moral attitude of men
and women toward the marriage bond, or lower the moral standards of the
youth of the country?

4. Do you believe that knowledge which enables parents to limit their
families will make for human happiness, and raise the moral, social and
intellectual standards of population?

We sent this questionnaire not only to those who we thought might agree
with us, but we sent it also to our known opponents.

When I arrived at the Town Hall the entrance was guarded by policemen.
They told me there would be no meeting. Before my arrival our executives
had been greeted by Monsignor Dineen, secretary of Archbishop Hayes, of
the Roman Catholic archdiocese, who informed them that the meeting would
be prohibited on the ground that it was contrary to public morals. The
police had closed the doors. When they opened them to permit the exit
of the large audience which had gathered, Mr. Cox and I entered. I
attempted to exercise my constitutional right of free speech, but was
prohibited and arrested. Miss Mary Winsor, who protested against this
unwarranted arrest, was likewise dragged off to the police station. The
case was dismissed the following morning. The ecclesiastic instigators
of the affair were conspicuous by their absence from the police court.
But the incident was enough to expose the opponents of Birth Control and
the extreme methods they used to combat our progress. The case was too
flagrant, too gross an affront, to pass unnoticed by the newspapers. The
progress of our movement was indicated in the changed attitude of the
American Press, which had perceived the danger to the public of the
unlawful tactics used by the enemies of Birth Control in preventing open
discussion of a vital question.

No social idea has inspired its advocates with more bravery, tenacity,
and courage than Birth Control. From the early days of Francis Place
and Richard Carlile, to those of the Drysdales and Edward Trulove, of
Bradlaugh and Mrs. Annie Besant, its advocates have faced imprisonment
and ostracism. In the whole history of the English movement, there has
been no more courageous figure than that of the venerable Alice Drysdale
Vickery, the undaunted torch-bearer who has bridged the silence of
forty-four years--since the Bradlaugh-Besant trial. She stands head and
shoulders above the professional feminists. Serenely has she withstood
jeers and jests. To-day, she continues to point out to the younger
generation which is devoted to newer palliatives the fundamental
relation between Sex and Hunger.

The First American Birth Control Conference, held at the same time
as the Washington Conference for the Limitation of Armaments, marks a
turning-point in our approach to social problems. The Conference made
evident the fact that in every field of scientific and social endeavour
the most penetrating thinkers are now turning to the consideration of
our problem as a fundamental necessity to American civilization. They
are coming to see that a QUALITATIVE factor as opposed to a QUANTITATIVE
one is of primary importance in dealing with the great masses of
humanity.

Certain fundamental convictions should be made clear here. The programme
for Birth Control is not a charity. It is not aiming to interfere in
the private lives of poor people, to tell them how many children
they should have, nor to sit in judgment upon their fitness to become
parents. It aims, rather, to awaken responsibility, to answer the demand
for a scientific means by which and through which each human life may
be self-directed and self-controlled. The exponent of Birth Control, in
short, is convinced that social regeneration, no less than individual
regeneration, must come from within. Every potential parent, and
especially every potential mother, must be brought to an acute
realization of the primary and individual responsibility of bringing
children into this world. Not until the parents of this world are given
control over their reproductive faculties will it be possible to improve
the quality of the generations of the future, or even to maintain
civilization at its present level. Only when given intelligent mastery
of the procreative powers can the great mass of humanity be aroused to
a realization of responsibility of parenthood. We have come to the
conclusion, based on widespread investigation and experience, that
education for parenthood must be based upon the needs and demands of
the people themselves. An idealistic code of sexual ethics, imposed from
above, a set of rules devised by high-minded theorists who fail to take
into account the living conditions and desires of the masses, can never
be of the slightest value in effecting change in the customs of the
people. Systems so imposed in the past have revealed their woeful
inability to prevent the sexual and racial chaos into which the world
has drifted.

The universal demand for practical education in Birth Control is one
of the most hopeful signs that the masses themselves to-day possess
the divine spark of regeneration. It remains for the courageous and
the enlightened to answer this demand, to kindle the spark, to direct a
thorough education in sex hygiene based upon this intense interest.

Birth Control is thus the entering wedge for the educator. In answering
the needs of these thousands upon thousands of submerged mothers, it
is possible to use their interest as the foundation for education in
prophylaxis, hygiene and infant welfare. The potential mother can
then be shown that maternity need not be slavery but may be the most
effective avenue to self-development and self-realization. Upon this
basis only may we improve the quality of the race.

The lack of balance between the birth-rate of the "unfit" and the "fit,"
admittedly the greatest present menace to the civilization, can never be
rectified by the inauguration of a cradle competition between these
two classes. The example of the inferior classes, the fertility of the
feeble-minded, the mentally defective, the poverty-stricken, should
not be held up for emulation to the mentally and physically fit, and
therefore less fertile, parents of the educated and well-to-do classes.
On the contrary, the most urgent problem to-day is how to limit and
discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.
Possibly drastic and Spartan methods may be forced upon American
society if it continues complacently to encourage the chance and chaotic
breeding that has resulted from our stupid, cruel sentimentalism.

To effect the salvation of the generations of the future--nay, of the
generations of to-day--our greatest need, first of all, is the ability
to face the situation without flinching; to cooperate in the formation
of a code of sexual ethics based upon a thorough biological and
psychological understanding of human nature; and then to answer the
questions and the needs of the people with all the intelligence and
honesty at our command. If we can summon the bravery to do this, we
shall best be serving the pivotal interests of civilization.

To conclude this introduction: my initiation, as I have confessed, was
primarily an emotional one. My interest in Birth Control was awakened
by experience. Research and investigation have followed. Our effort has
been to raise our program from the plane of the emotional to the plane
of the scientific. Any social progress, it is my belief, must purge
itself of sentimentalism and pass through the crucible of science. We
are willing to submit Birth Control to this test. It is part of the
purpose of this book to appeal to the scientist for aid, to arouse that
interest which will result in widespread research and investigation. I
believe that my personal experience with this idea must be that of
the race at large. We must temper our emotion and enthusiasm with
the impersonal determination of science. We must unite in the task of
creating an instrument of steel, strong but supple, if we are to triumph
finally in the war for human emancipation.



CHAPTER II: Conscripted Motherhood

     "Their poor, old ravaged and stiffened faces, their poor,
     old bodies dried up with ceaseless toil, their patient souls
     made me weep.  They are our conscripts. They are the venerable
     ones whom we should reverence. All the mystery of womanhood
     seems incarnated in their ugly being--the Mothers! the Mothers!
     Ye are all one!"

     --From the Letters of William James

Motherhood, which is not only the oldest but the most important
profession in the world, has received few of the benefits of
civilization. It is a curious fact that a civilization devoted to
mother-worship, that publicly professes a worship of mother and child,
should close its eyes to the appalling waste of human life and human
energy resulting from those dire consequences of leaving the whole
problem of child-bearing to chance and blind instinct. It would be
untrue to say that among the civilized nations of the world to-day, the
profession of motherhood remains in a barbarous state. The bitter truth
is that motherhood, among the larger part of our population, does not
rise to the level of the barbarous or the primitive. Conditions of life
among the primitive tribes were rude enough and severe enough to
prevent the unhealthy growth of sentimentality, and to discourage the
irresponsible production of defective children. Moreover, there is ample
evidence to indicate that even among the most primitive peoples
the function of maternity was recognized as of primary and central
importance to the community.

If we define civilization as increased and increasing responsibility
based on vision and foresight, it becomes painfully evident that the
profession of motherhood as practised to-day is in no sense civilized.
Educated people derive their ideas of maternity for the most part,
either from the experience of their own set, or from visits to
impressive hospitals where women of the upper classes receive the
advantages of modern science and modern nursing. From these charming
pictures they derive their complacent views of the beauty of motherhood
and their confidence for the future of the race. The other side of the
picture is revealed only to the trained investigator, to the patient and
impartial observer who visits not merely one or two "homes of the poor,"
but makes detailed studies of town after town, obtains the history of
each mother, and finally correlates and analyzes this evidence. Upon
such a basis are we able to draw conclusions concerning this strange
business of bringing children into the world.

Every year I receive thousands of letters from women in all parts of
America, desperate appeals to aid them to extricate themselves from the
trap of compulsory maternity. Lest I be accused of bias and exaggeration
in drawing my conclusions from these painful human documents, I prefer
to present a number of typical cases recorded in the reports of the
United States Government, and in the evidence of trained and impartial
investigators of social agencies more generally opposed to the doctrine
of Birth Control than biased in favor of it.

A perusal of the reports on infant mortality in widely varying
industrial centers of the United States, published during the past
decade by the Children's Bureau of the United States Department of
Labor, forces us to a realization of the immediate need of detailed
statistics concerning the practice and results of uncontrolled breeding.
Some such effort as this has been made by the Galton Laboratory of
National Eugenics in Great Britain. The Children's Bureau reports only
incidentally present this impressive evidence. They fail to coordinate
it. While there is always the danger of drawing giant conclusions from
pigmy premises, here is overwhelming evidence concerning irresponsible
parenthood that is ignored by governmental and social agencies.

I have chosen a small number of typical cases from these reports. Though
drawn from widely varying sources, they all emphasize the greatest crime
of modern civilization--that of permitting motherhood to be left to
blind chance, and to be mainly a function of the most abysmally ignorant
and irresponsible classes of the community.

Here is a fairly typical case from Johnstown, Pennsylvania. A woman
of thirty-eight years had undergone thirteen pregnancies in seventeen
years. Of eleven live births and two premature stillbirths, only two
children were alive at the time of the government agent's visit. The
second to eighth, the eleventh and the thirteenth had died of bowel
trouble, at ages ranging from three weeks to four months. The only cause
of these deaths the mother could give was that "food did not agree with
them." She confessed quite frankly that she believed in feeding babies,
and gave them everything anybody told her to give them. She began to
give them at the age of one month, bread, potatoes, egg, crackers, etc.
For the last baby that died, this mother had bought a goat and gave its
milk to the baby; the goat got sick, but the mother continued to give
her baby its milk until the goat went dry. Moreover, she directed the
feeding of her daughter's baby until it died at the age of three months.
"On account of the many children she had had, the neighbors consider her
an authority on baby care."

Lest this case be considered too tragically ridiculous to be accepted
as typical, the reader may verify it with an almost interminable list of
similar cases.(1) Parental irresponsibility is significantly illustrated
in another case:

A mother who had four live births and two stillbirths in twelve years
lost all of her babies during their first year. She was so anxious that
at least one child should live that she consulted a physician concerning
the care of the last one. "Upon his advice," to quote the government
report, "she gave up her twenty boarders immediately after the child's
birth, and devoted all her time to it. Thinks she did not stop her hard
work soon enough; says she has always worked too hard, keeping boarders
in this country, and cutting wood and carrying it and water on her back
in the old country. Also says the carrying of water and cases of beer
in this country is a great strain on her." But the illuminating point in
this case is that the father was furious because all the babies died.
To show his disrespect for the wife who could only give birth to babies
that died, he wore a red necktie to the funeral of the last. Yet this
woman, the government agent reports, would follow and profit by any
instruction that might be given her.

It is true that the cases reported from Johnstown, Pennsylvania, do not
represent completely "Americanized" families. This lack does not prevent
them, however, by their unceasing fertility from producing the Americans
of to-morrow. Of the more immediate conditions surrounding child-birth,
we are presented with this evidence, given by one woman concerning the
birth of her last child:

On five o'clock on Wednesday evening she went to her sister's house to
return a washboard, after finishing a day's washing. The baby was born
while she was there. Her sister was too young to aid her in any way.
She was not accustomed to a midwife, she confessed. She cut the cord
herself, washed the new-born baby at her sister's house, walked home,
cooked supper for her boarders, and went to bed by eight o'clock. The
next day she got up and ironed. This tired her out, she said, so she
stayed in bed for two whole days. She milked cows the day after the
birth of the baby and sold the milk as well. Later in the week, when
she became tired, she hired someone to do that portion of her work. This
woman, we are further informed, kept cows, chickens, and lodgers, and
earned additional money by doing laundry and charwork. At times her
husband deserted her. His earnings amounted to $1.70 a day, while a
fifteen-year-old son earned $1.10 in a coal mine.

One searches in vain for some picture of sacred motherhood, as depicted
in popular plays and motion pictures, something more normal and
encouraging. Then one comes to the bitter realization that these, in
very truth, are the "normal" cases, not the exceptions. The exceptions
are apt to indicate, instead, the close relationship of this
irresponsible and chance parenthood to the great social problems of
feeble-mindedness, crime and syphilis.

Nor is this type of motherhood confined to newly arrived immigrant
mothers, as a government report from Akron, Ohio, sufficiently
indicates. In this city, the government agents discovered that more than
five hundred mothers were ignorant of the accepted principles of
infant feeding, or, if familiar with them, did not practise them. "This
ignorance or indifference was not confined to foreign-born mothers.... A
native mother reported that she gave her two-weeks-old baby ice cream,
and that before his sixth month, he was sitting at the table `eating
everything."' This was in a town in which there were comparatively few
cases of extreme poverty.

The degradation of motherhood, the damnation of the next generation
before it is born, is exposed in all its catastrophic misery, in the
reports of the National Consumers' League. In her report of living
conditions among night-working mothers in thirty-nine textile mills
in Rhode Island, based on exhaustive studies, Mrs. Florence Kelley
describes the "normal" life of these women:

"When the worker, cruelly tired from ten hours' work, comes home in the
early morning, she usually scrambles together breakfast for the family.
Eating little or nothing herself, and that hastily, she tumbles into
bed--not the immaculate bed in an airy bed-room with dark shades, but
one still warm from its night occupants, in a stuffy little bed-room,
darkened imperfectly if at all. After sleeping exhaustedly for an hour
perhaps she bestirs herself to get the children off to school, or care
for insistent little ones, too young to appreciate that mother is tired
out and must sleep. Perhaps later in the forenoon, she again drops into
a fitful sleep, or she may have to wait until after dinner. There is
the midday meal to get, and, if her husband cannot come home, his
dinner-pail to pack with a hot lunch to be sent or carried to him. If
he is not at home, the lunch is rather a makeshift. The midday meal is
scarcely over before supper must be thought of. This has to be eaten
hurriedly before the family are ready, for the mother must be in the
mill at work, by 6, 6:30 or 7 P.M.... Many women in their inadequate
English, summed up their daily routine by, 'Oh, me all time tired. TOO
MUCH WORK, TOO MUCH BABY, TOO LITTLE SLEEP!'"

"Only sixteen of the 166 married women were without children; thirty-two
had three or more; twenty had children one year old or under. There were
160 children under school-age, below six years, and 246 of school age."

"A woman in ordinary circumstances," adds this impartial investigator,
"with a husband and three children, if she does her own work, feels that
her hands are full. How these mill-workers, many of them frail-looking,
and many with confessedly poor health, can ever do two jobs is a
mystery, when they are seen in their homes dragging about, pale,
hollow-eyed and listless, often needlessly sharp and impatient with the
children. These children are not only not mothered, never cherished,
they are nagged and buffeted. The mothers are not superwomen, and like
all human beings, they have a certain amount of strength and when that
breaks, their nerves suffer."

We are presented with a vivid picture of one of these slave-mothers: a
woman of thirty-eight who looks at least fifty with her worn, furrowed
face. Asked why she had been working at night for the past two years,
she pointed to a six-months old baby she was carrying, to the five
small children swarming about her, and answered laconically, "Too much
children!" She volunteered the information that there had been two more
who had died. When asked why they had died, the poor mother shrugged her
shoulders listlessly, and replied, "Don't know." In addition to bearing
and rearing these children, her work would sap the vitality of any
ordinary person. "She got home soon after four in the morning, cooked
breakfast for the family and ate hastily herself. At 4.30 she was in
bed, staying there until eight. But part of that time was disturbed for
the children were noisy and the apartment was a tiny, dingy place in
a basement. At eight she started the three oldest boys to school, and
cleaned up the debris of breakfast and of supper the night before. At
twelve she carried a hot lunch to her husband and had dinner ready for
the three school children. In the afternoon, there were again dishes
and cooking, and caring for three babies aged five, three years, and
six months. At five, supper was ready for the family. The mother ate by
herself and was off to work at 5:45."

