audience was intense.  One could see that with them it was not merely a dialectic question, as it was with their leaders, but a matter of life and death.  I came to attend a meeting against the limitation of offspring; it soon proved to be a meeting very decidedly for the limitation of offspring, for every speaker who spoke in favor of the artificial prevention of conception or undesired pregnancies, was greeted with vociferous, long-lasting applause; while those who tried to persuade the people that a limited number of children is not a proletarian weapon, and would not improve their lot, were so hissed that they had difficulty going on.  The speakers who were against the... idea soon felt that their audience was against them....  Why was there such small attendance at the regular Socialistic meetings, while the meetings of this character were packed to suffocation?  It did not apparently penetrate the leaders’ heads that the reason was a simple one.  Those meetings were evidently of no interest to them, while those which dealt with the limitation of offspring were of personal, vital, present interest....  What particularly amused me—­and pained me—­in the anti-limitationists was the ease and equanimity with which they advised the poor women to keep on bearing children.  The woman herself was not taken into consideration, as if she was not a human being, but a machine.  What are her sufferings, her labor pains, her inability to read, to attend meetings, to have a taste of life?  What does she amount to?  The proletariat needs fighters.  Go on, females, and breed like animals.  Maybe of the thousands you bear a few will become party members....”

The militant organization of the Marxian Socialists suggests that their campaign must assume the tactics of militarism of the familiar type.  As represented by militaristic governments, militarism like Socialism has always encouraged the proletariat to increase and multiply.  Imperial Germany was the outstanding and awful example of this attitude.  Before the war the fall in the birth-rate was viewed by the Junker party with the gravest misgivings.  Bernhardi and the protagonists of Deutschland-Uber-Alles condemned it in the strongest terms.  The Marxians unconsciously repeat the words of the government representative, Krohne, who, in a debate on the subject in the Prussian Diet, February 1916, asserted:  “Unfortunately this view has gained followers amongst the German women....  These women, in refusing to rear strong and able children to continue the race, drag into the dust that which is the highest end of women—­motherhood.  It is to be hoped that the willingness to bear sacrifices will lead to a change for the better....  We need an increase in human beings to guard against the attacks of envious neighbors as well as to fulfil our cultural mission.  Our whole economic development depends on increase of our people.”  Today we are fully aware of how imperial Germany fulfiled that