All persons of fair education and good intelligence know what those conditions are, and if they procreate regardless of their absence, that procreation is an evil, and prevention by restraint is the contrary virtue.

It is not suggested, however, that all those who prevent, without or within the marriage bond, do so from this worthy motive, nor is it suggested that all those who prevent are not extravagant in their demand for luxurious conditions for themselves and for their children.

Many require not merely the conditions necessary to the healthful development of each and every child they may bear, but they demand that child-bearing shall not entail hardships nor the prospect of hardships, shall not involve the surrender of any comfort or luxury, nor the prospect of any such surrender.

Whatever doubt may exist in the minds of moralists and philanthropists as to the ethics of prevention in the face of poverty, there can be no doubt that prevention by those able to bear and educate healthy offspring, without hardship, is a pernicious vice degrading to the individual, and a crime against society and the State.

Aristotle called this vice “oliganthropy.”  Amongst the ancients it was associated with self-indulgence, luxury, and ease.  It was the result of self-indulgence, but it was the cause of mental and moral anaemia, and racial decay.

So far in this chapter prevention has been dealt with only in so far as it is brought about by ante-nuptial and post-nuptial restraint.  Artificial checks were first brought prominently before the notice of the British Public under the garb of social virtue, about the year 1877 by Mrs. Annie Besant and Mr. Charles Bradlaugh.

These checks to conception, though they are very largely used, can hardly be defended on physiological grounds.  Every interference with a natural process must be attended, to some extent at least, with physical injury.  There is not much evidence that the injury is great, but in so far as an interference is unnatural, it is unhealthy, and there is much evidence to show that many of the checks advocated and used, are not only harmful but are quite useless for the purpose for which they are sold.

It will be conceded by most, no doubt, that with those capable of bearing healthy children, and those unable to rear healthy ones when born, prevention by restraint, ante-nuptial or post nuptial, is a social virtue, while prevention under all other circumstances is a social vice.

Happiness has been defined as the surplus of pleasure over pain.  What constitutes pleasure and what pain varies in the different stages of racial and individual development.  In civilized man we have the pleasures of mind supplementing and in some cases replacing the pleasures of sense.  We talk, therefore, of the higher pleasures—­the pleasures of knowledge and learning, of wider sympathies and love, of the contemplation of extended prosperity and concord, of hope for international fraternity and peace, and for a life beyond the grave.  Happiness to the highly civilized will consist, therefore, of the surplus of these pleasures over the pains of their negation.