Another of the night-working mothers was a frail looking Frenchwoman of
twenty-seven years, with a husband and five children ranging from eight
years to fourteen months. Three other children had died. When visited,
she was doing a huge washing. She was forced into night work to meet the
expenses of the family. She estimated that she succeeded in getting
five hours' sleep during the day. "I take my baby to bed with me, but he
cries, and my little four-year-old boy cries, too, and comes in to make
me get up, so you can't call that a very good sleep."

The problem among unmarried women or those without family is not the
same, this investigator points out. "They sleep longer by day than they
normally would by night." We are also informed that pregnant women work
at night in the mills, sometimes up to the very hour of delivery. "It's
queer," exclaimed a woman supervisor of one of the Rhode Island mills,
"but some women, both on the day and the night shift, will stick to
their work right up to the last minute, and will use every means to
deceive you about their condition. I go around and talk to them, but
make little impression. We have had several narrow escapes.... A Polish
mother with five children had worked in a mill by day or by night, ever
since her marriage, stopping only to have her babies. One little girl
had died several years ago, and the youngest child, says Mrs. Kelley,
did not look promising. It had none of the charm of babyhood; its
body and clothing were filthy; and its lower lip and chin covered with
repulsive black sores."

It should be remembered that the Consumers' League, which publishes
these reports on women in industry, is not advocating Birth Control
education, but is aiming "to awaken responsibility for conditions under
which goods are produced, and through investigation, education and
legislation, to mobilize public opinion in behalf of enlightened
standards for workers and honest products for all." Nevertheless, in
Miss Agnes de Lima's report of conditions in Passaic, New Jersey, we
find the same tale of penalized, prostrate motherhood, bearing the
crushing burden of economic injustice and cruelty; the same blind but
overpowering instincts of love and hunger driving young women into the
factories to work, night in and night out, to support their procession
of uncared for and undernourished babies. It is the married women with
young children who work on the inferno-like shifts. They are driven to
it by the low wages of their husbands. They choose night work in order
to be with their children in the daytime. They are afraid of the neglect
and ill-treatment the children might receive at the hands of paid
caretakers. Thus they condemn themselves to eighteen or twenty hours of
daily toil. Surely no mother with three, four, five or six children can
secure much rest by day.

"Take almost any house"--we read in the report of conditions in New
Jersey--"knock at almost any door and you will find a weary, tousled
woman, half-dressed, doing her housework, or trying to snatch an hour or
two of sleep after her long night of work in the mill. ... The facts
are there for any one to see; the hopeless and exhausted woman, her
cluttered three or four rooms, the swarm of sickly and neglected
children."

These women claimed that night work was unavoidable, as their husbands
received so little pay. This in spite of all our vaunted "high wages."
Only three women were found who went into the drudgery of night work
without being obliged to do so. Two had no children, and their husbands'
earnings were sufficient for their needs. One of these was saving for
a trip to Europe, and chose the night shift because she found it less
strenuous than the day. Only four of the hundred women reported upon
were unmarried, and ninety-two of the married women had children. Of the
four childless married women, one had lost two children, and another
was recovering from a recent miscarriage. There were five widows. The
average number of children was three in a family. Thirty-nine of the
mothers had four or more. Three of them had six children, and six of
them had seven children apiece. These women ranged between the ages of
twenty-five and forty, and more than half the children were less than
seven years of age. Most of them had babies of one, two and three years
of age.

At the risk of repetition, we quote one of the typical cases reported
by Miss De Lima with features practically identical with the individual
cases reported from Rhode Island. It is of a mother who comes home from
work at 5:30 every morning, falls on the bed from exhaustion, arises
again at eight or nine o'clock to see that the older children are sent
off to school. A son of five, like the rest of the children, is on a
diet of coffee,--milk costs too much. After the children have left for
school, the overworked mother again tries to sleep, though the small son
bothers her a great deal. Besides, she must clean the house, wash, iron,
mend, sew and prepare the midday meal. She tries to snatch a little
sleep in the afternoon, but explains: "When you got big family, all time
work. Night-time in mill drag so long, so long; day-time in home go so
quick." By five, this mother must get the family's supper ready, and
dress for the night's work, which begins at seven. The investigator
further reports: "The next day was a holiday, and for a diversion, Mrs.
N. thought she would go up to the cemetery: `I got some children up
there,' she explained, `and same time I get some air. No, I don't go
nowheres, just to the mill and then home."'

Here again, as in all reports on women in industry, we find the
prevalence of pregnant women working on night-shifts, often to the very
day of their delivery. "Oh, yes, plenty women, big bellies, work in the
night time," one of the toiling mothers volunteered. "Shame they go, but
what can do?" The abuse was general. Many mothers confessed that owing
to poverty they themselves worked up to the last week or even day before
the birth of their children. Births were even reported in one of
the mills during the night shift. A foreman told of permitting a
night-working woman to leave at 6.30 one morning, and of the birth of
her baby at 7.30. Several women told of leaving the day-shift because of
pregnancy and of securing places on the night-shift where their condition
was less conspicuous, and the bosses more tolerant. One mother defended
her right to stay at work, says the report, claiming that as long as she
could do her work, it was nobody's business. In a doorway sat a sickly
and bloodless woman in an advanced stage of pregnancy. Her first baby
had died of general debility. She had worked at night in the mill until
the very day of its birth. This time the boss had told her she could
stay if she wished, but reminded her of what had happened last time. So
she had stopped work, as the baby was expected any day.

Again and again we read the same story, which varied only in detail: the
mother in the three black rooms; the sagging porch overflowing with pale
and sickly children; the over-worked mother of seven, still nursing
her youngest, who is two or three months old. Worn and haggard, with a
skeleton-like child pulling at her breast, the women tries to make the
investigator understand. The grandmother helps to interpret. "She never
sleeps," explains the old woman, "how can she with so many children?"
She works up to the last moment before her baby comes, and returns to
work as soon as they are four weeks old.

Another apartment in the same house; another of those night-working
mothers, who had just stopped because she is pregnant. The boss had
kindly given her permission to stay on, but she found the reaching on
the heavy spinning machines too hard. Three children, ranging in age
from five to twelve years, are all sickly and forlorn and must be cared
for. There is a tubercular husband, who is unable to work steadily, and
is able to bring in only $12 a week. Two of the babies had died, one
because the mother had returned to work too soon after its birth and had
lost her milk. She had fed him tea and bread, "so he died."

The most heartrending feature of it all--in these homes of the mothers
who work at night--is the expression in the faces of the children;
children of chance, dressed in rags, undernourished, underclothed, all
predisposed to the ravages of chronic and epidemic disease.

The reports on infant mortality published under the direction of the
Children's Bureau substantiate for the United States of America the
findings of the Galton Laboratory for Great Britain, showing that an
abnormally high rate of fertility is usually associated with poverty,
filth, disease, feeblemindedness and a high infant mortality rate. It
is a commonplace truism that a high birth-rate is accompanied by a high
infant-mortality rate. No longer is it necessary to dissociate cause and
effect, to try to determine whether the high birth rate is the cause of
the high infant mortality rate. It is sufficient to know that they are
organically correlated along with other anti-social factors detrimental
to individual, national and racial welfare. The figures presented by
Hibbs (2) likewise reveal a much higher infant mortality rate for the
later born children of large families.

The statistics which show that the greatest number of children are born
to parents whose earnings are the lowest,(3) that the direst poverty is
associated with uncontrolled fecundity emphasize the character of the
parenthood we are depending upon to create the race of the future.

A distinguished American opponent of Birth Control some years ago spoke
of the "racial" value of this high infant mortality rate among the
"unfit." He forgot, however, that the survival-rate of the children
born of these overworked and fatigued mothers may nevertheless be large
enough, aided and abetted by philanthropies and charities, to form the
greater part of the population of to-morrow. As Dr. Karl Pearson has
stated: "Degenerate stocks under present social conditions are not
short-lived; they live to have more than the normal size of family."

Reports of charitable organizations; the famous "one hundred neediest
cases" presented every year by the New York Times to arouse the
sentimental generosity of its readers; statistics of public and private
hospitals, charities and corrections; analyses of pauperism in town
and country--all tell the same tale of uncontrolled and irresponsible
fecundity. The facts, the figures, the appalling truth are there for all
to read. It is only in the remedy proposed, the effective solution, that
investigators and students of the problem disagree.

Confronted with the "startling and disgraceful" conditions of affairs
indicated by the fact that a quarter of a million babies die every year
in the United States before they are one year old, and that no less
than 23,000 women die in childbirth, a large number of experts and
enthusiasts have placed their hopes in maternity-benefit measures.

Such measures sharply illustrate the superficial and fragmentary manner
in which the whole problem of motherhood is studied to-day. It seeks a
LAISSER FAIRE policy of parenthood or marriage, with an indiscriminating
paternalism concerning maternity. It is as though the Government were
to say: "Increase and multiply; we shall assume the responsibility of
keeping your babies alive." Even granting that the administration of
these measures might be made effective and effectual, which is more
than doubtful, we see that they are based upon a complete ignorance
or disregard of the most important fact in the situation--that of
indiscriminate and irresponsible fecundity. They tacitly assume that
all parenthood is desirable, that all children should be born, and
that infant mortality can be controlled by external aid. In the great
world-problem of creating the men and women of to-morrow, it is not
merely a question of sustaining the lives of all children, irrespective
of their hereditary and physical qualities, to the point where they,
in turn, may reproduce their kind. Advocates of Birth Control offer and
accept no such superficial solution. This philosophy is based upon
a clearer vision and a more profound comprehension of human life. Of
immediate relief for the crushed and enslaved motherhood of the world
through State aid, no better criticism has been made than that of
Havelock Ellis:

"To the theoretical philanthropist, eager to reform the world on paper,
nothing seems simpler than to cure the present evils of child-rearing
by setting up State nurseries which are at once to relieve mothers of
everything connected with the men of the future beyond the pleasure--if
such it happens to be--of conceiving them, and the trouble of bearing
them, and at the same time to rear them up independently of the home, in
a wholesome, economical and scientific manner. Nothing seems simpler,
but from the fundamental psychological point of view nothing is
falser.... A State which admits that the individuals composing it are
incompetent to perform their most sacred and intimate functions, and
takes it upon itself to perform them itself instead, attempts a task
that would be undesirable, even if it were possible of achievement.(4)"
It may be replied that maternity benefit measures aim merely to aid
mothers more adequately to fulfil their biological and social functions.
But from the point of view of Birth Control, that will never be possible
until the crushing exigencies of overcrowding are removed--overcrowding
of pregnancies as well as of homes. As long as the mother remains the
passive victim of blind instinct, instead of the conscious, responsible
instrument of the life-force, controlling and directing its expression,
there can be no solution to the intricate and complex problems that
confront the whole world to-day. This is, of course, impossible as long
as women are driven into the factories, on night as well as day shifts,
as long as children and girls and young women are driven into industries
to labor that is physically deteriorating as a preparation for the
supreme function of maternity.

The philosophy of Birth Control insists that motherhood, no less
than any other human function, must undergo scientific study, must be
voluntarily directed and controlled with intelligence and foresight. As
long as we countenance what H. G. Wells has well termed "the monstrous
absurdity of women discharging their supreme social function, bearing
and rearing children, in their spare time, as it were, while they `earn
their living' by contributing some half-mechanical element to some
trivial industrial product" any attempt to furnish "maternal education"
is bound to fall on stony ground. Children brought into the world as the
chance consequences of the blind play of uncontrolled instinct, become
likewise the helpless victims of their environment. It is because
children are cheaply conceived that the infant mortality rate is high.
But the greatest evil, perhaps the greatest crime, of our so-called
civilization of to-day, is not to be gauged by the infant-mortality
rate. In truth, unfortunate babies who depart during their first twelve
months are more fortunate in many respects than those who survive to
undergo punishment for their parents' cruel ignorance and complacent
fecundity. If motherhood is wasted under the present regime of "glorious
fertility," childhood is not merely wasted, but actually destroyed.
Let us look at this matter from the point of view of the children who
survive.

     (1)  U.S. Department of Labor: Children's Bureau. Infant
          Mortality Series,
     No. 3, pp. 81, 82, 83, 84.

     (2)  Henry H. Hibbs, Jr.  Infant Mortality:  Its Relation to
          Social and
     Industrial Conditions, p. 39.  Russell Sage Foundation, New
          York, 1916.

     (3)  Cf. U. S. Department of Labor.  Children's Bureau:
          Infant Mortality
     Series, No. 11. p. 36.

     (4)  Havelock Ellis, Sex in Relation to Society, p. 31.



CHAPTER III: "Children Troop Down From Heaven...."

Failure of emotional, sentimental and so-called idealistic efforts,
based on hysterical enthusiasm, to improve social conditions, is nowhere
better exemplified than in the undervaluation of child-life. A few years
ago, the scandal of children under fourteen working in cotton mills was
exposed. There was muckraking and agitation. A wave of moral indignation
swept over America. There arose a loud cry for immediate action. Then,
having more or less successfully settled this particular matter, the
American people heaved a sigh of relief, settled back, and complacently
congratulated itself that the problem of child labor had been settled
once and for all.

Conditions are worse to-day than before. Not only is there child labor
in practically every State in the Union, but we are now forced to
realize the evils that result from child labor, of child laborers
now grown into manhood and womanhood. But we wish here to point out a
neglected aspect of this problem. Child labor shows us how cheaply we
value childhood. And moreover, it shows us that cheap childhood is the
inevitable result of chance parenthood. Child labor is organically bound
up with the problem of uncontrolled breeding and the large family.

The selective draft of 1917--which was designed to choose for military
service only those fulfiling definite requirements of physical
and mental fitness--showed some of the results of child labor. It
established the fact that the majority of American children never got
beyond the sixth grade, because they were forced to leave school at that
time. Our over-advertised compulsory education does not compel--and does
not educate. The selective-draft, it is our duty to emphasize this fact,
revealed that 38 per cent. of the young men (more than a million) were
rejected because of physical ill-health and defects. And 25 per cent.
were illiterate.

These young men were the children of yesterday. Authorities tell us that
75 per cent. of the school-children are defective. This means that
no less than fifteen million schoolchildren, out of 22,000,000 in the
United States, are physically or mentally below par.

This is the soil in which all sorts of serious evils strike root. It is
a truism that children are the chief asset of a nation. Yet while the
United States government allotted 92.8 per cent. of its appropriations
for 1920 toward war expenses, three per cent. to public works, 3.2 per
cent. to "primary governmental functions," no more than one per cent.
is appropriated to education, research and development. Of this one
per cent., only a small proportion is devoted to public health. The
conservation of childhood is a minor consideration. While three cents
is spent for the more or less doubtful protection of women and
children, fifty cents is given to the Bureau of Animal Industry, for
the protection of domestic animals. In 1919, the State of Kansas
appropriated $25,000 to protect the health of pigs, and $4,000 to
protect the health of children. In four years our Federal Government
appropriated--roughly speaking--$81,000,000 for the improvement
of rivers; $13,000,000 for forest conservation; $8,000,000 for the
experimental plant industry; $7,000,000 for the experimental animal
industry; $4,000,000 to combat the foot and mouth disease; and less than
half a million for the protection of child life.

Competent authorities tell us that no less than 75 per cent. of American
children leave school between the ages of fourteen and sixteen to go
to work. This number is increasing. According to the recently published
report on "The Administration of the First Child Labor Law," in five
states in which it was necessary for the Children's Bureau to handle
directly the working certificates of children, one-fifth of the 25,000
children who applied for certificates left school when they were in the
fourth grade; nearly a tenth of them had never attended school at all or
had not gone beyond the first grade; and only one-twenty-fifth had gone
as far as the eighth grade. But their educational equipment was even
more limited than the grade they attended would indicate. Of the
children applying to go to work 1,803 had not advanced further than the
first grade even when they had gone to school at all; 3,379 could not
even sign their own names legibly, and nearly 2,000 of them could not
write at all. The report brings automatically into view the vicious
circle of child-labor, illiteracy, bodily and mental defect, poverty and
delinquency. And like all reports on child labor, the large family and
reckless breeding looms large in the background as one of the chief
factors in the problem.

Despite all our boasting of the American public school, of the equal
opportunity afforded to every child in America, we have the shortest
school-term, and the shortest school-day of any of the civilized
countries. In the United States of America, there are 106 illiterates to
every thousand people. In England there are 58 per thousand, Sweden and
Norway have one per thousand.

