To find an answer to this problem which at that point in my experience I could not solve, I determined to study conditions in Europe.  Perhaps there I might discover a new approach, a great illumination.  Just before the outbreak of the war, I visited France, Spain, Germany and Great Britain.  Everywhere I found the same dogmas and prejudices among labor leaders, the same intense but limited vision, the same insistence upon the purely economic phases of human nature, the same belief that if the problem of hunger were solved, the question of the women and children would take care of itself.  In this attitude I discovered, then, what seemed to me to be purely masculine reasoning; and because it was purely masculine, it could at best be but half true.  Feminine insight must be brought to bear on all questions; and here, it struck me, the fallacy of the masculine, the all-too-masculine, was brutally exposed.  I was encouraged and strengthened in this attitude by the support of certain leaders who had studied human nature and who had reached the same conclusion:  that civilization could not solve the problem of Hunger until it recognized the titanic strength of the sexual instinct.  In Spain, I found that Lorenzo Portet, who was carrying on the work of the martyred Francisco Ferrer, had reached this same conclusion.  In Italy, Enrico Malatesta, the valiant leader who was after the war to play so dramatic a role, was likewise combating the current dogma of the orthodox Socialists.  In Berlin, Rudolph Rocker was engaged in the thankless task of puncturing the articles of faith of the orthodox Marxian religion.  It is quite needless to add that these men who had probed beneath the surface of the problem and had diagnosed so much more completely the complex malady of contemporary society were intensely disliked by the superficial theorists of the neo-Marxian School.

The gospel of Marx had, however, been too long and too thoroughly inculcated into the minds of millions of workers in Europe, to be discarded.  It is a flattering doctrine, since it teaches the laborer that all the fault is with someone else, that he is the victim of circumstances, and not even a partner in the creation of his own and his child’s misery.  Not without significance was the additional discovery that I made.  I found that the Marxian influence tended to lead workers to believe that, irrespective of the health of the poor mothers, the earning capacity of the wage-earning fathers, or the upbringing of the children, increase of the proletarian family was a benefit, not a detriment to the revolutionary movement.  The greater the number of hungry mouths, the emptier the stomachs, the more quickly would the “Class War” be precipitated.  The greater the increase in population among the proletariat, the greater the incentive to revolution.  This may not be sound Marxian theory; but it is the manner in which it is popularly accepted.  It is the popular belief, wherever the Marxian influence is strong.  This