limit their offspring are sometimes selfish, but more often honourable and cogent. The desire to marry and to rear children well equipped for life’s struggle, limited incomes, the cost of living, burdensome taxation, are forcible motives; and, further, amongst the educated classes there is the desire of women to take a part in life and their husband’s careers, which is incompatible with oft-recurring pregnancies. Absence of birth control means late marriages, and these carry with them irregular unions and all the baneful consequences.

It is idle to decry illicit intercourse and interpose obstacles to marriage at one and the same time.

But, say many whose opinions are entitled to our respect: “Yes—birth control may be necessary, but the only birth control which is justifiable is voluntary abstention from connubial relations.” Such abstention would be either ineffective or, if effective, impracticable and harmful to health and happiness.

To limit the size of a family to, say, four children during a child-bearing period of 20–25 years, would be to impose on a married couple an amount of abstention which for long periods would almost be equivalent to celibacy, and when one remembers that owing to economic reasons the abstention would have to be most strict during the earlier years of married life when desires are strongest, I maintain a demand is being made which for the mass of people it is impossible to meet; that the endeavours to meet it would impose a strain hostile to health and happiness and carry with them grave dangers to morals.

Imagine a young married couple in love with each other—the parents, say, of one child, who feel they cannot afford another child for, say, three years—being expected to occupy the same room and to abstain for two years. The thing is preposterous. You might as well put water by the side of a man suffering from thirst and tell him not to drink it.

And further than that, if the efforts to abstain are seriously made the strain involved is harmful to the health and temper—if the efforts do not succeed the minds of husband and wife are troubled by doubts and anxieties which are damaging to their intimate relationships. And, moreover, if this harmful restraint succeeds in preventing conception there eventuates the inevitable prevalence of sex excitement followed by abortive and half-realised satisfaction, and the enhanced risk of the man or woman yielding to outside sex temptations.

No—birth control by abstention is either ineffective, or, if effective, is pernicious.

The Home’s True Interests.

I will next consider Artificial Control. The forces in modern life which make for birth control are so strong that only convincing reasons will make people desist from it. It is said to be unnatural and intrinsically immoral. This word unnatural perplexes me. Civilisation involves the chaining of natural forces and their conversion to man’s will and uses. Much of medicine and surgery consists of means to overcome nature.

When anæsthetics were first used at childbirth there was an outcry on the part of many worthy and religious people that their use under such circumstances was unnatural and wicked, because God meant woman to suffer the struggles and pains of childbirth. Now we all admit it is right to control the process of childbirth, and to save the mother as much pain as possible. It is no more unnatural to control conception by artificial means than to control childbirth by artificial means. Surely the whole question turns on whether these artificial means are for the good or harm of the individual and the community! Do all contraceptive measures damage the individual? The answer to that depends on the purpose for which they are used. If they are used to render unions childless or inadequately