is incorporated as an integral part of world-statesmanship and the
pivotal importance of Birth Control is recognized in any program of
reconstruction, all efforts to create a new world and a new civilization
are foredoomed to failure.

We can hope for no advance until we attain a new conception of sex, not
as a merely propagative act, not merely as a biological necessity for
the perpetuation of the race, but as a psychic and spiritual avenue of
expression. It is the limited, inhibited conception of sex that vitiates
so much of the thought and ideation of the Eugenists.

Like most of our social idealists, statesmen, politicians and
economists, some of the Eugenists suffer intellectually from a
restricted and inhibited understanding of the function of sex. This
limited understanding, this narrowness of vision, which gives rise to
most of the misconceptions and condemnations of the doctrine of Birth
Control, is responsible or the failure of politicians and legislators to
enact practical statutes or to remove traditional obscenities from the
law books. The most encouraging sign at present is the recognition by
modern psychology of the central importance of the sexual instinct in
human society, and the rapid spread of this new concept among the more
enlightened sections of the civilized communities. The new conception
of sex has been well stated by one to whom the debt of contemporary
civilization is well-nigh immeasurable. "Sexual activity," Havelock
Ellis has written, "is not merely a baldly propagative act, nor, when
propagation is put aside, is it merely the relief of distended
vessels. It is something more even than the foundation of great social
institutions. It is the function by which all the finer activities of
the organism, physical and psychic, may be developed and satisfied."(6)