The United States is the most illiterate country in the world--that is,
of the so-called civilized countries. Of the 5,000,000 illiterates
in the United States, 58 per cent. are white and 28 per cent. native
whites. Illiteracy not only is the index of inequality of opportunity.
It speaks as well a lack of consideration for the children. It means
either that children have been forced out of school to go to work, or
that they are mentally and physically defective.(1)

One is tempted to ask why a society, which has failed so lamentably to
protect the already existing child life upon which its very perpetuation
depends, takes upon itself the reckless encouragement of indiscriminate
procreation. The United States Government has recently inaugurated a
policy of restricting immigration from foreign countries. Until it is
able to protect childhood from criminal exploitation, until it has made
possible a reasonable hope of life, liberty and growth for American
children, it should likewise recognize the wisdom of voluntary
restriction in the production of children.

Reports on child labor published by the National Child Labor Committee
only incidentally reveal the correlation of this evil with that of large
families. Yet this is evident throughout. The investigators are more
bent upon regarding child labor as a cause of illiteracy.

But it is no less a consequence of irresponsibility in breeding. A
sinister aspect of this is revealed by Theresa Wolfson's study of
child-labor in the beet-fields of Michigan.(2) As one weeder put it:
"Poor man make no money, make plenty children--plenty children good for
sugar-beet business." Further illuminating details are given by Miss
Wolfson:

"Why did they come to the beet-fields? Most frequently families with
large numbers of children said that they felt that the city was no place
to raise children--things too expensive and children ran wild--in the
country all the children could work." Living conditions are abominable
and unspeakably wretched. An old woodshed, a long-abandoned barn, and
occasionally a tottering, ramshackle farmer's house are the common
types. "One family of eleven, the youngest child two years, the oldest
sixteen years, lived in an old country store which had but one window;
the wind and rain came through the holes in the walls, the ceiling was
very low and the smoke from the stove filled the room. Here the family
ate, slept, cooked and washed."

"In Tuscola County a family of six was found living in a one-room shack
with no windows. Light and ventilation was secured through the open
doors. Little Charles, eight years of age, was left at home to take
care of Dan, Annie and Pete, whose ages were five years, four years, and
three months, respectively. In addition, he cooked the noonday meal and
brought it to his parents in the field. The filth and choking odors of
the shack made it almost unbearable, yet the baby was sleeping in a heap
of rags piled up in a corner."

Social philosophers of a certain school advocate the return to the
land--it is only in the overcrowded city, they claim, that the evils
resulting from the large family are possible. There is, according to
this philosophy, no overcrowding, no over-population in the country,
where in the open air and sunlight every child has an opportunity for
health and growth. This idyllic conception of American country life
does not correspond with the picture presented by this investigator, who
points out:

"To promote the physical and mental development of the child, we forbid
his employment in factories, shops and stores. On the other hand, we are
prone to believe that the right kind of farm-work is healthful and the
best thing for children. But for a child to crawl along the ground,
weeding beets in the hot sun for fourteen hours a day--the average
workday--is far from being the best thing. The law of compensation is
bound to work in some way, and the immediate result of this agricultural
work is interference with school attendance."

How closely related this form of child-slavery is to the over-large
family, is definitely illustrated: "In the one hundred and thirty-three
families visited, there were six hundred children. A conversation held
with a 'Rooshian-German' woman is indicative of the size of most of the
families:"

"How many children have you?" inquired the investigator.

"Eight--Julius, und Rose, und Martha, dey is mine; Gottlieb und Philip,
und Frieda, dey is my husband's;--und Otto und Charlie--dey are ours."

Families with ten and twelve children were frequently found, while those
of six and eight children are the general rule. The advantage of a large
family in the beet fields is that it does the most work. In the one
hundred thirty-three families interviewed, there were one hundred
eighty-six children under the age of six years, ranging from eight weeks
up; thirty-six children between the ages of six and eight, approximately
twenty-five of whom had never been to school, and eleven over sixteen
years of age who had never been to school. One ten-year-old boy had
never been to school because he was a mental defective; one child of
nine was practically blinded by cataracts. This child was found groping
his way down the beet-rows pulling out weeds and feeling for the
beet-plants--in the glare of the sun he had lost all sense of light and
dark. Of the three hundred and forty children who were not going or had
never gone to school, only four had reached the point of graduation, and
only one had gone to high school. These large families migrated to the
beet-fields in early spring. Seventy-two per cent. of them are retarded.
When we realize that feeble-mindedness is arrested development and
retardation, we see that these "beet children" are artificially retarded
in their growth, and that the tendency is to reduce their intelligence
to the level of the congenital imbecile.

Nor must it be concluded that these large "beet" families are always the
"ignorant foreigner" so despised by our respectable press. The following
case throws some light on this matter, reported in the same pamphlet:
"An American family, considered a prize by the agent because of the fact
that there were nine children, turned out to be a `flunk.' They could
not work in the beet-fields, they ran up a bill at the country-store,
and one day the father and the eldest son, a boy of nineteen, were seen
running through the railroad station to catch an out-going train. The
grocer thought they were `jumping' their bill. He telephoned ahead
to the sheriff of the next town. They were taken off the train by the
sheriff and given the option of going back to the farm or staying in
jail. They preferred to stay in jail, and remained there for two weeks.
Meanwhile, the mother and her eight children, ranging in ages form
seventeen years to nine months, had to manage the best way they could.
At the end of two weeks, father and son were set free.... During all of
this period the farmers of the community sent in provisions to keep
the wife and children from starving." Does this case not sum up in a
nutshell the typical American intelligence confronted with the
problem of the too-large family--industrial slavery tempered with
sentimentality!

Let us turn to a young, possibly a more progressive state. Consider the
case of "California, the Golden" as it is named by Emma Duke, in her
study of child-labor in the Imperial Valley, "as fertile as the Valley
of the Nile."(3) Here, cotton is king, and rich ranchers, absentee
landlords and others exploit it. Less than ten years ago ranchers
would bring in hordes of laboring families, but refuse to assume any
responsibility in housing them, merely permitting them to sleep on
the grounds of the ranch. Conditions have been somewhat improved, but,
sometimes, we read, "a one roomed straw house with an area of fifteen
by twenty feet will serve as a home for an entire family, which not
only cooks but sleeps in the same room." Here, as in Michigan among the
beets, children are "thick as bees." All kinds of children pick,
Miss Duke reports, "even those as young as three years! Five-year-old
children pick steadily all day.... Many white American children are
among them--pure American stock, who have gradually moved from the
Carolinas, Tennessee, and other southern states to Arkansas, Texas,
Oklahoma, Arizona, and on into the Imperial Valley." Some of these
children, it seems, wanted to attend school, but their fathers did not
want to work; so the children were forced to become bread-winners. One
man whose children were working with him in the fields said, "Please,
lady, don't send them to school; let them pick a while longer. I ain't
got my new auto paid for yet." The native white American mother of
children working in the fields proudly remarked: "No; they ain't
never been to school, nor me nor their poppy, nor their granddads and
grandmoms. We've always been pickers!"--and she spat her tobacco over
the field in expert fashion.

"In the Valley one hears from townspeople," writes the investigator,
"that pickers make ten dollars a day, working the whole family. With
that qualification, the statement is ambiguous. One Mexican in the
Imperial Valley was the father of thirty-three children--`about thirteen
or fourteen living,' he said. If they all worked at cotton-picking, they
would doubtless altogether make more than ten dollars a day."

One of the child laborers revealed the economic advantage--to the
parents--in numerous progeny: "Us kids most always drag from forty to
fifty pounds of cotton before we take it to be weighed. Three of us
pick. I'm twelve years old and my bag is twelve feet long. I can drag
nearly a hundred pounds. My sister is ten years old, and her bag is
eight feet long. My little brother is seven and his bag is five feet
long."

Evidence abounds in the publications of the National Child Labor
Committee of this type of fecund parenthood.(4) It is not merely a
question of the large family versus the small family. Even comparatively
small families among migratory workers of this sort have been large
families. The high infant mortality rate has carried off the weaker
children. Those who survive are merely those who have been strong enough
to survive the most unfavorable living conditions. No; it is a situation
not unique, nor even unusual in human history, of greed and stupidity
and cupidity encouraging the procreative instinct toward the manufacture
of slaves. We hear these days of the selfishness and the degradation
of healthy and well-educated women who refuse motherhood; but we hear
little of the more sinister selfishness of men and women who bring
babies into the world to become child-slaves of the kind described in
these reports of child labor.

The history of child labor in the English factories in the nineteenth
century throws a suggestive light on this situation. These child-workers
were really called into being by the industrial situation. The
population grew, as Dean Inge has described it, like crops in a newly
irrigated desert. During the nineteenth century, the numbers were nearly
quadrupled. "Let those who think that the population of a country can
be increased at will, consider whether it is likely that any physical,
moral, or psychological change came over the nation co-incidentally with
the inventions of the spinning jenny and the steam engine. It is too
obvious for dispute that it was the possession of capital wanting
employment, and of natural advantages for using it, that called those
multitudes of human beings into existence, to eat the food which they
paid for by their labor."(5)

But when child labor in the factories became such a scandal and such a
disgrace that child-labor was finally forbidden by laws that possessed
the advantage over our own that they were enforced, the proletariat
ceased to supply children. Almost by magic the birth rate among the
workers declined. Since children were no longer of economic value to
the factories, they were evidently a drug in the home. This movement, it
should not be forgotten however, was coincident with the agitation and
education in Birth Control stimulated by the Besant-Bradlaugh trial.

Large families among migratory agricultural laborers in our own country
are likewise brought into existence in response to an industrial demand.
The enforcement of the child labor laws and the extension of their
restrictions are therefore an urgent necessity, not so much, as some of
our child-labor authorities believe, to enable these children to go to
school, as to prevent the recruiting of our next generation from the
least intelligent and most unskilled classes in the community. As long
as we officially encourage and countenance the production of large
families, the evils of child labor will confront us. On the other hand,
the prohibition of child labor may help, as in the case of English
factories, in the decline of the birth rate.

UNCONTROLLED BREEDING AND CHILD LABOR GO HAND IN HAND. And to-day
when we are confronted with the evils of the latter, in the form of
widespread illiteracy and defect, we should seek causes more deeply
rooted than the enslavement of children. The cost to society is
incalculable, as the National Child Labor Committee points out. "It
is not only through the lowered power, the stunting and the moral
degeneration of its individual members, but in actual expense, through
the necessary provision for the human junk, created by premature
employment, in poor-houses, hospitals, police and courts, jails and by
charitable organizations."

To-day we are paying for the folly of the over-production--and its
consequences in permanent injury to plastic childhood--of yesterday.
To-morrow, we shall be forced to pay for our ruthless disregard of our
surplus children of to-day. The child-laborer of one or two decades
ago has become the shifting laborer of to-day, stunted, underfed,
illiterate, unskilled, unorganized and unorganizable. "He is the last
person to be hired and the first to be fired." Boys and girls under
fourteen years of age are no longer permitted to work in factories,
mills, canneries and establishments whose products are to be shipped out
of the particular state, and children under sixteen can no longer work
in mines and quarries. But this affects only one quarter of our army of
child labor--work in local industries, stores, and farms, homework
in dark and unsanitary tenements is still permitted. Children work in
"homes" on artificial flowers, finishing shoddy garments, sewing their
very life's blood and that of the race into tawdry clothes and gewgaws
that are the most unanswerable comments upon our vaunted "civilization."
And to-day, we must not forget, the child-laborer of yesterday is
becoming the father or the mother of the child-laborer of to-morrow.

"Any nation that works its women is damned," once wrote Woods
Hutchinson. The nation that works its children, one is tempted to add,
is committing suicide. Loud-mouthed defenders of American democracy pay
no attention to the strange fact that, although "the average education
among all American adults is only the sixth grade," every one of these
adults has an equal power at the polls. The American nation, with all
its worship of efficiency and thrift, complacently forgets that "every
child defective in body, education or character is a charge upon the
community," as Herbert Hoover declared in an address before the American
Child Hygiene Association (October, 1920): "The nation as a whole," he
added, "has the obligation of such measures toward its children... as
will yield to them an equal opportunity at their start in life. If we
could grapple with the whole child situation for one generation, our
public health, our economic efficiency, the moral character, sanity and
stability of our people would advance three generations in one."

The great irrefutable fact that is ignored or neglected is that the
American nation officially places a low value upon the lives of
its children. The brutal truth is that CHILDREN ARE CHEAP. When
over-production in this field is curtailed by voluntary restriction,
when the birth rate among the working classes takes a sharp decline, the
value of children will rise. Then only will the infant mortality rate
decline, and child labor vanish.

Investigations of child labor emphasize its evils by pointing out that
these children are kept out of school, and that they miss the advantages
of American public school education. They express the current confidence
in compulsory education and the magical benefits to be derived from
the public school. But we need to qualify our faith in education, and
particularly our faith in the American public school. Educators are just
beginning to wake up to the dangers inherent in the attempt to teach the
brightest child and the mentally defective child at the same time. They
are beginning to test the possibilities of a "vertical" classification
as well as a "horizontal" one. That is, each class must be divided into
what are termed Gifted, Bright, Average, Dull, Normal, and Defective. In
the past the helter-skelter crowding and over-crowding together of all
classes of children of approximately the same age, produced only a dull
leveling to mediocrity.(6)

An investigation of forty schools in New York City, typical of hundreds
of others, reveals deplorable conditions of overcrowding and lack of
sanitation.(7) The worst conditions are to be found in locations the
most densely populated. Thus of Public School No. 51, located almost in
the center of the notorious "Hell's Kitchen" section, we read: "The play
space which is provided is a mockery of the worst kind. The basement
play-room is dark, damp, poorly lighted, poorly ventilated, foul
smelling, unclean, and wholly unfit for children for purposes of play.
The drainpipes from the roof have decayed to such a degree that in some
instances as little as a quarter of the pipe remains. On rainy days,
water enters the classrooms, hallways,  corridors, and is thrown
against windows because the pipes have rotted away. The narrow stairways
and halls are similar to those of jails and dungeons of a century ago.
The classrooms are poorly lighted, inadequately equipped, and in some
cases so small that the desks of pupils and teachers occupy almost all
of the floor-space."

Another school, located a short distance from Fifth Avenue, the
"wealthiest street in the world," is described as an "old shell of a
structure, erected decades ago as a modern school building. Nearly two
thousand children are crowded into class-rooms having a total seating
capacity of scarcely one thousand. Narrow doorways, intricate hallways
and antiquated stairways, dark and precipitous, keep ever alive the
danger of disaster from fire or panic. Only the eternal vigilance
of exceptional supervision has served to lessen the fear of such a
catastrophe. Artificial light is necessary, even on the brightest days,
in many of the class-rooms. In most of the classrooms, it is always
necessary when the sky is slightly overcast." There is no ventilating
system.

In the crowded East Side section conditions are reported to be no
better. The Public Education Association's report on Public School No.
130 points out that the site at the corner of Hester and Baxter Streets
was purchased by the city years ago as a school site, but that there
has been so much "tweedledeeing and tweedleduming" that the new building
which is to replace the old, has not even yet been planned! Meanwhile,
year after year, thousands of children are compelled to study daily in
dark and dingy class-rooms. "Artificial light is continually necessary,"
declares the report. "The ventilation is extremely poor. The fire hazard
is naturally great. There are no rest-rooms whatever for the teachers."
Other schools in the neighborhood reveal conditions even worse. In
two of them, for example; "In accordance with the requirements of
the syllabus in hygiene in the schools, the vision of the children is
regularly tested. In a recent test of this character, it was found in
Public School 108, the rate of defective vision in the various grades
ranged from 50 to 64 per cent.! In Public School 106, the rate ranged
from 43 to 94 per cent.!"

The conditions, we are assured, are no exceptions to the rule of
public schools in New York, where the fatal effects of overcrowding
in education may be observed in their most sinister but significant
aspects.

The forgotten fact in this case is that efforts for universal and
compulsory education cannot keep pace with the overproduction of
children. Even at the best, leaving out of consideration the public
school system as the inevitable prey and plundering-ground of the cheap
politician and job-hunter, present methods of wholesale and syndicated
"education" are not suited to compete with the unceasing, unthinking,
untiring procreative powers of our swarming, spawning populations.

