Introduction
Birth control, Mrs. Sanger claims, and claims rightly, to be a
question of fundamental importance at the present time. I do not know
how far one is justified in calling it the pivot or the corner-stone
of a progressive civilization. These terms involve a criticism of
metaphors that may take us far away from the question in hand. Birth
Control is no new thing in human experience, and it has been practised
in societies of the most various types and fortunes. But there can be
little doubt that at the present time it is a test issue between two
widely different interpretations of the word civilization, and of what
is good in life and conduct. The way in which men and women range
themselves in this controversy is more simply and directly indicative
of their general intellectual quality than any other single
indication. I do not wish to imply by this that the people who oppose
are more or less intellectual than the people who advocate Birth
Control, but only that they have fundamentally contrasted general
ideas,—that, mentally, they are DIFFERENT. Very simple, very
complex, very dull and very brilliant persons may be found in either
camp, but all those in either camp have certain attitudes in common
which they share with one another, and do not share with those in the
other camp.
There have been many definitions of civilization. Civilization is a
complexity of count less aspects, and may be validly defined in a
great number of relationships. A reader of James Harvey Robinson's
MIND IN THE MAKING will find it very reasonable to define a
civilization as a system of society-making ideas at issue with
reality. Just so far as the system of ideas meets the needs and
conditions of survival or is able to adapt itself to the needs and
conditions of survival of the society it dominates, so far will that
society continue and prosper. We are beginning to realize that in the
past and under different conditions from our own, societies have
existed with systems of ideas and with methods of thought very widely
contrasting with what we should consider right and sane to-day. The
extraordinary neolithic civilizations of the American continent that
flourished before the coming of the Europeans, seem to have got along
with concepts that involved pedantries and cruelties and a kind of
systematic unreason, which find their closest parallels to-day in the
art and writings of certain types of lunatic. There are collections
of drawings from English and American asylums extraordinarily parallel
in their spirit and quality with the Maya inscriptions of Central
America. Yet these neolithic American societies got along for
hundreds and perhaps thousands of years. they respected seed-time and
harvest, they bred and they maintained a grotesque and terrible order.
And they produced quite beautiful works of art. Yet their surplus of
population was disposed of by an organization of sacrificial slaughter
unparalleled in the records of mankind. Many of the institutions that
seemed most normal and respectable to them, filled the invading
Europeans with perplexity and horror.
When we realize clearly this possibility of civilizations being based
on very different sets of moral ideas and upon different intellectual
methods, we are better able to appreciate the profound significance of
the schism in our modern community, which gives us side by side,
honest and intelligent people who regard Birth Control as something
essentially sweet, sane, clean, desirable and necessary, and others
equally honest and with as good a claim to intelligence who regard it
as not merely unreasonable and unwholesome, but as intolerable and
abominable. We are living not in a simple and complete civilization,
but in a conflict of at least two civilizations, based on entirely
different fundamental ideas, pursuing different methods and with
different aims and ends.
I will call one of these civilizations our Traditional or
Authoritative Civilization. It rests upon the thing that is, and upon
the thing that has been. It insists upon respect for custom and
usage; it discourages criticism and enquiry. It is very ancient and
conservative, or, going beyond conservation, it is reactionary. The
vehement hostility of many Catholic priests and prelates towards new
views of human origins, and new views of moral questions, has led many
careless thinkers to identify this old traditional civilization with
Christianity, but that identification ignores the strongly
revolutionary and initiatory spirit that has always animated
Christianity, and is untrue even to the realities of orthodox Catholic
teaching. The vituperation of individual Catholics must not be
confused with the deliberate doctrines of the Church which have, on
the whole, been conspicuously cautious and balanced and sane in these
matters. The ideas and practices of the Old Civilization are older
and more widespread than and not identifiable with either Christian or
Catholic culture, and it will be a great misfortune if the issues
between the Old Civilization and the New are allowed to slip into the
deep ruts of religious controversies that are only accidentally and
intermittently parallel.
