The curious and persistent antagonism to Birth Control that began with Marx and continues to our own day can be explained only as the utter refusal or inability to consider humanity in its physiological and psychological aspects—­these aspects, apparently, having no place in the “economic interpretation of history.”  It has remained for George Bernard Shaw, a Socialist with a keener spiritual insight than the ordinary Marxist, to point out the disastrous consequences of rapid multiplication which are obvious to the small cultivator, the peasant proprietor, the lowest farmhand himself, but which seem to arouse the orthodox, intellectual Marxian to inordinate fury.  “But indeed the more you degrade the workers,” Shaw once wrote,(3) “robbing them of all artistic enjoyment, and all chance of respect and admiration from their fellows, the more you throw them back, reckless, upon the one pleasure and the one human tie left to them—­the gratification of their instinct for producing fresh supplies of men.  You will applaud this instinct as divine until at last the excessive supply becomes a nuisance:  there comes a plague of men; and you suddenly discover that the instinct is diabolic, and set up a cry of `over-population.’  But your slaves are beyond caring for your cries:  they breed like rabbits:  and their poverty breeds filth, ugliness, dishonesty, disease, obscenity, drunkenness.”

Lack of insight into fundamental truths of human nature is evident throughout the writings of the Marxians.  The Marxian Socialists, according to Kautsky, defended women in industry:  it was right for woman to work in factories in order to preserve her equality with man!  Man must not support woman, declared the great French Socialist Guesde, because that would make her the PROLETAIRE of man!  Bebel, the great authority on woman, famous for his erudition, having critically studied the problem of population, suggested as a remedy for too excessive fecundity the consumption of a certain lard soup reputed to have an “anti-generative” effect upon the agricultural population of Upper Bavaria!  Such are the results of the literal and uncritical acceptance of Marx’s static and mechanical conception of human society, a society perfectly automatic; in which competition is always operating at maximum efficiency; one vast and unending conspiracy against the blameless proletariat.

This lack of insight of the orthodox Marxians, long represented by the German Social-Democrats, is nowhere better illustrated than in Dr. Robinson’s account of a mass meeting of the Social-Democrat party to organize public opinion against the doctrine of Birth Control among the poor.(4) “Another meeting had taken place the week before, at which several eminent Socialist women, among them Rosa Luxemburg and Clara Zetkin, spoke very strongly against limitation of offspring among the poor—­in fact the title of the discussion was GEGEN den GEBURTSTREIK! `Against the birth strike!’ The interest of the