plague of men; and you suddenly discover that the instinct is
diabolic, and set up a cry of `over-population.' But your slaves are
beyond caring for your cries: they breed like rabbits: and their poverty
breeds filth, ugliness, dishonesty, disease, obscenity, drunkenness."

Lack of insight into fundamental truths of human nature is evident
throughout the writings of the Marxians. The Marxian Socialists,
according to Kautsky, defended women in industry: it was right for woman
to work in factories in order to preserve her equality with man! Man
must not support woman, declared the great French Socialist Guesde,
because that would make her the PROLETAIRE of man! Bebel, the great
authority on woman, famous for his erudition, having critically studied
the problem of population, suggested as a remedy for too excessive
fecundity the consumption of a certain lard soup reputed to have an
"anti-generative" effect upon the agricultural population of Upper
Bavaria! Such are the results of the literal and uncritical acceptance
of Marx's static and mechanical conception of human society, a society
perfectly automatic; in which competition is always operating at maximum
efficiency; one vast and unending conspiracy against the blameless
proletariat.

This lack of insight of the orthodox Marxians, long represented by
the German Social-Democrats, is nowhere better illustrated than in Dr.
Robinson's account of a mass meeting of the Social-Democrat party to
organize public opinion against the doctrine of Birth Control among
the poor.(4) "Another meeting had taken place the week before, at which
several eminent Socialist women, among them Rosa Luxemburg and Clara
Zetkin, spoke very strongly against limitation of offspring among the
poor--in fact the title of the discussion was GEGEN DEN GEBURTSTREIK!
`Against the birth strike!' The interest of the audience was intense.
One could see that with them it was not merely a dialectic question,
as it was with their leaders, but a matter of life and death. I came to
attend a meeting AGAINST the limitation of offspring; it soon proved to
be a meeting very decidedly FOR the limitation of offspring, for every
speaker who spoke in favor of the artificial prevention of conception
or undesired pregnancies, was greeted with vociferous, long-lasting
applause; while those who tried to persuade the people that a limited
number of children is not a proletarian weapon, and would not improve
their lot, were so