Into such schools as described in the recent reports of the Public
Education Association, no intelligent parent would dare send his child.
They are not merely fire-traps and culture-grounds of infection, but of
moral and intellectual contamination as well. More and more are public
schools in America becoming institutions for subjecting children to
a narrow and reactionary orthodoxy, aiming to crush out all signs
of individuality, and to turn out boys and girls compressed into a
standardized pattern, with ready-made ideas on politics, religion,
morality, and economics. True education cannot grow out of such
compulsory herding of children in filthy fire-traps.

Character, ability, and reasoning power are not to be developed in
this fashion. Indeed, it is to be doubted whether even a completely
successful educational system could offset the evils of indiscriminate
breeding and compensate for the misfortune of being a superfluous child.
In recognizing the great need of education, we have failed to recognize
the greater need of inborn health and character. "If it were necessary
to choose between the task of getting children educated and getting them
well born and healthy," writes Havelock Ellis, "it would be better to
abandon education. There have been many great peoples who never dreamed
of national systems of education; there have been no great peoples
without the art of producing healthy and vigorous children. The matter
becomes of peculiar importance in great industrial states, like
England, the United States and Germany, because in such states, a tacit
conspiracy tends to grow up to subordinate national ends to individual
ends, and practically to work for the deterioration of the race."(8)

Much less can education solve the great problem of child labor. Rather,
under the conditions prevailing in modern society, child labor and the
failure of the public schools to educate are both indices of a more
deeply rooted evil. Both bespeak THE UNDERVALUATION OF THE CHILD. This
undervaluation, this cheapening of child life, is to speak crudely but
frankly the direct result of overproduction. "Restriction of output" is
an immediate necessity if we wish to regain control of the real values,
so that unimpeded, unhindered, and without danger of inner corruption,
humanity may protect its own health and powers.

     (1)  I am indebted to the National Child Labor Committee for
     these statistics, as well as for many of the facts that
     follow.

     (2)  "People Who Go to Beets" Pamphlet No. 299, National
     Child Labor Committee.

     (3)  California the Golden, by Emma Duke.  Reprinted from
     The American Child, Vol. II, No. 3.  November 1920.

     (4)  Cf. Child Welfare in Oklahoma; Child Welfare in
     Alabama; Child Welfare in North Carolina; Child Welfare in
     Kentucky; Child Welfare in Tennessee. Also, Children in
     Agriculture, by Ruth McIntire, and other studies.

     (5)  W. R. Inge:  Outspoken Essays: p. 92

     (6)  Cf. Tredgold:  Inheritance and Educability.  Eugenics
     Review, Vol. Xiii, No. I, pp. 839 et seq.

     (7)  Cf. New York Times, June 4, 1921.

     (8)  "Studies in the Psychology of Sex," Vol. VI. p. 20.




CHAPTER IV: The Fertility of the Feeble-Minded

     What vesture have you woven for my year?
     O Man and Woman who have fashioned it
     Together, is it fine and clean and strong,
     Made in such reverence of holy joy,
     Of such unsullied substance, that your hearts
     Leap with glad awe to see it clothing me,
     The glory of whose nakedness you know?

     "The Song of the Unborn"
     Amelia Josephine Burr

There is but one practical and feasible program in handling the great
problem of the feeble-minded. That is, as the best authorities are
agreed, to prevent the birth of those who would transmit imbecility to
their descendants. Feeble-mindedness as investigations and statistics
from every country indicate, is invariably associated with an abnormally
high rate of fertility. Modern conditions of civilization, as we are
continually being reminded, furnish the most favorable breeding-ground
for the mental defective, the moron, the imbecile. "We protect the
members of a weak strain," says Davenport, "up to the period of
reproduction, and then let them free upon the community, and encourage
them to leave a large progeny of `feeble-minded': which in turn,
protected from mortality and carefully nurtured up to the reproductive
period, are again set free to reproduce, and so the stupid work goes on
of preserving and increasing our socially unfit strains."

The philosophy of Birth Control points out that as long as civilized
communities encourage unrestrained fecundity in the "normal" members
of the population--always of course under the cloak of decency and
morality--and penalize every attempt to introduce the principle of
discrimination and responsibility in parenthood, they will be faced with
the ever-increasing problem of feeble-mindedness, that fertile parent
of degeneracy, crime, and pauperism. Small as the percentage of the
imbecile and half-witted may seem in comparison with the normal members
of the community, it should always be remembered that feeble-mindedness
is not an unrelated expression of modern civilization. Its roots strike
deep into the social fabric. Modern studies indicate that insanity,
epilepsy, criminality, prostitution, pauperism, and mental defect, are
all organically bound up together and that the least intelligent and the
thoroughly degenerate classes in every community are the most prolific.
Feeble-mindedness in one generation becomes pauperism or insanity in the
next. There is every indication that feeble-mindedness in its protean
forms is on the increase, that it has leaped the barriers, and that
there is truly, as some of the scientific eugenists have pointed out, a
feeble-minded peril to future generations--unless the feeble-minded are
prevented from reproducing their kind. To meet this emergency is the
immediate and peremptory duty of every State and of all communities.

The curious situation has come about that while our statesmen are
busy upon their propaganda of "repopulation," and are encouraging the
production of large families, they are ignoring the exigent problem of
the elimination of the feeble-minded. In this, however, the politicians
are at one with the traditions of a civilization which, with its
charities and philanthropies, has propped up the defective and
degenerate and relieved them of the burdens borne by the healthy
sections of the community, thus enabling them more easily and more
numerously to propagate their kind. "With the very highest motives,"
declares Dr. Walter E. Fernald, "modern philanthropic efforts often tend
to foster and increase the growth of defect in the community.... The only
feeble-minded persons who now receive any official consideration are
those who have already become dependent or delinquent, many of whom have
already become parents. We lock the barn-door after the horse is stolen.
We now have state commissions for controlling the gipsy-moth and
the boll weevil, the foot-and-mouth disease, and for protecting the
shell-fish and wild game, but we have no commission which even attempts
to modify or to control the vast moral and economic forces represented
by the feeble-minded persons at large in the community."

How the feeble-minded and their always numerous progeny run the gamut
of police, alms-houses, courts, penal institutions, "charities and
corrections," tramp shelters, lying-in hospitals, and relief afforded by
privately endowed religious and social agencies, is shown in any
number of reports and studies of family histories. We find cases of
feeble-mindedness and mental defect in the reports on infant mortality
referred to in a previous chapter, as well as in other reports published
by the United States government. Here is a typical case showing the
astonishing ability to "increase and multiply," organically bound up
with delinquency and defect of various types:

"The parents of a feeble-minded girl, twenty years of age, who was
committed to the Kansas State Industrial Farm on a vagrancy charge,
lived in a thickly populated Negro district which was reported by
the police to be the headquarters for the criminal element of the
surrounding State.... The mother married at fourteen, and her first
child was born at fifteen. In rapid succession she gave birth to sixteen
live-born children and had one miscarriage. The first child, a girl,
married but separated from her husband.... The fourth, fifth and sixth,
all girls, died in infancy or early childhood. The seventh, a girl,
remarried after the death of her husband, from whom she had been
separated. The eighth, a boy who early in life began to exhibit criminal
tendencies, was in prison for highway robbery and burglary. The ninth, a
girl, normal mentally, was in quarantine at the Kansas State Industrial
Farm at the time this study was made; she had lived with a man as
his common-law wife, and had also been arrested several times for
soliciting. The tenth, a boy, was involved in several delinquencies when
young and was sent to the detention-house but did not remain there
long. The eleventh, a boy... at the age of seventeen was sentenced to the
penitentiary for twenty years on a charge of first-degree robbery; after
serving a portion of his time, he was paroled, and later was shot and
killed in a fight. The twelfth, a boy, was at fifteen years of age
implicated in a murder and sent to the industrial school, but escaped
from there on a bicycle which he had stolen; at eighteen, he was shot
and killed by a woman. The thirteenth child, feeble-minded, is the girl
of the study. The fourteenth, a boy was considered by police to be the
best member of the family; his mother reported him to be much slower
mentally than his sister just mentioned; he had been arrested several
times. Once, he was held in the detention-home and once sent to the
State Industrial school; at other times, he was placed on probation.
The fifteenth, a girl sixteen years old, has for a long time had a bad
reputation. Subsequent to the commitment of her sister to the Kansas
State Industrial Farm, she was arrested on a charge of vagrancy, found
to be syphilitic, and quarantined in a state other than Kansas. At the
time of her arrest, she stated that prostitution was her occupation.
The last child was a boy of thirteen years whose history was not
secured...."(1)

The notorious fecundity of feeble-minded women is emphasized in studies
and investigations of the problem, coming from all countries. "The
feeble-minded woman is twice as prolific as the normal one." Sir James
Crichton-Browne speaks of the great numbers of feeble-minded girls,
wholly unfit to become mothers, who return to the work-house year after
year to bear children, "many of whom happily die, but some of whom
survive to recruit our idiot establishments and to repeat their mothers'
performances." Tredgold points out that the number of children born to
the feeble-minded is abnormally high. Feeble-minded women "constitute
a permanent menace to the race and one which becomes serious at a time
when the decline of the birth-rate is... unmistakable." Dr. Tredgold
points out that "the average number of children born in a family is
four," whereas in these degenerate families, we find an average of 7.3 to
each. Out of this total only a little more than ONE-THIRD--456 out of
a total of 1,269 children--can be considered profitable members of the
community, and that, be it remembered, at the parents' valuation.

Another significant point is the number of mentally defective children
who survive. "Out of the total number of 526 mentally affected persons
in the 150 families, there are 245 in the present generation--an
unusually large survival."(2)

Speaking for Bradford, England, Dr. Helen U. Campbell touches another
significant and interesting point usually neglected by the advocates of
mothers' pensions, milk-stations, and maternity-education programs.

"We are also confronted with the problem of the actually mentally
deficient, of the more or less feeble-minded, and the deranged,
epileptic... or otherwise mentally abnormal mother," writes this
authority. "The `bad mothering' of these cases is quite unimprovable
at an infant welfare center, and a very definite if not relatively very
large percentage of our infants are suffering severely as a result of
dependence upon such `mothering."'(3)

Thus we are brought face to face with another problem of infant
mortality. Are we to check the infant mortality rate among the
feeble-minded and aid the unfortunate offspring to grow up, a menace to
the civilized community even when not actually certifiable as mentally
defective or not obviously imbecile?

Other figures and studies indicate the close relationship between
feeble-mindedness and the spread of venereal scourges. We are informed
that in Michigan, 75 per cent. of the prostitute class is infected with
some form of venereal disease, and that 75 per cent. of the infected
are mentally defective,--morons, imbeciles, or "border-line" cases
most dangerous to the community at large. At least 25 per cent. of the
inmates of our prisons, according to Dr. Fernald, are mentally defective
and belong either to the feeble-minded or to the defective-delinquent
class. Nearly 50 per cent. of the girls sent to reformatories are
mental defectives. To-day, society treats feeble-minded or "defective
delinquent" men or women as "criminals," sentences them to prison or
reformatory for a "term," and then releases them at the expiration
of their sentences. They are usually at liberty just long enough to
reproduce their kind, and then they return again and again to prison.
The truth of this statement is evident from the extremely large
proportion in institutions of neglected and dependent children, who are
the feeble-minded offspring of such feeble-minded parents.

Confronted with these shocking truths about the menace of
feeble-mindedness to the race, a menace acute because of the unceasing
and unrestrained fertility of such defectives, we are apt to become the
victims of a "wild panic for instant action." There is no occasion for
hysterical, ill-considered action, specialists tell us. They direct our
attention to another phase of the problem, that of the so-called "good
feeble-minded." We are informed that imbecility, in itself, is not
synonymous with badness. If it is fostered in a "suitable environment,"
it may express itself in terms of good citizenship and useful
occupation. It may thus be transmuted into a docile, tractable, and
peaceable element of the community. The moron and the feeble-minded,
thus protected, so we are assured, may even marry some brighter member
of the community, and thus lessen the chances of procreating another
generation of imbeciles. We read further that some of our doctors
believe that "in our social scale, there is a place for the good
feeble-minded."

In such a reckless and thoughtless differentiation between the "bad"
and the "good" feeble-minded, we find new evidence of the conventional
middle-class bias that also finds expression among some of the
eugenists. We do not object to feeble-mindedness simply because it
leads to immorality and criminality; nor can we approve of it when it
expresses itself in docility, submissiveness and obedience. We object
because both are burdens and dangers to the intelligence of the
community. As a matter of fact, there is sufficient evidence to lead us
to believe that the so-called "borderline cases" are a greater menace
than the out-and-out "defective delinquents" who can be supervised,
controlled and prevented from procreating their kind. The advent of the
Binet-Simon and similar psychological tests indicates that the mental
defective who is glib and plausible, bright looking and attractive, but
with a mental vision of seven, eight or nine years, may not merely lower
the whole level of intelligence in a school or in a society, but may
be encouraged by church and state to increase and multiply until he
dominates and gives the prevailing "color"--culturally speaking--to an
entire community.

The presence in the public schools of the mentally defective children
of men and women who should never have been parents is a problem that
is becoming more and more difficult, and is one of the chief reasons for
lower educational standards. As one of the greatest living authorities
on the subject, Dr. A. Tredgold, has pointed out,(4) this has created
a destructive conflict of purpose. "In the case of children with a low
intellectual capacity, much of the education at present provided is
for all practical purposes a complete waste of time, money and
patience.... On the other hand, for children of high intellectual
capacity, our present system does not go far enough. I believe that
much innate potentiality remains undeveloped, even amongst the working
classes, owing to the absence of opportunity for higher education, to
the disadvantage of the nation. In consequence of these fundamental
differences, the catchword `equality of opportunity' is meaningless
and mere claptrap in the absence of any equality to respond to such
opportunity. What is wanted is not equality of opportunity, but
education adapted to individual potentiality; and if the time and money
now spent in the fruitless attempt to make silk-purses out of sows'
ears, were devoted to the higher education of children of good natural
capacity, it would contribute enormously to national efficiency."

In a much more complex manner than has been recognized even by students
of this problem, the destiny and the progress of civilization and of
human expression has been hindered and held back by this burden of the
imbecile and the moron. While we may admire the patience and the deep
human sympathy with which the great specialists in feeble-mindedness
have expressed the hope of drying up the sources of this evil or of
rendering it harmless, we should not permit sympathy or sentimentality
to blind us to the fact that health and vitality and human growth
likewise need cultivation. "A LAISSER FAIRE policy," writes one
investigator, "simply allows the social sore to spread. And a quasi
LAISSER FAIRE policy wherein we allow the defective to commit crime
and then interfere and imprison him, wherein we grant the defective the
personal liberty to do as he pleases, until he pleases to descend to a
plane of living below the animal level, and try to care for a few of his
descendants who are so helpless that they can no longer exercise that
personal liberty to do as they please,"--such a policy increases and
multiplies the dangers of the over-fertile feeble-minded.(5)

The Mental Survey of the State of Oregon recently published by the
United States Health Service, sets an excellent example and should be
followed by every state in the Union and every civilized country as
well. It is greatly to the credit of the Western State that it is one of
the first officially to recognize the primary importance of this problem
and to realize that facts, no matter how fatal to self-satisfaction,
must be faced. This survey, authorized by the state legislature, and
carried out by the University of Oregon, in collaboration with Dr. C.
L. Carlisle of the Public Health service, aided by a large number of
volunteers, shows that only a small percentage of mental defectives and
morons are in the care of institutions. The rest are widely scattered
and their condition unknown or neglected. They are docile and
submissive, they do not attract attention to themselves as do the
criminal delinquents and the insane. Nevertheless, it is estimated that
they number no less than 75,000 men, women, and children, out of a total
population of 783,000, or about ten per cent. Oregon, it is thought, is
no exception to other states. Yet under our present conditions, these
people are actually encouraged to increase and multiply and replenish
the earth.

