it an instrument of moral education as well as of hygienic and racial
advance. It awakens the attention of parents to their potential
children. It forces upon the individual consciousness the question of
the standards of living. In a profound manner it protects and reasserts
the inalienable rights of the child-to-be.

Psychology and the outlook of modern life are stressing the growth
of independent responsibility and discrimination as the true basis of
ethics. The old traditional morality, with its train of vice, disease,
promiscuity and prostitution, is in reality dying out, killing itself
off because it is too irresponsible and too dangerous to individual
and social well-being. The transition from the old to the new, like
all fundamental changes, is fraught with many dangers. But it is a
revolution that cannot be stopped.

The smaller family, with its lower infant mortality rate, is, in more
definite and concrete manner than many actions outwardly deemed "moral,"
the expression of moral judgment and responsibility. It is the assertion
of a standard of living, inspired by the wish to obtain a fuller and
more expressive life for the children than the parents have enjoyed. If
the morality or immorality of any course of conduct is to be determined
by the motives which inspire it, there is evidently at the present day
no higher morality than the intelligent practice of Birth Control.

The immorality of many who practise Birth Control lies in not daring to
preach what they practise. What is the secret of the hypocrisy of the
well-to-do, who are willing to contribute generously to charities
and philanthropies, who spend thousands annually in the upkeep and
sustenance of the delinquent, the defective and the dependent; and yet
join the conspiracy of silence that prevents the poorer classes from
learning how to improve their conditions, and elevate their standards
of living? It is as though they were to cry: "We'll give you anything
except the thing you ask for--the means whereby you may become
responsible and self-reliant in your own lives."

The brunt of this injustice falls on women, because the old traditional
morality is the invention of men. "No religion, no physical or moral
code," wrote the clear-sighted George Drysdale, "proposed by one sex
for the other, can be really suitable. Each must work out its laws for
itself in every department of life." In the moral code developed by the
Church, women have been so degrade