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.