Many similar cases might be quoted where young people, without any considered motive, are acting in accordance with the vogue of the moment.

2.  The use of contraceptives does not encourage self-control, yet the cultivation of self-control is a far higher gain to the individual and the nation than any apparent advantages obtained by its abandonment.

By no means unimportant is the influence that wide diffusion of the knowledge of how to prevent conception would have in causing more irregular unions and greater promiscuity in sex relations.  The effect of this would not only loosen, rather than strengthen, the marriage tie, but would inevitably lead to an extension of venereal disease.  Many people seem to think that contraceptives prevent venereal disease at the same time that they prevent conception.  But this is not so.  The use of methods of prevention by women is no protection to them from infection.

3.  We have, moreover, to take a wider view, and consider who will receive and act upon the advice given, and hence what the result will be on the differential birth-rate of the community.

It is quite obvious that the educated classes can most easily follow instructions which result in protection from conception, and since such knowledge most easily circulates among the more highly endowed classes, it has been claimed that it is important to make efforts to let the knowledge be so widespread that it may reach all.  The result, however, could only be that the practice of conception control would spread throughout the upper, middle and more intelligent of the working classes, and this would involve a very serious reduction in the births of those who furnish the leaders and efficient workers in all branches of life, and in those only.

For the birth-rate amongst the least intelligent, least efficient and the mentally deficient will be unaffected.  It must be apparent that after a very few generations of such weeding out of the best, with the continuous multiplication of the worst type of citizen, the general standard of efficiency, enterprise and executive skill of the nation would be seriously impaired.  Such, briefly stated, is the problem before the public at the present time.

CHAPTER II

THE DEMAND FOR KNOWLEDGE AND FROM WHOM TO OBTAIN IT

Even the brief survey given in the first chapter will have suggested to the reader that the people who ask for knowledge seek it for various reasons.  Indeed, the first thing that strikes anyone who gives consideration to the subject is the difference in type and circumstance of the people for whom relief is claimed.  We begin to realise at once that the subject of conception control is an intimate and individual one, and can only really be dealt with by advice which is given to the individual and not to the public at large.

This is perhaps most obvious in the first group mentioned on page 17, where the woman is suffering from chronic or acute disease, and the necessity for preventing conception is clear to her medical adviser.  If disease renders child-bearing a danger to the life and health of the mother, it becomes a positive duty of her doctor to prevent such a catastrophe—­but the method advised will differ according to the special nature of the case.