Concerning the importance of the Oregon survey, we may quote Surgeon
General H. C. Cumming: "the prevention and correction of mental
defectives is one of the great public health problems of to-day. It
enters into many phases of our work and its influence continually crops
up unexpectedly. For instance, work of the Public Health Service in
connection with juvenile courts shows that a marked proportion of
juvenile delinquency is traceable to some degree of mental deficiency
in the offender. For years Public Health officials have concerned
themselves only with the disorders of physical health; but now they are
realizing the significance of mental health also. The work in Oregon
constitutes the first state-wide survey which even begins to disclose
the enormous drain on a state, caused by mental defects. One of the
objects of the work was to obtain for the people of Oregon an idea
of the problem that confronted them and the heavy annual loss, both
economic and industrial, that it entailed. Another was to enable the
legislators to devise a program that would stop much of the loss,
restore to health and bring to lives of industrial usefulness, many of
those now down and out, and above all, to save hundreds of children from
growing up to lives of misery."

It will be interesting to see how many of our State Legislatures have
the intelligence and the courage to follow in the footsteps of Oregon in
this respect. Nothing could more effectually stimulate discussion, and
awaken intelligence as to the extravagance and cost to the community of
our present codes of traditional morality. But we should make sure
in all such surveys, that mental defect is not concealed even in such
dignified bodies as state legislatures and among those leaders who are
urging men and women to reckless and irresponsible procreation.

I have touched upon these various aspects of the complex problem of the
feeble-minded, and the menace of the moron to human society, not merely
for the purpose of reiterating that it is one of the greatest and most
difficult social problems of modern times, demanding an immediate, stern
and definite policy, but because it illustrates the actual harvest of
reliance upon traditional morality, upon the biblical injunction to
increase and multiply, a policy still taught by politician, priest
and militarist. Motherhood has been held universally sacred; yet, as
Bouchacourt pointed out, "to-day, the dregs of the human species, the
blind, the deaf-mute, the degenerate, the nervous, the vicious, the
idiotic, the imbecile, the cretins and the epileptics--are better
protected than pregnant women." The syphilitic, the irresponsible, the
feeble-minded are encouraged to breed unhindered, while all the powerful
forces of tradition, of custom, or prejudice, have bolstered up the
desperate effort to block the inevitable influence of true civilization
in spreading the principles of independence, self-reliance,
discrimination and foresight upon which the great practice of
intelligent parenthood is based.

To-day we are confronted by the results of this official policy. There
is no escaping it; there is no explaining it away. Surely it is an
amazing and discouraging phenomenon that the very governments that have
seen fit to interfere in practically every phase of the normal citizen's
life, dare not attempt to restrain, either by force or persuasion, the
moron and the imbecile from producing his large family of feeble-minded
offspring.

In my own experience, I recall vividly the case of a feeble-minded girl
who every year, for a long period, received the expert attention of a
great specialist in one of the best-known maternity hospitals of New
York City. The great obstetrician, for the benefit of interns and
medical students, performed each year a Caesarian operation upon this
unfortunate creature to bring into the world her defective, and, in
one case at least, her syphilitic, infant. "Nelly" was then sent to a
special room and placed under the care of a day nurse and a night nurse,
with extra and special nourishment provided. Each year she returned to
the hospital. Such cases are not exceptions; any experienced doctor or
nurse can recount similar stories. In the interest of medical science
this practice may be justified. I am not criticising it from that
point of view. I realize as well as the most conservative moralist that
humanity requires that healthy members of the race should make certain
sacrifices to preserve from death those unfortunates who are born with
hereditary taints. But there is a point at which philanthropy may become
positively dysgenic, when charity is converted into injustice to the
self-supporting citizen, into positive injury to the future of the race.
Such a point, it seems obvious, is reached when the incurably defective
are permitted to procreate and thus increase their numbers.

The problem of the dependent, delinquent and defective elements in
modern society, we must repeat, cannot be minimized because of their
alleged small numerical proportion to the rest of the population. The
proportion seems small only because we accustom ourselves to the habit
of looking upon feeble-mindedness as a separate and distinct calamity to
the race, as a chance phenomenon unrelated to the sexual and biological
customs not only condoned but even encouraged by our so-called
civilization. The actual dangers can only be fully realized when we have
acquired definite information concerning the financial and cultural cost
of these classes to the community, when we become fully cognizant of the
burden of the imbecile upon the whole human race; when we see the funds
that should be available for human development, for scientific, artistic
and philosophic research, being diverted annually, by hundreds of
millions of dollars, to the care and segregation of men, women, and
children who never should have been born. The advocate of Birth Control
realizes as well as all intelligent thinkers the dangers of interfering
with personal liberty. Our whole philosophy is, in fact, based upon
the fundamental assumption that man is a self-conscious, self-governing
creature, that he should not be treated as a domestic animal; that he
must be left free, at least within certain wide limits, to follow his
own wishes in the matter of mating and in the procreation of children.
Nor do we believe that the community could or should send to the
lethal chamber the defective progeny resulting from irresponsible and
unintelligent breeding.

But modern society, which has respected the personal liberty of the
individual only in regard to the unrestricted and irresponsible bringing
into the world of filth and poverty an overcrowding procession of
infants foredoomed to death or hereditable disease, is now confronted
with the problem of protecting itself and its future generations
against the inevitable consequences of this long-practised policy of
LAISSER-FAIRE.

The emergency problem of segregation and sterilization must be faced
immediately. Every feeble-minded girl or woman of the hereditary
type, especially of the moron class, should be segregated during the
reproductive period. Otherwise, she is almost certain to bear imbecile
children, who in turn are just as certain to breed other defectives. The
male defectives are no less dangerous. Segregation carried out for one
or two generations would give us only partial control of the problem.
Moreover, when we realize that each feeble-minded person is a potential
source of an endless progeny of defect, we prefer the policy of
immediate sterilization, of making sure that parenthood is absolutely
prohibited to the feeble-minded.

This, I say, is an emergency measure. But how are we to prevent the
repetition in the future of a new harvest of imbecility, the recurrence
of new generations of morons and defectives, as the logical and
inevitable consequence of the universal application of the traditional
and widely approved command to increase and multiply?

At the present moment, we are offered three distinct and more or less
mutually exclusive policies by which civilization may hope to protect
itself and the generations of the future from the allied dangers of
imbecility, defect and delinquency. No one can understand the necessity
for Birth Control education without a complete comprehension of the
dangers, the inadequacies, or the limitations of the present attempts at
control, or the proposed programs for social reconstruction and racial
regeneration. It is, therefore, necessary to interpret and criticize
the three programs offered to meet our emergency. These may be briefly
summarized as follows:

(1) Philanthropy and Charity: This is the present and traditional method
of meeting the problems of human defect and dependence, of poverty and
delinquency. It is emotional, altruistic, at best ameliorative, aiming
to meet the individual situation as it arises and presents itself. Its
effect in practise is seldom, if ever, truly preventive. Concerned
with symptoms, with the allaying of acute and catastrophic miseries, it
cannot, if it would, strike at the radical causes of social misery. At
its worst, it is sentimental and paternalistic.

(2) Marxian Socialism: This may be considered typical of many widely
varying schemes of more or less revolutionary social reconstruction,
emphasizing the primary importance of environment, education, equal
opportunity, and health, in the elimination of the conditions (i. e.
capitalistic control of industry) which have resulted in biological
chaos and human waste. I shall attempt to show that the Marxian doctrine
is both too limited, too superficial and too fragmentary in its
basic analysis of human nature and in its program of revolutionary
reconstruction.

(3) Eugenics: Eugenics seems to me to be valuable in its critical and
diagnostic aspects, in emphasizing the danger of irresponsible and
uncontrolled fertility of the "unfit" and the feeble-minded establishing
a progressive unbalance in human society and lowering the birth-rate
among the "fit." But in its so-called "constructive" aspect, in seeking
to reestablish the dominance of healthy strain over the unhealthy, by
urging an increased birth-rate among the fit, the Eugenists really offer
nothing more farsighted than a "cradle competition" between the fit
and the unfit. They suggest in very truth, that all intelligent and
respectable parents should take as their example in this grave matter of
child-bearing the most irresponsible elements in the community.

     (1)  United States Public Health Service:  Psychiatric
     Studies of Delinquents. Reprint No. 598:  pp. 64-65.

     (2)  The Problem of the Feeble-Minded:  An Abstract of the
     Report of the Royal Commission on the Cure and Control of
     the Feeble-Minded, London:  P. S. King & Son.

     (3)  Cf.  Feeble-Minded in Ontario:  Fourteenth Report for
     the year ending October 31st, 1919.

     (4)  Eugenics Review, Vol. XIII, p. 339 et seq.

     (5)  Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem:  A True Story of the
     Social Aspect of Feeble-mindedness.  By A. C. Rogers and
     Maud A. Merrill; Boston (1919).




CHAPTER V: The Cruelty of Charity

     "Fostering the good-for-nothing at the expense of the
     good is an extreme cruelty.  It is a deliberate storing
     up of miseries for future generations.  There is no greater
     curse to posterity than that of bequeathing them an increasing
     population of imbeciles."

     Herbert Spencer

The last century has witnessed the rise and development of philanthropy
and organized charity. Coincident with the all-conquering power of
machinery and capitalistic control, with the unprecedented growth
of great cities and industrial centers, and the creation of great
proletarian populations, modern civilization has been confronted, to a
degree hitherto unknown in human history, with the complex problem of
sustaining human life in surroundings and under conditions flagrantly
dysgenic.

The program, as I believe all competent authorities in contemporary
philanthropy and organized charity would agree, has been altered in aim
and purpose. It was first the outgrowth of humanitarian and altruistic
idealism, perhaps not devoid of a strain of sentimentalism, of an
idealism that was aroused by a desperate picture of human misery
intensified by the industrial revolution. It has developed in later
years into a program not so much aiming to succor the unfortunate
victims of circumstances, as to effect what we may term social
sanitation. Primarily, it is a program of self-protection. Contemporary
philanthropy, I believe, recognizes that extreme poverty and overcrowded
slums are veritable breeding-grounds of epidemics, disease, delinquency
and dependency. Its aim, therefore, is to prevent the individual family
from sinking to that abject condition in which it will become a much
heavier burden upon society.

There is no need here to criticize the obvious limitations of organized
charities in meeting the desperate problem of destitution. We are all
familiar with these criticisms: the common indictment of "inefficiency"
so often brought against public and privately endowed agencies. The
charges include the high cost of administration; the pauperization
of deserving poor, and the encouragement and fostering of the
"undeserving"; the progressive destruction of self-respect and
self-reliance by the paternalistic interference of social agencies; the
impossibility of keeping pace with the ever-increasing multiplication of
factors and influences responsible for the perpetuation of human misery;
the misdirection and misappropriation of endowments; the absence of
interorganization and coordination of the various agencies of church,
state, and privately endowed institutions; the "crimes of charity"
that are occasionally exposed in newspaper scandals. These and similar
strictures we may ignore as irrelevant to our present purpose, as
inevitable but not incurable faults that have been and are being
eliminated in the slow but certain growth of a beneficent power in
modern civilization. In reply to such criticisms, the protagonist of
modern philanthropy might justly point to the honest and sincere workers
and disinterested scientists it has mobilized, to the self-sacrificing
and hard-working executives who have awakened public attention to the
evils of poverty and the menace to the race engendered by misery and
filth.

Even if we accept organized charity at its own valuation, and grant that
it does the best it can, it is exposed to a more profound criticism.
It reveals a fundamental and irremediable defect. Its very success, its
very efficiency, its very necessity to the social order, are themselves
the most unanswerable indictment. Organized charity itself is the
symptom of a malignant social disease.

Those vast, complex, interrelated organizations aiming to control and to
diminish the spread of misery and destitution and all the menacing evils
that spring out of this sinisterly fertile soil, are the surest
sign that our civilization has bred, is breeding and is perpetuating
constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents and
dependents. My criticism, therefore, is not directed at the "failure" of
philanthropy, but rather at its success.

These dangers inherent in the very idea of humanitarianism and altruism,
dangers which have to-day produced their full harvest of human waste, of
inequality and inefficiency, were fully recognized in the last century
at the moment when such ideas were first put into practice. Readers of
Huxley's attack on the Salvation Army will recall his penetrating
and stimulating condemnation of the debauch of sentimentalism which
expressed itself in so uncontrolled a fashion in the Victorian era. One
of the most penetrating of American thinkers, Henry James, Sr., sixty or
seventy years ago wrote: "I have been so long accustomed to see the most
arrant deviltry transact itself in the name of benevolence, that the
moment I hear a profession of good will from almost any quarter, I
instinctively look around for a constable or place my hand within reach
of a bell-rope. My ideal of human intercourse would be a state of things
in which no man will ever stand in need of any other man's help, but
will derive all his satisfaction from the great social tides which
own no individual names. I am sure no man can be put in a position of
dependence upon another, without the other's very soon becoming--if he
accepts the duties of the relation--utterly degraded out of his just
human proportions. No man can play the Deity to his fellow man with
impunity--I mean, spiritual impunity, of course. For see: if I am at all
satisfied with that relation, if it contents me to be in a position of
generosity towards others, I must be remarkably indifferent at bottom to
the gross social inequality which permits that position, and, instead
of resenting the enforced humiliation of my fellow man to myself in the
interests of humanity, I acquiesce in it for the sake of the profit it
yields to my own self-complacency. I do hope the reign of benevolence
is over; until that event occurs, I am sure the reign of God will be
impossible."

To-day, we may measure the evil effects of "benevolence" of this type,
not merely upon those who have indulged in it, but upon the community at
large. These effects have been reduced to statistics and we cannot, if
we would, escape their significance. Look, for instance (since they are
close at hand, and fairly representative of conditions elsewhere) at
the total annual expenditures of public and private "charities and
corrections" for the State of New York. For the year ending June 30,
1919, the expenditures of public institutions and agencies amounted to
$33, 936,205.88. The expenditures of privately supported and endowed
institutions for the same year, amount to $58,100,530.98. This makes
a total, for public and private charities and corrections of
$92,036,736.86. A conservative estimate of the increase for the
year (1920-1921) brings this figure approximately to one-hundred and
twenty-five millions. These figures take on an eloquent significance if
we compare them to the comparatively small amounts spent upon education,
conservation of health and other constructive efforts. Thus, while the
City of New York spent $7.35 per capita on public education in the year
1918, it spent on public charities no less than $2.66. Add to this last
figure an even larger amount dispensed by private agencies, and we may
derive some definite sense of the heavy burden of dependency, pauperism
and delinquency upon the normal and healthy sections of the community.

Statistics now available also inform us that more than a million dollars
are spent annually to support the public and private institutions in
the state of New York for the segregation of the feeble-minded and
the epileptic. A million and a half is spent for the up-keep of state
prisons, those homes of the "defective delinquent." Insanity, which, we
should remember, is to a great extent hereditary, annually drains from
the state treasury no less than $11,985,695.55, and from private sources
and endowments another twenty millions. When we learn further that the
total number of inmates in public and private institutions in the State
of New York--in alms-houses, reformatories, schools for the blind,
deaf and mute, in insane asylums, in homes for the feeble-minded and
epileptic--amounts practically to less than sixty-five thousand, an
insignificant number compared to the total population, our eyes should
be opened to the terrific cost to the community of this dead weight of
human waste.

The United States Public Health Survey of the State of Oregon, recently
published, shows that even a young community, rich in natural resources,
and unusually progressive in legislative measures, is no less subject to
this burden. Out of a total population of 783,000 it is estimated that
more than 75,000 men, women and children are dependents, feeble-minded,
or delinquents. Thus about 10 per cent. of the population is a constant
drain on the finances, health, and future of that community. These
figures represent a more definite and precise survey than the rough one
indicated by the statistics of charities and correction for the State
of New York. The figures yielded by this Oregon survey are also
considerably lower than the average shown by the draft examination, a
fact which indicates that they are not higher than might be obtained
from other States.

Organized charity is thus confronted with the problem of
feeble-mindedness and mental defect. But just as the State has so far
neglected the problem of mental defect until this takes the form
of criminal delinquency, so the tendency of our philanthropic and
charitable agencies has been to pay no attention to the problem until
it has expressed itself in terms of pauperism and delinquency. Such
"benevolence" is not merely ineffectual; it is positively injurious to
the community and the future of the race.

