chapter but in other ways, is this crying need expressed.  The investigators of the Children’s Bureau who collected the data of the infant mortality reports, noted the willingness and the eagerness with which these down-trodden mothers told the truth about themselves.  So great is their hope of relief from that meaningless and deadening submission to unproductive reproduction, that only a society pruriently devoted to hypocrisy could refuse to listen to the voices of these mothers.  Respectfully we lend our ears to dithyrambs about the sacredness of motherhood and the value of “better babies”—­but we shut our eyes and our ears to the unpleasant reality and the cries of pain that come from women who are to-day dying by the thousands because this power is withheld from them.

This situation is rendered more bitterly ironic because the self-righteous opponents of Birth Control practise themselves the doctrine they condemn.  The birth-rate among conservative opponents indicates that they restrict the numbers of their own children by the methods of Birth Control, or are of such feeble procreative energy as to be thereby unfitted to dictate moral laws for other people.  They prefer that we should think their small number of children is accidental, rather than publicly admit the successful practice of intelligent foresight.  Or else they hold themselves up as paragons of virtue and self-control, and would have us believe that they have brought their children into the world solely from a high, stern sense of public duty—­an attitude which is about as convincing as it would be to declare that they found them under gooseberry bushes.  How else can we explain the widespread tolerance and smug approval of the clerical idea of sex, now reenforced by floods of crude and vulgar sentiment, which is promulgated by the press, motion-pictures and popular plays?

Like all other education, that of sex can be rendered effective and valuable only as it meets and satisfies the interests and demands of the pupil himself.  It cannot be imposed from without, handed down from above, superimposed upon the intelligence of the person taught.  It must find a response within him, give him the power and the instrument wherewith he may exercise his own growing intelligence, bring into action his own judgment and discrimination and thus contribute to the growth of his intelligence.  The civilized world is coming to see that education cannot consist merely in the assimilation of external information and knowledge, but rather in the awakening and development of innate powers of discrimination and judgment.  The great disaster of “sex education” lies in the fact that it fails to direct the awakened interests of the pupils into the proper channels of exercise and development.  Instead, it blunts them, restricts them, hinders them, and even attempts to eradicate them.