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

THE PIVOT OF CIVILIZATION

CHAPTER I:  A New Truth Emerges

Be not ashamed, women, your privilege encloses the
rest, and is the exit of the rest,
You are the gates of the body, and you are the gates of
the soul.

—­Walt Whitman

This book aims to be neither the first word on the tangled problems of human society to-day, nor the last.  My aim has been to emphasize, by the use of concrete and challenging examples and neglected facts, the need of a new approach to individual and social problems.  Its central challenge is that civilization, in any true sense of the word, is based upon the control and guidance of the great natural instinct of Sex.  Mastery of this force is possible only through the instrument of Birth Control.

It may be objected that in the following pages I have rushed in where academic scholars have feared to tread, and that as an active propagandist I am lacking in the scholarship and documentary preparation to undertake such a stupendous task.  My only defense is that, from my point of view at least, too many are already studying and investigating social problems from without, with a sort of Olympian detachment.  And on the other hand, too few of those who are engaged in this endless war for human betterment have found the time to give to the world those truths not always hidden but practically unquarried, which may be secured only after years of active service.