But there is a special type of philanthropy or benevolence, now widely
advertised and advocated, both as a federal program and as worthy of
private endowment, which strikes me as being more insidiously injurious
than any other. This concerns itself directly with the function of
maternity, and aims to supply GRATIS medical and nursing facilities
to slum mothers. Such women are to be visited by nurses and to receive
instruction in the "hygiene of pregnancy"; to be guided in making
arrangements for confinements; to be invited to come to the doctor's
clinics for examination and supervision. They are, we are informed, to
"receive adequate care during pregnancy, at confinement, and for one
month afterward." Thus are mothers and babies to be saved. "Childbearing
is to be made safe." The work of the maternity centers in the various
American cities in which they have already been established and in which
they are supported by private contributions and endowment, it is hardly
necessary to point out, is carried on among the poor and more docile
sections of the city, among mothers least able, through poverty and
ignorance, to afford the care and attention necessary for successful
maternity. Now, as the findings of Tredgold and Karl Pearson and the
British Eugenists so conclusively show, and as the infant mortality
reports so thoroughly substantiate, a high rate of fecundity is always
associated with the direst poverty, irresponsibility, mental defect,
feeble-mindedness, and other transmissible taints. The effect of
maternity endowments and maternity centers supported by private
philanthropy would have, perhaps already have had, exactly the most
dysgenic tendency. The new government program would facilitate the
function of maternity among the very classes in which the absolute
necessity is to discourage it.

Such "benevolence" is not merely superficial and near-sighted. It
conceals a stupid cruelty, because it is not courageous enough to face
unpleasant facts. Aside from the question of the unfitness of many women
to become mothers, aside from the very definite deterioration in the
human stock that such programs would inevitably hasten, we may question
its value even to the normal though unfortunate mother. For it is never
the intention of such philanthropy to give the poor over-burdened and
often undernourished mother of the slum the opportunity to make the
choice herself, to decide whether she wishes time after to time to bring
children into the world. It merely says "Increase and multiply: We are
prepared to help you do this." Whereas the great majority of mothers
realize the grave responsibility they face in keeping alive and rearing
the children they have already brought into the world, the maternity
center would teach them how to have more. The poor woman is taught how
to have her seventh child, when what she wants to know is how to avoid
bringing into the world her eighth.

Such philanthropy, as Dean Inge has so unanswerably pointed out, is kind
only to be cruel, and unwittingly promotes precisely the results most
deprecated. It encourages the healthier and more normal sections of the
world to shoulder the burden of unthinking and indiscriminate fecundity
of others; which brings with it, as I think the reader must agree,
a dead weight of human waste. Instead of decreasing and aiming to
eliminate the stocks that are most detrimental to the future of the race
and the world, it tends to render them to a menacing degree dominant.

On the other hand, the program is an indication of a suddenly awakened
public recognition of the shocking conditions surrounding pregnancy,
maternity, and infant welfare prevailing at the very heart of our
boasted civilization. So terrible, so unbelievable, are these conditions
of child-bearing, degraded far below the level of primitive and
barbarian tribes, nay, even below the plane of brutes, that many
high-minded people, confronted with such revolting and disgraceful
facts, lost that calmness of vision and impartiality of judgment so
necessary in any serious consideration of this vital problem. Their
"hearts" are touched; they become hysterical; they demand immediate
action; and enthusiastically and generously they support the first
superficial program that is advanced. Immediate action may sometimes be
worse than no action at all. The "warm heart" needs the balance of
the cool head. Much harm has been done in the world by those
too-good-hearted folk who have always demanded that "something be done
at once."

They do not stop to consider that the very first thing to be done is to
subject the whole situation to the deepest and most rigorous thinking.
As the late Walter Bagehot wrote in a significant but too often
forgotten passage:

"The most melancholy of human reflections, perhaps, is that on the whole
it is a question whether the benevolence of mankind does more good or
harm. Great good, no doubt, philanthropy does, but then it also does
great evil. It augments so much vice, it multiplies so much suffering,
it brings to life such great populations to suffer and to be vicious,
that it is open to argument whether it be or be not an evil to the
world, and this is entirely because excellent people fancy they can do
much by rapid action, and that they will most benefit the world when
they most relieve their own feelings; that as soon as an evil is seen,
`something' ought to be done to stay and prevent it. One may incline to
hope that the balance of good over evil is in favor of benevolence; one
can hardly bear to think that it is not so; but anyhow it is certain
that there is a most heavy debt of evil, and that this burden might
almost all have been spared us if philanthropists as well as others
had not inherited from their barbarous forefathers a wild passion for
instant action."

It is customary, I believe, to defend philanthropy and charity upon
the basis of the sanctity of human life. Yet recent events in the world
reveal a curious contradiction in this respect. Human life is held
sacred, as a general Christian principle, until war is declared, when
humanity indulges in a universal debauch of bloodshed and barbarism,
inventing poison gases and every type of diabolic suggestion to
facilitate killing and starvation. Blockades are enforced to weaken and
starve civilian populations--women and children. This accomplished, the
pendulum of mob passion swings back to the opposite extreme, and
the compensatory emotions express themselves in hysterical fashion.
Philanthropy and charity are then unleashed. We begin to hold human life
sacred again. We try to save the lives of the people we formerly
sought to weaken by devastation, disease and starvation. We indulge in
"drives," in campaigns of relief, in a general orgy of international
charity.

We are thus witnessing to-day the inauguration of a vast system of
international charity. As in our more limited communities and cities,
where self-sustaining and self-reliant sections of the population are
forced to shoulder the burden of the reckless and irresponsible, so
in the great world community the more prosperous and incidentally less
populous nations are asked to relieve and succor those countries which
are either the victims of the wide-spread havoc of war, of militaristic
statesmanship, or of the age-long tradition of reckless propagation and
its consequent over-population.

The people of the United States have recently been called upon to
exercise their traditional generosity not merely to aid the European
Relief Council in its efforts to keep alive three million, five hundred
thousand starving children in Central Europe, but in addition to
contribute to that enormous fund to save the thirty million Chinese
who find themselves at the verge of starvation, owing to one of those
recurrent famines which strike often at that densely populated and inert
country, where procreative recklessness is encouraged as a matter of
duty. The results of this international charity have not justified the
effort nor repaid the generosity to which it appealed. In the first
place, no effort was made to prevent the recurrence of the disaster; in
the second place, philanthropy of this type attempts to sweep back the
tide of miseries created by unrestricted propagation, with the feeble
broom of sentiment. As one of the most observant and impartial of
authorities on the Far East, J. O. P. Bland, has pointed out: "So long
as China maintains a birth-rate that is estimated at fifty-five per
thousand or more, the only possible alternative to these visitations
would be emigration and this would have to be on such a scale as would
speedily overrun and overfill the habitable globe. Neither humanitarian
schemes, international charities nor philanthropies can prevent
widespread disaster to a people which habitually breeds up to and
beyond the maximum limits of its food supply." Upon this point, it is
interesting to add, Mr. Frank A. Vanderlip has likewise pointed out the
inefficacy and misdirection of this type of international charity.(1)

Mr. Bland further points out: "The problem presented is one with which
neither humanitarian nor religious zeal can ever cope, so long as we
fail to recognize and attack the fundamental cause of these calamities.
As a matter of sober fact, the benevolent activities of our missionary
societies to reduce the deathrate by the prevention of infanticide and
the checking of disease, actually serve in the end to aggravate the
pressure of population upon its food-supply and to increase the
severity of the inevitably resultant catastrophe. What is needed for
the prevention, or, at least, the mitigation of these scourges, is an
organized educational propaganda, directed first against polygamy
and the marriage of minors and the unfit, and, next, toward such a
limitation of the birth-rate as shall approximate the standard
of civilized countries. But so long as Bishops and well meaning
philanthropists in England and America continue to praise and encourage
`the glorious fertility of the East' there can be but little hope of
minimizing the penalties of the ruthless struggle for existence in
China, and Nature's law will therefore continue to work out its own
pitiless solution, weeding out every year millions of predestined
weaklings."

This rapid survey is enough, I hope, to indicate the manifold
inadequacies inherent in present policies of philanthropy and charity.
The most serious charge that can be brought against modern "benevolence"
is that it encourages the perpetuation of defectives, delinquents
and dependents. These are the most dangerous elements in the world
community, the most devastating curse on human progress and expression.
Philanthropy is a gesture characteristic of modern business lavishing
upon the unfit the profits extorted from the community at large. Looked
at impartially, this compensatory generosity is in its final effect
probably more dangerous, more dysgenic, more blighting than the initial
practice of profiteering and the social injustice which makes some too
rich and others too poor.

     (1)  Birth Control Review.  Vol. V. No. 4. p. 7.




CHAPTER VI: Neglected Factors of the World Problem

War has thrust upon us a new internationalism. To-day the world is
united by starvation, disease and misery. We are enjoying the ironic
internationalism of hatred. The victors are forced to shoulder the
burden of the vanquished. International philanthropies and charities are
organized. The great flux of immigration and emigration has recommenced.
Prosperity is a myth; and the rich are called upon to support huge
philanthropies, in the futile attempt to sweep back the tide of famine
and misery. In the face of this new internationalism, this tangled unity
of the world, all proposed political and economic programs reveal a
woeful common bankruptcy. They are fragmentary and superficial. None
of them go to the root of this unprecedented world problem. Politicians
offer political solutions,--like the League of Nations or the limitation
of navies. Militarists offer new schemes of competitive armament.
Marxians offer the Third Internationale and industrial revolution.
Sentimentalists offer charity and philanthropy. Coordination or
correlation is lacking. And matters go steadily from bad to worse.

The first essential in the solution of any problem is the recognition
and statement of the factors involved. Now in this complex problem
which to-day confronts us, no attempt has been made to state the primary
facts. The statesman believes they are all political. Militarists
believe they are all military and naval. Economists, including under the
term the various schools for Socialists, believe they are industrial and
financial. Churchmen look upon them as religious and ethical. What is
lacking is the recognition of that fundamental factor which reflects and
coordinates these essential but incomplete phases of the problem,--the
factor of reproduction. For in all problems affecting the welfare of a
biological species, and particularly in all problems of human welfare,
two fundamental forces work against each other. There is hunger as
the driving force of all our economic, industrial and commercial
organizations; and there is the reproductive impulse in continual
conflict with our economic, political settlements, race adjustments and
the like. Official moralists, statesmen, politicians, philanthropists
and economists display an astounding disregard of this second
disorganizing factor. They treat the world of men as if it were purely
a hunger world instead of a hunger-sex world. Yet there is no phase of
human society, no question of politics, economics, or industry that is
not tied up in almost equal measure with the expression of both of
these primordial impulses. You cannot sweep back overpowering dynamic
instincts by catchwords. You can neglect and thwart sex only at your
peril. You cannot solve the problem of hunger and ignore the problem of
sex. They are bound up together.

While the gravest attention is paid to the problem of hunger and food,
that of sex is neglected. Politicians and scientists are ready
and willing to speak of such things as a "high birth rate," infant
mortality, the dangers of immigration or over-population. But with few
exceptions they cannot bring themselves to speak of Birth Control. Until
they shall have broken through the traditional inhibitions concerning
the discussion of sexual matters, until they recognize the force of the
sexual instinct, and until they recognize Birth Control as the PIVOTAL
FACTOR in the problem confronting the world to-day, our statesmen must
continue to work in the dark. Political palliatives will be mocked
by actuality. Economic nostrums are blown willy-nilly in the unending
battle of human instincts.

A brief survey of the past three or four centuries of Western
civilization suggests the urgent need of a new science to help humanity
in the struggle with the vast problem of to-day's disorder and danger.
That problem, as we envisage it, is fundamentally a sexual problem.
Ethical, political, and economic avenues of approach are insufficient.
We must create a new instrument, a new technique to make any adequate
solution possible.

The history of the industrial revolution and the dominance of
all-conquering machinery in Western civilization show the inadequacy of
political and economic measures to meet the terrific rise in population.
The advent of the factory system, due especially to the development
of machinery at the beginning of the nineteenth century, upset all the
grandiloquent theories of the previous era. To meet the new situation
created by the industrial revolution arose the new science of "political
economy," or economics. Old political methods proved inadequate to keep
pace with the problem presented by the rapid rise of the new machine and
industrial power. The machine era very shortly and decisively exploded
the simple belief that "all men are born free and equal." Political
power was superseded by economic and industrial power. To sustain their
supremacy in the political field, governments and politicians allied
themselves to the new industrial oligarchy. Old political theories and
practices were totally inadequate to control the new situation or to
meet the complex problems that grew out of it.

Just as the eighteenth century saw the rise and proliferation
of political theories, the nineteenth witnessed the creation and
development of the science of economics, which aimed to perfect an
instrument for the study and analysis of an industrial society, and
to offer a technique for the solution of the multifold problems it
presented. But at the present moment, as the outcome of the machine
era and competitive populations, the world has been thrown into a new
situation, the solution of which is impossible solely by political or
economic weapons.

The industrial revolution and the development of machinery in Europe and
America called into being a new type of working-class. Machines were
at first termed "labor-saving devices." In reality, as we now know,
mechanical inventions and discoveries created unprecedented and
increasingly enormous demand for "labor." The omnipresent and still
existing scandal of child labor is ample evidence of this. Machine
production in its opening phases, demanded large, concentrated and
exploitable populations. Large production and the huge development of
international trade through improved methods of transport, made
possible the maintenance upon a low level of existence of these rapidly
increasing proletarian populations. With the rise and spread throughout
Europe and America of machine production, it is now possible to
correlate the expansion of the "proletariat." The working-classes bred
almost automatically to meet the demand for machine-serving "hands."

The rise in population, the multiplication of proletarian populations as
a first result of mechanical industry, the appearance of great centers
of population, the so-called urban drift, and the evils of overcrowding
still remain insufficiently studied and stated. It is a significant
though neglected fact that when, after long agitation in Great Britain,
child labor was finally forbidden by law, the supply of children dropped
appreciably. No longer of economic value in the factory, children were
evidently a drug in the "home." Yet it is doubly significant that
from this moment British labor began the long unending task of
self-organization.(1)

Nineteenth century economics had no method of studying the interrelation
of the biological factors with the industrial. Overcrowding, overwork,
the progressive destruction of responsibility by the machine discipline,
as is now perfectly obvious, had the most disastrous consequences upon
human character and human habits.(2) Paternalistic philanthropies and
sentimental charities, which sprang up like mushrooms, only tended to
increase the evils of indiscriminate breeding. From the physiological
and psychological point of view, the factory system has been nothing
less than catastrophic.

Dr. Austin Freeman has recently pointed out (3) some of the
physiological, psychological, and racial effects of machinery upon the
proletariat, the breeders of the world. Speaking for Great Britain, Dr.
Freeman suggests that the omnipresence of machinery tends toward the
production of large but inferior populations. Evidences of biological
and racial degeneracy are apparent to this observer. "Compared with the
African negro," he writes, "the British sub-man is in several respects
markedly inferior. He tends to be dull; he is usually quite helpless
and unhandy; he has, as a rule, no skill or knowledge of handicraft,
or indeed knowledge of any kind.... Over-population is a phenomenon
connected with the survival of the unfit, and it is mechanism which
has created conditions favorable to the survival of the unfit and the
elimination of the fit." The whole indictment against machinery is
summarized by Dr. Freeman: "Mechanism by its reactions on man and his
environment is antagonistic to human welfare. It has destroyed industry
and replaced it by mere labor; it has degraded and vulgarized the
works of man; it has destroyed social unity and replaced it by social
disintegration and class antagonism to an extent which directly
threatens civilization; it has injuriously affected the structural
type of society by developing its organization at the expense of the
individual; it has endowed the inferior man with political power which
he employs to the common disadvantage by creating political institutions
of a socially destructive type; and finally by its reactions on the
activities of war it constitutes an agent for the wholesale physical
destruction of man and his works and the extinction of human culture."

It is not necessary to be in absolute agreement with this diagnostician
to realize the menace of machinery, which tends to emphasize quantity
and mere number at the expense of quality and individuality. One thing
is certain. If machinery is detrimental to biological fitness, the
machine must be destroyed, as it was in Samuel Butler's "Erewhon." But
perhaps there is another way of mastering this problem.

Altruism, humanitarianism and philanthropy have aided and abetted
machinery in the destruction of responsibility and self-reliance among
the least desirable elements of the proletariat. In contrast with
the previous epoch of discovery of the New World, of exploration
and colonization, when a centrifugal influence was at work upon the
populations of Europe, the advent of machinery has brought with it a
counteracting centripetal effect. The result has been the accumulation
of large urban populations, the increase of irresponsibility, and
ever-widening margin of biological waste.

