ttle 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 record