“Civilization is bound up with the success of that movement.  The man who rejoices in it and strives to further it is alive; the man who shudders and raises impotent hands against it is merely dead, even though the grave yet yawns for him in vain.  He may make dead laws and preach dead sermons and his sermons may be great and his laws may be rigid.  But as the wisest of men saw twenty-five centuries ago, the things that are great and strong and rigid are the things that stay below in the grave.  It is the things that are delicate and tender and supple that stay above.  At no point is life so tender and delicate and supple as at the point of sex.  There is the triumph of life.”

     Havelock Ellis

Our approach opens to us a fresh scale of values, a new and effective method of testing the merits and demerits of current policies and programs.  It redirects our attention to the great source and fountainhead of human life.  It offers us the most strategic point of view from which to observe and study the unending drama of humanity,—­how the past, the present and the future of the human race are all organically bound up together.  It coordinates heredity and environment.  Most important of all, it frees the mind of sexual prejudice and taboo, by demanding the frankest and most unflinching reexamination of sex in its relation to human nature and the bases of human society.  In aiding to establish this mental liberation, quite apart from any of the tangible results that might please the statistically-minded, the study of Birth Control is performing an invaluable task.  Without complete mental freedom, it is impossible to approach any fundamental human problem.  Failure to face the great central facts of sex in an impartial and scientific spirit lies at the root of the blind opposition to Birth Control.

Our bitterest opponents must agree that the problem of Birth Control is one of the most important that humanity to-day has to face.  The interests of the entire world, of humanity, of the future of mankind itself are more at stake in this than wars, political institutions, or industrial reorganization.  All other projects of reform, of revolution or reconstruction, are of secondary importance, even trivial, when we compare them to the wholesale regeneration—­or disintegration—­that is bound up with the control, the direction and the release of one of the greatest forces in nature.  The great danger at present does not lie with the bitter opponents of the idea of Birth Control, nor with those who are attempting to suppress our program of enlightenment and education.  Such opposition is always stimulating.  It wins new adherents.  It reveals its own weakness and lack of insight.  The greater danger is to be found in the flaccid, undiscriminating interest of “sympathizers” who are “for it”—­as an accessory to their own particular panacea.  “It even seems, sometimes,” wrote the late William Graham Sumner, “as if the primitive people were working along better lines of effort in this direction than we are... when our public organs of instruction taboo all that pertains to reproduction as improper; and when public authority, ready enough to interfere with personal liberty everywhere else, feels bound to act as if there were no societal interest at stake in the begetting of the next generation."(1)