Just as eighteenth century politics and political theories were unable
to keep pace with the economic and capitalistic aggressions of the
nineteenth century, so also we find, if we look closely enough, that
nineteenth century economics is inadequate to lead the world out of the
catastrophic situation into which it has been thrown by the debacle
of the World War. Economists are coming to recognize that the purely
economic interpretation of contemporary events is insufficient. Too
long, as one of them has stated, orthodox economists have overlooked
the important fact that "human life is dynamic, that change, movement,
evolution, are its basic characteristics; that self-expression, and
therefore freedom of choice and movement, are prerequisites to a
satisfying human state".(4)

Economists themselves are breaking with the old "dismal science" of the
Manchester school, with its sterile study of "supply and demand,"
of prices and exchange, of wealth and labor. Like the Chicago Vice
Commission, nineteenth-century economists (many of whom still survive
into our own day) considered sex merely as something to be legislated
out of existence. They had the right idea that wealth consisted solely
of material things used to promote the welfare of certain human beings.
Their idea of capital was somewhat confused. They apparently decided
that capital was merely that part of capital used to produce profit.
Prices, exchanges, commercial statistics, and financial operations
comprised the subject matter of these older economists. It would have
been considered "unscientific" to take into account the human factors
involved. They might study the wear-and-tear and depreciation of
machinery: but the depreciation or destruction of the human race did
not concern them. Under "wealth" they never included the vast, wasted
treasury of human life and human expression.

Economists to-day are awake to the imperative duty of dealing with the
whole of human nature, with the relation of men, women, and children to
their environment--physical and psychic as well as social; of dealing
with all those factors which contribute to human sustenance, happiness
and welfare. The economist, at length, investigates human motives.
Economics outgrows the outworn metaphysical preconceptions of nineteenth
century theory. To-day we witness the creation of a new "welfare" or
social economics, based on a fuller and more complete knowledge of the
human race, upon a recognition of sex as well as of hunger; in brief, of
physiological instincts and psychological demands. The newer economists
are beginning to recognize that their science heretofore failed to take
into account the most vital factors in modern industry--it failed
to foresee the inevitable consequences of compulsory motherhood; the
catastrophic effects of child labor upon racial health; the overwhelming
importance of national vitality and well-being; the international
ramifications of the population problem; the relation of indiscriminate
breeding to feeble-mindedness, and industrial inefficiency. It
speculated too little or not at all on human motives. Human nature riots
through the traditional economic structure, as Carlton Parker pointed
out, with ridicule and destruction; the old-fashioned economist looked
on helpless and aghast.

Inevitably we are driven to the conclusion that the exhaustively
economic interpretation of contemporary history is inadequate to
meet the present situation. In his suggestive book, "The Acquisitive
Society," R. H. Tawney, arrives at the conclusion that "obsession
by economic issues is as local and transitory as it is repulsive and
disturbing. To future generations it will appear as pitiable as the
obsession of the seventeenth century by religious quarrels appears
to-day; indeed, it is less rational, since the object with which it is
concerned is less important. And it is a poison which inflames every
wound and turns each trivial scratch into a malignant ulcer. Society
will not solve the particular problems of industry until that poison is
expelled, and it has learned to see industry in its proper perspective.
IF IT IS TO DO THAT IT MUST REARRANGE THE SCALE OF VALUES. It must
regard economic interests as one element in life, not as the whole of
life...."(5)

In neglecting or minimizing the great factor of sex in human society,
the Marxian doctrine reveals itself as no stronger than orthodox
economics in guiding our way to a sound civilization. It works within
the same intellectual limitations. Much as we are indebted to the
Marxians for pointing out the injustice of modern industrialism, we
should never close our eyes to the obvious limitations of their own
"economic interpretation of history." While we must recognize the great
historical value of Marx, it is now evident that his vision of the
"class struggle," of the bitter irreconcilable warfare between the
capitalist and working classes was based not upon historical analysis,
but upon on unconscious dramatization of a superficial aspect of
capitalistic regime.

In emphasizing the conflict between the classes, Marx failed to
recognize the deeper unity of the proletariat and the capitalist.
Nineteenth century capitalism had in reality engendered and cultivated
the very type of working class best suited to its own purpose--an inert,
docile, irresponsible and submissive class, progressively incapable
of effective and aggressive organization. Like the economists of the
Manchester school, Marx failed to recognize the interplay of human
instincts in the world of industry. All the virtues were embodied in the
beloved proletariat; all the villainies in the capitalists. The greatest
asset of the capitalism of that age was, as a matter of fact, the
uncontrolled breeding among the laboring classes. The intelligent and
self-conscious section of the workers was forced to bear the burden of
the unemployed and the poverty-stricken.

Marx was fully aware of the consequences of this condition of things,
but shut his eyes tightly to the cause. He pointed out that capitalistic
power was dependent upon "the reserve army of labor," surplus labor,
and a wide margin of unemployment. He practically admitted that
over-population was the inevitable soil of predatory capitalism. But he
disregarded the most obvious consequence of that admission. It was all
very dramatic and grandiloquent to tell the workingmen of the world to
unite, that they had "nothing but their chains to lose and the world
to gain." Cohesion of any sort, united and voluntary organization, as
events have proved, is impossible in populations bereft of intelligence,
self-discipline and even the material necessities of life, and cheated
by their desires and ignorance into unrestrained and uncontrolled
fertility.

In pointing out the limitations and fallacies of the orthodox Marxian
opinion, my purpose is not to depreciate the efforts of the Socialists
aiming to create a new society, but rather to emphasize what seems to me
the greatest and most neglected truth of our day:--Unless sexual science
is incorporated as an integral part of world-statesmanship and the
pivotal importance of Birth Control is recognized in any program of
reconstruction, all efforts to create a new world and a new civilization
are foredoomed to failure.

We can hope for no advance until we attain a new conception of sex, not
as a merely propagative act, not merely as a biological necessity for
the perpetuation of the race, but as a psychic and spiritual avenue of
expression. It is the limited, inhibited conception of sex that vitiates
so much of the thought and ideation of the Eugenists.

Like most of our social idealists, statesmen, politicians and
economists, some of the Eugenists suffer intellectually from a
restricted and inhibited understanding of the function of sex. This
limited understanding, this narrowness of vision, which gives rise to
most of the misconceptions and condemnations of the doctrine of Birth
Control, is responsible or the failure of politicians and legislators to
enact practical statutes or to remove traditional obscenities from the
law books. The most encouraging sign at present is the recognition by
modern psychology of the central importance of the sexual instinct in
human society, and the rapid spread of this new concept among the more
enlightened sections of the civilized communities. The new conception
of sex has been well stated by one to whom the debt of contemporary
civilization is well-nigh immeasurable. "Sexual activity," Havelock
Ellis has written, "is not merely a baldly propagative act, nor, when
propagation is put aside, is it merely the relief of distended
vessels. It is something more even than the foundation of great social
institutions. It is the function by which all the finer activities of
the organism, physical and psychic, may be developed and satisfied."(6)

No less than seventy years ago, a profound but neglected thinker, George
Drysdale, emphasized the necessity of a thorough understanding of man's
sexual nature in approaching economic, political and social problems.
"Before we can undertake the calm and impartial investigation of any
social problem, we must first of all free ourselves from all those
sexual prejudices which are so vehement and violent and which so
completely distort our vision of the external world. Society as a whole
has yet to fight its way through an almost impenetrable forest of sexual
taboos." Drysdale's words have lost none of their truth even to-day:
"There are few things from which humanity has suffered more than the
degraded and irreverent feelings of mystery and shame that have been
attached to the genital and excretory organs. The former have been
regarded, like their corresponding mental passions, as something of a
lower and baser nature, tending to degrade and carnalize man by their
physical appetites. But we cannot take a debasing view of any part of
our humanity without becoming degraded in our whole being."(7)

Drysdale moreover clearly recognized the social crime of entrusting to
sexual barbarians the duty of legislating and enforcing laws detrimental
to the welfare of all future generations. "They trust blindly to
authority for the rules they blindly lay down," he wrote, "perfectly
unaware of the awful and complicated nature of the subject they are
dealing with so confidently and of the horrible evils their unconsidered
statements are attended with. They themselves break through the most
fundamentally important laws daily in utter unconsciousness of the
misery they are causing to their fellows...."

Psychologists to-day courageously emphasize the integral relationship
of the expression of the sexual instinct with every phase of human
activity. Until we recognize this central fact, we cannot understand the
implications and the sinister significance of superficial attempts
to apply rosewater remedies to social evils,--by the enactment of
restrictive and superficial legislation, by wholesale philanthropies and
charities, by publicly burying our heads in the sands of sentimentality.
Self-appointed censors, grossly immoral "moralists," makeshift
legislators, all face a heavy responsibility for the miseries, diseases,
and social evils they perpetuate or intensify by enforcing the primitive
taboos of aboriginal customs, traditions, and outworn laws, which
at every step hinder the education of the people in the scientific
knowledge of their sexual nature. Puritanic and academic taboo of sex in
education and religion is as disastrous to human welfare as prostitution
or the venereal scourges. "We are compelled squarely to face the
distorting influences of biologically aborted reformers as well as the
wastefulness of seducers," Dr. Edward A. Kempf recently declared. "Man
arose from the ape and inherited his passions, which he can only refine
but dare not attempt to castrate unless he would destroy the fountains
of energy that maintain civilization and make life worth living and the
world worth beautifying.... We do not have a problem that is to be solved
by making repressive laws and executing them. Nothing will be more
disastrous. Society must make life worth the living and the refining for
the individual by conditioning him to love and to seek the love-object
in a manner that reflects a constructive effect upon his fellow-men
and by giving him suitable opportunities. The virility of the automatic
apparatus is destroyed by excessive gormandizing or hunger, by excessive
wealth or poverty, by excessive work or idleness, by sexual abuse or
intolerant prudishness. The noblest and most difficult art of all is the
raising of human thoroughbreds."(8)

     (1)  It may be well to note, in this connection, that the
     decline in the birth rate among the more intelligent classes
     of British labor followed upon the famous Bradlaugh-Besant
     trial of 1878, the outcome of the attempt of these two
     courageous Birth Control pioneers to circulate among the
     workers the work of an American physician, Dr. Knowlton's
     "The Fruits of Philosophy," advocating Birth Control, and
     the widespread publicity resulting from his trial.

     (2)  Cf. The Creative Impulse in Industry, by Helen Marot.
     The Instinct of Workmanship, by Thorstein Veblen.

     (3)  Social Decay and Regeneration.  By R. Austin Freeman.
     London 1921.

     (4)  Carlton H. Parker:  The Casual Laborer and other
     essays: p. 30.

     (5)  R. H. Tawney.  The Acquisitive Society, p. 184.

     (6)  Medical Review of Reviews:  Vol. XXVI, p. 116.

     (7)  The Elements of Social Science:  London, 1854.

     (8)  Proceedings of the International Conference of Women
     Physicians. Vol. IV, pp. 66-67.  New York, 1920.




CHAPTER VII: Is Revolution the Remedy?

Marxian Socialism, which seeks to solve the complex problem of human
misery by economic and proletarian revolution, has manifested a new
vitality. Every shade of Socialistic thought and philosophy acknowledges
its indebtedness to the vision of Karl Marx and his conception of the
class struggle. Yet the relation of Marxian Socialism to the philosophy
of Birth Control, especially in the minds of most Socialists, remains
hazy and confused. No thorough understanding of Birth Control, its aims
and purposes, is possible until this confusion has been cleared
away, and we come to a realization that Birth Control is not merely
independent of, but even antagonistic to the Marxian dogma. In recent
years many Socialists have embraced the doctrine of Birth Control, and
have generously promised us that "under Socialism" voluntary motherhood
will be adopted and popularized as part of a general educational system.
We might more logically reply that no Socialism will ever be possible
until the problem of responsible parenthood has been solved.

Many Socialists to-day remain ignorant of the inherent conflict between
the idea of Birth Control and the philosophy of Marx. The earlier
Marxians, including Karl Marx himself, expressed the bitterest
antagonism to Malthusian and neo-Malthusian theories. A remarkable
feature of early Marxian propaganda has been the almost complete
unanimity with which the implications of the Malthusian doctrine have
been derided, denounced and repudiated. Any defense of the so-called
"law of population" was enough to stamp one, in the eyes of the orthodox
Marxians, as a "tool of the capitalistic class," seeking to dampen the
ardor of those who expressed the belief that men might create a better
world for themselves. Malthus, they claimed, was actuated by selfish
class motives. He was not merely a hidebound aristocrat, but a pessimist
who was trying to kill all hope of human progress. By Marx, Engels,
Bebel, Karl Kautsky, and all the celebrated leaders and interpreters
of Marx's great "Bible of the working class," down to the martyred Rosa
Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, Birth Control has been looked upon as a
subtle, Machiavellian sophistry created for the purpose of placing the
blame for human misery elsewhere than at the door of the capitalist
class. Upon this point the orthodox Marxian mind has been universally
and sternly uncompromising.

Marxian vituperation of Malthus and his followers is illuminating. It
reveals not the weakness of the thinker attacked, but of the aggressor.
This is nowhere more evident than in Marx's "Capital" itself. In that
monumental effort, it is impossible to discover any adequate refutation
or even calm discussion of the dangers of irresponsible parenthood
and reckless breeding, any suspicion that this recklessness and
irresponsibility is even remotely related to the miseries of the
proletariat. Poor Malthus is there relegated to the humble level of
a footnote. "If the reader reminds me of Malthus, whose essay on
Population appeared in 1798," Marx remarks somewhat tartly, "I
remind him that this work in its first form is nothing more than
a schoolboyish, superficial plagiary of De Foe, Sir James Steuart,
Townsend, Franklin, Wallace, etc., and does not contain a single
sentence thought out by himself. The great sensation this pamphlet
caused was due solely to party interest. The French Revolution had
passionate defenders in the United Kingdom.... `The Principles of
Population' was quoted with jubilance by the English oligarchy as the
great destroyer of all hankerings after human development."(1)

The only attempt that Marx makes here toward answering the theory of
Malthus is to declare that most of the population theory teachers were
merely Protestant parsons.--"Parson Wallace, Parson Townsend, Parson
Malthus and his pupil the Arch-Parson Thomas Chalmers, to say nothing
of the lesser reverend scribblers in this line." The great pioneer of
"scientific" Socialism then proceeds to berate parsons as philosophers
and economists, using this method of escape from the very pertinent
question of surplus population and surplus proletariat in its relation
to labor organization and unemployment. It is true that elsewhere (2) he
goes so far as to admit that "even Malthus recognized over-population
as a necessity of modern industry, though, after his narrow fashion, he
explains it by the absolute over-growth of the laboring population, not
by their becoming relatively supernumerary." A few pages later, however,
Marx comes back again to the question of over-population, failing
to realize that it is to the capitalists' advantage that the working
classes are unceasingly prolific. "The folly is now patent," writes the
unsuspecting Marx, "of the economic wisdom that preaches to the laborers
the accommodation of their numbers to the requirements of capital. The
mechanism of capitalist production and accumulation constantly affects
this adjustment. The first work of this adaptation is the creation of a
relatively surplus population or industrial reserve army. Its last work
is the misery of constantly extending strata of the army of labor, and
the dead weight of pauperism." A little later he ventures again in the
direction of Malthusianism so far as to admit that "the accumulation
of wealth at one pole is... at the same time the accumulation of misery,
agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality and mental degradation
at the opposite pole." Nevertheless, there is no indication that Marx
permitted himself to see that the proletariat accommodates its numbers
to the "requirements of capital" precisely by breeding a large, docile,
submissive and easily exploitable population.

Had the purpose of Marx been impartial and scientific, this trifling
difference might easily have been overcome and the dangers of reckless
breeding insisted upon. But beneath all this wordy pretension and
economic jargon, we detect another aim. That is the unconscious
dramatization of human society into the "class conflict." Nothing was
overlooked that might sharpen and accentuate this "conflict." Marx
depicted a great melodramatic conflict, in which all the virtues were
embodied in the proletariat and all the villainies in the capitalist.
In the end, as always in such dramas, virtue was to be rewarded and
villainy punished. The working class was the temporary victim of a
subtle but thorough conspiracy of tyranny and repression. Capitalists,
intellectuals and the BOURGEOISIE were all "in on" this diabolic
conspiracy, all thoroughly familiar with the plot, which Marx was so
sure he had uncovered. In the last act was to occur that catastrophic
revolution, with the final transformation scene of the Socialist
millennium. Presented in "scientific" phraseology, with all the authority
of economic terms, "Capital" appeared at the psychological moment.
The heaven of the traditional theology had been shattered by Darwinian
science, and here, dressed up in all the authority of the new science,
appeared a new theology, the promise of a new heaven, an earthly
paradise, with an impressive scale of rewards for the faithful and
ignominious punishments for the capitalists.

