uelty upon his child.

What, in a word, are we to say of such cases as these? There is here a
real opposition, as it would appear, between the interests of the
present and the interests of the future. But the answer is that, just
because, and just in so far as, human beings are provident and
responsible and worthy of the name of human beings, the opposition can
be practically solved. Not for anything must we betray the cause of the
unborn, but marriage does not necessarily involve parenthood, and the
right course--the profoundly right and deeply moral course--in such
cases as these, is marriage without parenthood.

On every hand in the civilized world we now see childless marriages, the
number of which incessantly increases; they are an ominous symptom of
excessive luxury and other factors of decadence, if history is to be
trusted. But it is not permissible for us, without special knowledge, to
condemn individuals, whatever we may think of the phenomenon as a whole.
Yet convention and prejudice are curious things, and people who are
themselves married and deliberately childless, others of both sexes who
are unmarried, people who have never raised their voices against
themselves or their friends who, though married, are childless, because
they have little courage or because they permit compliance with
fashion's demands to stifle the best parts of their nature--such people,
I say, will actually be found to protest, with the sort of canting
righteousness which does its best to smirch the Right, against this
doctrine, _Marry, but do not have children_, as the rule of life in the
cases under discussion. Nevertheless, this is the moral doctrine; this
is the right fruit of knowledge, and knowledge will more and more be
applied to this high end, the service alike of the present and the
future. We must not allow our minds to be bullied out of just reasoning
because the possibility of marriage without parenthood is often abused.
All forms of knowledge, like all other forms of power, may be used or
may be abused. Knowledge has no moral sign attached to it, but neither
has it any immoral sign attached to it. The power to control parenthood
is neither good nor evil, but like any other power may serve either good
or evil. Dynamite may cause an explosion which buries a hundred men in a
living grave, or it may blast the rock which buries them and set them
free. The man of science is false to his creed and his cause if he
declares that