Marx was fully aware of the consequences of this condition of things, but shut his eyes tightly to the cause.  He pointed out that capitalistic power was dependent upon “the reserve army of labor,” surplus labor, and a wide margin of unemployment.  He practically admitted that over-population was the inevitable soil of predatory capitalism.  But he disregarded the most obvious consequence of that admission.  It was all very dramatic and grandiloquent to tell the workingmen of the world to unite, that they had “nothing but their chains to lose and the world to gain.”  Cohesion of any sort, united and voluntary organization, as events have proved, is impossible in populations bereft of intelligence, self-discipline and even the material necessities of life, and cheated by their desires and ignorance into unrestrained and uncontrolled fertility.

In pointing out the limitations and fallacies of the orthodox Marxian opinion, my purpose is not to depreciate the efforts of the Socialists aiming to create a new society, but rather to emphasize what seems to me the greatest and most neglected truth of our day:—­Unless sexual science is incorporated as an integral part of world-statesmanship and the pivotal importance of Birth Control is recognized in any program of reconstruction, all efforts to create a new world and a new civilization are foredoomed to failure.

We can hope for no advance until we attain a new conception of sex, not as a merely propagative act, not merely as a biological necessity for the perpetuation of the race, but as a psychic and spiritual avenue of expression.  It is the limited, inhibited conception of sex that vitiates so much of the thought and ideation of the Eugenists.

Like most of our social idealists, statesmen, politicians and economists, some of the Eugenists suffer intellectually from a restricted and inhibited understanding of the function of sex.  This limited understanding, this narrowness of vision, which gives rise to most of the misconceptions and condemnations of the doctrine of Birth Control, is responsible or the failure of politicians and legislators to enact practical statutes or to remove traditional obscenities from the law books.  The most encouraging sign at present is the recognition by modern psychology of the central importance of the sexual instinct in human society, and the rapid spread of this new concept among the more enlightened sections of the civilized communities.  The new conception of sex has been well stated by one to whom the debt of contemporary civilization is well-nigh immeasurable.  “Sexual activity,” Havelock Ellis has written, “is not merely a baldly propagative act, nor, when propagation is put aside, is it merely the relief of distended vessels.  It is something more even than the foundation of great social institutions.  It is the function by which all the finer activities of the organism, physical and psychic, may be developed and satisfied."(6)