(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, he could have kept out ten thousand foreign slum babies, if only he had lent his aid to margaret sanger!
ah, but he wanted all the babies to be born, you say! i see before me the face of a certain devout old christian lady, known to me, who settles the question by the bible quotation, "be fruitful and multiply." but what avails it to follow this biblical advice, if we allow one out of five of the new-born infants to perish from lack of scientific care before they are two years old? what avails it if we send them to school hungry, as we do twenty-two per cent of the public school children of new york city? what avails it if we allow venereal disease to spread, so that a large percentage of the babies are deformed and miserable? what avails it if, when they are fully grown, we can think of nothing better to do with them than to take them by millions at a time and dress them up in uniforms and send them out to be destroyed by poison gases? would it not be the part of common sense to establish universal birth control for at least a year or two—until we have learned to take care of our newly born babies, and to feed our school children, and to protect our youths from vice, and to abolish poverty and war from the earth?
these are the social aspects of birth control. there are also to be considered what i might call the personal aspects of it. because young people do not know about it, and have no way to find out about it, they dare not marry, and so the amount of vice in the world is increased. because married women do not know about it, love is turned to terror, and marital happiness is wrecked. because the harmless and proper methods are not sensibly taught, people use harmful methods, which cause nervous disorders, and wreck marital happiness, and break up homes. thorough and sound knowledge about birth control is just as essential to happiness in marriage as knowledge of diet is necessary to health, or as knowledge of economics is necessary to intelligent action as a voter and citizen. the suppression by law of knowledge of birth control is just as grave a crime against human life as ever was committed by religious bigotry in the blackest days of the spanish inquisition.
now this law stands on the statute books of our country, and if i should so much as hint to you in this book what you need to know, or even where you can find out about it, i should be liable to five years in jail and a fine of $5,000, and every person who mailed a copy of this book, or any advertisement of this book, would be in the same plight. but there is not yet a law to prohibit agitation against the law, so the first thing i say to every reader of this book is that they should obtain a copy of the birth control review, published at 104 fifth avenue, new york, and also should join the voluntary parenthood league, 206 broadway, new york. get the literature of these organizations and circulate them and help spread the light!
as to the knowledge which you need, the only advice i am allowed to give is that you should seek it. seek it, and persist in seeking, until you find it. ask everyone you know; and ask particularly among enlightened people, those who are willing to face the facts of human life and trust in reason and common sense. i do not know if i am violating the law in thus telling you how to find out about birth control. one of the charming features of this law, and others against the spreading of knowledge, is that they will never tell you in advance what you may say, but leave you to say it and take your chances! i believe that i am not violating any law when i tell you that there are half a dozen simple, inexpensive, and entirely harmless methods of preventing undesired parenthood without the destruction of the marital relationship.
i am one of those who for many years believed that the destruction of the marital relationship was the only proper and moral method. i was brought up to take the monkish view of love. i thought it was an animal thing which required some outside justification. i had been taught nothing else; but now i have had personal experience of other justifications of love, and i believe that love is a beautiful and joyful relationship, which not merely requires no other justification, but confers justification upon many other things in life.
i used to believe in that old ideal of celibacy, thinking it a fine spiritual exercise. but since then i have looked out on life, and have found so many interesting things to do, so much important work calling for attention, that i do not have to invent any artificial exercises for my spirit. i have looked at humanity, and brought myself to recognize the plain common sense fact—that whatever superfluous energy i may have to waste upon artificial spirituality, the great mass of the people have no such energy to spare. they need all their energies to get a living for themselves and for their wives and little ones. they have their sex impulses, and will follow them, and the only question is, shall they follow them wisely or unwisely? the religious people decide that sexual indulgence is wrong, and they impose a penalty—and what is that penalty? a poor, unwanted little waif of a soul, which never sinned, and had nothing to do with the matter, is brought into a hostile world, to suffer neglect, and perhaps starvation—in order to punish parents who did not happen to be sufficiently strong willed to practice continence in marriage!
i used to believe that there was benefit to health and increase of power, whether physical or mental, in the celibate life. i have tried both ways of life, and as a result i know that that old idea is nonsense. i know now that love is a natural function. of course, like any other function it can be abused; just as hunger may become gluttony, sleeping may become sluggishness, getting the money to pay one's way through life may become ferocious avarice. but we do not on this account refuse ever to eat or sleep or get money to pay our debts. i do not say that i believe, i say i know, that free and happy love, guided by wisdom and sound knowledge, is not merely conducive to health, but is in the long run necessary to health.
people who condemn birth control always argue as if one wished to teach this knowledge indiscriminately to the young. perhaps it is natural that those who oppose the use of reason should assume that others are as irrational as themselves. all i can say is that i no more believe in teaching birth control to the young than i believe in feeding beefsteak to nursing infants. there is a period in life for beefsteaks—or, if my vegetarian friends prefer, for lentil hash and peanut butter sandwiches; in exactly the same way there is a time for teaching the fundamentals of sex, and another time for teaching the art of happiness in marriage, which includes birth control. that brings me, by a very pleasant transition, to the other two subjects which i have promised to discuss: early marriage and education for marriage.
