and what do you find? The first thing you find is that
they themselves, one and all, practice birth-control with their wives
or their mistresses. The second thing you find is that the
statute-books are crowded with other laws which they make no pretense
of enforcing; for example, the law which forbids the saloons to be
open on Sunday--which law they take the liberty of understanding to
mean that the saloons shall not have their front doors open on Sunday.
You will find that they are not at all afraid of the religious taboos;
they are afraid of the religious vote--and even more they are afraid
of the campaign contributions of sweat-shop manufacturers and
landlords, who cannot see what would become of prosperity if the women
of the slums were to cease to breed. So once more we discover the wolf
in sheep's clothing, the trader, making use of Tradition-worship;
hiding behind the skirts of devout old maiden aunts and grandmothers,
who repeat the instructions which God gave to Adam and Eve, "Be
fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth." As if God were as
blind as a Fifth Avenue preacher, and could see no difference between
the Garden of Eden, full of all fruits that grow and all creatures
that run and fly and swim, and a modern East Side tenement-room, with
an oil stove and no windows and no water-closet, and the price of
cabbage seven cents a pound!

#Sheep#

There are more than a hundred thousand Protestant churches in America.
They own more than a billion dollars' worth of property, and in the
West and South they dominate the intellectual life of the country. I
do not wish to be unfair in what I say of them. They are far more
democratic than the Catholic Church; they fight valiantly against the
liquor traffic and those forms of graft which are obvious, or directly
derived from vice. There are among their clergy many men who are
honestly seeking light, and trying to make their institutions a factor
for progress. But they are caught in the spirit of Lutheran
scholasticism, narrow and ignorant, dogmatic and jealous; and they
cannot help it, because they are pledged by their creeds and
foundations to Tradition-worship; they have to believe certain things
because their ancestors believed them, they have to act in certain
ways, because of certain facts which existed in the world three
thousand years ago, but which now are known only to historians.

You are familiar with the habit of a herd of sheep to follow the
example