g, the sane mind in the sound body, is absolutely dependent upon the
functioning and exercise of all the organs in the body. The "moralists"
who preach abstinence, self-denial, and suppression are relegated by
these findings of impartial and disinterested science to the class of
those educators of the past who taught that it was improper for young
ladies to indulge in sports and athletics and who produced generations
of feeble, undeveloped invalids, bound up by stays and addicted to
swooning and hysterics. One need only go out on the street of any
American city to-day to be confronted with the victims of the cruel
morality of self-denial and "sin." This fiendish "morality" is stamped
upon those emaciated bodies, indelibly written in those emasculated,
underdeveloped, undernourished figures of men and women, in the nervous
tension and unrelaxed muscles denoting the ceaseless vigilance in
restraining and suppressing the expression of natural impulses.

Birth Control is no negative philosophy concerned solely with the number
of children brought into this world. It is not merely a question of
population. Primarily it is the instrument of liberation and of human
development.

It points the way to a morality in which sexual expression and human
development will not be in conflict with the interest and well-being of
the race nor of contemporary society at large. Not only is it the most
effective, in fact the only lever by which the value of the child can be
raised to a civilized point; but it is likewise the only method by which
the life of the individual can be deepened and strengthened, by which
an inner peace and security and beauty may be substituted for the
inner conflict that is at present so fatal to self-expression and
self-realization.

Sublimation of the sexual instinct cannot take place by denying it
expression, nor by reducing it to the plane of the purely physiological.
Sexual experience, to be of contributory value, must be integrated and
assimilated. Asceticism defeats its own purpose because it develops the
obsession of licentious and obscene thoughts, the victim alternating
between temporary victory over "sin" and the remorse of defeat. But
the seeker of purely physical pleasure, the libertine or the average
sensualist, is no less a pathological case, living as one-sided and
unbalanced a life as the ascetic, for his conduct is likewise based on
ignorance and lack of understanding. In seeking pleasure without