of a race creative, flowering into beautiful expression
through talent and genius.

As a social programme, Birth Control is not merely concerned with
population questions. In this respect, it is a distinct step in advance
of earlier Malthusian doctrines, which concerned themselves chiefly with
economics and population. Birth Control concerns itself with the spirit
no less than the body. It looks for the liberation of the spirit of
woman and through woman of the child. To-day motherhood is wasted,
penalized, tortured. Children brought into the world by unwilling mothers
suffer an initial handicap that cannot be measured by cold statistics.
Their lives are blighted from the start. To substantiate this fact, I
have chosen to present the conclusions of reports on Child Labor and
records of defect and delinquency published by organizations with no
bias in favour of Birth Control. The evidence is before us. It crowds in
upon us from all sides. But prior to this new approach, no attempt had
been made to correlate the effects of the blind and irresponsible play
of the sexual instinct with its deep-rooted causes.

The duty of the educator and the intellectual creator of public opinion
is, in this connection, of the greatest importance. For centuries
official moralists, priests, clergymen and teachers, statesmen and
politicians have preached the doctrine of glorious and divine fertility.
To-day, we are confronted with the world-wide spectacle of the
realization of this doctrine. It is not without significance that the
moron and the imbecile set the pace in living up to this teaching,
and that the intellectuals, the educators, the archbishops, bishops,
priests, who are most insistent on it, are the staunchest adherents in
their own lives of celibacy and non-fertility. It is time to point out
to the champions of unceasing and indiscriminate fertility the results
of their teaching.

One of the greatest difficulties in giving to the public a book of this
type is the impossibility of keeping pace with the events and changes of
a movement that is now, throughout the world, striking root and growing.
The changed attitude of the American Press indicates that enlightened
public opinion no longer tolerates a policy of silence upon a question
of the most vital importance. Almost simultaneously in England and
America, two incidents have broken through the prejudice and the guarded
silence of centuries. At the church Congress in Birmingham,