(Deals with the prevention of conception as one of the greatest of man's discoveries, releasing him from nature's enslavement, and placing the keys of life in his hands.) I assume that you have followed my argument, and are prepared to consider seriously whether it may be possible to establish love in marriage as the sex institution of civilized society. If you really wish to bring such an institution into existence, the first thing you have to do is to accomplish the social revolution; that is, you must wipe out class control of society, and prestige based upon money exploitation. But that is a vast change, and will take time, and meanwhile we have to live, and wish to live with as little misery as possible. So the practical question becomes this: Suppose that you, as an individual, wish to find as much happiness in love as may now be possible, what counsel have I to offer? If you are young, you wish this advice for yourself; while if you are mature, you wish it for your children. I will put my advice under four heads: First, marriage for love; second, birth control; third, early marriage; fourth, education for marriage.
The first of these we have considered at some length. A part of the process of social revolution is personal conversion; the giving up by every individual of the worldly ideal, the surrender of luxury and self-indulgence, the consecrating of one's life to self education and the cause of social justice. And do not think that that is an easy thing, or an unimportant thing, a thing to be taken for granted. On the contrary, it is something that most of us have to struggle with at every hour of our lives, because respect for property and worldly conventions has become one of our deepest instincts; our whole society is poisoned with it, and I can count on the fingers of one hand the people I have known in my life who have completely escaped from it. It is not merely a question of refusing to marry except for love, it is a question of refusing to love except for honest and worthy qualities. It is a question of saving our children from the damnable forces of snobbery, which lay siege to their young minds and destroy the best impulses of their hearts, while we in our blindness are still thinking of them as babies.
Of the other three topics that I have suggested, I begin with birth control, because it is the most fundamental and most important. Without birth control there can be no freedom, no happiness, no permanence in love, and there can be no mastery of life. Birth control is one of the great fundamental achievements of the human reason, as important to the life of mankind as the discovery of fire or the invention of printing. Birth control is the deliverance of womankind, and therefore of mankind also, from the blind and insane fecundity of nature, which created us animals, and would keep us animals forever if we did not rebel.
Ever since the dawn of history, and probably for long ages before that, our race has been struggling against this blind insanity of nature. Poor, bewildered Theodore Roosevelt stormed at what he called "race suicide," thinking it was some brand new and terrible modern corruption; but nowhere do we find a primitive tribe, nowhere in history do we find a race which did not seek to save itself from overgrowth and consequent starvation. They did not know enough to prevent conception, but they did the best they could by means of abortion and infanticide. And because today superstition keeps the priceless knowledge of contraception from the vast majority of women, these crude, savage methods still prevail, and we have our million abortions a year in the United States. Assuming that something near one-fourth our population consists of women capable of bearing children, we have one woman in twenty-five going through this agonizing and health-wrecking experience every year. They go through with it, you understand, regardless of everything—all the moralists and preachers and priests with their hell fire and brimstone. They go through with it because we have both marriage without love, and love without marriage; also because we permit some ten or twenty per cent of our total population to suffer the pangs of perpetual starvation, because more than half our farms are mortgaged or occupied by tenants, and some ten or twenty per cent of our workers are out of jobs all the time.
Some of our women know about birth control. They are the rich women, who get what they want in this world. They object to the humiliations and inconveniences of child bearing, and some of them raise one or two children, and others of them raise poodle dogs. Also, our middle classes have found out; our doctors and lawyers and college professors, and people of that sort. But we deliberately keep the knowledge from our foreign populations, by the terrors which the church has at its command. And what is the practical consequence of this procedure? It is that while all our Anglo-Saxon stock, those who founded our country and established its institutions, are gradually removing themselves from the face of the earth, our ignorant and helpless populations, whether in city slums or on tenant farms, are multiplying like rabbits. Read Jack London's "The Valley of the Moon" and see what is happening in California. You will find the same thing happening in any portion of the United States where you take the trouble to use your own eyes.
Now, I try to repress such impulses toward race prejudice as I find in myself. I am willing to admit for the sake of this argument that in the course of time all the races that are now swarming in America, Portuguese and Japanese and Mexican and French-Canadian and Polish and Hungarian and Slovakian, are capable of just as high intellectual development as our ancestors who wrote the Declaration of Independence. But no one who sees the conditions under which they now live can deny that it will take a good deal of labor, teaching them and training them, as well as scrubbing them, to accomplish that result. And what a waste of energy, what a farce it makes of culture, to take the people who have already been scrubbed and taught and trained for self-government, and exterminate them, and raise up others in their place! It seems time that we gave thought to the fundamental question, whether or not there is something self-destroying in the very process of culture. Unless we can answer this we might as well give up our visions and our efforts to lift the race.
Theodore Roosevelt stormed at birth control for something like ten years, and it would be interesting if we could know how many Anglo-Saxon babies he succeeded in bringing into the world by his preachments. If what he wanted was to correct the balance between native and foreign births, how much more sensible to have taught birth control to those poor, pathetic, half-starved and overworked foreign mothers of our slums and tenant farms! I can wager that for every Anglo-Saxon baby that Theodore Roosevelt brought into the world by his preachings, ............