itual
end.

It is needless to insist how intimately that secondary end of marriage is
bound up with the practice of birth-control. Without birth-control,
indeed, it could frequently have no existence at all, and even at the
best seldom be free from disconcerting possibilities fatal to its very
essence. Against these disconcerting possibilities is often placed, on the
other side, the un-aesthetic nature of the contraceptives associated with
birth-control. Yet, it must be remembered, they are of a part with the
whole of our civilised human life. We at no point enter the spiritual save
through the material. Forel has in this connection compared the use of
contraceptives to the use of eye-glasses. Eye-glasses are equally
un-aesthetic, yet they are devices, based on Nature, wherewith to
supplement the deficiencies of Nature. However in themselves un-aesthetic,
for those who need them they make the aesthetic possible. Eye-glasses and
contraceptives alike are a portal to the spiritual world for many who,
without them, would find that world largely a closed book.

Birth-control is effecting, and promising to effect, many functions in our
social life. By furnishing the means to limit the size of families, which
would otherwise be excessive, it confers the greatest benefit on the
family and especially on the mother. By rendering easily possible a
selection in parentage and the choice of the right time and circumstances
for conception it is, again, the chief key to the eugenic improvement of
the race. There are many other benefits, as is now generally becoming
clear, which will be derived from the rightly applied practice of
birth-control. To many of us it is not the least of these that
birth-control effects finally the complete liberation of the spiritual
object of marriage.

CHAPTER IV

HUSBANDS AND WIVES

It has always been common to discuss the psychology of women. The
psychology of men has usually been passed over, whether because it is too
simple or too complicated. But the marriage question to-day is much less
the wife-problem than the husband-problem. Women in their personal and
social activities have been slowly expanding along lines which are now
generally accepted. But there has been no marked change of responsive
character in the activities of men. Hence a defective adjustment of men
and women, felt in all sorts of subtle as well as grosser ways, most felt
when they are husband and wife, and sometimes bec