tically-minded, the study of Birth Control is performing an
invaluable task. Without complete mental freedom, it is impossible
to approach any fundamental human problem. Failure to face the great
central facts of sex in an impartial and scientific spirit lies at the
root of the blind opposition to Birth Control.

Our bitterest opponents must agree that the problem of Birth Control
is one of the most important that humanity to-day has to face. The
interests of the entire world, of humanity, of the future of mankind
itself are more at stake in this than wars, political institutions, or
industrial reorganization. All other projects of reform, of revolution
or reconstruction, are of secondary importance, even trivial, when we
compare them to the wholesale regeneration--or disintegration--that is
bound up with the control, the direction and the release of one of the
greatest forces in nature. The great danger at present does not lie with
the bitter opponents of the idea of Birth Control, nor with those who
are attempting to suppress our program of enlightenment and education.
Such opposition is always stimulating. It wins new adherents. It reveals
its own weakness and lack of insight. The greater danger is to be found
in the flaccid, undiscriminating interest of "sympathizers" who are "for
it"--as an accessory to their own particular panacea. "It even seems,
sometimes," wrote the late William Graham Sumner, "as if the primitive
people were working along better lines of effort in this direction than
we are... when our public organs of instruction taboo all that pertains
to reproduction as improper; and when public authority, ready enough to
interfere with personal liberty everywhere else, feels bound to act as
if there were no societal interest at stake in the begetting of the next
generation."(1)

Slowly but surely we are breaking down the taboos that surround sex; but
we are breaking them down out of sheer necessity. The codes that have
surrounded sexual behavior in the so-called Christian communities, the
teachings of the churches concerning chastity and sexual purity, the
prohibitions of the laws, and the hypocritical conventions of society,
have all demonstrated their failure as safeguards against the chaos
produced and the havoc wrought by the failure to recognize sex as a
driving force in human nature,--as great as, if indeed not greater than,
hunger. Its dynamic energy is indestructible. It may be transmuted,
refined