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Famines in China can be permanently cured only by better methods of agriculture combined with emigration or birth-control on a large scale. Educated Chinese realize this, and it makes them indifferent to efforts to keep the present victims alive. A great deal of Chinese callousness has a similar explanation, and is due to perception of the vastness of the problems involved.
It is, indeed, quite possible to see why, although theoretically a random application of birth-control cannot affect the germinal possibilities of a community, in practise it may improve the somatic conditions under which the germinal elements develop.
There is one prejudice already mentioned, due to lack of clear thinking, which deserves more special consideration because it is widespread among the socialistic democracy of several countries as well as among social reformers, and is directed alike against eugenics and birth-control.
It is still in the name of Individualism that the most brilliant antagonists of eugenics and of birth-control are wont to direct their attacks.
It is a form of reverse selection the responsible being out-bred by the irresponsible. What is wanted is the general application of birth-control by voluntary contraception, and the particular application of voluntary and compulsory sterilisation of the feeble-minded and unfit.
It is the attitude of a handful of Pharisees seeking to thrust the bulk of mankind into Hell. All this confusion and evil comes of the blindness which cannot know that, beyond the primary animal end of propagation in marriage, there is a secondary but more exalted spiritual end. It is needless to insist how intimately that secondary end of marriage is bound up with the practice of birth-control.
When, however, we have found reason to believe that, even if practised without regard to eugenic considerations, birth-control may yet act beneficially to promote good breeding, we begin to realise how great a power it may possess when consciously and deliberately directed towards that end.
Few members of the well-to-do and wealthy classes think for a single moment of obeying them. They limit their families to one, two or three well-cared-for children. Usually the prosecutor who presents the case against a birth-control advocate, trapped by a detective hired by the Comstock Society, has no children at all or a small family.
Nine-tenths of them advocate reforms aimed at the alleged lubricity of the male-the single standard, medical certificates for bridegrooms, birth-control, and so on. The motive here, I believe, is mere rage and jealousy. The woman who is not pursued sets up the doctrine that pursuit is offensive to her sex, and wants to make it a felony. No genuinely attractive woman has any such desire.
It is not usually accompanied by definite argument, but it assumes that birth-control is the method of such suicide, and that the first and most immediately dangerous result is that one's own nation, whichever that may be, is placed in a position of alarming military inferiority to other nations, as a step towards the final extinction.
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