Contrasted with the ancient civilization, with the Traditional
disposition, which accepts institutions and moral values as though
they were a part of nature, we have what I may call—with an evident
bias in its favour—the civilization of enquiry, of experimental
knowledge, Creative and Progressive Civilization. The first great
outbreak of the spirit of this civilization was in republican Greece;
the martyrdom of Socrates, the fearless Utopianism of Plato, the
ambitious encyclopaedism of Aristotle, mark the dawn of a new courage
and a new wilfulness in human affairs. The fear of set limitations,
of punitive and restrictive laws imposed by Fate upon human life was
visibly fading in human minds. These names mark the first clear
realization that to a large extent, and possibly to an illimitable
extent, man's moral and social life and his general destiny could be
seized upon and controlled by man. But—he must have knowledge. Said
the Ancient Civilization—and it says it still through a multitude of
vigorous voices and harsh repressive acts: "Let man learn his duty
and obey." Says the New Civilization, with ever-increasing
confidence: "Let man know, and trust him."
For long ages, the Old Civilization kept the New subordinate,
apologetic and ineffective, but for the last two centuries, the New
has fought its way to a position of contentious equality. The two go
on side by side, jostling upon a thousand issues. The world changes,
the conditions of life change rapidly, through that development of
organized science which is the natural method of the New Civilization.
The old tradition demands that national loyalties and ancient
belligerence should continue. The new has produced means of
communication that break down the pens and separations of human life
upon which nationalist emotion depends. The old tradition insists
upon its ancient blood-letting of war; the new knowledge carries that
war to undreamt of levels of destruction. The ancient system needed
an unrestricted breeding to meet the normal waste of life through war,
pestilence, and a multitude of hitherto unpreventable diseases. The
new knowledge sweeps away the venerable checks of pestilence and
disease, and confronts us with the congestions and explosive dangers
of an over-populated world. The old tradition demands a special
prolific class doomed to labor and subservience; the new points to
mechanism and to scientific organization as a means of escape from
this immemorial subjugation. Upon every main issue in life, there is
this quarrel between the method of submission and the method of
knowledge. More and more do men of science and intelligent people
generally realize the hopelessness of pouring new wine into old
bottles. More and more clearly do they grasp the significance of the
Great Teacher's parable.
The New Civilization is saying to the Old now: "We cannot go on
making power for you to spend upon international conflict. You must
stop waving flags and bandying insults. You must organize the Peace of
the World; you must subdue yourselves to the Federation of all
mankind. And we cannot go on giving you health, freedom, enlargement,
limitless wealth, if all our gifts to you are to be swamped by an
indiscriminate torrent of progeny. We want fewer and better children
who can be reared up to their full possibilities in unencumbered
homes, and we cannot make the social life and the world-peace we are
determined to make, with the ill-bred, ill-trained swarms of inferior
citizens that you inflict upon us." And there at the passionate and
crucial question, this essential and fundamental question, whether
procreation is still to be a superstitious and often disastrous
mystery, undertaken in fear and ignorance, reluctantly and under the
sway of blind desires, or whether it is to become a deliberate
creative act, the two civilizations join issue now. It is a conflict
from which it is almost impossible to abstain. Our acts, our way of
living, our social tolerance, our very silences will count in this
crucial decision between the old and the new.
In a plain and lucid style without any emotional appeals, Mrs.
Margaret Sanger sets out the case of the new order against the old.
There have been several able books published recently upon the
question of Birth Control, from the point of view of a woman's
personal life, and from the point of view of married happiness, but I
do not think there has been any book as yet, popularly accessible,
which presents this matter from the point of view of the public good,
and as a necessary step to the further improvement of human life as a
whole. I am inclined to think that there has hitherto been rather too
much personal emotion spent upon this business and far too little
attention given to its broader aspects. Mrs. Sanger with her
extraordinary breadth of outlook and the real scientific quality of
her mind, has now redressed the balance. She has lifted this question
from out of the warm atmosphere of troubled domesticity in which it
has hitherto been discussed, to its proper level of a predominantly
important human affair.
H.G. Wells
Easton Glebe,
Dunmow,
Essex., England
