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.