if all our gifts to you are to be swamped by an indiscriminate torrent
of progeny. We want fewer and better children who can be reared up to
their full possibilities in unencumbered homes, and we cannot make the
social life and the world-peace we are determined to make, with the
ill-bred, ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens that you inflict upon
us." And there at the passionate and crucial question, this essential
and fundamental question, whether procreation is still to be a
superstitious and often disastrous mystery, undertaken in fear and
ignorance, reluctantly and under the sway of blind desires, or whether
it is to become a deliberate creative act, the two civilizations join
issue now. It is a conflict from which it is almost impossible to
abstain. Our acts, our way of living, our social tolerance, our very
silences will count in this crucial decision between the old and the
new.

In a plain and lucid style without any emotional appeals, Mrs. Margaret
Sanger sets out the case of the new order against the old. There have
been several able books published recently upon the question of Birth
Control, from the point of view of a woman's personal life, and from the
point of view of married happiness, but I do not think there has been
any book as yet, popularly accessible, which presents this matter from
the point of view of the public good, and as a necessary step to the
further improvement of human life as a whole. I am inclined to think
that there has hitherto been rather too much personal emotion spent upon
this business and far too little attention given to its broader aspects.
Mrs. Sanger with her extraordinary breadth of outlook and the real
scientific quality of her mind, has now redressed the balance. She
has lifted this question from out of the warm atmosphere of troubled
domesticity in which it has hitherto been discussed, to its proper level
of a predominantly important human affair.