Critics have often been puzzled by the tremendous vitality of this work.
Its predictions have never, despite the claims of the faithful, been
fulfilled. Instead of diminishing, the spirit of nationalism has
been intensified tenfold. In nearly every respect Marx's predictions
concerning the evolution of historical and economic forces have been
contradicted by events, culminating in the great war. Most of his
followers, the "revolutionary" Socialists, were swept into the whirlpool
of nationalistic militarism. Nevertheless, this "Bible of the working
classes" still enjoys a tremendous authority as a scientific work. By
some it is regarded as an economic treatise; by others as a philosophy
of history; by others as a collection of sociological laws; and finally
by others as a moral and political book of reference. Criticized,
refuted, repudiated and demolished by specialists, it nevertheless
exerts its influences and retains its mysterious vitality.

We must seek the explanation of this secret elsewhere. Modern psychology
has taught us that human nature has a tendency to place the cause of its
own deficiencies and weaknesses outside of itself, to attribute to some
external agency, to some enemy or group of enemies, the blame for
its own misery. In his great work Marx unconsciously strengthens
and encourages this tendency. The immediate effect of his teaching,
vulgarized and popularized in a hundred different forms, is to relieve
the proletariat of all responsibility for the effects of its reckless
breeding, and even to encourage it in the perpetuation of misery.

The inherent truth in the Marxian teachings was, moreover, immediately
subordinated to their emotional and religious appeal. A book that could
so influence European thought could not be without merit. But in the
process of becoming the "Bible of the working classes," "Capital"
suffered the fate of all such "Bibles." The spirit of ecclesiastical
dogmatism was transfused into the religion of revolutionary Socialism.
This dogmatic religious quality has been noted by many of the most
observant critics of Socialism. Marx was too readily accepted as the
father of the church, and "Capital" as the sacred gospel of the social
revolution. All questions of tactics, of propaganda, of class warfare,
of political policy, were to be solved by apt quotations from the "good
book." New thoughts, new schemes, new programs, based upon tested fact
and experience, the outgrowth of newer discoveries concerning the nature
of men, upon the recognition of the mistakes of the master, could only
be approved or admitted according as they could or could not be tested
by some bit of text quoted from Marx. His followers assumed that Karl
Marx had completed the philosophy of Socialism, and that the duty of
the proletariat thenceforth was not to think for itself, but merely to
mobilize itself under competent Marxian leaders for the realization of
his ideas.

From the day of this apotheosis of Marx until our own, the "orthodox"
Socialist of any shade is of the belief that the first essential for
social salvation lies in unquestioning belief in the dogmas of Marx.

The curious and persistent antagonism to Birth Control that began with
Marx and continues to our own day can be explained only as the utter
refusal or inability to consider humanity in its physiological and
psychological aspects--these aspects, apparently, having no place in the
"economic interpretation of history." It has remained for George Bernard
Shaw, a Socialist with a keener spiritual insight than the
ordinary Marxist, to point out the disastrous consequences of rapid
multiplication which are obvious to the small cultivator, the peasant
proprietor, the lowest farmhand himself, but which seem to arouse the
orthodox, intellectual Marxian to inordinate fury. "But indeed the
more you degrade the workers," Shaw once wrote,(3) "robbing them of all
artistic enjoyment, and all chance of respect and admiration from their
fellows, the more you throw them back, reckless, upon the one pleasure
and the one human tie left to them--the gratification of their instinct
for producing fresh supplies of men. You will applaud this instinct
as divine until at last the excessive supply becomes a nuisance: there
comes a plague of men; and you suddenly discover that the instinct is
diabolic, and set up a cry of `over-population.' But your slaves are
beyond caring for your cries: they breed like rabbits: and their poverty
breeds filth, ugliness, dishonesty, disease, obscenity, drunkenness."

Lack of insight into fundamental truths of human nature is evident
throughout the writings of the Marxians. The Marxian Socialists,
according to Kautsky, defended women in industry: it was right for woman
to work in factories in order to preserve her equality with man! Man
must not support woman, declared the great French Socialist Guesde,
because that would make her the PROLETAIRE of man! Bebel, the great
authority on woman, famous for his erudition, having critically studied
the problem of population, suggested as a remedy for too excessive
fecundity the consumption of a certain lard soup reputed to have an
"anti-generative" effect upon the agricultural population of Upper
Bavaria! Such are the results of the literal and uncritical acceptance
of Marx's static and mechanical conception of human society, a society
perfectly automatic; in which competition is always operating at maximum
efficiency; one vast and unending conspiracy against the blameless
proletariat.

This lack of insight of the orthodox Marxians, long represented by
the German Social-Democrats, is nowhere better illustrated than in Dr.
Robinson's account of a mass meeting of the Social-Democrat party to
organize public opinion against the doctrine of Birth Control among
the poor.(4) "Another meeting had taken place the week before, at which
several eminent Socialist women, among them Rosa Luxemburg and Clara
Zetkin, spoke very strongly against limitation of offspring among the
poor--in fact the title of the discussion was GEGEN DEN GEBURTSTREIK!
`Against the birth strike!' The interest of the audience was intense.
One could see that with them it was not merely a dialectic question,
as it was with their leaders, but a matter of life and death. I came to
attend a meeting AGAINST the limitation of offspring; it soon proved to
be a meeting very decidedly FOR the limitation of offspring, for every
speaker who spoke in favor of the artificial prevention of conception
or undesired pregnancies, was greeted with vociferous, long-lasting
applause; while those who tried to persuade the people that a limited
number of children is not a proletarian weapon, and would not improve
their lot, were so hissed that they had difficulty going on. The
speakers who were against the... idea soon felt that their audience
was against them.... Why was there such small attendance at the regular
Socialistic meetings, while the meetings of this character were packed
to suffocation? It did not apparently penetrate the leaders' heads
that the reason was a simple one. Those meetings were evidently of
no interest to them, while those which dealt with the limitation of
offspring were of personal, vital, present interest.... What particularly
amused me--and pained me--in the anti-limitationists was the ease and
equanimity with which they advised the poor women to keep on bearing
children. The woman herself was not taken into consideration, as if she
was not a human being, but a machine. What are her sufferings, her labor
pains, her inability to read, to attend meetings, to have a taste of
life? What does she amount to? The proletariat needs fighters. Go on,
females, and breed like animals. Maybe of the thousands you bear a few
will become party members...."

The militant organization of the Marxian Socialists suggests that their
campaign must assume the tactics of militarism of the familiar type. As
represented by militaristic governments, militarism like Socialism has
always encouraged the proletariat to increase and multiply. Imperial
Germany was the outstanding and awful example of this attitude. Before
the war the fall in the birth-rate was viewed by the Junker party
with the gravest misgivings. Bernhardi and the protagonists of
DEUTSCHLAND-UBER-ALLES condemned it in the strongest terms. The Marxians
unconsciously repeat the words of the government representative, Krohne,
who, in a debate on the subject in the Prussian Diet, February 1916,
asserted: "Unfortunately this view has gained followers amongst the
German women.... These women, in refusing to rear strong and able
children to continue the race, drag into the dust that which is the
highest end of women--motherhood. It is to be hoped that the willingness
to bear sacrifices will lead to a change for the better.... We need
an increase in human beings to guard against the attacks of envious
neighbors as well as to fulfil our cultural mission. Our whole economic
development depends on increase of our people." Today we are fully aware
of how imperial Germany fulfilled that cultural mission of hers; nor
can we overlook the fact that the countries with a smaller birth-rate
survived the ordeal. Even from the traditional militaristic standpoint,
strength does not reside in numbers, though the Caesars, the Napoleons
and the Kaisers of the world have always believed that large exploitable
populations were necessary for their own individual power. If Marxian
dictatorship means the dictatorship of a small minority wielding power
in the interest of the proletariat, a high-birth rate may be necessary,
though we may here recall the answer of the lamented Dr. Alfred Fried to
the German imperialists: "It is madness, the apotheosis of unreason, to
wish to breed and care for human beings in order that in the flower of
their youth they may be sent in millions to be slaughtered wholesale by
machinery. We need no wholesale production of men, have no need of the
`fruitful fertility of women,' no need of wholesale wares, fattened and
dressed for slaughter What we do need is careful maintenance of those
already born. If the bearing of children is a moral and religious duty,
then it is a much higher duty to secure the sacredness and security of
human life, so that children born and bred with trouble and sacrifice
may not be offered up in the bloom of youth to a political dogma at the
bidding of secret diplomacy."

Marxism has developed a patriotism of its own, if indeed it has not yet
been completely crystallized into a religion. Like the "capitalistic"
governments it so vehemently attacks, it demands self-sacrifice and even
martyrdom from the faithful comrades. But since its strength depends
to so great a degree upon "conversion," upon docile acceptance of the
doctrines of the "Master" as interpreted by the popes and bishops of
this new church, it fails to arouse the irreligious proletariat.
The Marxian Socialist boasts of his understanding of "working class
psychology" and criticizes the lack of this understanding on the part
of all dissenters. But, as the Socialists' meetings against the
"birth strike" indicate, the working class is not interested in such
generalities as the Marxian "theory of value," the "iron law" of wages,
"the value of commodities" and the rest of the hazy articles of faith.
Marx inherited the rigid nationalistic psychology of the eighteenth
century, and his followers, for the most part, have accepted his
mechanical and superficial treatment of instinct.(5) Discontented
workers may rally to Marxism because it places the blame for their
misery outside of themselves and depicts their conditions as the result
of a capitalistic conspiracy, thereby satisfying that innate tendency
of every human being to shift the blame to some living person outside
himself, and because it strengthens his belief that his sufferings
and difficulties may be overcome by the immediate amelioration of his
economic environment. In this manner, psychologists tell us, neuroses
and inner compulsions are fostered. No true solution is possible, to
continue this analogy, until the worker is awakened to the realization
that the roots of his malady lie deep in his own nature, his own
organism, his own habits. To blame everything upon the capitalist and
the environment produced by capitalism is to focus attention upon merely
one of the elements of the problem. The Marxian too often forgets
that before there was a capitalist there was exercised the unlimited
reproductive activity of mankind, which produced the first overcrowding,
the first want. This goaded humanity into its industrial frenzy, into
warfare and theft and slavery. Capitalism has not created the lamentable
state of affairs in which the world now finds itself. It has grown
out of them, armed with the inevitable power to take advantage of our
swarming, spawning millions. As that valiant thinker Monsieur G. Hardy
has pointed out (6) the proletariat may be looked upon, not as the
antagonist of capitalism, but as its accomplice. Labor surplus, or
the "army of reserve" which as for decades and centuries furnished
the industrial background of human misery, which so invariably defeats
strikes and labor revolts, cannot honestly be blamed upon capitalism.
It is, as M. Hardy points out, of SEXUAL and proletarian origin. In
bringing too many children into the world, in adding to the total of
misery, in intensifying the evils of overcrowding, the proletariat
itself increases the burden of organized labor; even of the Socialist
and Syndicalist organizations themselves with a surplus of the docilely
inefficient, with those great uneducable and unorganizable masses. With
surprisingly few exceptions, Marxians of all countries have docilely
followed their master in rejecting, with bitterness and vindictiveness
that is difficult to explain, the principles and teachings of Birth
Control.

Hunger alone is not responsible for the bitter struggle for existence we
witness to-day in our over-advertised civilization. Sex, uncontrolled,
misdirected, over-stimulated and misunderstood, has run riot at the
instigation of priest, militarist and exploiter. Uncontrolled sex has
rendered the proletariat prostrate, the capitalist powerful. In this
continuous, unceasing alliance of sexual instinct and hunger we find the
reason for the decline of all the finer sentiments. These instincts tear
asunder the thin veils of culture and hypocrisy and expose to our gaze
the dark sufferings of gaunt humanity. So have we become familiar with
the everyday spectacle of distorted bodies, of harsh and frightful
diseases stalking abroad in the light of day; of misshapen heads and
visages of moron and imbecile; of starving children in city streets
and schools. This is the true soil of unspeakable crimes. Defect and
delinquency join hands with disease, and accounts of inconceivable and
revolting vices are dished up in the daily press. When the majority
of men and women are driven by the grim lash of sex and hunger in the
unending struggle to feed themselves and to carry the dead-weight of
dead and dying progeny, when little children are forced into factories,
streets, and shops, education--including even education in the Marxian
dogmas--is quite impossible; and civilization is more completely
threatened than it ever could be by pestilence or war.

But, it will be pointed out, the working class has advanced. Power has
been acquired by labor unions and syndicates. In the beginning power
was won by the principle of the restriction of numbers. The device of
refusing to admit more than a fixed number of new members to the unions
of the various trades has been justified as necessary for the upholding
of the standard of wages and of working conditions. This has been the
practice in precisely those unions which have been able through years
of growth and development to attain tangible strength and power. Such
a principle of restriction is necessary in the creation of a firmly and
deeply rooted trunk or central organization furnishing a local center
for more extended organization. It is upon this great principle of
restricted number that the labor unions have generated and developed
power. They have acquired this power without any religious emotionalism,
without subscribing to metaphysical or economic theology. For the
millenium and the earthly paradise to be enjoyed at some indefinitely
future date, the union member substitutes the very real politics
of organization with its resultant benefits. He increases his own
independence and comfort and that of his family. He is immune to
superstitious belief in and respect for the mysterious power of
political or economic nostrums to reconstruct human society according to
the Marxian formula.

In rejecting the Marxian hypothesis as superficial and fragmentary, we
do so not because of its so-called revolutionary character, its threat
to the existing order of things, but rather because of its superficial,
emotional and religious character and its deleterious effect upon the
life of reason. Like other schemes advanced by the alarmed and the
indignant, it relies too much upon moral fervor and enthusiasm. To build
any social program upon the shifting sands of sentiment and feeling, of
indignation or enthusiasm, is a dangerous and foolish task. On the other
hand, we should not minimize the importance of the Socialist movement
in so valiantly and so courageously battling against the stagnating
complacency of our conservatives and reactionaries, under whose
benign imbecility the defective and diseased elements of humanity
are encouraged "full speed ahead" in their reckless and irresponsible
swarming and spawning. Nevertheless, as George Drysdale pointed out
nearly seventy years ago;

"... If we ignore this and other sexual subjects, we may do whatever else
we like: we may bully, we may bluster, we may rage, We may foam at
the mouth; we may tear down Heaven with our prayers, we may exhaust
ourselves with weeping over the sorrows of the poor; we may narcotize
ourselves and others with the opiate of Christian resignation; we may
dissolve the realities of human woe in a delusive mirage of poetry and
ideal philosophy; we may lavish our substance in charity, and labor over
possible or impossible Poor Laws; we may form wild dreams of Socialism,
industrial regiments, universal brotherhood, red republics, or
unexampled revolutions; we may strangle and murder each other, we may
persecute and despise those whose sexual necessities force them to break
through our unnatural moral codes; we may burn alive if we please the
prostitutes and the adulterers; we may break our own and our neighbor's
hearts against the adamantine laws that surround us, but not one step,
not one shall we advance, till we acknowledge these laws, and adopt
the only possible mode in which they can be obeyed." These words were
written in 1854. Recent events have accentuated their stinging truth.

     (1)  Marx: "Capital."  Vol. I, p. 675.

     (2)  Op. cit. pp, 695, 707, 709.

     (3)  Fabian Essays in Socialism.  p. 21.

     (4)  Uncontrolled Breeding, By Adelyne More.  p. 84.

     (5)  For a sympathetic treatment of modern psychological
     research as bearing on Communism, by two convinced
     Communists see "Creative Revolution," by Eden and Cedar
     Paul.

     (6)  Neo-Malthusianisme et Socialisme, p. 22.




CHAPTER VIII: Dangers of Cradle Competition

Eugenics has been def

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