ed on fact. Even in the most unenlightened sections of the community,
among mothers crushed by poverty and economic enslavement, there is
the realization of the evils of the too-large family, of the rapid
succession of pregnancy after pregnancy, of the hopelessness of bringing
too many children into the world. Not merely in the evidence presented
in an earlier chapter but in other ways, is this crying need expressed.
The investigators of the Children's Bureau who collected the data of the
infant mortality reports, noted the willingness and the eagerness with
which these down-trodden mothers told the truth about themselves.
So great is their hope of relief from that meaningless and deadening
submission to unproductive reproduction, that only a society pruriently
devoted to hypocrisy could refuse to listen to the voices of these
mothers. Respectfully we lend our ears to dithyrambs about the
sacredness of motherhood and the value of "better babies"--but we shut
our eyes and our ears to the unpleasant reality and the cries of pain
that come from women who are to-day dying by the thousands because this
power is withheld from them.

This situation is rendered more bitterly ironic because the
self-righteous opponents of Birth Control practise themselves the
doctrine they condemn. The birth-rate among conservative opponents
indicates that they restrict the numbers of their own children by the
methods of Birth Control, or are of such feeble procreative energy as to
be thereby unfitted to dictate moral laws for other people. They prefer
that we should think their small number of children is accidental,
rather than publicly admit the successful practice of intelligent
foresight. Or else they hold themselves up as paragons of virtue and
self-control, and would have us believe that they have brought their
children into the world solely from a high, stern sense of public
duty--an attitude which is about as convincing as it would be to declare
that they found them under gooseberry bushes. How else can we explain
the widespread tolerance and smug approval of the clerical idea of
sex, now reenforced by floods of crude and vulgar sentiment, which is
promulgated by the press, motion-pictures and popular plays?

Like all other education, that of sex can be rendered effective and
valuable only as it meets and satisfies the interests and demands of
the pupil himself. It cannot be imposed from without, handed down from
above, superimposed up